Andy Cerberus's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Andy Cerberus spread the files across the workbench and counted them twice. Three field reports, a water schematic stained brown at the edges, and a folded clinic blueprint he'd pulled from a battered drawer behind the back fence. He was an orange tabby in a tan safari jacket, and he had not slept. Red Hills Traders thought he was scouting the Broken Hills corridor for a new outpost. He was, in a way. He just hadn't told them the outpost would sit on top of a Vault-Tec lie. The filing cabinet had given up the best of it. Water-damaged, half its drawers jammed open, papers hanging out like tongues. Inside the bottom drawer he'd found the document that mattered: a pre-war work order for a secondary purification line at the buried clinic, signed off by a Vault-Tec engineer whose name appeared on none of the resident manifests. Two water systems. One for the people in the Vault. One for something else. Andy had read enough of these to know the shape of it. He set the work order on top of the stack. Beside it he placed a gaming laptop, lid open, five files queued on the desktop under a folder labeled Kira's Revelations. He had cross-referenced everything against her notes twice. The frequencies matched. The clinic's concrete pillar marker matched. The hatch location matched. If she walked in skeptical, the laptop would carry the argument he couldn't. Kira Dallas came through the door first, glasses fogged, pack still on. Sinclair Feldman followed, slower, reading the room before he stepped into it. Andy slid the rolodex aside to clear sightlines and gestured at the bench. "Two water systems," he said. "One the residents drank. One they never saw. I can show you where the second one ends." Kira picked up the work order without sitting. She held it under the lamp, traced the engineer's signature with one claw, then set it down. "Pre-war stamp's real. Routing code matches a black-budget series I've seen twice." She glanced at the laptop. "That tells me everything about how they planned it." Sinclair leaned over the blueprint and exhaled through his teeth. "Friend, you understand what you're holding. A hidden line under a clinic nobody admits exists. Guilt's a lousy negotiating partner, but this? This is a deal worth closing." Andy felt the ledger entry shift in his head. "Then we're aligned." Kira nodded once, already moving. "Tomorrow. We open the hatch and we verify. I don't get close to a deal until the product's in my hands." Sinclair was quieter. "If the second system's still running, somebody upstream knows. And the minute we lift that slab, they'll know we know." He met Andy's eyes. "You sure you want to be the one on the ladder?" Andy gathered the files back into the stack. The meeting was over. The descent had just been scheduled.