Calvert Mansion

When you are two-hundred-some-odd years of age, and have been a player in the Great Game for all of that time save the first twenty or so, you learn a paranoid kind of care about your daily existence. You find that directing people as if they were tools comes easily, when it means your own survival goes on that much longer, and the voice you used to call guilt no longer comes calling save in the dimmest watches of the night. If the people you'd by-and-large ignored for more than a decade become hostile for no clear reason, you take up whatever resource comes to hand to protect yourself, and send someone else to investigate the issue. You'll sort out however much of what they say is truth and how much mistake or outright lie once you hear it. Better to risk them than you when things get hairy.

There's never been anyone you could trust, after all. Except for the pups. Freki and Geri can't be bought; you found them, raised them, trained them, taught them you could be trusted and taught them anyone else on two feet was to be watched as if they were targets. Because they would be, eventually. If not yours then your enemies'. You can trust your pups; everyone else is a liability.

So when those frothing mad tribals from the northeastern swamps gave off attacking for a while, and that Brotherhood of Steel girl was away investigating them, Desmond Lockheart called his dogs over and set them to watching the exits. He might, he estimated, have a few minutes' quiet time, and by damn he wanted a bowl of cereal. So what if the stuff was two hundred years old and starting to moulder. So was he. Irradiated food wasn't any kind of a big thing to him, and the preservatives would just keep him from rotting at this stage. Time, at last, for his goddamn cereal. A little powdered milk, a little water, some stirring, half the remaining contents of the box of Sugar Bombs-

Damn it to hell, Geri was barking. Was there not enough peaceful time in the world to have ONE bowl of cereal? Was that too much to fucking ask?

He set the cereal aside and carefully covered the bowl with an overturned pot. "All right, you mud-lovers," he muttered, "since you can't extend me even that much common fucking courtesy I'll just have to-"

"Mr. Lockheart!" The voice was coming from outside the house; the speaker had enough sense not to try anything stupid, at least. "Mr. Lockheart, it's me! Paladin 101! Tell your dog he can stand down."

"Are you fucking kidding me?" wondered Desmond aloud to the air. He edged over to the window, nudging Geri aside, and scanned the area- there, right there, there was a blurry patch. "Is that a damn Stealth Boy?"

"Not exactly, sir," said the Brotherhood girl. There was a faint fwomp, and the stealth field dissipated, leaving behind-

"Fucking hell," the ghoul breathed. "Where'd you get a damn Crimson Dragoon suit- never mind! Get your arse in here before someone sees you!"

A few minutes later the door was locked and barred and both the dogs sat unblinking at their master's side. "All right," Desmond said, "talk."

The Brotherhood girl in the Crimson Dragoon suit settled herself uneasily into one of Desmond's chairs. "First of all," she said, "I have ways of concealing my supplies and armor-"

"Not about that! The suit's irrelevant, unless it was yours when it was new and there's something you're not telling me. You said you were going to find out why those damned swamp grubbers were trying to kill me. Did you get any information at all?"

She exhaled. "Some, yes," she said. "Do you happen to have any old, long-standing enemies who might represent themselves with a hologram of a human brain?"

Desmond sat up straight so quickly he heard his spine make a popping sound. He ignored it. "Just a brain?" he said.

"Just a brain. No head, no skull, nothing- that's all that was in the hologram. He seemed to hate you pretty-"

"I knew it!" Desmond spat. "I knew that little bastard was behind all this! After all these years he's stuck his head out, and this is my chance to cut it off!.... figuratively speaking, of course."

"... he expressed pretty similar sentiments about you, sir," the girl said. "Do you mind filling me in on this particular feud?"

"I should have known. My old rival, so close to his family home. Only he would be so stupid." Desmond shook his head, looked up at the girl. "He was once a man... Professor Calvert. The Calverts owned half of Maryland, back when there was a Maryland to own. Members of the Calvert family were influential all over the world. They practically owned a deed to the US government. In their best days, there were no less than three Calvert family senators, seven members of the House, and two governors. They even had a top candidate for President, until that scandal with the dog forced him to drop out of the race." He smirked. "I was particularly proud of that one."

The Brotherhood girl was staring at him, but rallied enough to say, "Once a man. He's something else now?"

"Oh yes," said Desmond. "Back in the old days one of his Senatorial brothers got him an appointment as chief of research at the St. Aubin research facility. The process of extracting and isolating brains for Robobran robots needed refining, and that little bastard was just the sort to pursue it to its furthest ends. A few years into the project he decided they'd achieved enough advances in their biogel formulas that it was worth shedding the rest of his carcass to experience the results himself. He's been floating in a damned jar for the past two hundred years."

She shuddered. "I see," she said. "Well, he seems to have adapted pretty well to it; he was commanding the tribals' leader via hologram..."

"It wasn't a hologram. Back when he had a body, Calvert was tinkering with the gel formula to allow the brain to project words and images," said Desmond. "He was getting results, too, scum that he was..."

"He still is," the Brotherhood girl murmured, looking down at her knees. "He was talking about exerting psychic domination over more than just the cave where he was talking to Jackson. That's what the tribals were attacking this place for- he said you had a jamming device that interfered with his ability to affect more than just that cavern, and he wanted them to get it and destroy it."

