Radiance

Chapter 114: Ghost in the Machine.

The network of pipes was like a bloody maze and if it wasn't for Wisp's ability to create bursts of light when she needed to it would have been a bloody nightmare for her to even see where to go let alone pick her way through a maze.

The old ventilation and heating pipes crisscrossed one another in a seemingly never-ending maze and she lost count of the number of rats and spiders she sent fleeing off into the darkness as she released a burst of light in order to see which way to turn, though mostly she kept it to a minimum so that she didn't accidentally give herself away.

But eventually, she saw a light at the end of a particularly long ventilation duct and when she floated to the end she was relieved to see a grate that led directly into what was blatantly the Railroad HQ.

The place kinda looked pretty chaotic for a resistance HQ, with parts, weapons and all sorts of shit strewn everywhere, but it also had a kinda lived-in and fully alive quality to it as well.

There were people constantly coming and going returning from missions only to be sent back out on others or turning in intel before taking a breather, the place was a hive of activity.

It looked like they tended to keep the onsite staff to a minimum most likely for security as having all your major players and eggs in one basket was pretty much inviting your opponents to remove you as a threat, a similar stance to which Seven had taken with how he'd split their own group up to tackle multiple tasks at once.

That's when Wisp spied two figures that she instantly recognised from Fuller's visual descriptions of them, Desdemona and Glory.

Taking one look at Glory and Wisp could instantly see what had caused Fuller to fall for her, she was indeed a rather handsome woman, strong, regal looking and with an air of confidence about her that simply shone off her.

But Wisp could also see an air of sadness hanging around her and she got the distinct feeling that it was due to the ESF soldier currently sitting atop of their tower with the rest of her team.

The other face that Wisp instantly recognised due to Fuller's vivid description of him was Tinker Tom, the dude was exactly how she'd pictured him in her mind when Fuller had been describing him.

A tall skinny black guy with the funkiest helmet that she'd ever seen and more electronics hanging off him than she herself had had when she was in the body of a sentry bot.

He was currently hunched over a workbench elbows deep in what appeared to be a weapon of some kind, though to Wisp it looked like a cross between a coilgun and a rocket launcher, which if it didn't explode in the user's face would most likely pack one hell of a punch.

"Tom any progress on that anti-Courser gun?" Desdemona asked lifting her flame red head from her maps to glance over at him.

"Some, I got the alignment right just got to tune the frequency into all of the coils so that the shell goes where we want it to and not either straight down or up," Tom replied lifting up his own head to show off his massively magnified eyes due to all the jewellers lauves he had bolted onto the front of the helmet for close up work.

"Well hurry up with that thing we need to field test it, especially with all the reports we keep getting of increased Institute activity, Something has really fucking stirred them up as of late and I just wish we knew what?" Desdemona said.

"Think it could have something to do with the reports we've been getting about those mysterious vertibirds that we've been seeing in the area?" Glory asked.

Desdemona simply shrugged, "I honestly have no idea, all we do know is those things don't belong to the Brotherhood, at least those guys are obvious when they go somewhere," Desdemona said.

"Think it could be the Enclave?" Tom asked and again Desdemona shrugged.

"Hell for all we know it could be those new guys Mouse warned us about, The Free Peoples of the Wastes, fucking free my ass, from what she said they sound like slavers with a particular taste for synth labour," Desdemona said and Wisp's sparkly heart skipped a beat.

"Yeah been hearing whispers about those guys from a ton of different settlements but something doesn't add up Des, the intel Mouse got has them pegged as slave takers but from what I've been hearing they are the opposite," Glory said sounding confused.

Desdemona simply held her hands out to the sides, "I have no idea what to believe about them, they are like the fucking boogie man, hell they got us beat on the damn tradecraft front we've got no positive sightings on them and nothing to really go on, but at the same time if a report comes in from one of our best agents we have to act accordingly so until I get some proof otherwise we are going to treat them as a threat to us and to synths," she said and Glory nodded as did Tom.

