Chapter 120: Homemovers Blues.
In the midst of the crap storm that followed Number Eight's infiltration of the Railroad and subsequent ousting by Wisp and her people both groups found some common ground and sat down together to discuss a potential partnership that could benefit them both.
But the first order of business had been getting the Railroad people moving as their HQ under the church at the centre of Boston had been compromised by Number Eight and if he had gone scurrying back to the Enclave, then there was no telling when the heavy clomping of power armoured Jackboots would be heard clomping through those well-disguised catacombs.
So with Wisp's team's help, they stripped and moved the entire HQ to a nearby site that Desdemona had picked out, though it wasn't one of the fallback locations they had on file as they had no way of telling if Eight had compromised those as well.
Tinker Tom set up a beacon that informed all incoming Railroad teams of the security breach and to disperse to their designated safe house until they could be contacted and brought into the new HQ.
This was also communicated in Railsign that was plastered on all the doors and walls of the HQ so if by chance any personnel came in without hearing the beacon they would see the warning signs and vanish.
The last thing they did before finally leaving the HQ which had served them for so long was to booby trap everything they could think of to make the place a hall of nightmares to any trespassers who broke in while they were gone, though Desdemona hoped that one day they would reclaim it.
The new HQ they picked out was ironically an actual railroad, well a subway station deep underground in the heart of the rail network of Boston.
Turned out Tom had been holding onto this little ace up his sleeve for a dire emergency and had pulled it at just the right moment and the best part was he hadn't either written it down or told anyone about it, until now.
You see this was not any ordinary subway station, it was an old abandoned Vaulttec Vault.
He'd discovered it when going through a series of old Vault tec records that had been brought in on holo tape by one of the scav teams but there had never been any records of this place in any of the other records they'd recovered from the local Vault tec offices and they were always on the lookout for old Vaults as they had a mine of old tech they could salvage.
This place had been penned for local politicians and VIPs and was a strictly off-grid kind of affair, apparently some kind of under-the-table deal between someone high up in the Vault tec hierarchy and the local business and politics bigwigs.
The local wealthy business folk had stumped up the cash while the politicians did their bit to keep it out of the papers and under the radar, it was so hush-hush that it didn't even have a number, it was simply referred to as the Retreat.
"Are you sure this place exists Tom?" Desdemona asked for about the sixth time this particular hour as the now large group of Railroad personnel and Wisp's team walked together through the rat's maze of tunnels that wound them ever deeper under the city.
"I'm sure Des for the umpteenth time, it was right there in the fucking paperwork, hard as fuck to dig up and decode mind you but it was there," Tom said as he tapped his pipboy which contained the route and rough location of the supposed secret vault.
"All I'm seeing down here is feral bloody Ghouls and roaches, so many bloody roaches," Malakai said from above their heads on the tunnel ceiling.
"Yeah, I heard that," Glory grumbled as she saw another feral ghoul and roach strung up in one of Malakai's web traps and dangling from the ceiling like a shit-filled pinata.
"We're close trust me," Tom said checking his map again and then pointing off to the left.
"If I'm right and I always bloody well am, there should be a maintenance door coming up on the left side there, if we take it should lead us into a side tunnel that doesn't show up on any of the transit maps," Tom said.
"Military?" Wisp asked and Tom nodded.
"Yup, there's quite a few like that down here that you'd never even know about unless you managed to stumble into them by off chance and given the sheer amount of shit down here you'd have to have balls of steel or be able to walk on walls like your fluffy boyfriend up there to get past them, or well you know to be a big angry Claw," Tom said glancing first at Malakai scuttling along on the ceiling and then switching to Ven who was simply striding along at the centre of the group.
Wisp had noticed just how many of the Railroad personnel had warmed right up to her non-human friends when the first wave of Ferals had charged them only to run smack bang into Ven and Passa who had diced them like rotten sausages in a matter of seconds.
Ever since the group had tightened up around the two Claws like they were two walking beacons of safety.
Just as Tom had said out of the gloom a door appeared set into the wall of the tunnel with faded and flaking yellow paint on it which gave away its maintenance status rather easily as all the maintenance shafts down here were painted yellow so they could be easily spotted.
Malakai dropped down off the ceiling and scuttled up to the door, he tried the handle and saw that it was rusted shut so planting his eight legs wide apart he anchored himself down and put that surprising arachnid strength of his to good use in wrenching the handle opened with a metallic screech that echoed away into the distance.
As he pulled it open both Ven and Passa moved in first just in case the tunnel had a nasty feral surprise waiting for them on the other side of it and despite not having much in the way of manoeuvrability in the tight corridor an angry wall of scales and claws coming at you down a tunnel was still more than enough to make the rat brains think twice.
Once everyone had passed through the tunnel Malakai sealed it up behind them and the group found themselves in a slightly narrower train tunnel now that wound its way off into the darkness in both directions.
"The entrance to the vaulted tunnel should be just up ahead, they used this line to run munitions between some of the military bases in the region and there are a few underground stations that serve as fallback positions and stockpiles for the military, though most have been picked clean there are still one or two still sitting in the shadows waiting to be found, there's not exactly a road map for me you know?" Tom said taking point.
"How did the military keep track of them all if there are no maps?" Passa asked.
"It was most likely written in code but without a cypher to decode it would be a pain in the arse for anyone to crack these days, so it's not that maps don't exist it's more they've been encoded so that any rando who somehow managed to get their hands on one would have little chance of reading it," Fuller said as he walked along next to Glory who had barely let him out of her sight to take a piss since their reunion, not that Wisp could blame her.
Hell, she figured that if she found herself in Glory's shoes she'd probably have tied herself to Malakai's fluffy rear end and clung the fuck on no matter where he scuttled off to.
"So how the hell did they manage to sneak a whole bloody Vault down here into this line without getting noticed?" Desdemona asked as they walked following Tom.
