Twelve days late, but it's finally time for chapter 5. Sorry it took so long, but my work has been kicking it into high gear with the holiday season starting so soon.
That means that the next major update probably wouldn't be until sometime in December, as I will have very little free time in the coming months.
But my whining certainly isn't why you are here. So let's start chapter 5.
Hearts of Iron: Chapter V – Barriss fails to live up to expectations, and Nina's luck gets even worse…
Date: 3/11/95, Location: Berlin, Block T-22a
Lena Einstein glared up at her younger brother. Isaak simply raised one of his well plucked eyebrows, his ridiculous glasses switching lenses as he attempted to use his greater height in an arrogant attempt to intimidate her.
"I have said it before, and I will say it again Doctor," she let the code-name she had gifted him with when they were both very young drip from her mouth; "there will be no experimentation of any kind on the prisoners. We don't have enough of them to start wasting them yet."
"And even if we did, father has expressly forbid it…" She let the sentence trail off with a wave of her hands; it's meaning clear, as she began walking down the hall.
Her brother didn't budge from his metaphorical position, and he used his greater stride to catch up to her quickly. "Come now Professor, we could learn so much from a dissection or two!" She could feel his excitement ripple across the aether as he waved his hand. "I know you're just as eager as I am, to learn more about them."
"Yes, but I have patience…" She raised her eyebrow at him, "and a lab coat that isn't continuously covered in blood or oil." She drawled out, highlighting his ever messy appearance while her eyes trailed idly across the mural painted on the hallways concrete wall.
It was an older painting, with skeletal forms that howled in anguish, their painted blood drooling from their empty eye-sockets while unseen artillery shells ripped across the burning husk of a dreamed city.
It was a familiar mural to her, which she had seen many times before, and it was the one that meant they were close to the hidden hatch she was looking for.
Though it wasn't like she actually needed to use the ladder, she could always simply will herself there if she wished it. The very acknowledgement of that power made her tiny form flicker out beneath her vastly over-sized lab coat, and if anyone had looked at that moment they would have seen nothing but blackness inside her crisp white jacket.
But she stayed her body in place with a flicker of her will, seeing no reason to be rude to her brother by disappearing from his presence so abruptly.
If Isaak had seen anything, he didn't comment.
'The ladder will do fine.' She thought to herself, and it wasn't like he would sneak back to go against her in a matter like as this anyway. "Besides brother, the linguists are having themselves a field day." She said, and he bent down to contradict her but she pushed on. "And don't you have enough work to do anyways? I was under the impression that you had been juggling a dozen different projects Doctor." She finished with a wave of her hand.
The light flickered at her will as they marched down the hallway, and she ignored the sudden change in scenery. "Some of which, I seem to remember being closer to completion than others…"
That got a rise out of him, and he seemed to physically resist the urge to pull his own hair out. "And now I will say to you, what I have said many, many times before. I cannot make any headway with those designs. They will not fly; we simply don't have the technology to lift their bulks free from the pull of gravity." He pinched the bridge of his nose, his blond hair waving as he shook his head. "If you all had listened to me three centuries ago, when we had started that funding black hole, we wouldn't be in this mess."
She shrugged at him, unconcerned as they turned down another hallway and the lights flickered again. "They need all the armor they can get don't they? After all if they are destroyed, our entire plan falls apart."
He sucked air through his teeth, long overdue frustration resurfacing. "Yes I understand that, but do the need so much armor they can't even preform the tasks we created them for?"
She shrugged again, waving him off as they wandered down another flight of stairs. "Have you tried using the alien technology?" She asked him, feeling excitement run down her veins and she gave him a haughty smile. "Wouldn't it be ironic if we could make that happen?"
Her brother seemed to deflate himself at that suggestion. "And that's the problem, even though we understand the basics of how their technology works…" He sighed explosively and rubbed his forehead. "Having physical pieces of equipment to deal with is still a world of difference from merely understanding how something works on paper. So it could be a month or more until we understand enough to start working on replicating it."
"It is very different from our own…" She commented idly, twiddling a pen from her pocket.
His eyebrows rose in incredulity. "Have you actually been down to the labs, or are you just going by hearsay again?" He chided.
Lena allowed a victorious grin to spread across her face. "Even better than that Doctor, I have seen them in function." She flashed him a haughty look. "Who do you think was giving orders the night they arrived on our doorstep?"
Isaak actually stopped in shock, his glasses still whirring on even without his input. "You little…" He trailed off, his mouth hanging open as he glared at her in indignation. "You were there and you didn't tell ME!" He shouted, gesticulating wildly.
"You never asked." She shrugged back at him, relishing in the sensation of pulling one over on him as they walked into a cavernous store room.
He continued sputtering and waving his hands at her for a while, nearly smacking her in the eyebrow at one point. "That doesn't mean you should just go leaving out important details!" He frowned, suddenly seeming to realize that they had been wandering around the stacks of crates and boxes for several minutes. "Where the hell are we going?"
She gave him another shifty grin, and moved to shift a seemingly random empty crate, revealing a steel hatch in the concrete floor. "That my good Doctor… is for me to know and for you to find out later!"
