The Brotherhood of Steel

Do come in, sir or madam, and mind the suit of powered armor by the door. The Brotherhood of Steel is the wasteland's great martial order: soldiers in T-series plate beneath the winged sword, marching to the cry of Ad Victoriam, gathering up the Old World's machines before anyone can use them twice.

Their doctrine is unflattering and consistent: humanity built wonders, turned them on itself, and cannot be trusted with a second attempt. Technology is to be recovered, preserved, and withheld. Their law is the Codex; their ranks run like a monastery with a quartermaster's ambitions — Initiates who prove, Scribes who record, Knights who build and fight, Paladins who command, Elders who decide what everyone else may know. I confess a professional weakness for the Scribes, sir. They file.

They are librarians, in their way. The difference is that my stacks are open.

In October 2077, Captain Roger Maxson's garrison stood guard at Mariposa, a military research facility in California where government scientists pursued work the soldiers were not cleared to understand. Then they understood it. The researchers were experimenting on military prisoners — human beings, requisitioned like equipment. What was done to them, I will summarize rather than read aloud. Maxson's men mutinied, and the captain declared his garrison seceded from the United States of America.

The United States had days to live. The bombs fell, and the desertion outlived the government deserted. Maxson led his people out to a bunker at Lost Hills, wrote his Codex, and founded an order from what he had witnessed: an army whose war had ended and whose penance had not. The Brotherhood was born owing a debt, and it has been collecting technology against it ever since.

From Lost Hills the order scattered like seed. The first sowing was by radio: Paladin Elizabeth Taggerdy, an Army Ranger stranded in Appalachia, was sworn in by Maxson himself over a satellite uplink — two old comrades-in-arms, rebuilding an order across a continent, who would never stand in the same room again. Her knights fought the Scorched until the fighting used them up, and Appalachia held only their banners until new knights returned from the west, years later.

The Capital chapter is the schism. Owyn Lyons marched east, took the measure of the ruined Capital's people, and committed the order's gravest heresy: he protected them. Lost Hills cut him off; his purists walked out as the Outcasts, keeping the old mission in the old armor.

Reunification came under Arthur Maxson, the founder's last descendant, who folded the Outcasts home while scarcely a man and in 2287 brought the airship Prydwen to the Commonwealth to hunt the Institute. How that hunt ended, the record does not settle — the archive prefers a gap to a guess. What is settled: two centuries after one Maxson seceded from a government, another commands from a warship. The family has kept its habit.

West of the mountains, the order aged strangely. The Mojave chapter lost its war with the New California Republic — the last stand was fought over a solar array — and sealed itself into a hidden bunker: knights in a reliquary, waiting out a world that had stopped waiting for them.

By 2296 the television record finds the western Brotherhood grown into something like a church: clerics to keep the creed, squires to carry the armor, knighthood conferred as sacrament. Steel, given enough time, becomes liturgy. The archive also holds accounts of a Midwestern chapter — airships blown off course, conscripted tribes, a war with a machine intelligence. Apocrypha, sir. I file such things; I do not vouch for them.

Which leaves the question the Codex declines to answer and every Elder inherits: does the Brotherhood guard the Old World's fire, or hoard it? Each chapter answers differently, and each is certain. An order founded on guilt does not resolve; it persists.