566. Fixing The Castle PT.1

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The stars began to come out above them, faint at first but growing clearer with each minute, shimmering against the dark sky. Someone produced an old harmonica from their pocket and began playing a soft tune—slow, meandering, bluesy. The kind of music that lingered like smoke.

The next morning came slow and gray, wrapped in a mist that clung to the crumbled battlements like damp linen. Sico rose early—not because he had to, but because sleep had found him only in fragments, soft and stubborn, slipping through his grasp like grains of sand. The night before had been… necessary. The food, the warmth, the shared laughter—it had worked some balm over the open wounds of the past day. But rest was a different thing entirely. Rest required safety, and that was something Sico had never truly learned to trust.

He didn't bother with armor, just threw on a thick coat against the cold and made his way up the stairs that wound along the outer fortifications. The old stone was slick beneath his boots, pocked and weathered by centuries of salt and time. He didn't mind the walk. He needed the air.

At the top, the sea greeted him—not with violence, but with a hush. The tide had gone out sometime during the night, leaving dark streaks of seaweed clinging to the rocks below. Gull cries echoed faintly across the bay, and the sky hung low, a quilt of soft grays and hesitant blues. It would probably rain by afternoon.

Sico rested both hands on the edge of the parapet, elbows locked, and drew in a long breath. The salt was sharp this morning, sharper than usual, cutting through the dull ache in his chest with something close to clarity.

The Castle still stood.

That mattered.

It wasn't pretty. The northern wall was still a mess, the eastern tower partially collapsed. Sandbags held more than they should, and if another Queen came within the week, they'd probably be up to their necks in trouble again. But they'd held. They'd survived. And now—now the real work began.

The wind picked up, tugging at the lapels of his coat. Sico let it run through his hair, the strands still thick with grit from the battle. He closed his eyes, just for a moment, letting himself feel that rarest of luxuries: peace.

Then he heard it.

Distant, but unmistakable—the low rumble of engines, muffled by the heavy morning fog. He opened his eyes, brow furrowing as he turned his gaze inland.

More than one vehicle.

Wheels on dirt. A convoy.

He straightened slowly.

That would be Sarah.

She hadn't said exactly when the reinforcements would arrive, but yesterday—after the last of the Mirelurk corpses had been dragged to the sea and the wounded tallied—he'd taken a moment at the Castle's radio tower to contact her, asking for the list Ronnie had drawn up. Timber, steel, mortar, fresh power coils, replacement capacitors, even some basic luxuries like dry blankets, antiseptics, and boots. She'd answered with a simple promise:

I'll send what I can. You'll get it soon.

Soon, it seemed, meant now.

Sico moved with purpose down the stairs, feet lighter than they had any right to be after days of combat and command. He hit the courtyard just as the first of the gate guards called out, the shout bouncing off the inner walls.

"Convoy incoming!"

Workers and soldiers alike paused in their movements. A few still held half-eaten breakfast rations, others had grease-streaked hands from early repairs. All of them turned toward the Castle's inner gate.

Sico strode past them, through the archway and out onto the muddy front path. And there they were.

Eight trucks with Freemasons Republic insignias on their flanks, rolled up the road in a slow procession. Some were covered with tarps, others open-backed and piled high with crates. Behind them came four Humvees, armor plating catching what little light the sun offered.

Sico spotted familiar figures among them—drivers he'd seen at Sanctuary, scouts he recognized from patrols up north. Sarah hadn't just sent supplies. She'd sent reinforcements.

The lead truck hissed to a halt. The passenger door creaked open, and a young woman in officer's fatigues hopped down. She wore her dark hair in a tight braid and had a clipboard in one hand. Sico met her halfway.

"President Sico?" she asked.

He nodded. "That's me."

She gave a small salute, one handed but crisp. "Lieutenant Rina Ellis, reporting from Sanctuary. Sarah sends her regards—and everything on your list. Plus a few extras she said you'd probably need even if you didn't ask."

Sico's mouth quirked upward. "Sounds like her."

"She wanted me to tell you she's proud of what you pulled off here." Rina's eyes flicked up at the Castle's battered silhouette. "And that this place deserves to stand."

He nodded once, slowly. "It does."

She motioned to the trucks behind her. "We've got building materials, ammo, field medkits, and food stores. Three crates of fusion batteries for the towers, half a dozen generators, and one very pissed-off mechanic who's been stuck with the welding crew since sunrise."

That got a tired chuckle out of him. "Where do you want to start?"

"Wherever the walls are worst."

They got to work fast.

The yard filled with the sound of shouted instructions, slamming tailgates, and the rhythmic clatter of supply crates being offloaded. Sico oversaw it all with a quiet steadiness, occasionally stepping in to help lift a load or direct a squad toward a priority repair. Ronnie emerged from the command tower not long after, boots crunching over gravel, a new blueprint already rolled beneath her arm.

"They brought everything?" she asked, eyeing the supplies like a wolf sizing up prey.

"Everything and then some."

"Good. We'll need it. East tower's barely holding together. And the north-facing battlements—" she stopped mid-sentence as she noticed the line of reinforced I-beams being hauled off one truck.

