Fallout - Chapter 124: The Glowing Sea (Patreon)

The Glowing Sea was the source of the radstorms that swept across the entire Commonwealth.

During the nuclear war of 2077, this region suffered the heaviest bombardment anywhere in the Commonwealth. One strategic nuclear warhead and a large number of tactical warheads reduced what had once been an industrial district, residential zone, and major military-industrial center to ruin.

After the nuclear fire had swept across the land, what remained was more than rubble.

It was a hell shaped by radiation.

The moment Danse took his first step into it, he felt something strange beneath his feet.

The ground was nothing but ash and shattered stone. Every step produced an unpleasant crunch, as though he were walking across the bones of some enormous creature.

The nuclear blast had instantly fused the topsoil into a mixture of glassy and carbonized material. Over the following two hundred years, countless radstorms, acid rains, and sandstorms had ground it down into what it was now.

Worse still was the color.

The entire landscape was an unhealthy gray-black, like ash soaked in oil. In the low-lying areas and at the bottoms of collapsed pits, the soil and standing water gave off a faint green glow.

It was the result of radioactive material accumulating in the earth for two centuries. Strontium-90, cesium-137, and plutonium isotopes had seeped into every grain of dust, leaving the land glowing with a sickly yellow-green light even in broad daylight.

Danse looked up.

Even during the day, the sky over the Glowing Sea was a murky dark green. A dense radioactive haze hung over the entire region like a heavy blanket, cutting visibility down to thirty or fifty meters.

Anything farther away was swallowed by the yellow-green fog, leaving only vague silhouettes, like specimens suspended in formaldehyde.

Radioactive dust glowing faintly green drifted through the air. Some particles were large enough to see with the naked eye, floating slowly through the haze like swarms of luminous fireflies.

And yet life still survived here.

That was partly thanks to the extraordinary industrial capacity of pre-War America.

American construction standards had been absurdly high. Although the nuclear blasts devastated the surface, many buildings had not collapsed completely. Instead, they were buried beneath radioactive dust and melted soil, forming sealed underground cavities.

Those cavities became an underground kingdom for mole rats.

Using buried houses, bomb shelters, and subway tunnels, the mole rats had connected the subterranean world beneath the Glowing Sea into one vast maze.

Two kinds of fungi flourished throughout that maze: glowing fungus and brain fungus.

They needed no sunlight. Radiation and water were enough to sustain them, and they spread like moss across every inch of the underground pipes.

The mole rats fed on those fungi.

With food and water plentiful, their population had exploded.

And the mole rats, in turn, fed something else.

Radscorpions.

Descended from pre-War emperor scorpions and mutated under the combined influence of radiation and FEV, these enormous arthropods were also subterranean predators.

They could burrow into the mole rats' tunnel networks, sting the animals to death one by one, then drag the bodies back to their nests.

A Radscorpion's carapace was a sickly dark red and unbelievably tough.

The Khans, who originated from Vault 15, had accumulated a great deal of experience in running away and surviving beatings, largely because their terrible reputation meant powerful enemies were constantly coming after them.

That experience had taught them how to turn Radscorpion carapaces into some of the best and cheapest light armor around.

The Deathclaws here, meanwhile, used claws strong enough to tear through steel to rip open Radscorpion nests, drag the enormous arthropods out of their underground hiding places, tear them apart, and eat them.

There wasn't much choice.

Deathclaws might have some chameleon DNA, but they couldn't exactly live like chameleons and survive on flying insects.

So every day, the Glowing Sea played host to its own version of "lizard versus scorpion."

The only difference was that both sides were considerably larger.

No matter who won, though, the ground was always left covered in severed limbs.

That was when the bloatflies, bloodbugs, and stingwings arrived.

They cleaned up what remained, breaking down and digesting the flesh left behind by the Deathclaws and Radscorpions before returning those nutrients to the cursed soil.

Together, they formed a perfect, closed, savage ecosystem powered by radiation.

The air circulation systems inside the team's power armor were functioning normally, while the lead radiation shielding blocked more than ninety-nine percent of the radioactive dust outside.

"Paladin."

A Knight's voice came from behind Danse.

"Radiation levels just spiked thirty meters ahead."

Danse stopped and looked forward.

Through the yellow-green haze, he could make out a faintly glowing pool of stagnant water. It stretched more than ten meters across, with an oily film floating across the surface and giving off an unsettling fluorescent yellow light.

