Unsafe Working Conditions
Feb. 8th, 2012 09:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aaaaaaaagh_skyThat man in the protective suit, the one who tallied slaves' scrap when they came in from the steelyard (assuming they came in at all)- he'd leered. He'd actively leered at Ellen. And the things he'd said under his breath to Voodoo- well, she hadn't heard them, but she'd heard the man's snicker and it was a sound she didn't want to hear ever again. Frankly, she was darn grateful to hear the Mill door close behind them and see the light wink out.
Out here, the only light is what makes it through the clouds and smog above. It's daytime, Ellen can tell that much, but when the air's polluted enough that the sky's the color of bile you can't really tell much more than that. She shakes her head grimly and looks to Voodoo. "Let's get to somewhere you can undo the wrist bindings," she says. "I want my weapons back if we're going to look for Dave in this." She casts an eye over the buckling fences and ancient, corroded railroad cars and adds, "Probably the Shishkebab. This is too much like the Metro tunnels- I haven't got enough line of sight for the Gauss rifle to be worthwhile."
Out here, the only light is what makes it through the clouds and smog above. It's daytime, Ellen can tell that much, but when the air's polluted enough that the sky's the color of bile you can't really tell much more than that. She shakes her head grimly and looks to Voodoo. "Let's get to somewhere you can undo the wrist bindings," she says. "I want my weapons back if we're going to look for Dave in this." She casts an eye over the buckling fences and ancient, corroded railroad cars and adds, "Probably the Shishkebab. This is too much like the Metro tunnels- I haven't got enough line of sight for the Gauss rifle to be worthwhile."
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Date: 2012-02-10 04:45 am (UTC)With that, he hops off, sprints to a nearby boxcar, slides to an edge, and peeks out - there's no movement, ground level or higher.
"Way forward's clear. Got you covered."
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Date: 2012-02-10 04:58 am (UTC)She nods to Voodoo and looks both ways before dropping to ground level and darting across the open space. She's seen the way the trogs move and she doesn't like to present a target for longer than absolutely necessary. Without the stealth suit or armor, all she's got is speed and the fact that she's relatively small; she plasters herself against a shadowed bit of the building immediately and gestures to Voodoo that she's all right.
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Date: 2012-02-10 05:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-10 05:17 am (UTC)Yeah, Ellen doesn't like the look of that either. The Shishkebab isn't lit yet, but it's drawn and ready to go if even the slightest movement appears in the shadows.
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Date: 2012-02-10 05:43 am (UTC)"Room clear. Hallway, twelve."
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Date: 2012-02-10 05:47 am (UTC)"Auto-turret," she murmurs, and points at the ceiling. "Laser model. Inactive. Look for a control terminal, I can probably-"
Someone's coming. Someone running for their lives, by the sound of the hammering footfalls. Back to cover, immediately.
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Date: 2012-02-10 05:52 am (UTC)"Ellen. Terminal. Halfway mark, wall, right side."
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Date: 2012-02-10 06:00 am (UTC)Oh, thank God in Heaven and Mr. House in his office, it's a RobCo terminal running a bog-standard RobCo TermLink interface. She's hacked so many of these into obedience by now that she could do it in her sleep. Granted, she has to pop her Pip-Boy back out of Karkat's storage deck to do it, but it's well worth the extra second or so that takes to see the password screen fill up with garbage characters, then flicker away and get replaced by turret controls.
Lots of turret controls.
Well, she'll just turn this one here on and let it take out whoever's coming. If there's one terminal in this building with access to turret fire controls, there'll be others, and if Dave's in this building there's no reason to take the chance of incinerating him. She can turn the other ones on later to cover their retreat.
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Date: 2012-02-10 06:26 am (UTC)"...so you guys used these things for more than markers."
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Date: 2012-02-10 06:31 am (UTC)She makes a mental note to see if she can't get her hands on an AER9 rifle the next time she's buying from Harith. The Brotherhood doesn't control all the energy weapons in the Wasteland, and Voodoo deserves a gift of some kind for all his help. This seems like a good start.
