Endgame (Fallout 4)

Chapter 3 - Taking Concord

"Power armor?" Night repeated, unsure that such a thing would still exist two-hundred years in the future.

"Yeah. I mean, we'll need to power it up, but it's just sitting up there, right next to that vertiberd just sitting up there, waiting for us to take it," Sturges shrugged, and Preston rubbed a hand over his face, frustrated.

"So we'll need-" Sturges went to continue before Night cut him off.

"A fusion core..."

"That's right, but the only one around here is locked up behind a security gate in the basement of this building. I'm no scientist, I have no idea how to hack a terminal... Though once I'm in, I can do pretty much anything with it. I fix things, though, I don't pick locks and hack old computers. That's where you come in," Sturges pointed to Night.

"Alright, I'll head down and try to recover that fusion core."

"Thanks, brother, you're alright," Sturges grinned at Night, who just nodded.

He was still numb from everything. Numb from being frozen, waking up to a dead world. Numb from losing Nora. Numb from failing as a father to Shaun. He should be out there looking for them, instead of getting distracted along the way, but he needed their help as much as they needed his.

Stepping past everyone in the room, he exited and made his way to the stairwell once again, Dogmeat close on his heels. He went down each flight, the world seemingly flying by him as he moved. He was disconnected. He could see and hear everything around him, he could touch everything, but nothing felt real. But now wasn't the time to pity himself, he had to focus and save Shaun before it was too late. Too late for the both of them.

Dogmeat barked, and as he looked down at the friendly mutt, who's big, brown eyes stared up at him with the admiration and loyalty of a dog that had stood by his side for years. The animal seemed to sense his tension, and jumped up to lick at his hand as he stopped, and Night took a moment to ruffle Dogmeat's fur. He never thought he could appreciate the company of a dog so much as he did at that moment, and he allowed himself a second to break his own walls down before putting them right back up, moving along to where the floor had collapsed into the basement.

Just as Sturges had said, there was a perfectly-intact security gate, and a terminal sat right beside it. Night didn't have the first clue about hacking a terminal, but he figured it was worth a shot. He remembered watching one of his superiors hacking a terminal once when he was in the army and his group had infiltrated an enemy base. He had begun by tapping the key to bring the screen online - easy enough.

Once the screen flashed, prompting for a password, he vaguely remembered a three key combination, when pressed and held down all at once would bring up a screen with potential passwords, and information on what letters and numbers it could contain. Once that screen had popped up, he seemed to be looking at an entire screen full of random numbers, letters and symbols, until he realized that sitting inside the mess of type were a series of words, phrases and codes that could potentially be the correct one. 

The number of attempts he had to guess before the terminal locked him out for a cooldown period was indicated above the potential codes, where it displayed the terminal information. Blinking at the screen, Night flicked the keys down, highlighting a password, and he hit "enter".

Beep.

"Rejected... Damn," Night sighed, glancing at the password information in the one that he had just selected.

The information indicated that the code he had selected had a match of 3/6 symbols, meaning that, by process of elimination, the only two other codes that contained 3/6 of the symbols in the previous one gave him a 50/50 chance of getting it right the next time. He only had one attempt, and he was eager to move on, so he closed his eyes and hit enter, hoping for the best.