Logan Harrison's Arc

Chapter 2 of 9

Logan carried the broken keycard to his workshop in Calico Flats. The old fire station stood behind patched sheet metal and weathered red brick. Zelda had sent for him weeks back to fix Red Hills gear, and the place still held his best tools. He laid the dented Pip-Boy 3000 on the worn worktable. A bullet had punched clean through its housing. The CPU card read fine. But the panel behind it was cracked, and half the drive contacts were gone. He clipped his blue diagnostic analyzer to the board and watched the screen. Numbers scrolled. He read the machine by what was missing. Two power traces. A ribbon connector. A voltage regulator he had no match for. His two-fingered hand hovered over the tools. He knew this feeling. The parts he needed were not in this room, and not in any room within a hundred miles. "You'll need parts," said a voice behind him. Zelda Verada leaned in the doorway. She wore her red beret and her jacket with the medic cross. Her medical bag hung on her belt. She had sent Logan to Calico Flats in the first place, and she read a workbench the way she read a wound. "How bad?" "Bad," Logan said. "Regulator, ribbon, a panel. Prewar spec. I can order them, but they're a few days out. And they'll cost more caps than this contract pays." Zelda crossed to the table. She looked at the cracked door panel where the Pip-Boy had shorted out. She did not flinch at the price. "That key opens Vault One-Forty-One," she said. "Sublevel three has the medical labs. A G.E.C.K. I've burned every favor I own getting a hospital ready near that door. I've got nothing left to trade in caps." "Then it stays broken," Logan said. Zelda set her bag on the table and opened it. She pulled out a sealed case and a bundle of manuals. "I don't carry caps. I carry gear." She laid out a portable field autoclave, a sealed diagnostic kit, two prewar tech manuals. "High spec. The kind a supplier wants more than caps. You order your parts. You trade these against the bill." Logan lifted a manual. It was a genuine prewar service guide, the sort suppliers hoarded. Worth more than the parts three times over. "This clears the whole order." "Then order it," Zelda said. "Funny what survives when no one knows what they're looking at." Logan set the trade goods beside the broken key. He wrote the parts list by hand. The order would take a few days to arrive. When it did, he could rebuild the key. And when the key worked, the inner doors would open, and his server cores would be waiting behind them. He sealed the list in an envelope. The parts were coming now. The wait had a end. But so did his contract, and the raiders' informant was still out there, counting the same days he was.