Fallout - Chapter 105: The Pit (Patreon)

The mine tunnel leading down from Station 1 was much longer than Jace remembered.

The group advanced steadily through the winding passage. The slope was not particularly steep, but it descended continuously, taking them deeper underground. In the narrow tunnel, their footsteps overlapped and echoed dully through the darkness, carrying far into the distance. Every movement of the Power Armor brought a low hum from its hydraulic components.

Aside from that, the entire mine was unnaturally quiet.

The hollow wind they had heard near the entrance was completely gone. The rock walls were covered in damp stains, yet there was not even the sound of dripping water. Not a single mutated insect or bloodbug, creatures found everywhere across the wasteland, could be seen.

The silence was almost absurd.

The only disturbance was a rhythmic vibration coming from somewhere deep underground.

It was not frequent, occurring only once every few minutes, but the intervals were remarkably regular. Each time it came, the rock beneath their feet trembled slightly, bringing with it an inexplicable sense of oppression.

“How much farther to Station 2?” Nate called from behind.

“Shouldn’t be much farther,” Jace replied.

After another five minutes or so, the narrow tunnel abruptly opened up.

Station 2 was easily twice the size of Station 1. The area formed a neat rectangle, with clear signs of manual excavation covering the rock walls on both sides. Dense rows of drill marks were still plainly visible.

A collection of old mining equipment sat in the middle of the station. There was a bulldozer with its front blade half-buried in loose rubble, along with several mine carts rusted nearly through.

Several industrial lights hung overhead, but every one of them was dark.

Jace stopped near the center of the station and quickly surveyed the area. It did not take long for him to spot the metal circuit breaker box mounted on the wall, identical to the one at Station 1.

He walked over, pulled open the box, and threw the main breaker.

Click.

The lights overhead flickered several times. About a third of them finally came on, casting a dim yellow glow that barely illuminated most of the station. The corners and edges along the rock walls remained buried in heavy shadow, the uneven patches of light and darkness making the place even more unsettling.

The others immediately spread out and began checking the surrounding area.

Jace’s attention settled on the bulldozer.

Its blade was buried deep in the ground, frozen in place as though work had been interrupted without warning. A complete skeleton sat inside the cab. A hard hat was still securely perched on its skull, and its skeletal hands remained wrapped around the steering wheel.

The man had died suddenly.

Radiation from the nuclear blasts could never have penetrated this far underground. Radiation could not have killed him.

So what had?

Jace looked around and noticed several more skeletons scattered throughout the station. One rested against the rock wall. Another lay curled beside a mine cart. Others had collapsed across the tracks.

Every corpse had been reduced entirely to bone. Not a trace of decayed soft tissue remained.

It seemed the strange sacrificial ritual that had taken place beneath the earth all those years ago had not ended with the nuclear war.

“General.”

Jace turned toward the voice.

“What is it?”

Nate pointed toward the mining equipment around them, looking puzzled.

“We’ve come all this way, and I haven’t seen a single robot or charging station.”

He paused before continuing.

“Since the Dunwich Corporation built this entire mine to excavate the ruins of a dark god, this kind of tedious, dangerous underground work should have been perfect for robots. They’re efficient, and they don’t need rest.”

The others nodded at Nate’s observation.

“Exactly,” one of the Minutemen veterans agreed. “Before the War, anywhere with even a little money had a few robots. A high-risk workplace like a mine should’ve been one of the first places to replace human workers with machines.”

“I saw a type of mining robot in the Capital Wasteland,” one of the Brotherhood Knights added. “Fully automated excavation, twenty-four hours a day. It could even repair itself when something broke. So why leave advanced equipment sitting around unused and rely entirely on human labor?”

Jace did not answer immediately.

He walked over to the bulldozer and pointed at the skeleton sitting in the cab.

“The fact that they could use robots is exactly why there aren’t any here.”

Nate frowned slightly.

Then his expression slowly changed as he understood.

Jace continued.

“It’s true that the Dunwich family used a ‘mining company’ as cover for archaeological excavation, but the commercial mining operation wasn’t entirely fake. They were still capitalists, after all. To people like them, losing money was worse than death.”

“A normal mine follows the ore veins. But every tunnel here runs in a single straight direction. There are almost no actual mining faces, just passageways. That means terrible output and almost no profit.”

“If production can’t be increased, then the only way to make money is to cut costs as hard as possible. They’d already cut equipment expenses to the bone. So what was left to cut?”

Nate narrowed his eyes.

