Proof Through The Night: Yet Another Kill-The-Draka Fic

[CaptainChewbacca]

Holeeeee shit! The Draka lose a THIRD of their population and still think they can win it? 'I'm betting you run out of nukes before we run out of cities' is hardly a winning strategy.

[Vehrec]

Problem is, I think canonically Douglas is President during the ACW. Might still be a fun concept, though. Would this be before, during, or after the war?

Durring, of course. See, the Drakafic-setting had Abe both elected president and live into the early years of reconstruction-John Wilkes Booth never got him in that setting, so I was wondering what would prompt it.

I do find it horrible that apparently the author of the setting never considered the consequences of a democratic victory on the eve of the ACW, especially in terms of the country's future politics.

[Pelranius]

Holeeeee shit! The Draka lose a THIRD of their population and still think they can win it? 'I'm betting you run out of nukes before we run out of cities' is hardly a winning strategy.

Well, if they disperse the population, a few conventional bombing raids (or using nerve gas) should finish off any concentrations of 10,000 to 50,000 very nicely.

[ChaserGrey]

Holeeeee shit! The Draka lose a THIRD of their population and still think they can win it? 'I'm betting you run out of nukes before we run out of cities' is hardly a winning strategy.

I think they're thinking more in terms of, "We can still pull this army back and pacify a big enough piece of our territory to start rebuilding as a nation". Thinking that democracies don't have the stomach to finish wars and that they can come back from anything is part of their national mythos, and even in the face of overwhelming evidence the thought patterns of a lifetime are hard to break. Don't forget a healthy (actually, more than healthy) dose of arrogance. These are the Draka we're talking about.

Of course, that means we're just going to have to beat on 'em some more. Who's for that?

[ChaserGrey]

Durring, of course. See, the Drakafic-setting had Abe both elected president and live into the early years of reconstruction-John Wilkes Booth never got him in that setting, so I was wondering what would prompt it.

Ahhhhk. That would be very, very interesting. McClellan was actually Lincoln's opponent in the 1864 election, so having him save Abe would be doubly ironic. And if the plot is revealed to be Draka in origin beyond a doubt, that's not something that's going to be easily forgotten.

I do find it horrible that apparently the author of the setting never considered the consequences of a democratic victory on the eve of the ACW, especially in terms of the country's future politics.

No kidding. Some of the divergences in that timeline seem to be just for the sake of being different, which I can't stand. I think there would have been some kind of North-South showdown sometime around then without a doubt, but if Douglas isn't elected the Civil War's probably not going to start when it did.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I seem to remember back when DrakaFic was big on SDN, someone came up with some post-war maps of how Africa would get partitioned. As I recall, it even included a gypsy homeland.

[Chris OFarrell]

“You. Gone.” Roosevelt’s voice was completely devoid of humor. “The Draka are a cancer, Arch-Strategos. We took a long time to realize that while the tumor got bigger and bigger. Almost too long. We’re not going to give you the chance to grow back in another generation or so.”

You know, that is the kind of line you stay awake at night for, saying it over and over in your mind and just going nuts counting down the days until you can finally utter it over the phone.

Oh and in honor the man doing the same thing twice;

*removed*

Damnit, didn't read clearly enough. Too bad too.

[Slacker]

Well, I'd think that by this point they'd let them keep the Draka 'homeland' of basically OTL South Africa. After three hundred years, I doubt there's any actual natives left to build a nation out of. Besides, it's radiation blasted, the work required to rebuild it would be staggering and occupy the Draka's attention for decades.

[ChaserGrey]

I considered that. The problem is that OTL South Africa is absolutely lousy with strategic minerals- not just the gold and diamonds everyone thinks about, but a lot of other goodies like uranium, titanium, molybdenum, and so on. Even irradiated and blasted to bits, it's got some seriously valuable stuff there that a clever regime could use to get a lot of economic leverage and fund a serious rebuilding/industrialization effort. On the theory that the discussions in my head correspond to Roosevelt's advisers talking about this, the idea was mooted but it was decided that they explicitly *did not* want the Draka to have access to anything that could even theoretically give them economic power in the near future. Same reason why they didn't decide to take all of Africa and settle them in Syria or Arabia.