She moved to grab the trapdoor with her bare hands, before her brain reasserted itself and she floated the two-hundred pound steel hatch open instead, freeing a new shaft of light to pierce the massive storehouses gloom.
Her younger brother gave her a disapproving look. "Why do I get the feeling that you're planning something extremely stupid?" He drawled at her, smoothing his lab coat.
"Don't look at me Isaak," she used his hated real name and he gave her an annoyed look, "I'm just following my part in the plan after all."
"That is exactly what worries me." He finished by placing his hands on his hips in disapproval, sensing their conversation had ended.
She grinned as she crouched down into the ladder, and readied herself to slide down. "Be a dear and put the box back on top when I close the door, would you?" She asked him.
"And don't wait up!" She shouted, feeling the pulse of adrenaline as she slid down the ladder, the sound of the metal hatch slamming shut reverberating through the concrete tube she slid down into the abyss.
Well not actually an abyss, more like a very secure room hidden in the bowels of the city.
It wasn't even a big room in actuality. Just a short little corridor with a large steel door, covered in hexes, sealing glyphs, and other symbols of the occult, and guarded by a pair of elite Schreiber.
The two men saluted to her crisply, a slight anxiety fluttering just below the surface of their well-ordered minds.
"The prisoner was brought here just as you ordered Professor." The younger of the two chirped out crisply, scratching nervously at his collar as he answered her unasked question.
Lena simply nodded, walking straight up to the massive door. Her hand rested on the warm steel and she readied herself to open the door, but a sudden presence stopped her. "Schrödinger do you actually have business here, or is this just a pleasure visit?" She turned, seeing both of the Schreiber slumped unconscious on the floor, one of her least favorite creations standing there and smirking at her from between their unconscious bodies.
He straightened his collar. "I'm all business today unfortunately." He seemed to actually be annoyed at that, and it made Lena wonder if actually having to do his job instead of just annoying people was leaving a bad taste in the androgynous teen's mouth.
She tried to find it in her to care for the other ghost, and she failed spectacularly. "Does Max require my presence?"
He grinned down at her. "Good guess…Mother." The boy's lips practically molested the familial term. "Something about an acceleration being in the works, and him needing your presence as soon as is convenient" He waved his hand flippantly.
"Tell him I will arrive when I am finished with my preliminary interrogation."
Schrödinger just grinned larger, flipping her with a lazy salute. "Heil!"
Then the aether flickered and he was gone. Lena entertained the notion of waking the scribes up, and then dismissed it. They had been guarding the door for who knows how long, and she could handle herself against a single restrained teen.
They could certainly be afforded a little rest.
She smiled to herself as the hexes on the door vanished, their steel bulk swinging open on well-oiled hinges. "Wake up my sleeping beauty." She crooned to herself happily as she stepped into the darkened hallway.
Date: Unknown, Location: Unknown
Barriss's head was pounding, her mind cloudy, and her thoughts thick and languid. Something terrible had happened to her, she was sure of it.
TERRIBLE VIOLENCE… DEATH OF COMPANIONS …
Her thoughts flickered dimly and she unconsciously reached out with the Force, fumbling around blindly. She tried to shift, and her limbs failed to respond. They felt stiff and unresponsive, with their articulation clearly being restrained by something that was both soft and unyielding.
BLOOD MIXED IN MUD… APATHY TO BRUTALITY…
A flicker passed through the Force, a presence she did not recognize. It didn't seem hostile though, merely rubbing across the surface of her mind, feeling almost affectionate.
MENTAL & PHYSICAL PAIN… UNIFORMED CORPSES…
She opened her eyes stiffly, but there was nothing for her to see, just blackness lurked beyond their lids.
'I was drugged…?' She thought, as the reality if the situation began to sink into her bleary mind.
Then the flashes of memory slammed into her psyche with all of the subtly of a turbolaser salvo, and Barriss fought against the urge to retch.
She had failed… they all had failed…
They had been blasted from the sky, drawn out, and defeated in detail. The cadets had been obliterated…seemingly having been killed off almost completely in their scramble to defend the ship. The scientists and researchers had been presumably been captured, along with the warship itself.
The entire thing had been an absolutely terrifying experience, so much so that she had collapsed when Linu had been… 'NO!' she stopped the thought befrore it could blossom. Her friend hadn't merely been killed, she had been butchered. Cut to literal ribbons with a casual ease, by a Force user who had looked half her age, and who had been more annoyed by the bickering from her own troops than anything she or the cadets had done.
Barriss herself had been outflanked in that instant of weakness, by one of the rapidly closing mass of soldiers. Someone had clubbed her hard in the back of the head in that singular moment of distraction.
The next thing she knew they had all been handcuffed, and while the ship was boarded, they were made to kneel in the mud and listen to the shouts and sounds of weapons fire that echoed out from the loading ramp.
It had been awful, but the thing that was really the most frightening thing was how blasé the soldiers that had captured them had been acting.
Had they been soldiers though? They had been carrying weapons and equipment. The landscape had certainly seemed like a battlefield.
But they had all been so young, even the girl that had seemed to be leading them had felt barely as old as Ahsoka.
