If I were to write as fast as Trevayne polishes this TL would have been done three years ago. Thanks greatly, this TL certainly improved with your help. Today we learn that even social media was effected by the Weltensprung, have another go at the ugliest ships disgracing the Warhammer World and seee what the war does to Druchii of reknown.
Pursuit Special, 200 km before Karond Kar
Hartmut Klawitter's head was still turning a lot, his gaze shifting from instruments to his wingmates' position to the airspace around Leviathan's attack flight. The sun was on its way towards dusk and a red glow suffused the horizon. There was a lot to do for the pilot and that was a good thing. Ever since he had regained his sight after the first dive attack, ever since he had seen two DawiZharr ships escape, there was one question on his mind. Would the Flugscheiben be back or would they abandon the dreadnaughts to their fate?
Klawitter eyed the clouds above him with at least the same intensity as any other parts of the sky. He had been ambushed once, he would not be again. When he looked back at the instruments he checked the screen that displayed where his planes were. Not that his biplane had radar or anything so grandiose. There was just a butchered smartphone wired into the electronics of all planes, providing a location to the pilots and their location to Hartmut and far-off Leviathan. The only powers who could supposedly use these emissions against them should be at least friendly neutrals and it made his job that much easier.
So far things had gone pretty well, with only two planes having to turn back to the carrier because of mechanical issues. Given that they had used the Pursuit Specials hard and in a role they were not really built for before doing very little maintenance that was good. He would …The crackle in his ear cut his thoughts short.
"Pursuit one, this is Pursuit 04. I see many airborne bogeys at 12 o' clock, Angels 20, closing. Over"
"Pursuit 01 copies many airborne bogies, Pursuit 04. All elements, keep course. Out."
Hartmut Klawitter had good vision, for a human of more than 40 years that was. Many of his Druchii pilots were considerably older, but their bodies played by different rules. Now that he knew where to look he could also make out the small black dots that silhouetted themselves against the white and gray clouds. And there were many of them, far more than he had ever seen. He had planned for some Flugscheiben, but not that many. He also had no choice, but to see the attack through.
"Hawker 01, this is Pursuit 01, many bogies seven klicks ahead, closing on my position. Over"
"Hawker 01 copies many bogies seven klicks ahead. Will proceed as planned. Out."
Hartmut Klawitter's flight was still flying at their somewhat sedate 250 kph cruise speed. The disks were faster, the pilot had reason to know. They seemed to get hotter the faster they flew, so there was a limit to what they could achieve. Still they closed with what seemed like warp speed. Klawitter's breath stopped at the thought of judging things wrong. He knew he wanted to end this right now, knew that would lead to disaster and silently counted to ten. Checking his screen and the enemy before him he saw that it was time.
"Come on down now Xune" was bad radio procedure and what had been agreed between the flight leaders two hours ago.
For a moment nothing seemed happen and Klawitter nearly despaired at the sight over ever more Flugscheiben coming into view.
A predator's shriek came through his headphones stopped the pilot's thoughts and made him look upwards. The dark cloud above the Flugscheiben birthed fast-moving shadows. Some blended into the gray, others stood out in red and gold. Nearly two dozen biplanes that aimed for the flying disks, aiming for their upper sides. Guns fired under the Pursuit Specials' wings, producing spectacular back-blasts that lit the clouds. Many of these shots missed, but those which connected destroyed the flying disks utterly. The Flugscheiben broke formation like a flock of alarmed crows while the Wild Geese's escorts dove through them accelerating as they went. They had provided an opening for Hartmut's flight and he intended to use it for all that was worth.
"All Helldiver's, this Pursuit 01. We are going in. Make it count people."
Klawitter pushed the throttle all the way forward and then engaged the nitrox. His plane accelerated quickly enough and he aimed the plane for a piece of sky with neither Flugscheibe nor biplane in it. All around him pandemonium raged. The Geese's fighters had executed S-turns, making half-loops and turning on their next targets on the ascent. The flying disks had scattered all over the sky, turning this way and that. They fired their autocannons at anything in the sky, be it in range our hopelessly outside. Tracers curved towards the sea or disappeared in the gray clouds. What the Flugscheiben did not do was break off and flee. Whether this was as the Geese did not use the guided missiles they no longer had, their numbers or something else was not clear to Klawitter. The Pursuit Specials had to close with their enemies, their own weapons were far too short-ranged to hit anything at range. And hit they must, as they had four shots per plane. The Flugscheiben's weapon was of similar range and a single hit would turn a Pursuit Special into so many splinters. The parachutes worn by the pilots would not save them even if they survived being shot down. The local water temperatures would kill them in under ten minutes even in their cold weather gear.