"Shall we press on?"
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Date: 2012-02-10 06:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-10 06:59 am (UTC)--
There's a bright yellow Protectron sprawled in one corner of the room, PLANT SECURITY emblazoned across its midsection. It's still got a working fission battery and a fistful of energy cells. Normally Ellen would pass that up, but with Karkat's deck the battery's weight scarcely matters any more, and she might need it later on.
If nothing else, even a trog hates being hit in the head with ten pounds of battery.
--
The catwalk snakes across a room big enough to play baseball in, thirty feet off the ground. Ellen would avert her eyes from the view below, but there's a guttural, bestial snarling coming from the shadows. She's starting to know that sound all too well.
Voodoo's M60 wipes out most of the trogs by the time she gets the Gauss out and fires. She doesn't look too closely at the corpses when they get down to floor level. Most of them are back among ancient ore-carts, and they looked awfully small from above.
Paladin Kodiak had told her once that out of all the children in the Pitt during the Scourge, the Brotherhood only found twenty who hadn't mutated already...
--
Two cart-tracks diverge in a yellow-and-brick room. They take the one on the right, first.
The trogs that were there are dead by the time Voodoo and Ellen return and switch to the track on the left. Ellen has to stop anyway and lean her head against the wall. She hasn't had a fit of the shakes like this since Vault 87.
She hasn't seen anything like that trackway and what was left there since Vault 87, either.
--
A locked door- locked from the inside. Dave's just clever enough to think of that himself, so Ellen insists on forcing the lock. He might be in there, unconscious- there's been a lot of blood on the floor hereabouts.
He's not. There's a pile of human bones near a still-operational terminal, though. As for the terminal-
I brought it up with Management today that the men down at the plant aren't taking the new shipment of robots lightly. They fear losing their jobs and I don't blame them....
...told management that we've been having problems with the previous batch of robots and are not prepared for another batch anytime soon. This is complete bullshit of course, the robots work perfectly. They outperform our best worker by a factor of five...
...They saw first hand the speed and efficiency of the robots. Unfortunately, they also caught two employees in the act of tearing apart a Protectron...
News broke out today over the loud speakers that everyone needs to vacate the plant by 1 PM. The men knew at once there was no budget cut....
...begged them to leave before the robots got here. They laughed and said they'd take care of the robots, it's me they wanted...
Whoever reads this, let it be known that I did everything in my power to keep everyone's job at the plant. And let this be an example of how not to replace humans with machines.
Tom McMullin
Supply Plant Supervisor
"Huh," says Ellen, and absently copies the files to her Pip-Boy, just in case.
--
Upstairs there's what used to be a supervisory floor. Someone used it as a bedroom recently. Someone used it to test one of those horrible rotary axe-weapons more recently.
At least they didn't test it on Dave. Even though the head's nowhere to be found, the skin's the wrong color and the man's build is too small.
--
There are still four Protectrons in their recharging stations as Voodoo and Ellen approach the plant's exit. Ellen's already switched on all the laser turrets; there are still things moving in the shadows that she would rather never surprise anyone again. The robots get a speculative look, though. "Think I should switch these on too, Voodoo?"
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Date: 2012-02-10 07:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-10 07:15 am (UTC)She's got one of her own, of course, and she makes sure of its presence before stepping over to the terminal at the end of the recharging stations and activating it.
"Commencing security operations," announces the first robot to step out of its charging station. "Please stand clear. This is now a free-fire zone."
It turns its eyeless gaze in Ellen and Voodoo's direction a moment, then lurches off into the factory's depths; the others do the same shortly thereafter.
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Date: 2012-02-10 10:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-10 02:23 pm (UTC)Which isn't to say she isn't still wary as she approaches the plant's exit, of course. You don't survive long otherwise- even if you are greeted by a blue heeler whose fur is absolutely soaked in rapidly drying brown-red yuk from muzzle to sternum.
"Nice of you to join us," Ellen says.
