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- Joined
- Dec 29, 2014
- Location
- Central US
The hiss of Quinn's hydroflask floated through the silence like wisping smoke. A metal box the size of a handgun magazine, one end of the device split open to reveal a small electrical coil charged with an internal alchemical battery. Water inside the flask was charged and cycled through, separating out the oxygen and releasing it through a vent on the side while collecting the hydrogen in the other half of the open cavity inside the body. Quinn brought his hands together, slapping the open end of the flask to the base of his right wrist. His right hand held an alloyed metal cube inscribed with alchemical sigils curled in his pinky and ring fingers, while his index and middle extended forward. His cocked thumb completed the finger gun.
And when Quinn activated the hydroflask to jettison a burst of hydrogen gas into his right palm, that cube flashed and absorbed the gas, shearing off a fraction of itself and rocketing forward as a bullet. A bullet that crunched through the skull of one terribly unlucky soldier who had not heard the quiet hissing of the flask.
Quinn darted forward, three other figures behind him in tow. The hallway had been populated by four men before their entry; it was now populated by four men and four corpses as Quinn and his unit ghosted through the compound. Flask bullets made very little sound in comparison to the proper firearms the guards carried; the tiny pops of gas were easily lost in the sound of the howling winter winds outside. The sound of their rifles clattering to the floor was deafeningly louder.
Trotting up to the radio console and setting the dials to a very specific frequency, Quinn murmured, "Laplace in position," through the speaker, adding, "Internal sentries neutralized," and waiting.
Hold position, Laplace. Penetration team en route to your position; ETA 12 minutes.
His eyes glanced down at his watch, noting the time with a nod. Quinn raised two fingers and cocked his hand twice, watching as his three men visibly relaxed and moved to pull chairs from under the other desks in the room. They dropped heavily into them, huffs of relieved sighs preceding quiet chatter of the last hour's events.
The facility was a weapons manufacturing plant in northern Germany, just north of Hamburg. The group that ran it was a private military sect that sold to the highest bidder and well-known for both their unusual tastes in materials and absence of moral compass. Any road that led to a dollar, they would travel, and recycle into their research. When it had come to light that their latest body of research was to be automaton-soldiers, a good number of people had shifted uncomfortably in their seats.
The war—dubbed the "White War" in the earliest days of its campaigns—had been a largely quiet affair marked by grotesque displays of violence throughout its still-running two-year incumbency. Germany had no stake in it initially, but it had been roped in when it had hosted the first scenes that led to bloodshed. The Russia-Ukraine conflict of the 1870's had left a sour taste for many, and 20 years later, that distaste had eventually blossomed to open conflict once more. Moving in as allies, France and Poland had announced their support for Ukraine and officially declared war against Russia. In response, Russian forces had been dispatched to attack France directly; Polish forces had slowed their advance, and the fighting was ultimately pushed to German soil. With the loss of civilian life now looming, Germany announced their support for the French-Polish alliance as well, and the allies had begun scheming.
Quinn and his platoon were the result of just one such scheme. They had taken the name "Thoth": A conglomerate effort of several nations' efforts to assemble an alchemical strike team, he and his colleagues were one of barely a hundred men that had been outfitted with experimental equipment and dispatched as insurgents across northern Europe. This facility had produced many a weapon that had caused many a stir on the battlefields in the last months, and the resources gathered here would have been an invaluable asset to Thoth and its scientists-turned-soldiers.
The advancement of alchemy as a military endeavor was not a new one, but new advancements had been made in the last handful of years, due in no small part to Quinn's own involvement. The gas-deconstructing flasks they carried were one of his inventions, made manifest by the gratuitous research grants he had been provided. The ability to produce high concentrations of volatile gas at the push of a button had opened the door to a great number of on-demand applications, and their particular weaponry was his brainchild, the result of three years of nearly single-minded, dedicated work. They contained a number of mechanisms designed to separate atomic components—water, in this case—into their constituent components, then heavily concentrate those elements into a usable substrate. Quinn and each of his men wore a bandolier-like belt patched along its length with snap-lidded pockets. Each pocket contained a cube of a pure elemental metal inscribed with the necessary sigils to charge and activate the reaction to shape and form them into projectiles, which would combine with the propellant-creating properties of the flasks when held in the hand. The literal use of finger guns had never stopped feeling comical, even as it took life after life before their eyes.
The minutes passed. Five turned to eight turned to ten, and the tension grew. Quinn had never known operations to give him a bad timeframe, so when the twelve-minute mark came and went, he stood and returned to the radio console. "Laplace to operations, penetration team has not arrived, clarify time frame, over." Only silence responded to him. "Ops, Laplace in position, penetration team is not on site, please clarify." Now it was his team's turn to shift uncomfortably in their seats.
