The Belkan war: alternative story

by Vergeltern

It did not take great mans to begin wars nor to end then. But to turn the tide of one they are required. This is an alternate history for the Belkan war. Follow an other sixth Unit of Ustio, a different Galm team, as their actions will turn the tide in a twisted, but maybe better way. This story is rated T, but can content some M rated chapter with some depicted violent scenes.

23. Chapter 121: Operation Cannibal 1 part1

Hoffnung, Belka, 11/06/1995, 00:30, Weather: little night fog.

She had hoped to enter in the airspace of Hoffnung without being detected this early. She was seeing rows of civilian and transport jet leaving the city, either for the West or for the North, from the rows of green and red lights gliding in the far away sky. Most of them were going for the West, shepherd by some fighters. She needed no radar to see them, only her eyes and the lights on the planes were enough to spot them.

She had just gone above the valley's limit around Hoffnung, after having flown from the abandoned base in the Verzweiflungsberg when she saw two F-35s heading for her. Aircraft that she considered as weak after having downed several of them above B7R. But compared to an ULM, even the old propeller planes, and even biplanes were more powerful.

She had thought this ULM was stealthy enough to move a bit around undetected. But even in the night, such plane with a basic metallic structure was fairly visible for the military grade radar onboard those craft. Or she has been spotted through some PM radar, or even by the Merlin satellites. Which could make sense, since Kupchenko had surely many systems and parts produced in the factories of Hoffnung. The factories around the Wunderwaffe were already of a big size, but they were might be meant for maintenance and repairs.

And of course, since she hadn't any onboard radio, she couldn't hear the chat between the two Belkan pilots. As they went even closer, she could hear their engine, very loud from a plane without pressurized canopy. She could also saw their camouflage, a black one with yellowish fluorescent bands, making them flash a bit in the night, but only on a very slight scale.

"What should we do about this ultralight? Warning shots?" Donner three asked to this wingman, Donner eight. It was the first time he had to intercept such kind of plane. They were pretty tired, between the escort for the civilian jets

"Even warning shots could injure whoever's flying this craft in a future war zone. Let's guide them to a landing zone and ask about her whereabouts." He suggested, knowing that even the shrapnels of a warning shot could damage such fragile airplane. But he was a bit surprised by the look of it, as it had no propellers but a strange electrical ring that was producing the thrust. This wasn't the usual ULM, he knew it. And its pilot was no usual person, he was certain of that.

"Ver. Follow us." Donner 3 agreed and began to roll a bit leftward and then rightward, shaking his wings to make the ULM understood it. He wasn't supposed to be that visible in the sky at night, but there was a clear moon this night, and he didn't know of the IR goggles the pilot was equipped with. Which obviously could see very well his engine glowing in the dark like a powerful flashlight.

"The pilot must have understood." Donner 8 commented, looking backward, as he saw the ULM rolling a bit, shaking his wing following the international code.

"Well, wait for me at the Landebahn (runway). I will guide her below the current civilian traffic. ID set as neutral." Donner 3 added, and slow down as much as he could in order not to lose the propeller plane. So, he was doing small back and return flights, as the ULM was a tortoise. He agreed his F-35 was not the fastest plane in the world, even some third and fourth generation plane could match its speed easily. Yet, the small sharklets they implemented on their aircraft allow them to have a lower stall speed than the Osean F-35s, and their X-shaped empennage was quite helpful in boosting their overall mobility.

This last part of her ULM flight was pretty boring. She would follow this F-35X for a few minutes, flying above the large residential area that were plunged into darkness. She wouldn't see any lights from vehicles nor city lights, outside of military vehicles. Maybe the civilian had already been evacuated. She hoped so, as Hoffnung was a city counting almost a million of inhabitant. If it was bombed without evacuation by the Belkans, the losses would be in the tens of thousands or even in the hundreds of thousands.

Then, she would fly over the over numerous factories that boarded the Löre river, with the river being often used to cooled down some parts. These rivers in industrial cities were almost dead ones, due to overheating. When it was not due to water pollutions. She thought she would have felt the fumes or smell them. But many factories seemed to be working, and when she took a look at them with her IR goggles, she saw only cold chimney from which vapors would pour and filled the air all over the city. Maybe some of these factories were being transferred, only leading to more cargo planes needing to be used for this matter.

At some point she flew over two bridges that connected the two sides of the city, after having lunged the rows of cylindrical fuel tanks. There, vehicles could be seen. That appeared to be trapped in traffic jams. If the allied wanted to create mayhem, there would be no easiest way than to strike at these traffic jams. Death would be quite high if they resort to such options.

And finally, after more than ten minutes, she had arrived at the military airport of Hoffnung, who was also swarm with transport crafts and smaller fighters. It was a four-lane airport, surrounded by warehouses and with a control tower as big as the bell tower of Ste Victoire's cathedral in Directus, housing almost as much radar. It looked like someone had taken the isle of a carrier and had put it here. The two main lanes were used for the transport crafts, who would land, and take-off shortly after, filled with military supplies for who… maybe for the CSB, she guessed. Hoffnung's industries were the most engaged in the Pendragon Projekt. They had maybe more than commercial ties to it. The other Easter one was used for the fighter jets.

The first F-35X that she had seen had his gear lowered and had switch on his lights. He flew by the fourth runway, signaling her that she was clear to land. If she had some radio, she would have surely heard some "Landeklar" (clear to land). But here she could only land on sight, which was pretty difficult. And it was even more difficult due to the turbulences induced by the transport doing back and forth travels around her. In a fighter she would have no worries about it, but now she had to be a bit more cautious.

In the end, she succeeded in her landing. Even if she was badly shaken, the shock dampeners of the light wheels of this ULM being not that strong. And she had more weight than the last time onboard. She didn't know what these Belkans would do of her. Right now, what she would want them to do would be to let her sleep for a couple of hours. Despite having been near the overdose level of adrenaline, she was not quite tired. The F-35X landed behind her with what seemed to be amazing ease compared to her poorly executed landing. And even them taxiing next to her was enough to shake her fragile plane due to the vibration in the ground.

Bienenstock (beehive) Airbase, Hoffnung, Belka, 11/06/1995, 00:30, Weather: little night fog.

The two pilots were already on their way to her ULM than she hadn't left the canopy. And they weren't alone, some Belkan soldiers were with them as well. She understood their suspicion, showed evidently by the war rifles they were carrying. She stepped out of the canopy with care, leaving momentarily Vasquez inside -to be honest she had not the strength to carry her out of the open cockpit right now-. A strange thing that happened was that she had the feeling to be still in flight. She was feeling a bit dizzy, like if she was drunk.

Of course, they didn't recognize her at first glance. But she could recognize very well at their slightly startled faces that the blood now covering her suit was bothering them a bit. She hadn't gotten her suit soaked with blood like last time before she arrived at Valais, but she had quite a lot on her, which was understandable due to the number of people she had killed this night: sixteen. A bit of blood had been shed on the Sapin pilot during the slaughter of the Hexen, but for now it wasn't visible was she laid in the ULM.

"Wer bist du?" One of the two Belkan pilot asked, not recognizing the mercenary at first glance, especially in that kind of suit. She would have been recognized, if she still wore her Galm 1 insignia. Even if she hadn't been flying under that name for a while.

"I ...am..." She began to talk, then suddenly crumpled where she was currently standing. The adrenaline she had injected herself with had managed to counter the effect of the Kalium chloride for a time, but it hadn't been rejected of her system. A portion of it might have bee, through the sweat during her fight, but it was not enough. And if adrenaline had been enough to give her the willpower, it hadn't provided any energy to her own body. She had actually been pretty lucky not to collapse before she land, or this last ULM flight would have been her very last flight, literally speaking.

The closest pilot quickly stepped forward, catching her in time, preventing her to fall toward the ground. She didn't seem to be severely hurt despite all the blood on her, but it was only from the outside.

"Ruf einem Medic. Schnell. Wie ist die andere? (call a medic, quick. How is the other one?)" He ordered to the soldier standing beside him, still holding the unknown person, and asked for the state of the passenger of the ULM. He was wondering how they managed to fit in such a tiny canopy. But from the look of the first one, he could guess that such concern hadn't be the highest ones on her list.

"lebt und atmet (alive and breathing). Aber sie scheint eingeschlafene. (but she seemed to be sleeping)." Donner 8 got a look at the sleeping pilot. But this face was remembering him of something. Of someone he had seen a few times in the hangar, as they had to wait there sometimes before going on escort missions. And at the Sapin insignia he saw when the soldiers move her out of the canopy, he understood who this one was. But that couldn't help them deduce the identity of the other one a single bit.

"Gustav, this one is the overseer Kupchenko sent about the power source parts. She went missing yesterday and we couldn't find her anywhere in the goddam city." He reported to Donner 3 as he joined with him, while the two unconscious women were set up on stretchers.

"Ja, du stimmt, Helmut. So die Pilote ist vielleicht eine andere Pendragon Projekt Person." Gustav emitted what was obviously a very false guess. Of course, he had no way to quickly verify what he was implying, and his theory was the one making more sense, so they chose to stick with it. Maybe their IT technicians would find something either in their files or in the allied defectors -since there was already a small number of allied defectors in the ranks of the Pendragon Projekt-. And with Osea having no equivalent of the Schwarze team, this number could and would only grow in the coming weeks.

Both of these women would have the luck to get some rest due to their current state. Rest that was quite rare in these situations. These two Belkan pilots knew it was rare, as they had had only a few hours of rest per days since the beginning of the evacuation of Hoffnung. Obviously, since the announcement of the secession, quite a lot had already been done, but there was still a lot to finish, before they could basically turned Hoffnung into a trap that would swallow all allied forces trying to invade it.

Bienenstock Airbase, Hoffnung, Belka, 11/06/1995, 10:30, Weather: little night fog.

This time, her sleep was a good half-night of rest. Not a very short time of paradoxical sleep filled with mortuary apparition. It was almost strange for her to have undergone such brutal slaughter, and then to was able to sleep like an innocent people. Dead rarely haunted her, because what could be haunting her in the end? Only cinders were left of those Hexens by now. And cinders wouldn't do anything to her.

When she woke up, it wasn't because of some adrenaline surge, pain, or anything that she had suffered this night. What caused her to wake up was simply the warmth of the room in an unknown building she was laying right now, caused by the sun. And she had doubted that she would saw another sunrise the last night, when she had had to experience this almost-dead state. She would never let anyone get so close to kill her, she swore.

