Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
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Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
Disclaimer: The characters and situations of the Domination of the Draka universe are the property of S.M. Stirling and are used here without permission. No money is being made, and if requested I will remove this story from the web. So don't sue me. I don't have any money anyway. Mmmk?
A/N: Yeah, yeah, I know it's been done...but this is an idea that's been in my head literally for years, ever since I first read Marching Through Georgia and got to the part where the Draka forced the Pyrenees with nuclear weapons. A little voice told me, what if, just when they were stuck in nice and tight there, someone on the Good Guy side was smart, brave, and stone cold crazy enough to really go for broke? Of course, they didn't, because this is the Drakaverse and only evil slaver bisexual S&M supervillains have those kind of stones. But the idea stayed with me, and its finally coming out.
Chapter one of several, probably at least six. This one's more like a prologue, but more coming unless I get death threats or something like that. So without further ado, I give you:
Proof Through the Night: Chapter One
March 22, 1945, 0745 Hours
T-40 Hours and Counting
Seventh Draka Army Headquarters, near Toulouse, France
Arch-Strategos Eric von Shrakenberg closed his eyes and raised his face to the weakly shining morning sun. Even here in the south of France there was still more than a hint of winter in the air, the air thick and dark with the smoke from the Eurasian War. Cities had burned under the bombs of British and American bombers, then burned again when the Draka marched through to break them to the Yoke. The latest reports from the Conservation Directorate said it would take years for the growing season to return to normal. And still, it’s not enough for us. Not as long as there’s anything left on the table. And Gods help me, I have to finish it off.
“Eric?” He turned to see Decurion-Tech Sophie Nixon standing behind him. A childhood spent in the Draka agoge and years on the sharp end of the war had made him a hard man to sneak up on, but Sophie had always been able to manage when she wanted to. Perhaps because she’s the one person I never mind feeling vulnerable to. She was wrapped in an old motted green-and-brown field jacket, which still bore the sleeve flash of the First Airborne Legion and a long scorch mark down the side from a German bomb near Pyatigorsk. Her snub-nosed face was uncharacteristically grave as she held a steaming mug of coffee out towards him. “It’s time.”
Eric shut his eyes and lifted his face to the sun for a last moment, then turned and gratefully accepted the china mug. The coffee was scalding hot, naked of sugar or milk, but it had the rich smell of ground bean from the Draka Police Zone, not roasted-wheat ersatz. He’d need it today. Sophie rose up on tiptoes to kiss him lightly, then fell in one step behind him as he walked back towards the Seventh Army’s command bunker. He let the silence drag out comfortably before asking,
“All of our distinguished guests assembled?”
Sophie nodded. “Corps commanders were in before dawn. General Staff liason, Navy men, even the representative from our friends the Headhunters.” Eric pressed his lips together. There was absolutely no love lost between him and the Domination’s Security Directorate, but so far his family connections, the corona aurea he’d won at Pyatigorsk, and the Archon’s firm insistence that none of her toys were to be broken without her permission had kept him alive. “Group Captain Caudell just got in an hour ago. They had problems with the concealment at one of his dispersal fields and he was up all night fixin’ the Freya-damned thing.” Eric grunted in unconscious approval. True, Caudell had subordinates for that sort of thing, but the small group of Mamba jet bombers he commanded were the keystone of Operation Herakles. They had to be ready. Almost as important, the rag-tag mix of Spaniards, Portuguese, German Army remnants, and assorted refugees from all over Europe that awaited them on the other side of the Pyrenees Mountains could not be allowed to find them.
“Eric?” He stopped just short of the door and turned to face her as she took a step towards him, voice lowering as she leaned closer. After a moment’s hesitation, he reached up and drew an arm around her shoulders, selfishly enjoying a few more moments with her before he walked into the bunker. However informal the Citizen Force might be about relationships within its ranks, once they stepped through that door there could only be room for the Arch-Strategos and his personal aide. He and Sophie had accepted that when she’d chosen to follow him up the ladder of promotion, but this morning he just let her lean on him for a long minute. When they broke, all she asked was,
“Do you think this’ll work?” He nodded.
“It will, Sophie.” A pause. “It has to.”
March 22, 1945, 0600 Hours
T-36 Hours and Counting
The White House, Washington, DC
“Mister President? Sir?”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt struggled awake, blinking his eyes for a few moments in the dark before he felt able to respond to the voice coming from his bedroom door. Even lying in his sickbed he felt short of breath, and he could feel his hands shaking underneath the linen covers. It was a moment before he felt strong enough to respond with,
“Yes?” The door opened, and Roosevelt raised his arm to shield against the light as Colonel Harrison, his military aide, leaned in through the door. “What is it?”
“Sorry to wake you, Mister President, but Admiral Stark just called from the Navy Department. He says it’s time, Sir.”
“Time?” Roosevelt shook his head, and cursed the cobwebs that still slid across his mind. “Are we sure?”
“Yes, Sir. The last photo birds from Gibralter and Grand Canary showed Draka forces mobilizing across southern France, and our snooper teams in Spain have picked up a four-fold increase in Draka radio traffic over the past four hours. If they’re not going for it today or tomorrow, Sir, they’re doing a damn good impression of it.”
“I see.” Roosevelt fell back into his pillow for a moment, feeling an odd sense of peace wash over him. “Are we ready?”
“Yessir. Reprisal transited the Straits of Gibraltar yesterday morning and is on schedule. United States and her group had to fake engine trouble to keep the Snakes from getting suspicious, but they’re just around the Cape of Good Hope now.” Harrison hesitated, then went on in a flat tone. “The Combined Chiefs of Staff also agree with our conclusions. The Japanese even had a ready-made message to hand over. Their Prime Minister says Godspeed.”
“Now, now, Harry.” Roosevelt fell back into bed with a chuckle. “Be nice. If Yamamoto hadn’t convinced the Emperor to throw in the towel when we bombed their fleet at Truk, we might still be tied up over there and the Snakes would be merrily taking over the world. I never thought I’d be glad the old bastard's so hard to kill.”
Roosevelt coughed once, twice, a dry rattle that shook his throat, then struggled to a sitting position. “Okay, Harry. You may inform Admiral Stark that he has the green light for MONGOOSE. As you go out, would you please ask Stamper to lay out clothes and call a car? I’ll await developments at the Navy Department.” Harrison paused as he turned to go.
“Sir, shouldn’t you be-“ Roosevelt cut him off.
“Harry, if this doesn’t go off right it won’t matter how much longer I live. I appreciate your concern, but there’s nowhere else I’d want to be right now." Harrison nodded, and carefully brought his right arm up in a crisp salute.
“Yes, Mister President.”
March 22, 1945, 1900 Hours
T-29 Hours and Counting
Hangar Deck Two, USS Reprisal (CVA-56)
South of Sicily
Lieutenant Commander Julius Rosemont ran his hand over the deep blue nose of his mount and smiled at the words painted there. Spirit of Rio, the same name as the modified mail plane he’d flown from that city to Cape Town in 1929, earning himself the twenty thousand auric prize offered by the Domination of the Draka’s Transportation Directorate and his first measure of fame. The original Spirit was long gone, picked over by souvenir hunters and then finally torched last year after the armistice with Japan, when Americans started taking a look around and realizing just what they’d allied themselves with.
Rosemont felt a deep, black pit in his stomach as he thought of that, a weltering spring of shame that he sometimes felt would never run dry. The first pictures had started coming out of Draka-occupied Europe since then, the refugees with their stories of Janissary rape gangs, millions of men, women, and children penned up like cattle, the nerve gas grenades tossed into packed basements and hundreds impaled on stakes when anyone dared raise their hands against the Draka. Words like serf, debt-bondage, and pacification had seemed so simple and reasonable when they were spoken about peoples that had spent centuries under the Yoke, or about Afghan tribesman that had resisted every other attempt to bring civilization from the Persians to the British.
The system Rosemont had seen in his tours of the Draka Police Zone had seemed so peaceful, orderly, with the serfs well provided for by the Draka masters who benevolently oversaw their welfare. Certainly preferable to the patchwork of tribal kingdoms that had been there before the Draka, both in Africa and across much of Asia, with millions of subjects living nasty, brutish, and short lives. He’d returned to America, spoken of what he’d seen across the land, told people that the Draka were simply fulfilling a self-imposed duty to guide and protect the lesser peoples of the Earth. He’d helped a reporter named Dreisier get permission from the notoriously suspicious War Directorate to accompany Draka airborne forces as a war correspondent, and been glad when the resulting articles helped raise a wave of pro-Draka sentiment across the country.
He’d done all that, been crucial in aligning his nation with the masters of Africa and Turkey…and he’d never once considered that he might have been lead along a primrose path all along. He’d never thought about what might lie behind the cool-sounding words his Draka hosts had used talking about Afghanistan and Persia. He’d never wondered why he’d seen so little of the industrial Combine camps, or any of the territories taken after the Great War. He’d not considered for an instant what his Draka hosts had really meant when they spoke of rescuing Europe from the twin perils of Nazism and Communism. He had, in short, been the blindest damn fool ever born, and helped lead his country into an alliance with monsters.
Well, that was all right. He might have a big debt to settle with the Snakes, but last time paid for all. And the new Spirit could write quite a big check. Rosemont’s lips curled up as he looked the craft over. She was massive, half again as large as the Avenger torpedo bombers he’d flown over the Pacific and easily the heaviest thing anyone had ever flown of an aircraft carrier- but she almost looked lighter, balanced on her tricycle gear and chocked down. Where the Avenger had been a solid, beefy battleaxe of a plane that looked like it was carved from a solid block of steel, the new Spirit was all flush lines and fine metal. Her nose was smooth glass over the bombardier’s station, extending back into a long, slim fuselage that tapered into a point near the tail like a wasp stinger. Gently swept-back wings held the twin Allison turboprop engines, which promised to offer the power of the new reaction jets with some of the fuel economy of piston designs. A sleek bubble canopy mounted the top of the fuselage, long enough for both pilot and the gunner who would work the twin cannons of the remote tail turret.
Painted in the deep blue of U.S. Navy night aircraft camouflage, she resembled nothing so much as a malign ghost. Personally, Rosemont thought that the Bureau of Aeronautics had done a good day’s work when they named the Ryan AR-1 carrier attack bomber the Revenant.
He turned from his reverie as a welter of sound spilled into the hangar deck, puzzled for a moment. Officially Reprisal was sailing to help evacuate British troops from India via the Suez Canal, now that the Japanese had finally agreed to respect Indian independence. As far as the Snakes had been told Hangar Deck Two was empty, and the men and planes of Heavy Attack Squadron One had been grounded for the cruise out lest they break open the deception. Now one of the ordnance lifts had begun to whine, rising up from the armory buried deep in the heart of the ship. Rosemont took a few steps away from his bird for a look, and felt his stomach tighten at what he saw.
A dozen brawny sailors in dungarees were wrestling an ordnance cart off of the lift and wheeling it towards one of the squadron’s Revenants tied down on the hangar deck. On the cart was a single bomb, a jet-black spheroid with the simplest of box fins mounted in the rear. It would fill the plane’s bomb bay and make it strain to get off the ship even with the new steam catapults, but it could also explode with more destructive power than a sky full of conventional bombers.
The Ryan AR-1 Revenant, the United States class attack carriers, and the Mark 4 nuclear bomb had all been designed as part of the same system. Now the waiting was over, and it was time for that system to fulfill its purpose.
EDIT: Fixed some formatting mistakes
EDIT II: Fixed some embarrassing timestamp mistakes.
A/N: Yeah, yeah, I know it's been done...but this is an idea that's been in my head literally for years, ever since I first read Marching Through Georgia and got to the part where the Draka forced the Pyrenees with nuclear weapons. A little voice told me, what if, just when they were stuck in nice and tight there, someone on the Good Guy side was smart, brave, and stone cold crazy enough to really go for broke? Of course, they didn't, because this is the Drakaverse and only evil slaver bisexual S&M supervillains have those kind of stones. But the idea stayed with me, and its finally coming out.
Chapter one of several, probably at least six. This one's more like a prologue, but more coming unless I get death threats or something like that. So without further ado, I give you:
Proof Through the Night: Chapter One
March 22, 1945, 0745 Hours
T-40 Hours and Counting
Seventh Draka Army Headquarters, near Toulouse, France
Arch-Strategos Eric von Shrakenberg closed his eyes and raised his face to the weakly shining morning sun. Even here in the south of France there was still more than a hint of winter in the air, the air thick and dark with the smoke from the Eurasian War. Cities had burned under the bombs of British and American bombers, then burned again when the Draka marched through to break them to the Yoke. The latest reports from the Conservation Directorate said it would take years for the growing season to return to normal. And still, it’s not enough for us. Not as long as there’s anything left on the table. And Gods help me, I have to finish it off.
“Eric?” He turned to see Decurion-Tech Sophie Nixon standing behind him. A childhood spent in the Draka agoge and years on the sharp end of the war had made him a hard man to sneak up on, but Sophie had always been able to manage when she wanted to. Perhaps because she’s the one person I never mind feeling vulnerable to. She was wrapped in an old motted green-and-brown field jacket, which still bore the sleeve flash of the First Airborne Legion and a long scorch mark down the side from a German bomb near Pyatigorsk. Her snub-nosed face was uncharacteristically grave as she held a steaming mug of coffee out towards him. “It’s time.”
Eric shut his eyes and lifted his face to the sun for a last moment, then turned and gratefully accepted the china mug. The coffee was scalding hot, naked of sugar or milk, but it had the rich smell of ground bean from the Draka Police Zone, not roasted-wheat ersatz. He’d need it today. Sophie rose up on tiptoes to kiss him lightly, then fell in one step behind him as he walked back towards the Seventh Army’s command bunker. He let the silence drag out comfortably before asking,
“All of our distinguished guests assembled?”
Sophie nodded. “Corps commanders were in before dawn. General Staff liason, Navy men, even the representative from our friends the Headhunters.” Eric pressed his lips together. There was absolutely no love lost between him and the Domination’s Security Directorate, but so far his family connections, the corona aurea he’d won at Pyatigorsk, and the Archon’s firm insistence that none of her toys were to be broken without her permission had kept him alive. “Group Captain Caudell just got in an hour ago. They had problems with the concealment at one of his dispersal fields and he was up all night fixin’ the Freya-damned thing.” Eric grunted in unconscious approval. True, Caudell had subordinates for that sort of thing, but the small group of Mamba jet bombers he commanded were the keystone of Operation Herakles. They had to be ready. Almost as important, the rag-tag mix of Spaniards, Portuguese, German Army remnants, and assorted refugees from all over Europe that awaited them on the other side of the Pyrenees Mountains could not be allowed to find them.
“Eric?” He stopped just short of the door and turned to face her as she took a step towards him, voice lowering as she leaned closer. After a moment’s hesitation, he reached up and drew an arm around her shoulders, selfishly enjoying a few more moments with her before he walked into the bunker. However informal the Citizen Force might be about relationships within its ranks, once they stepped through that door there could only be room for the Arch-Strategos and his personal aide. He and Sophie had accepted that when she’d chosen to follow him up the ladder of promotion, but this morning he just let her lean on him for a long minute. When they broke, all she asked was,
“Do you think this’ll work?” He nodded.
“It will, Sophie.” A pause. “It has to.”
March 22, 1945, 0600 Hours
T-36 Hours and Counting
The White House, Washington, DC
“Mister President? Sir?”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt struggled awake, blinking his eyes for a few moments in the dark before he felt able to respond to the voice coming from his bedroom door. Even lying in his sickbed he felt short of breath, and he could feel his hands shaking underneath the linen covers. It was a moment before he felt strong enough to respond with,
“Yes?” The door opened, and Roosevelt raised his arm to shield against the light as Colonel Harrison, his military aide, leaned in through the door. “What is it?”
“Sorry to wake you, Mister President, but Admiral Stark just called from the Navy Department. He says it’s time, Sir.”
“Time?” Roosevelt shook his head, and cursed the cobwebs that still slid across his mind. “Are we sure?”
“Yes, Sir. The last photo birds from Gibralter and Grand Canary showed Draka forces mobilizing across southern France, and our snooper teams in Spain have picked up a four-fold increase in Draka radio traffic over the past four hours. If they’re not going for it today or tomorrow, Sir, they’re doing a damn good impression of it.”
“I see.” Roosevelt fell back into his pillow for a moment, feeling an odd sense of peace wash over him. “Are we ready?”
“Yessir. Reprisal transited the Straits of Gibraltar yesterday morning and is on schedule. United States and her group had to fake engine trouble to keep the Snakes from getting suspicious, but they’re just around the Cape of Good Hope now.” Harrison hesitated, then went on in a flat tone. “The Combined Chiefs of Staff also agree with our conclusions. The Japanese even had a ready-made message to hand over. Their Prime Minister says Godspeed.”
“Now, now, Harry.” Roosevelt fell back into bed with a chuckle. “Be nice. If Yamamoto hadn’t convinced the Emperor to throw in the towel when we bombed their fleet at Truk, we might still be tied up over there and the Snakes would be merrily taking over the world. I never thought I’d be glad the old bastard's so hard to kill.”
Roosevelt coughed once, twice, a dry rattle that shook his throat, then struggled to a sitting position. “Okay, Harry. You may inform Admiral Stark that he has the green light for MONGOOSE. As you go out, would you please ask Stamper to lay out clothes and call a car? I’ll await developments at the Navy Department.” Harrison paused as he turned to go.
“Sir, shouldn’t you be-“ Roosevelt cut him off.
“Harry, if this doesn’t go off right it won’t matter how much longer I live. I appreciate your concern, but there’s nowhere else I’d want to be right now." Harrison nodded, and carefully brought his right arm up in a crisp salute.
“Yes, Mister President.”
March 22, 1945, 1900 Hours
T-29 Hours and Counting
Hangar Deck Two, USS Reprisal (CVA-56)
South of Sicily
Lieutenant Commander Julius Rosemont ran his hand over the deep blue nose of his mount and smiled at the words painted there. Spirit of Rio, the same name as the modified mail plane he’d flown from that city to Cape Town in 1929, earning himself the twenty thousand auric prize offered by the Domination of the Draka’s Transportation Directorate and his first measure of fame. The original Spirit was long gone, picked over by souvenir hunters and then finally torched last year after the armistice with Japan, when Americans started taking a look around and realizing just what they’d allied themselves with.
