NARRATOR<br/><br/>It was another day in the wastes, hot, dry, and unnaturally bright as always. The Marshal (http://th09.deviantart.net/fs8/PRE/f/2006/350/2/0/Fallout_by_hunqwert.jpg) let his eyes roam over the small camp set up near the excavation site. He'd had a large force of men and women put at his disposal to use in 'annexing' the vault. It had taken a long time for his technicians to get the machine they were going to used to break into the vault working. According to them the delays in getting the pre-war tunnelling machine (http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:aQ-fucTxTCJ_ZM:http://www.jadcomfg.com/images/mining_drill.jpg&t=1) running had been due to how complicated the fission batteries it used were...<br/><br/>But in all honesty The Marshal didn't care. All he cared about was the fact that the delays were finally over and they'd be able to crack open the vault, get what they needed, and leave! Once he got to the excavation Rick, the head engineer, walked over to him.<br/><br/>"What have you got for me Rick?" The Marshal asked.<br/><br/>The other man sighed and rubbed his temples before answering. "Well... we've had access to the door for a while already," he said, "And so while we were working on the drill, a few of us got the idea that it might be smart to figure out some way to try and listen in on the vault... you know listen for mirelurks, or for sirens, or something like that, so we'd know if we're walking into a reactor breach or a mirelurk den or whatever. So we got to work with a few different things, and we managed to use parts from some radios and..."<br/><br/>"Cut to the chase Rick," The Marshal said, interrupting him in the middle of his little technical story. The Marshal wasn't even looking at Rick but staring off past his head up the hillside to the blue sky beyond. Over there some large birds were wheeling about. That meant people over there. The Marshal didn't want other people being nearby, he got twitchy with other people. The Marshal didn't really have much of a problem with Rick, he was an okay kinda guy and he did his part but the man could go on forever about how they built this, or how they managed to fix that, or what they did on Sundays after church… and he just didn't have the time for it. "What did you hear?"<br/><br/>"We heard...well...maybe it's better if you have a listen for yourself." With that Rick walked over to a small table set up in an alcove of rocks on the hillside a little away from the drilling machine. On the table there was a small machine that looked like the bastard son of a television and a radio. Rick flipped a switch on the machine and its speaker crackled to life. Static poured out and into the Marshal's ear for a second, and he was about to make a sarcastic comment about how the static changed everything but before he could even open his mouth the static faded away and was replaced by what sounded like the tail end of an old advertisement jingle like he'd seen on holotapes of old TV shows or radio shows. There was another rush of static and then quite unmistakeably came the sound of singing. He knew that song, it was called<em>"Fly Me to the Moon"</em>and the man singing it was a long-turned-to-dust crooner from well before the war: Frank Sinatra. The ghost of Frank ended his song and then a woman's voice came out of the machine babbling some happy stuff about Radio One-Eleven.<br/><br/>"Where the hell is this coming from?"<br/><br/>"Inside the vault," Rick said. "Yep, so that's what I wanted to tell you... we've got signs of human life in there."<br/><br/>The Marshal took a slow deep breath that turned into a sigh, as if this mission isn't a big enough cluster already! "Damn it!" he cursed, "Now we have to spend another week at least trying to talk these fuckers out of their little hole in the ground, only to get the same 'no' that I'm willing to bet everything I own they are going to give us in the first place! Then we have to just breach the vault anyways and fight our way through God knows how many people, in their territory, who won't only know we are coming but will have had a week to get ready!"<br/><br/>"It's – ah - worse than that," Rick said, "The digger is already prepped, we've already started to cycle up the fission batteries"<br/><br/>"Yeah... And?" The Marshal asked.<br/><br/>"And… we had to jury-rig the shit out of this thing just to get it to work. We aren't going to be able to cycle the batteries back down, they will blow themselves out after about a day and half...it was the only way we could get the machine to work. So if we follow our guidelines we won't be able to complete the mission unless we are very lucky and they let us in when we ask. That's assuming we find a way to communicate with them."