Still, someone had changed her clothes while she was sleeping. Gone were her thick suit, and she was only wearing a hospital gown, this thin clothe of light blue cotton. Of course, they had removed her jade harpoon, maybe to prevent her from hurting herself with the barbs on it. But what she noticed the most, and right away, was a pretty big wound dressing all other a small portion of her left forearm. She hadn't remember having been hurt there. Besides, this kind of dressing was making her think more of the ones she had when she would go to give her blood, back in Erusea. At least, she could say she had saved twelve life -they said you were saving three by giving your blood once, and she gave hers four times-.

But as soon as she was awake, she wasn't let idle more than thirty seconds. Two pilots barged into the room, in which she was alone. Apparently, they had moved Vasquez to another single room, maybe. At their shoulder patch, which was made of a fluorescent lightning in a dark circle, she guessed these might be the pilots that had intercepted her last night. They didn't seem that threatening, these Belkans might have better intent than the Osean commandos she had to slaughter a few weeks ago, and obviously far better intent than the Hexen.

"Well, you're quick to wake up. For someone that had to undergo through a dialysis while sleeping. He's Gustav and I'm Helmut. Forget him if he's not verbose, he's not found of strangers." The one with brown her said, which caused an unfunny glare from his colleague that had his hair cut so short that she had a bit of trouble figuring out their color.

"So, now that you're awake, I'll repeat my question : who are you?" Gustav said, in a somewhat cold manner, ignoring if he could trust this woman that had appeared out of the blue on their radar.

She could say many things right now. Galm 1 was one of the few, but she dismissed it. Her true name was another one, but these two pilots would be wary of someone with a not very Belkan-sounding name. Besides, her name had maybe gone over the borders by now, due to the number of Belkan she had killed in combat. So, she decided to stick with the nickname she had come out when asked by Netz leader. She hoped that her little act of folly above Tauberg had been too spread by Kupchenko. Maybe he didn't, not wanting to admit the losses of two ADFX-01 to the allied forces, that could think that the Pendragon Projekt could be defeated then.

"Schwarze Luchs." She replied with confidence.

"Schwarze Luchs? I heard about you, weren't you lost from the radars after some battle over B7R?" Gustav showed again his suspicion toward this mysterious woman. He didn't remember who had spoken of that pilot, but this person had bragged about the fact that she was worth in her killing spree.

"I did suffer a slight structural damage that resulted in some precarious landing." She half lied, her fist slightly clenched around her cover. It wasn't a full lie because she did suffer structural damage after this battle, but way more than what she was asserting right now. Same for the landing, it had been more than precarious. Landing with a chute was not a very good landing in her books.

"Gut. Maybe we should get her to the mess hall, so we can patch her about the current situation, and you'll be able to eat a little?" Helmut proposed, being a bit more open than his colleague. The fact that she had brought back the envoy of Kupchenko was enough to trust her for him. He trusted people on acts rather than facts. Gustav did too, but he might be waiting to see her act in the sky rather than talk her way out of the situation on the ground.

To this invitation her stomach was the first to respond with a small growl. Which she summed up with this sentence:

"That would be a pleasure. I had quite a busy night, and the who sleep eats proverb doesn't seem to apply to me."

"Will you need some help getting up?" Helmut asked her nicely, having some concerns about her health. Even if these concerns were based on what the doctors reported him, and if everything had followed their mind, this girl shouldn't have woken up before the afternoon.

"Nicht. I should be fine. I'm starving, but not in hypoglycemia." She specified, knowing that even if she had satisfied her thirst for blood last night, she had her throat a bit sore since she hadn't drunk a lot recently. Obviously, her throat was less sore than the ones of the Hexen she pierced.

"So Verfolg uns, miss." Gustav responded a bit more coldly, again. Were they playing some sort of good cop / bad cop thing to make her talk? Such hypothesis could be true or false. Still, she was expecting a bit more of cunningness from Belkans.

She managed to stand up despite her state of tiredness, and follow both pilots, wearing only her hospital gown over her undergarments. They had not removed the fabric band she wore to make her look like a man. When would she remove it, herself was a good question. Maybe when someone would see her as a woman and not an emotionless matricidal slaughtering-lover monster, and share some interest, she would. Until then she saw no reasons to recreate her old self she had buried after her first slaughter, now a few years ago.

The lunch was quite welcome by the hungry merc. Sure, Kellerman had managed to bring back some more food during her little absence, but it wasn't that much. She had indeed had a somewhat hard life and wasn't used to have three-courses meal every day, but there was nothing more satisfying than a good meal after a good night. It would have been perfect if all of this was in peace time and that she wasn't talking with people that she might have murdered some far away relatives during her career with the allied forces.

But then she was met with reality as she was resting after the lunch, at ease physically but not entirely psychologically speaking. They were wary of her, and she was as much wary of them as well. She might have scored good point by saving Vasquez but barging here covered in blood in wartimes was not the best thing to do. And she hadn't solved the mystery of this wrist dressing.

"What happened to you?" "What happened to my wrist?" The merc and Donner 3 asked at the same time.

"About your wrist, they had to do some dialysis to clean your blood. They said you were under the effect of some poison." Helmut aka Donner 8 replied, again surprised that this girl survived such treatment.

"I see. That's a good thing. About me… I'm not sure you want to know." She was a bit reluctant to talk about what she performed last night. It wasn't cold blood murder but more of a boiling blood murder. Then inhuman treatment as repayment of her own, extraction of some intel through their thine own flesh, and a bit of arson. For this last crime, she could always try to say that an allied plane had dropped some napalm bombs in the vicinity.

"Was passiert?" Donner 3 insisted, frowning and his wariness toward this "Schwarze Luchs" lady growing further.

"You see, sometimes people play witch and wizard and simply go ask for treats. But these persons that I met yesterday were a bit tricky than that. Let's just say that their spell backfired." She wanted to stay elusive on her close past, or at least wait a bit until unfolding the whole story. These Hexen were without any doubt not loved in Belka for their acts, since they had the same reputation than The Vulture.

"Was meinst du mit Hexen (what do you mean with witches)?" Donner eight wanted some more details too. This name was not fully unknown to him, he had heard some high-ranking discussed about a group of women named as such. This discussion was a very heated one, if he remembered well. Well, it had been a very heated one since it was one of the few times that the Pendragon and the Künstliche Intelligenz Projekt had tried to talk their way out of their disparities to act jointly over Wesson. And due to the Dolch firing on some of the DW-1s by mistake, it had been the last time too.

"Die "HEXEN". Und jetzt müssen sie zur Höhle ankommen (THE "HEXEN". And know they must have arrived in hell)." Iskanda emphasized the word designating the thirteen person she killed only ten hours ago. She hoped her last sentence was explicit enough to make them understand what she had done with them yesterday. Or she could always try to intimidate them by telling them they could be her seventeenth and eighteenth Belkan kills on the ground, but she might want not to go to such extent here.

"Ich… Vielleicht du stimmst, werde ich nicht mehr hören (I … maybe you're right, I don't want to hear any more on them.)." Donner 3 settled to stop this talk, or at least steer the talks in another way, which Iskanda did the next second.

"Und, how's the evacuation going?" She tried to show some interest to the becoming of this city. City of Hope, which was the last hope for some Belkans. Maybe it was her last hope to change something too, in the end.

"Almost the nine tenth of the inhabitants are evacuated, and almost as much of the necessary items for the Projekt have been shipped as well." Helmut began to describe the somewhat good advancement of the shipment. Still, there was still a good hundred thousand people left to evacuate, and no Belkans wanted those hundred thousand inhabitants to turn into one hundred thousand civilian losses. Such high numbers of losses would not even the losses with Osea. Total losses of the EMP disaster and subsequent replica, crashes due to Merlin disturbing shipment of munitions and fuel, and local disaster instilled by the EMP disaster such as the flooding of Burgen, had reached the hundred thousand losses. Osea was not bloodless, but they had quite nasty wounds, which seemed to have trouble cicatrizing.

"Helmut, we aren't supposed to talk about that to foreigners…" Gustav's glare grew a bit angered toward his wingmen who was trusting too easily this still unknown lady.

They might have talked for quite some times about the city. They surely would have, and maybe they would have tried to investigate more on the events of this night, if it wasn't for a pretty high-pitch alarm that rezoned into the whole mess hall, wrecking a bit the sensible ears of Iskanda.

"What should we do with her?" Gustav was a bit reluctant to let some unknown wander around, and for good reasons. If someone had managed to rapt Vasquez in the middle of Hoffnung, they had to raise their wariness. Obviously, she was the one that brought Vasquez back, and not the other way around.

"You're a fighter pilot, right?" Helmut checked an obvious assertion.

"Natürlich." Iskanda nodded, almost reading where he was heading.

"If you survived B7R, then you should be helpful up there. Ask for a uniform at the logistics, first barrack on your right." He sent her on her way to very likely join her in the defense of Hoffnung. Gustav said nothing, only shrugged and sighed heavily as they left for the briefing room.

"You wanted to see if she's worth your trust in the sky. So, I'm giving a chance to do so." Helmut justified his proposal as they were walking toward the said room.

"It's not what I wanted to do as first… But this way I'll have an eye on her in the sky." Gustav had to concede they needed all the help they could get. Half of the Donner squad was not in the vicinity, as they were protecting the shipping lane between Hoffnung and Blumenberg.

For Iskanda, it was a short run. They were a bit doubtful to see a girl in hospital gown asking for a uniform, but they gave her anyway. It was almost the same Pixy gave her at Valais when they first met. Which was comprehensible, since Ustio was still using a lot of Belkan hardware due to the temporal proximity of their secession. Now, she just wanted another thing, her jade harpoon, but she had no idea who had it at this time. It was something she would need to ask to these two pilots that seemed to almost mothball her. Or were they just very wary of her? Gustav surely was, but Helmut was a bit more open-minded.

It was a slightly longer run to find the briefing room, which was at the second underground level, maybe in case of bombing. It was a bit longer due to the lift being occupied when she wanted to use it, so she descended the staircase with three stairs in one step. This time she wasn't caring about the drama like she cared when she was descending in that crypt. And the shoes pilots wore were definitively more fitting than heavy iron-sole ones.

Briefing Room, Bienenstock Air Base, Hoffnung, Belka, 11/06/1995, 11:00, Weather: overcast.

She barged into the room a bit awkwardly, earning a death glare from the officer currently doing the briefing. Officer whose name was not unknown to her. It was none other than Pixy's former base commander, Oswin Neugel. Why was he leading the evacuation effort in Hoffnung when his base was in the North near Dinsmark was a startling her a bit, but she would leave these concerns for later. A simple Belkan order directing her to sit down and listen and the briefing started again.