Rosemont felt a deep, black pit in his stomach as he thought of that, a weltering spring of shame that he sometimes felt would never run dry. The first pictures had started coming out of Draka-occupied Europe since then, the refugees with their stories of Janissary rape gangs, millions of men, women, and children penned up like cattle, the nerve gas grenades tossed into packed basements and hundreds impaled on stakes when anyone dared raise their hands against the Draka. Words like serf, debt-bondage, and pacification had seemed so simple and reasonable when they were spoken about peoples that had spent centuries under the Yoke, or about Afghan tribesman that had resisted every other attempt to bring civilization from the Persians to the British.
The system Rosemont had seen in his tours of the Draka Police Zone had seemed so peaceful, orderly, with the serfs well provided for by the Draka masters who benevolently oversaw their welfare. Certainly preferable to the patchwork of tribal kingdoms that had been there before the Draka, both in Africa and across much of Asia, with millions of subjects living nasty, brutish, and short lives. He’d returned to America, spoken of what he’d seen across the land, told people that the Draka were simply fulfilling a self-imposed duty to guide and protect the lesser peoples of the Earth. He’d helped a reporter named Dreisier get permission from the notoriously suspicious War Directorate to accompany Draka airborne forces as a war correspondent, and been glad when the resulting articles helped raise a wave of pro-Draka sentiment across the country.
He’d done all that, been crucial in aligning his nation with the masters of Africa and Turkey…and he’d never once considered that he might have been lead along a primrose path all along. He’d never thought about what might lie behind the cool-sounding words his Draka hosts had used talking about Afghanistan and Persia. He’d never wondered why he’d seen so little of the industrial Combine camps, or any of the territories taken after the Great War. He’d not considered for an instant what his Draka hosts had really meant when they spoke of rescuing Europe from the twin perils of Nazism and Communism. He had, in short, been the blindest damn fool ever born, and helped lead his country into an alliance with monsters.
Well, that was all right. He might have a big debt to settle with the Snakes, but last time paid for all. And the new Spirit could write quite a big check. Rosemont’s lips curled up as he looked the craft over. She was massive, half again as large as the Avenger torpedo bombers he’d flown over the Pacific and easily the heaviest thing anyone had ever flown of an aircraft carrier- but she almost looked lighter, balanced on her tricycle gear and chocked down. Where the Avenger had been a solid, beefy battleaxe of a plane that looked like it was carved from a solid block of steel, the new Spirit was all flush lines and fine metal. Her nose was smooth glass over the bombardier’s station, extending back into a long, slim fuselage that tapered into a point near the tail like a wasp stinger. Gently swept-back wings held the twin Allison turboprop engines, which promised to offer the power of the new reaction jets with some of the fuel economy of piston designs. A sleek bubble canopy mounted the top of the fuselage, long enough for both pilot and the gunner who would work the twin cannons of the remote tail turret.
Painted in the deep blue of U.S. Navy night aircraft camouflage, she resembled nothing so much as a malign ghost. Personally, Rosemont thought that the Bureau of Aeronautics had done a good day’s work when they named the Ryan AR-1 carrier attack bomber the Revenant.
He turned from his reverie as a welter of sound spilled into the hangar deck, puzzled for a moment. Officially Reprisal was sailing to help evacuate British troops from India via the Suez Canal, now that the Japanese had finally agreed to respect Indian independence. As far as the Snakes had been told Hangar Deck Two was empty, and the men and planes of Heavy Attack Squadron One had been grounded for the cruise out lest they break open the deception. Now one of the ordnance lifts had begun to whine, rising up from the armory buried deep in the heart of the ship. Rosemont took a few steps away from his bird for a look, and felt his stomach tighten at what he saw.
A dozen brawny sailors in dungarees were wrestling an ordnance cart off of the lift and wheeling it towards one of the squadron’s Revenants tied down on the hangar deck. On the cart was a single bomb, a jet-black spheroid with the simplest of box fins mounted in the rear. It would fill the plane’s bomb bay and make it strain to get off the ship even with the new steam catapults, but it could also explode with more destructive power than a sky full of conventional bombers.
The Ryan AR-1 Revenant, the United States class attack carriers, and the Mark 4 nuclear bomb had all been designed as part of the same system. Now the waiting was over, and it was time for that system to fulfill its purpose.
EDIT: Fixed some formatting mistakes
EDIT II: Fixed some embarrassing timestamp mistakes.
Last edited by ChaserGrey on 2010-12-25 11:24pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
Hmm. Not bad. I seem to recall that historically the Navy had some kind of plan for nuclear bombers flying off the (abandoned in our timeline) United States class carriers. But I don't know any details.
EDIT: I'm not sure when the aircraft in question were first available; the strategic nuclear bombs of 1945 (even in the anachronistically advanced Drakaverse) would not fit gracefully in anything but a very heavy bomber for the era.
EDIT II: Are you familiar with the Drakafic setting, put together by a number of writers on this site?
EDIT: I'm not sure when the aircraft in question were first available; the strategic nuclear bombs of 1945 (even in the anachronistically advanced Drakaverse) would not fit gracefully in anything but a very heavy bomber for the era.
EDIT II: Are you familiar with the Drakafic setting, put together by a number of writers on this site?
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
Hey, thanks for the review! The Navy did indeed have plans for that, although the United States class carriers in this timeline are actually smaller than the historical ones. More details coming in later chapters...I didn't want to cram the first one with too much exposition. They're sort of a crossbreed between the United States design and the original configuration for the Coral Sea class carriers- steam catapults, but no angled deck yet.Simon_Jester wrote:Hmm. Not bad. I seem to recall that historically the Navy had some kind of plan for nuclear bombers flying off the (abandoned in our timeline) United States class carriers. But I don't know any details.
When I was planning this out, I reasoned as follows. The first implosion weapon in our timeline, Fat Man, weighed about 10,000 pounds. Within a few years that was down to about 6,000. I took 8,000 pounds as a compromise figure and set that as the payload figure for my aircraft design spreadsheet for the Revenant bomber. (Yes, I am that big of a geek) I think there's also some evidence for bombs getting smaller faster in the Drakaverse, given that the Draka were putting them in jet bombers and the Alliance putting them in cruise missiles by 1945 in canon.EDIT: I'm not sure when the aircraft in question were first available; the strategic nuclear bombs of 1945 (even in the anachronistically advanced Drakaverse) would not fit gracefully in anything but a very heavy bomber for the era.
What actually drives the availability of carrier-based nuclear bombers is two things- smaller bombs, but also better engines. The Revenant is based on the North American AJ Savage, a regional carrier-based nuclear bomber that entered service in 1949 in our timeline, flying off Coral Sea class carriers. It's a bit better in that it has turboprop engines and not combined radial-turbojet propulsion, but performance is roughly similar. So call it a five-year advance over our time line, which I thought was reasonable. Does that work?
No, actually. I came across one fic called "Night of the Superforts" that I enjoyed, and I saw Draka stuff being posted on this site, which made me decide to register and post it here rather than ff.net since it seemed like a more SF-type crowd. Not familiar with that setting, though I may have to go looking now that I know about it...EDIT II: Are you familiar with the Drakafic setting, put together by a number of writers on this site?
Thanks for the response!
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
Well, while it might not be possible in our timeline, or in a "realistic" Drakaverse, in the Drakaverse-Stirling-wrote, it seems not out of line with some of the other anachronisms we see in the same period.ChaserGrey wrote:What actually drives the availability of carrier-based nuclear bombers is two things- smaller bombs, but also better engines. The Revenant is based on the North American AJ Savage, a regional carrier-based nuclear bomber that entered service in 1949 in our timeline, flying off Coral Sea class carriers. It's a bit better in that it has turboprop engines and not combined radial-turbojet propulsion, but performance is roughly similar. So call it a five-year advance over our time line, which I thought was reasonable. Does that work?
"Night of the Superforts" is one of the better known stories in the setting, I'd say.No, actually. I came across one fic called "Night of the Superforts" that I enjoyed, and I saw Draka stuff being posted on this site, which made me decide to register and post it here rather than ff.net since it seemed like a more SF-type crowd. Not familiar with that setting, though I may have to go looking now that I know about it...EDIT II: Are you familiar with the Drakafic setting, put together by a number of writers on this site?
Thanks for the response!
Here is a link to an index of DrakaFic stories and material. It's set in the aforementioned "realistic" Drakaverse, where the Drakans encounter more viable opposition to their rule, where the changes they make in world geopolitics after WWI result in a different political context, and where their technological supremacy is more limited, as is not surprising given their background as a state whose economic resources were almost entirely oriented toward mass construction projects, heavily mobilized hard labor, and the systematic exploitation of Draka's industrial resources.
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Armour/She ... index.html
This wouldn't work as a DrakaFic story, but in my opinion it works quite well on its own, or has the potential too.
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
Hmmm, interesting. I found "Night of the Superforts" in isolation and didn't know about the rest of the DrakaFic verse. I think the universe for this story is sort of a "semi DrakaFic"- keep the anachronistic technology, but people other than the Draka visit the Wizard of Oz and get some brains, heart, and courage.
More coming shortly.
More coming shortly.
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
A/N: I was going to end this one with an action scene, but ran out of steam, so I'm posting as is. Sorry for all the buildup- action starts soon and the dead Snakes soon after, promise!
March 23 1945, 0700 Hours
T-17 Hours and Counting
Seventh Draka Army Field Headquarters, 20 miles from the Franco-Spanish border
Someone had dumped a load of hot sand behind Eric von Shrakenberg’s eyelids. He rubbed at them for a moment before taking another sip of coffee and looking down at the map in front of him, conscious of the eyes on them. Outside his massed artillery thundered across the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains, putting in support for the attack that had begun four hours before. Already more smoke was rising out of the mountain passes to the west as the Draka infantry went in. Eric allowed himself one more moment of silence, then spoke.
“My apologies, y’all. Strategos Thunorssen, please continue.”
“Yes, sir.” The hatchet-faced commander of his II Corps didn’t even look tired, damn it. Young for her rank, with the falconer’s-glove emblem of the Janissaries on her sleeve and eyes that had only seemed to get brighter since they jumped off. “My lead elements are about halfway through the mountains right now. Minimal resistance, most of it from company sized units or smaller. They’re holding us up in places, but no sign of any counterattacks and no reinforcements.” She turned towards Caudell, the Air Force Johnny, with a broad smile. “I think most of their big formations and headquarters got it from your bombers, Group Captain.”
“Well they should.” Caudell grinned slightly. “Twelve bombs ought to ruin anybody’s day. They’ll still be wondering which end goes upwards when we reach Madrid.” There was a burst of laughter around the table, and even Eric chuckled. His nightmare had been failure of that crucial first step, the Draka armies bled white through the mountains and then smashed by counterattacks if they got through. That worry, it seemed, was over. Thunorssen continued.
“Yes, well. Anyway, we’re going through all four passes like a knife through a throat. Main thing delayin’ us is getting new assault units to the front when the old ones are expended and the security measures. “ She slid her eyes over to the green-tabbed representative of the Security Directorate. “Strategos Vashon, are you sure you can’t move more of yo’ people up towards the front lines? All the security in the world won’t save us if those people somehow find their asses before we’re through the mountains.” Vashon bristled, and Eric held up his hand. A boss Headhunter wasn’t likely to make his Yule card list in this lifetime, but Loki knew the last thing he needed right now were arguments among his command staff.
“That was discussed during the plannin’ step, Angelica. If we do get held up in there we’re going to need an uninterrupted line of communication to our troops to get our momentum going again. Expendin’ the population within ten miles of the line of march is extreme, but we don’t have time to be elegant. I’m sure Strategos Vashon will assist as much as possible, and if things get too bad I may release some of our airmobile reserve to speed the job up. But this isn’t the time.” Thunorssen looked like she’d just bitten into a lemon, and the damned Headhunter looked entirely too smug for Eric’s taste. Time to nip this in the bud now.
“Brothers and sisters of the Race.” They all looked up at his changed tone. “We-“
March 23, 1945, 0100 Hours
T-17 Hours and Counting
Navy Department Offices, Washington, DC.
“Are we sure this is it?” Captain James Weatherly bit down on his tongue at the question. Normally his response would have been something along the lines of “of course it is, you idiot!”, but that wasn’t a very politic option when your interrogator was the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, with his cabinet and the chief of your service sitting right next to him. After a moment, he managed a calm tone.
“Yes, Mister President. The Draka opened their attack with twelve fission bombs, aimed at major Euro-Spanish force concentrations and headquarters. General Groves at the Taos Project advises they can have no more than one or two bombs still in their stockpile, and very likely none at all. They’ve thrown all their chips on the table.
"We haven’t been able to get a plane anywhere near the Pyrenees Mountains, but our intercept teams say the radio bands are full of commanders all up and down the range yelling for help. The Snakes seem to be sending at least three separate Corps of Janissaries, which is damn near all we’ve identified in the area. No Citizen Force units yet, but we think that’s only because they haven’t scored a breakthrough for them to exploit.”
“No?” From his seat next to President Roosevelt, Vice President Truman looked skeptical. “All that firepower and no breakthrough?”
“No, Sir. For there to be a breakthrough you need a line of defense first, and so far the Spanish haven’t managed one. If anyone’s running the show at more than a regimental level over there, we haven’t seen any signs of it. The Janissaries are advancing along all four of the passes they’ve attacked, and it’s not even noon local time over there yet. Best guess is that since things are going so well, the Snakes will wait until they actually have a path through the mountains, then send in the Citizens. We estimate that will happen by local nightfall at the latest.” Roosevelt nodded from his wheelchair.
“Admiral King. Your opinion please.” Fleet Admiral Ernest King looked across at the wasted form of his Commander in Chief and shrugged.
“Sir, Reprisal and her group have to keep moving towards the Suez Canal at a decent rate, or the Snakes will get suspicious. In another day, she’ll be far east enough that some of the primary targets will be marginal at best. I know we contemplated the entire Draka field force on the wrong side of those mountains before MONGOOSE kicked off, but I think tonight will offer the best chance of success. We need a decision now, Sir.”
Roosevelt nodded, his drawn face looking around the room. “Gentlemen-“
Seventh Draka Army Field Headquarters
“I’m not here to preach to y’all about the glorious destiny of the Race. My father’s already said that if I do that again he’ll clap me for breach of copyright.” A chuckle around the table- at the joke, and at the idea of an Old Domination stalwart like Karl von Shrakenberg soiling his hands with something so bourgeois as a lawsuit. Eric leaned forward over the table. “I will remind y'all, however, of the long-term picture here. The Yankees and their tame allies have been at peace with the Japanese for a year, which means they been getting’ bolder and bolder about supporting our enemies. Which is a move not even a Yankee could miss forever.” Another chuckle, a bit graver this time. Good.
“If we miss this chance, we could be left with a modern, industrial state on the Domination’s borders. If the Yankees don’t make us stop, biology will- we have a good percentage of the Race still under arms, even more of those of childbearin’ age and if we don’t get to demobilizing soon we are going to be well and truly fucked in about twenty years.” Which was rather more of a planning window than most professional soldiers talked about in the middle of operations, but for the Draka everything they did served the ultimate goals of the Dragon Race. “This has got to work, and it’s got to work the first time. If we get a case of victory disease, even this late in the game, we can still lose it all. Anybody forget that, I will blow them a new asshole befo’ I ship them back to the Police Zone.” He drew his eyes between Thunorssen and Vashon. They looked like they’d gotten the message. Good.
“Now. Unless we hit a major snag, I want to be able to send the Citizen Force through in the afternoon and have them laagered on the far side by nightfall. And there had better not be any snags. Clear?” Nods all around the table. “Service to the State.”
“Glory to the Race.” A ragged chorus, then a rustle of uniforms and paperwork as the Domination’s field commanders returned to the business of conquest.
The Navy Department
“We all agreed when we launched Operation MONGOOSE that the Domination of the Draka posed the greatest long-term threat to the United States of any nation today, perhaps any nation ever. This country has not made a habit, to date, of attacking without warning or provocation. We have before us a unique opportunity, however, to deal our enemy a serious blow without the chance of retaliation.”
Roosevelt’s hands shook and his face was now drawn with pain, but his eyes were still bright and intense as they swept the room. “The decision is mine. The order is mine. The responsibility is mine. But if any of you have objections to launching MONGOOSE now, tonight, then now is the time.”
The room went silent. Most of the men in it met their President’s gaze. Some dropped their eyes. Some looked away entirely. But not a man said anything. Roosevelt nodded.
“Admiral King.”
“Sir.” King’s voice was perfectly smooth, as though he was merely delivering lines already rehearsed.
“Send our messages to both carrier task forces. This ends tonight.”
March 23, 1945, 1700 Hours
T-7 Hours and Counting
Ready Room One, USS Reprisal
Southwest of Sicily
Julius Rosemont settled back into his leather-padded chair and listened to the polyglot of accents as the flight crews of Heavy Attack Squadron One settled in. The long years of the Eurasian War had let tides of refugees sweep over the Western world- Frenchmen and Poles fleeing from the Germans, later Russians fleeing from the Germans and Australians fleeing the Japanese, and still later a mix of Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Dutch, and Scandanavians fleeing from a Draka Yoke that would have harnessed them all with equal indifference. When the Navy had begun to form VAH-1 in secret a year ago, they had sought out the best airmen from all those nations, taught them the arts of carrier operations and radar bombing, and reminded them of one truth- no matter who they were, they hated the Draka that had murdered their nations much more than they hated each other.
The trainers back at their Stateside base, out in the deserted Nevada desert near a Godforsaken one-street town named Las Vegas, said it was for secrecy, so no one would wonder where experienced USN aviators were disappearing to, and so that afterwards the world would have struck the blow against the Snakes, not just the U.S. Privately, Rosemont had noted the larger proportion of “foreign” crews assigned to VAH-1 than their sister squadron aboard United States, and figured there was another reason for the policy. The Navy didn’t expect to get too many of them back when this party was over.
They were a fearsome bunch, though- eyes with permanent squints from searching the sun for enemies, faces and hands battered by landing accidents, not a few bullet scars. One of the pilots, a tall German named Dortmunder, had the left side of his face cracked and split open from bailing out of a flaming Ju-88 over Vienna. Walker, Rosemont’s British-born ECM man, still had a baby face along with a few of the other men, but even they bore lines and a strange stare that looked odd on men who should just be graduating high school or working their first job.
