The Breakout

Even after they passed Læsø and the guns there, they still had to pass additional batteries posted at Skagen on the northernmost tip of the Jutland Peninsula. The fleet held 29kts as they moved to the northwest through the Kattegatt.

Hermione and Bellatrix were shoulder to shoulder, looking to port, to the west—across the deck of the carrier. Her aeroplanes were struck below, and that was good, as the batteries on Læsø had managed to slip three shells past them. There was a crew still fighting the fire which had started aft, but, it was aft, so the wind across the deck as the Admiral Kornilov moved at speed kept it confined to the stern of the ship.

It was small enough either of them could easily extinguish it, but they were busy at the moment. "The problem is there's so many of them!" Bella exclaimed with a laugh. Her wand work was always unpredictable, and Hermione was pressed hard to keep up and keep their spells coordinated.

"Muggles, or shells?" Hermione asked a bit trenchantly.

But Bella's eyes just flashed in bemusement. "Idiots trying to stop us," she corrected, and it made even Hermione grin.

Sometimes it seemed like half of War was just a variation on Protego for a witch, though. But Bellatrix could still layer and manipulate the spells to derange even complex attacks with an airy confidence. Every one of the guns was firing at the Kornilov—she was the largest ship in the breakout force by far—and the shells splashing columns high in the water, the smoke in the air—much of it intentionally laid by the destroyers and frigates to cover her—was completed by the crazy ricochet of projectiles, while others detonated in air.

Hermione was proud when she kept pace, feeling some of the crackling, competitive energy from the shorter, older witch. The Brightest Witch of Her Age… As Hermione's wand snapped, she couldn't help but ask. "Who called you the Brightest first?"

"Slughorn! He probably wanted to network with my father." Bellatrix cackled, as another spell shot from her wand. "You?"

"McGonagall!" Hermione answered.

"Of course she would, you fucking Gryffindor. Nothing brings out house rivalries quicker than some trite informal title."

"Trite informal title that means a lot to you, Bella!"

"And you, Granger!" It was always Granger when Bella got worked up, but at least now it was reliably Granger.

Hermione's eyes had never left the scene to the southwest. The guns firing from Skagen were like a painting, puffs of white in the distance, columns of water churned white close by. Particularly with the banter between them, it did not at all feel like combat. She could see the explosions and fires from where the Su-24s supporting them were hitting targets, both near and far. One of their jobs was to suppress any land-based anti-ship missile batteries.

Then there were the ships of the squadron themselves, closer in, making time through the water, their wakes trailing out long, smoke generators running hard to obscure them from the enemy. They held their active countermeasures in reserve, against the real danger—truck-mounted anti-ship missiles being brought up to engage them. The destroyers were moving at thirty-four knots, zig-zagging and laying smoke, while the Admiral Kornilov ran flat out in a straight line at 29kts behind the cover they provided.

There was a fundamental challenge, a tension between magic and technology, in defending the ship. The powerful radars of the Kashtan CIWS mounts could be brought up to target incoming missiles, if they were launched from trucks along the shore—and it was hard to blow up every truck in the north of Jutland. Would they get all of them? If they didn't, the unpredictable combination of magic cast on the deck and the sophisticated electronics on the ship being brought on-line was inherently a risk, and with the two being mutually exclusive, you had to choose one or the other to defend each ship with. So the choice came down to when it was witches or technology that would be more effective in a particular situation. Soon enough, they were confronted with the choice.

It was one of Hermione's charms that gave her the warning, an enchanted bracelet on her left wrist that glowed without heat. She grimaced. "Bella, there's something else coming in!"

"Mmmn, they're coming for us hard," Bellatrix spun in the direction that Hermione pointed. Despite her comment, she was grinning, as if she knew a secret that no-one else knew.

The ship's speakers crackled: "Missile launch detected! – at least four signatures!"

"Hermione, Intruder Periculum," the elder witch instructed after a moment, a particularly devious smile cross her face as she leaned upon the railing.