He remembered the pre-War news reports about the massive unemployment wave that had swept across America. Increasing automation had put countless workers out of jobs, pushing social tensions to the breaking point.

“People.”

The others reached the same conclusion almost simultaneously.

“Exactly.” Jace nodded. “Robots are expensive. They cost a fortune to buy, even more to maintain, and you need specialized technicians to keep them running. But people? People were everywhere. Before the War, there was no shortage of workers. Work them to death and you could still turn a profit.”

Preston fell silent for a moment before saying quietly,

“That’s no different from a slave owner working slaves to death.”

The atmosphere in the station immediately grew somber.

Just then, a Knight who had only recently arrived from the Capital Wasteland and knew little about the Commonwealth casually asked,

“Come to think of it, there aren’t any open slave markets in the Commonwealth, are there?”

Danse’s expression darkened instantly.

A name immediately came to mind.

Paradise Falls.

It had once been the largest hub of the slave trade in the Capital Wasteland, a professional and highly organized slave market. Slavers there controlled their captives with remote-controlled explosive collars, operating an entire cross-regional trade network. They bought and sold slaves in bulk and even provided after-sales service.

As long as you had enough caps, you could buy whatever kind of slave you wanted.

In the end, the Lone Wanderer from Vault 101 had gone in alone, wiped out every slaver in Paradise Falls, and destroyed the entire wretched operation.

But that had not ended the slave trade.

Because the demand still existed.

The Pitt could not function without slaves, at least not in the short term. No matter who the Lone Wanderer ultimately sided with, a place like the Pitt was still filled with toxic air, radiation, and the Trog disease. What sane person would willingly work there?

Yet someone still had to fill the mines and factories.

So the trade followed its own momentum and disappeared underground.

The vacuum left behind by the destroyed slaver gangs was quickly filled by people who were more cautious and more cunning. Maxson had been forced to repeatedly send troops after small slave markets operating in the shadows.

Destroy one, and another would appear before long.

Preston’s voice pulled Danse from his thoughts.

“From the day the Minutemen were founded, the slave trade has been strictly forbidden. Even after General Becker died in 2282 and we fell into internal conflict, nobody dared openly trade slaves on Commonwealth territory.”

“Until last year,” Jace suddenly said.

Everyone turned toward him.

“A Raider leader named Gage came out of nowhere.” Jace frowned slightly at the name, a trace of coldness entering his expression. “He got his hands on some kind of specialized remote-controlled collar technology and quietly restarted the slave trade at Nuka-World, out on the edge of the Commonwealth. We’ve had too many other problems to deal with, so we haven’t gotten around to taking him out yet.”

He turned to Danse.

“The Brotherhood of Steel has seen more of the world than most. Do you know where those specialized collars came from?”

Danse did not answer immediately.

He felt deeply frustrated.

The Brotherhood had controlled the Capital Wasteland for ten years, yet they still had not managed to completely eliminate the slavers on their own territory. Instead, those people had managed to move into the Commonwealth and open up a new market.

It was humiliating.

Jace was not planning to press him.

But at that exact moment, a voice suddenly sounded inside his mind.

It was not something he heard with his ears. The sound echoed directly through his consciousness.

It was as though someone far below the earth was calling to him. The voice passed through layer after layer of solid rock, faint and indistinct, yet somehow clinging to his thoughts and refusing to fade.

Jace’s body abruptly went rigid.

He quickly looked around at everyone nearby.

Nate, Preston, Danse, and the rest of the team all looked perfectly normal. None of them seemed to have noticed anything unusual.

“Did any of you hear something just now?” Jace asked.

“Hear what?” Nate replied, confused.

“Someone calling me.”

Everyone exchanged glances, then shook their heads.

“General, it’s completely silent down here,” Preston said. “We didn’t hear anything.”

The strange voice did not come again, but the lingering sensation of being pulled remained unmistakably clear.

It felt as though an invisible thread had hooked itself into his consciousness and was steadily drawing him deeper into the mine.

“It’s nothing.” Jace pushed down the unease in his chest and spoke firmly. “Keep moving.”

The group set off again, heading deeper toward Station 3.

The tunnel leading to Station 3 was steeper than either of the previous sections. The incline had become noticeably sharper.

The damp patches on the rock walls had turned into actual seepage. In some places, thin streams of water could be seen running over the stone.

The smell of moisture in the air grew stronger.

It was no longer something they could only faintly detect. It had almost completely overwhelmed their sense of smell, like a wet cloth pressed over the face.

And mixed into that damp odor was something sharper.

