Dark days are coming. She wonders if Danse can feel it, like the heaviness in the air before a storm. The Railroad had been cut from the head, leaving the base to flounder from the toppled hierarchy. Powers will continue to shift and change. ‘ARTHUR LOST SIGHT OF WHAT THE BROTHERHOOD SHOULD STAND FOR’ is not just an observation, but a foreshadow of what’s to come. The Commonwealth is a sickly thing, and as Quinn shuffles the pieces across the board, she intends to see it restored.
Even so, she’s placing a gamble on the former Paladin. His loyalty has never been to a person, but an idea, and ideas are tricky, tricky things; less fallible than people; less corruptible; LESS.
Quinn reaches into her coat now, producing a folded up paper–thick leaf, but the yellowed edges belies its age. She unfolds it, flattening it out across the table.
“These are the schematics of the Yangtze-31 – a nuclear submarine PREVIOUSLY in Boston Harbor. They believe the submarine is still active…. and that it still has a living crew.” It does. Just a sole Captain, but she doesn’t disclose this. “I’m sure you can imagine the repercussions to letting a nuclear submarine escape.”
Danse had been told he was an intense individual ; he never saw it that way. He merely knew where his own loyalties lay and would defend them to a tee. LOYALTY had been everything to Frederick Danse --- and where did that get him? it got him chewed up by the very men and women he had spent more than a decade serving and spat back out like he meant nothing, despite all he had done for them. Despite the blood he had shed, despite the sweat. And tears. And deaths he had witnessed. All of it meant nothing, when faced with the truth of what he was. And, the reality of it all had left the former paladin reeling without a handhold to grasp onto. Within a few hours, everything fell apart before he could scarcely comprehend it.
And, at the same time, it left him to reevaluate everything he had been taught to believe.
He wonders -- wonders idly if one day soon, would be be forced to come gun to gun with his former soldiers? Would he have to choose between his own life, and the former family that had sheltered him after Rivet City -- that had given him a true purpose for the first time in his life? The thought alone made his stomach quake.
He takes a step back when she reaches into her coat -- caution more than anything -- and watching her take out of the paper; tipping his head back to look at what she was indicating before flickering his stoic gaze between the paper and her.
And, behind that calculated gaze he knew how to call upon so easily was a war with himself. Brotherhood of Steel soldiers outside of the Commonwealth still had a chance at becoming what they meant to be; instead of becoming poisoned by Maxson -- just as he had been.
“How did you come across this information?” was his next, carefully measured question as he folded both arms across his chest. “And -- do you honestly think that I alone can take care of this?”