"That's just a – okay." She cast the warning charm. It was wide effect, release a starburst of red sparks in the sky when it was passed through. And the missiles were coming on fast.

Bellatrix grabbed the bridge intercom. "I'll take care of it. Don't break your radars," she teased in Russian, a hint of mocking in her voice. She was, as ever, far more confident of magic than any of technology. And she clearly had something in mind. It was a testament to how far things had come, too, that the Admiral trusted her implicitly. There was no debate, just a single word acknowledgement. Then Bella raised her wand and began to prepare an incantation. Hermione looked to her sharply for a minute, and then took a breath and decided to trust her.

The missiles passed through the zone of warning, and blossoms of red sparkles in the darkened sky illuminated their course for them in a flash. Tens of kilometres away, there were still only seconds to respond, and Hermione's magic had done her part. She had to trust that Bellatrix was not going to allow the ship that they were on to be hit hard by the cruise missiles. In fact, like it or night, thousands of Russian sailors were essentially dependent on the pureblood witch's estimation of her own abilities actually being correct.

Bellatrix had her targets, and the arc of her wand was now completed sharply. Fat bolts of purple and red and blue lighting arced from the leaden clouds hanging low in the sky and converged across the horizon, on certain courses. "Elektra Testuda!" She cried, culminating the spell with a gleeful and genuinely happy cackle.

Hermione's eyes widened. She said she hadn't performed her magic of electricity since Azkaban. She never said that she could perform a defensive spell in it, either. A defensive spell in electric magic! For a moment, she felt just the childlike awe of seeing Bellatrix do something absolutely new, which confirmed her talent which had won her the title of the Brightest Witch of Her Age those decades before.

Electric magic. It was something that the murderer, the terrorist, the Death Eater had never done, but that her Bella just had.

The missiles went wild, not because of a physical effect or a curse, but because of the electrical field ruining their guidance systems and computers, causing a kind of directed chaos which Bellatrix prolonged with the motion of her wand, driving them up and then down, plunging them into the sea, and sending others spinning around, back to the south, back toward Jutland.

Bellatrix nodded archly as the other wizards cheered her display of power. A second salvo of missiles came in, and again, the fat bolts of lightning were conjured as the flashy, outward symbol of an electrical field effect across the battlefield, which seized control of the circuits in the incoming Harpoon missiles. With her banner of windswept hair streaming behind her, she conducted an orchestra of energy within the circuits of the missiles, and diverted the second group.

There's eight, Hermione thought, bringing the warning charms back up again. The MinKol wizards and witches were continuing their regular shielding against the incoming artillery fire, which certainly hadn't stopped. The sea battlefield still spread around them. The destroyers were on the edge of the area of protection, but they needed to be there to properly screen the Admiral Kornilov. So far, though, Bellatrix had protected them as well.

Now the enemy understood something unexpected had happened. They fired their last two salvoes—another eight missiles—simultaneously in an attempt to overwhelm whatever this defence was. Bellatrix smirked and laughed, as if the challenge to her skill only amused her. But it was twice the difficulty, now.

The warning charms alerted in starbursts of red across the sky, like flares blossoming in patterns, Hermione's magic marking the positions for Bella, so that she could call forth her power across the right area of effect. One after the other, she sent the missiles turning back or plunging into the sea, almost a dance with her wand, manipulating the circuitry across an invisible bridge of magic in the air connecting her wand and its motions into the input controls and sensor feeds of the missiles.

For seven of them, it worked just fine. For the eighth, it wandered too far outside the area of effect. The defending ship was one of the Sovremenny-class destoryers, Projekt 956 "Sarych". She took the missile well aft, in the hangar, with a crack of yellow light and a flaring explosion in red, a column of smoke rising to mingle with that she was intentionally creating aft.

Hermione could see parts of the ship rising, consumed in the flames. She could tell the destroyer, moving at high speed, at once caught on fire. She knew that dozens of men were killed or mortally injured in a heartbeat. But it was so much more distant than war on land for her, too. The destroyer hove out to starboard, to the east, crossing behind them. There were no more missiles forthcoming. The shells of the enemy were starting to fall well short, too. They had passed out of range of the battery at Skagen.