"Baroo?" says Dogmeat, or something like that.
She pets him anyway- he's obviously been fighting somebody- and crouches down to make sure that that's not his own blood. He's wagging his tail happily when the loudspeakers high above suddenly flare into life:
"ALL WORKERS ARE TO REPORT TO THE CENTRAL PLAZA IMMEDIATELY. LORD ASHUR WILL BE ADDRESSING THE CITY AT THE END OF THE WORKSHIFT."
"... huh."
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Date: 2012-02-10 04:06 pm (UTC)If only to try to max out his Bullshit Detector.
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Date: 2012-02-10 06:23 pm (UTC)The Mill’s a mess, of course, all the slaves scurrying to shut down their equipment and work stations before bolting for the plaza. The incessant thudding that permeates the place’s sound is gone, the machine that made it finally stilled. Voodoo can catch a glimpse of a great press or molding device in the dimly-lit recesses of the Mill’s open space before he and his ‘worker’ are urged onward and shooed outdoors.
In the plaza, the slaves are already packed as densely as New York subway riders at Christmas. As more of them pour out- Midea here, the girl who asked after Wild Bill there, the hollow-eyed fellow who was brother to Billy the trog across the way- the overseers make no move to give extra space, instead shoving them together so tightly the oshiyas of the Japanese metro could not possibly do better. An uncomfortable situation, but a tolerable one- at least for now. Hopefully Ashur won’t talk too long.
(A keen eye might spot a bald, narrow-faced fellow about halfway across the plaza. Too far to reach, but not far enough to lose, he’s badly bruised and has a number of untreated cuts of the sort one expects to see on a bare-knuckle boxer who lost very badly. Even through all of that, his resemblance to Vladimir Lenin is kind of amazing.)
There’s a rebar-and-planking scaffold a good thirty feet high at the widest end of the plaza. It’s here that the two leather-clad raiders appear, and then a third man. Hard to get a good look at his face at this distance, but he looks blond and bearded, and he’s definitely clad in power armor (albeit with a Brahmin skull in place of one shoulder pauldron). He steps forward and raises his hands as silence falls over the slaves, and then in a booming voice Martin Luther King would envy, declaims:
"Citizens of the Pitt! Workers of Downtown! Traders of Uptown! And all fierce souls who do what must be done! I bring you good news! We stand at the dawn of a new golden age! Where others merely survive… we thrive!”
Ellen opens her mouth, but there’s no words she could possibly speak. They’re just not coming.
It doesn’t matter. Ashur’s voice rolls implacably, passionately on: “Our industry is the envy of the Commonwealth! Our safety is the envy of the Capital Wastes! Our might is the envy of Ronto!”
”We don’t even know these people exist in the Capital!” Ellen whispers indignantly.
”Sssh!”
“And while I have led your efforts,” Ashur continues, “it has been by your own strength that you have earned all the envy of the world! They envy the steel shaped by the workers in our mills! And they envy the strength of our traders and raiders who wield the steel for the Pitt! And most of all, they envy our victories in the struggle for freedom!”
What.
WHAT.
(Not that he’s stopped. He’s still going. But Ellen’s brain is temporarily stalled out; she looks indignantly towards Voodoo. Surely he’s hearing this too? She hasn’t gone insane?)
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Date: 2012-02-10 07:04 pm (UTC)...Ashur would be gibbed halfway to the Capital by now. And on fire.
It takes every ounce of disciple Voodoo's mustered up over the years to resist the urge to sight in on this motherfucker's face and let loose a burst. But he manages it.
This, of course, does not rule out Ashur's chances of getting in a little one-on-one time with the tomahawk later. Not in the least.
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Date: 2012-02-10 07:55 pm (UTC)It’s not working. Alas.
If Ashur notices, he doesn’t care. Or if he cares, he doesn’t let it interrupt his words. “Because yes, freedom is what we ALL work towards!” he calls out as the raiders all around the plaza hoist their weapons meaningfully. “Freedom from fear! Freedom from disease! Freedom to live as once we did before we were shackled by atomic fire!”
