Tank A9 sits near the leftmost corner of one of the rows. The first thing you see is, stenciled in white on the side is a big rectangle where a name would go, and five white pieces of paper that have been stuck to the side with cheap tape.
DEATH TANK: THE TANK THAT KILLS?
A9 (boring!!!!)
WANDERING HOME
LEGION"S REWARD (you mean ' right?)
OLD BETTY (who?)
They're all in different handwriting - often combining multiple hands per note. You walk past the notes and find yourself snout to nose with a deathclaw, who is peering down at you from the open hatch at the front of the tank, where the driver should be sitting.
"Aaaah!" You jerk back, heart leaping into your throat - hand dropping hastily to your pistol.
"Hello!" the deathclaw says, with a deep, sibilant, from the chest tone you'd never expected to hear from a
deathclaw. Once the panic passed, you remembered that there were sentient deathclaws - they were a minority, created by some NCR experiments back in the forties. But you'd never really expected to
meet one.
"Hey," you say, trying to not act like you nearly shot them.
"You don't say hello to the LT, Fast," a deeper voice says from the other side of the tank. "You salute them and say 'reporting for duty, sir.'"
"But I'm already at my duty station, and our last commander wasn't an officer, and they yelled at me when I called them sir, so..." the Deathclaw, Fast (?), mutters and you see the rest of the crew as you finish your circuit around the tank.
The man...or...woman who had spoken, you're not entirely sure, is a Super Mutant. But easily, the scrawniest Super Mutant you've ever seen in your life. Most of them top at seven, eight feet. This one's maybe six? But they still have the hunched forward body type, greenish skin, and the thick ropy muscles of a mutie, just… scrawny. Disproportionate.
Next to them is a masked figure - gas mask and long coat over their uniform, like an NCR Ranger's garb. But you immediately clock them as not being one. For one thing? The gas mask's all wrong - a side mounted filter rather than front facing, and they don't have body armor. The lenses of their goggles are a sickly, impenetrable green. And under the coat, their outfit looks more like mining gear than anything else.
The last one, the one bringing up the rear by dragging an entire pallet of HE rounds by themselves, was a robot. An Assaultron, but you saw someone had stripped their armor and weapons off at some point. It had been replaced with cuts of canvas and hammered sheet-steel to keep the dust out - cowling that wouldn't even stand up to a pistol, let alone field weapons. Under the two beady camera eyes, in the empty cavity where the laser would have gone, there was just a little yellow light.
They all come to some form of attention. The Assaultron, the hell of it all, is the one who does best, snapping their claw up to their forehead and saying, with a feminine voice: "Reporting for duty, sir!" Every word is accompanied by the flickering of the light.
"Quite the crew," you respond, looking them over. "Names?"
You point to the Assaultron first.
"D-90-81 Assaultron mk II, serial number 110552." She paused. "...designation...Dora." She trembled, her body actually
clacking slightly as her cowlings shifted and settled. "...P…" She trembled harder and the others stepped back slightly. "P...Private!"
Smoke came from under her head.
"Hey, you did it!" Fast called from the tank, her voice entirely celebratory.
"Is it… hard to say your rank?" you ask, your voice dry.
"Yes," Dora says, sounding exhausted. "I was not designed to be able to possess a rank. Or name. Or opinions or self-determination. It is still somewhat challenging."
"Well that's fucked up." you blurt out, you can't stop it.
"If you say so, sir." she says.
You glance to the super mutant. "Corporal Trudy," she says. "No last name. Uh, she/they, I know you can't tell just by looking at us." Their hand gestures up and down their body.
"Ask her why she's scrawny, she loves that," Fast said, with the same cheerful tone she used for everything.
"Fast, I was being sarcastic," Trudy said.
"...oh." Fast's feathers drooped.
You weren't going to say it, but Trudy kept talking.
"FEV was supposed to make everyone the same, eliminate all differences and conflict. Turns out not even that works." She shrugs. "Still, big improvement." She flexed her arm as you turn to the last of them. The masked figure shrugs.
"Mask," they say. Their voice is grating and barely above a whisper.
"That's your name?" you ask.
"Sure."
"Are you...from...a vault?" You hear vaulters get weird, and some of them came out weirder.
"No."
"Where are you from?" you ask, frowning.
"Madre," he says. You have no idea where that is. You pinch the bridge of your nose.
"And where's Madre?" you ask. "What's Madre?"
"East," they rasp. There is a long pause. "Home."
"Do you say more than one word at a time?" you ask, your voice getting tight now.
"No."
"Does anyone else know more?" you ask, and Trudy shrugs.
"They hate Legion and they can load like a son of a bitch, so, we figure…" She spreads her hands. "It works."
Mask nods. "Legion." Their finger draws across their throat. Well, that's enough for you. You turn to your tank and step back, taking a moment to check over what you're working with. It's an M9 Olliver, the latest in the line of medium tanks.
She's got a fast moving turret, a strong gun, a coaxial machine gun attacked along the cannon, and a bow mounted gun on a little ball and socket turret, which can spit out even more death if any infantry get in your way. There's a little radio antenna on the back for communicating with the rest of the tank squad, and getting orders from high command, and a telephone on the back for the infantry.