The expression on Bella's face had fallen. "Well, it was fifteen out of sixteen," she muttered. "And their job was to protect the Admiral Kornilov. We protected the Admiral Kornilov."

"It was," Hermione agreed. They both stood at the ready, until they were freezing in the bitter cold, waiting for the resumption of combat. Just because it seemed like the fighting was over didn't mean it actually was.

Hermione watched the destroyer past behind them, and then make her way to the north, slowing, but staying underway. Based on their course and speed, she expected they had been ordered to make for shelter in the Oslofjord, probably so that after repairs were completed, they could join the rest of the fleet at Stavanger. Gothenburg was much closer, but would mean accepting that the ship was bottled up in the Kattegatt.

Several of the MinKol personnel on the bridge turned away and went below-decks, summoned to help fight the fire aft. That kept Bellatrix and Hermione on duty as the temperature continued to fall as they stood out deeper into the Skagerrak, and the land behind them to the south disappeared. The fires, with magical help, were quickly extinguished, and temporary steel matting was welded into place over the shell-holes in the after flight deck. The arresting gear were checked out and confirmed, and an hour and a half after they had cleared the batteries at Skagen and broken out into the North Sea, the first of the Mig-29Ks were coming up onto the deck, loaded for strike with laser-guided bombs. Because in naval combat between ships, there would frequently be an opportunity for only a single mission, and it must be either win or die, the Naval Aviation forces received all the most advanced remaining technology for strike purposes.

The fleet now turned to the southwest off Arandal on the coast of Aust-Agder in Norway. They would be able to stay at least one hundred kilometres away from Jutland at all points from here. The fleet now consisted of the Admiral Kornilov with six Project 956 destroyers, most of them of the modified type originally intended for China; one Projekt 11551the Admiral Chabanenko—as well as the frigate Neustrashimyy, three Talwar-class frigates originally built for India, and two older frigates of Projekt 1135. Fourteen ships breaking out into the North Sea in formation, no longer zig-zagging but instead holding 29kts to the Southwest as the strike squadron of Migs was spotted on the deck and the first were positioned on the catapults. The Kornilov was the only Russian carrier to have them, and they made this operation so much more possible, because it increased the loads they could carry into combat.

Hermione distantly watched the flight group begin to launch their strike, the roar of the jets drowning out any ability to talk with anyone on the wing of the bridge, the steam swirling off the catapult track and trailing behind the ship. They had been so focused on the tactical engagement that Hermione wasn't even sure what they were attacking! But it didn't matter, that was the Admiral's job. The crew cheered as the heavily laden strike aircraft hurled down the deck and into the leaden sky, the St. Andrew's Cross whipping from the yardarm on the side of the funnel, in the sharp cold wind across the deck.

What did matter was the intensely pale colour that had come over Bella's skin, the way that, standing watch, and now quiet after the missile hit on the ship, she was starting to shiver. The sailors talking around them (before the air operations cut them off) had identified the damaged ship as the Bespokoynyy. 'Restless'. Perhaps her name fit. Hermione turned back to her. "It will be fine. They will make port, I am sure of it. Your magic saved us all. I admit, that you're upset about the lives of four hundred muggles matters to me," Hermione offered a smile.

"Oh damn it, I'm just cold, Granger. And I'm not upset about the lives of four hundred muggles, I'm upset that I wasn't perfect. I finally did it, but it wasn't perfect."

Hermione stepped closer to the shorter woman. "Perfect is the enemy of Good Enough, especially in combat. Also, that was the first time you had ever used that spell in earnest, wasn't it?"

"It was," Bellatrix admitted with a shake of her head. "I had …" She shook her head violently and turned away.

The All-Clear finally sounded. They might come under attack again soon, but now, the witches were not needed for a moment; it was time to eat, to drink tea, to rest.