Another minute passed in silence, but then the radio crackled. Quinn lifted the receiver to his ear—then scrunched his face and jerked it away when the screech of feedback screamed in his ear. The sound of gunfire through the speaker followed, and collectively, their stomachs dropped. The operations base for this night was not far from the manufacturing plant itself, and the gunfire heard through the speaker would have been audible even if they did not have a front-row seat.
The sound of scrabbling through the radio brought their attention back. The voice was their handler, but by the scratchy, patchy way his voice came through, the radio sounded damaged.
...Attacked by—zzz—and evacuating. Laplace, exfil—zzZZZzz—...regroup at the riv...bombing immin—
The radio clicked to silence, the line dead. "I heard her say bombing," said one man in heavy German accent. "Surely they don't mean—" His question was answered by the sound of an explosion outside, terrifyingly close.
Quinn's mind was moving at a mile per minute, thoughts racing. "They must have a zero-losses policy for this base," he concluded, eyes coming back into focus. "Someone must have screwed up, and they know we're here, and rather than let—" another bomb detonating outside cut him off with a wince "—rather than let anything go, they're just going to scrap the whole facility." The realization dawned on him as the words came out of his mouth, and his nerves lit on fire. "We're out, let's go, let's—!"
As the hallway they had just come down was blasted away by an explosion, all four men scrambled towards the other end of the room where a door led deeper into the facility. They barely had time to rip around the corner before the room they had occupied a breath before exploded behind them, showering them in the stone dust and debris that billowed down the hallway. Their boots pounded the stone floor as they sprinted through the facility, turning away from hallways that were blown away by artillery fire as they searched for an exit. The building was large and sprawling, and even though they had studied and memorized its layout, navigating the base under the threat of bombing was an exercise they had never practiced.
A four-way junction in the hallway caused them to skid to a halt, heads whipping around. This junction had not been on their maps, their memories telling them that this hallway should have been a T-connector that led between the barracks and the mess halls. They all shared a glance, then Quinn took off down the mystery hallway. It was a short sprint that found them facing a long flight of stairs that descended into the earth. Another shared glance, and a collective shrug, and they started descending.
What would have been a long descent was abbreviated by an explosion barely a dozen feet behind them, blasting the four-way junction to ash. The shockwave lifted all of them off their feet. Quinn bounced against the ceiling, the air punched from his lungs as he impacted and then bounced back down into the stairs. His lungs burned as he inhaled the sulfurous after-blast air, righting himself on the stair and coughing. He cast his eyes up and down the stairs, blinking furiously to force his eyes to come back into focus. The dull shape of a man lay up the stairs from him, and if the streaks against the side walls were anything to go by, Quinn's squad was down a man.
Two men, he found, as he panned down the stairs to see a now-misshapen form sprawled on the stairs, leaking dark fluids from the head. Quinn hauled himself up, shook his head out, and started down the stairs.
And when Quinn activated the hydroflask to jettison a burst of hydrogen gas into his right palm, that cube flashed and absorbed the gas, shearing off a fraction of itself and rocketing forward as a bullet. A bullet that crunched through the skull of one terribly unlucky soldier who had not heard the quiet hissing of the flask.
Quinn darted forward, three other figures behind him in tow. The hallway had been populated by four men before their entry; it was now populated by four men and four corpses as Quinn and his unit ghosted through the compound. Flask bullets made very little sound in comparison to the proper firearms the guards carried; the tiny pops of gas were easily lost in the sound of the howling winter winds outside. The sound of their rifles clattering to the floor was deafeningly louder.
Trotting up to the radio console and setting the dials to a very specific frequency, Quinn murmured, "Laplace in position," through the speaker, adding, "Internal sentries neutralized," and waiting.
Hold position, Laplace. Penetration team en route to your position; ETA 12 minutes.
His eyes glanced down at his watch, noting the time with a nod. Quinn raised two fingers and cocked his hand twice, watching as his three men visibly relaxed and moved to pull chairs from under the other desks in the room. They dropped heavily into them, huffs of relieved sighs preceding quiet chatter of the last hour's events.
The facility was a weapons manufacturing plant in northern Germany, just north of Hamburg. The group that ran it was a private military sect that sold to the highest bidder and well-known for both their unusual tastes in materials and absence of moral compass. Any road that led to a dollar, they would travel, and recycle into their research. When it had come to light that their latest body of research was to be automaton-soldiers, a good number of people had shifted uncomfortably in their seats.
The war—dubbed the "White War" in the earliest days of its campaigns—had been a largely quiet affair marked by grotesque displays of violence throughout its still-running two-year incumbency. Germany had no stake in it initially, but it had been roped in when it had hosted the first scenes that led to bloodshed. The Russia-Ukraine conflict of the 1870's had left a sour taste for many, and 20 years later, that distaste had eventually blossomed to open conflict once more. Moving in as allies, France and Poland had announced their support for Ukraine and officially declared war against Russia. In response, Russian forces had been dispatched to attack France directly; Polish forces had slowed their advance, and the fighting was ultimately pushed to German soil. With the loss of civilian life now looming, Germany announced their support for the French-Polish alliance as well, and the allies had begun scheming.