The same genius who named their plane must have been the one who named the squadron, Rosemont thought. The AR-1 was the Revenant, the avenging ghost…and the men who would fly it were the Myrmidons, men who couldn’t conceive of an “after the war” and so would continue to fight until an enemy finally caught up with them. Young men who had been fighting since adolescence, men without countries to go home to-
-and old men who cared more about getting revenge on the Draka or atoning for their past than they did about surviving the process. Can’t forget those, can we, Rosemont?
Commander Quentin Flannery, the squadron CO, strode to his lectern in the front of the room, near a cloth-covered chalkboard. He was a colorless man with pasty skin that refused to bronze under any sun, light brown hair, and pale grey eyes. Flannery had been in the Navy since the lean years after the Great War, had seen his entire world shattered at Pearl Harbor and then been a cog in the great machine that had broken the Japanese war effort in the battles around the Solomon Sea and New Guinea. His friends were long gone, his family only whispered of, and he would fly Navy Attack until someone sent him on to join them all.
“Allright, people.” Flannery’s voice was crisp, waspish, all business. “The word just came in from Washington. We’re going tonight.” He dropped the cloth from the blackboard, revealing a map of the Mediterranean and a chalked-in flight schedule. Rosemont leaned forward, his spine turning to water. This was it. Tonight.
“We’ll be hitting eight targets, gentlemen. Together they compose the major supply centers for the Draka Expeditionary Force in Europe…” Flannery’s voice trailed off as Rosemont scanned the flight schedule. He’d read up on all that. Part of his research had been the major ports the Draka were using to receive supplies from their homeland. Far and away the most important was Marseilles, which sat practically in the rear of the Draka army rather hundreds of miles across blasted Europe and the Alps. As befitted its importance, Marseilles was heavily defended, and the need to hit targets in Africa and Turkey meant it was also near the end of the Revenant’s fuel range.
And there it was on the flight schedule. Warhammer 03, target Marseilles. Crew was Walker, Gunner/ECM Operator, Fujita, Bombardier/Navigator, and Rosemont, Pilot.
It was going to be one of those nights.
Edit: Fixed some embarassing continuity errors.
March 23 1945, 0700 Hours
T-17 Hours and Counting
Seventh Draka Army Field Headquarters, 20 miles from the Franco-Spanish border
Someone had dumped a load of hot sand behind Eric von Shrakenberg’s eyelids. He rubbed at them for a moment before taking another sip of coffee and looking down at the map in front of him, conscious of the eyes on them. Outside his massed artillery thundered across the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains, putting in support for the attack that had begun four hours before. Already more smoke was rising out of the mountain passes to the west as the Draka infantry went in. Eric allowed himself one more moment of silence, then spoke.
“My apologies, y’all. Strategos Thunorssen, please continue.”
“Yes, sir.” The hatchet-faced commander of his II Corps didn’t even look tired, damn it. Young for her rank, with the falconer’s-glove emblem of the Janissaries on her sleeve and eyes that had only seemed to get brighter since they jumped off. “My lead elements are about halfway through the mountains right now. Minimal resistance, most of it from company sized units or smaller. They’re holding us up in places, but no sign of any counterattacks and no reinforcements.” She turned towards Caudell, the Air Force Johnny, with a broad smile. “I think most of their big formations and headquarters got it from your bombers, Group Captain.”
“Well they should.” Caudell grinned slightly. “Twelve bombs ought to ruin anybody’s day. They’ll still be wondering which end goes upwards when we reach Madrid.” There was a burst of laughter around the table, and even Eric chuckled. His nightmare had been failure of that crucial first step, the Draka armies bled white through the mountains and then smashed by counterattacks if they got through. That worry, it seemed, was over. Thunorssen continued.
“Yes, well. Anyway, we’re going through all four passes like a knife through a throat. Main thing delayin’ us is getting new assault units to the front when the old ones are expended and the security measures. “ She slid her eyes over to the green-tabbed representative of the Security Directorate. “Strategos Vashon, are you sure you can’t move more of yo’ people up towards the front lines? All the security in the world won’t save us if those people somehow find their asses before we’re through the mountains.” Vashon bristled, and Eric held up his hand. A boss Headhunter wasn’t likely to make his Yule card list in this lifetime, but Loki knew the last thing he needed right now were arguments among his command staff.
“That was discussed during the plannin’ step, Angelica. If we do get held up in there we’re going to need an uninterrupted line of communication to our troops to get our momentum going again. Expendin’ the population within ten miles of the line of march is extreme, but we don’t have time to be elegant. I’m sure Strategos Vashon will assist as much as possible, and if things get too bad I may release some of our airmobile reserve to speed the job up. But this isn’t the time.” Thunorssen looked like she’d just bitten into a lemon, and the damned Headhunter looked entirely too smug for Eric’s taste. Time to nip this in the bud now.
“Brothers and sisters of the Race.” They all looked up at his changed tone. “We-“
March 23, 1945, 0100 Hours
T-17 Hours and Counting
Navy Department Offices, Washington, DC.
“Are we sure this is it?” Captain James Weatherly bit down on his tongue at the question. Normally his response would have been something along the lines of “of course it is, you idiot!”, but that wasn’t a very politic option when your interrogator was the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, with his cabinet and the chief of your service sitting right next to him. After a moment, he managed a calm tone.
“Yes, Mister President. The Draka opened their attack with twelve fission bombs, aimed at major Euro-Spanish force concentrations and headquarters. General Groves at the Taos Project advises they can have no more than one or two bombs still in their stockpile, and very likely none at all. They’ve thrown all their chips on the table.
"We haven’t been able to get a plane anywhere near the Pyrenees Mountains, but our intercept teams say the radio bands are full of commanders all up and down the range yelling for help. The Snakes seem to be sending at least three separate Corps of Janissaries, which is damn near all we’ve identified in the area. No Citizen Force units yet, but we think that’s only because they haven’t scored a breakthrough for them to exploit.”
“No?” From his seat next to President Roosevelt, Vice President Truman looked skeptical. “All that firepower and no breakthrough?”
“No, Sir. For there to be a breakthrough you need a line of defense first, and so far the Spanish haven’t managed one. If anyone’s running the show at more than a regimental level over there, we haven’t seen any signs of it. The Janissaries are advancing along all four of the passes they’ve attacked, and it’s not even noon local time over there yet. Best guess is that since things are going so well, the Snakes will wait until they actually have a path through the mountains, then send in the Citizens. We estimate that will happen by local nightfall at the latest.” Roosevelt nodded from his wheelchair.
“Admiral King. Your opinion please.” Fleet Admiral Ernest King looked across at the wasted form of his Commander in Chief and shrugged.
“Sir, Reprisal and her group have to keep moving towards the Suez Canal at a decent rate, or the Snakes will get suspicious. In another day, she’ll be far east enough that some of the primary targets will be marginal at best. I know we contemplated the entire Draka field force on the wrong side of those mountains before MONGOOSE kicked off, but I think tonight will offer the best chance of success. We need a decision now, Sir.”
Roosevelt nodded, his drawn face looking around the room. “Gentlemen-“
Seventh Draka Army Field Headquarters
“I’m not here to preach to y’all about the glorious destiny of the Race. My father’s already said that if I do that again he’ll clap me for breach of copyright.” A chuckle around the table- at the joke, and at the idea of an Old Domination stalwart like Karl von Shrakenberg soiling his hands with something so bourgeois as a lawsuit. Eric leaned forward over the table. “I will remind y'all, however, of the long-term picture here. The Yankees and their tame allies have been at peace with the Japanese for a year, which means they been getting’ bolder and bolder about supporting our enemies. Which is a move not even a Yankee could miss forever.” Another chuckle, a bit graver this time. Good.
“If we miss this chance, we could be left with a modern, industrial state on the Domination’s borders. If the Yankees don’t make us stop, biology will- we have a good percentage of the Race still under arms, even more of those of childbearin’ age and if we don’t get to demobilizing soon we are going to be well and truly fucked in about twenty years.” Which was rather more of a planning window than most professional soldiers talked about in the middle of operations, but for the Draka everything they did served the ultimate goals of the Dragon Race. “This has got to work, and it’s got to work the first time. If we get a case of victory disease, even this late in the game, we can still lose it all. Anybody forget that, I will blow them a new asshole befo’ I ship them back to the Police Zone.” He drew his eyes between Thunorssen and Vashon. They looked like they’d gotten the message. Good.
“Now. Unless we hit a major snag, I want to be able to send the Citizen Force through in the afternoon and have them laagered on the far side by nightfall. And there had better not be any snags. Clear?” Nods all around the table. “Service to the State.”
“Glory to the Race.” A ragged chorus, then a rustle of uniforms and paperwork as the Domination’s field commanders returned to the business of conquest.
The Navy Department
“We all agreed when we launched Operation MONGOOSE that the Domination of the Draka posed the greatest long-term threat to the United States of any nation today, perhaps any nation ever. This country has not made a habit, to date, of attacking without warning or provocation. We have before us a unique opportunity, however, to deal our enemy a serious blow without the chance of retaliation.”
Roosevelt’s hands shook and his face was now drawn with pain, but his eyes were still bright and intense as they swept the room. “The decision is mine. The order is mine. The responsibility is mine. But if any of you have objections to launching MONGOOSE now, tonight, then now is the time.”
The room went silent. Most of the men in it met their President’s gaze. Some dropped their eyes. Some looked away entirely. But not a man said anything. Roosevelt nodded.
“Admiral King.”
“Sir.” King’s voice was perfectly smooth, as though he was merely delivering lines already rehearsed.
“Send our messages to both carrier task forces. This ends tonight.”
March 23, 1945, 1700 Hours
T-7 Hours and Counting
Ready Room One, USS Reprisal
Southwest of Sicily
Julius Rosemont settled back into his leather-padded chair and listened to the polyglot of accents as the flight crews of Heavy Attack Squadron One settled in. The long years of the Eurasian War had let tides of refugees sweep over the Western world- Frenchmen and Poles fleeing from the Germans, later Russians fleeing from the Germans and Australians fleeing the Japanese, and still later a mix of Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Dutch, and Scandanavians fleeing from a Draka Yoke that would have harnessed them all with equal indifference. When the Navy had begun to form VAH-1 in secret a year ago, they had sought out the best airmen from all those nations, taught them the arts of carrier operations and radar bombing, and reminded them of one truth- no matter who they were, they hated the Draka that had murdered their nations much more than they hated each other.
The trainers back at their Stateside base, out in the deserted Nevada desert near a Godforsaken one-street town named Las Vegas, said it was for secrecy, so no one would wonder where experienced USN aviators were disappearing to, and so that afterwards the world would have struck the blow against the Snakes, not just the U.S. Privately, Rosemont had noted the larger proportion of “foreign” crews assigned to VAH-1 than their sister squadron aboard United States, and figured there was another reason for the policy. The Navy didn’t expect to get too many of them back when this party was over.
They were a fearsome bunch, though- eyes with permanent squints from searching the sun for enemies, faces and hands battered by landing accidents, not a few bullet scars. One of the pilots, a tall German named Dortmunder, had the left side of his face cracked and split open from bailing out of a flaming Ju-88 over Vienna. Walker, Rosemont’s British-born ECM man, still had a baby face along with a few of the other men, but even they bore lines and a strange stare that looked odd on men who should just be graduating high school or working their first job.
The same genius who named their plane must have been the one who named the squadron, Rosemont thought. The AR-1 was the Revenant, the avenging ghost…and the men who would fly it were the Myrmidons, men who couldn’t conceive of an “after the war” and so would continue to fight until an enemy finally caught up with them. Young men who had been fighting since adolescence, men without countries to go home to-
-and old men who cared more about getting revenge on the Draka or atoning for their past than they did about surviving the process. Can’t forget those, can we, Rosemont?
Commander Quentin Flannery, the squadron CO, strode to his lectern in the front of the room, near a cloth-covered chalkboard. He was a colorless man with pasty skin that refused to bronze under any sun, light brown hair, and pale grey eyes. Flannery had been in the Navy since the lean years after the Great War, had seen his entire world shattered at Pearl Harbor and then been a cog in the great machine that had broken the Japanese war effort in the battles around the Solomon Sea and New Guinea. His friends were long gone, his family only whispered of, and he would fly Navy Attack until someone sent him on to join them all.
“Allright, people.” Flannery’s voice was crisp, waspish, all business. “The word just came in from Washington. We’re going tonight.” He dropped the cloth from the blackboard, revealing a map of the Mediterranean and a chalked-in flight schedule. Rosemont leaned forward, his spine turning to water. This was it. Tonight.
“We’ll be hitting eight targets, gentlemen. Together they compose the major supply centers for the Draka Expeditionary Force in Europe…” Flannery’s voice trailed off as Rosemont scanned the flight schedule. He’d read up on all that. Part of his research had been the major ports the Draka were using to receive supplies from their homeland. Far and away the most important was Marseilles, which sat practically in the rear of the Draka army rather hundreds of miles across blasted Europe and the Alps. As befitted its importance, Marseilles was heavily defended, and the need to hit targets in Africa and Turkey meant it was also near the end of the Revenant’s fuel range.
And there it was on the flight schedule. Warhammer 03, target Marseilles. Crew was Walker, Gunner/ECM Operator, Fujita, Bombardier/Navigator, and Rosemont, Pilot.
It was going to be one of those nights.
Edit: Fixed some embarassing continuity errors.
Last edited by ChaserGrey on 2010-12-27 01:06am, edited 3 times in total.
Lt. Brown, Mr. Grey, and Comrade Syeriy on Let's Play BARIS
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
Even with one carrier destroying all the main Mediterranean ports and another brutalizing South Africa, the Draka have so much still in between that the Dominate will be far from dead after this strike - MONGOOSE had better be the opening strike of a campaign of grand scale to finally turn the tide back against the Snakes...
"The 4th Earl of Hereford led the fight on the bridge, but he and his men were caught in the arrow fire. Then one of de Harclay's pikemen, concealed beneath the bridge, thrust upwards between the planks and skewered the Earl of Hereford through the anus, twisting the head of the iron pike into his intestines. His dying screams turned the advance into a panic."'
SDNW4: The Sultanate of Klavostan
SDNW4: The Sultanate of Klavostan
- ChaserGrey
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
Have to read and find out, won't you? But remember, the Domination is large, but as the Draka often say themselves- they're not a numerous people, and nobody loves them.
Lt. Brown, Mr. Grey, and Comrade Syeriy on Let's Play BARIS
Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
So Reprisal is in the Mediterranean, right ? I don't have high hopes for her survival when the Snakes go for her group...
If the plan succeeds the logistics of the Draka army are going to be seriously screwed up.
That and apparently there's another CV around South Africa ? Bye bye Archona !
If the plan succeeds the logistics of the Draka army are going to be seriously screwed up.
That and apparently there's another CV around South Africa ? Bye bye Archona !
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
I notice that while they are hitting Eight targets tonight, there is nothing mentioned about planned strikes for tommorow. After all, they're not very likely to transit the Suez unless there's an entire army steaming towards it ready to sever Africa from the rest of the Drakian empire.
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
Strikes on the canal itself would be interesting if they could get there (almost certainly not; the Med is a Drakan lake in this setting). Even then, as a dear friend pointed out to me in a related context, the Suez Canal is sea-level. It's just a big ditch, which makes it rather difficult to sabotage in any permanent sense compared to something like the Panama Canal.
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
Canals have two ends-if you can't get into it from the Med, there's always the Red Sea or overland from the Tigres and Euphrates. Needless to say, a long shot in the extreme. A better target might be any railway bridges over the Canal, to sever an additional supply link to europe. After all, it can take months to rebuild those if the embankments or pilings are lost.
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
Well, the point here would be to do maximum damage to the Draka infrastructure in Europe before Reprisal is inevitably sunk, allowing resistance in Spain to hold out and hopefully weakening the Draka position to the point where invasions of Europe become practical- since the Draka logistics base isn't in Europe, this is somewhat more practical than it would have been to create a Western Front historically without Soviet support.
The job of taking out the Suez Canal from the other end would fall to another carrier group at some other time; the only question is if somehow Reprisal could manage it before dying. Since they probably won't get there before being sunk by land-based aviation the question is moot, though strikes against the railroad bridges over the Canal are a definite possibility if they can get there, especially air-atomic strikes.
Transiting Suez was a pretext to put the carrier in the right general vicinity right around the time the Draka were going to attack over the Pyrenees. Nothing more.
The job of taking out the Suez Canal from the other end would fall to another carrier group at some other time; the only question is if somehow Reprisal could manage it before dying. Since they probably won't get there before being sunk by land-based aviation the question is moot, though strikes against the railroad bridges over the Canal are a definite possibility if they can get there, especially air-atomic strikes.
Transiting Suez was a pretext to put the carrier in the right general vicinity right around the time the Draka were going to attack over the Pyrenees. Nothing more.
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
Glad to see the responses here- I was afraid of this thing sinking like a stone among groans of "God, not another Draka fanfic!" As for what's coming next, you'll all just have to come along for the ride and see, won't you?
Thanks again for reading!
Thanks again for reading!
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
Well, Draka fics aren't that common here, and the fanfic board is a bit dead now that Stuart has wrapped up Pantheocide. So you're coming in at an ideal time with reasonably good material.
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
March 23, 1945 1815 Hours
T- 6 Hours, 45 Minutes and Counting
Navigation Bridge, DWS Ferguson
Southeast of Sicily
“Cap’n.” Captain Rudolf ten Brincken turned to face the Janissary Specialist who stood on his cruiser’s open bridge wing, a pair of heavy binoculars clapped to his eyes. “Somethin’ goin’ on.” ten Brincken lifted his own field glasses and trained them on the Alliance task force he and his two destroyer consorts had been “observing” ever since they passed the Straits of Gibralter days ago. Sure enough, there were men swarming all over the ships, watertight doors slamming shut behind them, guns training out and elevating at the sky- all of them, he noted, carefully pointed away from his ship. Same old.
“I see it, lookout. No cause for alarm. Yankees always go to battle stations at sunset, and this is right on their schedule.” There was no hint in his voice of the frustration and envy he felt when he looked at the Alliance ships. High Command might have stuck him with a uniquely pointless and annoying task, but damned if he was going to take that out on a serf seaman whose only offense was being nearby.
Besides, the Navy was a family tradition for him- which meant that when he’d chosen to enter it as an officer cadet nearly twenty-five years ago he’d been fully aware of just where the Domination’s War Ships stood in relation to the other major naval powers of the world. The Navy had always been the poor relation among the Domination’s armed services, with the sharply limited mission of securing the Draka homeland's coast from intruders and exercising sea control in the Mediterranean. Since the demise of Austria-Hungary as a naval power in 1918, Castle Tarleton had been content to rely largely on submarines and shore-based aircraft for the task, with a few powerful heavy cruisers and fast torpedo-firing destroyers to complement them.