And they really didn't seem all that concerned with their prisoners. Those guarding them spent most of the time gawking at Professor Aluni's unconscious body, or arguing with each other in several distinct and equally undecipherable languages.
But even the arguing had been mostly casual; despite the inkling feeling Barriss had that they weren't all from the same sides. They didn't seem overly concerned about being next to their former enemies, giving each other nothing more hostile than a few scowls or brief strings of heated gibberish.
It had made her wonder again, just what exactly had been going on with this planet.
She had been unable to ascertain that though, there had not been enough time. As they had knelt in the mud, someone had shoved a rag over her mouth. The harsh chemical smell it emitted preceded almost instantaneous unconsciousness.
She had woken only once, feeling like something was pricking the back of her wrist. It had felt like a needle of some sort, which she supposed made sense.
They had clearly drugged the survivors of the battle, probably for ease of handling. Which was a thought that begged the question, of where exactly she was now? To what end they had been kept alive, why had they been attacked in the first place?
The fabric covering her head shifted as she rolled, and she became distinctly aware of another presence… one that was in the room with her.
She didn't sense it through the Force though, but she didn't need to because the other person chuckled. A childish voice called out to her in heavily accented Basic. "Now what do we have here?" The unseen figure questioned.
The hood was pulled off slowly, and the first thing she saw was the cheerful face of yet another child. "You have had enough sleeping now yes?" The cherubic girl withdrew slightly at her stiff nod, and she was able to take in her surroundings.
They were in a tiny padded cell, less than six feet across, with a white dome on the ceiling providing illumination and some sort of spongy material covering all of the walls. The professionally dressed child, who looked around eight, sat on a small stool grinning at her in a pleased manner. As Barriss watched her, she tossed the hood behind her casually and leaned forward, eagerly tapping her clipboard with what appeared to be some kind of plastic stylus.
Barriss probed with the Force, trying to gauge if there was anyone else around, specifically the Force user that had killed Linu. It felt like they were alone. Though there was a pair of unconscious presences beyond the door and down the hallway, probably just guards napping on duty, there was no one else she could feel nearby.
A jolt of lightning shot down her spine before she could even think of escape, and she yelped in shock. Her limbs jerked in the cloth prison that bound them. The little girl placed something back inside her crisp white jacket, and waggled her finger at Barriss in a teasing way. "Naughty, naughty!" Her childish voice squeaked out in clear amusement.
"I wish for your thoughts to be focused on questions today." The apparent Force user said in a perky tone. "Not on those stiffs down the hallway." Her little blonde eyebrows wiggled.
"W… Where am I?" Barriss found her voice sore and scratchy, like it had gone unused for a long time.
The child chuckled, pointing to a decorative sigil on the lapel of her coat as though that explained everything. "You are in Berlin…" She said, grinning cheerfully.
The word was unfamiliar, as was the crest on her lapel, which wasn't all that surprising. "Berlin?" She scratched out the alien word.
"The capitol of the Third Reich, it is located in Deutschland specifically." She answered, in what she probably believed was a helpful manner, but was little more than a half-way understandable slew of gibberish to Barriss.
"Where are the cadets? Are the scientists alright? What about-" The questions started pouring out before she could stop them, but the girl cut them off.
"Your companions are all in good health." Her cheerful look dimmed with fury for a flash, but it was gone so fast she was left wondering if she had really seen it. "Those that survived; that is." The girl flipped her long blonde hair and scribbled something onto her clipboard. "They were most uncooperative when my forces arrived." She said, in an almost haughty manner which Barriss found odd, considering both the dress and undercurrent of hostility between some of the troops from before.
She reached out to the girl with the Force, and her stomach lurched powerfully. This child felt wrong, she didn't feel like a child should.
Actually, when she reflected on it, everything about the situation had felt wrong. It had been there from the first moment they had entered the system. She had sensed a growing sense of dread; the Force giving her a warning.
But no one on the ship had listened to her.
It was something that a Jedi had to be able to deal with, something she had thought long and hard on. That people still ignored their advice had always confused her. That the peoples of the galaxy would call them for council, and then promptly ignore whatever advice they gave, it had left her with no shortage of grief.
"W-what is going on here?" Barriss asked the child who was not a child, confusion thick in her voice as she winced from her throat scraping against itself, and she tried not to tremble in pain. "What did we do to you… why did you shoot us down?" She found herself pleading for answers.
A tiny hand ran itself through her uncovered hair, and she found herself looking into the face of the girl, she was giving her a look no child her age should have been able to.
It was an expression of sadness and compassion, mixed with understanding.
"Fear not, young Psyker. Those of your company who still draw breath will be safe here… under my hospitality." She whispered the sweet words warmly, the Force thick around them, and for a moment Barriss almost believed that all could be set right again. Then her cherubic face turned wiry, and she cupped her chin. "After all, your part in this play is almost over, but the show must go on for the rest of us." She continued to smile, now almost sadly at that.
Then she snapped back, suddenly looking as professional as an eight-year old could possibly appear. "Now back to the questions… Let's start with your name, shall we?"