"Go around it," Danse ordered.

"Don't get near any standing water. There are a lot of bloodbugs around here."

The four Knights silently adjusted their formation and followed him around to the left.

But in the Glowing Sea, every step came at a price.

The ground beneath them suddenly shook again, harder than ever before.

Danse stopped instantly and raised his right fist.

The entire squad froze.

About forty meters ahead, two green lights appeared in the haze.

They were eyes.

The glow came from within them, phosphorescent and eerie, like burning phosphorus.

Their owner slowly rose from the mist.

A huge, heavily muscled silhouette gradually came into view.

A Glowing Deathclaw.

Its skin was a sickly dark green, the result of years of exposure to extreme levels of radiation.

A thin layer of crystalline material coated its bone spurs and spine, reflecting a ghostly green sheen in the dim light.

It was almost twice the size of a standard Deathclaw, with shoulders more than two meters wide. Every breath made its chest rumble with a deep resonance that seemed to rise from the depths of hell itself.

This Deathclaw had lived in the Glowing Sea for so long that its body seemed to have become part of the land.

Radiation flowed through its blood. Radioactive particles had accumulated throughout its muscle fibers.

It was practically a walking source of radiation.

The Deathclaw raised its head and blasted two streams of glowing green vapor from its nostrils.

Then it roared.

It wasn't merely a roar.

The sound carried a powerful infrasonic shockwave strong enough to make the air visibly tremble.

Even at that distance, Danse could feel it passing through his armor and into his chest, making his ribs vibrate.

After roaring, the Deathclaw raised its forelimbs and slammed them down.

BOOM—!!

A visible shockwave burst outward from beneath its feet.

The charred ground cracked apart like a spiderweb, and fragments of stone and ash rippled outward.

Then the Deathclaw charged.

The explosive power of such a massive body seemed to defy physics.

It launched itself forward like a green artillery shell, crossing forty meters in less than three seconds.

"Focus fire! Now!"

Laser fire burned black streaks across its radiation-hardened hide, while plasma rounds burst into searing balls of ionized gas on impact.

But the Deathclaw didn't stop.

The attacks only made it lower its body during the charge, shielding its most vulnerable area.

Its lower abdomen.

The lasers and plasma could only strike the thick bone plates and dense muscle along its back.

"Damn it!" one of the Knights shouted. "We can't hit anything vital!"

Even crouched low, the Deathclaw maintained an astonishing speed, barreling toward the Knight on the far left like a green armored bulldozer.

The Knight was wearing T-60 Power Armor.

Its protection was solid.

But against a full-speed charge from an adult Deathclaw...

Danse didn't hesitate.

He switched the Union power armor's hydraulic servo system into industrial output mode.

It was a design unique to Union power armor. In this mode, the servos operated at one hundred and eighty percent of their normal output, at the cost of drastically increased power consumption and accelerated wear on the joints.

Danse threw aside his plasma rifle and charged straight at the Deathclaw.

The creature swung one claw sideways with enough force to tear through steel, carving a deadly arc through the air.

If that strike hit T-60 Power Armor, it could rip the entire chest plate open.

Danse raised his left arm.

He caught the blow directly on the Union power armor's massive forearm plating.

CLANG—!!

A deafening metallic crash exploded through the toxic haze of the Glowing Sea.

Sparks flew.

Danse felt as though his left arm had been struck head-on by a truck traveling at full speed.

The Union power armor's hydraulic servos screamed an overload warning.

But they held.

Danse clenched his teeth and drove his left arm forward.

Enormous force surged from the Union power armor's shoulder transmission, through the hydraulic assembly, and into the forearm.

The Deathclaw was forced back a step.

Its hind claws carved two deep furrows into the charred ground, and a flicker of confusion appeared in its eyes.

Here in the Glowing Sea, nothing had ever overpowered it in a direct contest of strength.

Danse didn't give it time to recover.

His right fist shot forward and smashed into the side of the Deathclaw's face.

Thud.

Its head snapped to one side.

But the instant the blow landed, its forelimbs wrapped around him.

The Deathclaw seized Danse around the waist and heaved upward.

His entire body left the ground.

His vision spun.

A second later, the creature slammed him down onto the scorched earth.

The impact passed through the Union power armor's shock absorbers and into his back, blacking out his vision for an instant.