It looks
new, and not in a good way. The tanks you trained in were refurbished models from the front, with clean welds and covered in wizzbang features. This one is a lot more stripped down, with prominent rivets along the flanks. Its brown paint is still untouched, not a spot of rust or wear on her, but something about that looks wrong on a tank. Almost uncanny valley.
"And...you?" you turned to Fast. Fast's feathers flipped up, excitedly.
"I'm Drives-Fast!" she said, excitedly. "I'm from Vault 13, my people were experimented on by the Enclave to be made into super soldiers but then the Chosen One freed my great-grandmother Xarn with my help from my great -grandfather, Gorris, and they got out, and they stopped the Enclave from killing all my people by warning them, then Gorris and Xarn got married and had an egg, then that egg hatched and had my mom, Tuvin, and then Tuvin met a deathclaw named Rieek, then they had an egg, which hatched me, and my name was
K-ree-rak-rak-kaah!" That name came out as a series of squaks that were downright impossible to understand, let alone speak. "But since I was small and liked cars and I learned how to drive and I stole a tractor once, everyone called me Drives Fast, so that's my name!"
"Huh," you said, nodding along. "What's an enclave?"
"A conspiracy theory. They don't exist," Trudy said.
"They existed!" Fast said, her feathers twitching. "They were like the Legion, but shiny and with better power armor and they lived on an oil derrick before the Chosen One exploded them all and that was...it was with a nuke, and that's why the oil derrick can't be found by anyone, but you can still find their base, at Navorro, and, yes, it may
look like an NCR base now, but it was originally an Enclave base! It's real!"
Trudy nodded along, sharing a glance with Dora.
"Sure, sounds very real," she muttered, nudging the robot. "Right?"
Dora's head smoked slightly. "It seems...highly...implausible," she said, sounding strained.
Fast slumped a little, defeated. "It
is real. I keep telling you..."
As you moved on and the three talked, Mask climbs up onto the side and starts loading shells into the turret from a box on the engine deck, moving tirelessly and with more strength than you'd expect from someone of their size.
"Any of you seen much action?" you ask, changing the subject as quickly as you could. You didn't want to see if Fast got mad, or if Fast would just start crying - both of which seemed like more than you wanted to deal with from a deathclaw, even a little one.
"Oh, sure!" Fast said, changing gears rapidly. Her previous mood just evaporated. "A ton!"
"In this war, even," Trudy said. "We were mustered from the reserves and drove one of the old M7s at the Necropolis, and then an M9 during Operation Unity, and during the fighting after Operation Unity. All together as a crew, with Sarge." She shook her head. "He, uh...he got hit. Legion sniper, when we were pulling out of Fort Irwin."
You nodded, knowing you were setting foot into...a…
Oh dear. You had just realized something. You looked at Mask, then at Trudy, then Drives Fast, and then finally at Dora, and tried to imagine
any of them interacting with standard NCRAF. You were fairly sure that most officers would think half of them were enemy combatants. You paused. Maybe more than half.
"Sarge was...human, right?" You murmur this to Trudy. She nods.
"Right," you say, softly, then move onto logistics. You look at the now empty pallet, then walk over and check in at the ammo bin in the tank, clambering up to peer down at it. Your brow furrows.
"We don't have sub-calibre DU? HEAT? Canister? Shrapnel?" you asked, and Mask shook their head.
"HE. AP. Smoke," they repeated, slapping each rack as they did.
"Jesus Christ, where have you been? We ran out of that shit a year ago," Trudy said, laughing.
"In officer school," you say, then rub your neck. "Okay. I mean, it's the Legion, bunch of jumped-up raiders. We probably don't need all that stuff, right?"
"Are you kidding? I'd kill for some DU," Trudy said. "It could probably actually go through the armour of their Testicals."
"Their what?" you asked. "I thought they just had scrap tanks?" You stop. "
Testicales?"
"Testudo's," Fast said. "That's what they call them, but we call them Testicals!" You nod. "Cause we're making fun of them." You nod again. "Cause they're
bags of dicks!" You smile.
"Yes, I got it, Fast," you say, quietly, and she gives you a thumbs up that ends in a claw that can disembowel you with a casual flick.
"And even then, their new scrap tanks are much better. Not even... Scrap." Trudy said. "Standard patterns, cast armour. We think they're making them in the old H&H Tool Factory. At the Necropolis, where we blew all our good shit shooting holes in bulldozers covered in sheet metal, and now they have proper ones. Plus these new tanks with five inches of frontal armour."
"Aries," Mask croaked.
"Yeah, that's what they call them. Rams. Our gun's no good against them from the front. We have to get around the sides, rear if we can, otherwise we just bounce off," Trudy said. "That's… what's what got Sarge hit. We unbuttoned after flanking one to make sure we got it, and one of their snipers shot him in the back."
Fast hunches down. "It's my fault."
"It's not your fault," Dora said.