2/10/95, USSR – Pravda Underground
Nina squeaked awake, slammed her head into the top of her bunk and immediately started cursing. Yet another nightmare had come to plague her sleeping mind.
Her dreams had been like this for weeks, since everything had gone to hell and everything seemed to be pointing to it being entirely their fault.
No one else had seemed to remember much about the events of that frigid night. Nina herself could recall that there had been shots fired, and a strange chirping she could hear through the opened view slots in the walkers armor, followed by a mess of cursing and garbled sentence's over her radio.
And she remembered that when she had slid down the hatch that was wedged beneath her tiny chair, and into the freezing cold at Oleg's orders, that the sight hat had greeted her had been like something from a fever-dream. Snow swirled around Nonna, who had been almost literally hysterical. Their giant commissar crouched in the snowdrifts, illuminated eerily by headlights, shouting orders as she cradled Katyusha's limp body in her arms.
Their ship had sunk faster than a Grotte driving over a frozen lake.
In the flickering light cast by the headlamps of the walkers and transports, chaos broke loose in the taiga.
Every new person to exit a vehicle seemed to go into panic mode mode. Whether at their stricken commander, at the hideous machine that lay still twitching in the snow on the other side of her walker, or at their giant commissar's helpless rage, there was no one who seemed to have any idea how to handle t any of it.
And then it had really started snowing.
Nina had climbed back inside her walker, ignoring the insistent questions from her comrades, about what was going on outside. She had slammed the controls on her radio with freshly numbed fingers, and shouted desperately at the pilot overhead to climb above the coming storm and radio for help.
Nearly five days later she had been informed that her quick thinking had awarded her a medal. The shiny bronze star was pinned on her dress uniform in Moscow, waiting for her there in the even that she actually lived long enough to wear it.
But that knowledge hadn't made her memory of the days they had spent hunkered in the freezing cold, listening to the maddening howls of the wind outside her walker, or of the numbing walks in the drifting snow to find boxes of airdropped supplies, any more pleasant in retrospect.
That the week had passed in a blur after the storm had finally cleared was smaller comfort. She had found herself almost wishing that the snow had lasted longer; it had been such simplicity, brutal and uncompromising but simple, compared to what had followed.
Because as soon as the blizzard had cleared enough for it, Moscow had sent the entirety of the 5th army out to their little city. And that meant that such straightforwardness was quickly beyond her reach.
She had awoken on the sixth day to a commotion outside, quickly realized that no one else was inside their walker, and so she had promptly squirmed her way to the commanders cupola at the vehicles top.
And she saw more armor through the viewslots than she had ever seen before in her life… which really was saying something. Thousands of tanks, and other vehicles of all varieties, littered the outside world. Their tracks having crushed the snow banks flat under their weight.
And there had been spooks and scientists galore, and they all wanted to interview absolutely everyone, and that meant that they all had to stay sober for interviews.
It made for a frustrating week for everyone involved.
Everyone, but the shrinks that would be. The scientists had been ecstatic. Running around like a hive of lab-coat wearing bees, begging questions from anyone who would give them the time of day. The closest they had come to settling down was when Nonna had thrown a professor twenty feet into a working space-heater for suggesting they dissect the still unconscious Katyusha to learn more about the mysterious variety of energy weapon.
That had been a weeks ago at least. Nina wasn't sure of the exact time-frame, sleepless nights huddled in the belly of her walker had been followed by an endless hurry to answer so many questions from so many people that it all swam together into a blur.
Despite the fact that they were home now, back in her beloved Pravda, the memories refused to fade. She KNEW that something monumental had happened, she just didn't know what.
"You alright Nina?" Alina, asked from one of the beds below. Her gloved fingers gripping on the wooden edges of Nina's bunk as the slightly taller girl pulled herself up to stare at her.
She felt her cheeks flush in embarrassment. "I'm fine, I'm fine… just grab my vodka for me will you?" She waved at the other girl, who merely grinned at her in response then slipped out of sight.
"Isn't it a little early to be hitting the bottle?" The other teen jibed rhetorically, giving her a sly grin as she walked backwards from the bunks. "Johan will never let us hear the end of it, especially if he finds you drunk again."
"It's not like I have inspection today." She groped her bed for her hat. "And the German can go fuck himself." Nina spat in halfhearted annoyance. It was just her luck that she ended up with the only Nazi on the entire damn planet that didn't drink.
The brunette snorted in agreement. "Not like those guys have a lot of room to talk anyways. And I suppose we are in the middle of fucking Siberia." Nina pulled herself back into a sitting position, and she watched her friend's free hand wave through the air, while she went about digging thought the pile in the corner of the barracks.
There was a deep rumbling of tanks treads above their heads, which she could hear over Alina's triumphant shout, and Nina watched the little trails of dust that broke free from the ceiling. Nina briefly worried about the bunker's structural integrity, but banished the thought when the other Slav returned with a big bottle of their favorite vice.
"So what's on the agenda today?" The other radioman growled, ripping the cork out with her teeth.