All of which meant that his people would never have been able to assemble the collection of ships steaming 10,000 yards off his starboard side. Leading them all was the old battlecruiser Renown, flanked by a new heavy command cruiser, a British heavy, and one of the Yankees’ antiaircraft cruisers. Almost a dozen destroyers and destroyer escorts flanked the task force, flying both the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes.
The centerpiece of the group, though, was beyond a doubt the massive new aircraft carrier Reprisal, and ten Brincken’s heart clenched hardest when he looked her over. She was massive, longer than Renown and displacing over half again as much as she cut through the water at an insolently comfortable 22 knots. She deserved the traditional nickname of “flat-top” more than most- her smoke stacks were trunked over the side, leaving long white clouds in her wake, and her island was little more than a vestigial bump holding up a collection of masts and antennas, balanced precariously out on a sponson over the water. All to hold the new generation of carrier aircraft the Yankees were supposed to be building, turning their fleet into nuclear strike platforms from the sea.
He smirked. Of course, according to the greenskin back at Nova Cartago Reprisal was currently serving as the world’s most expensive transport ship, steaming obligingly on to clear India of troops that might oppose the Draka’s plans for the region. Maybe a little more charity was in order, considering the circumstances.
“Suh.” This time the voice came from the darkened room behind the bridge, young and still high-pitched. Sublieutenant Moreau stepped out, with Chief Specialist Nkambe in his wake. That would be unusual in the Army, a Janissary reporting along with his Citizen officer, but the Navy’s traditions had been heavily shaped by the Rationalist Party and in any case technical qualifications often mattered more than rank aboard a warship. Nkambe knew his place, but he would also be ready to- respectfully- correct any errors his officer made. “New emissions from the Yankee task force.”
ten Brincken raised an eyebrow and fought down impatience. “They did just go to battle stations, Mister Moreau. Do you mean different emissions than usual?” This time he let the sarcasm drip into his voice. Typical junior officers- to them, every irregularity was the world about to erupt in fire.
To his credit, Moreau didn’t back down. “Yassuh. Millimeter-wave radar bands, unknown type, or anyway not previously recorded. They sweepin’ their whole forward arc, which means they paintin’ us too.” ten Brincken narrowed his brow, and began to lever himself out of the bridge chair. Might as well take a-
“Cap’n!” This time the lookout’s voice was distorted in pure horror. By the time ten Brincken had spun around, there was a deep resounding boom across the water as gouts of smoke erupted from Renown’s guns. For a moment the entire bridge watch was frozen in horror and disbelief, until a set of splashes erupted just ahead of their bow.
ten Brincken’s lips moved for a moment before he could make sound come out. “Helm, hard to port! Engines ahead emergency!” The cruiser heeled over into her turn as Renown’s guns slammed out another salvo. “Radio, get on the horn to Nova Cartago. Tell them-“
Exactly what Ferguson’s message would have been, the world would never know. Guided by her new Type 2704 gun-director radar, three 15-inch shells from Renown’s second salvo found their mark. The range was short enough that they were firing high explosive, not armor piercing shells. The resulting detonations snapped the unlucky cruiser’s keel, splitting her in two and sending the back half almost instantly to the bottom. Lighter and not directly hit, the bow plowed on for a final few frantic seconds, as Captain ten Brincken and everyone else on the bridge scrabbled frantically for some sort of handhold. Then her split-open compartments filled with the sea, tilting her bow crazily back just before she sank forever into the Mediterranean depths.
1820 Hours
Flag Bridge, HMS Renown
Admiral Sir John Amos lowered his binoculars with a cold smile, watching the wreck of the Draka cruiser slide below the surface. One of her consorts was already sinking, courtesy of an 8” shell from HMS Devonshire, and the other was fleeing with the command cruiser Traverse City in pursuit, her antennas squealing electronic noise to block any transmissions to shore. The destroyer had speed, but the new American cruisers were also bloody fast, and Amos very much doubted whether the Draka would be able to open the range enough before Traverse City scored a hit. Her 8” rapid-fire guns would demolish a destroyer just as thoroughly as a few hits from Renown would a treaty cruiser.
His yeoman of signals leaned in from the battlecruiser’s bridge window. “From Traverse City, Sir.” The force’s true flagship, though until now the Snakes had not been allowed to know that. “Begins: Well shot, Renown. Strike Force taking departure now. Proceed as planned. Ends.” Amos nodded. While the carrier headed into strike position, his force would continue on their announced route, with Devonshire and two modified destroyer escorts broadcasting on their new model of deception jammers. It wouldn’t hold forever, but hopefully they could confuse Snake radar as to which of the two groups was the real striking force.
Amos had no illusions about his mission. At his personal order, before sailing the ships under his command had landed absolutely everyone they could, with priority being given to men with families and new recruits. They would create as much of a diversion as they could, and then they would be sunk deep in a Draka ocean far from any help.
Well, perhaps it would suffice as partial payment on the Empire’s mistakes, for letting the damned Draka get so big in the first place. And by God, his ship had scored one last good hit today.
“Yeoman, make to Flag-“
Flag Plot, USS Traverse City
“Message from Renown, Sir.” Admiral George Connors turned to his signalman just as a gout of flame erupted from the last Draka destroyer, his flagship’s 8” autocannon finally scoring a hit. “Your message acknowledged. Stop. Hit them a good one for us. Stop. Best of British.”
Connors turned his eyes towards the Royal Navy ships, still steaming doggedly eastward as the ships of his own force peeled away smoothly to the north, taking their guide from Traverse City. Their upperworks were lit by the blood-red rays of the setting sun, dappled red against grey as they sailed off. They looked so serene that it was nearly impossible to imagine anything disturbing their progress.
Connors knew better, of course. Even with all the hell they planned to raise among the Draka he put it at four to one against any of his ships seeing Gibraltar again, which was a little long even for a man who liked to make book every now and then. And if the odds were long for them, they were impossible for the Brits. Connors very much doubted any of those ships would see another sunset, and for a moment he swallowed past a lump in his throat.
“Make reply to Renown, please. Wish them Godspeed.”
1915 Hours
T-4 Hours, 45 Minutes and Counting
Flight Deck, USS Reprisal
“Flight quarters, flight quarters. All nonessential crew clear the flight deck. Open all circle Zebra fittings between Ready Room One and the flight deck. The smoking lamp is out throughout the ship. Now all pilots man your planes for the 2000 launch. Repeat, all pilots man your planes for the 2000 launch. Flight quarters, flight quarters.”
Commander Julius Rosemont lead his crew out through the bulkhead door and up the exposed metal-grating stairs to the flight deck. In most ships they’d have come out from the island, but the United States class carriers’ islands were not much more than open cockpits and a collection of masts to leave as much space as possible for the Revenants' wings. Even so, Rosemont still had to duck underneath the extended wingtip of Warhammer 02 as he reached the top of the stairs and began striding along the teak-covered deck under the harsh blue-white glare of the arc lights. The five Revenants scheduled for the first launch were staggered all down the flight deck, parked nose-to-tail with their wings spreading the entire width of the deck. At the rear of the line, deck gang members with fuel hoses were still working alongside Warhammer 05.
Spirit of Rio waited in the number-three position, lined up with the left-hand catapult and pointing across the ship’s bow into the inky black. Rosemont had always done his own preflights, and tonight was no exception. He left the nose with its radar and sensor gear to Fujita, and busied himself making sure that the metal control surfaces all traveled over their full range of motion without sticking and that no drops of oil fell out of the engines when he removed the inspection plates from their cowlings. The nacelles were of necessity tight over the engines, slim and streamlined like the bomber itself, cutting down on drag- and incidentally on airflow over the engines, meaning that the Revenant suffered more than its fair share of engine fires unless everyone involved was very careful. Satisfied, he hopped up onto the wing and walked casually back over the top of the fuselage, feeling his way along in the dark so that he could check the tail surfaces. Barely visible out in the blackness, he could see Walker doing a final check on the tail turret. All clean. It was time.
Rosemont retraced his steps over the top of the bomber, pausing over the wing to reach down and give Fujita a hand up onto the plane. The bombardier’s hachimaki headband with its red rising sun and Japanese script looked damned odd underneath a USN issue crash helmet, but that had always been one of the things that Rosemont had first liked about the man back when the squadron was forming, when most of the pilots didn’t want to fly with a “damned Jap” no matter how good he was or what Washington said. Once Fujita had made up his mind about something, he was going to go through with it and to hell with what anyone else thought. Now he clapped his commander on the arm and smiled, as Walker came up on the wing next to them.
“Time for me to go down the Hole.” Once he was in the bombardier’s position in Warhammer 03’s nose, Fujita’s only contact with the rest of the crew would be over the intercom. “So just in case we don’t see each other again, gentlemen-“ He reached into his flying jacket, khaki Imperial Navy issue with a defiantly large Rising Sun flag on the left sleeve, and drew out three shot glasses and a thick glass bottle. He handed one to Rosemont and one to Walker with a rakish grin, pouring a generous dollop into each. “-will you have a drink with me? For luck.” Rosemont grinned, lifting the glass up to his nose. It had the raw smell of brewed sake.
“To the Warhammers.”
“Cheers!”
“Kanpai!”
Rosemont tilted his head back and drank it down. The alcohol was still hot, but cut with water so it didn’t do more than burn on its way down his throat and light a fire in his stomach. He could see the ship’s Air Boss on the flight deck behind him, glaring at the flagrant use of alcohol aboard a U.S. Navy vessel.
“Look out, boys. We might all be at Captain’s Mast when we get back.” Walker grinned, his face looking young for an instant.
“Hope so, Sir. It’ll beat the alternative.” Fujita and Rosemont both laughed at that, then the Japanese aviator tucked his bottle away again and tossed them a jaunty salute before disappearing down the tunnel between pilot and gunners’ seats to worm his way to the bombardier’s position in the nose. Walker went next, dropping into his rear-facing seat and starting to run his hands over the black boxes and scopes that surrounded his remote-control gunsight. That left Rosemont to drop into his ejection seat, buckling in tight before running his eyes over the instruments. Go and green. A hand stuck itself across his vision, and he looked up.
“Sir?” It was the plane captain, crouching on the wing and sticking a paw out. “She’s all set.” Rosemont nodded and shook firmly.
“Thanks, Chief. For everything.”
“Give ‘em Hell, Sir. From all of us.” The chief took a step back, then pulled the Revenant’s bubble canopy from where it was hinged to one side, pushing it down until it locked with a solid click. Rosemont turned back to his checklist, methodically running up the bomber’s systems. He barely noticed when engines began to start around the flight deck, intent on his own indicators as the twin Allisons sprang to life and power meters began to rise off the stops. He didn’t look up when the slamming of a steam catapult sent Warhammer 01 into the night sky. Warhammer 02 was still in the way, hooked up to the longer right-hand catapult, blocking his way forward. It wasn’t until the ship shook with the second launch that Rosemont looked up to catch the taxi director’s eye. He carefully eased off the brakes and taxied past the right-hand catapult, stopping short at the left-hand station and placing his hands on his head while ground crewmen connected him up.
The next few minutes were a ritual ballet, the catapult shooter’s hands and his moving in a sympathetic counterpoint. The split hands of check rudder, and his feet moved on the pedals. Flaps down, and he instinctively moved the lever down into the “Takeoff” detent. The log-rolling motion of “Run ‘em up”, and the turboprops squalled with power, their temperature gauges climbing. Finally the thumbs up, and the wait.
“Pilot ready.”
“BN, ready.”
“Gunner, ready.”
Rosemont took a deep breath. Closed his eyes for a moment. Opened them, and very carefully saluted the cat officer.
With an almighty SLAM the catapult fired and Warhammer 03 raced down its track, Rosemont’s body flattening out in his seat as he felt her ride down, then the jerk of the catapult bridle falling away and launching the bomber into the sky. For a brief, terrifying moment he could feel them fall, then he felt the lift come up to meet them.
Breathe.
The flaps came up, and Warhammer 03 turned west, ascending into the night sky at its best climb speed of 150 knots. Ahead of it, there was no friend.
A/N: Few things-
1) I know the Draka use fake-Roman ranks for just about everything, including Navy and Space Navy in Under the Yoke and The Stone Dogs. On the other hand, we have Pilot Officer (IIRC) Johanna von Shrakenberg in Marching Through Georgia. I decided to square the circle by using regular Navy ranks and saying that there was some kind of "rationalization" movement between 1945 and the time of Under the Yoke three years later to bring the rank structure more in line across services.
2) There isn't much in canon about the Draka Navy, but I think what I have here is reasonable. Hell, even the Draka have to make choices somewhere, and as long as they can dominate the Med and secure the African coastline itself I don't think they have any other big naval missions. In particular, I can't imagine anyplace they need the sea-based power projection that led the British, Americans, and Japanese to develop aircraft carriers.
3) Yep, an IJN naval aviator in the US Navy. What can I say? There's a truce on, and I've always admired the IJN Naval Air Arm. Fujita is not really Cmdr. Mitsuo Fuchida, but is based on him- just like Rosemont is based on Charles Lindbergh.
4) Yes, autoloading 8" guns. They featured on the Des Moines class heavy cruisers in our time line, which missed the end of WWII by about *that* much.
EDIT: Fixed some formatting mistakes.
EDIT II: And some continuity errors. More coming.
T- 6 Hours, 45 Minutes and Counting
Navigation Bridge, DWS Ferguson
Southeast of Sicily
“Cap’n.” Captain Rudolf ten Brincken turned to face the Janissary Specialist who stood on his cruiser’s open bridge wing, a pair of heavy binoculars clapped to his eyes. “Somethin’ goin’ on.” ten Brincken lifted his own field glasses and trained them on the Alliance task force he and his two destroyer consorts had been “observing” ever since they passed the Straits of Gibralter days ago. Sure enough, there were men swarming all over the ships, watertight doors slamming shut behind them, guns training out and elevating at the sky- all of them, he noted, carefully pointed away from his ship. Same old.
“I see it, lookout. No cause for alarm. Yankees always go to battle stations at sunset, and this is right on their schedule.” There was no hint in his voice of the frustration and envy he felt when he looked at the Alliance ships. High Command might have stuck him with a uniquely pointless and annoying task, but damned if he was going to take that out on a serf seaman whose only offense was being nearby.
Besides, the Navy was a family tradition for him- which meant that when he’d chosen to enter it as an officer cadet nearly twenty-five years ago he’d been fully aware of just where the Domination’s War Ships stood in relation to the other major naval powers of the world. The Navy had always been the poor relation among the Domination’s armed services, with the sharply limited mission of securing the Draka homeland's coast from intruders and exercising sea control in the Mediterranean. Since the demise of Austria-Hungary as a naval power in 1918, Castle Tarleton had been content to rely largely on submarines and shore-based aircraft for the task, with a few powerful heavy cruisers and fast torpedo-firing destroyers to complement them.
All of which meant that his people would never have been able to assemble the collection of ships steaming 10,000 yards off his starboard side. Leading them all was the old battlecruiser Renown, flanked by a new heavy command cruiser, a British heavy, and one of the Yankees’ antiaircraft cruisers. Almost a dozen destroyers and destroyer escorts flanked the task force, flying both the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes.
The centerpiece of the group, though, was beyond a doubt the massive new aircraft carrier Reprisal, and ten Brincken’s heart clenched hardest when he looked her over. She was massive, longer than Renown and displacing over half again as much as she cut through the water at an insolently comfortable 22 knots. She deserved the traditional nickname of “flat-top” more than most- her smoke stacks were trunked over the side, leaving long white clouds in her wake, and her island was little more than a vestigial bump holding up a collection of masts and antennas, balanced precariously out on a sponson over the water. All to hold the new generation of carrier aircraft the Yankees were supposed to be building, turning their fleet into nuclear strike platforms from the sea.
He smirked. Of course, according to the greenskin back at Nova Cartago Reprisal was currently serving as the world’s most expensive transport ship, steaming obligingly on to clear India of troops that might oppose the Draka’s plans for the region. Maybe a little more charity was in order, considering the circumstances.
“Suh.” This time the voice came from the darkened room behind the bridge, young and still high-pitched. Sublieutenant Moreau stepped out, with Chief Specialist Nkambe in his wake. That would be unusual in the Army, a Janissary reporting along with his Citizen officer, but the Navy’s traditions had been heavily shaped by the Rationalist Party and in any case technical qualifications often mattered more than rank aboard a warship. Nkambe knew his place, but he would also be ready to- respectfully- correct any errors his officer made. “New emissions from the Yankee task force.”
ten Brincken raised an eyebrow and fought down impatience. “They did just go to battle stations, Mister Moreau. Do you mean different emissions than usual?” This time he let the sarcasm drip into his voice. Typical junior officers- to them, every irregularity was the world about to erupt in fire.
To his credit, Moreau didn’t back down. “Yassuh. Millimeter-wave radar bands, unknown type, or anyway not previously recorded. They sweepin’ their whole forward arc, which means they paintin’ us too.” ten Brincken narrowed his brow, and began to lever himself out of the bridge chair. Might as well take a-
“Cap’n!” This time the lookout’s voice was distorted in pure horror. By the time ten Brincken had spun around, there was a deep resounding boom across the water as gouts of smoke erupted from Renown’s guns. For a moment the entire bridge watch was frozen in horror and disbelief, until a set of splashes erupted just ahead of their bow.
ten Brincken’s lips moved for a moment before he could make sound come out. “Helm, hard to port! Engines ahead emergency!” The cruiser heeled over into her turn as Renown’s guns slammed out another salvo. “Radio, get on the horn to Nova Cartago. Tell them-“
Exactly what Ferguson’s message would have been, the world would never know. Guided by her new Type 2704 gun-director radar, three 15-inch shells from Renown’s second salvo found their mark. The range was short enough that they were firing high explosive, not armor piercing shells. The resulting detonations snapped the unlucky cruiser’s keel, splitting her in two and sending the back half almost instantly to the bottom. Lighter and not directly hit, the bow plowed on for a final few frantic seconds, as Captain ten Brincken and everyone else on the bridge scrabbled frantically for some sort of handhold. Then her split-open compartments filled with the sea, tilting her bow crazily back just before she sank forever into the Mediterranean depths.