The Deathclaw gave him no chance to recover.

It pinned him to the ground with its forelimbs and began tearing at him.

Left claw.

Right claw.

Left claw.

Every strike carried enough force to tear through steel plate, carving deep gouges across the Union power armor's chest.

Grapple and tear.

One of a Deathclaw's signature tactics.

It used its massively muscled forelimbs to lock onto prey, pinned it beneath its full weight and strength, then shredded it repeatedly with its claws.

The Union power armor's HUD showed its integrity dropping in real time.

92%.

87%.

79%.

71%.

"Paladin!"

The Knights shouted behind him as gunfire erupted.

Laser beams hammered the Deathclaw's back and head from every direction.

It ignored them completely.

All of its attention was focused on the prey beneath it.

The creature that had dared challenge it in a contest of strength.

It was going to tear Danse apart.

Then eat him.

Danse knew the armor wouldn't hold forever.

His plasma rifle was already out of reach.

And a laser pistol would do almost nothing against a Deathclaw like this.

His right hand moved to his belt.

A frag grenade.

The Deathclaw raised its right claw high and brought it straight down toward Danse's visor.

If the blow landed, the helmet's composite glass would shatter.

Danse threw everything he had into shifting fifteen centimeters to the right.

The claw scraped across the edge of his visor instead, gouging three deep lines into the side of his helmet.

At the same time, he released the grenade's safety and pulled the pin.

The Deathclaw had lowered its head after the missed strike.

Its enormous mouth, packed with sharp teeth, was directly in front of him.

Perfect.

Danse moved instantly.

He shoved the frag grenade into the Deathclaw's mouth.

Then his left hand seized its lower jaw while his right clamped down on the upper jaw.

He wasn't going to let it spit the grenade out.

The Deathclaw immediately realized something was inside its mouth.

It thrashed its head wildly.

The tremendous force hurled Danse into the air and slammed him back into the ground.

It was strong enough to have thrown a pre-War car.

Danse felt as though his arms were about to be ripped from their sockets.

His body was flung around like a rag doll in the jaws of a rabid dog, his back and shoulders repeatedly smashing into the ground.

Every impact made the Union power armor groan near its limits.

But Danse refused to let go.

He clenched his teeth, gripping with enough force to turn his knuckles white, while the power armor's hydraulic servos screamed continuous overload warnings.

The grenade's delay fuse burned down.

Three seconds.

The Deathclaw became even more frantic.

It seized Danse around the waist with its foreclaws, trying to rip him away from its mouth.

Two seconds.

A muffled roar rumbled in the creature's throat.

It violently threw its head backward in one final attempt to dislodge both Danse and whatever he had forced between its jaws.

One second.

BOOM—!!

The frag grenade detonated inside the Deathclaw's mouth.

Its head burst apart like an overripe watermelon.

Green blood, brain matter, shattered bone, and pieces of mangled jaw sprayed in every direction, coating Danse's visor in a thick layer of gore.

The Deathclaw's enormous body went rigid for a second.

Then it collapsed onto Danse like a falling mountain.

Everything went quiet.

Only the heavy breathing of the stunned Knights could be heard in the distance.

"Paladin!"

All four Knights rushed forward.

Two of them worked together to shove the Deathclaw's corpse off Danse, while the others dropped beside him and hurriedly checked his condition.

The corpse was still twitching.

The final electrical impulses in its nerves made its hind legs kick involuntarily several times.

But everything above the neck had been reduced to a jagged, bloody cavity.

Glowing green blood poured from severed arteries and soaked into the scorched earth.

Danse lay on the ground, breathing heavily.

The Union power armor was covered in claw marks nearly two centimeters deep.

The entire left shoulder plate had been crushed inward, while the transmission shafts around the joints produced a dry grinding noise.

"Medical kit! Hurry!"

"Stimpaks! Inject him!"

One of the Knights pulled two standard Stimpaks from his pack and found an emergency injection port at the neck of the Union power armor.

It had been designed specifically for situations where the armor remained sealed and emergency treatment had to be administered without removing it.

He inserted the needle and depressed the plunger.

The agony in Danse's chest began to ease.

It slowly became a dull ache, then soreness, and finally a tolerable lingering pain.

Danse coughed twice and pushed himself into a sitting position.

He tested his left arm.