"Did he, now." Desmond stroked his chin with one scabrous finger. "So those half-wits are getting messages from the Professor, eh? So he's off somewhere broadcasting to 'em. But without those buggers to do things for him, he can't do much for himself.... so what we do now is, we cut off his ability to talk to 'em, and he'll need to try harder. Maybe then I can find the squishy little worm and finish him off for good!"

"He's got those two Paladins I came to find captive," the girl said, a sudden firmness in her tone. "He mentioned holding them prisoner. Whatever we can do to flush him out so I can get them back, I'll help with."

Desmond nodded. "Right," he said. "If I know Professor Calvert, and I do, he's using a high frequency cognitive sine broadcast. I have the perfect device to jam up his little talkbox. All you need to do is take it to the highest point in the area and install it so it's got maximum freedom to broadcast."

"The highest point being-"

"Up in the top of the mud-grubbers' cathedral," said Desmond. "You've got the suit for it- it can't be that hard to get past those drooling wonders with the field engaged."

"No, it's not, I've already done it once," said the girl, who was looking green around the gills. "One of them spotted me. Thought I was a spirit."

"Well, it's your own fault for letting them see you at all, but that's neither here nor there." Desmond waved one hand dismissively. "Get in there somehow and stick the jammer as high above their communal insanity joint as you can manage it. I'll track it from here and turn it on. Then we'll see where our little professor is."

The Brotherhood girl glanced away, towards the front door. Desmond thought she looked like she might be about to object, but no- she took a deep breath and nodded. "I think I can get in," she said. "One way or another, I'll get in there."

"Good. Go," said Desmond. "My cereal's all fucking soggy by now, I'm sure."

Too Many Plans

Well.

That had gone… interestingly.

What Ellen didn't know about Desmond Lockheart could fill a Vault, she was sure. What she didn't know about this Professor Calvert could fill an even bigger one. They both gave the impression of being fairly awful people, and she wished that she'd never stumbled into their conflict. As far as she was concerned it was something they should have been left to sort out between themselves.

Unfortunately, there were Whydah and Morgan involved. Calvert had said they were alive. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he was lying. She didn't know. But he had no reason to care whether she thought they were alive or not, so why would he-

(Unless psychic domination also allowed him to read thoughts at a distance. Which was a possibility. Who knew what that machine was if it wasn't a holoprojector?)

And Desmond, well- Desmond seemed to know enough about Calvert without being prompted for her to assume that he was giving her at least some measure of the truth. At least about what Calvert was capable of, and what he wasn't capable of. It wasn't as if the tribals were in any kind of condition to be ideal allies. Surely Calvert would have used any other resource in the world instead if he could have, right? Did that mean he was really as limited as Desmond said? Did he have more capability that he was holding in reserve?

At any rate, the way she saw it, Calvert had a pretty good chance of actually holding Whydah and Morgan prisoner. (Unless he could read her thoughts and make references to them off hand to lull her into a false sense of security.) (Unless he'd actually killed them already.) (Unless he was in the process of extracting their brains to put them into robot bodies, the way Desmond had said.)

Agh. Some days Ellen wished she hadn't found out just how many liars there really were in the world. Trying to pick her way through all of the possible half-truths and manipulations gave her a headache.

She reached up with one gloved hand to rub at her temple. She had Desmond's word for the situation, and what might have been the word of a hologram of a disembodied brain or might have been the word of a psychic projection of a disembodied brain, and no real way of sorting out whether she could trust Desmond properly or not- and no way of finding the brain without trusting Desmond. What she had was a box that should cripple the professor's psychic efforts (which were real enough, if the frustration she'd heard when he'd tried to talk sense into Jackson was anything to go by), and a walled compound to mount it in.

Getting in there in the Chinese stealth suit (honestly, it was kind of creepy the way both the brain and Desmond recognized its origin on sight) was possible. Getting to the highest point without someone spotting the blur of the stealth field was… somewhat less likely. She'd gotten away with it in the Pitt because nobody had thought her patch of distorted air meant anything beyond a little problem with their eyes. With these tribals trying to transcend earthly existence with all the chems they could muster, she was in real danger of a Toad scenario repeating itself. Oh, sure, she didn't have to talk to whoever spotted the 'spirit', but what guarantee did she have that they wouldn't decide she was a hostile entity? Or that- and she wished the idea hadn't occurred to her- or that Professor Calvert hadn't told Jackson that he'd sent the person in the suit after their hated enemy, and what the suit might be capable of? True, it was Jackson and he'd probably misinterpret every word, but-

Well. There was one other option. The gatekeeper had sent her off to the Sacred Bog to get them their stupid seeds, and he'd only ever seen her in her power armor. If an armored figure came back to them with a bag full of punga seeds and said 'I've done your ritual, let me in', they'd have no reason to connect the event to Toad's little epiphany with the invisible. And it would give her the opportunity to find whoever it was that was performing brain surgery on these people, now that she thought about it, since whoever it was would probably be on the lookout for the gatekeeper's latest postulant…

Hm. Brain surgery. If what Desmond had said was true, maybe this person was another of Calvert's associates. Where one ghoul existed for two centuries, there could just as easily be two.

Well- she'd find out soon enough who and what she was dealing with. First things first. She had to go change back into her armor, and then she had to find the tribals' compound again so she could ask the gatekeeper for directions to this Sacred Bog. Lots of marshes had a west, after all.