Hartmut saw a biplane dropping to the sea like a burning meteor and glowing pieces of steel that might have been a flying disk rain from the sky. The clouds above him lit with the weapons fire like a fiery thunderstorm and he flew through its center.
A flying disk appeared in front of his plane like magic. One second there was the clear sky, the next a dark shape flew directly towards Klawitter. The pilot pulled the trigger immediately and sent a stream of bullets towards the enemy which all bounced off harmlessly. Hartmut swore while a cold hand clutched his heart and fumbling fingers found the button screwed under the trigger.
Cannons have long been part of fighter's fixed forward armament. Calibers between 20 and 30 mm were usual, there were few examples which worked themselves up to 45 mm. Such guns would have ripped the Pursuit Special apart with recoil. Which was why the gun that fired under the left lower wing had a caliber of 105 mm.
Klawitter finally found the right button an electric current blew a primer in a huge cartridge case, igniting enough propellant for an L7 tank gun. Had this all worked on the shell that rested before it, it would have ripped the plane apart. As the gun was constructed only a tenth or so did that, the rest left the gun's rear through a venturi nozzle. As things stood the two forces cancelled each other out and a shell left the muzzle at a bit above the speed of sound. The shell should have been inside an Imperial gun truck, but had somehow found its way to the Wild Geese. For such a snapshot it flew remarkably true and impacted a bit off-center. The rounded shape pushed the shell's tip a bit further out before the fuze detonated. The shaped charge inside the shell converted its copper lining into a plasma jet travelling ten times the speed of sound. It burned away a huge amount of armor, leaving a glowing scar along the Flugscheibe's flank. Its own shots missed Klawitter's plane by a few meters and the German would have sworn he heard a shriek when he passed it. When he turned his head he found that the flying disk reversed course and sped after him.
Klawitter turned around and realized that there was no enemy before him, but a DawiZarr dreadnought below. Something clicked in his head and a grin split his face while he switched the nitrox off. Correcting course a bit he brought the plane into a half-roll that turned the churning sea above his head. Pulling the stick against his chest and feathering the prop was one act, turning the plane around again the next. He hardly realized that more tracers passed his plane from above and saw the muzzle flashes that reached for him from below.
The dive was an indiscernible sensation, something that filled the mind to the point where conscious thought was nearly absent. Time seemed to pass slowly and too fast at the same time. The ship below grew with every second and new details vied for his attention. He barely saw the kink in the ship's wake and was hardly aware of his course correction. His ears were filled with the engine's roar and the Flugscheibe's scream of hate. And then came the moment when he had to calculate just right. He was higher than during his last dive attack but he had been faster when he started the descent. If he pulled too late he would pancake himself against the ship. Too far up and he would miss the ship and give the Flugscheibe a chance. When a traitorous part of his mind was very sure it was by far too late he counted out a few seconds more before pulling the lever.
Below the plane a set of levers were freed from the pins that held them and rotated forward, taking the bomb they held with them. When they caught at their stop they released the former shell outside of the propeller's disk. Now he could pull the stick back again. This time he remembered to tense his stomach and leg muscles in an effort to keep as much blood as possible in his brain. And now it was his time to shout. He had been right, the flying disk was far too heavy and had followed him too deeply into the dive. It had no weight to drop like he had done and nearly no aerodynamic surfaces to convert its speed into altitude. The short glimpse he caught of it showed it glowing from whatever energies it used to fly and maybe the flash of an explosion from its gun port.
The g-forces he invoked with his pull up nailed him to his seat so that he could not watch and he saw his vision leech color again. This time he managed to keep his vision and wits about him, at least to the degree that he always knew where he was. When things became somewhat normal again he could finally bank the biplane to the point where he could observe his target. There was a huge column of water before the ship that made him cheer and a ship that showed no obvious damage. He was about to swear when he spotted an orange glow at the base of the front turret. He was still asking himself if he had really seen that when a huge geyser of flame erupted from that spot. The turret lifted itself from the ship, reaching an impressive height before dropping back down into the cold sea. The geyser had not stopped by that time and seemed intent to consume the whole ship. He now spotted the other DawiZharr dreadnaught. While the damage was not so spectacular there were copious black clouds of smoke and the ship had something of a list. Above and all around Hartmut biplanes turned and burned, trying to get into position for a kill on a flying disk. At the same time the faster disks tried to disengage, just so they could attack another plane. Several pairs of pursuit specials flew endless scissors, crossing the paths of their partners. That way they threatened every flying disk that tried to get into their wingmate's six.