The joint produced a piercing metallic grind, but it could still bend and exert force.

The Union power armor Zeke had recreated really was that tough.

Danse turned toward the Knight who had nearly been struck by the Deathclaw.

Kyle.

He stood off to one side.

Danse couldn't see his expression behind the helmet, but the young man's rigid posture made his feelings obvious enough.

"Paladin..." Kyle's voice came through his speaker, trembling despite his efforts to control it.

"Why did you rush in? You could've just ordered everyone to fire at me..."

"You're still young," Danse interrupted.

"If your power armor had been damaged, there was no way you'd make it out of here alive."

"But..."

"No buts."

Danse stood up.

"I'm the captain. This time... I'm bringing every one of you back."

Kyle lowered his head.

His cheeks beneath the helmet were burning red.

The other Knights fell silent as well.

They looked at Danse's battered Union power armor.

At the claw marks.

The dents.

The cracks.

Danse bent down and picked up his plasma rifle.

He checked it for damage, found none, then slung it over his shoulder.

He glanced at the corpse still leaking bodily fluids onto the ground.

"Don't go near it. Go around. Something else will come to feed on it soon."

The squad regrouped and followed Danse deeper into the Glowing Sea.

None of them noticed that three hundred meters away, atop a collapsed ruin, a reconnaissance drone hidden within the radioactive haze was silently recording everything that had happened.

...

Enclave base, codename Scorched Earth Outpost.

The base wasn't on the surface of the Glowing Sea.

It lay underground, hidden deep beneath the ruins of the pre-War Atlantic Offices.

Inside the base's communications center, an Enclave scout sat at a terminal, staring at the thermal and optical imagery that had just been transmitted.

"Colonel."

He turned toward the man standing in the middle of the room.

"The reconnaissance drone picked up anomalous footage. A power armor squad is crossing Sector Three. They encountered a Glowing Deathclaw and survived the engagement."

The man was an Enclave colonel.

John Sterling.

He wore the dark gray uniform reserved for senior Enclave officers, with a silver eagle insignia embroidered on his epaulets.

His eyes were sharp as knives.

"A power armor squad?"

Colonel Sterling frowned, irritation creeping into his voice.

"That's all? Do I need to teach you how to write a report? Send out an extermination team and eliminate them."

"But, Colonel..."

The scout hesitated.

"One of them is wearing power armor that's... strange. There's no matching model in the database."

Sterling walked over to the terminal and leaned down to examine the footage.

The scout enlarged the image.

It was a close-up captured through the drone's telephoto lens.

A man in heavy power armor was fighting a Glowing Deathclaw at close range.

The armor's silhouette matched nothing Sterling recognized.

It wasn't from the T-series.

It certainly wasn't one of the Enclave's X-series models.

Its profile was rougher, with broader shoulder plates and a distinctly industrial appearance.

Sterling stared at it for several seconds.

"Is that... Union power armor from Pittsburgh?"

He muttered under his breath.

"Impossible."

"Could it be...?"

The scout clearly had no idea what he meant.

"Colonel?"

Sterling didn't answer immediately.

He strode across the room to the tactical map and stared at Appalachia for several seconds before shifting his gaze back to the Glowing Sea.

He drew a deep breath.

A sudden chill of delayed fear ran through him.

If he had just sent out the extermination team...

If that squad really did include...

Sterling turned around.

His voice carried a trace of tension that was almost impossible to detect.

"Suspend all hostile action against that squad. Recall the drone."

"Yes, Colonel."

"And open a long-range communications channel. I want to speak to them directly."

Danse was inspecting the damage to the Union power armor.

The breach wasn't especially deep.

At least it hadn't reached the internal life-support system.

But the damage was still troublesome.

One ceramic ballistic plate had shattered completely and would have to be replaced. Two hydraulic lines were leaking and needed to be temporarily patched with emergency sealant.

"Captain."

One of the Knights suddenly spoke.

"We've received an external connection request on our communications channel, but it's not using a Minutemen frequency."

"Source?"

"Can't pinpoint it. The signal has been routed through multiple relays and masked. But the encryption protocol is... familiar."

The Knight sounded confused.

"It's similar to pre-War military communications standards, but not quite the same."

Danse fell silent for several seconds.

Pre-War military standards.

Deep inside the Glowing Sea.

A signal sophisticated enough to hide itself through multiple relays.