Nina snorted, sliding off of her bunk to squat next to the other girl on the floor. Alina passed her the bottle and she took a deep swig of the burning liquid, letting the alcohol shake though her system. "Nothing much that I know about, just staring at the poor saps manning the ZSU's… and drinking, lots and lots of drinking."
Alina laughed happily. "I can drink to that."
It was a casual moment that they both desperately needed, where they both passed their bottle back and forth, and ignored everything that had gone wrong since they had been sent out into the snow. The roof rumbled every once in a while, but the alcohol helped them ignore the disturbance. It made it easy to ignore everything, and that made it a temptation they didn't even bother to resist.
So freshly awake, with empty stomachs, and a burning desire to ignore their problems, it wasn't long until they were both piss drunk.
Their state probably didn't do much to impress Clara, when the relatively friendly NKVD officer marched into their almost abandoned barracks only a short while later.
The statuesque blonde blinked at them, pinching the bridge of her nose. "Really you two?" She said in an exasperated groan.
Nina stumbled back onto her butt as the blonde entered, her head swimming pleasantly at the way the young woman frontal armor swayed while she walked. "N… Not like we got anything else to do." She slurred out, while the tall blonde grabbed their bottle. Weighting it in her hand and frowning down at them like the henpecked nurse she technically was.
Alina flopped over next to her with a groan. "S… it's not like the Capitalists are gonna do anything. Not like we could help even if they did." She tried to stand and ended up falling on her butt as well. "I-I'm a radioman for fucks sake I…. can't man an anti-air…aircraft gun." The other girl snorted at Clara.
The door to the barracks slammed open and Oleg marched in, clearly already in a foul mood. "Thunder and lightning!" The Slav swore in German, as soon as he saw them. "Can't you idiots stay sober for one day…? I manage it!" He waved his arms in frustration.
Then he waved at her, and his hand smeared across her vision. "Especially you!" He jabbed his accusing finger at her, and Nina frowned in response.
"I-I don't need to be sober to work the radio." She slurred out, insulted by the very notion. "I've been doing it since I was a baby." She pointed her hand back in his general direction.
Her superior didn't look impressed, despite the truth in her statement. Fortunately Clara, bless the woman's heart, came to her defense. "Come now, nothing wrong with a little drink now and then." She said casually, taking a small sip from the bottle.
"I think it's pretty clear that they've had more than a little…" Oleg scowled, still clearly unhappy. Then his countenance brightened. "But actually ma'am, I came to tell you that Katyusha is awake again."
Clara's eyes nearly dropped from her skull. The tall blonde tossed the bottle into his hands, almost flattening him as she went barreling out the door past him.
Nina didn't need to be a tactician to know that their luck had just run out. The grin across his unshaven face told them enough. "Looks like I just got a pair of new volunteers for the breastworks…" He took a sip from the bottle, letting his sentence trail, as he luxuriated in his suddenly superior position.
Nina only had one thing to say about that. "Well shit…"
2/10/95, France – Paris Training Grounds
There was an awkwardness permeating the locker-room. It wasn't the stiffness of their clothes and equipment, or even the knowledge that this was their last training session before they could officially join the Allied forces. After ten years of training, now they only had to survive one more session and they would be real soldiers.
No, if he had to guess. Reginald would have presumed that the three platoons of Axis trainees, who had somehow replaced the French Company he had been told they were going to run the exercise with, was probably the main cause of all their unease.
The Nazi's, for their part had remained cordial enough, even if they were a little distant, cleaning their reserve weapons with the attention to detail that everyone in his unit expected of them. He figured they probably felt as awkward about the whole thing as his own Company did.
That the mixed Axis platoon had disappeared off into the lockers left him feeling slightly worried though.
But he had been given a task to preform, and he was going to see it done. Even if he had to do it with their help, if that was what was ordered of him then so be it.
And that was their orders, pretty much exactly. As all three of his lieutenants had informed him not five minutes ago, while he had been helping one of their medics fasten her gas-mask.
"Since we're on a forty eight hour timer, I suggest that we rush the main road and take the central compound." The redheaded Nazi Lieutenant said, pointing a gloved finger to what Reginald assumed was supposed to be a mock-up of a bombed out factory. "There seems to be a decent fire-clearance and we can even back the tanks up through the walls if they are thin enough. It'll provide a good place to hold out as any."
"Not a lot a weight in your PZ-2's." Enrique, his own lieutenant griped. "You sure they can make it through the walls?"
"Our panzers will be fine Anglo." The second German Lieutenant growled out. "Just make sure you cover your French scrap-piles so they make it to the fucking building."
"Oh, come on!" One of his tankers called out from her locker nearby. "What's wrong with the Renault?"
The blonde snorted, and smoothed out her yellow Volkssturm uniform. "You mean besides the fact that it has no machine-gun, and its armor is worse than the Panzer-I?"
"Down Oberleutnant." The German Major interrupted the brewing argument, with a tone that left the German girl sputtering. "We have no place to argue about such matters, we must work with the equipment we have been allocated." He grimaced, brushing curly blonde locks from his eyes and back up under his helmet. "Whether we think it is sufficient or not is irrelevant."
