"-advise you to land outside the city."
With that, the transmission died with a click.
"Sheffield! Come in, Sheffield! Come in!"
"Your majesty, there's no reply."
Elizabeth folded her hands under her chin. "What a mess…Valiant, tell the pilot to re-plot a course that takes us down outside Wilhelmshaven. We'll find out what's going on when the arrive."
The private Concorde-class jet cruised over the dark Atlantic at more than twice the speed of sound. Insulated from the shockwave the supersonic vehicle left in its wake, no sound permeated the space from the outside, giving the occupants the eerie notion that they were flying in a dark and soundless void, the only indicator of movement the subtle vibrations of the plane.
Fourteen minutes passed.
The intercom came on.
"This is your pilot speaking. We are about to come into view of Wilhelmshaven in fifteen seconds-wait, what the fu-"
The entire plane was buffeted by something from the outside, tossing it to the side like a ragdoll. A metallic screech rang from outside, loud enough to penetrate the insulated interior as the five KAN-SEN in the plane were tossed around the rapidly spinning interior. Static roared over the intercom as the light flickered once, then went out.
"What's going on? Pilot! Pilot!"
Crrrrr-fzzzz-
"Pilot!"
The static mocked Warspite's calls.
Oh well, I guess I just have to do this myself.
"Elizabeth! I'm going to try to enter the pilot compartment!" Warspite shouted, straining to hear herself over the screaming static.
Warspite didn't have time to wait for an answer. Grabbing the top of a chair, she maneuvered herself towards the front of the plane in the darkness, using the lights on the floor (could it still be a floor if it's on top?) to guide her way.
Finally she came to a hard metal door. Clenching her fist, she slammed it into the steel, feeling it dent satisfyingly under the blow. Drawing back her arm, she hit the door again. And again. And again.
On the fourth hit, it flew off its hinges, exposing the pilot.
Or what was left of him.
The man that had flown the plane was now nothing more than a cooked pile of meat, shredded by a thousand shards of shattered glass. The windows of the Concorde, specially built to withstand hundreds of degrees of heat, were gone, letting hot air rush into the cockpit, the acrid stench of smoke billowing all over the place.
Straight ahead was Wilhelmshaven.
A flattened wasteland, with only several buildings poking out of a sea of fire, everything else somehow having been immolated into nothingness. Warspite stumbled as the plane tumbled again, and caught a glimpse of the shore glittering in the reddish firelight.
Glittering-sand doesn't-but that's-
Glass, smooth, black, molten.
And floating above it all was a lone figure, ascending slowly into the air. At this distance Warspite couldn't make out any features, but the wings of light around it were horrifyingly clear, even at this distance. Six of them, each glowing bright orange, extending outwards. The largest was easily five hundred metres in length, ionised bubbling air reaching out over the ruined city. Warspite watched, heartbeat thumping in her ears, as a sphere of crackling purple energy began to build in front of the figure, before lancing out into a bright, whining beam that slashed a deep gouge into the ground, leaving a steaming canyon filled with bubbling lava.
The plane.
Warspite grabbed the joystick and yanked it to one side, trying to wrest the plane back into a level position. The yawing of the plane, lopsided and ungainly, told her that she was missing a wing, no doubt sheared off by whatever had tossed the plane.
Need to land the plane-
Still speeding at over twice the speed of sound, Warspite saw Wilhelmshaven grow rapidly in size as they hurtled towards their destination. Now she could see everything-burning wood, collapsing houses, blackened bodies impaled on ten-metre high lampposts, thrown by the force of the blast.
Too fast.
She jerked the yoke even further right, sending the plane into a barely-controlled spiral towards the outskirts of the city. Yanking the controls back up again, Warspite tried to pull the plane into a level glide.
Too late.
"Brace for impact!"
The flaming Concorde slammed into the ground, still going at just over the speed of sound, and immediately exploded.
Warspite was thrown out of the plane and hit the ground on her side, feeling her body being lifted and slammed back down by the sheer impact as she spun over the dirt. A sharp pain lanced up her back as she felt her spine break. Throwing out a hand, she arrested her movement, yelling as her back flared with yet more pain.
She lay there for a couple of minutes, unable to move as she felt her vertebrae knit themselves together. Once feeling had returned to her legs, she got up and began jogging towards the burning wreckage of the plane.
Elizabeth and Dido were already standing there, their clothes ripped and burnt by the blast. Dido's arm hung limp at her side, bent at an awkward angle, while Elizabeth's torso was studded with countless shards of ripped metal.