"Donner 4,5,6 and seven, your sector is the south. Donner 3 and eight, and Fraulein "Schwarze Luchs", you'll patrol the North. These are the only point to enter the valley. If the allied forces try to go above, they will get splashed by our anti-air if they go above the valley's limit."

"What can we expect?" Donner 5, the only women of the squad, a thirty-years-old with short red hairs, asked. She too had looked at the new pilot with curiosity, as well as the other Donner squad members. Some showed more animosity than curiosity, and for their it seemed to be the other way around.

"Anything, from both the allied forces and the Rald-led North Belka." Oswin described what they could engage, as the Belkan mapping system was showing them their area above the croissant-shaped valley of Hoffnung, which was indeed well covered by radars. The only entrance point were the North and the South. At the South, they would be against the allied forces, mostly, and at the North against the North Belkans. But in both case the situation could be inverted, as Oswin dwelled a bit more in the explanation of the pretty messed up current situation.

"The Rald have authorized the allied to fly above Facto and even their own territories to bomb us. As such, expect heavy deployment of any kind of forces both at the North and the South. Stealth can be expected, but I'm not expecting F-22 nor YF-23s right now." Oswin was pretty angry to see that instead of the Belkans banding together to counter the allied forces, it was the opposite that was being enacted right now: two enemies with the only common point was to hate Kupchenko and his project of a new Belkan state possessing a Wunderwaffe would join their forces. What could such alliance based on hatred give? Nothing good was the answer. Yuktobania and Osea had once banded together to defeat Belka in the 1940's, yet it was only to be at odds for the decades to come in the Cold War period.

"That's pathetic." Iskanda dared to comment this really messed-up situation. The CSB was at the center of this war now, surrounded by adversaries on all sides. And these adversaries that a few days ago were only wanting to annihilate each other were now all joining together to annihilate this new third party. She was forced to admit that Kupchenko had quite a lot of influence to achieve such results on people.

"Donner 3 and 8, you'll give her the third replacement craft. That'll be all." Oswin ended this briefing, and as such, the program was put offline, ending the briefing

"Ver." Gustav nodded, ready to engage whoever would cross their sky, will it be former brother-in-arms brainwashed by propaganda or allied pilots brainwashed by their so-called "idea of universal freedom".

They all left the room, but Iskanda stayed a bit behind, wanting to know where her stuff was. And she knew how to get fine with the present commander.

"Pixy spoke highly of you, Herr Neugel." She quoted his former student he once was in charge off.

"How do you know about him? And how do you know about this link?" Were his two questions than her assertion raised. Maybe her tactic wasn't that good. And now she was the one that needed to answer to questions when she wanted to be the one asking for a bit of intel.

"I have my sources. And I prefer to protect them." She answered, not satisfying a single bit the Belkan commander, who only raised his eyebrows as well as his suspicion.

"I'm happy he's alive. I would like to have him fighting for the motherland, though." Oswin expressed the bit of regret to know that one of his best elements was fighting against Belka. Yet, Pixy didn't join the allied just to fight Belkans, but what Belka had become since he left with this merc to live a more heated life.

"People change, sometimes." She added, knowing that she had herself changed quite a lot in these last weeks. What was she now? And why was she still fighting were two good questions she still had to answer, but not right now.

"Whatever. But from what I can tell, you want to ask me something. So sprichst, Fraulein." He had read her intention a thousand miles ago and might have a good assumption about what she was going to ask.

"Where is my harpoon?" She wanted to have her stuff back. It wasn't that it had an intrinsic valor by itself, but its sentimental valor was meaningful to her.

"Ah, that flesh and blood-soaked blade you were wearing like some kind of strange jewelry? It must have been sent to the logistics." His answer almost made her die from laugh. She had just been to the logistics a few minutes ago. But they might not know she was the owner of this weapon.

"Jetzt, go. join Donner 3 and 8 and make use your skills that allowed you to survive above B7R." He ordered her, rendering the urgency of the situation by a hand gesture directing her to go join them ASAP. She had never flown F-35s. They suffered quite a bad reputation due to some delays in the Osean program. But those Belkans -she had no idea how the Belkans managed to get their hands on the blueprints in the first place- might be better, since Belkan planes seemed always to have some little upgrades above the Oseans. It was understandable, when the latter would always try to use quantity over quality.

And after a few minutes of fast walk, and a few needed demands to find her way to their hangar, she found once more the two pilots that would be her unofficial wingmen for today. They were waiting outside their F-35X. Like in the sky, she could look for their disparities with the Osean variants. But there were a few disparities she hadn't seen that well last night. One of them was these small sharklets. She had already seen some on big crafts, but not on fighter jets. With these and vectored thrust, they might be better dogfighters than the baseline one, which had been outmatched by F-16Cs.

"This will be your jet for today. If you were able to fly a Su-47 you should have no problem with this craft." Helmut explained her, as he was putting his helmet on. His had the number eight painted with this light fluorescent paint on the back of his fuselage, written in Belkan as "acht". Gustave had the one marked with "drei". And her, she was apparently the number zehn -ten-.

"And is there some changes about the weaponry?" She wanted to know how far the Belkan changes had affected this plane and its capacities.

"Since we're mostly on anti-air, you'll have the standard missiles in the forward side-bays, the QAAMs in the central bay, as such if you fire them while turning belly toward the enemy jet you'll have no problem with the lock. And those stealth pods are not conformal fuel tanks but housings for XMAAs." Helmut described her weaponry, oriented toward interception purposes. They could carry some GPBs, but no big weapon for anti-armored units like Stand-Off Dispensers or Cruise missiles.

"Balanced at medium, but weak at long range." She pointed the obvious limitation of such bays, that did not offer enough rooms for LAGMs or XLAAs.

"Osea will not use long-range armament until they have clear shots. And with Excalibur, this delay will always increase. Good flight, Fraulein." Gustav's view of the Oseans was clearly biased, but he knew what he was speaking off. And the few stand-off cruise missiles they had tried to launch from Fato had been intercepted by the Merlin satellites. Hence why they would mostly use strike fighters and not bombers right now. Besides, if their SAM network was not perfect against fighters, it would surely score aces against Osean B-52s or Yukte Tu-95s. These planes were sturdy enough to fly through the plasma shutter of a Merlin satellite without risking to lose their engines, but they were easy to pick up and destroy.

North of Hoffnung, Belka, 11/06/1995, 11:20, Weather : overcast, medium cloud coverage.

Her take off had been quite a smooth one. She thought it would lack a bit of power due to the F-35 being a single engine plane, but apparently these ones had their engine as powerful, if not more than her former and now gone X-29A. And the addition of this X-shaped empennage and canards allowed her to pull out an Himmelman to steer her aircraft northward. She definitively thought the F-35 was heavier than what she felt from its cockpit, especially with two additional weapon pods, that were giving it a pretty high number of special weaponry - ten QAAMs and three volleys of XMAAs from these weapon pods-.

"This F-35X is lighter than the ones I fought against in B7R." She shared her mind with the two other Donner squad members escorting her as they flew over some couples of fuel tanks in between some BAWS and SAMs had been deployed. It left them vulnerable if the fuel tanks were hit, but the good range of the BAWS could reduce this danger.

"It's because ours have a bit of carbon nanotubes in their structure. It's twice as strong as steel but five times lighter." Gustav replied, having no problem to follow their new unofficial squad members. All had reached Mach 1 pretty quickly.

"So, what's the deal with that harpoon you asked for to the commander? some kind of horseshoe?" Helmut asked, as they left the limits of the airspace covered by the SAM network of the city. Now they would be on their own. Or maybe the BAWS could still reach the enemies here, she wasn't sure of its range.

"Ja und Nein. It's a symbol of resilience to me. Of the flame of my will." She didn't want to talk about her past to unknown, but they could know about it. Not that it was covered with the dry blood of more than fifty person by now including her own mother.

"Interesting. What do you think the Osean will send?" Donner 3 asked, knowing that whatever it will be, they would be outnumbered. But not outmatched.

"I don't know. I doubt they would send F-117 above a denied battlespace. Their F-22 are not good strikers. Maybe some UCAVs to outnumber us?" Iskanda analyzed what she knew of the Osean arsenal. They wouldn't use B-2s for sure. They were far too slow to be able to avoid Helligen Kolumne. B-1s had surely been decimated after the losses above the Glatisant and the failed attack on the Wunderwaffe.

"I think you're right. I have a dozen of QF-4s and QF-16s. We need to go through her ranks, kill the leading craft and then finish the rest." Donner eight just saw quite a lot of spot entering on his radar.

"Donner 4, we have the same type of attack at the south. The defenses can handle them a bit. Destroy the E-6B Mercury covering them, and it will be just target practice." The other member at the South confirmed the current tactical choice of the allied forces. Which was quite poor against harden veterans.

"Use your XMAAs, these automated fighters are just good missile trucks." Donner 3 suggested, as he opened his bays and began locking on the QF planes.

"Ver. Fox 3!" She followed the order, and a dozen of the automated Ghosts were down with ease.

But in the meantime, the F-16Cs had advanced, and were at range to launch their XMAAs. Numerous volleys were fired toward the three fighters, but out of the blue the sky began to color in a pale violet colors, while small distorted lines of light appeared in midair. And most of the Osean XMAAs detonated on the plasma curtain.

"Damned, they activated their Merlin satellites, again! engage close combat mode." An Osean officer leading the E-6B was expressing his fury toward the much more potent Belkan counter. Sure, their onboard electronics could survive EMPs. But they wouldn't resist gunfire for a long time if they failed to down these fighters.

The curtain didn't last long. Its energy had decreased enough to allow all planes to fly through it, even if there was still a lot of EMI on their radars. Now they only had to down a bunch of useless drones. Maybe just taking half of it would be enough to have a clear path onto the enemy command plane, Iskanda guessed, as she was going head-on against four QF-16s. One tried to fire his XMAAs again, but they had poor close range mobility, and she was able to evade them by banking right hard. Which was made easy by the vector thrust. Then she took them down like she had seen Pixy proceed, even if she changed a bit his method of one gun kill, two QAAMs and a missile kill.

First, she evaded a pair of missiles coming from the one at the left, by doing a hard turn to the right. Then she executed an Herbert Manöver, not wanting to use her head-to-tail maneuver for two reasons : she didn't know of the mobility of her F-35X enough to try such, and she didn't wanted any pilots, would they be Belkan or those Osean far behind their monitors to recognize Galm 1's fighting style. But when she flew perpendicularly to the QF-16s, she opened her main bay and fired two QAAMs. That didn't miss. But the two others open fire with their gun, forcing her to flee in front of them. Standard missiles grazed her fighter as she was getting out of range and pulled out an Himmelman. The two Automated Fighting Falcons quickly pitched to counter her maneuver, but she dived below their line of fire. And as they had pitched a bit too quickly, they stalled slightly in doing so. She stalled too as she used her canard as air brakes to slow her motion right below them and dispatch one of them with her gun and the other with a pair of missiles. Still, her stall was perfectly in her control, thanks to the new stability permitted by the sharklets.