Hartmut Klawitter could stop flying for the Wild Geese for now, he would fight for himself now. Selecting the right frequency on his screen he pushed the button for all all-birds call.
"All Leviathan elements, this is Pursuit 01. Mission accomplished folks, time to get going. If anybody needs to get rid of a bloody Scheibe, they cannot follow into deep dives."
He saw a plane doing just that and a disk which seemed to hesitate between diving too fast and too deep and not letting its prey go. Using the nitrox again Klawitter managed to close the distance and entered a shallow dive. He had to pay attention to his speed soon. He saw the plywood skin on his wings starting to flutter and the rudders became very hard to move indeed. He watched as the Flugscheibe grew in his windshield and leveled his plane as well as he could. When the disk filled two lines freshly painted on the glass he pulled the trigger all the way. Two recoilless guns roared, one on each side of his plane and two shells made for the enemy. One missed by a meter, the other impacted the raised section of the disk head on.
Klawitter twisted the plane away as hard as he could and still metal parts "thunked" into the wooden fuselage. The explosion that ripped the Flugscheibe apart was quite spectacular and Klawitter checked his plane for a few anxious seconds before deciding that nothing important had been shredded.
And with that it was over. What flying disks remained made their way to Karond Kar having failed to protect their charges. Hartmut Klawitter never breathed the rubbery air of his mask so gladly, he could hardly believe being alive. He needed a minute before the shudders subside and he had to fight his stomach which decided that now would be an excellent time to void itself. When that was done he used the wireless again.
"We did it folks, job's well done. We opened the door, next stop Karond Kar. Course 76, we go home. Element leaders, tally losses and landing priorities."
And then he dreaded the calls that would tell him how many of his pilots would not land on Leviathan.
Berlin, Office
Andrea Hermanns was late to the office and she knew it. She had all the excuses she needed, but for herself. Yesterday had been long, too fucking long. In the old days the final printout the committee on budgets produced had been hundreds of pages long. Now it went into Excel lines with high five digits and she rued the day when she had introduced the "what-if" function to the senior members. It had given them another toy to play with and play they did, until the early hours of the morning while she had made that possible.
In the end it was in a good cause, she had been allowed to slip a few lines in that were dear to her. Still she had used a lot of coffee this morning and she did not relish the cleanup she had to do today.
Beate, her assistant, was damnably chipper this morning and only the smell of more coffee rescued her from Andrea's wrath.
"Good morning dear, you look like you could use a cup or two. I had the cantina send over a few bread rolls. You can eat them while you have a look at this mess."
Andrea nearly choked on the scalding liquid. Did she scramble the master file of yesterday's marathon? Oh f…, it would take days to unscramble that. But she had saved that file a dozen times over so..
"What bloody mess?"
"This Studivz thing you set in motion before you left to do honest work. I had a look at it and something seems off."
That could not be that bad, couldn't it? How bad could her attempt to scare up some help among the students have gone? If some far-left group had gotten into that they could have filled the group with nonsense and hate.
She logged into the social network that the Weltensprung had saved from obscurity and looked into the group page she had created yesterday.
And lo and behold, it was full of messages. Scrolling down she looked for what went wrong and needed a few moments to realize what the problem was.
The internet is full of causes that somebody thinks worthy. A great of them never gain more attention than a few people, mostly by the "friends" that person had in the network.
Some issues find a following, a very few go viral. The latter usually needs time and a lot of work. This one had not.
This page was full of offers to help, of support, of wisdom and terrible naiveté. But mostly it was full, with enough traffic that it resembled a DDOS attack. She would have to contact the admins soon or the page would be shut down.
And she needed help and lots of it. A few names in the mess stuck out, she knew them. Or had heard of them. Time to contact them and soon.
Something would happen that was for sure. If it was something grand or an embarrassment was yet to be seen.
Andrea Hermanns swallowed. This exceeded her experience considerably and could well have a fallout for the SPD.