"Come on, Bella," Hermione insisted. The other woman gave no resistance as they went into the interior of the ship's tower again, which was almost luxuriously hot from the steam heat off the reactor. She helped the exhausted older witch doff her greatcoat before she started sweating. Bella in her British Army uniform was quite distinctive to the other uniforms aboard, but also attended immediate respect because of her rank.

However, she just waved aside the salutes with her gloved left hand and headed promptly for the Officer's Mess. The glove essentially never came off, and Hermione had made peace with respecting Bella's shame over it. Regardless, she was ravenous, and there was a big hot dish of Makaroni po-flotski and countless blazing hot carafes of tea lined up on counters which had metal racks to keep them from falling off as the ship rolled in the sea, in a room painted some off yellow with a mass of pipes running the ceiling—but there were paintings on the walls, and tablecloths on the tables. It was an officer's mess; and both food and tea seemed like an impossible luxury after the hours and hours of fighting and freezing in that strangely distant sort of battle which was defending a ship at sea. It didn't seem like they had been doing much, but the warmth reminded her just how much its absence had cut into her bones.

By now in her life, Hermione well understood that feeling of exhaustion from a sudden release of tension. It had felt clinical, isolated, and distant to fight like they just had, but the slightest mistake could lead to instant death. So it felt like you were playing a game—catch the artillery shell with one spell or another, see how fast you could cast Protego—but in a single heartbeat, you knew inside that it could instantly turn into a very real death.

Hermione realised she had been shivering, just like Bellatrix. But the steaming glasses of tea and the plates banished any other thought. She didn't even care what the meat in the dish was, it was just hot, and delicious, with the thin sauce, all velvety, coating the pasta which meant it had been cooked with some flour, and of course, the butter, caramelized onion, and parsley. There was some varenye for the tea, and Hermione might as well have been in heaven, the fruit it had been made with hardly mattered. She probably scalded her throat a little with how fast she ate and drank, and she didn't care one damned bit. It felt impossibly good, like there wasn't enough food in the world to sate one's hunger or tea to quench one's thirst, so she'd just eat and drink forever—you'd get quite fat if you always felt that way, but of course, it was really the way you felt only after you had been working desperately hard in the cold for hour after hour. There was no other feeling like that in all the world.

Hermione's frantic eating and drinking slowed. She felt sated as few things could accomplish. Anyone who thinks chocolate is better than sex must have eaten it after running around dancing outside for twelve hours in -30C, she snarked to herself. "Bella, to get back to what I was saying before… That was amazing. I want to learn the Elektraworking myself." She spoke in English, to give them some privacy.

Bellatrix didn't answer. She just got up, and refilled her tea, and returned to the seat, looking down at it, and ignoring Hermione.

"Bella… I know you're obsessive. And right then and right there, you were probably…"

"Obsessed with being perfect," Bellatrix acknowledged with a grimace. "Don't think of blaming me for it, Granger. I was required to be perfect as the eldest Black daughter, growing up."

"Then how did you ever start to develop electricity-working yourself? You had to have made mistake after mistake to finally get it right." Hermione leaned forward. Magic was trial and error. She wanted to say, without Voldemort you could have been the most famous Witch of the 20th century, you could have invented an entire class of Magic. They'd have had to add another Professoriate at Hogwarts, and you'd be the Professor. Hermione knew better than to say such a thing, though. It would either enrage Bella or crush her feelings, or, most likely, both.

But Bellatrix still responded sharply. She dropped her tea onto the table with a clatter. It landed upright, and there was just a splash, across that gloved hand, and a fleck which hit Hermione's chin and burned for a brief moment. Bellatrix, though, had grabbed Hermione's lapels, and leaned in close. "Hermione Granger, I was comfortable enough to risk making mistakes then because I was loved. And I dared to test defending the fleet like this because …" She trailed off, unable to say it even now, when they were officially in a relationship and her sisters approved of it.

Hermione grinned. "Because you love me?" She hazarded, and then waved a hand at someone making a half-hearted move to get up (you generally let flag officers do whatever they wanted), and switched to Russian: "It's fine, the General just gets intense."