"Fancy flying." Gustav gauged, as he dispatched his opponents, beginning with the ones at the exterior of his four opponents' formation, with two missiles and one QAAM. He flew very close to the ground to avoid being fired upon, in this case flying over small meanders of the Löre above which there was some power line, which the QF-16s preferred to avoid by climbing a bit. And as the meanders was doing a 180-degree turn on the axis of his opponent, he followed it, flying so low that he created some trails on the water. And while the QF-16s were searching, he came from being and destroy the two of them through Schräge Musik.

"I might be fancy, but at least I'm not playing submarine." She retorted playfully, before going on the hunt for the E-6B. It was at the limit of their airspace, and she could see some other QF planes approaching on her Belkan radar, but they had to destroy it to hamper further drone deployment.

"I'm joining you right now." Donner 8 nodded with her intent to destroy their mothership. His manner of destroying his four targets was not fancy at all. He simply overrun them as they went head on, then pulled a fast 180 degree turn and fired his XMAAs. Sure, one managed to evade the volley, but he had bled speed as the operator twisted the drone like an eel. But a short gun burst was enough to down the other single-engine fighter.

"Donner 3 and eight, they have ten more QF-4. I entrust six of them to you. I'm going for the Mercury." She let them know, as she just fired her second volley of XMAAs. Numerous SAAMs followed as retaliation, but she had no trouble losing them as she flew vertically. She felt the plane struggle a bit to keep a bit its stability, more than she had with the Su-47, but there was glaring disparities between the two fighters.

"Ver." Donner eight agreed. He destroyed his enemy head-on, firing one missiles and one QAAMs on the ones at the side of the three drone formation, before barrel-rolling to evade the missiles of the one at the center, and gunned the last one from its one hours.

"And It was her who was supposed to follow our directives, not the other way around." Gustav silently thought, a bit surprised to see how fast this merc had assumed their command. She wasn't just a lonely predator like Luchs are. She had had already members under her leadership, he had no little doubt about it. But when? He left the question in suspense as he went for three QF-4s with two missile on the one at the left, and gunned a bit the other two craft, before firing a pair of QAAMs on the damaged craft, that tried to run, but couldn't match but redundant heat seekers of his missiles.

"I'm seeing the E-6Bs. But their jamming is quite strong. Let's try to do a without-lock kill." She described her situation, as she was climbing right in front of it. She eased up the throttle a bit, slowing her approach. And fired cautiously one missile inside the two left engines, firing the first quickly, then barrel-rolling to the left to get the second. The aircraft tilted heavily due to the sudden loss of thrust and the roll instability due to the throwback of the impact. She flew by over the damaged wing, before pulling a split-S toward the small radome at the top of the Mercury. It must be the housing for the jammer, as she was unable to lock it. But from such short distance, lock was no liability. She just fired two XMAAs that went right for the top of the fuselage, destroying the electronics in the radome, and creating a massive hole at the bottom of their fuselage. She saw crew members being pulled away as she overrun the EW plane, due to the air pressure at the exterior.

She finished the plane by firing straight at its cockpit, which caused the plane to fall very quickly. Maybe she had hit some controls, and it messed up their steering. Or the dying pilot had clenched his hand too hard on the control stick, and this resulted in this hard dive. A few minutes later, his remains would go straight into the Löre. Only a couple of chutes were sighted by the three pilots as they returned to the center of their CAP zone.

"Donner 4 to 3, we had similar assault ongoing right now. We should be able to hold. Keep your stance and listen to Herr Bürgermeister 's speech." The pilot at the South of Hoffnung indicated, as they were engaged with a pretty big swarm of MQ-9s. But they were winning undoubtedly, despite the waste of more than half of their XMAAs and QAAMs. There, it was a BAWS that destroyed the E-6B, with Donner 6 having some designation pods instead of the XMAAs pod, in order to ease stealth hunt.

"Ver. Set your frequency to 106.5 FM." He advised Schwarze Luchs, as she did not know of the Hoffnung radio station. Because they wouldn't use a military radio for such message. Theirs were put on alert mode, in case of any new allied aircraft showing up. And there eyes were still looking sharply at the horizon, ready to spot anything that would escape radar by flying at very low altitude.

"Setting radio to 106,5 FM" Iskanda nodded, and a few seconds afterwards, she began to hear some Belkan old voice. It had no commanding tone in it like Kupchenko, but it was still good to instill bravery in the heart of his citizens and of their soldiers, if they wanted to succeed in evacuating with minimal losses. There would be, she knew that. It would have taken her to fall to such depth to do what could be considered as nobility in fight: for the ones that cannot. And she was doing that for her former enemies. Or former adversaries, the line between was a bit vague sometimes.

"Hoffnungern und Hoffnungerinnen. Heute könnte der dunkelste Tag unserer Geschichte sein. Aber wir könnten nicht erlauben, unsere Hoffnung zu verschwinden. Unsere Hoffnung wird immer in unseren Hertz brennen. Unsere Hoffnung wird für Generation weiterleben, durch unser Blut. Könnten die Blut heute vergießen, Feuer werden, um unsere Feinde niederzubrennen. (Inhabitants of Hoffnung. Today may be the darkest day of our history. But we cannot allow our Hope to disappear. Our Hope will always burn in our hearts. Our Hope will continue to live for generation, through Blood. May the shed blood become fire to burn our enemies to the ground)." Was the short speech of the mayor, a discourse filled with vibrant emotion and passion. There were maybe some reasons why Philosophers used Belkan words sometimes to describe their concept, even in countries were most people didn't know much words in Belkan.

"My, that was a nice speech. I feel like I could go to Oured and drop some FAEB on the bright house right now." Iskanda commented the pretty heated speech. Sure, it was made to foster bravery, but was also filled with hatred to the brim. After all, what was she expecting from Belkans on the verge of annihilation? And did she harbor less hatred for the Oseans? Maybe a tad less, but many things had begun to change for her today, and these changes could only go in exponential ways, for her point of views.

"It is nicht fertig." Donner eight corrected her, as the mayor was finally saying the conclusion.

"In diese dunkelste Tag, in dieser schweren Zeit, guck an der Zukunft wo Hoffnung Hell scheint. (in this darkest day, in these uncertain times, look to the future where hope burn bright)." Were the end of the Mayor's speech. He knew Kupchenko had offered him a lift on a DW-2s when they had evacuated some important officials and engineers, but he refused the offer. He would only leave when his work would be done. He didn't want to sink with his ship like some captains but would not jump right out of it and let the third-class passenger die like some company leaders did.

"Und wir werden die Alliierten zur Hell senden!" Iskanda couldn't prevent herself from adding this line, due to the closeness of the two words, meaning bright for the Belkan word that was written like hell.

North of Hoffnung, Belka, 11/06/1995, 11:30, Weather: overcast, medium cloud coverage.

The radar had been quite quiet on both the Northern and Southern front, but that was about to change very fast, or at least in a very close future. Obviously, they couldn't have heard Iskanda's intent to send all of them in Hell. Yet these allied reinforcements already belonged to hell in some way.

"I have a mixed unit on my radar: Fishbed, Fulcrum, Flankers and Sea Flankers, some Tornadoes." Donner eight described the mixed unit that was coming at them.

"They seemed to be escorting some unit, a bit further away, ETA ten minutes." Donner 3 indicated, having climbed a few kilometers higher than this comrade to increase his radar range.

"Good. I'm counting at least fifteen fighters overall. They don't seem to have any specific camo." Iskanda shared her information too, as the fighters were getting in visual range. To be fair, they had no camo at all, just a plain grey paint job. They only bore the insignia of the Yuktobanian air force, and these had been covered by black hatched lines.

"Great. Here comes the Kulaks." Donner three finally settled on the IDs of these Yukte craft. From his more elevated position, he had a plain field of sight to fire his XMAAs, while the Yukte crafts were beginning to engage his two wingmen with their SAAMs, with the said pilots having no trouble evading the slow semi-active missiles.

"Flankieren Sie" Donner eight ordered to Iskanda, as the first line of Yukte attackers was heavily disturbed by the two XMAA volley, the last of Donner 3. They had made sixth victims on the fifteen that this wave contained. But now all of them had no more XMAAs.

Still, the flank was pretty effective, as the two F-35X flew away from each over, as the Yukte attackers scrambled to evade the explosions of their unfortunate dying comrades. But amongst all of these companions of misfortune, who were the most fortunate ones? Maybe the ones to die in combat, as it was meaning to have a chance to die and end their misery. Iskanda attacked them from the left, after having executed a leftward horizontal loop, flying inverted to fire her QAAMs from her ventral bay easily. Even if she had a pretty bad headache when she inverted after firing three of her QAAMs, two pairs of missiles and a few gun bursts. And as the over members rotated their planes left to counterattack, which she evaded by flying vertically again, they were picked from behind by Donner three who slaughtered three Tornadoes solely with his gun. The three of them had their wings clipped off and either fell toward the Löre in the hope of crash landing or exploded in the fields. The Yukte planes, the few Fishbeds and Tornadoes in the backline of the first wave that they had not initially accounted for were now turning to engage him.

But these four survivors only met their doom when Donner 3 and Schwarze Luchs fell on them like bird of prey, gun blazing and missiles locked. Two of them were killed by vertical gunfire that turned their cockpits into metallic wreckage filled with minced meat and shattered glass, and the two over fell victim to missile that broke their tail, leading to pretty big explosion. But for all these planes, she didn't count any chute. She found that to be expected with the QF-4s and QF-16s, but not for planes with living pilots in it.

"Why aren't they bailing out?" She asked to Donner 3 as he leveled near her, ready to engage the next wave of Yukte attackers, this time made of the Su-27 and -33s, and Fulcrums.

"Kulaks aren't authorized to live outside of their service for their motherland. Just asked to these people they turned into living target practice for Excalibur when they throw them in space above Belka. They are penal units, like they used the Kulaks of the beginning of this century as cannon fodder back then." Donner 3 sadly explained, almost feeling sorry for these soldiers that had almost a gun behind their head at any time. Because these planes were just as ordinary as the usual Yukte plane, but they removed the chute and put some heavy explosive instead. And of course, if the plane crashed, it would blow up. That could explain why these planes had blown up with more power than usually.