[Simon_Jester]

Madagascar would have been a nice choice. Easy to patrol, makes postwar allied naval superiority more useful, and sets a very convenient dividing line: any Draka influence on the mainland can be prohibited, and under no circumstances will the Draka be able to use the excuse that they were just defending their homeland against aggressors.

[ChaserGrey]

...That's such a good idea that I may have to steal it and retcon it in. Would people mind terribly? It makes too much sense not to do, the only problem is that I didn't think of it!

[Simon_Jester]

Go for it.

It's not unprecedented, though the precedent is a little disturbing; Hitler considered exiling the Jews there in the event that he won the war...

[ChaserGrey]

That's what I thought of too, and it did make my stomach drop a bit, but it's just too perfect. Big enough for all the Draka that are left, no real natural resources, and no chance to say "Oops, those nasty ferals crossed our border, we were just pursuing them, honest!"

[Simon_Jester]

That's what I thought of too, and it did make my stomach drop a bit, but it's just too perfect. Big enough for all the Draka that are left, no real natural resources, and no chance to say "Oops, those nasty ferals crossed our border, we were just pursuing them, honest!"

Look at it this way. Winding up in the Designated Dumping Ground for Ethnic Cleansing Victims is entirely fair to the Draka after all the shit they've pulled...

[Slacker]

Especially given how long ago it'd be absorbed into the Drakan sphere, you're not taking it away from a culture or people that likely exist any more.

[ChaserGrey]

A/N: The discussion on this topic must have sparked my muse. And so, your sins have qualified you for another installment of "Proof Through the Night"!


1530 Hours, Local Time
T+ 15 Hours, 30 Minutes and Counting
Navigation Bridge, USS Reprisal

“Here we go again!”

Captain Bledsoe pulled his steel combat helmet down over his ears and hunched down. They’d all expected the second Draka attack to come earlier, but once their circling Watchman airborne radar planes started to make contact they could see why it had taken so long to organize. The previous raid had shown up as a number of discreet blips, each one a small group of aircraft. This one was almost a fog on the cathode ray screens, a gaggle of everything the Draka had that could make it out to the Reprisal group and carry ordnance. The Watchman patrol had been driven off station by long-range Eagle fighters, and the ship’s Corsairs had reported Eagles, Falcon single-engine fighter-bombers, Vultures, and even Rhino close-support aircraft among the forces coming in. Most of the pilots would have little training for maritime strike, but that wasn’t what the Draka were going for. They were going for sheer weight of numbers to overwhelm the group’s air defenses, and then sheer weight of metal to score hits.

It had all the elegance of a jackhammer, but the damnable thing was that jackhammers were very effective if you didn't care about them getting banged up in the process.

Bledsoe listened with half an ear as the bridge squawk box began to blare, the tinny voices of pilots and fighter directors going back and forth as the ship’s Corsairs moved in for their attack runs seventy miles from the carrier. The chatter was terse, clipped, with none of the wild excitement and furious chatter that he remembered from his own battles against the Japanese. Bledsoe’s hands scanned his binoculars back and forth as he let his mind form an image from the words.

Sixty miles now. Two minutes gone, the distance between his ship and her enemies melting away like a lump of sugar under a stream of hot water. He could hear the fighter jocks’ voices, strained now as they fought for position and struggled to evade the Draka escorts. Bledsoe winced as one of the voices trailed off into a scream, a frantic barrage of words like fire, help, burning that trailed off into a final silent epitaph. The Draka escorts were fighting hard- they couldn’t be saving much for the trip back home, if anything. Well, they’d been backed into a corner. They were overwhelming Reprisal’s handful of fighters, though, as the distance wound down to fifty miles. There were fewer voices now coming through into Bledsoe’s awareness, and his mind counted off bright points one by one as voices fell silent.

“Pull them back. Call CAG, pull them back.” He wasn’t aware for a moment that he had spoken aloud, but when he heard the message repeated by a phone talker he relaxed. It was the right call. The Corsairs were too few to get through those escorts. Better to pull them back and use them to augment the point defense, hope that the escort fighters wouldn’t follow their charges into the teeth of the task force’s flak. And if they did…at least the fighter pilots could bail out near friendly decks. It was all he could give them, now.

