My last few days in the vault came quickly. I'd be undergoing a lung operation to replace my cancer riddled lungs. With the technology here it would be trivial to get rid of the cancer and save my biolungs. With advanced auto-docs, disease cures and all the other near magical stuff this world has, the operation would be taking a few shots to the chest and some medicine. I'd hack up the cancer tissue while the medicine fixed the damage.
Unluckily I was going back to the surface. That meant that powerful cybernetic lungs were what I'd want. I'd be down an entire day with recovery into the next, but my pipboy would get me moving in less than an hour after I woke from surgery. So when I laid down for surgery and alarms started blaring as I went under, I attempted to freak out and ready for combat. That was cut off as the doc had already begun cutting into numbed flesh.
I briefly caught the old overseer slump inside the doorway with John following right behind, the door slamming shut with a slap of his hand to the control panel.
I awoke hours later to my pipboy thumping in a soft alarm. Hours passed as I laid there simply listening to everything I could. The vault was quiet. I could hear breathing from those that were in the room but not much else. The background hum of the vaults systems, the soft buzzing of a light, then suddenly the whirring whoosh of a Mr.Handy rocket activating. I slowly sat up at that. There was an instant explosion of soreness and some tightness as I did but it didn't slow me down.
Once I was sitting up I looked around. Two doors were open with the main door to the room shut. Makeshift beds and old mattresses lined the floor with vault dwellers all over the place. Almost all of them were injured in some way. I could see John standing by the main door with a 12.7mm SMG in one hand and the other was a fully cybernetic arm with a power fist. He stood tall watching over the dwellers and the door, seemingly trying to stare right through the steel to whatever threat lay beyond.
When he spotted me moving he quickly navigated the maze of living bodies and came up to me. "The frozen android has thawed and attacked. The overseer led a counter attack a few hours ago and left me in charge. He said that I should make you my advisor when you woke and attempt another attack behind his own."
I nodded to him when he finished. "What do we have for our attack then?"
He gave a quick nod to a wall with a few lightly wounded dwellers in security armor. Beside them were two Mr.Handys and my cyberdog. With those forces and John we had a decent force. My own weapons and armor were still in the bag I'd left them in beside my bed. With the explosives inside we'd probably be able to take on the enemy. A few mines to cover our back and lots of thrown explosives, backed up by heavy firepower. An hour passed as I stretched and got my body warmed up. This was unhealthy, something my pipboy told me, but I had to if I wanted out of the vault.
As I armored up the assault force gathered. The vault web had given us the needed info to plot our route to the android based on the counter attack forces movements and death points. The overseers forces had suffered massive losses from the start and bled them away till multiple unconfirmed losses occurred in an instant. We couldn't confirm if they'd been wiped out or not but that didn't matter. The second we left this room we'd face traps and android controlled robots. Those robots were the real danger. They were almost completely made up of the humanoid robots the dwellers had built.
When we were finally ready I and John exited first. While the dwellers weren't exactly trained for this that didn't mean they couldn't follow my lead. As I cleared the first turn I opened fire. My blaster shots slammed into an unprepared robot and it whipped around. John split off with some of the men and a Handy. As he did I tossed a grenade and blind fired at the bot. A few seconds passed before gunfire echoed behind the bot. I and two men turned the corner and opened fire, crossfiring into the bot.
In less than a second the bot fell to concentrated fire from two sides. We stripped its core components and the laser cannon then hid a mine beneath the shattered body. The next two bots caught blasts from the makeshift laser cannon before it fried and was tossed at a third to detonate. The explosion blocked off the corridor but a side route got us back on track. That was when we started meeting the overseers forces and much more resistance.
We started taking losses at that point and dropped down to just five men, John, and I. The final room before the androids ice room had four sentry bots, five assaultrons, a full twenty protectrons, and a very scarred Mr.Gutsy. The second I took aim for a sentry bots core the Gutsy started spewing plasma and anti commie obscenities. That didn't stop my shot from scoring a hit and detonating a sentry. John on the other hand had taken on of the men and done his main character like job of activating the air gapped wall turrets. The second they activated I and my men ducked behind the corner and listened to the deafening sound of combat in the other room. Five minutes passed before John rejoined us and we stormed the final three protectrons.