"I didn't think that penal units were still a thing. Black ops deserter-killer like Schwarze, I can understand, but that… That his inhuman." Iskanda could do nothing but feel sorry for these Yuktes. She hadn't felt anything but raw hatred for the Hexens, because they were evil people that needed to go down. Of course, they couldn't just simply destroy their AWACS to prevent the Yuktobanian commander of the penal unit to blow them up. They had no choice but to kill them to end their worries for good. And the ones in these fourth-generation jets didn't seemed to be willing to go down as easily as the first ones.

"Donner 4, we are engaged with Osean Penal units too. They are a bit better than the last time." The leading pilot of the other platoon indicated.

"You let too much of them live last time." Donner 3 chastised his colleague, that had let these Osean penal unit live for another day, as they didn't have explosive charge if they run away.

"Only one man is enough to tell the tale." Iskanda commented, recalling her own suggestion she gave to Kupchenko before he attacked the last Osean plane and left only the pilot live. At least here she didn't have to worry that much about such subject.

They would have twelve aircraft against them, with almost four of each type. There was three Su-33s, five Su-27s and four Fulcrums. All of them bearing this anonymizing grey camo, denying their identity as a single soldier, and reducing it to mere pawn without any hopes of getting promotion. It was so simple for Yuktobania to create such units. After all, they engaged plenty of soldiers in the Romneyan Conflict, and not everybody had the bit of luck that Zubov had, to be "given" to Belka.

She rushed head-on toward the Su-27, she knew they were lighter and more agile than the Sea Flankers. All of them try to hit her with their SAAMs, but she made their shot go for trash by flying in a somewhat erratic pattern, sum of hairpin bends. Volleys of standards missiles followed, that once again she evaded successfully, this time by hitting the deck near the power line above that meander of the Löre, which was situated on a perpendicular axis to the Yukte's vector of approach. Their missile either splashed on the river or on the cables. They were slowly pitching down to engage her with their guns. But her next maneuver nullified their chances.

She climbed right in front of them, between the path of the two at the left of the five planes formation. Yet, when they saw her climbing, they noticed that her central bay was wide open. And before they could land a gunshot inside of said bays, they were struck by two QAAMs she had fired at the beginning of her climb. And the three remaining were not aligned correctly to land any hits on her.

As she climbed and did a vertical Himmelman to fall on her enemies, she had a good point of view on Donner 8. He had engaged the four MiG-29s head-on and had inverted his craft as he evaded their SAAMs. Then fired his QAAMs inverted, pulled out an Himmelman without having the need to invert back his aircraft, and finished the two others with a gun burst and a pair of missiles.

Now, she was falling on her preys, gun blazing. One Su-27 had his tail torn off by the gunfire and it somehow triggered his onboard explosives, resulting in quite a big explosion. His wingman had to bank hard to avoid any incoming parts from the explosion, but as he leveled, she leveled her aircraft right on his, and settled his fate with a pair of missiles. The last one had set his aircraft to attack her from the side, but she ruined his attempt by making her F-35X fall on its back, and the fast Flanker overran his target, even if some bullets grazed her fuselage. She was hot on his tail in five seconds, after a very hard turn that would have made the baseline Lightning II stall.

But she was enjoying the fact of using this Belkan model, and the small sharklets that improved its low speed stability. The Su-27 tried to lose her with maneuvers that out her on the verge of stalling. Yet, it was when she chose to stall that she downed him, pitching down to hit the deck and using the gained momentum to catch up with him and perform some Schräge Musik.

Meanwhile, Gustav had not much issues dispatching his Sea Flankers. The two first, he killed them head-on with a pair of QAAMs. But the last was a bit tricky. He tried to lose him by making very sharp turn that reduced greatly their speed. Donner 3 knew in which range of speed they were getting: the one in which Sukhois could perform post-stall maneuvers. So, he let his Yukte opponent do his Cobra, but wasn't passive: he hit the afterburners for a couple of seconds, getting thrown back on his seat by the sudden acceleration, but far outmatching the Su-33's speed.

And before the Su-33s had fully finished to level after his Cobra, he had already done a Herbert Manöver and fired a pair of missiles on his opponent, who was unable to evade due to his loss of speed.

"Cobra is nice for show, but useless if not fully mastered." Gustav pointed out, criticizing disdainfully the downed Kulak, as the two others were joining on his position.

"I thought there was only one thing to master above here, survival." Iskanda went a bit sarcastic, needing to blow off some steams after having to apply death sentence on those Yukte waiting in the death corridors of those modern gulags.

"Well, it's paramount above B7R. But ours' is not here. The transports and the civilians are." Donner eight countered Schwarze Luchs, knowing that sacrifices might be needed to prevent the death toll to go above the thousands.

"Herr Burgermeister expect us to be ready to die to keep Hoffnung safe as long as possible. This battle doesn't come with any certainties." The number three added, not being very positive about the likelihood of victory. Furthermore, how was conceding a city to the enemy a victory? Maybe when all that the enemy would obtain was dust soaked by the blood of their own soldiers.

"Positiveren, bitte." Iskanda asked, trying to cheer up their mood a bit.

However, their mood was frantically cheered down by the Osean reinforcements. This time, they meant business: Iskanda could count nineteen small flying wings incoming on her HUD, which identified them as A-12 Avenger IIs. Even if she doubted heavily that they were here to avenge their drones or the kulaks. And there weren't that many people to avenge on the E-6B she shot down earlier, as there was a great number of chutes when it fell. None of the pilots had survived it, but she hadn't sealed their fate like Pixy did with the Grabacrs either.

For her, it was the first time she saw them. She had already seen the DW-2s, but these were at least fifteen meters wide. While these A-12 Avenger IIs were only as wide as a F-14D with open wings. Maybe they had some carrier-capacities, she guessed. She was wondering why they just show up right now. They could have outnumbered them if the QFs, the Kulaks and this squad attacked all at the same time, they would have succeeded. Hopefully, Oseans weren't the smarter tools on this battlefield, or they would have some issues dealing with their forces. She was about to ask the Donner squad members about the A-12's capacities, when her missile alarm gave her the response, when the A-12s were only at five kilometers.

"They're using XLAAs." She warned her wingmen as she banked hard left to avoid the long-range with poor mobility, who was better suited for downing bombers.

"Then it must mean some of them are in hunter configuration. With their secondary bays with XMAAs and XLAAs." Donner 8 explained one of the configurations of this new fighter the Osean were trying to throw into service. Apparently, they had an entire line of them that they never bothered to finish back then, but due to this these aircraft had been stored outside of their main research centers and had been spared of the EMP disasters. Still, most of their pilots were lacking experience at piloting such aircraft, since the only other flying wings in Osea's arsenal were the B-2s, and B-2 pilots rarely flew fighter jets, which was true in the other way.

"Their other configuration is the striker : XMAAs and heavy SODs. Those must not enter the city, or they would ruin the defenses." Donner 3 added, trying to figure which one had fired XLAAs and which one had not.

"That will be a bit too much of Fox 3s, don't you think? I mean, these F-35X are more mobile than the baseline Lightning II, but not as much as the Su-47 I flew over B7R." Iskanda shared a bit of worries for the first time of this entire mission. Because having more than forty XMAAs incoming would definitively be too much of a heated situation, even for her taste of danger.

"Bienenstock to Donner 3, we have some missile boats heading for your sector, they should be able to provide a bit of support if you force the A-12s to dogfight at low altitude." The central Belkan command of Hoffnung announced them, as a group of four missile boats that were simple hydrofoils with three SAMs launchers was gliding down on the Löre toward their position. But they still needed to attract them to fight at low altitude. And not to attract every one of them or this support wouldn't last long if the A-12s in striker configuration attack the missile boats without these having some aerial cover.

"Can you ask for a Merlin satellite?" Iskanda admitted that this tool of the Pendragon Projekt was a great addition to the battlefield. And it was pretty hard for her to admit that what she wanted to be destroyed a few weeks ago, she was now asking for its help.

"Yeah, we have some links to Tauberg. Wofür (for what)?" The operator that was ready to transmit the area to ionize to the Belkan Wunderwaffe asked for the aim of such use.

"Um diese Vergelter anzugehören. Die Dichte abnimmt mit der Höhe, Recht? (to halt those Avengers. The density decreases with the altitude, right?)" She hoped that the dangerousness of the plasma curtain was somehow following the pressure variation.

"Einigermassen. Merlin auf in zehn Sekunde (More or less, Merlin on in ten seconds)." Another operator answered to her. She had already heard that voice. Very likely during operation Jugement, in which they horribly misjudged the power of said weapon.

"Gut." Iskanda acknowledged and began to set her plane for a steep climb.

"Be ready for anything, Dark Monarch squadron." Their leader announced, as he just heard the term "Merlin" in this Belkan conversation. And it was the only word he understood, because their avionics didn't include an onboard translator. Their squadron had a dark grey camo, with light grey painting of butterfly wings on their lower side.

"One of them is climbing. I'll follow her with the other hunter configured A-12." Dark Monarch 5 observed that the number ten of this Donner squad, the one that had destroyed the E-6B was in a vertical flight, while the two other were circling behind the plasma curtain.

And of course, with the plasma curtain being quite wide and their formation a very close one, they were stop dead in their tracks. Of the A-12 configured in hunter, 9 followed Dark Monarch 5. The other would try to circle around the plasma curtain, but this would be the perfect opportunity for Donner 3 and 8 to ambush them. Besides, the operators on the missile boats were ready too, and with the heavy EMIs the Merlin satellites produced above the operational area, there were pretty high chances that the Oseans hadn't spotted them yet.

As such, as the two remaining A-12 meant for air-to-air tried to trickle around the limit of the plasma curtain, they were warmly received by a pair of standard missiles. They managed to evade those missiles by barrel-rolling to either the right or the left, and retaliate with their standards and XMAAs on the other far away F-35X relative to their position, with Donner 3 being at the north-west of the curtain and the number 8 at the south-west, the curtain following a line between the NW and the SW. Of course, Donner 3 and 8 also managed to avoid this fire coming from both sides, but by hitting the deck, which gave them the momentum advantage in the ensuing dogfight. Indeed, the flying wing pilots were suffering from the fact that these planes had their mass less concentrated on the center of the craft, and as such had greater roll inertia. Thus, they lost more speed as they recovered from their evasive maneuvers.