<br/><br/>The Marshal gritted his teeth down in frustration, he was very close to just shooting Rick out of pure anger but that wouldn't do any good. "Well, ain't that nice? Ain't this all just fine and fucking dandy! Shit. Who else knows about this?" he asked.<br/><br/>"No one," Rick responded, slowly looking around making sure that no one was within earshot. The Marshal nodded. "Well then, listen up. This mission has been deemed of vital importance... and I'm not about to fail because failing really pisses me off and I tend to go kill people. Now I know that as head tech you're going to have to give a report, and when you do...your report will state that we made contact with the people in the vault, they refused to allow us entry, and we had no choice but to annex them by force. Understand?"<br/><br/>"Yes, sir. I understand." Rick said, his voice betraying the fact that the lie The Marshal had just cooked up didn't bother him in the slightest.<br/><br/>"Alrighty," the Marshal said, "Then in that case proceed as planned, I'll go get the troops ready to attack."<br/>________________________________________<br/><br/>Minutes after Glenn Miller finished singing about that damn String of Pearls once again and Chuck Wallace Simms swore to his watch buddy that if he heard that shit one more time this week he'd go over to that broad in the 1-11 radio shack and shove her entire Glenn Miller collection up her ass, one of the lab-coated men passing the readouts which displayed Vault 111's systems status spoke up.<br/><br/>Looking over at Simms he said, "The heat sensors on the inside of the main door are showing a rise in the temperature of the door." Simms, the watch supervisor walked over and read the information on the monitor then the information on a few of the other monitors. "None of the other sensors are showing any temperature spikes...it's probably just the door's sensor on the fritz. Send someone to check it out."<br/><br/>Simms sipped his coffee then spat it out. It was two hours cold and tasted like radroach dung. "Gah! And someone get me another coffee!"<br/><br/>________________________________________<br/>Like many things that have existed for a very long time, the different organizations in Vault 111 were normally slow to respond to things that fell out of the established routine. None more so than the maintenance department. More often than not if a problem wasn't either important to the Vault's continued survival, or pushed to the forefront by someone with authority shouting about it loud enough, it tended to be placed on the back burner. So it took two hours for Charlie Wilson, one of the Vault's many maintenance personnel, to get to the task of examining the main door's thermo-sensor. Of course by that time a few more of the door's systems had started to act up, so he now had to examine the seismic sensor, and the thermo-sensor and the tilt-magneto.<br/><br/>Once he was at the door he reached up to grab the access panel to the door's systems. As soon as he touched the door he yanked his hand back sharply with a hiss of pain. The door was<em>hot!</em>Charlie quickly pulled on his gloves and then reached out and opened the hatch. He had to be sure it wasn't just the door's systems overloading or something before he called things in... and to tell the truth he didn't know too much about the door... other than the fact that it had failed to open the thing had never given them any problems in the entire history of the vault! It was like, just a round thick piece of the rest of the walls. And they never fritzed out on them.<br/><br/>As Charlie worked he remained blissfully ignorant of two very important things. The first being that if he hadn't been listing to the vault radio station via his pip-boy he would have been able to hear the faint sounds coming from the other side of the door, and the second was that he would be working on diagnosing the problem with the door for the rest of his life... all two and a half minutes of it.<br/><br/>________________________________________<br/>As Charlie unknowingly stepped closer and closer to meeting his end, events on the other side of the door were also reaching their climax. The drill had already finished its job and been pulled back from the now considerably thinner vault door. In its place sat an impressive pile of explosives strapped to the weakened portion of the door. A single man stood at the pile of explosives and looked over his shoulder, sheltered behind rocks, slabs of metal, and even the drill that had been used to cut into the door were the men and women waiting to charge into the vault. The trooper's eyes caught on the Marshal. He was easy to spot; he was the only one standing up and in the open. Not that anyone would tell him to do otherwise... you didn't live long by telling a marshal what to do. Without a word the Marshal held up his hand and gave the trooper a 'thumbs up.' The trooper quickly moved his hands to the explosives, finding the small egg timer wired to them and gave it a twist. As soon as he let it go he was running for the cover of the rocks.