[color=00aeef][u]Lettie Lawson -- North Vegas Square -- Morning, Oct 17th[/u][/color]

The morning sun had crawled into the sky, like a trooper returning to base after a night on the Strip. By its light, the masses of people on Vegas’ outskirts could be seen, seething slowly around the city’s borders: refugees, caravanners, Followers and mercs. 

Lettie had stepped back from one of the water distribution tents and was leaning against the corroded remains of a steel fence. She paused to take a sip of precious clean water, swiped the hair out of her eyes. She enjoyed the coolness of the morning breeze against her sweat-coated face, but couldn’t help thinking, [i]I shouldn’t be working up this much of a sweat. There’s endless work to do, but the amount of energy expended in purifying this water versus the value of what I produce with my muscles… that can’t be an efficient exchange. I have to be better. Have to identify the weak points in the equation.[/i]

“Morning, Miss Lawson.”

She glanced up and saw Herb emerge from the crowd of aid workers. 

“Morning, Herb.”

As he slouched into a spot beside her, Lettie looked up and out, beyond the surging crowd of people. She took in the broken-down public square, the roads radiating from it like cracked arteries from a stone heart. The husks of houses crowding the ghost highway, and beyond them the old factory and the rubble of the former industrial district. If she could look further, she knew, she would find the fragments of homesteads and the old railway tracks.

Railway tracks laid down and built by generations of labourers, following the old caravan trails. Following the lonesome roads carved by couriers and, before them, the old tribes. Lifelines into the desert, arteries which fed old Vegas, fed its rotten, bloated carcass, which consumed everything, and gave nothing back but glitz and gluttony. Railroads to nowhere, now. 

Factories constructed and manned by generations of workers, toiling to build casinos they could never enter, produce goods they could never afford. Farms tended and harvested by homesteaders who would never taste the fruits of their labour.

All of them gone now, buried under piles of concrete, suffocated by the buildings they had slaved in. Incinerated by the atomic fire they’d never seen coming.

Mr House boasted, [i]When the bombs fell, I saved the best of Vegas. I saved the city’s heart and soul.[/i]

This was the rest of it. This was… [i]expendable. [/i]

“You look thoughtful today,” Herb said. 

“I’m thinking,” said Lettie, “about the ambassador’s presence here. It deserves a response.”

“I agree,” said Herb. “But Chez and his friends are our usual point of contact with the NCR. We’d ruffle too many feathers if we acted independently of them.”

“I have no intention of interfering with the Followers’ official response to the NCR. What I’m talking about is the will of the people. Our comrades may have decided that the lives of countless Followers and Freesiders can be written off as a tactical error by the 3rd battalion. Whether the people of this city feel that way themselves…”

A change came over Herb’s face. “Of course.”

“Have you heard about the ambassador’s exploits so far?”

“That the first thing he did in Freeside was kill someone?”

“And went to the NCR stronghold to rile them up. And then he moved onto the Strip. He’s being wined and dined by the Omertas today. God knows how many years this one’ll last. It’ll be non-stop carousing, embezzling, kickbacks from here on out. The Strip gets money, independence, the ear of the NCR. Freeside gets bullets and riot control. We know the script well enough.”

“What are your intentions?”

[i]“To remind him that Freeside exists![/i] That we haven’t forgotten the injustice, the mistreatment, the [i]murders.[/i] To remind him that the people are angry, and that anger doesn’t just go away when it’s beaten down by superior firepower.”

“But if the people poke the Bear…”

“I don’t want them to poke the Bear. I want the Bear to remember that it’s [i]one [/i]apex predator. I want the Bear to remember that it can kill ten, or twenty, or thirty coyotes, but it can’t kill a hundred. Let it stay in its cave, and leave the prairie to us.”

“If Chez finds out about this-–”

“About what? The spontaneous expression of the people’s anger? This has nothing to do with us. It must be managed carefully. I have no desire to bring the anger of the NCR down on the innocent people of Freeside. But I have no desire to let the NCR think we’ve forgotten what they’ve done to us, either. 

“Let the NCR see that they can’t send whatever two-cap Shady Sands political hack they feel like down here to stage a good photo-op and set up his pension fund. Let them feel the heat. I want Benny to sweat. I want him off-balance and nervous, and insecure about his bargaining position. 

“But he mustn’t see enough to think we’re the primary threat. Not until it’s too late.”

Herb nodded. “I understand. It’s not difficult to hide things from a NCR politician. Not when half the job is learning to look the other way.”

“Then you know how important this is.”

“I do. Leave it with me.”

Lettie watched Herb go, melting back into the swarm of people. 

[i]One day,[/i] she thought. [i]The Bear, big and blundering as he is, arrogant and short-sighted, confident in his power, will carelessly slip his paw into the vice. And on that day, I pray I'll be the one who springs the trap.[/i]