They tried to regain their speed as they went for the other fighter, crossing each other's path, but as they flew behind the middle of the plasma curtain, they ventured above the missile boats, with their bays still wide open after their first shots. Perfect target that had just chosen to nullify their own stealth. A handful of missiles left their tubes, buzzing from the water level. The few that connected weren't enough to critically damage the planes, those fast missiles having a light warhead. However, they were filled with magnetic particles that acted in the opposite way of deperming systems and would create disturbance in the radar cross section of stealth planes, ensuring their doom. Because the two F-35X didn't lose any time on them, shooting them down with ease.

Meanwhile, Iskanda was still climbing on her side of the plasma wall. Wall that she knew, was thinning with density and altitude, but density wasn't a straight function. She remembered that it was quite a complicated one, one with nonlinearity. But apparently, one Osean had forgotten that fact. He tried to go through at ten kilometers, but the plasma density was still too thick and the static electricity too powerful for his bays, which weren't perfect faraday cages. Thus, he blew up from the inside after losing all radio, his comrades couldn't even hear his afraid voice in his last moments.

Yet, the difference between her survival and their death was quite thin. It could have just settled by the pure specs of their respective planes, but she didn't know anything about the A-12 to be able to gauge that. Furthermore, they had bigger wings than her, so she thought their maximal ceiling would be above hers. And falling in another spin of death was not how she had foreseen to end this fight. She might need the help of the Belkan Wunderwaffe, she admitted this fact. To be honest, it was surely safer to fly with the ones having the Wunderwaffe, and not the other way around. Sure, there was so much glory to gain from destroying the Wunderwaffe, but does all the losses they suffer worth her individual glory? War couldn't be won by a single pilot, after all.

"Schwarze Luchs zu Tauberg. Können sie den Winkel der Sattelite verändern, ein bisschen mehr in Richtung diese alliierten? (SLuchs to Tauberg. Can you change the angle of the satellite, a bit more toward the allies?)" She asked to the Belkan operator, putting her little talks she had with Kellerman in use, as she needed to use a bit of technical Belkan here.

"Es ist möglich. Einigen Grad genug soll." The operator asserted, typing some commands on his monitor.

And at a few dozen thousand kilometers, the longilineal Satellite slowly rotated on its axis. The satellite itself only rotated with a very tiny torque, from some chemical solid propellant meant for orbital maneuvers. But these tiny changes meant that the plasma curtain was not any more vertical, but more of an oblique field. If Iskanda was on the good side of the curtain, the Avengers that were trailing her on the other side were grazed by the electrical currents moving through the air, as their ionic guides were shifting in angle. They all fell, their engines suddenly stopped in their very steep climb. They would have possessed a good lift if they hadn't pitched so much. Right now, most of them were falling without any control on their craft, with the unluckiest ones spinning so much that they were knocked out by the sheer acceleration they were submitted to.

"Es wird gefährlich, diese Feld durchqueren, Recht (it'll be dangerous, to cross this field, won't it) ?" She asserted, ash she was levelling her fighter with her altitude around sixteen kilometers. Her plane was becoming less and less stable at such a high altitude. After all, F-35s had not been intended to be high-altitude flyers, but more of low-altitude multirole strikers.

"Recht. Aber mit nichts in deinem Bays weniger es ist (Well it'll. But without anything in your bays it will be less dangerous)." The operator recognized that with her XMAAs bays empty, she had less risks of taking damage than the A-12s.

"Ich habe nur ein Leben... also, jetzt oder nie (I have only one life... so, it's now or never)." She threw this little line and her worries out of the windows, before crossing the field. Even if she wasn't sure of her survival right now, she had already greater likelihood of survival than against the Hexen of this night.

The F-35X flew through the overloaded air, catching a bit of lightnings. Still, with the air having gotten thinner at this altitude, she suffered less than the one Osean that tried to traverse at ten kilometers. For some instants, she saw some bits of plasma being sucked into her air intakes, and some gauges began to show worrying figures, especially the ones for fuel temperature in her tank. They might blow up if she stayed too long there. So, she didn't lose much time, and once her radar was less filled with EMIs, she hit the deck toward the falling Avengers. She was honestly surprised that her rudders were working. Her gun might be too, she guessed. She didn't wanted to fire missiles because of the amount of EMIs in the area that would make her miss very likely, and not to have some lighting striking inside of her missile bays.

She checked that when she caught up with a A-12 that had managed to regain a bit of stability. However, he hadn't much time to profit of this new stability, as a F-35X was diving on him, and shredded his flying wing with gunfire. She turned one of the first flying wing fighter into a solo wing. Who lose whatever mobility he had as one of his tanks in the snapped wing exploded right at him, like a burst shell of flak.

A few seconds of fall later, she encountered a pair of two still locked into their spins, that must have been quite close when they fell, and that were far too close for their own safety. She fired a gun burst to the one at the left, which by reflex rolled toward the right. And impacted his own wingman. The three next were a bit more widespread, as they had fully lost control other their craft, that had rolled on their pitched axis way too much time, and the negative Gs they had been submitted might have been deadly for two of them, because she was only seeing one trying to recover. The dead ones were no worth wasting her time nor her bullets

For this one, she guessed she was not far away enough from the Merlin satellite's area of effect to use her missiles. She thought she would need two of them to down those flying wings that had a stronger wing structure than the wings of more usual fighters like her own. She fired two missiles on his left wing, and the damage were more severe than she had anticipated. Maybe it was because her own kinetic energy had added itself to the energy of missile, and thus the blow was more powerful. Whatever the reason, in the end the fate of the Osean was the same : his death, as his fighter burned like a torch.

While she was catching the last four of the falling A-12, she could see the progress made by the two Donner team members. Three others tried to trickle in again, thinking they could overpower the only two aircraft. They had made the mistake of underestimating these pilots that had nothing to lose today and were fully convinced to be acting for the good of their people. And even if she liked doing the wrong things sometimes, she had to agree than having the feeling of being the "good" guys could be a good foster. Two of the three Avengers were destroyed by missiles fired head-on from the F-35Xs. Maybe it was their QAAMs, to have such accuracy, since the flying wings weren't able to avoid them even if they banked as hard as they could.

The third had no better fate: he managed to evade a QAAM by making the flying wings go flat on its back, performing some kind of false Cobra, but this deprived him greatly of his mobility. He stalled a bit, almost entered into a spin that brought him closer to the river

"Damn, that was close." The Osean pilot admitted, as he was slowly getting his flying wing stable again.

But before he could target anything, three missiles were heading toward him and blew him up.

"Well, case closed." Donner 8 commented the unfair death of the Osean. They really needed to improve their piloting of such planes if they wanted to be a real threat. Not too much, but enough so they wouldn't end up in laughable situation like this one.

"Nice shot for a missile boat." Iskanda congratulated what many pilots judged to be an insignificant threat compared to Aegis vessels. Sure, these were almost glass canons, but they could fire so quickly that there were great risks of hurting oneself with the shards of glass of said glass canon.

"Well, Dankeschön." The operator thanked back. He knew he was onboard of a glass canon. He actually envied the operator of RTLS on Excalibur, that hadn't a single chance of being killed in the actual state of things.

She only had the four last to take down by now. She took care of the two further away first. One with a missile on his cockpit, which reduced the pilot to minced meat. She aimed a bit more cautiously for the other and fired right into his air intake. His engines blew up instantly, and due to the violent shock, the plane was shattered in half, with the two parts falling in opposite direction. Then, yawing toward the last two, she set her plan in motion to kill them, but had to change it a bit as they opened fire. They had almost managed to regain enough stability to fire at her with enough accuracy. Which they did, forcing Iskanda to accelerate her fall, making them overshoot, with their volley of XMAAs crossing behind her falling craft -above it might be a better designation-.

They knew they had little hope to survive this fall, as most of the systems onboard theirs craft where still inactive from the effect of the Merlin satellite. However, they thought they could have at least the compensation of having taken down this "Schwarze Luchs" South Belkan ace. Or at least that's what their commander told them. Truth was their commander didn't know much than this about this new foe -or new allies for the CSB, from another point of view-. Almost, she was almost falling to her death, they exulted. They honestly thought they had hit her with their twin-mounted guns

But like she had made some Belkan misunderstood her fall above the Futuro canal, when she stopped her fall mere meter above the sea level, she fooled those Oseans. She performed a vertical Himmelman, which was quite hard to bear given the amount of speed her aircraft had gained during this long fall. It was a good thing these aircraft were intended to be carrier compatible, as such they had a bit more of resistance to mechanical stress. Still, it wasn't enough to prevent a high-pitch alarm to ring inside her cockpit, repeating "Achtung, strukturelle Fehlerrisikos." (warning, risk of structural failure). Which she did suffer in the end, when the canards they had added on those F-35X were torn off, as well as half of her elevators.

Yet, even with all of those pieces having being shattered by the high-Gs, she managed to keep her aircraft in control, and to do her vertical downward Himmelman. And, using her X-shaped empennage, she guided herself back to the falling A-12s, that were startled to hear the sound of their missile locked alarm. Like that UCAV operator she had encountered in her first official mission for Ustio, they underestimated her capacity to undergo pain and overly dangerous situation.

"How did she pull…" Was one of these pilots last questions, that he could never finish, as a strong gun burst struck his engine from behind. The A-12 shattered in a thousand pieces as the structure failed to keep the plane intact after having suffer so much punishment from this fall.

The other one tried to roll on the pitch axis to get his sight on her, but he pitched down too much, and fell again to his death, which came earlier than he anticipated, as a missile went straight to his cockpit, way before he impacted the ground.

Then Iskanda leveled her craft with chill-spinning ease, and pitched down a bit, attacking the two last A-12 that showed quite a great amount of reluctance to move. They had all the reason to act in such ways. However, one of these reasons disappeared suddenly: the EMI of the plasma shutter were losing in intensity, and by the time Iskanda had gotten in range, the A-12 were able to release a volley of their heavy SODs. The cloud of deadly shrapnels that covered the river the next second didn't let any chance to survive for the missile boat's crew.

"Donner 3 zu Tauberg, was passiert? Antwort! (What's happened? Respond!" Gustav asked quickly, having to barrel-roll to evade some XMAA from one of the A-12s.

"The North Belkan… They're using their anti-satellite missiles. The Merlin satellite is still active, but in defensive mode." The operator was angry and sorry to admit that the Rald Partei had now chosen to fight their own men, and thus to endanger their own citizen. Maybe this was the reason why most of the population of Hoffnung had chosen to join the CSB. Some had chosen to go to a closer location, Sudentor. But only a very short margin had chosen to retreat North with the units of the army that preferred to run rather than to stand up and fight.

"Bevolksverrätern. Stolzohne. (Traitor to the people. Prideless)." Donner 8 swore, and these few words were followed by a nice streak of the Belkan equivalent of many f-words.