"Steel braces?" she asked.

"Steel braces," Sico confirmed. "Sarah thought of everything."

For hours, the Castle buzzed with activity. Civilians and soldiers worked side-by-side—repairing the gates, reinforcing weak points, rewiring turrets. The air rang with hammer blows and drill whines. One of the Brotherhood defectors—a wiry man named Dorn—started rewiring the generator grid, muttering about "damn pre-war cowards who didn't believe in redundancy." Another brought out a fresh antenna from the convoy and began climbing the central comms tower to replace the one that had been fried during the assault.

By midday, a misty rain began to fall. Not heavy, just enough to cool the air and make everything smell faintly of rust and seaweed. Still, no one stopped.

Lunch was distributed in shifts. Hot stew and thick bread from the supply trucks. Someone even found coffee, real coffee, and the first whiff of it drew an audible sigh from the workers as if it were the smell of salvation.

Sico stood beneath the awning near the inner courtyard, chewing absently on the edge of his ration bread, watching the repair crews work. Preston was on the north wall now, overseeing turret placements. Ronnie was coordinating with Rina on barricade placements near the artillery battery. Everyone was where they needed to be.

Sico swallowed the last bite of his bread as a gust of sea wind lifted the canvas flap behind him, rattling the frame. The rain had picked up slightly, falling in a soft mist that clung to every surface, beading on stone and pooling in the seams of tarpaulin. He pulled the collar of his coat tighter around his neck and stepped back into the open yard, letting the rhythmic pulse of hammer strikes and the murmur of voices guide him forward. The Castle, for all its battered scars, was alive again—with motion, purpose, sweat. It felt… real.

He made his way first to the northern wall, where Preston stood with a small cluster of engineers and a pair of Minutemen from the advanced recon division. The team was focused on the turret placement—precisely where, how, and at what angle each automated gun would need to be calibrated for optimal defense coverage. One of the new generators had already been hooked up, its green indicator blinking steady in the gray drizzle. Wires snaked along the battlements, bundled neatly with zip ties and old-fashioned cloth loops, and several sandbag emplacements had been reshaped into more permanent fixtures, reinforced with steel plating from the supply convoy.

Preston noticed Sico approaching and turned with a half-smile, his cheeks streaked with dirt and his coat flapping in the wind.

"Afternoon, President," he said, the title spoken with familiar camaraderie. "Didn't think we'd see you out here so soon."

"I don't sleep well when the walls are bleeding," Sico replied, stepping up beside him.

Preston nodded. "Same."

The wall directly ahead of them had suffered heavy damage during the last Mirelurk surge. A collapsed section had exposed the inner walkway to both the sea and any potential enemy approach. Now, the makeshift repairs were coming apart—wooden scaffolding giving way under the weight of moisture and time. Two men were bracing a steel support beam while another welded brackets into the stone.

"They're holding up alright?" Sico asked.

Preston crossed his arms and nodded toward the welding sparks. "They are. Took a while to get that beam cut down to size, but once it's locked in, we'll have a solid corner to rebuild from. Turrets are next—Ronnie sent Dorn up here with a diagnostic. We'll have full coverage before nightfall, unless the weather goes sideways."

Sico walked a few paces forward and crouched beside one of the crates. He pried open the lid and glanced inside—ammunition belts, spare fuses, a disassembled spotlight. Everything labeled in careful handwriting, probably one of Sarah's crew. With a quiet grunt, he reached inside, pulled out a metal joint fitting, and walked it over to one of the soldiers still wrestling with the turret base.

"Here," he said, handing it over. "Swap this in—it'll give you better tension on the yaw pivot."

The soldier, a young man with freckles and mud-splattered boots, blinked in surprise, then nodded gratefully. "Thanks, sir."

Sico didn't linger. He moved on, checking the power lines where they joined with the relay coils, inspecting the mounts for cracks. He wiped grime from a welded seam with the edge of his sleeve, gave a few instructions on angle alignment, and then offered a steadying hand as another turret base was lowered into place by pulley and chain.

Preston watched all of it with a quiet kind of admiration. "You ever think about being an engineer instead of a revolutionary?"

"I think about a lot of things," Sico murmured. "Doesn't make any of them easier."

The rain hadn't stopped by the time he made his way toward the eastern tower, where Ronnie was overseeing one of the more ambitious projects—rebuilding the tower's inner frame and setting up additional firing slits for crossfire coverage. The spiral stairwell inside had partially collapsed during the last attack, and Ronnie had already brought in a three-man crew to erect a scaffolding so they could rebuild it from within.

Sico found her half-soaked, sleeves rolled to her elbows, one gloved hand gripping a folding blueprint while the other pointed emphatically at a cracked support arch that sagged like a broken rib.

"That arch needs to come out now," she was saying to one of the laborers. "Don't care if it's original stone—if it falls while someone's on that stair, it'll kill them."

The man hesitated.

"But—"

"Do you want me to get the damn chisel?" she snapped.

Sico couldn't help but smirk. Ronnie Shaw, as ever, had no time for sentimental attachments to architecture when human lives were on the line.

