"C'mon, Case, some food will warm up your soul," Milla said, her voice softening as she hooked an arm under his to help him stand.
The arrival of the gunship had turned the landing zone into a makeshift town square. Everyone was there—Jacob, Lily, Kelly, Corbin, Jack—all staring in hushed awe. Emily had arrived in her Assaultron Mk II chassis, using a holographic overlay to project her preferred image: a woman in a sharp blue dress with hair to match, her digital presence flickering slightly against the cold mountain air.
Even the Think Tank had descended from their central spire. The brain jars hovered in a semi-circle, their glass enclosures humming with intellectual excitement.
"The lob—Case has brought us a Vertibird," Klein announced, his voice booming through his speakers as he observed from the stairway. "Is this what you promised? To bring the entire Mojave into our grasp, one relic at a time?"
Case just nodded weakly, leaning against the cold concrete and trying to ignore the lingering taste of bile. He watched as Klein and 0 began a frantic, synchronized scan, their sensors bathing the armored hull in a grid of red and green light.
Emily walked up to the nose of the craft, her holographic hand passing through the 30mm autocannon. She nodded slowly, her expression a mix of professional curiosity and genuine pride.
"Impressive," Emily said, her holographic blue hair shimmering as she circled the gunship. "First the Power Armor, and now this. We'll get to work immediately, Case. Between my processing power and the Think Tank's facilities, we can refine the design, optimize the fusion intake, and maybe even fix that 'bumpy' flight profile of yours. Anything specific you want to add?"
"Yes. A window," Case croaked, finally standing upright but still looking a little green.
Emily tilted her head, her projectors humming. "I'm afraid I can't do that without compromising the structural integrity of the APA-grade plating. The best I can do is a 360-degree external camera array fed directly into a set of high-res cabin monitors. Or a weapon station for two gunners—that would work."
She turned her holographic gaze toward the hovering brain jars. "Zero, what do you think?"
"I think," Zero buzzed, his monitors flashing with rapid-fire blueprints, "that we can mount twin-linked autocannons on the ventral hull, or perhaps side-mounted miniguns for the crew. The possibilities are statistically endless!" He hummed a discordant, electronic tune. "Right! I'll get to the drawing board. I already know exactly what we're going to do."
"Do your robotic magic, my man," Case said, offering a weak but genuine thumb-up.
While the scientists and pilots obsessed over the steel and circuitry of the Vertibird, Jacob remained grounded in a much messier reality. He didn't care about flight specs; he cared about the people now filling the shadows of the crater. The recruitment—or rather, the rescue—plan had been effective. Too effective.
"Case, look around," Jacob said, his voice low and heavy with concern.
Case wiped his face and finally looked past the glowing lights of the laboratory. He saw them then. Groups of people huddled near the support pillars of the X-2 array. They wore the tell-tale signs of the Legion's cruelty: tattered rags marked with a crude, red 'X' across the chest or back. There were women clutching thin blankets, children with wide, hollow eyes, and men whose spirits looked as broken as their shackled wrists once were.
He had expected a dozen, maybe fifteen escapees to trickle in through the Rangers' underground networks. But as he scanned the perimeter, he saw dozens more. The scale was staggering.
"Holy shit," Case whispered, his air sickness completely forgotten as a new kind of dread settled in. "Jacob... how did they get here? Did the Rangers actually manage to cross the Colorado? Did they hit a slave train near the Dam?"
"That's the thing," Jacob replied, his brow furrowed. "The Dam is abandoned. Literally. As to why the NCR didn't take it, I don't know. Maybe they haven't pushed that far yet, or they're spread too thin. Whatever the reason, the gates were wide open."
"Okay, so, what's the headcount?" Case asked, rubbing his temples.
"Forty. Forty bloody souls, Case," Jacob said, gesturing toward the huddle of refugees. "Now we're in the business of trauma rehabilitation and job placement. I didn't expect Corbin to bring back a whole village."
Case sighed, the weight of leadership shifting from tactical to humanitarian. "We'll handle them, Jacob. We have to."
Emily leaned into the conversation, her holographic avatar flickering with a thoughtful blue light. "The hydroponics bays downstairs can finally be put to use. I've verified that the seeds from the X-22 Botanical Research Lab are stabilized, but we'll still need a thorough sweep to ensure every trace of that predatory fungus is gone."