"I should stupefy the lot of them and then obliviate every single one," Bella muttered, sinking back into her chair with a look of disgust that so many muggles had witnessed that between the two of them. "Come on, we're both done with the food, let's go talk somewhere else." She got up, and Hermione followed her; both women topped their tea off before leaving the mess.

Right to Bella's cabin, the larger one, of course. It was the same size as the Admiral's. The chairs were upholstered. The bed was big enough, that if they wanted to risk being naked when the ship came under attack again—they were still at stations, just relaxed from imminent battle condition, and Hermione knew it was just a matter of time—they could do something amazingly stupid.

Actually, that's a dumb thought. You're too tired to even take your clothes off, Hermione told herself. It was the tiredness that made such dumb thoughts…

Bellatrix kicked back in one of the chairs with her glass of tea, and regarded Hermione archly. "You keep reassuring me, but the reality is, I experimented with your life, my life, the lives of all the MinKol personnel in the fleet, and oh yes, the muggles."

"Every new weapon, tactic, spell, it's all got to be tried in combat sooner or later. You never told me that your electric magic included combat spells, though," Hermione shrugged. "I don't think it was risky. Do you think the CIWS could have gotten 15 for 16? I just wished you'd trusted me to go over the plan in advance."

Bella gritted her teeth. "I'm only turning that magic to war, because of Delphi, because of you. In the end, there's nothing that war doesn't touch."

Hermione sucked in her breath, her face seized in a moment of pensive wonder. "Did you hide it from The Dark Lord?"

"Don't be ridiculous, Granger," Bellatrix rolled her eyes. "I never explained it all to the Dark Lord because he wouldn't be interested, because it was magic that was mostly for manipulating things from the muggle world. Caring enough about the electrical world to make it a study of magic—hah, that was my perversion." She laughed, that manic laugh. "Not my only one."

"I'm not a perversion, thank you," Hermione answered tartly. "In fact, beyond the fact that you need to work on calling me Hermione or 'Mione or something else to reflect the fact we've already told your daughter I'm going to be her second mum, it might just be time for you to realise that you're making an assumption. You thought he wouldn't care. But in fact, for all his pretensions about the purity of the Wizarding world, the Dark Lord would have happily gobbled up any technique or tactic which gave him more power. You were keeping something to yourself because it mattered to you, no matter how you rationalised it."

Bella stared at her, her eyes rather wide, her hands unsteady on her glass of tea. Finally, she grimaced. "Don't try to psychometricise me, Hermione, or whatever that muggle pseudoscience is. That's not what I want our relationship to be about."

"Psychoanalyze," Hermione corrected with a grin. She didn't need Bellatrix to admit it, for it to be confirmed in her own heart.

"Just what I need to waste my brain on—muggle neologisms."

Then the tender moment, tea and warmth was all cut off with a jerk; the alarm sounded; the battle was going again.


Notes:

1. Because of the canonical interference of magic with electricity, I assume that the manipulation of electricity was a recent discovery, so far only known to Bellatrix-she is the brightest witch of her age for a reason! But forms of magic dealing with subjects outside of the norm will be a feature as we move forward, and not just here.

2. Project 956 Sarych is called the Sovremenny-class destroyer in the west.

3. Project 1155 Fregat and Project 11551 Fregat-M are the Udaloy/Udaloy II class, in this case, the only Udaloy II.

4. The Talwar class was identified in the western style because this is what the Indians do; in Russian service they would be called Project 11356.

5. Project 1135 is the Krivak class.

6. The Neustrashimyy is the sole ship of her class here-Project 11540. The hulls of the others would have been lost when Kaliningrad was overrun by the Morsmordre.

7. CIWS, "Close In Weapons System". In Russian service these are the AK-630, a 30mm gatling gun, and the Kashtan mount, which combines anti-missile missiles with two 30mm gatlings in the same mount.

8. On to another naval subject which is much less military. Have a recipe for Makaroni po-Flotski! It's extremely simple: recipes/main-course/makaroni-po-flotski-macaroni-navy-style/