1820 Hours
Flag Bridge, HMS Renown
Admiral Sir John Amos lowered his binoculars with a cold smile, watching the wreck of the Draka cruiser slide below the surface. One of her consorts was already sinking, courtesy of an 8” shell from HMS Devonshire, and the other was fleeing with the command cruiser Traverse City in pursuit, her antennas squealing electronic noise to block any transmissions to shore. The destroyer had speed, but the new American cruisers were also bloody fast, and Amos very much doubted whether the Draka would be able to open the range enough before Traverse City scored a hit. Her 8” rapid-fire guns would demolish a destroyer just as thoroughly as a few hits from Renown would a treaty cruiser.
His yeoman of signals leaned in from the battlecruiser’s bridge window. “From Traverse City, Sir.” The force’s true flagship, though until now the Snakes had not been allowed to know that. “Begins: Well shot, Renown. Strike Force taking departure now. Proceed as planned. Ends.” Amos nodded. While the carrier headed into strike position, his force would continue on their announced route, with Devonshire and two modified destroyer escorts broadcasting on their new model of deception jammers. It wouldn’t hold forever, but hopefully they could confuse Snake radar as to which of the two groups was the real striking force.
Amos had no illusions about his mission. At his personal order, before sailing the ships under his command had landed absolutely everyone they could, with priority being given to men with families and new recruits. They would create as much of a diversion as they could, and then they would be sunk deep in a Draka ocean far from any help.
Well, perhaps it would suffice as partial payment on the Empire’s mistakes, for letting the damned Draka get so big in the first place. And by God, his ship had scored one last good hit today.
“Yeoman, make to Flag-“
Flag Plot, USS Traverse City
“Message from Renown, Sir.” Admiral George Connors turned to his signalman just as a gout of flame erupted from the last Draka destroyer, his flagship’s 8” autocannon finally scoring a hit. “Your message acknowledged. Stop. Hit them a good one for us. Stop. Best of British.”
Connors turned his eyes towards the Royal Navy ships, still steaming doggedly eastward as the ships of his own force peeled away smoothly to the north, taking their guide from Traverse City. Their upperworks were lit by the blood-red rays of the setting sun, dappled red against grey as they sailed off. They looked so serene that it was nearly impossible to imagine anything disturbing their progress.
Connors knew better, of course. Even with all the hell they planned to raise among the Draka he put it at four to one against any of his ships seeing Gibraltar again, which was a little long even for a man who liked to make book every now and then. And if the odds were long for them, they were impossible for the Brits. Connors very much doubted any of those ships would see another sunset, and for a moment he swallowed past a lump in his throat.
“Make reply to Renown, please. Wish them Godspeed.”
1915 Hours
T-4 Hours, 45 Minutes and Counting
Flight Deck, USS Reprisal
“Flight quarters, flight quarters. All nonessential crew clear the flight deck. Open all circle Zebra fittings between Ready Room One and the flight deck. The smoking lamp is out throughout the ship. Now all pilots man your planes for the 2000 launch. Repeat, all pilots man your planes for the 2000 launch. Flight quarters, flight quarters.”
Commander Julius Rosemont lead his crew out through the bulkhead door and up the exposed metal-grating stairs to the flight deck. In most ships they’d have come out from the island, but the United States class carriers’ islands were not much more than open cockpits and a collection of masts to leave as much space as possible for the Revenants' wings. Even so, Rosemont still had to duck underneath the extended wingtip of Warhammer 02 as he reached the top of the stairs and began striding along the teak-covered deck under the harsh blue-white glare of the arc lights. The five Revenants scheduled for the first launch were staggered all down the flight deck, parked nose-to-tail with their wings spreading the entire width of the deck. At the rear of the line, deck gang members with fuel hoses were still working alongside Warhammer 05.
Spirit of Rio waited in the number-three position, lined up with the left-hand catapult and pointing across the ship’s bow into the inky black. Rosemont had always done his own preflights, and tonight was no exception. He left the nose with its radar and sensor gear to Fujita, and busied himself making sure that the metal control surfaces all traveled over their full range of motion without sticking and that no drops of oil fell out of the engines when he removed the inspection plates from their cowlings. The nacelles were of necessity tight over the engines, slim and streamlined like the bomber itself, cutting down on drag- and incidentally on airflow over the engines, meaning that the Revenant suffered more than its fair share of engine fires unless everyone involved was very careful. Satisfied, he hopped up onto the wing and walked casually back over the top of the fuselage, feeling his way along in the dark so that he could check the tail surfaces. Barely visible out in the blackness, he could see Walker doing a final check on the tail turret. All clean. It was time.
Rosemont retraced his steps over the top of the bomber, pausing over the wing to reach down and give Fujita a hand up onto the plane. The bombardier’s hachimaki headband with its red rising sun and Japanese script looked damned odd underneath a USN issue crash helmet, but that had always been one of the things that Rosemont had first liked about the man back when the squadron was forming, when most of the pilots didn’t want to fly with a “damned Jap” no matter how good he was or what Washington said. Once Fujita had made up his mind about something, he was going to go through with it and to hell with what anyone else thought. Now he clapped his commander on the arm and smiled, as Walker came up on the wing next to them.
“Time for me to go down the Hole.” Once he was in the bombardier’s position in Warhammer 03’s nose, Fujita’s only contact with the rest of the crew would be over the intercom. “So just in case we don’t see each other again, gentlemen-“ He reached into his flying jacket, khaki Imperial Navy issue with a defiantly large Rising Sun flag on the left sleeve, and drew out three shot glasses and a thick glass bottle. He handed one to Rosemont and one to Walker with a rakish grin, pouring a generous dollop into each. “-will you have a drink with me? For luck.” Rosemont grinned, lifting the glass up to his nose. It had the raw smell of brewed sake.
“To the Warhammers.”
“Cheers!”
“Kanpai!”
Rosemont tilted his head back and drank it down. The alcohol was still hot, but cut with water so it didn’t do more than burn on its way down his throat and light a fire in his stomach. He could see the ship’s Air Boss on the flight deck behind him, glaring at the flagrant use of alcohol aboard a U.S. Navy vessel.
“Look out, boys. We might all be at Captain’s Mast when we get back.” Walker grinned, his face looking young for an instant.
“Hope so, Sir. It’ll beat the alternative.” Fujita and Rosemont both laughed at that, then the Japanese aviator tucked his bottle away again and tossed them a jaunty salute before disappearing down the tunnel between pilot and gunners’ seats to worm his way to the bombardier’s position in the nose. Walker went next, dropping into his rear-facing seat and starting to run his hands over the black boxes and scopes that surrounded his remote-control gunsight. That left Rosemont to drop into his ejection seat, buckling in tight before running his eyes over the instruments. Go and green. A hand stuck itself across his vision, and he looked up.
“Sir?” It was the plane captain, crouching on the wing and sticking a paw out. “She’s all set.” Rosemont nodded and shook firmly.
“Thanks, Chief. For everything.”
“Give ‘em Hell, Sir. From all of us.” The chief took a step back, then pulled the Revenant’s bubble canopy from where it was hinged to one side, pushing it down until it locked with a solid click. Rosemont turned back to his checklist, methodically running up the bomber’s systems. He barely noticed when engines began to start around the flight deck, intent on his own indicators as the twin Allisons sprang to life and power meters began to rise off the stops. He didn’t look up when the slamming of a steam catapult sent Warhammer 01 into the night sky. Warhammer 02 was still in the way, hooked up to the longer right-hand catapult, blocking his way forward. It wasn’t until the ship shook with the second launch that Rosemont looked up to catch the taxi director’s eye. He carefully eased off the brakes and taxied past the right-hand catapult, stopping short at the left-hand station and placing his hands on his head while ground crewmen connected him up.
The next few minutes were a ritual ballet, the catapult shooter’s hands and his moving in a sympathetic counterpoint. The split hands of check rudder, and his feet moved on the pedals. Flaps down, and he instinctively moved the lever down into the “Takeoff” detent. The log-rolling motion of “Run ‘em up”, and the turboprops squalled with power, their temperature gauges climbing. Finally the thumbs up, and the wait.
“Pilot ready.”
“BN, ready.”
“Gunner, ready.”
Rosemont took a deep breath. Closed his eyes for a moment. Opened them, and very carefully saluted the cat officer.
With an almighty SLAM the catapult fired and Warhammer 03 raced down its track, Rosemont’s body flattening out in his seat as he felt her ride down, then the jerk of the catapult bridle falling away and launching the bomber into the sky. For a brief, terrifying moment he could feel them fall, then he felt the lift come up to meet them.
Breathe.
The flaps came up, and Warhammer 03 turned west, ascending into the night sky at its best climb speed of 150 knots. Ahead of it, there was no friend.
A/N: Few things-
1) I know the Draka use fake-Roman ranks for just about everything, including Navy and Space Navy in Under the Yoke and The Stone Dogs. On the other hand, we have Pilot Officer (IIRC) Johanna von Shrakenberg in Marching Through Georgia. I decided to square the circle by using regular Navy ranks and saying that there was some kind of "rationalization" movement between 1945 and the time of Under the Yoke three years later to bring the rank structure more in line across services.
2) There isn't much in canon about the Draka Navy, but I think what I have here is reasonable. Hell, even the Draka have to make choices somewhere, and as long as they can dominate the Med and secure the African coastline itself I don't think they have any other big naval missions. In particular, I can't imagine anyplace they need the sea-based power projection that led the British, Americans, and Japanese to develop aircraft carriers.
3) Yep, an IJN naval aviator in the US Navy. What can I say? There's a truce on, and I've always admired the IJN Naval Air Arm. Fujita is not really Cmdr. Mitsuo Fuchida, but is based on him- just like Rosemont is based on Charles Lindbergh.
4) Yes, autoloading 8" guns. They featured on the Des Moines class heavy cruisers in our time line, which missed the end of WWII by about *that* much.
EDIT: Fixed some formatting mistakes.
EDIT II: And some continuity errors. More coming.
Last edited by ChaserGrey on 2010-12-26 12:07am, edited 2 times in total.
Lt. Brown, Mr. Grey, and Comrade Syeriy on Let's Play BARIS
Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
Eh, having Japanese Naval aviators operating off US Carriers is part of the awesomeness potential of the series. It's like a cowboy riding a T-rex while armed with a flamethrower. It's so cool it doesn't have to be historically accurate.
Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
OOOh, another story line to subscribe to
Declan
Declan
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
2020 Hours
T- 3 Hours, 40 Minutes and Counting
Aboard Spirit of Rio
Julius Rosemont had always loved night flying the best. It had been a deadly love when he’d first started flying in the wake of the Great War, when flying on instruments was only a dream, cockpit lights an undreamt-of luxury and the sky full of weather fronts and mountain tops ready to dash your fragile kite to pieces. His first outfit of Airmail pilots had lost more men than his squadron had even in the worst of the Pacific fighting, and most of them had gone down on night flights with nothing but the strewn-about wreckage of their planes to say why. He’d survived, though, and found beauty there like there was at no other time and place.
Now it was with him again, as his Revenant skimmed over the tops of dirty-grey overcast at its cruising altitude of 15,000 feet. The waning moonlight was just strong enough to dance along his plane’s darkened metal skin and give a hint of silver to the very tops of the clouds. There were no holes in the clouds, letting him forget for a moment the world below that they would all unleash hellfire on before the sun rose. Once that would have worried him, with no way to check for landmarks, but not tonight. The stars were clear up here, and Fujita had a good eye with the sextant. Rosemont’s eyes flicked over the instruments, drinking in the information there with the practiced ease of a quarter-century in the air before coming up to scan through the windscreen again.
“Pilot, right three degrees.” Rosemont heard Fujita’s calm call-out and twitched the Spirit’s control yoke, blipping her into a turn. “Should have some of Sicily on the scope. Can I do a sweep to check it?” Rosemont weighed that in his mind. Any radar emissions could alert the Draka defenses, but the navigator knew his business. He wouldn’t have asked if he didn’t think the fix would help.
“Walker, got anything?”
“Clear, Skipper.” The boy’s voice was casual, but Rosemont would lay his last month’s pay that he hadn’t looked up from the crowd of meters and oscilloscopes in his rear cockpit since they lifted off over an hour before. Walker’s jammers were shut down to keep them electronically quiet, but his sensitive receivers would probably be the first warning they got of any hostiles. “If anybody’s watching the sky they’re doing it with bloody binos.”
Rosemont nodded. “Okay, Nav. Couple sweeps, then shut down.”
“Roger.” A pause, then Fujita came back. “Looks good, Skip. The island’s right where we left it.” And more to the point, Warhammer 03 was where he thought it was. Given that their next good radar target would be Sardinia and Corsica over two hours further on, it paid to make certain. Rosemont relaxed and swept his eyes over the skies again. Looked like some thunderheads off to the north. Hope nobody has to fly through that.
2045 Hours
T-3 Hours, 15 Minutes and Counting
Aboard Night Terrors, callsign Warhammer 08
North of Sicily
Lieutenant Walter Applebaum cursed under his breath and forced his eyes to maintain their instrument scan. Five thousand feet over his assigned cruise altitude, and still no end to this bloody damned soup he was in! They’d all wanted bad visibility on The Night, for God’s sake, but this was weather as bad as any he’d ever seen- and considering he’d learned to fly at the airport near his hometown in Nebraska, that was saying something. At this rate, by the time he saw anything like a landmark on the ground he’d be somewhere over London.
He could feel the bone-chilling cold of the stratosphere trying to leach in around his heavy leather flying gloves and the fur cuffs of his jacket as he sucked stale bottled oxygen in through his mask. Scan. Altimeter, airspeed indicator, compass, variometer. Keep climbing, try to get above this stuff- but not too much, or you’ll use too much gas on the climb and not have enough left for the cruise. Don’t look outside, or you’ll get vertigo. Don’t think about Bayreaux down there in the nose, marking his chart with pencil and compass and steering us over Draka-occupied Europe by dead reckoning. Don’t think about the payload, or the Snake radar beams out there in the night.
“We still clear, Al?” Allright, maybe that last bit hadn’t gone as well as he’d have liked. There was a sigh over the intercom.
“Alles klar, Herr Leutenant.” Damn it, the man spoke perfectly good English. On the other hand, he was also a Sudeten German who had been kicked out of three countries by various armies at last count and very sticky about what pride he had left. And he hated being called Al.
“Sorry, Albrecht. Just a little nervous in all this crap.” Applebaum ran his eyes over the instruments again, trying to keep his breathing even. “Wish we could just get a-“
Warhammer 08 bucked in midair, and Applebaum felt her slide off to the left as the power seemed to drain away, making the yoke shake as the airplane juddered on the brink of a stall. He pushed the yoke forward and tried to get his speed back up, feeling his heart stop in his chest as a flash of orange light caught his eye from the wing. His eyes jumped to the engine temperature gauges- the left one was off-the-scale high, tapping against the peg at the end of the meter.
Fire! Applebaum reacted instantly, yanking the number one engine’s yellow striped fire handle and pulling it back towards him as he pushed Night Terrors over into a steep dive. Had to get it out before something else caught, like the fuel line.
“Pilot, what the hell’s going on?” Beayreaux sounded more pissed off than frightened, but Applebaum knew he had to answer. If the fire was spreading, they needed to get out now. If it wasn’t, he needed to make sure his crew didn’t eject, because it was going to take all of them to get back to the ship. He risked another look out the window, then thumbed the intercom button on the control yoke.
“Fire in number one engine. Looks like I got it out, but the engine’s toast.” Now that the immediate emergency was past, Applebaum cursed himself mentally. He’d been so damned fixated on the weather that he’d forgotten to look at the engine instruments in his scan. He could have opened the cooling flaps or pulled power back from the climb, but he’d been too busy worrying about where they were going to pay attention to the bird. Now they were in some serious shit. “Get me a course back to the ship, pronto. Albrecht, check your gauges, we’re going to have to dump some fuel here in a minute.” The gunner had a backup set of gauges to help the pilot during delicate situations like this. “Before you do, get on the horn to the ship. Tell them we’re aborting.”
“Are you certain, Lieutenant?” Wallenstein’s English was picture-perfect now, taut with tension. “If we break radio silence-“
“If we don’t, the ship won’t know to launch a backup for another hour and a half. That’ll put whoever it is coming back near dawn. You want to hand someone else that deal?” There was a moment of silence over the intercom, and when Wallenstein spoke again it wasn’t to anyone on the plane.
“Vendetta, Vendetta, this is Warhammer 08. Punchout. Say again, Punchout-“
Bayreaux waited until the transmission was over before he tried to get the pilot’s attention. Applebaum had to keep her in a dive now with their power cut in half, but they were high enough that it wasn’t a crisis yet. “Shall I dump the bomb, Sir?”
Applebaum thought. “Can we dump fuel instead?”
“We could, but it won’t leave us much margin-“
“Never mind that.” Applebaum reefed the Revenant around into a turn, spiraling down and heading back for Reprisal. “We’ve got exactly two spare bombs for this thing, and we just called for one of ‘em. We miss a target, you all know what could happen. We’re getting this bomb back aboard or we’re going in the drink with it.” Silence. He wondered if the Frenchman would just dump the bomb into the drink anyway, but all Bayreaux said after a moment was,
“Course back to Vendetta 150 magnetic, Pilot.” Applebaum nodded.
“Thank you, Nav.”
2300 Hours
T- One Hour and Counting
Aboard Spirit of Rio
“Heads up, Skipper.” Walker’s voice was tight now, alert. “Starting to get some signals breaking out of the background.” A pause, and Rosemont could almost see him adjusting one of the knobs in his rear cockpit. “Sweeping azimuth only, it’s a pretty broad beam. This it it, lads. Snake Watchtower-type surveillance radar, probably the one Intel picked up on Corsica.”
“They get us yet, Jimmie?” Rosemont’s fingers tightened on the yoke.
“Don’t think so, Skip. They’re getting something but we oughtn’t to look like more than another ghost up here. Give them a minute to get it sorted.” The pilot snorted and felt his lips curling up into a smile behind his oxygen mask.