And then she started typing as quickly as her caffeinated hands would allow. She had given her word and now she would have to see this through to the best of her abilities.
She did not have the time to wonder what had made her plea go viral like this. She should have given it a bit more thought, not that it would have made things better.
Trench, 500 meters from Neustadt's first wire belt
The Druchii's helmet had a coal-scuttle shape and covered with a net that held a bit of dried foliage and some white cloth strips. More cloth was wound around the telescope in order to break up its regular shape. The face behind it was slender as a rapier, hid an eye behind a patch, and was covered in mud and green paint.
The body below lacked nearly any armor but for a chest piece that held a Sea Dragon skin under some metal plates. The rest was gray and green cloth and a webbing that held various bits of kit. A rifle was on the soldier's back and a revolver was on the hip. There was a single blade and that looked more useful for trench work than for taking lives.
Kouran Darkhand would have dismissed the Druchii as a wimp when she avoided being exposed to the enemy as much as possible last month. Now he had learned a few costly lessons about the new face of war and restrained himself. He would use any and all means to fulfil Malekith's commands, and if that meant listening to this grunt he would. The Black Guard's commander knew that the elf before him would have been beneath his notice a few years before. Of low birth she had not excelled in the deadly power exchange that dominated Druchii life. Her one stroke of luck had been being attached to Lord Silverhawk's forces, who had been among the first to receive the new weapons.
She had fought for Silverhawk ever since the first Chaos invasion and the stumpies ever since. And when so many others had died, she had lived and learned. And Kouran Darkhand needed that knowledge very much. But not as much as the troops that would follow her advance party.
Racca Dawneyes had taken many notes with one of these newfangled pencils and made some sketches. Now she finally stepped from the parapet and dropped below the trench's lip into what went for safety here.
"That's a bitch and a half and no lies about that. Whoever gave the slaves that much time to dig in should spend the rest of his days on the rack. I would have given a tit for so much barbed wire the last year and there are trenches, support trenches and bunkers. Fuck, even the damned stumpies did not dig that well. We'll bleed like mad breaking these lines, that's for sure. Hope you are not in a hurry about that, otherwise we check if we have more bodies or they have more bullets."
Racca Daweneyes had been through a year of unaltered hell and she had no longer any shits to give. A year ago Kouran would have killed her as she stood, now he needed her and those like her, badly.
Pursuit Special, 200 km before Karond Kar
Hartmut Klawitter's head was still turning a lot, his gaze shifting from instruments to his wingmates' position to the airspace around Leviathan's attack flight. The sun was on its way towards dusk and a red glow suffused the horizon. There was a lot to do for the pilot and that was a good thing. Ever since he had regained his sight after the first dive attack, ever since he had seen two DawiZharr ships escape, there was one question on his mind. Would the Flugscheiben be back or would they abandon the dreadnaughts to their fate?
Klawitter eyed the clouds above him with at least the same intensity as any other parts of the sky. He had been ambushed once, he would not be again. When he looked back at the instruments he checked the screen that displayed where his planes were. Not that his biplane had radar or anything so grandiose. There was just a butchered smartphone wired into the electronics of all planes, providing a location to the pilots and their location to Hartmut and far-off Leviathan. The only powers who could supposedly use these emissions against them should be at least friendly neutrals and it made his job that much easier.
So far things had gone pretty well, with only two planes having to turn back to the carrier because of mechanical issues. Given that they had used the Pursuit Specials hard and in a role they were not really built for before doing very little maintenance that was good. He would …The crackle in his ear cut his thoughts short.
"Pursuit one, this is Pursuit 04. I see many airborne bogeys at 12 o' clock, Angels 20, closing. Over"
"Pursuit 01 copies many airborne bogies, Pursuit 04. All elements, keep course. Out."
Hartmut Klawitter had good vision, for a human of more than 40 years that was. Many of his Druchii pilots were considerably older, but their bodies played by different rules. Now that he knew where to look he could also make out the small black dots that silhouetted themselves against the white and gray clouds. And there were many of them, far more than he had ever seen. He had planned for some Flugscheiben, but not that many. He also had no choice, but to see the attack through.
"Hawker 01, this is Pursuit 01, many bogies seven klicks ahead, closing on my position. Over"
"Hawker 01 copies many bogies seven klicks ahead. Will proceed as planned. Out."
