Spore Batch 08--"Hangtown Showdown"
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After reviewing my previous entry in this log, I find that my internal style guide balks at referring to myself in the third-person. While I could easily edit the entry, I will not; all of life should be a learning experience, especially our mistakes. If I don’t maintain that entry as a constant reminder, sometime down the road I may be tempted to write again as though I were an angst-ridden juvenile tasting the unfairness of the world. Rubbish. Though my teammates may displease or disappoint me at times, I am still proud of their accomplishments and commitment, and I have a duty to record the activities of my team. I should not allow my own feelings to unduly color the narrative.
I have been given the all-clear to revive Dr Prabhat Mishra and Miss Chelle Renault. Their cryo tubes are in worse condition than Sergeant Harris and Corporal Riley’s were, but this should be a wash, as I now have successful experience in this operation and can cannibalize more parts from the empty tubes. The numbers of our team will certainly grow. I expect the procedure to be complete by the time the next spore batches arrive.
Day 15
After being ambushed by Raiders while travelling to Hangtown, Miss Freya fell into a pit trap and was severely injured. Fortunately, Misters Riley and Harris were able to rescue her, and Jock was able to tend to her wounds. While I can tell that she has not fully recovered, it appears as though the worst danger is behind her.
While waiting for Jock and Freya to regain consciousness, Riley prepared defenses around the camp, fearing the raiders would send reinforcements. MARS kept watch over the road from Hangtown, and Sir Segway foraged in the woods for food while keeping an eye out for raiders approaching from less obvious directions. After a few tense hours of waiting and watching, the silence of the dead woods was broken by the distant staccato of several volleys of gunfire, then silence reigned again. Ever warier, Riley, Mars and Sir Segway continued to wait.
Far down the road to the southwest, toward Hangtown, a pair of uniformed men emerged from the brush. One bore a flag of parley attached to the barrel of his rifle. They approached cautiously until they confirmed that they had gotten MARS’ attention. When the tireless sentry approved their advance, they called forth their commander to speak. He rode into camp on a white stallion. It was the Ryker colonel, Horatio Blackwind, of whom the group clearly thought they’d seen the last when they had sent him packing away from Sparta over a week ago.
He explained that he was leading a group of his men around the area and had discovered the Raider stronghold of Hangtown and had been surveilling the town. Seeing that the team had business to prosecute there, he offered some assistance, since Raiders were a blight across all the wastelands, but admitted that he would be unable to commit any forces in the theater of battle proper due to the hazards of contamination rumored to exist there. Riley was reluctant to say yea or nay to the Colonel’s offer without input from the rest of the team, so he replied that when his fellows returned from their tasks (he naturally did not disclose that they were incapacitated), they would
return with a decision.
Once Jock and Freya awoke, Riley filled them in. The group consensus was that placing too much trust in The Rykers and allowing them to hold a sword of Damocles over their heads was a bad proposition. What if they were in a situation where they needed the Rykers’ assistance and the mutant-haters simply left them hanging out to dry in Hangtown? Best not to put themselves in that position. Instead, the team chose to reconnoiter the fringes of Hangtown on their own later that evening and base their future plans on what intel they could find. They relayed their intent to Colonel Blackwind, who seemed dismayed that they did not trust him, but also seemed infuriatingly reasonable enough to understand their decision. He said they would be remaining nearby in case they changed their strategy.
The team ate their evening meal, hashing out plans, when Sir Segway mentioned he found an interesting sign out in the woods and wondered if it might be good to erect it outside Blue Mount to scare off Raiders. The faded pictograms were certainly menacing, but the illiterate old merchant could not read the words that accompanied them:
WARNING!
DO NOT ENTER--HOT ZONE!
PERSISTENT BIOLOGICAL CONTAMINANTS AHEAD
INHALATION HAZARD
SKIN CONTACT HAZARD
PROLONGED EXPOSURE IS FATAL
CASUAL EXPOSURE MAY BE FATAL
DO NOT APPROACH
Riley and Jock stopped eating, looking suspiciously at the food that Sir Segway had gathered for them. As if on cue, Sir Segway grew delirious and blood began to drip from his nose and lips. He lost consciousness, and both Jock and Riley were ill-equipped to help him directly. Freya had Jock write a note that she attached to Kuro, and sent the eagle back to Sparta to deliver the message to Zael Thorn, hoping that she might know what to do or that she could find some resource in town to help. A while later, Kuro returned with a small bindle; a large hypodermic needle with a dose of medicine—possibly Atropine or Pralidoxime—and a rudimentary transfusion kit. Jock injected the medicine into Sir Segway’s thigh as directed, and Riley, who was a universal blood donor, donated blood. The old man’s condition quickly improved, but he was in no condition to do anything, and whatever adventures lay immediately ahead, he would miss out on.