“Switch on the Zed Baker set.” Another order repeated, and a low pulse of Morse code over the fighter frequency before Bledsoe reached up to snap the speaker off. The Draka could home in on the beacon, of course, but their radar would already have told them where Reprisal was. Better to make sure that the fighters could find their way home. The bridge was quiet with the speaker off, and for a moment he wished that Guitierrez was there to talk to. With Traverse City gone, though, someone had to coordinate the task force’s defenses, so Guitierrez was down in the carrier’s primitive Combat Information Center working at a job he’d described as “trying to play Bach with a mariachi band”.

“Captain.” Bledsoe turned his head as Lieutenant Simons, the assistant communications officer, stuck his head onto the bridge from the radio shack. “We’re picking up another Zed Baker beacon, sir! Not quite the same frequency as ours, and a different code so it won’t confuse our boys, but it’s drawing some of the Snakes away to a point east of us.” The young officer hesitated, his eyebrows drawing up. “Sir, is there someone else out there, maybe? Another carrier coming to help us?” For a moment Bledsoe almost nodded, because he wanted to believe it so, so very badly, just as Simons clearly wanted to. That had to be it! United States and her group had stolen a march on the Snakes, shooting their way through Suez, or the Brits had sent one of their armored-deck jobs through Gibraltar last night and now she was here to help them out. All they had to do was-

A terrible thought struck him. “Simons…what was the code on that beacon?”

“Sir?” Simons looked down at the message form in his hand. “WRNW, sir.”

Bledsoe shook his head slowly. “That’s not a carrier, Mister Simons. It’s Renown. She had a decoy Zed Baker set installed for this operation. She must still be floating…and decided to draw some of the Snakes off.”

Thirty miles now, and the bridge was completely silent. Half of it was disappointment, because they had all wanted to believe that another carrier had somehow come to save them in the nick of time. Half of it was mourning for the ships and men that were fulfilling their last duty as decoys for Reprisal and her group. After a long moment, Bledsoe looked over and just said,

“That’ll be all, Mister Simons.” The communications officer left, shoulders slumped, and chatter picked up on the bridge again. All of them were trying not to think of what would be happening to Renown soon, what would all too likely be happening to them soon after that.

Twenty miles now. Fifteen. Ten. Bledsoe heard a loud, stuttering crash as Altoona opened up, over a dozen 6” rifles firing proximity-fused shells, filling the sky with shrapnel as the Snakes started in. He was just swinging his binoculars around for a look when the lookout on the other bridge wing let out with,

“Son of a bitch!”

“What is it?” Tension made Bledsoe’s voice sharp.

“Sorry, Sir. It’s Worley. She’s, well…look Sir!”

Bledsoe walked over to the bridge wing and gritted his teeth, tearing his helmet off and almost throwing it to the deck in frustration. The destroyer USS Worley was breaking out of formation, turning to port until she was headed due East for Gibraltar and pouring on the knots. Behind her squadronmate Hammond tried to speed up and cover the gap she’d left, but it was no good. Bledsoe turned his head and snapped,

“Signals, tell Worley to get back into position, now!” The man on the lamp, a Mexican bluejacket named Sanchez, shook his head.

“No good, Sir. I already signaled, she doesn’t answer.” All the anger drained out of Bledsoe in that instant, and he just took his helmet off, running his hand through his hair for a moment. All he felt for the fleeing destroyer was a mix of pity and contempt.

“Damn fool. He’ll never make it to Gibraltar.”

“Sure he will, Skipper.” Sanchez’s voice was rich with the same vein of emotion. “The Snakes, they’ll leave her be. Professional courtesy.” Bledsoe grunted unwilling laughter as he watched his escort head for the horizon, turning about.

“Well, never mind it, Sanchez. We’ve got bigger problems just now.” Just as he said that the first raven-black dots appeared overhead, and Reprisal’s own 5” antiaircraft guns obliterated further noise and thought.

The next minutes, stretched out into Bledsoe’s memory, flowed with the same thick smoothness as an unusually vivid nightmare. Draka planes came from all points of the compass, fire licking up at them from the ships’ antiaircraft guns as they dove in. Bombs dropped away from them, and Bledsoe vaguely heard himself giving orders to the helm as he watched their trajectories, trying to separate the ones he had to dodge from the ones that were close enough to threaten his ship. Reprisal careened crazily through the task force’s formation, now heading straight for one of her own escorting destroyers, now heeling over to the other tack hard enough that Bledsoe could almost hear the rudder post screech in protest and his eyes were locked on the inclinometer for a precious few seconds to see if she would finally go over. Then his eyes were back on the bridge windows, and for few brief minutes Bledsoe could see everything.