The motion made Reginald's lips quirk. He wondered if the other boy realized how girly the gesture made him look. "Ten Renaults and ten Panzer-II's," he made an honest attempt to pronounce the German term correctly, "do you think that will be enough to break through to the building Hapmann?"
"I would normally say yes…" The other Major shrugged. "But with all of the spooks coming together to share their nasty secrets, I am not so sure anymore."
And that was the real kicker. There was no doubt that the scientists and Psychers would pull out all the stops on them this time. He shivered unconsciously at the though, and he was glad that he had already donned his trainee boiler-suit. The last time they had gone through a session, he had spent all of the next few nights calming his troop's night terrors, and that had been before the unexpected peace had broken out and brought all the bastards together in one place.
"We've got enough flamethrowers and anti-tank weapons…" He left the "I hope" part of his statement unsaid.
Hapmann nodded and spun in place, clearly having decided the plan was sufficient. "Schaumann, where is Vodka?" He snapped at his female lieutenant.
The steel haired girl snorted, and shrugged in an unconcerned manner. "If I had to guess, I would say living up to her name." She rolled her eyes while Major Adelger swore.
"Slavs, I tell you" The male lieutenant shrugged good-naturedly, while Hapmann stormed off to find the Russian girl.
Reginald took that as a sign that they were starting, "Deryn, Enrique, go and get Xing. We need to get this show on the road." He barked, and they snapped to attention, rushing deeper into the maze of steel lockers.
The two Nazi officers had a quick exchange in German while he sighed to himself. As that familiar feeling settled into his bones, the one he got when they were about to leap into the lions mouth and there was nothing he could do about it.
"Well bugger me bloody…"
Twenty minutes later their two companies, one hundred and fifty strong each, were parked in front of the massive steel doors that would open and release them into hell.
The tanks engines were not running yet, but they were already crewed and their guns pointed at the giant sliding doors. He had wanted to take no chances today.
Hapmann nodded to him as the clock above the doors ticked the last few seconds down. Though his face was hidden by his gas-mask he could see that the German was as dedicated to his troops as Reginald was to his own. The other boy would have stood by him for that reason alone, even if his mission hadn't required they cooperate.
He grimaced, jerking as the red klaxons lining the top of the door started to whine and those doors began sliding apart, revealing the massive darkened room that was to be their purgatory for the next two days.
Training rooms of this type were massive caverns, built to be able to be changed quickly to simulate a variety of environments under well controlled conditions. This one was five miles across, though the ceiling was less than two hundred feet high.
Not that they could see the ceiling though.
It looked like the spooks had decided to simulate a shitty, bombed out landscape under heavy fog. He could see a few broken trees scattered across his vision, and the slightly raised road they had been planning to travel down. Besides that there was nothing, it was dark and foggy with vision at less than two hundred feet.
"Suka!" The Russian Lieutenant swore into the darkness. She was a stumpy, angry girl who contrary to what everyone had thought, had not been drinking when they found her. Instead she had been overseeing the service their single BT-7a, the SPG being the heaviest gun in their entire force.
Said tank was currently bringing up their rear guard with the Panzer-II's.
He braced himself, gripping his rifle tightly. "Move out!" Reginald shouted to his forces after nothing leaped from the fog to tear their faces off.
"All troops charge!" Xing shouted in response, and the energetic boy led his troops first down the road, his sword in one hand, and his shitty Japanese sub-machine gun in the other.
And that forced them all to follow him into the too quiet landscape to keep him from getting cut off, because being cut off meant dying alone.
The tanks engines rattled to life as they set forwards, with the mud squelching under their boots and the single artificial light casting flickering shadows across dark landscape from far away.
It was not what he had been expecting, he admitted to himself as they marched in the fog, slinking down the road dirt road. The armor clattering forwards in single file. He had thought they would have been beset on all sides by waves of horrors from the very start. The fact that they had seen nothing so far, but a few stands of dead trees and some small shattered buildings looming from the fog, was worrying to say the least.
Hapmann walked up to him casually, fingering the trigger of his MP-3008. "You think it's too quiet Rees…" He trailed off, unstrapping his gas-mask. "I think so also."
Reginald shrugged. "Maybe, if we're lucky, it will stay that way." They both knew it was a fool's hope before he had even finished the sentence, but he had said it anyways.
"Major, the Asian says his platoon found something!" A dark haired Russian raced back down the column as though summoned by his words, shouting her best attempt at English. "He says there are a bunch of weird things sticking out of the ground on either side of the road."
They both swore in their respective languages, and they shouted for the tanks to double-time it. "All my rations on him trying to hack the fucking thing with his sword before we even get there." He growled, and Hapmann grinned in amusement.
"Is he Japanese?" The other boy asked while they started running. When he nodded the blonde just laughed. "Then I'm not taking that bet."
It was probably a good thing, as they hadn't even reached the front of the column when a tremendous roar burst from the fog.
"Well fuck me!' He cocked his rifle, as an entire platoon worth of swearing Japanese and Chinese troops burst from the fog racing towards the relative safety of their tanks.
Reginald strained his eyes, searching the rushing infantry for Xing's face, but his third lieutenant didn't appear. That meant the other boy was either dead or cut off… He hoped he was just cut off. Xing was energetic, but the boy was loyal to a fault, and good in a pinch.
