I wasn't sure what to make of Heather Casdin at first. She had a pleasant, even bubbly personality, but beneath the surface I could sense some tension. It was like she was putting on a practiced, public face and hiding what she really felt. Regardless of what she was hiding though, she hadn't been lying about knowing her way around the Commonwealth. Casdin guided us around a few different hot spots and we made good progress towards the Mystic River. 

 

 

We did stop at one point, just as a fortified little town came into view on the horizon. 

 

"That's Covenant," she explained. "It's a... weird place. Best to avoid it - Bunker Hill's better for trading anyway."

 

"What's so odd about it?" I asked.

 

"The folks there are real proud about how they've kept the town in good shape. I won't argue with them there. But they're not very trusting. You might even say paranoid."

 

"I can't really blame them, with all the super mutants up in Malden," I mused.

 

"Fair enough, but there's healthy paranoia and then there's just paranoid paranoia, if you know what I mean. Besides, we're on a tight timetable, so if you don't mind let's skip it."

 

 

I admit, I was still kind of curious about the place, but I took our guide's advice and didn't poke my head in any deeper. After all, I could always make a more controlled contact with them one Concord had a better grip over this area. Eventually I was going to have to do something about Malden - even if we couldn't completely clear the super mutants out of the city, I wanted to eventually establish some outposts to contain the city's new inhabitants. And when the time came for that, we'd have the presence and grip necessary to approach Covenant on even terms.

 

But I'm getting off on a bit of a tangent. Past Covenant, we headed for the Wellington Bridge, which would take us down into Somerville. From there, we could follow Route 28 and then cut along Prospect Street. Once we reached Cambridge Street, it would be just a few blocks' walk to the hospital. 

 

That was the plan, at least. Casdin was taking us through MacDonald Park to avoid a nasty stretch of Route 16 where some trucks full of radioactive waste had toppled over. Even two hundred years later, it wasn't safe to pass through and it attracted feral ghouls like nobody's business. The problem was that the park was full of ghouls too, and we found ourselves in a running battle through the trees.

 

 

And that was when the bugs hit us. Stingwings, specifically: nasty, poisonous dragonfly things. We must have riled up their nest with our shooting, and so things degenerated into a three way melee between us, the ghouls, and the bugs. It was starting to get real clear that if we stuck around, we were dead meat. And so, with Casdin leading the way, we hauled ass south until we hit the river and then followed it as fast as we could towards the bridge, all the while firing on the more persistent attackers. Cain and Winter's powersuits (and Curie's robot body) let them dash along like it was nothing, but by the time we reached the bridge I was feeling short of breath and Casdin was clearly struggling a bit.

 

At that moment, a thought crossed my mind that I never could have made a run like that before the war. However, I dismissed it in the heat of he moment and it would be a while before I revisited it. For the moment, our only priority was getting over the bridge and into Somerville. 

 

We finally got to the far side of the Mystic, gunning down one last ghoul in the process, and Casdin and I sat down to take a little breather. While we caught our breath, she softly sung, "I really must confess, I'm a weary exile singing my song of loneliness."

 

"You've got a nice voice," I said. "Where'd you learn to sing like that?"

 

 

"Ah, just here and there. Plenty of time to practice on the road. Thanks, though. What about you? You sing?"

 

I laughed, "not since about eighth grade. I just never had a talent for it."

 

"Eighth grade, huh? Like in the old days, the way the papers say?"

 

I nodded. "I was only really in school on and off. With the plague flaring up here and there, we kept getting locked down at home. But in eighth grade I not only actually got to attend most of the year, but I had a chorus class. It was kind of torture for me, though."

 

Casdin chuckled, saying, "yeah, sounds like it. I kind of envy you though... not a lot of folks these days get any real schooling, just whatever they pick up on the road or from their parents. But we better move on, if you're ready. We're making good time so far, no sense wasting it."

 

"Yeah, thank the ghouls for that. I haven't run that fast in a while, at least not without my powersuit."

 

Casdin poked a thumb towards Cain and Winter. "Like those? That's pretty slick technology."