He saw Corsairs follow Draka planes into the teeth of their own anti-aircraft fire, and more than once watched one go down in flames right behind its quarry. He saw a TBM Avenger from the anti-shipping patrol come winging in like an oversized fighter, fastening onto the tail of an even slower Draka Rhino and peppering its heavily armored body with .50 caliber rounds until one of the great radials burst into flame and the Draka fell into the sea. Saw a Draka Falcon fighter drop down and duel the Avengert’s rear gunner, the big Martin bursting into flames just seconds before the Draka caught a 5” shell burst and exploded into a cloud of metal slivers. He saw the destroyer Evans stagger as she took a sheaf of armor-piercing rockets, then saw a stick of bombs hit the unlucky Hammond until she exploded in a yellow-white flash that left only flotsam in her wake. Saw the grin on Sanchezs’ face as he ducked in from the flag bridge yelling that Worley was back, her skipper placed under arrest, and that the ship’s Exec wanted orders.

Bledsoe saw a Rhino run its way down the length of Reprisal’s flight deck, cannon flaming and sparking off the metal armored deck until it burst into flames just past the fantail and fell into the carrier’s churning wake. Saw the columns of white spray from near misses, and the ugly belch of black smoke as Altoona took a bomb meant for the ship she was escorting. Saw a wing of Draka torpedo bombers drop their deadly missiles, a wide spread that the carrier couldn’t hope to dodge, until the just-returned Worley wiped the stain on her honor clear by charging into the torpedoes and vanishing in a fountain of spray, leaving a gap Reprisal could just turn through. The fires of Hell itself played around his ship, and through it all she was untouched.

It couldn’t last, of course.

And when it all ended, it was with a flaming Draka Vulture diving straight for the carrier’s island, the antiaircraft rounds that tore at it only making it dive in steeper as the last of its bombs fell away.

Bright yellow flare of light, and an instant of pain.

Then nothing at all.

Ready Room One
USS Reprisal

The impact knocked them all out of their chairs and down to the deck sprawling. Julius Rosemont’s chin caught on the edge of Flannery’s desk on the way down, and he saw green and purple stars for a long moment before he could shake it off and get back up to his hands and knees. For a moment, he was so loopy that all he could think was that he must be getting old, because he sure couldn’t take a punch the way he used to.

Smoke! Smoke! Thick billowing black clouds of the stuff poured out of the ready room’s ventilation duct, sending Rosemont into a coughing fit as he struggled to pull air back into his bruised chest. He drew a breath, hacked it out, then forced another one down to yell,

“Out! Out! Everybody out and to the fallback station!” The thick black smoke had already cut visibility in the ready room down to just a foot or two, but Rosemont could hear enough heavy scrambling and cursing that the knew his orders were being obeyed, that the men were crawling out on their hands and knees the way they’d all been taught at basic damage control school back in the States. After a moment Rosemont started crawling himself, heading for the door, then paused as he heard muffled cries coming from the back of the ready room. He hesitated, remembering what they’d told him about smoke inhalation back in school- then damned himself for a fool even as his arms and legs carried him further back into the smoke-darkened room.

It was Bayreaux, Applebaum's navigator. One of the parachutes stored on the ready room’s ceiling had dropped down and somehow come open from the concussion, wrapping the man in thick layers of silk he couldn’t get out of in the zero visibility. It was hopeless trying to get it off, so Rosemont grabbed one of the shroud lines and tried dragging the other man out. Heavy. So damned heavy, and his vision was getting even darker, fighting for air. Then the burden seemed to get lighter, as another pair of hands grabbed another set of lines and helped him haul Bayreaux out of the ready room and into the corridor. Rosemont looked over into Fujita’s red, wheezing face.

