Fallout: Boneyards (Chariots of Steel playtest / New Vegas Sequel Quest!)

You grit your teeth. A bullet pings off the turret, right where you'd be, and your balls try and crawl up into your belly. But you square your shoulders, force yourself to not think about the lead whipping through the air, and throw the hatch open. You peek out, helmet feeling like it's paper thin and not enough for the world beyond your tank.

Through the dirt kicked up by your treads, you can see that there's just one AT gun, perched in the lower levels of the shop, manned by crew scurrying to load in some more rounds - they have Legion tunics, though a few look like they are just in loincloths. The second and third level have Legion in them - their rifles flashing hatefully at you and the other tanks as they work to keep up as withering rate of fire as they could...considering they only had bolt actions. Their MGs, though, were a bigger risk.

There was one in the window right above the AT gun, another on the left corner of the building, third floor.

You snatch one of your smoke grenades from your vest without thinking and chuck it ahead of you. It begins to hiss and cough, spurting greenish smoke into the air, filling the space between you and the building with opaqueness. Bullets whip through it, but none are precisely aimed at your head.

Which.

Well.

That was the point, wasn't it?

Your hand went to your radio. "Get us into some cover, I don't want an AT round in the ass, Fast! Baalja, Angel, get your tanks into cover, I want that AT gun SILENCED!" You grunt as Drives throws the Wandering Home forward, her treads biting into the ground and her front armor bashing through some detritus as she drives into a bit of cover to the side of the road, narrowly avoiding the cloud of smoke. You can just barely see the building through it. "Morales, get your kids out there and suppress the building - keep your heads fucking down."

The Legion gun roars again, like thunder in a stormcloud.

The shot whips through the open space between you and nearly clips the radio antenna off Lil' Mo Action as she takes up her position. Perched precariously out the open hatch, Angel flips off the cloud and the general direction of the AT gun. They entered into the windward edge of the cloud and their light cannon thomped - and then the front of the building exploded near where you'd see the AT gun positioned.

Well.

Time for you to open up. The front machine gun started to bark as Dora squeezed on the machine gun's trigger, Trudy putting the coax to work as you gripped your mounted pintle and started to hose down the building too. Pings and flecks of plaster and wood start to dust the air, but the Legion are shooting back. You barely notice as the bark of NCR service rifles add to the din.

Whump.

The sound is almost like the air itself has been split by whatever had gone off. You are...lucky...you suppose, enough to be looking in the right direction to see one of the Legion on the second story turn into a red cloud of mist. You risk a glance away from the building to see that the sniper from Morales's squad has parked himself in the rubble off the road and...well, he's using a goddamn Hecate.

You don't want to give the Legion any rest.

"Smoke on that AT!" you shout.

"Smoke," Mask croaks and slams the shell into the breach. Trudy calls out.

"Smoke, on the way!"

The cannon roars and you feel the backwash slap your face. The entire building blooms with a grayish cloud, billowing out of the windows and...then…

Quiet.

A shocking sudden quiet, filling the air as you realize that the entire squad is hunkered down. Even Brick has managed to bury himself in the rubble. You tense, readying for the Legion to start shooting again. There's what feels like a minute of agonizing silence as you hunt for a target, something to shoot.

Movement. You almost hose it down, but pause as you see it shuffling forward.

It's a Legion centurion, stepping into the light, his face clenched in agony that you can see, even from this distance. There's a pop from your side as an infantryman takes a hasty shot, which snaps against the pillar near him. He stumbles against the windowsill, flips, then hits the ground head first. His neck snaps with an audible, celery crunch, and you can see someone had stuck a bayonet in his back and into his lungs.

A second later, Legion start to come out of the building, their hands lifted into the air, their heads hunched forward, tensed, as if ready for you to start machine gunning you down. The first person out has a white glove on their right hand, a red glove on their left. No. No, wait.

That's blood. You trigger your radio.

"Hold fire, they're… they're surrendering, I think," you said nervously. "But stay in cover, and keep your fucking guns on them."

The other Legion have white gloves on, which do make their surrendering easy to spot, if no easier to understand. You'd been taught in training, Legion didn't surrender. They came running at you with fixed bayonets, with spears. This might be a trick. This almost certainly was a trick.

"They're surrendering?" Dora asked into the intercom. "Perfect. They'll make stationary targets."

"Wha- Dora, no!" you protest, along with everyone else in the tank. She lets out a little electric whine.

"You never let me have any fun."

Having figured that if they hadn't been shot, they probably aren't going to be, more Legion troops emerge from the rubble, stumbling over themselves. Several of them are dragging wounded friends and most of them are coughing from the acrid smoke still billowing from the building. Among them is a smaller figure in a blue jumpsuit and black leather jacket who you quickly realize is a young teenaged boy, blond, maybe thirteen, who looks completely in shock.

"Holy shit, they're White Gloves!" Angel snarls over the radio.

"Jesus Christ, are you kidding me?" Morales said tensely, and you could see her peeking up over the top of the rubble with her walkie-talkie in hand. "Surrender? That's fucking rich."

Vaguely, over the ringing in your ears and the roar of your engines, you can hear the infantry screaming insults and curses and threats as the dejected crowd stumbles forward. They're fucking pissed, you can tell. You look down, covering your mic.

