Sarah Burks's Arc

Chapter 6 of 8

The lab was theirs, but the door to Level 4 stayed dark. Sarah stood over the salvaged supplies and studied the dead lock panel. The G.E.C.K. waited past it. Her physician ID meant nothing to that clearance. She turned to the team. "We can't force it yet. Let's clean this place first. Every terminal, every record. Something in here tells us how to open that door." The scouts hauled broken chairs aside. Sarah pulled records off the floor and stacked them. In a fallen cabinet she found a blue and yellow data pad marked with Vault-Tec logos. Its screen still lit. Dense text scrolled under a warning triangle. She read a line, then another, and her tail went stiff. "This is the operations manual," she said. "For the G.E.C.K." Mary Long stepped close, folder held to her chest, glasses catching the blue light. She had joined Zelda's team as the field hospital tech, and she read fast. "Give me a minute." Her eyes moved down the screen. "It says the kit terraforms a whole area at once. Water, soil, power. And a warning. Never run it near a failing reactor." She looked up. "That's what killed this place." Logan crouched at a live terminal, hat pushed back, missing two fingers curled against the keys. He read machines by what wasn't there. "Got something," he said, flat. He held up a scuffed disc, cracked at one edge. "Accident footage. Levels five and six." He fed it to the terminal. The screen flickered to gray video. A pipe burst. Men in vault suits ran. One in a captain's uniform shouted an order, then keyed a wall panel. "That's the sealing procedure," Logan said. "He locked the lower levels from the inside. Before it spread." The room went quiet as they watched the captain die on screen. Then Sinclair Feldman came through the door. The Red Hills recon man kept his rifle slung and swept the room with his yellow eyes. He carried a weathered instrument, a repaired radiation analyzer, its needle already climbing. "You'll want this reading, gal," he said. He set the device on the desk. The needle jumped past level five, then level six. "That's coming up through the floor. From below four." He tapped the dial. "Whatever the G.E.C.K. mutated, it's still hot down there. You crack that door without suits, you cook." Sarah looked from the manual to the disc to the climbing needle. Three answers, one hard truth. "So we seal the lower levels tight," she said. "Same as the captain did. We hold this lab and stage from here." She met Sinclair's eyes. "Nobody goes past four until we have explorer suits and a way through that lock." Sinclair nodded. "Smart. Guilt won't dig you a grave, but radiation will." Logan pulled the disc and pocketed it. Mary logged the manual's warnings. They agreed, first they set level 3 lab, command station & supply room. Then plans can be made the explore level 4 and retrieve the used G.E.C.K. to find others.