“How about we don’t. Prepare for descent, crew.” He carefully trimmed the engines back to make sure they didn’t overspeed, then nosed the Spirit over into a dive, watching the altimeter unwind on his instrument panel. Without prompting, Fujita started calling out the altitude as they passed ten thousand feet, first every thousand and then every five hundred. His radar could see through the overcast and down to the dark ocean below them, more accurate than the pilot’s altimeter at a time when a slight error could kill them all before they knew it. Rosemont started to pull level when his radar man called three thousand, making sure he was level at 1500 feet above the waves before telling Fujita to kill the set. He would have liked to be lower, losing himself in the wave return as they’d practiced off the lonely Newfoundland coast, but even with Fujita on the radar there were limits to the risks he’d run on a night like this. Flying too low was an invitation to run into something solid in an abrupt and fatal manner, and the fact that they wouldn’t appear on Draka radar screens while doing so wouldn’t be much comfort. That done, he shifted a bit in his seat.
“Right on time, crew. We are one hour to target.”
Fujita spoke for them all. “I hope the rest of the squadron is doing as well.”
2400 Hours
T-One Hour and Counting
Aboard Tannhauser, Callsign Warhammer 01
Over Greece
Dieter Dortmunder took another deep breath and smiled to himself. It hurt, of course, just as every breath had since he’d woken up after the Battle of Vienna to find he owed his life to a retreating band of Polish partisans who would have shot him out of hand months before. Instead, they’d taken him with them in the nightmare retreat across Germany to Denmark, a ship to England, and now a chance at revenge fighting with the Americans. He would say this for the Draka: they had done more than all the treaties and diplomats in the world to bring nations together.
He smiled because although it hurt, it hurt a good deal less than usual. Part of that was because he was flying. Part of it, he thought, was the mask- he’d managed to salvage a helmet meant for high-altitude night fighter pilots, with a full faceplate and hose rather than the usual rubber mask, and having his burns bathed in pure oxygen seemed to help.
And part of it was because he was home.
He’d never been here before, but ever since he’d first read a translation of the Odyssey as a boy in school he’d dreamed of this place. Now his plane had just shot out between Mounts Ossa and Pelion and he was guiding it down over the wine-dark Aegean Odysseus had sailed with islands already passing beneath his wings. Only a dim and diffuse moon lit the scene, but Dieter had seen them a thousand times in his mind and needed only the briefest visual cues to fill in the details.
For a moment, he allowed himself a fantasy that after they dropped the bomb, he and his comrades could abandon their airplane, paddling their life raft around the wine-dark sea for twenty years while the world shook itself to pieces around them. He shook his head. He remembered too well what it had been like standing out in the summer heat at Nuremberg, cheering along with the rest of the crowds as the Party banner went past. His countrymen had been seduced into trying to become the Draka- he had been seduced into thinking it was the right thing to do. Now that bill had to be paid in full, and Dieter knew what would be required of him. His crewmates were Schmitt, another German, and a Latvian named Palcikas, none of them with homes to return to. Reprisal would be moving west now, further away from them, in an effort to reach Spain before the Draka could sink her, and Tannhauser still had miles to go.
At least he had gotten to see this place once. And as he turned his Revenant towards its target, another thought occurred to him.
At least the Draka had restored Istanbul’s name to Constantinople. It was fitting, that the city should die with the same name it had been born with.
2400 Hours
T- One Hour and Counting
Aboard Miss Unlucky, Callsign Scythe 01
300 Miles South of Archona, South African Province
Commander Ben Inness sucked in a breath as white combers passed beneath his wings. Scythe 01 was already as low as he dared, but his hands kept trying to push her even lower. Instead, he keyed the intercom to his crew.
“Feet dry, gentlemen. One hour to Archona.”
2310 Hours
T- 50 Minutes and Counting
Somewhere near Corsica
Flight Officer Alicia Venners banked her Night Owl fighter into a lazy turn, trying to keep her eyes from glazing over. She didn’t mind her assignment, usually- most of the rest of her class in pilot training had gone straight into Rhinos, hanging onto a pair of big radial engines down in the dirt where everybody and his bedwench could bang at you with anything they could find to shoot. Being a night fighter pilot wasn’t a glamorous job, but these days it was at least a safe one. None of the Draka’s likely foes flew much by night, and Alicia for one was just fine with that. Her plans included finding some strapping young man after demobilization, making a pile of money selling to planters in the New Territories, doing her duty to the Race and enjoying the fruits of conquest. She was a warrior born, but no sense in overdoing it.
Of course, sometimes it was just Wotan-damned dull.
“Black Buck three-two, this is Manorhouse.” The intercept controller sounded just as bored as she was. Alicia keyed her mic.
“Go, Manorhouse.”
“Black Buck, we’ve got somethin’ on our scopes, bearin’ about two hundred, range about thirty miles from yo’ position. Nothing solid, but it’s headed for Argos, so we’d like yo’ to check it out. Unless yo’ too busy, that is.” Alicia pursed her lips and contemplated a sarcastic reply, but the man was just trying to liven up his shift. Couldn’t fault even a serf for that. Besides, anything headed for Marseilles did deserve to be checked out.
“Roger, Manorhouse. Black Buck’s on it.” She turned out of her orbit and settled down on a new course.
“Weiss.” No answer. “Weiss!”
“Guh?” There was a sleepy sound from the back of the cockpit. “Whassamatter?” Alicia rolled her eyes.
“Mother Freya, Weiss. How yo’ made it through aircrew trainin’, I will never know. We got a job.” Her radar officer cleared his throat, then responded.
“Yo’ mean we do something besides bore holes in the sky for the whole night, then go back to hear the Rhino boys piss and moan about how easy we have it? Loki bless, it’s a miracle.” Alicia snorted.
“Well, look alive. Just might be somethin’ out there.” They both laughed at that, as the twin-engined fighter surged forward against the angry grey sky.
2430 Hours
T-30 Minutes and Counting
Aboard Spirit of Rio
"That's it, Skipper." Walker sounded a bit regretful, as though the horse he'd bet his last five-pound note on had just dropped into second or tea would be late half an hour. Certainly no more than that. "Definitely a Draka Night Eyes set. Can't lock it down for sure, but it's somewhere off to our starboard side and heading this way. They may still miss us." Unspoken, of course, was that they probably wouldn't.
"Thanks, Gunner." Rosemont bent the throttles forward a bit, keeping one eye on the engine indicators as he did so. Wouldn't do to have a fire now, oh no. "Bag of tricks ready?"
"We'll dazzle them, Skip. Any better and we'd have to charge admission."
"Just do your best to keep him off us for a little bit." Fujita's voice was light over the intercom, and Rosemont could tell the bastard was grinning to himself. "Then leave it to me, please. I have something to really dazzle him."
Rosemont pulled his straps tighter across the chest. "Okay, knock it off, boys. We're headed downtown, and it looks like the Snakes just got serious."
EDIT: Typo fixes. Gah.
T- 3 Hours, 40 Minutes and Counting
Aboard Spirit of Rio
Julius Rosemont had always loved night flying the best. It had been a deadly love when he’d first started flying in the wake of the Great War, when flying on instruments was only a dream, cockpit lights an undreamt-of luxury and the sky full of weather fronts and mountain tops ready to dash your fragile kite to pieces. His first outfit of Airmail pilots had lost more men than his squadron had even in the worst of the Pacific fighting, and most of them had gone down on night flights with nothing but the strewn-about wreckage of their planes to say why. He’d survived, though, and found beauty there like there was at no other time and place.
Now it was with him again, as his Revenant skimmed over the tops of dirty-grey overcast at its cruising altitude of 15,000 feet. The waning moonlight was just strong enough to dance along his plane’s darkened metal skin and give a hint of silver to the very tops of the clouds. There were no holes in the clouds, letting him forget for a moment the world below that they would all unleash hellfire on before the sun rose. Once that would have worried him, with no way to check for landmarks, but not tonight. The stars were clear up here, and Fujita had a good eye with the sextant. Rosemont’s eyes flicked over the instruments, drinking in the information there with the practiced ease of a quarter-century in the air before coming up to scan through the windscreen again.
“Pilot, right three degrees.” Rosemont heard Fujita’s calm call-out and twitched the Spirit’s control yoke, blipping her into a turn. “Should have some of Sicily on the scope. Can I do a sweep to check it?” Rosemont weighed that in his mind. Any radar emissions could alert the Draka defenses, but the navigator knew his business. He wouldn’t have asked if he didn’t think the fix would help.
“Walker, got anything?”
“Clear, Skipper.” The boy’s voice was casual, but Rosemont would lay his last month’s pay that he hadn’t looked up from the crowd of meters and oscilloscopes in his rear cockpit since they lifted off over an hour before. Walker’s jammers were shut down to keep them electronically quiet, but his sensitive receivers would probably be the first warning they got of any hostiles. “If anybody’s watching the sky they’re doing it with bloody binos.”
Rosemont nodded. “Okay, Nav. Couple sweeps, then shut down.”
“Roger.” A pause, then Fujita came back. “Looks good, Skip. The island’s right where we left it.” And more to the point, Warhammer 03 was where he thought it was. Given that their next good radar target would be Sardinia and Corsica over two hours further on, it paid to make certain. Rosemont relaxed and swept his eyes over the skies again. Looked like some thunderheads off to the north. Hope nobody has to fly through that.
2045 Hours
T-3 Hours, 15 Minutes and Counting
Aboard Night Terrors, callsign Warhammer 08
North of Sicily
Lieutenant Walter Applebaum cursed under his breath and forced his eyes to maintain their instrument scan. Five thousand feet over his assigned cruise altitude, and still no end to this bloody damned soup he was in! They’d all wanted bad visibility on The Night, for God’s sake, but this was weather as bad as any he’d ever seen- and considering he’d learned to fly at the airport near his hometown in Nebraska, that was saying something. At this rate, by the time he saw anything like a landmark on the ground he’d be somewhere over London.
He could feel the bone-chilling cold of the stratosphere trying to leach in around his heavy leather flying gloves and the fur cuffs of his jacket as he sucked stale bottled oxygen in through his mask. Scan. Altimeter, airspeed indicator, compass, variometer. Keep climbing, try to get above this stuff- but not too much, or you’ll use too much gas on the climb and not have enough left for the cruise. Don’t look outside, or you’ll get vertigo. Don’t think about Bayreaux down there in the nose, marking his chart with pencil and compass and steering us over Draka-occupied Europe by dead reckoning. Don’t think about the payload, or the Snake radar beams out there in the night.
“We still clear, Al?” Allright, maybe that last bit hadn’t gone as well as he’d have liked. There was a sigh over the intercom.
“Alles klar, Herr Leutenant.” Damn it, the man spoke perfectly good English. On the other hand, he was also a Sudeten German who had been kicked out of three countries by various armies at last count and very sticky about what pride he had left. And he hated being called Al.
“Sorry, Albrecht. Just a little nervous in all this crap.” Applebaum ran his eyes over the instruments again, trying to keep his breathing even. “Wish we could just get a-“
Warhammer 08 bucked in midair, and Applebaum felt her slide off to the left as the power seemed to drain away, making the yoke shake as the airplane juddered on the brink of a stall. He pushed the yoke forward and tried to get his speed back up, feeling his heart stop in his chest as a flash of orange light caught his eye from the wing. His eyes jumped to the engine temperature gauges- the left one was off-the-scale high, tapping against the peg at the end of the meter.
Fire! Applebaum reacted instantly, yanking the number one engine’s yellow striped fire handle and pulling it back towards him as he pushed Night Terrors over into a steep dive. Had to get it out before something else caught, like the fuel line.
“Pilot, what the hell’s going on?” Beayreaux sounded more pissed off than frightened, but Applebaum knew he had to answer. If the fire was spreading, they needed to get out now. If it wasn’t, he needed to make sure his crew didn’t eject, because it was going to take all of them to get back to the ship. He risked another look out the window, then thumbed the intercom button on the control yoke.
“Fire in number one engine. Looks like I got it out, but the engine’s toast.” Now that the immediate emergency was past, Applebaum cursed himself mentally. He’d been so damned fixated on the weather that he’d forgotten to look at the engine instruments in his scan. He could have opened the cooling flaps or pulled power back from the climb, but he’d been too busy worrying about where they were going to pay attention to the bird. Now they were in some serious shit. “Get me a course back to the ship, pronto. Albrecht, check your gauges, we’re going to have to dump some fuel here in a minute.” The gunner had a backup set of gauges to help the pilot during delicate situations like this. “Before you do, get on the horn to the ship. Tell them we’re aborting.”
“Are you certain, Lieutenant?” Wallenstein’s English was picture-perfect now, taut with tension. “If we break radio silence-“
“If we don’t, the ship won’t know to launch a backup for another hour and a half. That’ll put whoever it is coming back near dawn. You want to hand someone else that deal?” There was a moment of silence over the intercom, and when Wallenstein spoke again it wasn’t to anyone on the plane.
“Vendetta, Vendetta, this is Warhammer 08. Punchout. Say again, Punchout-“
Bayreaux waited until the transmission was over before he tried to get the pilot’s attention. Applebaum had to keep her in a dive now with their power cut in half, but they were high enough that it wasn’t a crisis yet. “Shall I dump the bomb, Sir?”
Applebaum thought. “Can we dump fuel instead?”
“We could, but it won’t leave us much margin-“
“Never mind that.” Applebaum reefed the Revenant around into a turn, spiraling down and heading back for Reprisal. “We’ve got exactly two spare bombs for this thing, and we just called for one of ‘em. We miss a target, you all know what could happen. We’re getting this bomb back aboard or we’re going in the drink with it.” Silence. He wondered if the Frenchman would just dump the bomb into the drink anyway, but all Bayreaux said after a moment was,
“Course back to Vendetta 150 magnetic, Pilot.” Applebaum nodded.
“Thank you, Nav.”
2300 Hours
T- One Hour and Counting
Aboard Spirit of Rio
“Heads up, Skipper.” Walker’s voice was tight now, alert. “Starting to get some signals breaking out of the background.” A pause, and Rosemont could almost see him adjusting one of the knobs in his rear cockpit. “Sweeping azimuth only, it’s a pretty broad beam. This it it, lads. Snake Watchtower-type surveillance radar, probably the one Intel picked up on Corsica.”
“They get us yet, Jimmie?” Rosemont’s fingers tightened on the yoke.
“Don’t think so, Skip. They’re getting something but we oughtn’t to look like more than another ghost up here. Give them a minute to get it sorted.” The pilot snorted and felt his lips curling up into a smile behind his oxygen mask.
“How about we don’t. Prepare for descent, crew.” He carefully trimmed the engines back to make sure they didn’t overspeed, then nosed the Spirit over into a dive, watching the altimeter unwind on his instrument panel. Without prompting, Fujita started calling out the altitude as they passed ten thousand feet, first every thousand and then every five hundred. His radar could see through the overcast and down to the dark ocean below them, more accurate than the pilot’s altimeter at a time when a slight error could kill them all before they knew it. Rosemont started to pull level when his radar man called three thousand, making sure he was level at 1500 feet above the waves before telling Fujita to kill the set. He would have liked to be lower, losing himself in the wave return as they’d practiced off the lonely Newfoundland coast, but even with Fujita on the radar there were limits to the risks he’d run on a night like this. Flying too low was an invitation to run into something solid in an abrupt and fatal manner, and the fact that they wouldn’t appear on Draka radar screens while doing so wouldn’t be much comfort. That done, he shifted a bit in his seat.
“Right on time, crew. We are one hour to target.”
Fujita spoke for them all. “I hope the rest of the squadron is doing as well.”
2400 Hours
T-One Hour and Counting
Aboard Tannhauser, Callsign Warhammer 01
Over Greece
Dieter Dortmunder took another deep breath and smiled to himself. It hurt, of course, just as every breath had since he’d woken up after the Battle of Vienna to find he owed his life to a retreating band of Polish partisans who would have shot him out of hand months before. Instead, they’d taken him with them in the nightmare retreat across Germany to Denmark, a ship to England, and now a chance at revenge fighting with the Americans. He would say this for the Draka: they had done more than all the treaties and diplomats in the world to bring nations together.
He smiled because although it hurt, it hurt a good deal less than usual. Part of that was because he was flying. Part of it, he thought, was the mask- he’d managed to salvage a helmet meant for high-altitude night fighter pilots, with a full faceplate and hose rather than the usual rubber mask, and having his burns bathed in pure oxygen seemed to help.
And part of it was because he was home.
He’d never been here before, but ever since he’d first read a translation of the Odyssey as a boy in school he’d dreamed of this place. Now his plane had just shot out between Mounts Ossa and Pelion and he was guiding it down over the wine-dark Aegean Odysseus had sailed with islands already passing beneath his wings. Only a dim and diffuse moon lit the scene, but Dieter had seen them a thousand times in his mind and needed only the briefest visual cues to fill in the details.
For a moment, he allowed himself a fantasy that after they dropped the bomb, he and his comrades could abandon their airplane, paddling their life raft around the wine-dark sea for twenty years while the world shook itself to pieces around them. He shook his head. He remembered too well what it had been like standing out in the summer heat at Nuremberg, cheering along with the rest of the crowds as the Party banner went past. His countrymen had been seduced into trying to become the Draka- he had been seduced into thinking it was the right thing to do. Now that bill had to be paid in full, and Dieter knew what would be required of him. His crewmates were Schmitt, another German, and a Latvian named Palcikas, none of them with homes to return to. Reprisal would be moving west now, further away from them, in an effort to reach Spain before the Draka could sink her, and Tannhauser still had miles to go.
At least he had gotten to see this place once. And as he turned his Revenant towards its target, another thought occurred to him.
At least the Draka had restored Istanbul’s name to Constantinople. It was fitting, that the city should die with the same name it had been born with.
2400 Hours
T- One Hour and Counting
Aboard Miss Unlucky, Callsign Scythe 01
300 Miles South of Archona, South African Province
Commander Ben Inness sucked in a breath as white combers passed beneath his wings. Scythe 01 was already as low as he dared, but his hands kept trying to push her even lower. Instead, he keyed the intercom to his crew.
“Feet dry, gentlemen. One hour to Archona.”
2310 Hours
T- 50 Minutes and Counting
Somewhere near Corsica
Flight Officer Alicia Venners banked her Night Owl fighter into a lazy turn, trying to keep her eyes from glazing over. She didn’t mind her assignment, usually- most of the rest of her class in pilot training had gone straight into Rhinos, hanging onto a pair of big radial engines down in the dirt where everybody and his bedwench could bang at you with anything they could find to shoot. Being a night fighter pilot wasn’t a glamorous job, but these days it was at least a safe one. None of the Draka’s likely foes flew much by night, and Alicia for one was just fine with that. Her plans included finding some strapping young man after demobilization, making a pile of money selling to planters in the New Territories, doing her duty to the Race and enjoying the fruits of conquest. She was a warrior born, but no sense in overdoing it.