Wisp wondered to herself was this Mouse that Desdemona had mentioned the one that Eight was impersonating or were they merely a patsy he was using to relay the information back to the Railroad HQ?

There was not going to be any clear-cut or easy way to get an answer to that question unless she could find a way of making Eight out himself or finding a way of forcibly outing him which until such an opportunity presented itself she would have to tread or rather float carefully.

Sweeping the environment directly outside of the Vent Wisp traced a path along the ceiling between two old heating pipes that she could use to traverse the room, so slowly and silently flowing out of the gaps in the vent she floated up to the ceiling and slipped through the gap in the copper pipes.

Slowly she inched her way across the room while staying in the shadow of the pipes and using the gaps to move, being a cloud of essentially gas had its real benefits at times, and that's when Wisp noticed something odd in a side room off the main one.

There appeared to be an assaultron in there but it didn't appear to be rigged for combat, it seemed to be doing complex mathematical equations like it was trying to work out the probabilities of something.

"Hey PAM any update on that new op?" Desdemona asked sticking her head into the room causing the faceless machine to turn and look at her.

"I have calculated a 72.2 per cent chance that the Institute will counterattack our agents should we attempt to disrupt their operation," the assaultron said in a very mechanical matter-of-fact voice.

"Fuck, any ideas on how we can reduce that?' Desdemona asked.

"Nuke the fuckers," Glory said sounding quite bitter from the other room.

"The highest chance of success would involve using an outside party to draw the Institute's attention, this theoretically could provide enough of a distraction for our agents to enter the facility and remove the captives," Pam said.

"A patsy? Yeah, I like this idea, think we can get either the Brotherhood or the fucking Gunners to hit them, be nice not to be the ones getting shot at for once," Glory said stepping into the room to join Desdemona.

"You know that's not a bad idea, not so much the Brotherhood as not only might they have the firepower to hit them but actually wipe them out placing the captives at serious risk especially if our guys can't get them out in time, but the Gunners are mercs they'll hit anyone they are paid to, so if we post an anonymous contract those goombas will walk right in there and start shooting up the place, should cause enough of a ruckus for a small extraction team to slip in quietly and be gone before anyone realises what's happened, plus added benefit of Institute now hunts Gunner goombas," Desdemona said scratching her chin thoughtfully.

"Sounds like a plan to me boss, want me to set it up?" Glory asked and Desdemona nodded.

"Yeah let's put out some feelers and see if we can get the Gunners to bite, pretty sure they'll be all over it like ferals over an abandoned railway station if they think there's a fat stack of caps waiting for them," she said.

"Anything that helps remove the threat of both the Gunners and the Institute in one go is definitely ok in my book," Glory said and with that, the pair of them turned and left the room leaving the Assaultron called PAM alone.

Wisp debated about the risks of possibly infiltrating the Assaultron as it would give her pretty unrestricted access to the Railroad HQ, but given that they seemed to use the bot for some kind of combat analysis calculations she figured it would be rather risky to take over the bot just in case one of the members came in to ask it a question.

So shelving that idea as a last resort and slinked her way back into the main room again, that's when she noticed something curious and an idea began to swirl in her mind.

On Tinker Tom's left arm appeared to be one of those Pipboys like the one that Seven wore on his arm, a portable computer that had been originally designed for Vault residents and was commonly worn by ex-Vault dwellers, if she could gain access to that device she'd be able to communicate with Tom one on one away from the others.

The biggest question was how to gain access to it without him noticing?

Wisp slowly made her way along the pipes until she was right above where Tom was working and she noticed that he had the Pipboy plugged into a much larger system that was sitting on the floor under his desk, so she figured that this was the main processing system while the Pipboy was the controller.

Wisp figured if she could gain access to that system she should be able to travel up the connecting wire and into the Pipboy itself, though she was going to have to be quick if she wanted to pass by Tom unnoticed as she went from ceiling to the floor.