<br/><br/>"Fire in the hole!" he shouted as he dived behind the nearest rock and covered his ears with his hands.<br/>________________________________________<br/><br/>When the egg timer counter reached zero several events took place. They were separated by small moments of time but these gaps were very small and they could have been said to have happened in the same instant as each another. The egg timer gave off a soft<em>DING</em>, the explosives detonated with a monstrous blast of sound and concussive force directed into the door, this force succeeding in fully destroying the already weakened door leaving nothing to keep the vault sealed, and Charlie Wilson, just tapping his knuckle on the sensor he'd been sent to check out and frowning in puzzlement as it confirmed that yes, the door temperature was indeed six hundred and nine degrees… died, his whole body from the waist up vapourized by the blast, without ever realizing he was dying.<br/>________________________________________<br/><br/>It took less than five seconds for the emergency alarms set throughout Vault 111 to go off. The Overseer's pre-recorded voice could be heard on the speakers calmly saying; "There has been a breech of the Vault's integrity. All personnel are required to report to their assigned stations. There has been a breach of the Vault's integrity. All personnel are required to report to their assigned stations..."<br/><br/>* * * * * *<br/><br/>Inside the main door vestibule there was chaos. A blast of sound and jagged metal and smoke filled the cargo dock and the generator room to the right, the door to which Charlie Wilson had left open as he worked. At the top of the access ramp at the doorway to the corridor that ran down to the atrium, Deputy Macmahon had three security officers with her; troopers Wells, Morgan and Harris. The four officers were the daily shift that the chief of security, Sherriff Kane had ordered be maintained at the main door for many months now; a constant drain on the team's resources. Listening- or thinking they were listening- to half-heard sounds beyond the door had become a joke and the battle against boredom was a constant struggle on the 'Door Shift'. Today however the four officers had been watching Charlie do a tech check on some of the sensors so they were at least awake.<br/><br/>Carl Morgan had been sat at the listening post's computer terminal, monitoring the repeated readouts of the doors thermal and seismic sensors that were relayed there from the main engineering desk. He was just beginning to put two and two together regarding heat and vibration and a low grinding noise which he was sure he could hear over the calming strains of Duke Ellington and he turned to speak with Deputy Macmahon about his concerns at the very instant Charlie Wilson died. The pressure wave from the explosion blew out the computer terminal's screen which lacerated Morgan's face badly, blinding him in the right eye. His turn aside was enough to save him from being completely blinded but it was not enough to do more however as a dog-sized chunk of steel which had been part of the upper half of the door hinge flew across the chamber and struck Deputy Macmahon, killing her instantly and proceeding to crush the half-blinded Morgan beneath both it and his commanding officer's body.<br/><br/>Bob Wells and Troy Harris were sat on makeshift stools behind the sandbag wall at the top of the ramp and were thrown to the floor by the blast, miscellaneous chunks of steel and rock thudding into and partly collapsing their emplaced sandbags. Deafened they struggled to get up and were quite unaware of gun-brandishing figures running in through the dust and smoke. Two men and a woman jumped the sandbag wall and shot the two writhing security men at point-blank range.<br/>________________________________________<br/><br/>The door lock mechanism and roller retractor power room was to the right of the door as you faced it from the atrium. Twenty-two year old Denise Wells, sister of the newly deceased Robert, was in there conducting a routine check of the dormant power cells. The pretty redhead was knocked over by the pressure wave, the blast of air tearing her jumpsuit off completely, other than at the neck, wrists and her boots.<br/><br/>She lay stunned on the metal decking in just her underwear as the doorway was filled with men in helmets and strange padded armour. One of them thrust a gun in the half-naked girl's face.<br/><br/>"Oh, my wordy. Looky here. We got us some spoils of war boys!" Six soldiers entered the room, closing the door behind them. Two knelt to hold the dazed woman to the ground as the others moved forwards...