Warspite watched as Dido's arm regenerated and locked back into place in front of her eyes, while the maid used her uninjured hand to help Elizabeth remove the metal shards from her body, Warspite jogged over and began helping her sister too. Elizabeth swatted her hand away, grunting as she plunged a hand into a particularly deep wound and ripped out an angry, jagged piece of metal, slick with red.
"Lucky we got that out before it healed over. How are you, Warspite?"
"I'm fine. You?"
Elizabeth coughed up a gob of phlegm flecked with red. "Right lung's punctured, stomach's ruptured, liver's more or less shot, but give it a couple of minutes and I'll be fine. Go help Belfast and Valiant."
Even among KAN-SEN, Queen Elizabeth was something of a demigod, her precursor physique boasting a regenerative factor that equaled her physical strength. Leaving her sister to attend to her own wounds, Warspite joined Dido in grabbing pieces of metal and hurling them off the burning skeleton of the plane, wincing as the skin on her hand burned away instantly on contact with the hot aluminium only to grow back in seconds.
After a while of sifting, Valiant and Belfast emerged. The entire right side of Valiant's face was burnt to the bone, although the flesh grew back in seconds, Valiant bemoaning the messy, new hair that had grown out of her scalp the entire time. Belfast was covered from head to toe in burns that were, while not as serious, far more numerous, although her regenerative factor took care of that, too. Valiant's shattered leg took a while longer, especially because they had to remove the tiny pieces of bone from the jellied flesh, but in fifteen minutes the BLACKLAMBS force was good to go.
At a thought, Warspite's rigging formed around her in a flash of blue light. The others followed suit, and soon they set off towards the burning city.
"We need to find Sheffield."
Wilhelmshaven on the ground was devastated. Among the broken, burning city, jagged splinters reaching like shattered fingers up to the sky, the only distinguishable feature was the ruined remains of the melted War Memorial. Above it a lone figure levitated, six incandescent, crackling wings of lightning bracketing its form, giving it the appearance of an otherworldly, hellish bat. At this distance Warspite could make out the figure's attire-a simple black gown-and see a crown of billowing yellow hair.
"What the hell is that…"
It took several minutes of searching before the party found an entrance to the ruined city that wasn't blocked by flaming girders or tonnes of rubble. Wasting no time, they plunged into the burning cityscape, eyes streaming for several seconds before their sinuses re-adjusted the pressure, blocking out the worst of the smoke and heat. Warspite felt her skin prickling uncomfortably.
The road they were on continued straight, evidently one of the roads in the massive grid-shaped network called the Hauptgitter that ran through Wilhelmshaven. All around them were the charred remains of humans, all blackened beyond recognition, all on fire. Warspite caught sight of a human-shaped, ash-coloured shadow on a wall, but no trace of the person who cast it.
They continued straight, passing by dead civilians impaled on lampposts like obscene buntings. The road remained unbent for around five hundred more metres before opening out into a junction, a blackened granite statue of Otto Bismarck in the centre, the sword that he pointed straight now a shattered stump. Strewn around the junction were yet more bodies, burnt down to the bone.
"We'll split up here and search for Sheffy. Once you find her, come back. Do the same if you see nothing for forty-five minutes. Ignore any and all civilians. We are here for one purpose."
"Yes, your Majesty."
Immediately the party sped off in three different directions, Warspite and Dido taking the left turn. Once they got to a fork in the road, Dido turned off, leaving Warspite traveling alone. The battleship ignored several branches in the main road before turning right, heading towards the centre of the city.
Her skin kept prickling.
Why is that-
More bodies, scorched to nearly nothing by atomic fire. A thin whine began to build up and Warspite felt her ears pop as the air pressure drastically increased. Throwing herself to the ground on instinct, she looked up just in time to see yet another one of those purple beams split the air, carving Wilhelmshaven from side to side. The beam passed several dozen metres above her head, aiming towards the outskirts of the city, and Warspite drew in a breath, choking as her lungs were filled with heated air. Her vision swam and she felt sick.
"Sheffield… Gah!"
Warspite saw something move in the corner of her vision. Blinking the black spots out of her eyes, she focused on the object and her throat froze solid.
