After Adam had enjoyed his drink he offered a nuka cola bottle to Mira and Deccanus, Deccanus declined but Mira took one happily. After a fake teasing pout vocalized by Eve for the unfairness at not being offered a drink, the group decided to continue on searching the building.
There were 3 floors so the group decided to, carefully, split up and search all three floors at the same time, agreeing to come quickly if someone was in danger. As it turned out though, there was no danger.
The entire building was completely devoid of any sort of hostiles. Not even the laser turrets he had hoped to find. Oh well. He can't win them all. All Adam really found was copious amounts of paperwork. There was a computer he got access to that referenced something called 'Project Zetan' but it was only name dropped in a sea of other, far more boring information so he decided to ignore it and move on.
This isn't to say Adam didn't find anything useful. In fact a lot of the desks had service pistols in them along with ammo, perhaps to keep the building safe from Chinese spies. In addition, he found a small armory in the back of the third floor with a small smattering of personal firearms, locked behind a metal grated door. Adam debated using his, still terrible, lock picking skill to open it. However Eve, walking up behind him, crushed the door hinges and then pulled the door open, solving his dilemma for him.
Adam was about to call it quits, having gathered a moderate selection of things to sell back at Midway. From the handfuls of guns and ammo, to more mundane things like electric fans, oil cans, crystal emitters, military circuit boards, and other odds and ends. However he was interrupted from this train of thought by Deccanus.
"Adam, I believe you will want to see what I have found." Deccanus said ominously.
Deccanus led Adam back to the first floor, and then slipped underneath a collapsed section of the second floor that created a near barricade in the hallway. Once Adam slipped under the rubble himself he saw what Deccanus wanted him to see. A door. A big metal door. The sort of door that the military believed could resist a nuclear blast. Now this was interesting.
Adam noted that on the side of the door was a computer panel. It was still online, interestingly, and asking for a password. As he expected, it too used the RobCo OS and thus he knew how to bypass the password screen. However, three tries in and Adam was met with the unfortunate truth, this had a master lock password system, the hardest to crack.
When it came to hacking, there was a common misconception that you got four tries to get the password and then the system shut down. And this was true. However, those who really read into the OS weaknesses knew that this was not a hard lock. The true trick was to attempt three times, and then, before your fourth attempt, initiate a complete system reboot. Once the system is rebooted you can try again, as if you never tried in the first place, giving you three more guesses. Of course this was incredibly tedious. A full system reboot could take upwards of 5 minutes. So you get three guesses, gone in ten seconds, and then a 5 minute wait. There were one or two other tricks one could use to break through the passwords such as searching through the files displayed and looking for code leaks to reset password tries or offer insight into what the password might be, but as is this is what awaited Adam. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, he had all the time in the world to get through this security system.
Adam sighed heavily as he initiated the reboot and then walked up, through the rubble of the collapsed second floor section which made a makeshift ramp and then dragged a chair back down to sit right in front of the computer to wait.
"I might be stuck here for a bit, Deccanus." Adam said with a sigh. "So you and the others can keep looking around, maybe I missed something. Or you guys can just get to loading up the APC." Adam said with a shrug as his eyes looked over to the still booting system.
"Understood, tell me when you succeed in your endeavour." Deccanus said back as he turned to leave Adam to it.
It took a solid 30 minutes for Adam to crack the password. This was not due to Adam failing for 30 minutes. Well, it was, but it was because each reboot cycle took 4 minutes each. Adam spent more time waiting than hacking.
Eventually, with the correct password entered and the option to open the door now available, he gathered his friends and opened the door once everyone was ready,
The door opened to reveal a triple wide set of stairs heading down to some sort of basement. Adam had seen the fire escape maps as he was exploring the third floor, none of the maps showed a sub-basement. But then again, this was a government research lab, there was a need for secrecy.
Adam began his descent carefully, laser rifle drawn and ready for combat. When they got to the plateau at the bottom of the stairs Adam pushed open the large double doors and was met with a stark white hallway.
Adam continued down the hallway carefully, the first room seemed to be some sort of operating room? Why would they need an operating room in an aircraft research lab? Whatever, he grabbed the various surgical tools from here and the few meds, another 2 stimpacks and then pressed on.
The next room looked like a small workshop for scientists. The wall had a pegboard with tons of schematics, diagrams, and other such research. In addition there were scattered energy cells, microfusion cells, a few electron charge packs, and even a fusion core as well as a few fusion batteries. There were also the dead bodies of two scientists, now long since turned to nothing but bones. It did occur to Adam that these scientists had died while standing at the workbench. They died in a way that would indicate they were killed. As if they died while in the middle of their work. But there was no sign the bomb explosions reached down here so how did these men die? Did they poison themselves? Were they killed? Ultimately it didn't matter but it was curious.
But none of this was what caught his eye. What caught his attention was a very strange gun on the workbench.
He walked over to the strange gun and examined it, it was designed like a pistol with a sleek iron-silver exterior. It was very curvy with no wires and tubes one would expect from a laser weapon. Its iron sight too felt very foreign and it, at least to Adam, seemed to have no design equivalent he had ever seen. In fact it looked a lot like an alien blaster he might have seen on a bad late night movie. Adam had no idea what to make of this but certainly this was a weapon he had never seen before.