<br/>________________________________________<br/><br/>On the opposite side of the door access ramp was the door control chamber, a narrow corridor full of power units and computers. It was no longer used and much of the equipment in there had been stripped out, cannibalised to keep other more essential systems running. Jed Harris, Troy's son and member of the science team was in there at the moment the door was blown open. He had that rare trait, useful for self-preservation and essential among scientists; an enquiring and analytical mind. Unlike his complacent colleagues down in engineering who had been so slow to identify and react to the temperature sensor rise, Jed had been a little curious himself and on the excuse of going up 'doorside' to look for a No.17-B12-A rheostatic valve that the door retractor desk had inside it, he had come here to observe Charlie and maybe help him out. The gruff engineer had refused his help however - the chance to work on a really new and unusual fault meant that Charlie had kept the diagnostic work all to himself demanding he be left alone at the door. His rudeness saved Jed's life as the lab technician had no business being near the door and MacMahon was already giving him one of her stern looks. The last time she would ever use that particular look, or any other look, as it turned out. Thus, when Charlie was vapourized into a wet mist by the blast, Jed was on his hands and knees under the door retractor desk - or what was left of it - the prized 17-B12-A in his hands.<br/><br/>Surprised by the explosion but protected by the blast, Jed crawled back out and jumped up, only to stare down the muzzle of a revolver thrust in his face, the grinning bearded man who held it snarling at him with a shockingly happy expression.<br/><br/>"Go on, vault-boy, make my day, just try it!"<br/><br/>Jed didn't really think. He had no intention of being a hero and he was quite unaware of any conscious thought to do anything. He was dimly aware, beyond the bearded gunman, of smoke and debris and other men and women jumping over the security team's sandbag wall and shooting at figures on the ground - "Dad!" he yelled, "DAD!!" - and knew he either had to act or most likely die. Jed Harris was therefore as surprised as the grinning man when his right arm flashed up in a curving punch and rammed the 17-B12-A into the man's face.<br/><br/>The thinly glass-walled valve bulb broke and the man screamed and clutched at his face, blood running between his fingers. He dropped the small revolver he held and an even more surprised Jed Harris grabbed it and in a scampering crawl, ran down the small room and into the door technician's security lock, punching the 'close' button as he flopped in the corner and seeing a snarling woman's face staring at him from beneath what he was sure was a pre-war police motorcyclists crash helmet. This bizarre vision was shut out by the powered door sliding closed right behind him.<br/><br/>Jed's exciting day was only just beginning. Exiting the atrium-side door to the security lock he realised the main security door at the top of the ramp was wide open. The listening post boys must have left it slid aside as a simple convenience so that the girls from catering could bring them lunch. To his left Jed saw only smoke and hairy gun-toting figures moving about among the bodies of the security team. Aware that one of the crumpled forms on the floor was his own father, Jed acted with surprising calmness. Rather than panicking and fighting the strangers in what would have certainly been a very short and one-sided battle, he doubled over and quietly as he could under cover of the smoke and dust, ran towards the atrium.<br/><br/>One of the attackers saw him however and fired some shots which went wide. Another gunman joined in and Jed was hit in the backs of his legs, tumbling with a cry into the atrium itself.<br/><br/>"Shut the door! Lock the door! We're being attacked!" he yelled. Old Sophie Westcott was playing checkers with Grandpa Walker on a bench booth in the atrium's lower level. At the explosion she got up.<br/><br/>"Oh my word! What's a goin' on? Jed Harris! You're bleedin'!" The old lady bent down to reach for Jed just as a bullet whacked into her right shoulder sending her spinning and sliding across the floor with a strangled yelp. With the alarm klaxon sounding other people were now running into the atrium (while others ran out), some of them armed with whatever they could carry, others grabbing tables and couches to push them into a makeshift barricade. Some security officers arrived, two of whom had pistols. With a groan Jed dropped the .32 revolver on the floor.<br/><br/>"Take this someone, I can't use it!" he shouted as an orderly from the medical bay dragged him aside.