Smoke filled the crisp night air and sirens blared as the first Fire Extinguishment vehicles veered from the main road into the surface lot of an otherwise unremarkable warehouse. Young men and women leaped from open hatches along the sides of the long trucks. Hadyn Smith, a man barely out of his teens who oversaw dozens of teenage Fire Manipulators, stepped out of the lead rig and surveyed the scene. One large bay door was standing open billowing clouds of white smoke that were just beginning to darken to lighter shades of black. The thirty or so workers milling around the grass beside the road must have used this opening to flee the building before they could suffocate on the fumes from the fire.
A man in a bright orange vest approached Hadyn with a tablet in hand. A thin layer of soot added some grey to his brown hair. This was Marvin, a man the Senior Fire Extinguisher had worked under as a new Manipulator.
“Great to see you, Hade!” Marvin shouted over the sirens extending a hand. “We deployed our Fire Suppression Modules, but corporate must have bought some second-hand devices. Everyone’s vacated the structure, but the modules are only slightly dampening the fuel source here.”
Hadyn shook the man’s leathery-tanned hand and flashed a bright smile revealing almost unnaturally white teeth. “Thanks, Marv,” he pointed to the tablet, “got anything on there that might help my crew?”
“Unfortunately, not much,” Marvin said, handing the tablet to Hadyn. “We’re not sure what started the blaze to be honest. We minimize the use of heat sources here. The item that runs the hottest is climate control, and that doesn’t even reach ignition temps.”
Hadyn paged through the fire safety sheet for the affected area of the warehouse and confirmed that the hottest source in the building was a unit on the opposite side of the building from the actual fire. Another oddity was the fire appeared to originate, according to the uplinked sensors, in a space that was unoccupied and had no climate control actively distributed to the room.
“OK, we need to get the flames extinguished.” Hadyn looked at the young men and women under his command. Most were fresh recruits from Firsta Academy, the Ustan fire Manipulation training center supplying Manipulators to the nation’s Fire Extinguishment services. They were standing in a textbook formation for their ten-person crew: three lines, all facing their Senior Extinguisher. Patches on the right arms of each manipulator distinguished their role and position in the department. Hadyn looked at two Manipulators in the front row, a young woman with two blue triangles pointing down on her right shoulder and a young man whose shoulder displayed one blue drop.
“Mandy, Ronald, I want you to check the water supplies,” Hadyn said, quickly tapping commands into the tablet to display a blueprint overlaid with a heatmap of the warehouse on the side of the truck. “Once the Flames are suppressed, we’ll have a better read on where it is needed. Here’s the local supply access.” A few swipes and taps at the device in his hands lit a hookup near the congregated service people. The two acknowledged the command with a synchronized nod and walked in the direction of the light.
Hadyn pointed to two Manipulators in the back line, two young men each with a pair of pink eyes on their shoulders. “Seer and Fink, are you picking up anyone inside? I’m told all the workers are accounted for, is there anyone still in there?”
The two closed their eyes for a moment, searching the structure for psychological presences. After a moment, the men opened their eyes and held up one finger. The one on the right said, “I’m picking up one, but it’s weak.”
Marvin flushed and glanced around the milling workers gathered in the grass at the edge of the lot. “There shouldn’t be anyone in there! Our workers are all out here.” He consulted a small device from his pocket. “The last visitor checked out over an hour ago.”
Hadyn touched Marvin’s arm. “Calm down, we’ll get them out safe. That’s what’s important here. After that, your security team can sort out any breaches.” He turned back to his crew and pointed to the two young women with a bright blue circular swirl on each of their right arms. “Remain on standby, we won’t try to suffocate the fire by removing the air, but we might need you to direct airflow to the victim once we’ve contained this.”
Looking to the last four, two men and three women with dark red triangles pointing up in a triad on their shoulders, Hadyn said, “we’re going to start by suppressing the fuel source. If we cannot suppress the source, we’ll have to bring the flames down and douse them with water. Let's get going.”
Hadyn and the nine Elemental Manipulators tapped the button on the right collar of their uniforms, causing a transparent film-like hood to close over their heads. With a hiss, tanks on their backs began circulating airflow around each air-tight apparatus. The six Fire Manipulators marched through the open door into the warehouse towards the orange glow of the flames. As they approached, they held out their hands feeling for the vibrations of the ignited fuel sources.
Sensing no suppressible fuel source, Hadyn moved his hands to the sides and patted the air to his sides, wordlessly communicating that the Manipulators were to work on the flames instead of dampening the fuel source. He then tapped a red comm button under his chin on the collar of his uniform. The red light turned green, indicating an open line to the crew. “Mandy, Ron, we’re bringing the flames down. We need you to get the water ready.”
While Hadyn was giving this order the Fire Manipulators with him raised their hands to the flames and, like maestros signaling a decrescendo, brought their hands down toward the ground. The glow began to dull as the fire began to die down. The inferno, which was licking the ceiling when the group entered the building subsided, with the highest of the flames no taller than the shortest of the teenage crew.
Hadyn tapped the comm again, “OK, get the water in here now. Jess, Ell, get ready to move some air.”