Something difficult to describe, like old iron mixed with rotting flesh.

As they continued deeper, the voice returned.

This time, it was slightly clearer.

It sounded like someone calling his name.

Not the name Jace.

It was something older. More primal.

The strange pronunciation belonged to some unimaginably ancient language he had never heard before, yet for some inexplicable reason, it felt familiar.

Jace showed no reaction. He told no one what he had heard and simply quickened his pace.

After another fifteen minutes or so, the tunnel abruptly ended.

The narrow passage ahead was gone.

In its place was an enormous pit.

Station 3.

No.

Calling it The Pit would be more accurate.

It was at least forty or fifty meters across, and judging by sight alone, more than twenty meters deep. Its walls were nearly vertical, their rocky surfaces scarred by layers of erosion.

A narrow metal walkway ran along the edge.

It spiraled downward along the pit wall, leading toward the depths below.

The entire Pit was shrouded in an extraordinarily dense darkness.

It was far thicker than the darkness around the previous stations, extending well beyond anything their lights could penetrate.

Jace activated the high-powered searchlight mounted on his Power Armor.

A brilliant beam shot straight toward the bottom.

It traveled less than ten meters before vanishing as though swallowed by an invisible black hole.

“Something’s wrong,” Danse said quietly, his voice grave.

Nate walked to the edge of The Pit, leaned forward, and peered down.

“There’s something down there.”

Everyone moved toward the edge.

The headlamps on their Power Armor, handheld flashlights, and tactical lights mounted on their laser rifles all turned toward the depths below.

But every beam seemed to strike an invisible barrier.

Not one of them reached the bottom.

Then everything changed.

There was no gradual transition.

No warning.

An overwhelmingly bright white light suddenly exploded into existence, as intense as a flashbang detonating at point-blank range, instantly swallowing everyone’s vision.

Everyone instinctively raised their arms to shield their eyes from the blinding glare.

A moment later, their vision returned.

The scene before them had completely changed.

Light filled the entire space.

It was neither electric light nor sunlight, but a soft glow tinged with pale gold, as though it were naturally radiating from somewhere deep beneath the earth.

Every detail of the rock walls was clearly visible. Every crack, every layer of stone, every mineral vein stood out with impossible clarity.

And the bottom of The Pit was packed with people.

Jace’s pupils contracted sharply.

Hundreds of people knelt together below, all facing the same direction.

Toward a door at the deepest part of The Pit.

The door was entirely black, without a single decoration on its surface. Against the pale golden light, it looked like a sharply defined hole cut into reality.

Among those kneeling were miners dressed in pre-War work clothes, wearing the distinctive dark blue overalls and hard hats.

There were women and children in ordinary clothing.

The miners’ families.

And there were Raiders in tattered leather jackets decorated with chains, the same murderous outlaws who robbed and slaughtered their way across the wasteland.

Every one of them was kneeling.

Not because they had been forced.

They knelt with genuine, wholehearted devotion.

Their foreheads touched the ground. Their arms stretched forward. Their entire bodies were arranged in a posture of absolute submission.

No one spoke.

The Pit was as silent as a tomb.

Then a few loose stones shifted near the edge and tumbled down the vertical rock wall.

Clack.

Clack-clack-clack.

The stones bounced several times before finally landing somewhere at the bottom.

The sound was not loud.

But in that absolute silence, it might as well have been thunder.

Every person kneeling at the bottom of The Pit raised their head at exactly the same moment.

Hundreds of pairs of eyes locked onto the figures standing above.

There were no pupils.

Only empty eye sockets glowing white.

Someone in the group sucked in a sharp breath.

Then, in the next instant, the white light vanished.

The vision shattered.

Darkness surged back from every direction like a tide and swallowed everything.

They were once again standing at the edge of the same cold, pitch-black Pit.

But before anyone could recover from what they had just seen, a sound rose from the depths below.

It was not a faint whimper.

It was a mass of overlapping howls and roars.

Countless savage cries echoed from the walls of The Pit, bouncing back and forth, piling over one another until they merged into a deafening wave of sound that surged upward from below.

Then came the footsteps.

Immediately afterward, the darkness erupted with the sound of countless creatures rushing toward them.

They were not running on two human feet.

It was the frantic scraping of innumerable creatures moving on all fours, overlapping in layer after layer of noise as they surged upward along the rock walls and spiraling walkway like a rising tide.

Closer.

Louder.

Jace instantly drew the shotgun from his waist and aimed it downward.

“Prepare for battle!”