So once she was directly behind the unaware man Wisp checked the coast was clear before she flitted her way down from the ceiling to the floor of the room and rolled over it like smoke across the surface of water.

Using the cooling intakes Wisp filtered her way into the large processing bank, it was filled with vacuum tubes and circuit boards that she could feel the electricity coursing through as it called to her.

She quickly made her way up the inside of the tower to where she found the connection ports that Tom's Pipboy was plugged into, using the solders as an access point Wisp pulled her slightly more impressive trick out of her bag and converted her body into the equivalent of an electrical current.

Now as impressive as this trick was it was kind of limited in how she could use it, she couldn't just do it on a whim as she needed access to either a live circuit or a flowing current to do it properly.

But employing this little trick was what allowed her to interface directly with machinery like all the bodies and machines she had taken control of throughout their adventure.

So as soon as her whole body converted into current Wisp let herself flow along the copper connection cable and up into Tom's wrist-mounted Pipboy where she instantly began to infiltrate its main processing board.

To Tom, this would have looked like nothing more than a glitch or an interrupt as Wisp was careful to make sure she didn't interrupt the processes he was currently running, but once she was fully integrated she essentially had full control over the system, both if you counted the ground-based processing system that it was currently hooked into.

Now all she had to do was bide her time until she could speak to Tom without either freaking him out and alerting the others to her presence or having him brush her off as an erroneous process.

It took a couple of hours of patient waiting but finally, Tom decided to finally take a break from his work, though he did seem to have finished work on the gun he had been working on and according to the files that Wisp found in the archive on the Pipboy he called it the CC or Courser Cracker.

From the files she read the weapon appeared to be something close to what she'd imagined it to be looking over it, it was a coilgun platform that fired a heavy explosive slug designed to punch through the energy shielding that Coursers apparently liked to use.

The slug it fired was truly the clever bit, it was a three-stake delivery system, kinda like a bullet within a bullet within a bullet, the first stage was a charged shell that the weapon infused with a high amount of electrical energy upon firing that it then dumped into the Courser's shields along with the incredible amount of kinetic energy upon impact.

As this proceeded to overload the Courser's shields a small charge within with a projectile fired sending a much denser and smaller core out of the centre of the outer shell which was designed to pierce the armoured flesh of a Courser, but it was the third and final stage that was truly the clever bit.

Once the slug punched into the Courser's body an explosive charge buried deep within the slug's core would detonate sending shrapnel outwards in every direction like a flechette bomb going off in your chest while also detonating a small EMP charge simultaneously which would short out any self-repair systems.

The sheer level of engineering that went into even conceiving of such a device let alone making it a reality wasn't just impressive it was on a whole other level.

A system like this relied heavily on absolutely precise timing to detonate its payloads at exactly the right time so what Tom was doing was designing a sensor system that could read its target and do the calculations for the user on the fly, this would mean that every direct hit could detonate at exactly the right time without having to be reprogrammed each and every time the target moved.

But finally, Tom unplugged his Pipboy and headed over to the canteen to grab something to eat and that's to it already being late night according to the Pipboy's clock everyone else was pretty much out or asleep in the bunk area.

This was Wisp's chance so as Tom grabbed something from one of the fridges and sat down at one of the tables to eat she began to access the word processing software in the Pipboy.

"You have a traitor in the Railroad," she wrote on the screen and set it to blink on and off until he finally noticed it.

This model of Pipboy actually had a little camera set into the top of it which allowed Wisp to actually see him and her surroundings, so she saw the exact moment he noticed the blinking text on the green screen.

Tom stared at it for a hard moment before looking around himself as if looking for the message sender but upon seeing this he quickly pulled up the on-screen-based keyboard and began to type.

"Who is this and where are you?" he wrote before waiting for a response.

"The who and where I am are unimportant suffice to say I am a friend who is part of a group with the same ideals and goals as yourselves, we have recently learned that your group has been infiltrated by an imposter posing as one of your agents with the intent of spreading misinformation as well as using you to lead them to the Institute," Wisp wrote.