A child, too small to be anything over twelve was wandering around the ruined streets of Wilhelmshaven, something dangling between its legs. Stripped entirely of skin, it was impossible to tell whether it was a boy or a girl. Shambling aimlessly, the little one bumped into a piece of debris, then stumbled backwards. Warspite heard the hiss of evaporating body fluid as the burnt, raw soles of its feet stepped over the hot cobblestones. The battleships nearly threw up as she saw the reason for the child's stumbling plight. Its face had been burned down more or less to the bone, its eyes nowhere to be found, sunken black sockets in its place. The thing dangling down from its stomach and dragging along the floor squelched as its legs were tangled in the mess. Intestines, Warspite thought as the child slipped and fell, its head cracking against pavement. It didn't get up. Warspite edged closer to the child, fear and pity mixing in her heart. Her eyes widened as she saw a fly enter the scorched, calcined mouth and crawled lazily out through the ruin of a nose.
Another wave of nausea swept over Warspite, nearly bringing the battleship to her knees. "What the hell!" The back of her mouth burned as bile began rising in her throat. The smell of nuclear death was overpowering. Something was dripping down next to her. It took her a while to realize that it was molten ceramic, sliding off a house's roof.
"Hot, it's hot, it's hot…"
She continued to run, looking for the maid.
"Sheffield! It's me, it's Warspite!"
Eventually Warspite turned into a wide terrace, covered in blackened grass. Right behind the terrace was the ruined Memorial, the strange levitating figure nearly directly above her head. Warspite felt another gigantic surge of heat as the figure fired off another energy beam, the temperature nearly unbearable, the figure's gigantic proto-wings writhing like snakes right above her.
Sheffield crouched in the corner of the terrace, a briefcase lying not too far away.
Warspite hurried over to Sheffield. "Sheffield! Are you all right?"
The maid turned to regard Warspite. She was in a bad state-drenched from head to toe in sweat, and somehow shivering in the massive heat. Her eyes were glazed and unfocused.
"Lady… Warspite?"
Warspite rushed over and helped Sheffield to her feet. "Yes, it's me, it's me. What happened?"
With some effort, Sheffield managed to stand upright. "The… Memorial. It appears to be a containment of sorts… for something. For whatever… that came out of it."
"What is it?"
"I'm not sure… but it's a KAN-SEN." Sheffield removed a Geiger counter from one of her pockets. The dial was spinning crazily on its axis. "Whatever is up there, it's outputting impossible amounts of æ-waves. Enough to kill a human… several hundred times over. That prickling you feel… on your skin? That's radiation."
"I have the last reading at… 1,566 roentgens per second."
Warspite remembered with a chill what Elizabeth had told her shortly after the war ended.
"The Union bombs…they had a radiation rating of 100 roentgens a second. Nothing survived."
Whatever was up there was emitting energy more than fifteen times that of the Eagle Union superbombs that had eviscerated the Sakura cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ended the war.
"Any idea what it is?"
Sheffield grimaced. "I… have reason to believe it is the battleship the Ironblood called Bismarck."
"What? Why?"
"Because…" Sheffield paused, as if confused.
Then she threw up, a copious projectile vomit that spattered all over the softened cobblestones of Wilhelmshaven. Mixed with the stomach acid was deep red blood and pieces of what appeared to be raw flesh.
Sheffield collapsed to the ground in a nearly-silent clatter of slender limbs and black fabric.
"Sheffield! Sheffield!" Warspite picked the maid up, and noted with horror just how soaked with sweat she was. Dark red streams traced their way from her underwear down the inside of her thighs.
"Oh my God…"
Warspite turned to return, carrying the stricken cruiser in her arms, when the ground rumbled.
"Not aga-"
Behind her, the terrace rumbled, lowering into the ground and splitting into two, then retracting to reveal a long, wide ramp.
"What now?"
Standing at the bottom of the ramp was a girl, peering at the Memorial through ice-blue eyes. Dressed from head to toe in a dark blue military dress and a black coat, two pieces of Ironblood rigging were strapped to her back, writhing and gnashing with a grotesque facsimile of life, bristling with cannon barrels and alien-looking spines. From her waist hung a black-handled sword nearly her own height, sheathed in a crimson scabbard.
Her hair, covered by a peaked military cap, was slashed in red and white.
Speakers on the side of the ramp crackled to life.
"Spezial-Forschungsabteilung dritte Generation KAN-SEN Waffenplattform KMS Odin wurde eingesetzt. Bestellungen sind: zerstören der Bismarck. "
Warspite's limited Ironblood could only barely pick up the last sentence, but it told her everything she needed to know.
It said-just now-it told that girl to destroy the Bismarck.