They weren't pushovers due to their armor but their lasers did little to the modern vault security armor and my own. The final protectron was pulverized with a fist through its head plates, curtesy of John's cybernetic arm. When we opened the door to the ice room we found the pitiable state of the android, and the remains of the overseers counter attack. The man had reactivated the ice room with his last breath and re-trapped the android in its cold prison. The android itself was horrific to say the least. It had half a face left and had crammed as many bad symbols on it as possible. I could easily make out an upside down cross on fire and a nazi swastika over its eye. A pentagram sat as the pupil of the side of the face that didn't have a face.
On what was once a child's breast was a large evil eye that was most definitely a laser weapon. One hand was stripped of android flesh and resembled an elongated bone and claw mix. The other hand was sealed in ice like most of the body but bore a striking resemblance to the devil horns hand symbol but the arm itself was nearly severed at the elbow, leaving the arm hanging limp in the ice.
As we entered the once young girl android began screaming at us and we all dove for cover. The information from the vault web told us all we needed to know about that attack. The dual layer scream slammed into one man not quick enough to move and he hit the floor coughing what little air was left in his chest, with bits of internals following.
We scattered across the room and John sprinted behind it. His power fist slammed into the skeletal arm and it exploded in sparks and lightning. This time the Fula layer screaming became sobs of pain for a moment before more lethal screams launched out with a scratching of a freed foot below the ice. I blasted for the face as the others opened fire. Most weapons fire simply sparked off the android but my own shots splashed android flesh onto the floor.
When I finally managed to follow John's example and stumbled behind it I blasted away at the middle of its back. The extrema core, aka five fusion cores all connected together, was finally exposed John simply grabbed and yanked. The android body flopped and twitched before it turned back and glared at us with pure hatred. A pulse grenade made a soft ting as it bounced off its forehead and we dove away.
The EMP exploded a millisecond later and carved a massive crater in the smoking metal skull. As John began picking up his men and shutting this room down I pulled the A.I core and wrapped it in some cloth before shoving it into my bag. I doubted that John would deny me that as loot but it was better safe than sorry. I also doubted that he wouldn't find out and it'd be easier to ask forgiveness for stealing it once I was outside the vault.
A few pipboy scans of the room later and I was heading for the security room. It had been taken immediately by the androids robotic control system and was what I was now using to control all the bots the android had distributed liberally throughout. Once they were dealt with John lifted the emergency lock down and began a headcount to tally the dead or lost. Over the hours that was going on, I was finishing my preparations to leave.
The last attempt of the android to fight back had caused what I'd thought to be insignificant harm but a metal fragment had slapped into my blaster and it was now scrap. So I tossed it in a press and melted it down before simply strapping myself up. I had five 44 cal revolvers, two 45 auto pistols, a 10mm smg, a plasma defender, a shortened grenade launcher, a few trench and combat knives, an ornate Bowie knife, a ripper, and finally my Ranger Sequoia with the new engraving of
[Sanguis Malus Innocentiam Affert]
with the other side reading
[Purga Corruptionem, Ut Sit Futurum.]
On the cylinder of my sequoia was engraved a vault door gear with the vault number 40.
The people that had helped me give the Ranger Sequoia new engravings liked the Latin and helped me put together something close to proper Latin for the lines. I'd also liked the lines themselves and they aligned well with how I did things.
When I finally left the vault I was given a handshake by John. The big man gave me a single nod and I turned away. As I passed I subtly scanned the door and it's mechanism, activation key included. The dwellers might get wiped out in the future and the door shut to entomb them. Most vaults were good places to set up in so if that did happen I'd be able to open the vault to clean up and control.
Outside the vault I was escorted to the edge of the vault controlled territory, were I'd crawl back through legion territory to my hidden invisible car and Radar.