"Sie benutzen ihre TempestAngreiffSchiffe. Sie werden nur uns überlasten, nicht zerstören. (they're using their Belkan Aegis class. They will only saturate us, not destroy us)" The operator tried to put all of this under this perspective that the repurposed BAWS they were using as ASAT missiles had poor capacity in this field. Still, they had obtained one thing: to force the defenders of Hoffnung to step back. And the same thing was happening at the south, and there too they would have to step back.

"Aber ich kann diese zerstören." Iskanda intervened, as she was getting on range for her standard missiles on the last two Avengers, who had been focused a bit too much on the two Donner squad members, that had succeeded in evading their attacks, and even in retaliating, thus further driving their attention away from their sixes. One took a pair right in the middle of the structure, behind the cockpit. A more formal jet would have just blown up from having his engines blew up. But since the engines were a bit more spread out, he only suffered from a terrible speed loss as the extended damages nullified the stability of the plane.

The other managed to evade a first missile from Iskanda's F-35X by doing a quarter of a barrel-roll, with the missile missing him by less than a meter. But as he was about to level in order to maintain his speed and the distance between him and this modified Lightning II, he realized he just did the mistake that caused his last alive wingman's life, but in reverse this time. As he was slowly countering the greater inertia of his flying wing, the F-35Xs of Donner eight and three opened fire from both sides, having successfully flanked him. The impact was terrible, ripping most of his wings. Due to the momentum of such heavy blow, his aircraft -or what was remaining of it to be more precise-. entered a deadly spin, that ended up with him crashing not that far away from the still fuming remains of the missile boats. The killer had joined his victims.

"Nice teamwork, pals." She commented their dual flank, with a fully honest mindset. These Belkans were showing quite a lot of determination. As much as did the Ustian when fighting for Directus, maybe.

"Kein Zeit für Komplimente (No time for praise)." Donner 3 said, as he was turning toward the northern limits of the airspace of the city, under protection from the BAWS. And according to his radar, not only the BAWS. They had maybe a chance to resist to the less numerous waves of eleven A-12s and a few B-2s there.

"Es stimmt. Rückschritten müssen wir (it's right. we have to retreat)." Donner 8 nodded, fully knowing that their capacity to evade such a swarm of enemy were limited. They had succeeded against greater odds just a few minutes ago, but they had the power of the Sword of Kings with them. And now, with its power challenged by North Belka, the three of them had to retreat. The closest A-12s were already in range, which caused their lock-on alarm to blare with a high-pitch tone. And since they were still pretty far, there was a pretty high likelihood they were in their hunter configuration.

If they made to the city, they would have a chance to survive this. The SAM sites she had seen near those fuel tanks weren't the only defenses nearby. They had talked enough times about BAWS for her to know that this city had quite a number of them. And if the A-12s might be agile enough to evade them, the B-2s weren't. Furthermore, one of the two bridge that were linking two industrial sites did seem to be a railway bridge. Railways that remind her of one thing that had once almost jeopardized the situation.

Northern Sector of Hoffnung, Belka, 11/06/1995, 11:45, Weather: overcast, medium cloud coverage.

Despite the few volleys of XLAAs hot on their tails, they had managed to enter back into Hoffnung's airspace. They had flown other the building of the suburbs of the highly widespread industrial city. Now she was understanding why the fly-by onboard her ULM seemed to be so long, with the city covering the entire valley that had a croissant-like shape. The Bienenstock base was a bit more to the North-West, were a smaller valley was open by an affluent of the Löre. Flanked between these arrays of mountains were still laying the dozens of factories that had somehow allowed Belka to keep the pace with the allied forces.

Then they flew other the little SAM site she had seen a bit sooner, who were either on top of some fuel tanks or hidden between them. However, she had not that much time to enjoy the landscape right now: like the two other F-35Xs, she had an impressive quantity of missile heading for her.

Usually, it was her who would come with crazy plans and the others would be afraid to follow her schemes. Now it was the opposite, when she saw what was on the railway bridge and heard what Donner 3 suggested:

"They have set a RTLS on the second bridge. If we fly just above the first, then dived below the second, we should be able to sleep between the fingers of those Fox 3s spammers!" He described his plan, as the SPKs set on the first bridge were beginning to fire. Iskanda recognized very well the shape of the RTLS, this heavily armored railcar with its telescope-like laser turrets. This one had the four small dual turrets. At least if they were hit by a stray shot, their crafts wouldn't be vaporized instantaneously.

"Gut. Ich werde dir verfolgen." Donner eight agreed, as he doubted that any conventional counter-measures would have any efficiency against such number of missile trailing them

"Ver" Iskanda simply said, a bit startled that once again, she would be saved by the accomplishment of what she once swore to destroy.

Their three aircraft flew very close to the bridge. Luckily, these were old arc bridges, so they had no network of cable to go through. Furthermore, the SPKs were on the sides and not on the middle. Otherwise their jet wash could have pushed one off the bridge, since they were very low. If they had their gear down, they could have taxied on the bridge for sure.

Behind them, they could already hear quite a lot of small explosion, half-covered by the deafened sound of the SPKs firing indiscriminately. Then, they flew even lower, skimming above the water lever like LASMs would, while the sky was covered by even more small explosions of the missiles trailing them, and their radar was getting covered by the EMIs caused by the shots of the RTLS. The fire was so intense than small sparks began to appear in mid-air.

Donner three and eight saw a bunch of A-12s that were heading toward the eastern side of Hoffnung, where there were arrays of small buildings. They weren't by any means skyscrapers, but their height was enough for the Osean to use them as some kind of cover to circumvent the bridge's defenses and thus get free reign for the small squad of B-2s following them. Thus, they banked right, and glided toward those buildings, unseen to the Oseans that had some other building in their field of sight.

Iskanda, on the opposite, saw that some of the A-12 that must be in striker configuration were firing with all of their strength at the RTLS. Already one SPK was down. Yet, she had seen some unorthodox method of approach, and it was on the western side of the river. So, they parted ways, without one noticing the others, as the EMIs of the RTLS were ruining their comms to such a level that they couldn't understand each other.

"If we can go through this little array of buildings, we shall be fine." One Osean pilot said, as he and five other A-12 in hunter configuration were flanking the RTLS, or at least trying to. Besides, flying low made them harder to track by the radar guiding the BAWS falling warheads. They were happy to get this cover, because the first salvo of the BAWS almost killed two of their squadmates that were flying a bit too close, as they had to pull last second evasives.

"Yes, and then their foolish Hope to keep their city will burn." Another bid, as they had easily destroyed the first few SAMs that were between these building, having one striker with them that overpowered their defenses with two heavy SODs, while their shot ended up trashed on some nearby building. Yet, this had forced them to fly close to one another again. And that caused their doom a few seconds later.

Donner three and eight had the chance to know Hoffnung better than these Oseans. Thus, they know where the few light defenses were situated, and how much time it would take to those Oseans to destroy them. Thus, they knew were they would arrive, given the speed of these A-12s.

"It's you who'll burn today." Donner 3 shouted, as he just flanked the Oseans, coming at their three hours, while the number eight had gone through a more oblique street, and was coming on their eight hours.

Pairs of missiles were quickly fired by both Belkan planes, taking the Osean by surprise. Yet, only one of them was shot down by the direct fire. However, one crashed his flying wing as another tried to lose a missile by flying near a building. The missile did crash, but the impact caused a great cloud of shattered glass to appear right behind him, and right behind him was also their striker. Whose air intakes sucked a bit of these tiny sharp things. His engine was dead in a few seconds, and as he was turning hard to evade the gun from Donner eight.

Furthermore, the one that flew near the building to lose the missile didn't had a better fate : as he kept climbing close to the building, he flew above it. He hadn't seen the AA guns on its top, flying at the bottom of the street on their way to this ambush they hadn't seen coming either. Numerous rounds pierced his wings, and the right fuel tank began to burn. A few seconds later, as he tried to fly away from the short range Belkan anti-air defense, one warhead of the BAWS went right for him. When they had enough mobility, they could evade it, but not after losing one engine and with a fuel tank burning.

"Three against two. We should have the advantage!" One Osean claimed, but he was only lying to himself to cope with their losses.

"Es ist nicht genug." Donner three retorted, pursuing one Osean between some building under construction. And as the Osean had to pitched down in order to evade some crane, he fired a pair of missiles on the said crane. The debris had a pretty high chance of hitting the Osean flying wing. He chose to fly vertical to evade a certain death, but the chase had made him bleed his speed. Thus, he stalled, and a gun burst of the F-35X that just had to pitch up a bit finished him.

"Let's try to run while they are busy." The very Osean who had claimed to have some false numeric superiority had turned toward the RTLS. He was followed by the last survivor. Still, the said last survivor wouldn't survive much longer. Donner eight attacked him from below, forcing him to climb.

And as he climbed and turned on his afterburners to outrun the F-35X, he got himself in the area of fire of the RTLS. Which his radar covered by EMIs should have taught him. But now, he kept climbing, even after Donner eight had abandoned the chase, seeing nothing on his radar but grey due to the radar anomalies caused by energy-based weaponry. He didn't see the small turrets of the RTLS targeting him, from one or two kilometers away. He only realized that he was targeted when the structural integrity alarm blared, as the fire from the RTLS had ruined his wing surface, which was quite thin near their bays. He exploded in mid-air after having half of his hull torn off by the Femtolasers.

The last one was shot down by the RTLS itself, at close range. SPK rounds damaged his intakes, and as he tried to ram his aircraft into the armored railcar, the weapon housed in his bays exploded due to the heat caused by their plating being sublimated.

"Wo ist Schwarze Luchs?" Donner 3 wondered, as he had now come to realize that she hadn't follow them. She hadn't crash either, or someone would've noticed it on the ground. The question, was indeed, where was she? Even her new Belkan IFF wasn't shown by his radar anymore. There wasn't a lot of places that could hide a plane from its own transponders.

"Ich sehe sie nicht." Donner eight acknowledged. And it was a bad time to be outnumbered, as the B-2s had come a bit closer to the city. Maybe close enough to use their cruise missiles on the RTLS. Which could deal with five A-12 in striker configuration, but not five A-12s and five B-2s.

"The Merlin's trackers had lost her too." One Tauberg operator who was transmitting the stealth position to the Belkan in Hoffnung added, having lost her just as she turned left after that bridge, when the two others turned right.

