"Goddamn, this is full-blown Enclave," Amelia breathed, her voice echoing slightly against the cold, metallic walls.
The transition was jarring. One step ago, they were in the dirt and pine needles; now, they were standing in a masterclass of pre-war shadow-government architecture. The blast door was a heavy, vertical iris of reinforced steel, and the walls were clad in those signature dark-metal plates. Everything was bathed in the eerie, clinical hum of blue floor-strip lighting that flickered with a steady, haunting pulse.
Case approached the primary terminal, the blue of its screen reflecting off his visor. As he touched the keys, the system hummed to life, prompting him for a high-level override password. Most people would have seen a brick wall, but Case felt a surge of nostalgic recognition.
He thought back to the Remnant Power Armor—the Advanced Power Armor Mk II. In the history of the wasteland, it was the gold standard of power armor, a walking tank that only the legendary Hellfire or Mk III variants could hope to surpass.
"Dear old friends, remember Navarro," Case said, his voice carrying a weight of shared history that hung heavy in the sterile air.
"Navarro…" Markus muttered, the name tasting like ash and old memories. "How long has it been since we deserted, Amelia?" He turned his head toward her, the blue lighting of the bunker catching the grey in his stubble.
"Dunno," Amelia replied, squinting as she did the mental math. "Enrolled at eighteen... then twenty, then some shit happened. Joined the Followers at thirty, Rangers at thirty-nine. Hmmm. Twenty-six years, I guess, since I'm forty-six now."
"Oh, hmm. You're older than me, huh?" Markus half-joked, trying to lighten the oppressive atmosphere of the tomb they had just entered.
"Well, by only one year," Amelia shot back with a dry smirk. "And Markus, I don't think it's a good idea to mention age to a woman—especially one holding a rifle."
The conversation died as the massive blast door finally groaned open. The sound of pressurized air escaping hissed through the chamber, and then they saw it.
They weren't looking at a mere outpost; they were looking at a pristine Enclave time capsule. The main hangar was a cathedral of steel and oil. Dominating the center of the room was the sleek, menacing silhouette of a VB-02 Vertibird, its rotors folded back at rest. Along the far wall stood a row of industrial docking stations, each one housing a suit of Advanced Power Armor Mk II—the "Black Devil" suits—standing tall and terrifying in the dim light.
Piles of reinforced metal crates, stamped with the Enclave insignia, were stacked neatly to the side, likely filled with the specialized energy cells and high-grade maintenance kits required to keep a force like this operational.
"Holy…" Milla muttered, her voice barely a whisper that disappeared into the vast, hollow space of the hangar.
"Shit…" Amelia breathed, her rifle lowering as she took in the scale of the facility.
Markus didn't say a word. He walked toward one of the stasis containers, his boots echoing sharply on the deck plating. As he drew closer, the sheer scale of the machine became clear. Case felt a jolt of recognition—in the old records of New Vegas, Power Armor was often depicted as a heavy suit, but this was different. This followed the terrifying logic of the newer Commonwealth models: it was a massive exoskeleton, a towering frame of hydraulics and thick, curved composite plates.
The suit was a beast. It shared the menacing silhouette of the X-01, but the Advanced Power Armor Mk II was noticeably thicker. A heavy-duty cooling fan was recessed into the back of the torso, and beneath it sat the distinctive circular slot for a Fusion Core. It was a walking tank, a mountain of matte-black steel and reinforced ceramics that made the T-60 look like a civilian model.
Markus reached out, his hand hovering just inches from the chest plate. "Hey there, old girl."
"Shit… if the Rangers had access to this…" Amelia just stood there, speechless. The scale of the betrayal—or perhaps the scale of the missed opportunity—seemed to weigh on her.
Milla, meanwhile, had drifted toward the center of the room. She reached out and touched the cold, matte-black composite skin of the transport. "Case, what in the goddamn hell is this place?"
"A refueling base for the Enclave," Case answered, his voice echoing in the vast hangar. "A waypoint between Navarro and the East. It was never meant to be found."
"Goddamn, holy gosh darn… with this, Case, with this, we are… untouchable," Amelia said, her voice rising with a mix of awe and professional appraisal. She walked over to Markus, joining him in gazing at the towering suit of armor. "Do you know the spec-sheet for X-01? Now, this APA—guess what the spec is?"
"What?" Markus asked, not taking his eyes off the menacing helmet.
"Autocannon round protection," Amelia stated flatly. "20mm full-metal jacket—it's rated to survive a direct hit to the torso. And it'll shrug off a 14.5mm Chinese anti-material round at any other part of the frame."