“Went back in there?” Rosemont nodded, and the Japanese officer raised an eyebrow. “Crazy. You’re a crazy man, Skipper.” He broke into a grin. “You need a job after the war, come fly for our Navy. Might just be crazy enough to fly with us.” Rosemont broke into laughter for a moment, coughing as he cleared the smoke from his lungs, then grabbed out his utility knife and cut Bayreaux out of the chute. The Frenchman was dazed and only half-conscious, and they made quite a trio stumbling down the corridor- tall American, slight Japanese, Frenchman in the middle and looking for all the world like they were coming off a 48 hour pass in Frisco. They made it that way down to the fallback station, where the rest of the squadron was waiting along with a few harried damage control personnel. A corpsman striker looked Bayreaux over briefly.

“Smoke inhalation?” Rosemont nodded. “Okay, get him up to the flight deck. The all clear’s just sounded, so we’re moving the minor cases up there. Somebody’ll take a look at him, or he’ll just get better once he has some air.”

“What about sickbay?” Somewhere deep down inside himself Rosemont knew, but he had to ask. The corpsman looked surprised.

“Sickbay? Ain’t you heard, Mac? The island took a hit and another Snake bomb got us near the waterline. Nobody’s getting into sickbay right now unless they’re pretty bad hit. Take your buddy topside, and be glad he ain't goin' to sickbay!” Rosemont nodded, and he and Fujita took Bayreaux up to the topside stairs- the same ones, he noted absently, they’d used to man their planes for the strike the night before. There they had to wait while a gang of sailors in dungarees stained black with soot and fuel oil ran a fire-fighting hose down from the flight deck, then they moved up in their turn.

Rosemont’s first thought when he got up to the flight deck was that it didn’t look so bad. There were a couple of crashed and burnt-out planes, but they seemed under control and aviation botswain’s mates were already starting to push one of them over the side. Thankfully, the heavy weight of the planes they’d been built for meant that the United States class carriers had been designed with the flight deck as their strength deck, rather than a superstructure deck as on previous US carriers. There were a few holes in it that would need patching before they could resume flight operations, but nothing like the burning mess he remembered when the old Enterprise took a hit like that over the Solomons.

Then they had to turn around, to haul Bayreaux towards the mass of injured men lying in a clear area of the flight deck, and Rosemont groaned in near despair. Reprisal’s island was a flaming mass of wreckage, the sponson it hung off of bent and twisted from the impacts that had destroyed it. Firefighting crews were spraying water and foam over the twisted metal, but it was evident that they were fighting to contain the blaze rather than extinguish it. It looked as though almost all of the carrier’s command and control gear was shot.

The second Draka strike had hurt Reprisal to the quick. Nightfall was still several hours off.


1600 Hours Local Time
T+ 16 Hours and Counting
Somewhere in the Western Mediterranean, South of Sicily

Admiral Sir John Amos leaned back in the rubber dinghy and combed a hand wearily through his hair. He didn’t regret for a moment using the decoy transmitter to divert as many Draka aircraft as he could- his force’s entire job description had been to act as a diversion and give Reprisal the best chance possible to complete her mission. That didn’t mean, however, that he was even close to happy with his current circumstances.

Renown had lasted about as long under the bombs and torpedoes of the Draka Air Corps as her sister Repulse had against the Japanese in 1941. The whole British task force had given it their best shot and downed not a few Draka aircraft, but from the moment the Draka decided to attack rather than break off and renew their search for the carrier force the outcome of the engagement had never really been in doubt. Less than half an hour had passed between the orders “Commence Firing” and “Abandon Ship”, and Amos had very little hope that any of the three destroyers that had been left when they abandoned Renown would make it anywhere. His last order, flashed just before evacuating the flag bridge, had been for them to scatter and keep going rather than come back for the survivors. The idea that the Draka might respect a rescue ship was good only as a grisly joke, and Amos saw no point in wasting any more lives than necessary today.

Sweet, merciful God knew there had already been far, far too many.

So he lay, under the merciless hot sun, the remaining hours and days of his life describing themselves in his mind’s eye with the same remorseless logic as a timer winding down to zero.

“Ship! Ship!” The call roused him, made him half-stand and pull his cap back on to shield his eyes from the sun. There she was. A destroyer, right enough, and for a moment relief warred with anger in Amos’ mind. Damn it, he’d given specific orders…

Then the destroyer turned, and his heart sank. The profile was that of a Domination Predator class destroyer, not any ship that had ever responded to his orders. And she wasn’t stopping. She was turning again and running straight for the cluster of survivors, crews scrambling aft to her depth charges in a manner that made their intent all too plain. Amos felt a wash of fear, then a sort of weary disgust. So this was it.