"How good is the yield?" Case asked, looking at her with newfound hope.
"Better than you can imagine," Emily said confidently. "We can expect a harvest every 15 to 20 days. At the absolute slowest, it's a monthly turnaround."
Case blinked, stunned. "You kidding?"
"No, I'm not. The seeds from X-22 are experimental high-yield variants. Combine that with the fact that we can break down Salient Green into nearly any nutritional profile we need, and we can feed an army, let alone thirty people. It's significantly more efficient than any wasteland farm."
"I see," Case nodded, his gaze lingering on a small child clinging to a tattered blanket.
"Right now, we are conducting strict intake checks," Jacob added, his tone professional yet weary. "We're making sure they didn't bring us any 'surprises' from the Legion—trackers, infectious diseases, or worse—but from the look of it, they're just people. Truly broken people."
Looking left and right, Case couldn't help but see a reflection of his own past in those eyes. To the Legion, these weren't people; they were profligates, human cattle to be branded, traded, and discarded. A cold, quiet anger began to simmer beneath his ribs. He wondered how much longer Caesar's empire could hold its own weight before crumbling into tiny, bloody pieces.
The Dam would likely be their undoing—history had a way of repeating itself there. But until that day came, the people standing in front of him had to come first. If he couldn't take down the entire Legion today, he could at least ensure that the suffering stopped for these people.
Case let out a long, weary sigh, the weight of the refugees and the new technology pressing down on him. "We really need to get ourselves together. At least, proper doctors, some highly trained personnel that are not robots.."
Jacob nodded, leaning against a stack of empty crates. "Don't worry, boy. We're already operating under the 'Mercenary' cover in the Mojave. And speaking of which, SO contacted me. They've got some jobs on the board, and they're paying hefty caps."
Case stiffened. "SO… Special Outcomes? That mercenary outfit? How the hell could they lock onto our signal?"
"They're the ones who supplied the Pip-Boys to us, remember?" Jacob pointed to Case's wrist. "I'm quite sure they have a back-channel for communication."
"Shit. Can they trace our location?" Case's hand instinctively moved toward his holster. The last thing they needed was a mercenary company knocking on the "Blue Wall" of Big Mountain.
"As far as I can tell, no," Jacob reassured him. "The Pip-Boy location sensors are dependent on the user's movement and internal gyros; they need constant calibration against satellite pings that don't exist anymore. Besides, the Big MT interference is a nightmare for tracking. Joker—their handler—just sent over a list of high-priority contracts."
Case relaxed, but only slightly. "Alright... what's on the menu?"
"That's our caps problem solved," Case muttered, looking at the glowing list, "but it doesn't fix our need for raw materials. Jacob, that teleportation gun... can we use it to strip the Mojave clean? Steel, scraps, entire buildings if we have to?"
"I have a better idea," Emily intervened. Her blue holographic form shimmered as she glided toward the center of the group, her digital eyes glowing with a sudden influx of data. "Now that I have a firmer grip on the surface sensors, I've deactivated a specific weather-control relay that was causing a localized feedback loop."
"And...?" Jacob scratched his bald head, looking confused.
"There's a town southeast of Vegas. Have you ever heard of Hopeville?" Emily asked. "I've dug through the Pre-War military records. It's a specialized military hub filled with decommissioned missiles, heavy ordinance, and tons of high-grade scrap metal. But it's situated in a highly volatile geographical corridor."
"The Divide?" Jacob's eyebrows shot up. "Don't tell me the constant dust storms in that hell-hole were this place's doing as well."
The name sent a chill down Case's spine. The Divide. In another life, another time, this was where a courier's story began and ended—a graveyard of skinless men and nuclear silos. But here, in this timeline, the detonators hadn't been triggered. There were no world-shaking earthquakes yet, no Marked Men, and no bloated presence of the NCR or Legion. It was a silent, wind-swept ghost of the Old World, ripe for the picking.
"It's a treasure trove," Emily continued. "The silos are packed with stuffs. We could haul back enough steel to build a fleet of Vertibirds, tanks, the works. Without the constant dust storm, maybe the community in Hopeville finally had a hope to thrive."
Case stood up, the last traces of nausea replaced by a cold, sharp focus. The potential of the Divide was too great to ignore. He had so many things to do, so many things to plan. This was it.
There was no time to waste.
"Let's get to work, then, shall we?"