"So you mean...?"
"Yes, I mean it. Only a Gauss Rifle can penetrate the headpiece of this armor reliably," Amelia added, her fingers trailing over the reinforced neck seal. "And even then, it would probably need to be an overcharged shot."
She paused, brushing dust away from a stencil on the chest plate. Her breath hitched. "Captain Judah Kreger... remember him, Markus?"
"No," Markus grunted.
"Our executive officer," Amelia muttered, her eyes softening for a brief, rare second. "And I'm a captain too now. How time flies..."
Markus sighed, his broad shoulders slumping slightly as the weight of the past filled the room. "Remembering the days, huh? One day, we're on the Oil Rig, led by Granite, watching the world from the top of the food chain. Then, we're helping that tribal blow the whole thing to hell and fleeing into the sunset. I wonder what happened to the rest of those guys..."
"Yeah, the rest is history," Amelia added, her voice dropping an octave. "A dark part of our history. We were the 'bad guys' until we weren't."
Whatever happened to those old souls, Case could only wonder. Now, the keys to the kingdom—the power armor and the Vertibird—were finally in his hands. With the industrial might of Big Mountain at their back, they could refine this tech, making it heavier, more durable, and deadlier than the Enclave ever dreamed.
"Strip it all," Case commanded, his voice echoing with newfound authority. "Gatling lasers, plasma munitions, every scrap of tech. If it's not bolted down, it's going to the Sink."
The Rangers moved with practiced precision, drawing their Transportalponders. One by one, the massive suits of Advanced Power Armor and the reinforced crates began to vanish in bursts of blue light, shunted safely into the Big MT storage buffers. Milla volunteered to head back up the ladder to teleport the stolen NCR jeep out of the vicinity; if a patrol found a Republic vehicle parked over a hidden hatch, this sanctuary would become a tomb.
Case left them to the heavy lifting and pushed deeper into the facility. He passed through a final set of pressurized doors into a central chamber. It wasn't a living space; it was a war room. In the center sat a circular table, eerily similar to the Think Tank's primary interface in Big Mountain, though it lacked the sentient personality of the CIU.
On the far wall, a massive tactical map of the Mojave flickered with ancient data points, showing troop movements and refueling routes that had been irrelevant for decades. Aside from a few scattered holotapes and a dusty terminal, the room was empty.
Years later, the Courier would walk these halls with a band of weary old men and a doctor named Arcade Gannon to reclaim a lost legacy. In that timeline, it was the best armor in the Mojave—the ultimate prize. But in Case's hands, right now, it was a blueprint. With the Think Tank's molecular replicators, this wouldn't just be one suit for a legend; it would be a standardized arsenal for the desert rangers.
The potential was intoxicating until a sudden, rhythmic thump-thump-thump vibrated through the steel floor.
The sound escalated instantly. A low-frequency hum grew into a violent, spinning flap that became a deafening roar, echoing off the hangar's reinforced concrete walls. Case sprinted out of the command room, his boots skidding on the metal grating.
In the center of the hangar, the VB-02 Vertibird had roared to life. Its twin rotors were tilted upward, slicing through the stagnant air of the bunker and kicking up decades of dust into a blinding storm. Above the craft, the massive, camouflaged hatch at the top of the hill had groaned open, revealing a square of the dark, starlit mountain sky.
Case didn't hesitate. He lunged into the side bay, his boots clanging against the reinforced floor as Markus hauled him inside. The interior smelled of old grease, hydraulic fluid, and the sharp, ozone tang of a waking fusion reactor.
This wasn't the glass-heavy transport version seen in the later years; this was a VB-02 gunship. Its hull was wrapped in thick, overlapping armor plating that left only narrow, reinforced slits for the pilots to peek through. The 30mm chin-mounted autocannon tracked the movement of the hangar floor like a predatory eye, ready to shred anything in its path.
"Let's fly, Case," Amelia's voice crackled over the internal comms, sounding more at home than she had since they'd left the Sink. "The gears are greased and the fusion engine has enough juice for sixty round-trips to the East Coast if we felt like it. The 30-mil bins are filled to the brim, but the missile pylons are bone dry—so don't expect any fireworks."
Up in the cockpit, Milla pulled back on the cyclic. The gunship lurched upward, the raw lift of the oversized rotors rattling Case's teeth in his skull. With a roar that vibrated through the very foundation of the mountain, the Vertibird cleared the hangar roof and ascended into the biting, crystalline night air of Mount Charleston.
Below them, the hidden hatch groaned shut, sealing the empty tomb once more.