Hartmut Klawitter's flight was still flying at their somewhat sedate 250 kph cruise speed. The disks were faster, the pilot had reason to know. They seemed to get hotter the faster they flew, so there was a limit to what they could achieve. Still they closed with what seemed like warp speed. Klawitter's breath stopped at the thought of judging things wrong. He knew he wanted to end this right now, knew that would lead to disaster and silently counted to ten. Checking his screen and the enemy before him he saw that it was time.
"Come on down now Xune" was bad radio procedure and what had been agreed between the flight leaders two hours ago.
For a moment nothing seemed happen and Klawitter nearly despaired at the sight over ever more Flugscheiben coming into view.
A predator's shriek came through his headphones stopped the pilot's thoughts and made him look upwards. The dark cloud above the Flugscheiben birthed fast-moving shadows. Some blended into the gray, others stood out in red and gold. Nearly two dozen biplanes that aimed for the flying disks, aiming for their upper sides. Guns fired under the Pursuit Specials' wings, producing spectacular back-blasts that lit the clouds. Many of these shots missed, but those which connected destroyed the flying disks utterly. The Flugscheiben broke formation like a flock of alarmed crows while the Wild Geese's escorts dove through them accelerating as they went. They had provided an opening for Hartmut's flight and he intended to use it for all that was worth.
"All Helldiver's, this Pursuit 01. We are going in. Make it count people."
Klawitter pushed the throttle all the way forward and then engaged the nitrox. His plane accelerated quickly enough and he aimed the plane for a piece of sky with neither Flugscheibe nor biplane in it. All around him pandemonium raged. The Geese's fighters had executed S-turns, making half-loops and turning on their next targets on the ascent. The flying disks had scattered all over the sky, turning this way and that. They fired their autocannons at anything in the sky, be it in range our hopelessly outside. Tracers curved towards the sea or disappeared in the gray clouds. What the Flugscheiben did not do was break off and flee. Whether this was as the Geese did not use the guided missiles they no longer had, their numbers or something else was not clear to Klawitter. The Pursuit Specials had to close with their enemies, their own weapons were far too short-ranged to hit anything at range. And hit they must, as they had four shots per plane. The Flugscheiben's weapon was of similar range and a single hit would turn a Pursuit Special into so many splinters. The parachutes worn by the pilots would not save them even if they survived being shot down. The local water temperatures would kill them in under ten minutes even in their cold weather gear.
Hartmut saw a biplane dropping to the sea like a burning meteor and glowing pieces of steel that might have been a flying disk rain from the sky. The clouds above him lit with the weapons fire like a fiery thunderstorm and he flew through its center.
A flying disk appeared in front of his plane like magic. One second there was the clear sky, the next a dark shape flew directly towards Klawitter. The pilot pulled the trigger immediately and sent a stream of bullets towards the enemy which all bounced off harmlessly. Hartmut swore while a cold hand clutched his heart and fumbling fingers found the button screwed under the trigger.
Cannons have long been part of fighter's fixed forward armament. Calibers between 20 and 30 mm were usual, there were few examples which worked themselves up to 45 mm. Such guns would have ripped the Pursuit Special apart with recoil. Which was why the gun that fired under the left lower wing had a caliber of 105 mm.
Klawitter finally found the right button an electric current blew a primer in a huge cartridge case, igniting enough propellant for an L7 tank gun. Had this all worked on the shell that rested before it, it would have ripped the plane apart. As the gun was constructed only a tenth or so did that, the rest left the gun's rear through a venturi nozzle. As things stood the two forces cancelled each other out and a shell left the muzzle at a bit above the speed of sound. The shell should have been inside an Imperial gun truck, but had somehow found its way to the Wild Geese. For such a snapshot it flew remarkably true and impacted a bit off-center. The rounded shape pushed the shell's tip a bit further out before the fuze detonated. The shaped charge inside the shell converted its copper lining into a plasma jet travelling ten times the speed of sound. It burned away a huge amount of armor, leaving a glowing scar along the Flugscheibe's flank. Its own shots missed Klawitter's plane by a few meters and the German would have sworn he heard a shriek when he passed it. When he turned his head he found that the flying disk reversed course and sped after him.
Klawitter turned around and realized that there was no enemy before him, but a DawiZarr dreadnought below. Something clicked in his head and a grin split his face while he switched the nitrox off. Correcting course a bit he brought the plane into a half-roll that turned the churning sea above his head. Pulling the stick against his chest and feathering the prop was one act, turning the plane around again the next. He hardly realized that more tracers passed his plane from above and saw the muzzle flashes that reached for him from below.