Quinn and his platoon were the result of just one such scheme. They had taken the name "Thoth": A conglomerate effort of several nations' efforts to assemble an alchemical strike team, he and his colleagues were one of barely a hundred men that had been outfitted with experimental equipment and dispatched as insurgents across northern Europe. This facility had produced many a weapon that had caused many a stir on the battlefields in the last months, and the resources gathered here would have been an invaluable asset to Thoth and its scientists-turned-soldiers.
The advancement of alchemy as a military endeavor was not a new one, but new advancements had been made in the last handful of years, due in no small part to Quinn's own involvement. The gas-deconstructing flasks they carried were one of his inventions, made manifest by the gratuitous research grants he had been provided. The ability to produce high concentrations of volatile gas at the push of a button had opened the door to a great number of on-demand applications, and their particular weaponry was his brainchild, the result of three years of nearly single-minded, dedicated work. They contained a number of mechanisms designed to separate atomic components—water, in this case—into their constituent components, then heavily concentrate those elements into a usable substrate. Quinn and each of his men wore a bandolier-like belt patched along its length with snap-lidded pockets. Each pocket contained a cube of a pure elemental metal inscribed with the necessary sigils to charge and activate the reaction to shape and form them into projectiles, which would combine with the propellant-creating properties of the flasks when held in the hand. The literal use of finger guns had never stopped feeling comical, even as it took life after life before their eyes.
The minutes passed. Five turned to eight turned to ten, and the tension grew. Quinn had never known operations to give him a bad timeframe, so when the twelve-minute mark came and went, he stood and returned to the radio console. "Laplace to operations, penetration team has not arrived, clarify time frame, over." Only silence responded to him. "Ops, Laplace in position, penetration team is not on site, please clarify." Now it was his team's turn to shift uncomfortably in their seats.
Another minute passed in silence, but then the radio crackled. Quinn lifted the receiver to his ear—then scrunched his face and jerked it away when the screech of feedback screamed in his ear. The sound of gunfire through the speaker followed, and collectively, their stomachs dropped. The operations base for this night was not far from the manufacturing plant itself, and the gunfire heard through the speaker would have been audible even if they did not have a front-row seat.
The sound of scrabbling through the radio brought their attention back. The voice was their handler, but by the scratchy, patchy way his voice came through, the radio sounded damaged.
...Attacked by—zzz—and evacuating. Laplace, exfil—zzZZZzz—...regroup at the riv...bombing immin—
The radio clicked to silence, the line dead. "I heard her say bombing," said one man in heavy German accent. "Surely they don't mean—" His question was answered by the sound of an explosion outside, terrifyingly close.
Quinn's mind was moving at a mile per minute, thoughts racing. "They must have a zero-losses policy for this base," he concluded, eyes coming back into focus. "Someone must have screwed up, and they know we're here, and rather than let—" another bomb detonating outside cut him off with a wince "—rather than let anything go, they're just going to scrap the whole facility." The realization dawned on him as the words came out of his mouth, and his nerves lit on fire. "We're out, let's go, let's—!"
As the hallway they had just come down was blasted away by an explosion, all four men scrambled towards the other end of the room where a door led deeper into the facility. They barely had time to rip around the corner before the room they had occupied a breath before exploded behind them, showering them in the stone dust and debris that billowed down the hallway. Their boots pounded the stone floor as they sprinted through the facility, turning away from hallways that were blown away by artillery fire as they searched for an exit. The building was large and sprawling, and even though they had studied and memorized its layout, navigating the base under the threat of bombing was an exercise they had never practiced.
A four-way junction in the hallway caused them to skid to a halt, heads whipping around. This junction had not been on their maps, their memories telling them that this hallway should have been a T-connector that led between the barracks and the mess halls. They all shared a glance, then Quinn took off down the mystery hallway. It was a short sprint that found them facing a long flight of stairs that descended into the earth. Another shared glance, and a collective shrug, and they started descending.
What would have been a long descent was abbreviated by an explosion barely a dozen feet behind them, blasting the four-way junction to ash. The shockwave lifted all of them off their feet. Quinn bounced against the ceiling, the air punched from his lungs as he impacted and then bounced back down into the stairs. His lungs burned as he inhaled the sulfurous after-blast air, righting himself on the stair and coughing. He cast his eyes up and down the stairs, blinking furiously to force his eyes to come back into focus. The dull shape of a man lay up the stairs from him, and if the streaks against the side walls were anything to go by, Quinn's squad was down a man.
Two men, he found, as he panned down the stairs to see a now-misshapen form sprawled on the stairs, leaking dark fluids from the head. Quinn hauled himself up, shook his head out, and started down the stairs.