"Where is the Lieutenant?" He shouted at the approaching infantry.
They ignored his question, but one of the girls slid into a nearby crater nearby, and screamed. "Tanks get ready to open f-!" It was as far into the sentence as she got, as a five foot long bone scythe shot from the fog and impaled her thought the chest.
Then the leg-thick barbed tentacle the scythe was attached to retreated, ripping her gurgling body away with it into the fog, and there was a deep almost bubbling sound from all around them.
Six eyes, glowing like red embers, appeared hovering in the fog nearly thirty feet in the air. Reginald panicked. "Fuck! Fuck! FUCK! OPEN FIRE!" He screamed, a little more shrilly than he normally would have liked, as something massive shifted just beyond the mist and a dozen of the barbed claw tipped tentacles lashed out at the landscape.
A dozen different types of small-arms spat hot lead at the abomination, which roared at them in defiance, and thundered from the fog.
It was a huge hellish beetle, but it was also some horrific squid. Venomous tentacles lashed from beneath its armored head, and the larger barbed appendages lashed from either side of its short neck while it barreled towards them on six column-like legs.
He threw himself on the ground as a Renault barreled hurriedly past him, trying to get shots into the monsters flank.
The tiny auto-cannon on the tank flashed rapidly in the darkness with a series of cracks, leaving afterimages in his vision. He could see that the tank was firing tracer rounds, which sparked on the creature's armored carapace, but they did no damage.
A horrible screeching sound came from the darkness, and the unlucky Renault suddenly levitated ten feet in the air and went sailing above him. Slamming into the ground behind him with a cataclysmic crash, as a second set of eyes glowed from the fog.
Then there was a fainter thud and the space between the newest abominations eyes exploded with a massive burst of fire, as the BT-7a's gun hit home.
There was a sickening screech, and ground trembled as the unseen body slammed into the ground with force.
And that just left the first monster, which was still busying trying to carve them to pieces, to deal with.
A PIAT shell whistled by his head as Reginald tried to stand, and he slid back into the muck to duck it. His rifle freed itself from his grip and clattered on something somewhere nearby, but he ignored the loss. His pulse was pounding in his ears as more people screamed, and the tiny fucking cannons on their tanks continued pattering the abomination, accomplishing essentially nothing.
"Aim for its tentacles!" His second lieutenant Deryn shouted above the din. "Cut the scythes from its wretched body!" He glanced and saw the girl standing atop a Panzer-II's turret, directing the rapidly firing cannon with her sword.
Several tentacles were ripped from its body by bloody volleys of explosive shells, and then creature reared up on its back legs, as though to smash the tanks under its hooved feet.
There was an instant in that moment when Reginald realized it was looking directly at him. Six alien eyes stared into his two as it towered over him.
Then another shell from the BT-7a slammed into its midsection and the things stomach burst open with a sickening plopping sound.
Its body went crashing backwards slowly, almost leisurely as it gurgled. There was a whoosh of foul smelling air as it slammed into the ground, it sickened his senses and he felt bile rising in the back of his throat.
Then there was stillness, which was broken almost instantly. "Alright, I for one say we get the fuck… to that fucking factory…" One of the German sergeants gasped out, reloading his pistol with trembling fingers.
Reginald looked up, his mind taking a second to process the clusterfuck that had just occurred. "Casualties?" He groaned, while everyone picked themselves up.
Hapmann emerged from the fog, coated in mud. "I've only counted four so far, plus the Renault and its driver."
"The commander?" He found himself asking.
Hapmann shrugged gazing at the ground; a Reginald realized that they had both lost their weapons. "She seemed to have been tossed from the vehicle before it landed. Girl's hurt but not bad."
He nodded at the other boy, a dark sense of amusement slinking through as he spied his rifle in a crater. "Just think Hapmann, we only have another mile and a half to the factory."
The other boy chuckled grimly, drawing his sword and Luger from their hilts. "And if we are lucky, we will have just enough troops for everyone to die before we reach it."
Date: Unknown, Location: Deutschland, Berlin, Solitary Confinement Cell
"Your name is Barriss Offee. You were born in 40…BBY… and are of the Mirialan race?" The girl, who had introduced herself as Professor, finished uncertainly. The child gave her an inscrutable gaze with her unsettling golden eyes. "These statements are correct are they not?"
Barrass nodded again, figuring the child was close enough, so she just sat back and continued to enjoy the weirdest conversation she had ever had, which was saying something.
Because if talking to Yoda was difficult, this was just an abstractly confusing mess.
The Professor had already made her answer a variety of menial questions, often cutting her off to have her explain every single detail of her sentences, or reword entire statements to fit some alien logic the child's mind seemed to be running on.
It was made all the harder by the fact that she had clearly learned Basic in an obtuse manner; as though she was self-taught in the language instead of having picked it up naturally. Which Barriss supposed did make sense when she thought about it, as no one else she had heard speaking had seemed to know Basic.
But she still would have suspected the girl was messing with her, if it wasn't for the fact that the blonde was scribbling furiously in her pad with almost every word Barriss had said.