"Ich hatte ein neue Flugvektoren gefunden." She surprised all of her new allies and enemies, as she just came out from below a very long metallic container-conveyer, that linked all factories and was used to reduce the delays for the moving of parts between factories, situated on the western side of the industrial complex, and was making her arrive on the three hours of the swarm of A-12s that kept releasing their heavy SODs on the RTLS to saturate its Femtolasers.

"Were is she?" An Osean asked, having not seen where she was coming from nor to where she was going either.

"In your sixes, Dummkopf." She bluntly replied, as she had flown low after leaving that tunnel, unseen from the Oseans. She had picked this one as he was coming back from a short gun run on a SPK. Gun run that had caused him to lose half of his control surfaces, but the SPK was destroyed. Still, without these, he had a hard time evading her. To be fair, he had no time to evade her, since she pitched up on her approach, only to fire at his canopy a few seconds later.

Two others tried to attack her, but she had still the advantage of mobility on those poorly trained A-12s pilots. Even in spite of her destroyed canards. They fired a volley of XMAAs at her, which she evaded by tilting her aircraft at a ninety degree with the horizon, and then dived below their firing arcs. That they could expect. But they didn't expect her to pull what seemed to be to them a fast U-turn, but was her little head-to-tail maneuver, which caused her to see in black due to the sheer acceleration she had to bear.

Still, seeing things in black and white for a few seconds didn't prevent her to perform Schräge Musik on these two A-12s she just outturn. Both exploded as she filled them with Belkan lead.

The two last, who were about to release another volley of SODs, felt the full retaliatory power of the RTLS. The CSB and its allied city of Hoffnung didn't need to use Vergeltungswaffe to retaliate. Femtolaser were efficient enough, who pierced their wings as they vaporize the metal they were made off. Before this "Schwarze Luchs" attacked them through this unorthodox manner, they would have enough SODs in the air to keep the RTLS operators busy. Not anymore. Now they had lost. This battle and their life, which ended quite violently in two balls of fire that explode on impact with the Löre, as they tried to steer their burning aircraft toward the last Belkan defenses, but a few shots of the Femtolaser made them fell a bit quicker.

"Blue Shadow, retreat." An Osean commander ordered from over the waves at the B-2s that had advanced with too much confidence in the ability of their forces to deal with a RTLS. After all, they had heard that one pilot managed to destroy three of them at Directus single-handedly. Yet, what they didn't know of course was that the same pilot was now chasing them.

"Roger sir, but I'm afraid we won't go this far." One of the B-2 copilot indicated, as he was seeing the three F-35X closing on their five aircraft formation. Two had already run a bit further.

"You're right to be afraid indeed. Afraid of death who's coming to get you." Iskanda taunted them, as she was catching up with one of them. Sure, they could activate their ECM pods and launch their flares. That won them a bit of time. But no jamming could negate guns. Her gunfire set one of their engines on fire, and it was enough to blow it sky-high. Maybe their payload was of incendiary bombs.

Two other Spirits with their grey-blue metallic camo fell to the guns of the defenders of Hoffnung. But as they caught up with the two last, a small issue began to emerge: fuel. They had all three made massive use of their afterburners this morning, especially Iskanda during her climb. They could only pepper the two last with gunfire, enough to hinder their mobility, when they realized they were bingo fuel. They hadn't much ammo left to be honest. Around a dozen missiles and hundred rounds.

"We have to head back to the Bienenstock." Donner three conceded, letting these two B-2As escape their fate for a while, as he turned toward the airbase.

"Damn, I hate to let my preys get away!" Iskanda was forced to follow him, as her gauge was now quite low. It was so low that she might even need to land her aircraft like a glider.

"Sie werden nicht uns entkommen können. (they won't be able to escape us)" A BAWS operator spoke. For once, she could see the full flight of one of these short-range ballistic missiles. The big rocket flew vertically, before curving her path. Then the nose cone was blown away by small explosives, and from the hole a full volley of these small MIRVs (Multi target re-entry vehicles) fell at supersonic speed on the B-2s.

"Fly faster!" The copilot shouted to the pilot of one of the two last two Spirits.

But this was for nothing. They had no way to evade these warheads. They had sacrificed their stealth to avoid getting picked up by the Merlin satellites. Little did they know, the satellites were as good at tracking low-flying planes that high-flying ones, using low frequency infrared cams, a technology once used by Oseans on their U-2 spy planes. How ironic that their own achievements had made Belka more powerful.

"These Belkans… may no one spare you." A pilot of the B-2 threatened them, before having his craft obliterated the next second. Little did they know, these Belkans didn't have a single chance to know to who he was referring in his last sentence.

"I wouldn't either." Donner 3 responded, now being quite close to the airport.

Landing was a bit cautious for all them, as they were already pretty tired from this battle. It was even more for Iskanda, as she had to land as a glider, like she had foreseen, and having lost her canards only deprived her even more of the weak low-altitude stability of the F-35.

Bienenstock, Belka, 11/06/1995, 12:00, Weather: overcast, medium cloud coverage.

The tough landing, actually reminded Iskanda her final stunt of the morning, since it had been as tough as to land with a damaged fighter. Which she would have no time to get repairs, sadly.

She had seen very well the two Belkan pilots steering eastward to go hunt those A-12 that were trying to go below the field of fire of the BAWS and RTLS. But almost as much Avengers were going for the RTLS head-on and were still mobile enough to avoid the supersonic MIRVs of the BAWS. Attacking them head-on wasn't a good solution, because she would risk stray shots from the RTLS, and XMAAs from the A-12s.

However, on the western banks of the Löre, she had seen some metallic structure that was going from some little harbor, were crane could move giant containers, to the factories near the two bridge up North. She thought she would have a nice time flying below that metallic conveyer, but she was dearly mistaken.

Apparently, the conveyer had been stopped, but they had not removed the last container that were being brought to the factories, forcing her to do quick and sharp turns to stay below the metallic structure, and thus hidden from the A-12's sight. At some point, she had to fly below the container, in a tight space, with less than five meters between her and the ground.

Then, she had a small fear at one point: something it the conveyer a few hundred meters in front of her and cause a container to hang partially from its attachment, blocking her path. For a moment, she thought someone had deliberately fired at her, but no second shot came. She attributed that to a stray shot, or some SOD having lost its track due to the EMIs of the RTLS. She had no choice but to blow the container with her missiles. Luckily for her, it was not full of explosive shells or anything, but metallic pieces that flew everywhere when it exploded and fell to the ground below.

A few other times, this happened. She had to destroy them without too much noise, or she would blow her silent approach. It wasn't as risky as flying in a tunnel since there was no walls on the side, but for this reason, she had to fly with even more care, so she wouldn't fly out of the conveyer hiding her.

The final line was pretty complicated. There was first, a sharp turn, that was quite hard to go through since she almost grazed a hanged container. But that was easy, compared to the last few hundred meters : there was containers that had been laid on the ground, where they were supposed to be picked by some trains, and some still hanged on the conveyer, creating some kind of metallic maze she had to fly through. And of course, she was far too close from the enemy craft to blow everything in her path. So, she had to slow her craft even more, grazing the metallic boxes from even closer, having to dive below some, that seemed to be hanging barely, and that the thrust of her fighter made move a bit. She was afraid she would move one and caught a chain reaction that would ruin her try at being stealthy.

However, the last four ones, that were a series of two hanged and two set on that railway, she couldn't do nothing to avoid them. Besides, she couldn't fly around, due to some of the pillars of the conveyer near that area. So, this time, she had to destroy a bit more of those containers. She hoped they wouldn't hear the explosions, but since she could hear the pretty loud explosions of SOD being intercepted nearby, she might be covered by that. And all her care she enacted on not to destroy the other containers might have been unnecessary, she realized.

So, she fired two missiles, and slow her fighter even more, at the limit of stalling, to ensure her she would be able to fire two other missiles on the containers. In the end, there was only a tiny space to fly through, above the two containers that had just been violently separated from their attachments and had fallen on the ones below them. But her X-shaped empennage that was smaller in height than conformal rudders such as an Eagle's or a Flanker's allow her to fly through this last part of this metallic maze

She was pretty exalted when she stormed through the torn off metallic container. She quickly climbed to a more safer altitude, and as she was hearing notices of her new wingmen worrying about her, she replied with a chilled voice, as she had needed to be at her chilliest point while flying in there ;

"Ich hatte eine neue Flugvektoren gefunden. (I have found a new vector of approach)"

Which was what she had told to Pixy when she flew through the flying arcs of the cathedral, or through the fortress at Glatisant. He would have understood if he was here. At this thought, she wondered what he would do at this place? He might choose Patria other money too.

"What did you do with your canards during this flight?" An operator asked her, bringing back from these souvenirs of this very recent past.

"I admit I took a bit too much Gs when falling from 18 kms." She replied, almost forgetting her long fall after this very close-quarter fly.

"Yeah, what did you do when you went off radar? I mean, you manage to fool even the Merlin Satellite." Donner 3 had some issues processing what had happened here. Anyone knowing Galm 1 would have understood for sure. But they didn't know that she was and intended to keep it that way until she deemed useful to reveal her identity to those Belkans.

She might have earned their respect this morning, but not their trust yet. Besides, who had said that the fights were over? They had won at the North, but the south had great trouble, from what the control tower was announcing them.

As such, they were grounded only the time to reload and refuel, and obviously with no time to repair her damaged canards or her slightly damaged gear. It was the same with Donner 3 and 8, they would have to do with their injuries of this morning's flight.

"So, you just below the industrial conveyer?" Donner 3 showed total astonishment when she recalled her little underground fly-by.

"But it's stopped since the beginning of the evacuation." Donner eight intervened, a bit doubtful that their newly recruited "Schwarze Luchs" pulled such a stunt. She hoped he didn't draw any parallel with her and a now lost allied female pilot that happened to pull such stunt.

"Well, there was some containers in my way I had to blow, I admit. But will still have some Osean left to murder." She replied quickly, this little almost underground flight being not her best one.

"Es stimmt. Na komm, Schwarze Luchs, bringen wir diesen Osean um." Donner three acknowledged, and asked her to follow him like this night, even if it was now useless since she had now radio. But she responded, and it was with their aircraft filled again with XMAA and QAAM to the brim that they were cruising to engage those Osean that had unwillingly only signed their death wish.

Here, I have decided to cut the chapter in half. For some reasons. First, I might have overexpanded a bit here. Second, I do not think it's good to read such a long one (even if I think there must exist longer chapter than this one was). Third, because it'll gave a bit of suspense and hope in those dark times. And fourth, because I can get a bit lazy, and because it's easier to correct two long chapter than a very long one.

No "Bis nächst mal" (to the next time), aber "Bis nächste Seite" (to the next page)