 

Standing I nodded. "In fact, Winter's using my suit right now. Slick is definitely the word - I haven't seen anything else like them out here."

 

Our talk cut off abruptly as the sounds of gunfire echoed out of East Somerville. A moment later, a billowing explosion rose up in the distance and Casdin's face set with focus.

 

"OK, follow me," she said, "let's get clear of the bridge and put some distance between us and those shooters."

 

Progressing deeper into Cambridge, we encountered one of those good news/bad news situations - on one hand, the gunfire abruptly stopped. On the other, a sickly fog started to roll in along with drizzling rain... and my Geiger counter started to chirp.

 

"Man," Casdin muttered, "I hate it when it rains."

 

"Worse than that," Cain countered, "radstorm moving in. We need to get into shelter."

 

 

"Damn, that's bad. Alright, I wanted to take you around the long way, by Cambridge Street, but that's not going to work. Get your guns ready, there's a big raider camp at Line and Magnolia, and we're going to be going through a little too close for comfort."

 

Fortunately, the raiders were just as keen to get under cover as we were, and the watchtowers at the edge of the camp were empty. Slipping past, I spotted the edge of Kendall Hospital's campus and we abandoned stealth in favor of dashing for the doors. Originally I'd planned on going in through the parking garage - the location we'd earmarked for our salvage camp - but with our radiation does growing by the second, we weren't wasting any time. 

 

"OK," Casdin said as we shut the door behind us, "that was a little more exciting than I planned but... welcome to Kendall Hospital. Now, where are you headed?"

 

Cain started to say, "The equipment should be on the sixth floor, in the--" but Casdin cut her off with a raised hand.

 

"Shh," she whispered. "I think I hear something."

 

 

And sure enough, we could hear indistinct voices followed by... gunfire.

 

"Fuck," Casdin muttered, "what do you want to bet that it's raiders?"

 

I nodded, whispering, "just our luck. Let's take it slow and quiet, then wipe them all out when we've got an advantage."

 

We did our best to creep forward unseen, sticking to the shadows, until we emerged into the central atrium.

 

"What the actual fuck," I muttered as a diabolical scene greeted me. Crucified bodies were roasting on a bonfire, surrounded by more prisoners who I presumed were next in line for the fire.

 

 

As you can probably imagine, as soon as we spotted the first of the raiders, we started shooting. And once we got rolling, with two powersuits and a small arsenal of powerful wapons, they were no match for us. We cleared the lower two floors of the hospital room by room, before I asked Curie to tend to the surviving victims while the rest of us took the elevator up to the sixth floor. 

 

Not much longer, and Cain had found the door she was looking for. "This is it," she said, carefully cracking open the door.

 

Unfortunately, if we'd expected this to be easy, we were in for disappointment. In the room beyond, we found that the ceiling had collapsed, spilling several floors' worth of debris and furniture all over the lab. If the scanning equipment was in there, it was buried at the bottom of the heap.

 

 

Even with her powersuit on, Cain seemed visibly deflated. 

 

"It's OK," I tried to reassure her. "Once we get the salvage camp set up, we'll take this place apart brick by brick if we have to. We'll get to that equipment."

 

"Assuming it wasn't destroyed in the collapse," Cain said.

 

"We always knew that was a possibility. Don't worry about it - if we can't recover what you needed here, we'll find a different way."

 

Cain didn't seem very convinced, but we agreed to head back downstairs to check on Curie. When we got there, she'd released the prisoners and tended to their most immediately concerning wounds, but she wanted to show us something first.

 

"Here," she said. "This seems out of place here."

 

 

"It's a mother fucking Synth," Casdin snarled.

 

"Indeed it is," I agreed. "But what was it doing here?"

 

"Maybe the same thing as us," Winter suggested, "looking for pre-war technology."

 

"That's possible," said Heather, "but in my experience what Synths usually show up to grab is people. Either to replace them with other Synths or to just make 'em disappear."

 

"That is not the only concerning discovery I have made," Curie continued. "Please follow me."

