(Hello everyone! I know it has been some time since I last posted but her I am again. Now that the summer is coming to a close for me I am able to write more. I have decided to post as part of my profile description the times when I will be updating or adding stories, you can look there for more information. But I will let you guys read. I hope you enjoy!)

Chapter 4: Sinking the ship of life.

"Convoy raiding?"

"Yes." Said the German officer. "The Fuhrer he has great expectations of you despite your differences at your meeting. He asked the Oberkommando to send you out immediately. The Oberkommando wishes you to start by sinking a convoy that is en route to the country of Norway from the British Isles."

"Convoy raiding?" Eugen repeated the question. For five days she had been at the pier waiting to be sent out. Soldiers had taken up positions at the pier to "guard" her. In reality, it was a security measure. They were obviously scared of her. She had not been allowed to leave the ship. Every time she made an attempt to leave, she found guns trained her way. Rather than create conflict, she had contented herself aboard her vessel running calculations at maximum speed and dragging up as much knowledge as she had in her databanks about World War 2. And on the fifth day she had noticed an important looking man waiting to board her. She was expecting a little more than raiding out of Nazi Germany. She hoped if anything that she would get to battle the military might of the allied forces, but no. Instead she was relegated to sinking cargo. Unfitting for a heavy cruiser of her power. She wasn't happy.

"Yes. the convoy that you are to sink is actually a convoy of special interest. It is loaded with weapons and troops the allies intend to use against us in the battle for Norway. Your job is to sink it. No transport ship is to escape."

"Are there any escorts?"

"No. However the convoy is composed of armed merchant cruisers. There will be some resistance, but for a vessel of your status, they should not be able to inflict much against you."

"Those mean nothing to me. When do I depart?"

"As soon as you and your...crew...are ready." Said the german officer. Clearly he was still confused about her crewless situation. He handed Eugen a sealed envelope and left in a hurry. Eugen stared off after him with a mix of confusion, anger, curiosity, and depression. Shunting out her emotions, she focused on the task at hand. The mooring lines that were attached to her vessel were sliced clean through by the quick activation of her Klein field. The soliders gaped as her tribal markings glowed with an unholy power. Engaging her graviton drive, she quickly left the port and before a german could yell schnitzel, she was out in open ocean, leaving Kiel a dwindling speck in her wake.

Eugen didn't have to open the envelope. She knew all it contained was the details of the convoy she was to sink, but she already knew. Operation FP, a plan with which to supply Norway with troops from the British Isles. There were three convoy's involved in the operation. She was to sink the first one. El Kantara, El Mansour, Franconia, and Ville d'Oran were the transports involved, all of them armed merchant cruisers. They would be ferrying troops to bolster Norway's defense. It wasn't like she couldn't handle them. It was just so...boring. She could probably take down the entirety of the British forces if she had to, although it would be a hellish fight. She had asked if there were escorts solely to check if the British had noticed her presence in the world, but it appeared they did not. Humans are so stupid. Fog warships are considerably faster than human vessels. The convoy would be traveling at around ten knots while she could easily make eighty. She was already positioned on the route the convoy would take by the time noon came a day earlier than the convoy would be departing! She wondered if it would be a wise idea to simply destroy all allied forces that came her way regardless of what Germany's admirals had intended, but she decided against it solely because she did not need to fight a war on two fronts.

Prinz Eugen did not like waiting however.

She couldn't blame the humans. It would have taken an ordinary vessel at least two days to reach the intercept point and probably a lot more if weather wasn't permitting. They had taken a note of her speed before when she saved the Lutzow, but they probably hadn't banked on her top speed.

Instead Eugen contented herself with self calculations. All she wanted was to return to her own time. If her sensors hadn't died when the vortex sucked her in, she probably could have built a similar device out of spare nanomaterial to get her home. The Fog knew how to manipulate space very well.

Time travel on the other hand, was something the Fog did not know how to do very well. Sifting through her databanks, she found a bit based on time travel written by a foreign Fog science and repair vessel. They must have gotten bored and wrote the article. Eugen opened up the article and read it on a holodisplay out loud to herself to block out the sound of the birds overhead.

"Most humans described time travel as dangerous, for any mucking with the past could potentially drastically alter the future. They called this the butterfly effect. In the infinity of space however, there are many different ways you can time travel. Time is always represented as an entity perceives it. A theory I have evolved is that time is like a piano. Each key on the piano is a moment in time. By human reasoning, you could travel back down your own key, change something in the past, and therefore alter the future."

"But it is also equally true that you can travel across key's. Take the moment in time you are in right now. Your time progresses while the key beside you travels at one moment slower than you. On your other side, you have one key which is one moment ahead of you. If one could in theory, jump between keys, they would effectively be traveling through time. Go backwards among the keys and you are going back moments in time. It is simply a matter of finding which key you wish to travel to. You could also go forward in time as well, jumping to the key that is directly in front of you-"

Eugen closed the article there. It sounded false to her. Though a small part of her hoped that the ship who decided to write the article was correct about time. She was afraid. Already she had altered the past quite a bit just by assisting the Lutzow and meeting with Adolf Hitler. Who knew what effect that would have on the future. However if she was correct and that was how time worked, essentially Eugen was free to do whatever she wanted. It would only change the way that this key of time progressed and that was ok, for perhaps infinitely behind her there would be infinite numbers of World War 2's that would eventually happen. No one would be hurt by it in the future.