He’s got a real way with words, for someone who’s essentially urinating on his people’s heads and telling them it’s raining.
“And so,” he says, dropping his voice, “to celebrate this struggle, I ask my loyal workers: who among you is prepared to fight for your freedom?”
( "Anybody who makes it all the way through the fights with the gladiators in the Hole and comes out on top gets their freedom and joins Ashur and his crowd-" )
“Who among you will risk your life in the crucible to create a new life of freedom in Uptown?”
There’s a motion in the crowd, more purposeful than mere shifting of the packed people. It’s the bald fellow, with the murderous look on his battered face- he’s trying to shove the others away, to get his arm free. To volunteer-
“Who will take this rare chance to thrive?"
It would be nice to say that she’s thinking of Paladin Renny’s reaction to being told ‘I found Dave, but he died in an idiotic gladiatorial combat’. Or to say that she’s calculating the Brotherhood’s chances of gaining agricultural trading rights with the two other presidential candidates of the Republic and finding them wanting. But that would require her to be thinking. This? This is pure reflex, and knowing in her gut that that man is going to die if he gets his hand in the air.
“I’ll do it,” she shouts, and shoves her own hand up where it can be seen. “Send me.”
And then her brain catches up to what her mouth and arm just did.
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Date: 2012-02-10 08:35 pm (UTC)Oh shit oh shit ohshit.
The words hit him like a freight train, and it's all he can do not to openly stare at her as the raiders glance at each other and close in on her.
"Ellen-"
For the moment he honestly considers damning the orders and lighting up the whole fucking square, wasting Ashur and the raiders in a couple of bursts, grabbing Dave and making a run for the exit, getting this whole fucking ordeal over with in the blink of an eye -
"Ellen-"
But no, some part of him just won't cooperate, just freezes up, wonders what the fuck she's thinking as the raiders come closer and closer and closer -
"Ellen, what the hell are you doing-"
But the part that tells him to do something, to save one of the few good people, one of the few good things in this shithole of a world, is just that much louder, and he raises his M60 -
- just in time for the raiders to converge on her, guns up.
There's too many. He can't take them. Not even with his '60. He hastily adjusts his aim to Ellen's back.
He tries for a front-sight focus, but the tears blind him.
"Goddammit, Ellen."
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Date: 2012-02-10 09:19 pm (UTC)"Very well!" thunders Ashur, as first Midea and then the slave around her begin to cheer. "If that is the will of the workers, then this woman shall be their champion!"
"Tell Dave why I'm doing this," she manages; she's a little surprised she can be quite that coherent. "Please."
"Madam, you you carry not only the dream that workers cam become free, but that we may all someday become truly free from the threats of our world," says Ashur. "Prepare yourself to be forged anew. Faydra, the Arena mistress, awaits in the steel mill. The rest of you are dismissed!"
If she's very, very lucky, she thinks, her armed escort to the bowels of the Mill will let her pause in a corner somewhere so she can throw up first.
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Date: 2012-02-10 10:34 pm (UTC)If one word could send him over the edge right now, into a near-blind and red-hot fury...
( he fixes his eyes on the bald and bruised man, but he doesn't see a man, just a target, a hostage, an arrogant, stuck-up prick of a VIP that has caused them all this grief, sent them through all this bullshit, without one iota of compensation )
...that would be it.
( he makes his way through the crowd, shoving people, knocking some to the ground, but he doesn't stop, not for a second, his gaze fixed on that target, but remembering enough of his training that that target doesn't see him until his hand is clamped.
Right.
Around.
His.
Throat.
He leans in close, his eyes boring into that target's like a well-honed drill into granite. )
"You're coming with me."
It is not a tone that invites discussion. Nor is it one that invites opposition as Voodoo picks Dave up, flops him onto his shoulder like a ragdoll, and starts walking back toward the Mill.
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Date: 2012-02-11 12:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 12:11 am (UTC)He grabs Dave's scrotum and twists.
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