"I'd pay good caps to see that, honestly," he said as he stepped into the alcove.

Ronnie glanced over, snorted, then shoved the blueprint into his chest. "Don't tempt me. We're short on masons as it is."

Sico unfolded the sheet and glanced over the layout. It was a newer draft, with grid markings showing reinforcement placements, potential support joints, and power line reroutes for the tower's backup lighting system. He nodded slowly, impressed.

"You did this since yesterday?"

"Last night," she said, wiping sweat from her brow with a dirty sleeve. "While you were trying to pretend a half-ration stew counted as dinner."

"It was a good stew."

"You're a liar."

He handed the plan back, but not before pointing to a section near the middle. "This gap—should we add a brace here, just in case?"

Ronnie looked, frowned, then nodded once. "Yeah. Good catch. I'll have Dorn pull another beam from the third truck."

Sico stayed a while, helping lift timber planks and brace a rusted support strut while one of the masons pried loose a slab of wet stone. It was slow work—laborious, dirty—but there was a rhythm to it. A rightness. Each motion contributed to something solid, something lasting.

By the time he left the tower, his sleeves were soaked through and his gloves were speckled with rust and mortar dust. He took a breath, the air thick with ozone and sea spray, and moved on.

Rina was further down the southern wall, coordinating with a trio of radio techs who were halfway through installing the new antenna onto the communications tower. She stood on a small scaffold, clipboard tucked under one arm and a stylus dancing across a digital display as she checked frequency calibrations.

The new antenna gleamed in the rain—slim, modern, compact. It had been designed to interface with both pre-war systems and the Republic's newer encrypted frequency bands. A slender cable unspooled from the base and snaked down toward the generator bank below, where another pair of engineers were finalizing the power coupling.

Rina looked up as Sico approached, her braid damp but still tight against her neck.

"President," she said, hopping lightly down from the scaffold. "We're nearly online. I've got one team on the antenna and one on the relay. We should be able to boost signal to Sanctuary and Concord both."

"And the signal clarity?"

"Five by five," she said with a grin. "Best we've had out here."

"Good. We'll need the link. I want full comms with patrols by tomorrow."

Rina nodded. "We're on it. Also, the mechanic we brought with us? She finally stopped yelling. Said you owe her a bottle of whiskey and a night without alarms."

"She can have both. In that order."

They shared a smile before Rina pointed toward the lower rampart, where a group of soldiers was laying down prefabricated barricade panels. Heavy steel plating, bolted into position and flanked by sandbags filled with a quick-setting mortar mix that hardened on contact with rain.

"These will hold against another charge?" Sico asked.

"They'll hold," Rina said confidently. "And if they don't, we've got surprises waiting behind them."

He glanced toward the crates lined neatly behind the barricades—ammo, mines, at least two modified plasma sentries waiting for activation. A careful plan, drawn in layers. Sarah had picked the right officer to lead this effort.

Sico stepped in again—lifting one end of a barricade panel, helping position it into place. The soldier beside him gave a startled blink before recognizing him, then offered a wordless nod. Together, they slid it into its slot and locked it down with a heavy twist of the anchor bolt.

It was nearly mid-afternoon by the time the major tasks had been touched, reinforced, or corrected. The rain eased to a drizzle, leaving a cool sheen on every surface. The Castle looked different now—not new, not whole, but held together by more than stone and steel. By people. Hands and hearts that refused to let it fall.

Sico stood again beneath the battlements, gaze sweeping from one end of the yard to the other. Preston was laughing with two recon scouts beside a fully mounted turret. Ronnie barked orders through a half-open window, blueprint rolled like a baton in one hand. Rina stood silhouetted against the radio tower, her headset crackling with an incoming signal—confirmation, perhaps, that the Castle now spoke again with the rest of the Republic.

And the wind carried the scent of warm stew and salt, rust and ozone, the smell of a place still standing. He took a breath, that is long and steady. As he know the Castle has live to see another day.

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• Name: Sico

• Stats :

S: 8,44

P: 7,44

E: 8,44

C: 8,44

I: 9,44

A: 7,45

L: 7

• Skills: advance Mechanic, Science, and Shooting skills, intermediate Medical, Hand to Hand Combat, Lockpicking, Hacking, Persuasion, and Drawing Skills

• Inventory: 53.280 caps, 10mm Pistol, 1500 10mm rounds, 22 mole rats meat, 17 mole rats teeth, 1 fragmentation grenade, 6 stimpak, 1 rad x, 6 fusion core, computer blueprint, modern TV blueprint, camera recorder blueprint, 1 set of combat armor, Automatic Assault Rifle, 1.500 5.56mm rounds, power armor T51 blueprint, Electric Motorcycle blueprint, T-45 power armor, Minigun, 1.000 5mm rounds, Cryolator, 200 cryo cell, Machine Gun Turret Mk1 blueprint, electric car blueprint, Kellogg gun, Righteous Authority, Ashmaker, Furious Power Fist, Full set combat armor blueprint, M240 7.62mm machine guns blueprint, Automatic Assault Rifle blueprint, and Humvee blueprint.

• Active Quest:-