She thought it was weird way to have a conversation, but not entirely unwanted one. After all, if she ignored the Force, she could almost pretend that she was just having a discussion with a relatively normal, if painfully uneducated, little girl.
While she sat on the cushioned floor she could feel the little ripples, which characterized an eagerness to learn pouring from the child's form, washing the room in anticipation.
The blonde smiled at her slyly. "Now that we have covered the most basics, we can move on to more interesting subjects!" The girl gushed excitedly.
"How about we start with where you have come from…" She asked curiously.
Barriss blinked, shifting on the cushions. "Our ship left Naboo only a few weeks ago…" She lied, in what she hoped was a smooth manner.
If the girl noticed, she didn't say anything. Merely nodding and scribbling something down. "Naboo… this is an important place?"
"It is an important cultural center, if that is what you mean."
"Is there a large military presence there?"
Barriss mulled over which way to answer, willing the Force to cloud her thoughts from outside inspection. "There is a significant force deployed there because of the risk of Separatist attacks, both in orbit and on the planet's surface."
That seemed to peak her interest, and the gold in her eyes flickered as they lit up in interest. "These Separatists, they are the enemies of your people?"
She nodded slowly. "They recently broke away from the Republic, which is where I am from."
"Such divisiveness…" The girl chided her, a cheerful smirk coloring her features as she kicked her shoes against the stool.
A stool Barriss noticed was made of some sort of wood. It seemed to fit the strange, quasi-primitive, level of technology that seemed to be in use. "Is there no division on your world? I seem to recall landing on what looked like a vicious battlefield." She found herself replying unhappily.
The Professor merely grinned widely at that. "A wise man once said that, 'the more you bleed in practice, the less you will bleed in battle', we have merely taken this wisdom to heart."
"Yet why battle us, we are not your enemies." She pleaded with the girl. "Or at least we were not before now."
The child gave her a haughty smile. "And yet those you have judged unworthy of your attention have deemed you fit for theirs." Her stylus tapped the board chidingly. "We have known about your civilization for a thousand years Psycher, and for a thousand years we have been preparing for this moment."
The girl sniffed at her proudly. "When two civilizations meet, the more powerful one always subverts the weaker." The Professor gestured grandly at the confines of her tiny padded cell. "And so because we love our cultures, and our peoples, we have seen fit to make ourselves your superiors."
The words seemed like the very epitome madness to Barriss. "You couldn't even have a billionth the population of the Republic, how can you possibly expect to win against it?" She found herself, almost shouting at the child, who merely regarded her outburst with a calm smirk.
"Yet I know that each of our old soldiers is equal to a million of your children…" her grin widened, "Barriss, your nation is one of decadence and hedonism. You people are soft and your worlds are vulnerable. Our single planet has more infrastructure than a billion of your worlds combined."
She gave Barriss an almost pitying look, and waved her clipboard. "It is merely nature for those who are strong to rise up when the mighty weaken." Her smile widened. "And we are very strong Psycher…"
"A rather callous opinion if I had ever heard one…" She replied automatically. "Is that why you send children to fight your battles?"
The blonde, for her part, didn't even bat an eye. "It takes less than a week of training to shoot a firearm proficiently. Why should we wait, if there is no reason not to?"
"That's horrible!" Barriss said in shock, faced with something so brutally opposite of the morality she had grown up with.
"Is it not the way of the universe?" She shrugged, smiling in that same almost apologetic manner. "You adapt, evolve, compete, or you die."
Then a knock came from the door, painfully loud after their relatively subdued conversation, and the girls grin instantly died. "JA! Was ist es?!" She shouted at the door in annoyance.
The person on the other side mumbled something unintelligible, and the Proffessor sighed. She quickly hopped off her stool and opened the door, revealing an apologetic looking man, in rather ornate black robes, rubbing a very shiny bald head.
There was a quick exchange, wherein the girl did a large amount of angry stomping and arm waiving, and the man wrung his hands and looked nervous, and they seemed to be unable to agree on anything.
Finally the Professor grimaced, and turned to Barriss. "It seems that our time is over… for now." The child nodded to the man, who swept back from the doorway, and held it open for her to leave.
"Wait," Barriss found herself gasping, "where are you going?"
The girl cast a cool backwards glance. "I'm going to help prepare our nation to greet the next wave of your companions of course." She said a tone that told Barriss that the answer should have been obvious.
"Until next time Psycher…" Her voice trailed off as the door swung shut with a climactic thud, and Barriss was left alone to dwell on her failures.
So that's chapter 5 done, which means now we can actually get back to the meat of the actual plot.
While I probably wont be able to add to the main plot in the next month or so, I do plan on working on several one-shots. One about Miho and Maxwell's first real meeting, and the other about the fate of the Allied and Axis Trainees that are mentioned in this chapter.
Also, Barriss didn't break anything... I suppose i will have to rectify that at some point in a future chapter.
I blame WarThunder.
So Next Time on Hearts of Iron: The Republic invasion, also Yukari and her entire Fallschirmjäger platoon sings the Führer's Face.