Tom stared at the screen as he'd just found an alien bolted to his arm before he began to write his response.

"Why should I believe you when you won't even tell me who you are?" he wrote.

"You wouldn't believe me even if I told you, but suffice to say we want what you want an end to the Insitute and freedom for all their synthetic slaves," Wisp wrote.

"Try me," Tom wrote defiantly.

Wisp sighed to herself and then decided to try something rather risky, it was a long shot but if it worked she was definitely going to have his full attention.

"Alright then so be it, I'm a non-corporeal being who is currently residing within the Pipboy on your wrist," Wisp wrote and Tom's expression said it all it went from amazed to irritated to amused in about three seconds.

"I'm being fucking serious!!" he wrote.

"So am I, allow me to show you," Wisp wrote before she disconnected and floated out of the vents on the sides of the Pipboy.

Tom's eyes turned into a pair of dinner plates as Wisp coalesced into her usual cloud form before doing a lap around his head and then heading back into his Pipboy.

"Believe me now?" she wrote.

Tom simply sat there staring at his screen with an open mouth and wide eyes for a solid minute before he collected himself enough to be able to write a response.

"How the fuck is such a thing possible!? Am I hallucinating?" he wrote.

"It would take me way too long to explain the science that created me and the others like me but suffice to say we exist as you can plainly see, as for the hallucinating part how about this for proof?" Wisp said and with that, she sent a jolt from the battery directly into his arm.

"OOWW!" Tom exclaimed a bit louder than she would have liked there were a few annoyed snorts from the bunk room as his yell disturbed some of the sleeping agents.

"Keep it down or you'll wake up the others and I have no wish for them to know of my existence as they could tip off the traitor," Wisp wrote.

"Oww that hurt why did you shock me?" Tom wrote with a mixture of hurt and irritation on his face.

"Sorry but I felt it would make the point quicker than getting into a metaphysical discussion as to why you are not hallucinating a little pain is a quick and easy proof of what I'm saying unless you know of any other types of smoke that can do loop the loops?" she said.

Tom looked pretty thoughtful at that and then he began to type again.

"Alright let's say I believe you, why come to me and not one of the others like Desdemona?" he asked.

"Firstly you're the one with the tech I need to communicate and secondly your the one with the most open mind and that's the most important part so that you'll listen to what I am saying and react to it rather than dismiss me outright," she said.

Tom nodded at that, "Alright you got me there, so what's this about a traitor?" he asked.

"Your group has been infiltrated by a member of the Enclave this person seeks to misguide you guys and to send you off in pursuit of a group that is aiming to do the same thing as yourselves, they hope to play you off against them and to possibly start a war between you so that they can capture some of its members," Wisp wrote.

Tom looked both intrigued and confused.

"What group and why would they do that?" he wrote.

"The Free Peoples of the Wastes, the group is dedicated to freeing people from slavery regardless of who or what they are while promoting human and non-human relations, they are trying to help build a better world by embracing the world we have and getting its inhabitants to work together, the Enclave see them as a threat to their power and their control and are using every trick they can think of to hunt them down, they also wish to capture its leaders as they happen to be two escaped experiments that were being run by its Bio-Weapons division," Wisp wrote.

Tom's mouth dropped open at this and he stared hard at the screen as the text blinked at him.

"Are you saying they are like superhumans or something?' he wrote.

"In a manner of speaking I guess you could say that yes, their leader who is called Seven which is short for number Seven is most likely one of the most powerful beings on the planet, he's a telekinetic being with the ability to interact with the world with nothing more than a simple thought, but he is also one of the nicest people you will ever meet, he has dedicated himself to freeing people from slavery and tyranny, to giving them the power to govern their own lives and to helping them understand that not every creature they share this world with is an abomination that wishes them harm, so as you can imagine this does not sit well with the Enclave as they would rather have people afraid and turning to them for protection from the scary boogymen, while then pledging them people and resources," Wisp explained.