The dive was an indiscernible sensation, something that filled the mind to the point where conscious thought was nearly absent. Time seemed to pass slowly and too fast at the same time. The ship below grew with every second and new details vied for his attention. He barely saw the kink in the ship's wake and was hardly aware of his course correction. His ears were filled with the engine's roar and the Flugscheibe's scream of hate. And then came the moment when he had to calculate just right. He was higher than during his last dive attack but he had been faster when he started the descent. If he pulled too late he would pancake himself against the ship. Too far up and he would miss the ship and give the Flugscheibe a chance. When a traitorous part of his mind was very sure it was by far too late he counted out a few seconds more before pulling the lever.
Below the plane a set of levers were freed from the pins that held them and rotated forward, taking the bomb they held with them. When they caught at their stop they released the former shell outside of the propeller's disk. Now he could pull the stick back again. This time he remembered to tense his stomach and leg muscles in an effort to keep as much blood as possible in his brain. And now it was his time to shout. He had been right, the flying disk was far too heavy and had followed him too deeply into the dive. It had no weight to drop like he had done and nearly no aerodynamic surfaces to convert its speed into altitude. The short glimpse he caught of it showed it glowing from whatever energies it used to fly and maybe the flash of an explosion from its gun port.
The g-forces he invoked with his pull up nailed him to his seat so that he could not watch and he saw his vision leech color again. This time he managed to keep his vision and wits about him, at least to the degree that he always knew where he was. When things became somewhat normal again he could finally bank the biplane to the point where he could observe his target. There was a huge column of water before the ship that made him cheer and a ship that showed no obvious damage. He was about to swear when he spotted an orange glow at the base of the front turret. He was still asking himself if he had really seen that when a huge geyser of flame erupted from that spot. The turret lifted itself from the ship, reaching an impressive height before dropping back down into the cold sea. The geyser had not stopped by that time and seemed intent to consume the whole ship. He now spotted the other DawiZharr dreadnaught. While the damage was not so spectacular there were copious black clouds of smoke and the ship had something of a list. Above and all around Hartmut biplanes turned and burned, trying to get into position for a kill on a flying disk. At the same time the faster disks tried to disengage, just so they could attack another plane. Several pairs of pursuit specials flew endless scissors, crossing the paths of their partners. That way they threatened every flying disk that tried to get into their wingmate's six.
Hartmut Klawitter could stop flying for the Wild Geese for now, he would fight for himself now. Selecting the right frequency on his screen he pushed the button for all all-birds call.
"All Leviathan elements, this is Pursuit 01. Mission accomplished folks, time to get going. If anybody needs to get rid of a bloody Scheibe, they cannot follow into deep dives."
He saw a plane doing just that and a disk which seemed to hesitate between diving too fast and too deep and not letting its prey go. Using the nitrox again Klawitter managed to close the distance and entered a shallow dive. He had to pay attention to his speed soon. He saw the plywood skin on his wings starting to flutter and the rudders became very hard to move indeed. He watched as the Flugscheibe grew in his windshield and leveled his plane as well as he could. When the disk filled two lines freshly painted on the glass he pulled the trigger all the way. Two recoilless guns roared, one on each side of his plane and two shells made for the enemy. One missed by a meter, the other impacted the raised section of the disk head on.
Klawitter twisted the plane away as hard as he could and still metal parts "thunked" into the wooden fuselage. The explosion that ripped the Flugscheibe apart was quite spectacular and Klawitter checked his plane for a few anxious seconds before deciding that nothing important had been shredded.
And with that it was over. What flying disks remained made their way to Karond Kar having failed to protect their charges. Hartmut Klawitter never breathed the rubbery air of his mask so gladly, he could hardly believe being alive. He needed a minute before the shudders subside and he had to fight his stomach which decided that now would be an excellent time to void itself. When that was done he used the wireless again.
"We did it folks, job's well done. We opened the door, next stop Karond Kar. Course 76, we go home. Element leaders, tally losses and landing priorities."
And then he dreaded the calls that would tell him how many of his pilots would not land on Leviathan.