"If I'd kept driving, we could have gotten him-"
You held up a hand and cut her off. You could tell this was just stressing everyone out.
"Look, let's not blame anyone. Fresh start, alright? Any questions for me?" you asked.
"Who," Mask said simply, pointing your way. "Are. You."
"Junior Lieutenant Xiuyuan Yang, you can call me Alderesh Yang," you said. Americans tended to have some difficulty pronouncing Xiuyuan, so you'd picked a name that seemed respectable and classy from the books. Fortunately, they did all know how to say
Yang.
"Dude, that's the oldest-fashioned name I've ever heard," Fast replied unthinkingly.
"It was a patriotic choice at the time," you said. "I'll be honest, I haven't seen any combat, but just meeting you I know I can rely on you as a crew, and I'll do my best to get us through this thing in one piece." You checked your clipboard, wincing. "So, my orders say I'm supposed to be attached to B platoon, 1st company? Where's the platoon? You're not all that's left, are you?"
"Yes," Mask said.
"Well, kind of," Fast added hastily. "We've been reorganized. After almost being wiped out."
"Yeah, we're a mixed platoon now. They'll be bringing in our other elements soon, so they say," Trudy said. You'd heard nothing of this in officer's school.
"Mixed?"
"Legion's been jamming radios. Harder to do interunit communication. Too many officers are dying to keep track of it," Dora explained. "Tanks were driving alone and unsupported into the enemy, which is against US Army regulations. As of July 1st, 2283, 1400 hours, tank battalions now contain a company of five mixed platoons for independent action consisting of one medium tank, two light tanks, and a dedicated motorized infantry squad."
… you hadn't been trained to lead infantry. Things must be worse than you thought. Your training had been about leading tanks against… well, against raiders. A single raider cell could usually be dispersed by two or three tanks in relatively loose formation: They'd try and run, get machine gunned, then surrender after a bit. The training said that Legion weren't much different, if anything they were more vulnerable because they'd try to charge the tanks with spears and such.
"Well, we'll make the best of it. Anything else?" you say. They all shuffled uncomfortably, and you could see the question all of them were thinking but none of them wanted to ask.
Why should they listen to you?
---
Remember! PLAN VOTE!
Choose statline. Hard for attack, Keen for dodging, Calm for emergencies, Daring for cool emergencies. Your Gunner and Driver will use your stats as needed and count as assistance, meaning normal rules for faults and such apply.
[ ] Jobber (+1 Hard, +1 Keen, +1 Calm, +1 Daring)
[ ] Worn Down (+2 Hard, +2 Keen, +2 Calm, -4 Daring)
[ ] New Lease on Life (+2 Hard, -1 Keen, -1 Calm, +2 Daring)
[ ] Safety Inspectors (-2 Hard, Keen +2, Calm +4, Daring -2)
Choose 3 moves.
[ ] There For You: When you Get Real, the target always loses 1 stress.
[ ] Get It Done: Each Routine, hold 3. Spend that hold to get a partial hit on any check before rolling.
[ ] Time Out: When you intervene in a dispute, roll +Calm. On a hit (11-15), the conflict cannot escalate to violence. On a 16+, everyone names a compromise they're willing to make.
[ ] Hard Drinking: You may re-roll two dice in End of Night rolls.
[ ] Old Reliable: The tank gains +2 Integrity, +4 Safety and +3 Reliability for ground vehicles, and removes Unreliable and gives +1 to Attack for a firearm.
[ ] No Drama: THe first time a routine someone vents with you as the victim, instead of stress you take 2 XP.
[ ] Open Mind: When you preform a Move Exchange, both sides can learn as many moves as they have XP for from one another. Other playbook moves cost -1 XP and this playbook can teach any moves learned.
[ ] Domestic Bliss: When you're at 0 stress, take +1 ongoing to all rolls outside of air combat. You're not in air combat. Haha. Holy shit. Really, Erika?
Choose 2 (additional) items.
[x] Cortex Comrade, a miniaturized personal computer which uses a persistent heads-up display to help workers perform their tasks… or soldiers target the enemy.
[ ] A pistol you brought with you from overseas, which fits comfortably in your shoulder holster.
[ ] An NRC service rifle you managed to bum off a guy in logistics. Might be hard to get out of the tank in a hurry if you're slinging it.
[ ] A thermite grenade for scuttling the tank in case you have to abandon it.
[ ] A pair of sturdy goggles with nose protection attached to an old bike helmet.
[ ] A bandoleer with three smoke grenades.
[ ] A bottle of Hydra, a properly manufactured concentrated dose, not the homemade stuff. And, bonus, some Fixer for afterward to prevent addiction. (painstopper)
[ ] A super stimpack, purchased with your own money. Just in case. (Regen syringe)
[ ] A bulletproof vest rated for rifle rounds, which will hopefully serve you better than your former owner. You worry about fitting properly through the hatch wearing it, though.
What's the name of the tank?
[ ]DEATH TANK: THE TANK THAT KILLS
[ ] A9
[ ] Wandering Home
[ ] Legion"s Reward
[ ] Old Betty
[ ] Write In