Several possibilities crossed his mind.

The worst one made the hair on the back of his neck rise.

"Accept it."

A brief crackle of static passed through the channel.

Then a man's voice came through.

"Unidentified power armor squad. This is Colonel Sterling, commanding officer of Scorched Earth Outpost, Enclave Armed Forces."

His voice was steady and controlled.

"You have entered our observation zone. Identify yourselves and state your purpose."

Enclave.

Danse's heart skipped.

The Enclave.

The military organization that had controlled some of America's most advanced military technology before the War and had carried out repeated acts of genocide after it under the banner of "purifying the wasteland."

They were here.

Danse remembered the talking points Jace had given him before the mission in case he encountered the Enclave.

He quickly composed himself.

"Enclave?"

His voice carried a deliberately calm, faintly provocative edge.

"What are you doing here? Running another biological experiment? Planning to create another giant bat or giant snake?"

Silence.

In Colonel Sterling's office, the hand holding the communicator stiffened.

A giant bat.

A giant snake.

Sterling's pupils contracted.

They really were connected to the 76ers.

Jace had told Danse to invoke the reputation of the 76ers if he encountered the Enclave.

And if the 76ers ever found out, there was nothing to worry about.

After all, Danse had never explicitly claimed anything.

The Enclave was drawing its own conclusions.

Several unpleasant memories flashed through Sterling's mind.

More accurately, they were memories of a dark chapter in Enclave history that the organization as a whole preferred not to discuss.

Appalachia.

The Enclave branch in that region, based in the Whitespring bunker, had conducted a series of biochemical experiments.

They had used native tricolored bats, irradiated ultracite from Appalachia, and proprietary biochemical compounds in an attempt to create biological weapons.

The result had been the first Scorchbeasts.

But the leader of the Appalachian branch at the time, Colonel Eckhart, had been insane.

In 2086, hoping to trigger a region-wide catastrophe and unlock access to the nuclear arsenal, he ordered the captive Scorchbeasts released from their underground nests.

What followed became a nightmare that lasted nearly two hundred years.

Vast numbers of Scorchbeasts multiplied in the wild.

Eventually, one emerged several times larger than an ordinary specimen.

The Scorchbeast Queen.

The "giant bat."

It had a wingspan comparable to a pre-War bomber, claws capable of tearing through power armor, and the ability to influence the Scorched across Appalachia through sonic signals.

It also spread a terrifying disease known as the Scorched Plague.

Those infected didn't die immediately.

Their bodies slowly mutated.

Their skin peeled away.

Their muscles hardened and fibrosed.

Eventually, they became shambling husks that followed the Queen's sonic commands.

And that was only one of Appalachia's nightmares.

The other "giant snake" presumably referred to the Ultracite Terror.

It had originated in the Gleaming Depths underground research facility in the Ash Heap, an Enclave experimental base devoted to ultracite research.

There, the Enclave had conducted biological mutation experiments using another type of ultracite native to Appalachia.

They kept a native giant snake immersed for extended periods in ultracite radiation and biochemical growth media.

Eventually, they produced a serpent more than one hundred meters long and as thick as a pre-War subway car.

The Ultracite Terror Python's scales could reflect most energy weapons.

Its venom was so corrosive that it could eat through the ceramic armor plating of T-51 Power Armor in less than a minute.

Powerful mutated creatures like these had kept the Vault 76 residents tied to Appalachia for the past two centuries.

Vault 76 had been officially designated by Vault-Tec as the vault commemorating the tricentennial of the founding of the United States.

Its promotional slogan was, "Vault-Tec Salutes America."

Most Vaults had been designed as human experimentation projects.

Vault 76 was different.

Its main political backers had been the Roosevelt family.

After World War II, the Roosevelt family had indeed declined from its former position, but only relatively speaking. Franklin D. Roosevelt had once practically embodied the United States by himself. Later, it was the Roosevelt family as a whole that carried that influence.

They had merely promised to stay out of politics.

Vault-Tec wouldn't have dared tamper with Vault 76.

That made Vault 76 one of the few normal Vaults with no human experimentation program.

It had a capacity of five hundred people.

Those five hundred residents had been selected from the elite of every field, including aerospace engineers, nuclear physicists, Nobel laureates, and others described as "America's best and brightest."

In practice, they might simply have been the most combat-capable group in the country.

They emerged from the Vault in 2102.