"White Glove?"

"Cannibals," Mask croaks out.

You feel the sudden urge to machine gun them rush up through your veins. Cannibals? Fucking people eaters? But you force the instinct down, no matter how intense it is. You...are not them. You're not going to shoot some surrendering people, no matter how monstrous they are. No matter how many stories you'd heard, growing up.

In theory, the NCR would at least give them a trial. You think...that kid looked like he might not have been old enough to be held responsible. Cannibal kids tended to get a better rap from the law, it wasn't like they could choose what their parents served them or what their parents did.

Maybe not from anyone who learned their past.

"All right, everyone," you say. "Keep it together. Do we have anyone here who speaks Latin? We'll call them over two at a time and secure-"

A machine gun ripped up. The lead White Glove fell, blood exploding from their head, and for a second, you think it came from Mighty Mighty Man, but the streak of red and the angle of the tracer makes you jerk your head to the side. You can't see what fired it through the rubble on your left, but you can...you think...was it another MG position?

Your eyes narrowed.

No.

It's not another MG. You can hear the rumbling of an engine and, briefly through the windows of the building to your left, see a low, sleek, deadly looking tank reversing down the road - one you've never seen before in your life. But it's main gun looks big.

And it's colors are Legion.

It disappears behind a concrete pillar as another burst rakes the retreating White Gloves, heading back into the building. Two of them stumble and fall and don't get back up.

---
WHAT DO YOU DO?

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A useful map, too!

You frown. The idea of running your tanks into the ruins that the Legion tank is retreating into doesn't strike you as a great way to get everyone out alive. And you have no idea if the AT gun's surviving crew has decided they'd rather get back into their 'allies' good graces by putting a high velocity slug through your side armor. So, you put your hand to your radio.

"Morales! We're going to cover you, but your boys need to make sure Legion doesn't get that AT gun back up!"

"Yes, sir," she says, and you mutter to Drives-Fast.

"Put us forward, armor plate at the corner. We'll watch for them, but not chase," you say, pointing, and she nods, then pauses.

"Wait, Xiuyuan, that might be a mine," she said, forgetting rank in the moment, and you realize that to drive forward and help secure the building, you'd need to either move around and go into the rubbled buildings to either side of the road, or drive along an area that might as well have a sign up saying 'Danger: Mines.' Or, you suppose, 'Periculum, Pedicas!' if you wanted to be accurate to the Legion.

"We can clear you a route," Baalaji says over the radio, and Mighty Mighty Man pushes up ahead of you, the dozer blades lowering into the rubble and sweeping through the gap. It takes about a minute and a half of tense scraping, braced expecting an explosion, but nothing other than some scrap metal was turned up.

Ahead, you can see that Brick has wriggled to the edge of the crossroads and is sticking his helmet out on a stick, then peering out with his own head. Other soldiers sweep rifles across the street. He gestures, and Morales' voice comes over the radio.

"They're gone, we're clear for a dash," she says.

You tense, expecting machine gun fire, watching as Brick and three of his riflemen run up behind him, the rifleman with their shotguns drawn. Brick shoulders into the door, and begins to shout in muffled Latin. You hear more clamoring - but no gunshots.

"Backed off up the road heading north," Morales continues. "Just caught sight of it leaving around the corner, just for a second,"

"Kind of hypocritical, shooting guys for surrendering and then retreating," Dora observed. Drives-Fast inched the tank closer to the corner, until you could just peek the barrel around.

You turn your attention . "I guess they were-"

WHUMP!

The wall beside you - really, more of a ruined expanse of plaster and drywall and overgrown bits of weeds - explodes with a spray of dust as a metal, armor piercing slug blows through it. The shell whines off, hits the wasteland about two hundred meters off, skips, hits again another hundred meters away, then buries itself a few meters beyond that, leaving a series of dust plumes. You duck as dust and concrete patter off the tank's roof. When you emerge, you see through the two-foot hole blown not six feet from your head that the Legion tank apparently doubled back south and had tried to put a shot blind into through the building..

Its treads begin to hastily grind as it backs up into the rubble, taking advantage of the rubble field that sits west of the baseball diamond. You lose sight of it again in the dust and haze of the day.

"Did anyone see it?" Angel's voice comes over the radio. "Shit! Where the fuck is it?"

"I didn't see it," Baalaji said, his voice tight, both light tanks turning to put their front armor to the west. Drives Fast does the same.

"I don't want to go hunting in that," Angel muttered over the radio. "Isn't this why we have the boots?"

"There's ten cannibals in here we're still disarming," Morales snaps, her voice tight. "None of them speak fucking English." Then, muffled. "Oh, well, then, start translating kid?" There was a pause. "No, you cannot talk to my fucking superior officer!"

"It's stupid. If it keeps trying to inch forward to attack, we'll get it. We have turrets," Trudy said, perched by her scope. "Suicidal."

Your eyes track along the rubble field, looking for any sign of the tank, but with Wandering Home's grumbling engine, the distant rumble of artillery, the clamor from inside the building, and the thundering of your own heart, you can't even hear them.

"But they might take one of us with them," you pointed out.

---

What do you do?
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