"What I am thinking?" Eugen reconfigured her processors. The universe wouldn't be that nice to her. It had dragged her here after all.

*Interlude*

Morning broke across the ocean, casting it's pinkish glow everywhere. Eugen woke up from her self-hibernation, and immediately reconfigured her body so she wouldn't have to stretch. A holodisplay appeared beside her. Four ships were in convoy formation coming directly towards her. She stood up from her captains chair and stared outwards. She could see the transports on the horizon. She decided to wait before dropping her Klein Camouflage. Another aspect of Klein fields was that they could be configured to bend light around objects and render them invisible, however the time it took to set up such a system made it pretty much worthless to the Fog. And even standard Fog sensors could still detect the Klein field as well as the wake that any ship created in the water. So no one ever used it.

Here however, it would be a great shock to the approaching convoy.

The four ships advanced closer, with the El Kantara ahead of the others. The Prinz Eugen wasn't moving, so they would never see her wake. They were sailing straight to their doom.

At five hundred yards, Eugen decided to let loose her frustrations with the universe.

The Klein Camouflage dropped and Eugen appeared right in front of the transports, it's yellow glare bathing the merchant cruisers with light. The Prinz Eugen's two forward turrets fired their photon charges. The yellow beams punched easily through the bow of the El Kantara and pierced straight through the entire vessel, killing everyone inside. The ship exploded with a loud "BOOM" Pieces of metal rained into the sea. Only after the El Kantara had been reduced to a flaming wreck did the other ships realize what had happened.

Except there was nothing they could do about it.

Eugen sidekicked her vessel to her port, spinning it at an alarming speed to bear her two aft turrets on the remaining vessels. Her AA defenses opened up, spitting fire at the crew on board the enemy ships. One of the gunners on the merchant cruiser Franconia managed to fire off a shell from the cruiser's battery, which promptly exploded against Prinz Eugen's Klein field with no effect. Instead he was vaporized as a beam from one of the SK C/30 10.5cm secondaries on Prinz Eugen punched through the turret like a strong man's fist through a cardboard box. Eugen split the fire of her forward and aft turrets. One set targeting the El Mansour while the other set targeted the Ville d'Oran, which was beginning a wide turn probably in an effort to escape. The secondary batter made quick work of the Franconia, which also exploded in a fiery blaze. The El Mansour suffered a slow death as the initial volley from the main battery missed important components, instead cooking the insides very nicely. But the secondary battery tore the El Mansour asunder and it too was going to sink, splitting in half as she began to go under. The Ville d'Oran had only taken four beams. But it was listing badly. Prinz Eugen turn all her weapons to face the stricken vessel. For a moment, she stared from her starboard bridgewing at the crew of the Ville d'Oran, who looked back at her with terror and rage.

It didn't last long. She blew them apart with full salvo.

Smoke plied high into the air from the sinking ships. Eugen released the energy her Klein had absorbed to her stern, and sailed through the wreckage. She looked down on the destruction she had caused.

They were calling to her, the survivors, asking to be saved.

There was nothing she could do. With no way to get off the ships they would soon be sucked under by the vessels that once bore them across the ocean. And Eugen didn't have any lifeboats or any way to save them. She could only look at the destruction she caused. Her eyes alighted on one soldier who was holding a picture that was signed from the flames. He sat on a floating piece of metal. Eugen's far vision could make out only the large details. It was a picture of what appeared to be a girl. The soldier wept, muttering apologies before the floor he stood on was pulled under by the sinking transport. He looked up at her and while she couldn't hear him, she could read his lips.

"You monster."

Then the soldier was sucked away into the depths. The picture was left floating on the ocean surface swirling from the current.

Eugen didn't know what it was that made her retrieve the picture, but she did. She tossed aside her uniform and dove off the side into the sea, using her personal Klein field to pull the picture towards her, then she kicked powerfully using her enhanced muscles to the surface and used the Klein again to create a small platform to bound back up to the deck of her vessel.

She was soaking wet. She dissolved her mental model she had and reformed it, shedding the water onto the deck. She took a look at the picture. It was either the man's daughter or younger sister. She appeared to be about twelve, with two blond pigtails wearing a white dress and she had a face of gold. A human would have commented her as pretty. But Eugen saw something different.

A girl who's father she had just killed.

For the first time, Eugen felt something in her emotion processors. It wasn't the first time she had seen people die. Why should this feel any different. Yet roiling in her processors was a unusual pain that she couldn't reconfigure. She shook uncontrollably and hugged herself, dropping the picture to the floor. The Prinz Eugen cleared the debris field and began traveling to Kiel.

What had she done?

To be continued...