Of course, sometimes it was just Wotan-damned dull.
“Black Buck three-two, this is Manorhouse.” The intercept controller sounded just as bored as she was. Alicia keyed her mic.
“Go, Manorhouse.”
“Black Buck, we’ve got somethin’ on our scopes, bearin’ about two hundred, range about thirty miles from yo’ position. Nothing solid, but it’s headed for Argos, so we’d like yo’ to check it out. Unless yo’ too busy, that is.” Alicia pursed her lips and contemplated a sarcastic reply, but the man was just trying to liven up his shift. Couldn’t fault even a serf for that. Besides, anything headed for Marseilles did deserve to be checked out.
“Roger, Manorhouse. Black Buck’s on it.” She turned out of her orbit and settled down on a new course.
“Weiss.” No answer. “Weiss!”
“Guh?” There was a sleepy sound from the back of the cockpit. “Whassamatter?” Alicia rolled her eyes.
“Mother Freya, Weiss. How yo’ made it through aircrew trainin’, I will never know. We got a job.” Her radar officer cleared his throat, then responded.
“Yo’ mean we do something besides bore holes in the sky for the whole night, then go back to hear the Rhino boys piss and moan about how easy we have it? Loki bless, it’s a miracle.” Alicia snorted.
“Well, look alive. Just might be somethin’ out there.” They both laughed at that, as the twin-engined fighter surged forward against the angry grey sky.
2430 Hours
T-30 Minutes and Counting
Aboard Spirit of Rio
"That's it, Skipper." Walker sounded a bit regretful, as though the horse he'd bet his last five-pound note on had just dropped into second or tea would be late half an hour. Certainly no more than that. "Definitely a Draka Night Eyes set. Can't lock it down for sure, but it's somewhere off to our starboard side and heading this way. They may still miss us." Unspoken, of course, was that they probably wouldn't.
"Thanks, Gunner." Rosemont bent the throttles forward a bit, keeping one eye on the engine indicators as he did so. Wouldn't do to have a fire now, oh no. "Bag of tricks ready?"
"We'll dazzle them, Skip. Any better and we'd have to charge admission."
"Just do your best to keep him off us for a little bit." Fujita's voice was light over the intercom, and Rosemont could tell the bastard was grinning to himself. "Then leave it to me, please. I have something to really dazzle him."
Rosemont pulled his straps tighter across the chest. "Okay, knock it off, boys. We're headed downtown, and it looks like the Snakes just got serious."
EDIT: Typo fixes. Gah.
Last edited by ChaserGrey on 2010-12-26 12:19am, edited 2 times in total.
Lt. Brown, Mr. Grey, and Comrade Syeriy on Let's Play BARIS
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
Speaking of typos, shouldn't "Rosemont" be "Applebaum" right there?ChaserGrey wrote:
Fire! Rosemont reacted instantly, yanking the number one engine’s yellow striped fire handle and pulling it back towards him as he pushed Night Terrors over into a steep dive. Had to get it out before something else caught, like the fuel line.
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
Aargh! Indeed it should. Fixed, and thank you.tortieconspiracy wrote: Speaking of typos, shouldn't "Rosemont" be "Applebaum" right there?
Next chapter is in progress, but as you can probably tell from the way I stalled in the last one action scenes are tough for me to write. Hopefully it'll be out in the next few days sometime.
Lt. Brown, Mr. Grey, and Comrade Syeriy on Let's Play BARIS
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
Technically, shouldn't that be Byzantium? Also, I can't see the Drakans changing the name of Istanbul to one that references the Emperor who Christianized the Roman Empire.At least the Draka had restored Istanbul’s name to Constantinople. It was fitting, that the city should die with the same name it had been born with.
But still all in all, a great work.
Turns out that a five way cross over between It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the Ali G Show, Fargo, Idiocracy and Veep is a lot less funny when you're actually living in it.
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
Constantinople is the "most traditional" name in European culture; "Byzantium" is a forgotten fishing village while "Constantinople" was the heart of Greco-Roman civilization for a thousand years. From the Draka point of view it was, granted, Christian and therefore bastardized Greco-Roman civilization, but nonetheless some kind of quasi-legitimate successor state.
So I could see it.
So I could see it.
This space dedicated to Vasily Arkhipov
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
2340 Hours
T-20 Minutes and Counting
Aboard Black Buck 32
“Definitely somethin’.” Fredrich Weiss turned the gain down on his scope and watched the flickering shadows on the phosphor screen. He’d grown up hunting on the veldt that his family kept wild as a hunting ground in the Dominion’s Abyssianian province, and this wasn’t so very different when you got down to it. Radar beams traced across the sky like a ripple of wind through the high grass, and you looked for sign that something was out of the ordinary. “It’s way the hell low, almost in the wave return, but it’s there and it’s fast. Range gate doesn’t show mo’ than fifty knots closure.” And the Night Owl was running flat-out as they came up on the bogey from behind, the airspeed needle wavering as it touched 350 knots. “Bettah call it in.”
Venners nodded and keyed her mic. “Manorhouse, this is Black Buck 32. Confirming yo’ contact, right where it’s supposed to be. No ID yet, we’re closing for a visual in a few more minutes. Recommend you scramble Peregrines.” The new reaction jet fighters didn’t have the endurance for more than about half an hour in the air, so doctrine was to patrol with Night Owls and hold the fast movers on runway alert until something was actually detected.
“Roger, Black Buck. Yo’ cleared in.” Venners nodded and bent her throttles forward. Time to go hunting.
“Give me a steer, Weiss.”
Aboard Spirit of Rio
“Coming up on the turn…mark!” Fujita called the waypoint, and Rosemont carefully banked right, keeping his eyes fixed on the artificial horizon and not the clouds and water outside. The quickest way to their target was straight in over the water, but that route also left them almost totally exposed- nothing to block radar but the wave return, and no visual obstructions at all. When Walker had called out the Draka night fighter heading their way, the crew had switched to their alternate attack plan. Now they would make landfall on the French coast before jagging over the lobbing their bomb down onto Marseilles harbor.
“Bandit changing course with us.” Walker’s voice was starting to rise in pitch, and Rosemont could feel him vibrating a bit with tension through the back of his ejection seat. “They’ve got us for sure, Skipper. I’m switching on the tail-warning radar and charging guns.” Rosemont clicked his mic. Another emission, but it was the gunner’s call to make. A moment, while the scope warmed up, then another call. “There she is. Coming straight in at six high, ten thousand yards and a fifty knot closure. We’ll have to see them off in a moment, I think. Keep level, we want them to think we’re fat dumb and happy.”
“What do you need?” The turn done, Rosemont could afford to ask that question. He felt the back of his neck itch. It was strange, knowing someone was on your tail and not taking evasive action. Stranger still to be getting reports about it from someone who wanted you to keep going straight in. Radar combat was looking to be a different school than he’d learned.
Walker thought about it. “Throttle back a bit…just a bit. Not so much that he’ll notice, but maybe we can make him overshoot.”
2345 Hours
T- 15 Minutes and Counting
Aboard Black Buck 32
“Okay, Weiss.” They had their range under four thousand yards now, and Venners’ hand was resting on her trigger. “Hit the light at three thousand. We going to take one shot at identifying this sumbitch, then we kill him. Still no sign he knows we here?
“Nope. Turned a couple minutes ago, but gradual like. Definitely not evasive.”
“Klim-bim.” Venners keyed her radio. “Manorhouse, this is Black Buck 32. Eyes on target in thirty seconds.”
Aboard Spirit of Rio
“Okay.” Walker’s voice almost sounded strangled now, and Rosemont really hoped his gunner wasn’t going to have a coronary in the middle of this engagement. Could be awkward. “Looks like they’re coming for a visual pass. When they hit us with the light go evasive. I’ll try to slap their wrists a bit for peeking.”
Aboard Black Buck 32
Alicia Venners had a brief second to take in a dagger-slim, twin-engined black silhouette in her searchlight beam before it snap-rolled to the right, yanking into a climb. It was already closer than she’d expected it to be, and the Night Owl shot past as she tried to bring it back up and around. Orange tracer fire shot past her cockpit as she cursed under her breath.
“Black Buck, report. Identify the target.” Alicia snarled and keyed her mic.
“Wotan damn it, I don’t know what it is, Manorhouse. Two engines, slim fuselage, slightly swept wing, no markings, and a hell of a stinger in the tail. That’s all I have, and next time I’m shootin’, not lookin’”
“Black Buck, we need identi-“
“Gods curse you, Manorhouse, does yo’ want me to pull out Janes’ Fuckin’ All The World’s Aircraft up here and go lookin’ this thing over? I say again, target unknown but it has fired on us. I’m blowin’ it out of the sky and we can sort this out at the debrief.” She snapped the Night Owl up into a climbing turn of its own, spotting the intruder and pulling up onto its tail. Her first burst of tracers went wild, then a spraying fountain of tracers that seemed to reach right for her. A whistling sound. A dim bang. Heat, pain, a scream from Weiss’ side of the cockpit.
Nothingness.
Aboard Spirit of Rio
James Walker drew in a deep breath as the Draka interceptor fell away in flames, instinctively tracking it with his ring sight until it splashed into the dark ocean below. Fujita laughed exultantly into the intercom.
“Way to go, Gunner! Should have known they’d never stop us.” Walker let that go for a minute, letting his breathing return to normal. He’d flown combat for five years now, ever since France when he’d been a turret gunner for the ill-fated Bouton-Paul Defiant, and every kill was still like this. Always the slamming realization that there were one or two very dedicated, motivated, and highly trained people focused solely on killing him, unless he could stop them.
Some men he knew had gotten used to it, worn their hardening like a badge of honor. Walker had noticed that those men made up a disproportionate number of his proverbial absent friends, and so he carefully preserved his combat nerves. Fear kept him careful, and being careful kept him alive.
“Not so fast, Fuji.” Now that he had his breath, Walker keyed the mic. “That Watchtower set’s still got us for sure, and the Snakes will be scrambling jets. It’ll be a near run thing.”
“Keep an eye out.” The Skipper’s voice was calm, but clearly intended to cut off this line of discussion as they skimmed low over the beach. “Fifteen miles inland, then we start the run. Walker, light ‘em up.” Walker swallowed again, then started moving his hands across the jammer panels in front of him. By the third switch he flipped, his hands were as steady as a marble statue’s.
2349 Hours
T- Eleven Minutes and Counting
Air Defense Operations Room, Marseilles Area Command
“Thor God of Thunder!” Squadron Leader Robert Douglas blinked his eyes once, twice to clear the purple and green blotches from them. He’d been watching over a serf operator’s shoulder as the man tried to keep a track on Black Buck 32 and the target she was tracking. The scope’s gain had been turned almost all the way up, which meant that the strobes which had suddenly erupted all over the plot position indicator had been eye-hurtingly bright. The Janissary was hunched over his controls, switching on filters even as he blinked his own eyes, and Douglas watched some of the clutter fade away from the scope- into a nightmare of false targets and odd blobs. Whatever was out there, it was putting out a lot of juice.
“Suh.” Pilot Officer Anson turned from the adjacent console. “No contact with Black Buck 32.”
“P.O., I don’t imagine we’ll be hearing from Black Buck 32 this side of Valhalla. Get over here and start vectoring the jets in, order them to shoot that sumbitch down.” The Peregrine jet fighters were built for pure speed, and had only a short-range radar set. He spun around to another seated figure. “Einarsson, get on the party line to all the gun emplacements. Tell ‘em barrage fire, right now, low altitude burst in their assigned sectors until we say otherwise. Anyone stops shootin’ before that, it better be because they rounds are cooking off in the chambers, because I do not want any other excuses. Clear?” The Tech Warrant nodded and reached for her field phone.
Douglas felt his lips peeling back into a feral snarl. An air raid on Marseilles was what he’d do if he was in the Euros’ position, but he wasn’t sure whether or not they’d have the balls to do it. One question answered at least.
“All right, you bastards, let’s see how well you fly through lead.”
Aboard Spirit of Rio
Lieutenant Kenichi Fujita bent over his radar scope and peered into the radar scope with all the concentration of a fortune teller reading out palm lines. He’d spent hours before the flight in Reprisal’s intelligence center, studying maps of Marseilles and sketching predictions of what the radar approach might look like from almost every angle. His job would have been easier coming in over the water, of course, with almost nothing to block his radar beam between them and the harbor. Now there was clutter all over the scope- from the ground, buildings, even bits of chaff and jamming from Spirit of Rio’s own defensive measures, no matter how carefully Walker tried to leave an electronic window for the bombardier to work through.
Fujita didn’t complain. That would have been useless, and unworthy of him. Instead he kept his eyes fixed on the bright phosphor traces until one pattern of reflections caught his eye. There. It had to be the steeple of the Abbaye St. Victor, built when the Roman Empire was still in living memory. Fujita centered the bright cursor over it with his tracking handle and squeezed the trigger, grunting in satisfaction when a red light confirmed that the track radar was working and locked on the target. He looked up from his scope, and took in a world on fire.
Spirit of Rio was winging towards Marseilles now, and the sky was filled with bright yellow tracers ahead of them. Fat, slow heavy shells reaching up for higher altitudes, and brilliant fountain-sprays of machine gun fire whipped up at them, seeming to bend past them as the Revenant sped on towards its target. If one didn’t…well. Fujita shrugged. If it didn’t, then it didn’t, and there was no good thinking about it. Service in the Imperial Japanese Navy did not produce men who worried excessively about their own mortality.
Working deliberately, Fujita sorted through a horizontal rack of flat black metal rectangles, using his penlight to read the kanji labels attached to each. The Revenant’s bombing system was state of the art, and these objects were the very latest thing to come out of the Alliance for Democracy’s research labs- prerecorded compinsets, allowing a program to actually be loaded into the bombing system’s control brain without having to be manually entered step by step. Fujita found the one for their approach path and slid it into the slot next to the radar scope, seating it firmly with the heel of his hand before flipping the read lever. An amber light went on, and Fujita used the small keypad next to the instruction slot to type in the code number for the offset point he’d used. A short pause, and then the amber light winked a lethal, friendly green as a mechanical timer automatically set itself. Fujita let a feral grin settle over his face as he bent over his other scope, this one linked to the optical bombsight. The tracers were hellishly close through its magnification, but below Fujita could see the cluster of buildings he was looking for. One hand keyed his intercom, the other reaching over to start the timer.
“Pilot, initial point in sight. Track radar- working! Bombcomp- working! Ikouze!”
Up in the cockpit, Rosemont was alive. It was cliché to say that in moments like this he was one with his aircraft, but in decades of flying he hadn’t found a better way to describe it either. He could feel the vibration of the turboprops as they snarled with power. He could see concentrations of flak up ahead, and his hands and feet guided Spirit of Rio around them as though she was responding to his thoughts.
“Initial point.” He heard himself echoing Fujita’s words, then reached down to onto his panel without looking away from his flying. He flipped a metal guard out of the way, then threw the switch underneath. The pilot’s nuclear consent switch, making sure at least two crewmen had to agree to drop the bomb. “You’re hot, Bombs.”
“Watch it, Skip. I’m picking up Crosshair-type radars. Draka jets coming in.” Walker’s voice was going up again, but he sounded like he was keeping it together. Rosemont hauled the Spirit around onto her bomb run and fixed his eye on the plane’s artificial horizon. When the bombcomp cut in, two hair-fine needles had snapped out, one showing the desired heading and the other the desired G-force for the toss-bombing run. Keep those centered, and the Mark Four would go right over Marseilles harbor before bursting- screw it up, and they might not do all the damage they needed to. Still, he managed to get out,
“How close, Guns?”
“Not sure, Skip, I-“ The rest of Walker’s sentence was drowned out as a pair of orange streaks shot past them at an impossibly fast speed, howling like Banshees as they passed overhead. In the rear cockpit, Walker watched the reaction jet fighters swing around, coming in to overtake the Spirit from behind.
“Ah, pretty close Sir. Coming up on our tail now.”
“Keep ‘em off the tail, then.” They could try to duck and run, but that was a losing proposition against the jets. No. Better to finish it now. “Bombs, we stay on the run.”
“Hai!” Japanese was a wonderfully deep language. Tone and context made a word that movie subtitles would have rendered as “Yes” serve as a wonderful blend of Yessir, All right!, and Let’s stick it to the bastards! Rosemont weaved a bit as the miles wore down to the release point, but mostly he concentrated on keeping the needle centered. Walker would keep the Snakes off, or he wouldn’t.
In the nose, Fujita was bent over his scope, searching for one last visual reference to lock the system down and tell him to start the pullup. He hadn’t worked with a sight like this in years- in fact, he realized, the last for-real horizontal bombing run he’d done had been on a December day four years ago, searching for the outline of an American battleship through the smoke shrouding Pearl Harbor. His scope came down on the outline of an apartment building, memorized from countless hours spent studying photographs of the target. Fujita mashed his thumb down on the trigger, looked over to watch the timer count down the last ten seconds. Without looking, he slapped the open button for the bomb doors.
“Ready…steady…”
The two Draka fighters blazed in from behind Spirit of Rio, their tracers reaching out towards Walker across the night. They were too fast for him to hold the ring sight onto- instead he held the triggers down and swept it like a garden hose, hoping to at least make them abort their run. He felt a dull wham as a Draka shell struck home, and a hornet-sharp whine as other shells hit near their aircraft and perforated the metal skin. The Snake jets shot past, and Walker could almost see them coming around in neat hammerhead turns. Coming to finish the job.
“Go!” Rosemont saw the g-needle shoot upward even as Fujita yelled the cue. He yanked the yoke back, watching the needle slide downwards even as a heavy boulder rolled onto his chest, the Allisons shrieking protest as Spirit of Rio looped upwards into the night sky. His thumb hit the wheel-mounted button for the fuel boost, then his hands pulled back even further as he felt the surge of power come on. He could feel their airspeed falling away, even as he gritted his teeth and forced himself to breathe. Any second now…needles centered….come on…
Fujita held onto the manual release handle like a lifeline as the Spirit swept in her arc across the sky like a bow over violin strings. Just as he decided the bombcomp had packed it in and jerked the manual handle, he felt the distinctive bang-jump, as though the plane had run over a speed bump in midair. The release mechanism, and Kenichi Fujita realized that to the end of his life, he would never know whether or not he’d actually pulled the trigger on an atomic bomb.
“Away!”
