Seras looked around. This looks like the break room in the barracks back at Hellsing. How can that be? It was destroyed.

"I don't know, Seras, but it's good to be able to look at you like this." She turned around to see Pip smiling at her. He looked the way she always thought of him.

"This has got to be a dream, but if it is, I hope I stay sleeping for a while yet."

Another voice intruded, "This is not my idea of a dream, Fraulein, especially when the last thing I remember was you being quite 'unfriendly' to me." Doc was sitting on one of the couches looking uninjured.

Seras blinked. Both eyes. Pip's unhurt, I have both eyes and that Nazi is sitting on the couch. "I think I'm starting to understand. Pip, this is one of the places that we shared and it doesn't have the bad memories of where you... of where I lost you. Remember what we agreed before I killed him? I think this is where we do it."

"Do what?" asked the Doc.

"This is where you tell us everything you know about Millenium, the Millenium vampires, the cargo of this blimp, and what was done to Walter. You will hold nothing back. Make this easy because if you don't, I have a feeling that I can make this really, really unpleasant."

"Why would I do something like that?" Doc seemed honestly interested.

"Because you're dead, I drained your blood and ate your soul and if you don't give me what I want, I'm going to take your soul apart."

Walter picked Seras up and carried her back over to where Integra was sitting. Seras' wounds from the wires were fully healed, but she wasn't conscious. "My vampiric first aid skills are somewhat minimal, Sir Integra. She's not bleeding, she hasn't turned to dust. These are good signs. What we need to do now is find a way off of this blimp. You need medical care; Alucard is on this vessel, which in my experience with him means that this vessel will very soon lose structural integrity; and Miss Seras is of no fighting use unconscious."

"I can fight." Seras huddled in Walter's arms. "I can fight, and I know how we can get down and I know why we need to do it right now."

"Schroedinger, where is he?" The Major stopped at an intersection of corridors.

"He went where you'd expect. He's with her."

Alucard stared at the bound figure in front of him. It was so wrapped in restraints and so withered that it was as genderless as any mummy. It was mounted on the wall like some sort of avant garde sculpture. He placed a hand on the creature,

"There she sees a damsel bright,
Dressed in a silken robe of white,
That shadowy in the moonlight shone:
The neck that made that white robe wan,
Her stately neck, and arms were bare;
Her blue-veined feet unsandaled were;
And wildly glittered here and there
The gems entangled in her hair.

"You were beautiful and powerful once, Geraldine. How did those Germans get their hands on you?"

"She came to us." The Major stepped in to the room.

"She went to them," explained Seras as she began leading them to the gliders that were situated under the zeppelin. She moved them through less used areas as though she had been on this craft for years. Despite Integra's protests, Seras was carrying her. Walter took point, following Seras' quiet directions. The wires effectively and silently dealt with the few soldiers they encountered.

"She wasn't the power behind Hitler's rise, but she was the power behind some of his advisers. She had a grudge against a certain English duke and used her influence to make sure that her people would encourage Hitler's assault against England. She thought she was playing with them, but she was betrayed. Hitler's obsession with the occult had yielded some successes, one of them being the binding spell they used to capture her to begin with. It couldn't rival the wards that bind Alucard to Hellsing, but it was sufficient to get her into their hands and prevent her use of her more devastating magics."

Speaking quietly into Integra's ear, Seras continued her explanation. She counted on Walter's new senses to keep him abreast of the information.

"From there on the special unit kept her weak by keeping her drained to the point of starvation. They would take blood from her and only give her tiny amounts of blood when they needed more from her. The idea was to be able to create vampires in a manner as easy as an injection. Once they had their initial successes, the research moved along two lines. The first was to create more powerful vampires with the injection. The initial subjects were more along the lines of self-willed ghouls than true vampires. Even now the artificial vampires are not as powerful as those made the old-fashioned way. The other line of research was to enhance a subject who was already a vampire. This was somewhat similar to the work that made Alucard so hard to kill and was also a combination of science and magic.

"The research on vampiric enhancement went forward despite the lack of useful 'synthetic' vampires by the workaround of having Geraldine directly sire test subjects. It was made possible by a breakthrough that allowed them to bypass the virginity and opposite sex requirements. The things the Germans could do with science combined with magic were remarkable.There was no way to have her cooperation, but they found a way to simultaneously feed her and drain her to keep her weak. Then they could feed the subject on her blood with little difficulty. You might call it a kind of rape. The Nazis have been raping her for more than 60 years. The elite vampires were created in this manner - Joleen, Schroedinger, the Captain, the crazy gunner - they were all sired by Geraldine against her will. Then they were all subjected to the enhancement experiments. There were different results in each case. The Major made use of the best of the experimental results. He will be very difficult to destroy, but not beyond Alucard's abilities."

Integra had wanted to know how Seras had gotten such detailed information, "Pip and I had a very long conversation with the Doc. He wasn't very cooperative at first, but we managed to 'persuade' him to give us everything. I guess time passes differently when you're...I don't know how to explain it...when you're inside my soul? I thought we'd been in there for much longer than you say I was unconscious.

"Walter, you are also a direct creation. You have the potential to be a very powerful vampire. I know you don't remember it, and I'm glad for you. I know what they did to you and it was a horror. We're lucky that the Doc had not finished his work with you when the Major decided to put you to the test. The Doc was certain that if he'd finished the drugs and bindings that you would never be able to break free. They hadn't counted on capturing you after so many years, but they made the best of it when the Captain encountered you earlier.

"We'll be at the gliders soon. I hope someone can fly one. The Doc didn't know how and Pip and I don't know either. We have to get as far from here and as far from London as we can before Alucard and Geraldine have their reunion. I touched her mind earlier and I can tell you that she is crazier and more dangerous than my Master. I don't think there's even any sort of personality left in her, just an abiding hatred of everything that lives. If she is freed, she will attempt to destroy every living thing in London and even that won't satisfy her. She is ancient, she is very powerful and to quote Doc, 'she is the apocalypse incarnate.'"

A/N The poem Alucard recites is an excerpt of Christabel by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.