Berlin, Office
Andrea Hermanns was late to the office and she knew it. She had all the excuses she needed, but for herself. Yesterday had been long, too fucking long. In the old days the final printout the committee on budgets produced had been hundreds of pages long. Now it went into Excel lines with high five digits and she rued the day when she had introduced the "what-if" function to the senior members. It had given them another toy to play with and play they did, until the early hours of the morning while she had made that possible.
In the end it was in a good cause, she had been allowed to slip a few lines in that were dear to her. Still she had used a lot of coffee this morning and she did not relish the cleanup she had to do today.
Beate, her assistant, was damnably chipper this morning and only the smell of more coffee rescued her from Andrea's wrath.
"Good morning dear, you look like you could use a cup or two. I had the cantina send over a few bread rolls. You can eat them while you have a look at this mess."
Andrea nearly choked on the scalding liquid. Did she scramble the master file of yesterday's marathon? Oh f…, it would take days to unscramble that. But she had saved that file a dozen times over so..
"What bloody mess?"
"This Studivz thing you set in motion before you left to do honest work. I had a look at it and something seems off."
That could not be that bad, couldn't it? How bad could her attempt to scare up some help among the students have gone? If some far-left group had gotten into that they could have filled the group with nonsense and hate.
She logged into the social network that the Weltensprung had saved from obscurity and looked into the group page she had created yesterday.
And lo and behold, it was full of messages. Scrolling down she looked for what went wrong and needed a few moments to realize what the problem was.
The internet is full of causes that somebody thinks worthy. A great of them never gain more attention than a few people, mostly by the "friends" that person had in the network.
Some issues find a following, a very few go viral. The latter usually needs time and a lot of work. This one had not.
This page was full of offers to help, of support, of wisdom and terrible naiveté. But mostly it was full, with enough traffic that it resembled a DDOS attack. She would have to contact the admins soon or the page would be shut down.
And she needed help and lots of it. A few names in the mess stuck out, she knew them. Or had heard of them. Time to contact them and soon.
Something would happen that was for sure. If it was something grand or an embarrassment was yet to be seen.
Andrea Hermanns swallowed. This exceeded her experience considerably and could well have a fallout for the SPD.
And then she started typing as quickly as her caffeinated hands would allow. She had given her word and now she would have to see this through to the best of her abilities.
She did not have the time to wonder what had made her plea go viral like this. She should have given it a bit more thought, not that it would have made things better.
Trench, 500 meters from Neustadt's first wire belt
The Druchii's helmet had a coal-scuttle shape and covered with a net that held a bit of dried foliage and some white cloth strips. More cloth was wound around the telescope in order to break up its regular shape. The face behind it was slender as a rapier, hid an eye behind a patch, and was covered in mud and green paint.
The body below lacked nearly any armor but for a chest piece that held a Sea Dragon skin under some metal plates. The rest was gray and green cloth and a webbing that held various bits of kit. A rifle was on the soldier's back and a revolver was on the hip. There was a single blade and that looked more useful for trench work than for taking lives.
Kouran Darkhand would have dismissed the Druchii as a wimp when she avoided being exposed to the enemy as much as possible last month. Now he had learned a few costly lessons about the new face of war and restrained himself. He would use any and all means to fulfil Malekith's commands, and if that meant listening to this grunt he would. The Black Guard's commander knew that the elf before him would have been beneath his notice a few years before. Of low birth she had not excelled in the deadly power exchange that dominated Druchii life. Her one stroke of luck had been being attached to Lord Silverhawk's forces, who had been among the first to receive the new weapons.
She had fought for Silverhawk ever since the first Chaos invasion and the stumpies ever since. And when so many others had died, she had lived and learned. And Kouran Darkhand needed that knowledge very much. But not as much as the troops that would follow her advance party.
Racca Dawneyes had taken many notes with one of these newfangled pencils and made some sketches. Now she finally stepped from the parapet and dropped below the trench's lip into what went for safety here.
"That's a bitch and a half and no lies about that. Whoever gave the slaves that much time to dig in should spend the rest of his days on the rack. I would have given a tit for so much barbed wire the last year and there are trenches, support trenches and bunkers. Fuck, even the damned stumpies did not dig that well. We'll bleed like mad breaking these lines, that's for sure. Hope you are not in a hurry about that, otherwise we check if we have more bodies or they have more bullets."
Racca Daweneyes had been through a year of unaltered hell and she had no longer any shits to give. A year ago Kouran would have killed her as she stood, now he needed her and those like her, badly.