 

She led us into a warren of partially collapsed corridors that had been turned into a shanty town of sorts. At length, she brought me to a heavily pregnant woman.

 

"This is Charlotte Ellison," Curie introduced, "she is the leader of our expedition and you should tell her what you told me."

 

 

The woman seemed hypervigilant and on edge, her eyes flicking this way and that and her shoulders tensing.

 

"There's... there's something in the basement," she finally said. "A monster. There's a monster in the basement."

 

"Based on my interview of this patient," Curie explained, "and on my own discussions with Dr. Cain, I believe this woman is a carrier of the IHFM gene mutation."

 

"They sent us down to the monster," the woman continued. "It ate the others... but a few of us, the Breeders, it... didn't eat us. And now I have a monster in me."

 

"Damn," I muttered. "Are there more women like you here?"

 

She nodded, "a few. A few. I'm not sure how many. I want the monster out of me."

 

"While I can terminate the pregnancy, I do not have the tools necessary to do it safely," Curie advised.

 

I thought on that for a moment. "Vault 81 might be able to help. They have a fully operational pre-war hospital. Listen," I looked to the woman, "what's your name?"

 

"Jo... Josie," she stammered.

 

"Alright, Josie. Soon my people will be coming here to secure the hospital. Once they arrive, I can have you and the other women escorted to Vault 81. They can help you there." I hoped I was right, but it was the best idea I could come up with.

 

"Thank you, thank you, thank you," Josie mumbled, "but you have to kill the monster. It's still in the basement."

 

I looked over to Winter. "Want to help me kill a monster?" I asked. 

 

She laughed, "any day, sweetie."

 

The way down to the monster's den was pretty direct - the floor of this section had caved in and exposed the concrete basement. I hopped down with Winter in tow, just in time to hear Casdin shout, "holy fuck, it's a deathclaw!"

 

Yes, this time I actually did fight a deathclaw. And it was a terrifying experience. I've been told by people who are experts on the subject that the one I fought was almost certainly just a juvenile, but that didn't change the fact that the creature was enormous. 

 

 

In the end, the solution was mostly 'spray and pray,' and afterwards I offered silent thanks to Danse for giving me that laser rifle. Without it's high energy capacity and fast rate of fire, I'm pretty sure I would have been deathclaw chow. Instead, it was the deathclaw who ended up on the floor, steaming from a dozen laser bolts all across its body. It took some time for us to extricate ourselves out of the pit, but with the 'monster' killed, the last threat in the hospital seemed to have been put to rest. After Curie did one final check on the prisoners we'd rescued, we sent the radio signal to Graygarden.

 

The next morning, the expedition party arrived - four women escorted by a squad of Red's Rangers. And they had a seventh person in tow - a raider they'd captured on the edge of Cambridge. The Rangers had brought him along for interrogation, though once they saw the folks we'd rescued, half of them peeled off to escort them over the river and down to Vault 81. Two Rangers stayed behind to set up security for the salvage camp.

 

Things moved pretty fast from that point. Over the next day, we set up ASAM sensors and started following their instructions to gather materials and set guardposts, sorting stations, and sleeping quarters. The haste proved valuable, as that night a few feral ghouls probed the entrances to the parking garage. We pushed them back, but the Rangers took note of where they'd come from and started working on an observation post on the roof of the garage to try and spot future unwelcome visitors. 

 

I'd been getting ready to hand over the recovery effort to the salvage crew and press on to Diamond City (no sense waiting days or weeks for them to dig out the sixth floor, after all) when I heard a familiar voice in the distance.

 

"Don't you remember me, Ms. Ellison?" 

 

I turned and saw a woman in a Brotherhood of Steel uniform talking to Winter. A moment of thought and I remembered her name - Haylen. She'd been part of Danse's crew back at the police station.

 

 

"Over here," I said. "Haylen, right?"

 

Haylen closed the distance between us, saying, "I'm sorry, Ms. Ellsion. I didn't recognize you outside your armor. Have you been monitoring frequency AF95? We've been trying to contact you."