Rosemont had felt the lurch of release, and the surge of acceleration as his craft suddenly shed four tons of weight. He pulled over to the top of the loop, hanging suspended from his straps for a moment at the top of it, flying inverted and looking down at the doomed city below. Then he snap-rolled upright and pushed the yoke forward, willing the airspeed indicator to spiral upwards.
2358 Hours
T- Two Minutes and Counting
Air Defense Operations Room, Marseilles Area Command
"That's odd." Pilot Officer Anson leaned forward and wiped his sleeve over the screen. "Horizontal velocity went to almost zero, vertical off the charts, and now the range is increasin'. Suh, malfunction?"
Douglas frowned as he walked over to stare at the scope. It was hard to see anything at first, but then that Freya-damned jamming started to clear. The contact looked good. But what- alarms started to sound in his head, bits from a doctrine paper that had been circulating around the Forces in the past weeks. Twin-engined aircraft. Looping up, then away. Bomb delivery, but what-" Douglas spun around.
"Duty Officer! Get on the horn to GHQ. Tell them we are under attack by atomic-"
Douglas never finished that sentence.
Aboard Spirit of Rio
The Revenant charged onward, her engines screaming as her pilot pushed them to their limits. In the rear cockpit, Walker had pulled the flash shield down across his canopy and was frantically pulling circuit breakers from his panel, trying to isolate his electronics. Before he snapped off the radar receivers, he could see the impulses of the Crosshairs coming in again. He laughed, a bit of hysteria underpinning it. Shot down right after they dropped off a nuke…that would be a hell of a way to go.
Somewhere fifteen miles behind them, a black metal object fell through 5,000 feet. Its onboard radar altimeter and backup pressure unit both agreed on this, and sent signals to the simple-minded control unit on board. Thousands of a second later, precisely machined explosive charges went off inside the atom bomb, squeezing together a sphere of plutonium in its heart.
Then a brilliant, deadly flash bloomed over Marseilles, and a wind like the hammer of God rushed out to spend its fury on the righteous and unrighteous alike.
T-20 Minutes and Counting
Aboard Black Buck 32
“Definitely somethin’.” Fredrich Weiss turned the gain down on his scope and watched the flickering shadows on the phosphor screen. He’d grown up hunting on the veldt that his family kept wild as a hunting ground in the Dominion’s Abyssianian province, and this wasn’t so very different when you got down to it. Radar beams traced across the sky like a ripple of wind through the high grass, and you looked for sign that something was out of the ordinary. “It’s way the hell low, almost in the wave return, but it’s there and it’s fast. Range gate doesn’t show mo’ than fifty knots closure.” And the Night Owl was running flat-out as they came up on the bogey from behind, the airspeed needle wavering as it touched 350 knots. “Bettah call it in.”
Venners nodded and keyed her mic. “Manorhouse, this is Black Buck 32. Confirming yo’ contact, right where it’s supposed to be. No ID yet, we’re closing for a visual in a few more minutes. Recommend you scramble Peregrines.” The new reaction jet fighters didn’t have the endurance for more than about half an hour in the air, so doctrine was to patrol with Night Owls and hold the fast movers on runway alert until something was actually detected.
“Roger, Black Buck. Yo’ cleared in.” Venners nodded and bent her throttles forward. Time to go hunting.
“Give me a steer, Weiss.”
Aboard Spirit of Rio
“Coming up on the turn…mark!” Fujita called the waypoint, and Rosemont carefully banked right, keeping his eyes fixed on the artificial horizon and not the clouds and water outside. The quickest way to their target was straight in over the water, but that route also left them almost totally exposed- nothing to block radar but the wave return, and no visual obstructions at all. When Walker had called out the Draka night fighter heading their way, the crew had switched to their alternate attack plan. Now they would make landfall on the French coast before jagging over the lobbing their bomb down onto Marseilles harbor.
“Bandit changing course with us.” Walker’s voice was starting to rise in pitch, and Rosemont could feel him vibrating a bit with tension through the back of his ejection seat. “They’ve got us for sure, Skipper. I’m switching on the tail-warning radar and charging guns.” Rosemont clicked his mic. Another emission, but it was the gunner’s call to make. A moment, while the scope warmed up, then another call. “There she is. Coming straight in at six high, ten thousand yards and a fifty knot closure. We’ll have to see them off in a moment, I think. Keep level, we want them to think we’re fat dumb and happy.”
“What do you need?” The turn done, Rosemont could afford to ask that question. He felt the back of his neck itch. It was strange, knowing someone was on your tail and not taking evasive action. Stranger still to be getting reports about it from someone who wanted you to keep going straight in. Radar combat was looking to be a different school than he’d learned.
Walker thought about it. “Throttle back a bit…just a bit. Not so much that he’ll notice, but maybe we can make him overshoot.”
2345 Hours
T- 15 Minutes and Counting
Aboard Black Buck 32
“Okay, Weiss.” They had their range under four thousand yards now, and Venners’ hand was resting on her trigger. “Hit the light at three thousand. We going to take one shot at identifying this sumbitch, then we kill him. Still no sign he knows we here?
“Nope. Turned a couple minutes ago, but gradual like. Definitely not evasive.”
“Klim-bim.” Venners keyed her radio. “Manorhouse, this is Black Buck 32. Eyes on target in thirty seconds.”
Aboard Spirit of Rio
“Okay.” Walker’s voice almost sounded strangled now, and Rosemont really hoped his gunner wasn’t going to have a coronary in the middle of this engagement. Could be awkward. “Looks like they’re coming for a visual pass. When they hit us with the light go evasive. I’ll try to slap their wrists a bit for peeking.”
Aboard Black Buck 32
Alicia Venners had a brief second to take in a dagger-slim, twin-engined black silhouette in her searchlight beam before it snap-rolled to the right, yanking into a climb. It was already closer than she’d expected it to be, and the Night Owl shot past as she tried to bring it back up and around. Orange tracer fire shot past her cockpit as she cursed under her breath.
“Black Buck, report. Identify the target.” Alicia snarled and keyed her mic.
“Wotan damn it, I don’t know what it is, Manorhouse. Two engines, slim fuselage, slightly swept wing, no markings, and a hell of a stinger in the tail. That’s all I have, and next time I’m shootin’, not lookin’”
“Black Buck, we need identi-“
“Gods curse you, Manorhouse, does yo’ want me to pull out Janes’ Fuckin’ All The World’s Aircraft up here and go lookin’ this thing over? I say again, target unknown but it has fired on us. I’m blowin’ it out of the sky and we can sort this out at the debrief.” She snapped the Night Owl up into a climbing turn of its own, spotting the intruder and pulling up onto its tail. Her first burst of tracers went wild, then a spraying fountain of tracers that seemed to reach right for her. A whistling sound. A dim bang. Heat, pain, a scream from Weiss’ side of the cockpit.
Nothingness.
Aboard Spirit of Rio
James Walker drew in a deep breath as the Draka interceptor fell away in flames, instinctively tracking it with his ring sight until it splashed into the dark ocean below. Fujita laughed exultantly into the intercom.
“Way to go, Gunner! Should have known they’d never stop us.” Walker let that go for a minute, letting his breathing return to normal. He’d flown combat for five years now, ever since France when he’d been a turret gunner for the ill-fated Bouton-Paul Defiant, and every kill was still like this. Always the slamming realization that there were one or two very dedicated, motivated, and highly trained people focused solely on killing him, unless he could stop them.
Some men he knew had gotten used to it, worn their hardening like a badge of honor. Walker had noticed that those men made up a disproportionate number of his proverbial absent friends, and so he carefully preserved his combat nerves. Fear kept him careful, and being careful kept him alive.
“Not so fast, Fuji.” Now that he had his breath, Walker keyed the mic. “That Watchtower set’s still got us for sure, and the Snakes will be scrambling jets. It’ll be a near run thing.”
“Keep an eye out.” The Skipper’s voice was calm, but clearly intended to cut off this line of discussion as they skimmed low over the beach. “Fifteen miles inland, then we start the run. Walker, light ‘em up.” Walker swallowed again, then started moving his hands across the jammer panels in front of him. By the third switch he flipped, his hands were as steady as a marble statue’s.
2349 Hours
T- Eleven Minutes and Counting
Air Defense Operations Room, Marseilles Area Command
“Thor God of Thunder!” Squadron Leader Robert Douglas blinked his eyes once, twice to clear the purple and green blotches from them. He’d been watching over a serf operator’s shoulder as the man tried to keep a track on Black Buck 32 and the target she was tracking. The scope’s gain had been turned almost all the way up, which meant that the strobes which had suddenly erupted all over the plot position indicator had been eye-hurtingly bright. The Janissary was hunched over his controls, switching on filters even as he blinked his own eyes, and Douglas watched some of the clutter fade away from the scope- into a nightmare of false targets and odd blobs. Whatever was out there, it was putting out a lot of juice.
“Suh.” Pilot Officer Anson turned from the adjacent console. “No contact with Black Buck 32.”
“P.O., I don’t imagine we’ll be hearing from Black Buck 32 this side of Valhalla. Get over here and start vectoring the jets in, order them to shoot that sumbitch down.” The Peregrine jet fighters were built for pure speed, and had only a short-range radar set. He spun around to another seated figure. “Einarsson, get on the party line to all the gun emplacements. Tell ‘em barrage fire, right now, low altitude burst in their assigned sectors until we say otherwise. Anyone stops shootin’ before that, it better be because they rounds are cooking off in the chambers, because I do not want any other excuses. Clear?” The Tech Warrant nodded and reached for her field phone.
Douglas felt his lips peeling back into a feral snarl. An air raid on Marseilles was what he’d do if he was in the Euros’ position, but he wasn’t sure whether or not they’d have the balls to do it. One question answered at least.
“All right, you bastards, let’s see how well you fly through lead.”
Aboard Spirit of Rio
Lieutenant Kenichi Fujita bent over his radar scope and peered into the radar scope with all the concentration of a fortune teller reading out palm lines. He’d spent hours before the flight in Reprisal’s intelligence center, studying maps of Marseilles and sketching predictions of what the radar approach might look like from almost every angle. His job would have been easier coming in over the water, of course, with almost nothing to block his radar beam between them and the harbor. Now there was clutter all over the scope- from the ground, buildings, even bits of chaff and jamming from Spirit of Rio’s own defensive measures, no matter how carefully Walker tried to leave an electronic window for the bombardier to work through.
Fujita didn’t complain. That would have been useless, and unworthy of him. Instead he kept his eyes fixed on the bright phosphor traces until one pattern of reflections caught his eye. There. It had to be the steeple of the Abbaye St. Victor, built when the Roman Empire was still in living memory. Fujita centered the bright cursor over it with his tracking handle and squeezed the trigger, grunting in satisfaction when a red light confirmed that the track radar was working and locked on the target. He looked up from his scope, and took in a world on fire.
Spirit of Rio was winging towards Marseilles now, and the sky was filled with bright yellow tracers ahead of them. Fat, slow heavy shells reaching up for higher altitudes, and brilliant fountain-sprays of machine gun fire whipped up at them, seeming to bend past them as the Revenant sped on towards its target. If one didn’t…well. Fujita shrugged. If it didn’t, then it didn’t, and there was no good thinking about it. Service in the Imperial Japanese Navy did not produce men who worried excessively about their own mortality.
Working deliberately, Fujita sorted through a horizontal rack of flat black metal rectangles, using his penlight to read the kanji labels attached to each. The Revenant’s bombing system was state of the art, and these objects were the very latest thing to come out of the Alliance for Democracy’s research labs- prerecorded compinsets, allowing a program to actually be loaded into the bombing system’s control brain without having to be manually entered step by step. Fujita found the one for their approach path and slid it into the slot next to the radar scope, seating it firmly with the heel of his hand before flipping the read lever. An amber light went on, and Fujita used the small keypad next to the instruction slot to type in the code number for the offset point he’d used. A short pause, and then the amber light winked a lethal, friendly green as a mechanical timer automatically set itself. Fujita let a feral grin settle over his face as he bent over his other scope, this one linked to the optical bombsight. The tracers were hellishly close through its magnification, but below Fujita could see the cluster of buildings he was looking for. One hand keyed his intercom, the other reaching over to start the timer.
“Pilot, initial point in sight. Track radar- working! Bombcomp- working! Ikouze!”
Up in the cockpit, Rosemont was alive. It was cliché to say that in moments like this he was one with his aircraft, but in decades of flying he hadn’t found a better way to describe it either. He could feel the vibration of the turboprops as they snarled with power. He could see concentrations of flak up ahead, and his hands and feet guided Spirit of Rio around them as though she was responding to his thoughts.
“Initial point.” He heard himself echoing Fujita’s words, then reached down to onto his panel without looking away from his flying. He flipped a metal guard out of the way, then threw the switch underneath. The pilot’s nuclear consent switch, making sure at least two crewmen had to agree to drop the bomb. “You’re hot, Bombs.”
“Watch it, Skip. I’m picking up Crosshair-type radars. Draka jets coming in.” Walker’s voice was going up again, but he sounded like he was keeping it together. Rosemont hauled the Spirit around onto her bomb run and fixed his eye on the plane’s artificial horizon. When the bombcomp cut in, two hair-fine needles had snapped out, one showing the desired heading and the other the desired G-force for the toss-bombing run. Keep those centered, and the Mark Four would go right over Marseilles harbor before bursting- screw it up, and they might not do all the damage they needed to. Still, he managed to get out,
“How close, Guns?”
“Not sure, Skip, I-“ The rest of Walker’s sentence was drowned out as a pair of orange streaks shot past them at an impossibly fast speed, howling like Banshees as they passed overhead. In the rear cockpit, Walker watched the reaction jet fighters swing around, coming in to overtake the Spirit from behind.
“Ah, pretty close Sir. Coming up on our tail now.”
“Keep ‘em off the tail, then.” They could try to duck and run, but that was a losing proposition against the jets. No. Better to finish it now. “Bombs, we stay on the run.”
“Hai!” Japanese was a wonderfully deep language. Tone and context made a word that movie subtitles would have rendered as “Yes” serve as a wonderful blend of Yessir, All right!, and Let’s stick it to the bastards! Rosemont weaved a bit as the miles wore down to the release point, but mostly he concentrated on keeping the needle centered. Walker would keep the Snakes off, or he wouldn’t.
In the nose, Fujita was bent over his scope, searching for one last visual reference to lock the system down and tell him to start the pullup. He hadn’t worked with a sight like this in years- in fact, he realized, the last for-real horizontal bombing run he’d done had been on a December day four years ago, searching for the outline of an American battleship through the smoke shrouding Pearl Harbor. His scope came down on the outline of an apartment building, memorized from countless hours spent studying photographs of the target. Fujita mashed his thumb down on the trigger, looked over to watch the timer count down the last ten seconds. Without looking, he slapped the open button for the bomb doors.
“Ready…steady…”
The two Draka fighters blazed in from behind Spirit of Rio, their tracers reaching out towards Walker across the night. They were too fast for him to hold the ring sight onto- instead he held the triggers down and swept it like a garden hose, hoping to at least make them abort their run. He felt a dull wham as a Draka shell struck home, and a hornet-sharp whine as other shells hit near their aircraft and perforated the metal skin. The Snake jets shot past, and Walker could almost see them coming around in neat hammerhead turns. Coming to finish the job.
“Go!” Rosemont saw the g-needle shoot upward even as Fujita yelled the cue. He yanked the yoke back, watching the needle slide downwards even as a heavy boulder rolled onto his chest, the Allisons shrieking protest as Spirit of Rio looped upwards into the night sky. His thumb hit the wheel-mounted button for the fuel boost, then his hands pulled back even further as he felt the surge of power come on. He could feel their airspeed falling away, even as he gritted his teeth and forced himself to breathe. Any second now…needles centered….come on…
Fujita held onto the manual release handle like a lifeline as the Spirit swept in her arc across the sky like a bow over violin strings. Just as he decided the bombcomp had packed it in and jerked the manual handle, he felt the distinctive bang-jump, as though the plane had run over a speed bump in midair. The release mechanism, and Kenichi Fujita realized that to the end of his life, he would never know whether or not he’d actually pulled the trigger on an atomic bomb.
“Away!”
Rosemont had felt the lurch of release, and the surge of acceleration as his craft suddenly shed four tons of weight. He pulled over to the top of the loop, hanging suspended from his straps for a moment at the top of it, flying inverted and looking down at the doomed city below. Then he snap-rolled upright and pushed the yoke forward, willing the airspeed indicator to spiral upwards.
2358 Hours
T- Two Minutes and Counting
Air Defense Operations Room, Marseilles Area Command
"That's odd." Pilot Officer Anson leaned forward and wiped his sleeve over the screen. "Horizontal velocity went to almost zero, vertical off the charts, and now the range is increasin'. Suh, malfunction?"
Douglas frowned as he walked over to stare at the scope. It was hard to see anything at first, but then that Freya-damned jamming started to clear. The contact looked good. But what- alarms started to sound in his head, bits from a doctrine paper that had been circulating around the Forces in the past weeks. Twin-engined aircraft. Looping up, then away. Bomb delivery, but what-" Douglas spun around.
"Duty Officer! Get on the horn to GHQ. Tell them we are under attack by atomic-"
Douglas never finished that sentence.
Aboard Spirit of Rio
The Revenant charged onward, her engines screaming as her pilot pushed them to their limits. In the rear cockpit, Walker had pulled the flash shield down across his canopy and was frantically pulling circuit breakers from his panel, trying to isolate his electronics. Before he snapped off the radar receivers, he could see the impulses of the Crosshairs coming in again. He laughed, a bit of hysteria underpinning it. Shot down right after they dropped off a nuke…that would be a hell of a way to go.
Somewhere fifteen miles behind them, a black metal object fell through 5,000 feet. Its onboard radar altimeter and backup pressure unit both agreed on this, and sent signals to the simple-minded control unit on board. Thousands of a second later, precisely machined explosive charges went off inside the atom bomb, squeezing together a sphere of plutonium in its heart.
Then a brilliant, deadly flash bloomed over Marseilles, and a wind like the hammer of God rushed out to spend its fury on the righteous and unrighteous alike.
Last edited by ChaserGrey on 2010-12-26 12:34am, edited 1 time in total.
Lt. Brown, Mr. Grey, and Comrade Syeriy on Let's Play BARIS
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Re: Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic
I think Shep might be crying that a B-36 didn't get to make the first nuke-drop. Hell, does the big Six Turning and Four burning actually exist in your drakaverse?
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