Meanwhile, MARS approached Hangtown under the cover of darkness. There was an old highway span crossing the nearby river, but the robot eschewed this path, and made his way to the water’s edge and traveled across the old-fashioned way. He discovered a sewer outflow large enough to accommodate his bulk, but stored this intel for later.
The outskirts of the town consisted largely of residential neighborhoods. There was little to no damage to these old homes other than that brought on by the rigors of time. Mummified corpses were littered here and there, looking as though they had not been disturbed in centuries. The perimeter of the suburb was marked by crosses and poles with bodies in various states of decay lashed to them. Some of the bodies showed signs of being picked at by scavengers, and many equally desiccated scavengers lay at the bases of these malevolent totems after having feasted upon a tainted meal. Clearly, Lynchburg, Virginia had been targeted by chemical or biological weapons rather than nuclear warheads. These hazards were meaningless to MARS, so he ignored this threat and crept inward as only a hulking robot can: Poorly.
MARS encountered a small store being looted, and froze in place. When the person inside came out of the building with his loot, his eyes passed over MARS, then he did a slow double-take, and quickly tried to flee. MARS was having none of it, and blasted the scavenger with his LRAD, intending to take a prisoner. While the lone bandit was easily incapacitated, a comical dilemma unfolded as MARS—with no true arms or manipulators—mounted the obstacle of carrying an unconscious body back with him. After a short time fiddling without success, he resorted to “gently” kicking the unlucky raider back to camp like a sack of meat fallen from one’s grocery bag. This less-than-optimal solution did solve another problem, however, as the constant physical abuse prevented the captive from regaining consciousness and objecting to this rough treatment.
Back at camp, the rest of the team interrogated the raider. They discovered that the raider leader, “Whiplash,” had indeed captured a woman recently, and held her in their camp at the college football stadium. The bandit evidently did not approve of the captive or Whiplash’s treatment of her, since he had not adequately tortured or killed her yet, and was supposedly committing the unthinkable act of letting her “fork-tongued whispers” influence his actions. After they extracted what information they could, the team was once again at a bit of an impasse as to what to do with their captive. Releasing him was clearly not an option, and Freya and MARS had no qualms about liquidating him; I gather from her demeanor that this is simply what one does with captured raiders where she comes from. Jock and Riley (…possibly just Jock) was less willing to simply execute him. They compromised on the option of turning him over to the Rykers, on the off chance that they could eke some other information from him, though Jock surely knew exactly what fate awaited the prisoner. The team would not see him alive again.
MARS prepared for another sortie into the suburbs, systematically sweeping the streets and houses, while the rest of the team waited at the bridge. MARS eventually encountered a raider checkpoint, and attacked. One of the raiders managed to set off a large firework that was clearly intended to signal his fellows, which suggested that they may not have radios. MARS incapacitated one of the raiders with his disintegrator, but the other managed to elude him. MARS returned, and shortly after, a host of raiders spilled out to the edge of town. Some armored hulk of a man approached to negotiate with Jock, who stood resolutely in the middle of the bridge to confront him.
Jock requested that the raiders release their prisoner, or face annihilation, because when God and a War Machine like MARS is on your side, what else can one be expected to ask? The underboss did not seem so impressed with this, but he did pause to deliberate. Instead, he countered that the outsiders could exchange a slave of their own for their prisoner, or provide them some entertainment by fighting their champion in a one-on-one duel. Neither of these options were acceptable, so they chose option C: From a distant sniper’s nest, Riley shot the raider in the face, killing him stone dead. MARS fanned the nearby houses with his energy weapon, setting them alight. The crowd of raiders cut loose a few panicked volleys of gunfire that did not cause any harm to the team before they ran back to the safety of their stadium. Full of zeal and fervor (and goaded on by Riley), Jock chased after them, as though he were the Messiah himself running the moneychangers out of the Temple. When he reached the checkpoint MARS had depopulated, Jock stood atop the sandbags and delivered a rousing address intended to shake the morale of the entire raider host. He also used his Esper talents to show them the hand of the almighty guiding the team and protecting them. A warbling alarum spread across the stadium’s ramparts at Jock’s defiance and display of his powers. His ultimatum laid out, he turned his back on the curs, and returned to his team. They set out to devise a plan of how to deal with the raiders now that they had been good and rattled.
Riley revealed a troubling discovery: When looting the corpse of the underboss he had expertly dispatched, he found that the raider’s kit-bashed armor was held together atop a standard-issue Morrow Project tactical coverall. The name “Henneman” was barely legible on the left breast. Riley had known Henneman from training untold years ago, and this dead man was clearly not him. This was their first encounter with other project assets, however it seemed possible that some of these assets may be in the hands of their enemies.
This is a portentous development, as I now appear to have a third spore batch feed trickling in.