They fought the Scorchbeast Queen across Appalachia.

And eventually, they successfully launched nuclear weapons.

It wasn't much of an exaggeration to say that America's fifty states rested on the shoulders of those 76ers.

If they hadn't spent the past two centuries keeping Appalachia's countless horrors contained, the Enclave might never have gotten the chance to talk about cleansing the wasteland at all.

In theory, their bloodline was even purer than the Enclave's.

They represented legitimate American continuity in the most literal sense.

Some of them had even joined the Enclave's Appalachian branch and later risen to the rank of Enclave General.

That was why Sterling's superior had once warned him:

"If anyone from Appalachia shows up in your jurisdiction, do not engage them. Do not provoke them. If you piss them off, I'll personally skin you alive and send your hide to that General as an apology."

"...Surely you jest, sir."

Sterling's voice returned over the communicator.

His tone now carried a subtle restraint that bordered on respect.

"As for what happened in Appalachia... we're aware of it. Those were historical issues and have nothing to do with us."

He chose his words carefully.

"We are not conducting biological experiments. If you require assistance, we can provide whatever help is within our capabilities."

Danse frowned beneath his helmet.

Their attitude was too strange.

The Enclave.

The same Enclave infamous for arrogance and brutality.

And now they were being this cautious?

Almost deferential?

Something was wrong.

Danse's mind raced.

He realized that this misunderstanding might be the strongest protection he could possibly have in the Glowing Sea.

"Is there a settlement belonging to the Children of Atom somewhere in this area?"

Silence returned on the other end.

But this time, it was different.

Colonel Sterling leaned back slightly in his command chair.

The Children of Atom.

Of course he knew them.

They were lunatics who worshipped nuclear radiation as "holy light."

Their central doctrine held that radiation wasn't a lethal threat, but a divine gift bestowed by Atom.

They believed the Great War hadn't been the end of civilization.

It had been a miracle.

A sacred baptism that purified the old world.

Radiation itself was a sacrament.

By bathing in it, believers communed with their god and achieved rebirth.

To them, highly irradiated places like the Glowing Sea were holy ground.

And the most disturbing part was that Atom actually seemed to exist.

Sterling thought to himself.

So that's what this is about.

No wonder they're here.

A trace of eagerness entered his voice.

"Yes. There is one. They have a settlement inside a crater in the Glowing Sea, roughly three kilometers from your current position. I can transmit the exact coordinates."

"No need," Danse replied immediately.

"Just give us the general direction."

Sterling paused.

Then he understood.

Danse was warning him.

With things like this, the less you knew, the better.

The last time an Enclave branch had ignored that principle, they'd intercepted a communication from a 76er on an outside mission and obtained the coordinates of a seaside fishing village.

Thinking they had gained some kind of local intelligence advantage, they had gone ahead and established "deep cooperation" with the inhabitants without authorization.

What had that fishing village been called?

Innsmouth, maybe?

Sterling had no idea what had actually been in that village.

He only knew that headquarters later dropped eight nuclear warheads on the base in a single strike.

The village, the base, and everything within twenty kilometers had been wiped off the map.

"...Understood."

Sterling's voice returned to its restrained calm.

"Head southwest and follow the edge of this collapsed zone. You'll eventually see a massive crater left by a nuclear blast. That's where they are."

Danse answered curtly.

"If there's nothing else, we're ending the transmission."

Sterling added one final sentence.

"Good luck with your operation."

The channel went dead.

Danse stood where he was for more than ten seconds.

He replayed the conversation in his mind.

The almost fearful caution in Sterling's voice.

The Enclave was afraid of something.

Not him.

Danse knew his own limits.

Five Knights in power armor weren't enough to make an entire Enclave base afraid.

What frightened them was whatever they mistakenly believed Danse represented.

Appalachia.

The giant snake.

The giant bat.

He had no idea what those words actually referred to.

"Captain?" one of the Knights asked quietly. "Was that... the Enclave?"

"Yes."

Danse returned his attention to the present and adjusted the Union power armor's operating mode.

"But they won't bother us anymore."

"Why?"

"They think we're someone else."

Danse started walking.

The four Knights exchanged looks behind him.

None of them asked another question.

They followed Danse southwest.

Behind them, the Enclave reconnaissance drone slowly climbed to a higher altitude, turned away, and never approached them again.