The trip to the United Kingdom was an interesting one. The trains brought you most of the way, through Poland and stopping shortly in Berlin to switch to another line. You were only paused for a few short hours, not enough time to do all the things you'd sworn you'd do in the country (visit Damenklub Violetta, raise the Soviet flag over the Reichstag, bang Marlene Dietrich...), but just long enough to see a few Luftstreitkräfte planes thunder overhead. The German Republic didn't have an air force until the war started, they weren't allowed under the treaty, but they did have aircraft genius Hugo Junker building them cutting-edge racing planes. Three of them thundered over, narrow tandem-winged darts with long noses concealing massive V12 engines, their lines unbroken by need for radiators due to evaporation cooling systems.
"They can do 670kph." Cait muttered beside you, as the droning of their engines subsided.
"Bullshit." Your replied.
"It's true. Downside is all it's got is an MG in the spinner. There wasn't any room for anything else."
Berlin was something of a hub for war material passing through central Europe, so you got to test your newfound linguistic comprehension on a dozen different languages, from the conductors on the platforms yelling themselves hoarse to the jokes passing between Polish troops, Italian pilots, and Danish supply officers. At one point you got turned around looking for a washroom and found yourself in a gaggle of Czech and Slovak pilots, who almost physically carried you along as they rushed to make their train heading for Belgium. The shear international scale of it all, invisible in the far reaches of the Soviet Union, was finally unfolding before you, and you were blessed to be able to understand it all.
"Oi! Red! You're train's that way, platform eighteen!
Acht-zehn, yeah? Urgh, you can't understand a word! Fucking... Rupert! I have a lost commie here, anyone speak Russian?" One of the platform managers yelled out, clearly exhausted off her feet from the constant pace. You nodded to her in thanks and rushed past to your platform, stepping on the train just in time.
You got off the train somewhere in northern France, right on an airbase on the coast. French fighters, squat pusher-planes with looming twenty millimeter cannons jutting from the nose, were lined up in neat rows waiting to scramble, and you swore staring out over the water you could actually
see England.
Quickly, your planes were rolled off the train and their wings put back on, mechanics running quick checks. The Brits and your ground crew were being brought over by transport plane, but you were flying yourself over. And quickly too: night was falling soon, and there were dark clouds on the horizon.
---
Three weeks later...
"Bloody hell, they're at it again, huh?" Hawkins muttered. Outside, there was a rumble from a blast somewhere, and the clatter of a rapid-fire AA gun from the base.
"We're not moving until we scramble, remember." You replied.
"I know, but I wish I was up there. Boys in the Defiants getting chewed up these days." He replied. The night fighting was mostly being done by these odd monoplanes called Defiants, which had rear turrets but no forward guns. Weren't any use during the day, but at night when setting up attack runs was almost impossible they were much more effective. They would just slide under enemy formations and shoot them to pieces.
You'd seen almost nothing of the city, just scrambled up for some terrifying fighting. On the wing of RAF planes during the day, battling the Invader's air superiority squadrons non-stop, and then a few times at night, as their bombers came overhead and indiscriminately dropped ordinance on London and every other city in the country. It was only getting worse, every night.
You regretted more than anything calling it a phony war.
You were currently stationed in an RAF base just outside the city, a manor converted to a headquarters that had a long, flat field to launch from, and hangers disguised as groves of trees. All the purpose-build airfields in the country were smoking ruins now. Wasn't that way a week ago.
You glanced out the window of the manor, watching the tracers dance across the sky, the flashes of light in the dark city. It must be terrible, huddling in the subway system, listening the world come apart above. There were explosives, and fire bombs and concussive blasts and other such terrible things, but the Invaders had otherworldly weapons that were just as terrible. The worst were the shard bombs, these awful things with no explosion or concussive effect, just shattering like glass into a million razor-sharp pieces that could cut apart bodies if you were caught by it, or right through boots and flesh and bone if you walked on them later. Every morning they had to get special teams to clear it out of the streets.
The worst part was you couldn't just go up and fight it. They couldn't waste you on that. You were waiting for a solid portal to show up that planes could get into and out of, which wasn't frequent, and the times it did happen and you made a mad rush for it you'd been intercepted or the portal had closed or something had gone wrong. It was beginning to feel hopeless.
You turned back to your magazine. While the Babel headphones didn't inherently give you understanding of how to speak or read other languages, it made it much, much easier to learn. You'd had to speak to a few Brits that hadn't been subject to it yet, and it was easier than it ought to be to find the right English words. Likewise, though you still didn't really understand English as it was written, once you got an understanding of the sound the letters made, aided by your high school classes, you started to be able to sound it out and understand about half the words.
... that said, you weren't reading
Belles for the articles.
You were shaken from your pleasant daydreams about cute English girls wearing Tommy helmets and little else when the door to the ready room flew open, a cute English girl with a Tommy helmet and everything else yelling at you.
"Scramble, scramble!"
---
The briefing was taking place over radio, there was simply no time for anything else. Your I-16 was already running when you made it to the hanger and climbed aboard, a mechanic's hand steady on your back in case the weight of the parachute pulled you off balance. You dropped into the cockpit, latched the safety belt, pulled down your goggles, and opened the throttle. There wasn't even taxiing to do: the field was wide enough that everyone would just buzz straight up and out from the hangers.
Within ten minutes, you were heading for the waypoint, out over the water. There was a portal in the English channel that had formed almost instantly to disengorge bombers and their escorts. Normally they came in from the north, so it had just looked like a light flight. Most of the RAF's planes were out of position.
"At least the French will be right there." Williamson added, the radio crackling. "Might intercept some."
"Negative. The frogs are tied up over Normandy, there's an attack on the port. Defiant squadron Gold will be following you in." RAF Command, callsign 'Nest', tended to be a set of indistinguishable female voices, all of them dead calm no matter what was happening. The RAF elements of the squadron were Sparrow, while the Soviet half was Robin. You were Robin 2.
"Roger that. Gold leader, this is Robin leader, we're five minutes out, how's your situation." Natalya, Robin leader, broadcast.
"We're on standby on the coast, Robin. We wanna get stuck in before those bombs make it overland, so hurry it up!"
The sky was pitch black, save for the occasional blink of the formation lights on Robin and Sparrow leaders. But as you crossed over London, over the fires burning in the streets below, in places so bright you could see the other planes silhouetted in it, you almost wished for that darkness again.
Finally, you crossed over the city and were heading out to sea. Out to the objective. Out to another world.
Roll 3d10 drop Highest, +Calm.