A young petty officer broke the silence in a cracked, hoarse voice.

“Come cheer up me lads 'tis to glory we steer
To add something more to this wonderful year”

His voice gave out, but someone else picked it up. They all knew it. And somehow, with their deaths bearing down on them at thirty-plus knots, it was exactly the message every British sailor wanted to send. Amos stood, not minding the way it made the raft pitch, and joined in.

“To honor we call you, not press you like slaves
For who are so free as the sons of the waves?”

The Draka warship was closer now. He could see the sailors at their stations, see the Dragon standard flapping at her mast.

“Heart of oak are our ships, hearts of oak are our men
We always are ready- steady, boys, steady.”

The depth charges tumbled off their racks and into the water beneath the survivors with a white splash. Amos’ last thought was a warm one- that they might be about to die, but at least they hadn’t lost.

“We’ll fight and we’ll conquer again and again!”

1700 Hours
Docking Bridge, USS Reprisal

“Here's the situation.” Commander Guitierrez, now Captain Guitierrez, swept his eyes over Reprisal’s remaining senior officers. “We can make maybe twenty knots, if we’re lucky. Communications are down to signal flags and blinker lights, although Altoona and the destroyers still have working radio sets for the time being. Holes in the deck are going to be patched shortly, but it’ll take a miracle to get any fighters in the air and it’s too far to fly the group off to Gibraltar. We’re low on every kind of anti-aircraft ammo, and we can expect another Draka strike before sundown. If that doesn't happen and we’re still floating come the dawn, we can expect another strike then to finish us off.” He swept his eyes around the table. All the faces were grim.

“Now. I do have some good news.” A slightly dubious stir. “SubRon 51 is transiting the Straits tonight, and they should be on station sometime tomorrow.” Another ripple of murmurs, slightly more hopeful. SubRon 51 was made up of large troop-carrier submarines built for Pacific island raiding, along with a few even larger Japanese boats originally built to carry floatplanes. “So if we can keep her afloat long enough, they should be able to help take our survivors off.”

“Sir.” Guitierrez looked up. It was an older man, tall and lanky, with quiet eyes. He searched his memory- right, the Heavy Attack guy, the former DrakSymp now left in command of his squadron after everyone else bought it against the Snakes. Rosemont, that was the man’s name. “Sir, what about Genoa?”

“Genoa?” Guitierrez didn’t bother keeping the incredulity out of his voice. “Have you lost your mind? Even if we could launch you boys, what makes you think you’d have any better luck than the last two crews to try it? Forget Genoa, we need to concentrate on surviving out here.” Rosemont held up a hand.

“Sir, our mission is to cut off the Draka Expeditionary Force in Europe from their supply lines. If we don’t finish that job, this- all this- might end up being for nothing.” Guitierrez nodded, but the hostility in his eyes didn’t diminish. Rosemont took a breath, went on doggedly. “I know the ship’s beat up, Sir, and that the catapult isn’t a hundred percent. That doesn’t matter. All I need is one shot from it to get a three-quarters loaded Revenant off the catapult. That’ll let us carry a bomb and enough gas to get there.”

“Where you planning on landing? We may be a little indisposed by the time you’re done.”

“Switzerland.” Groans of disbelief. “No, it’s possible. We’ve got coordinates and approach plates for the Zurich and Berne airports, and Genoa’s not that far from the Alps as the crow flies. After we drop the bomb, we can keep going and make it there. Even if we have to bail out it beats the alternatives.”

“Okay.” Guitierrez crossed his arms over his chest. “Let’s say you really can do all this. And you’re right, we can’t ignore the chance to get the job done, if there really is one. What makes you think you’ll do any better than the last guys to make the trip?” Rosemont grinned tightly.

“I won’t be going alone.”

1715 Local Time
T+ 17 Hours, 15 Minutes and Counting
Ready Room One

“So that’s it.” Rosemont finished his delivery. “They can give us enough steam pressure for one cat shot, then twenty knots or so for the rest of you. That ought to be enough for you to get off the deck with enough fuel to make Switzerland, plus a few of those chaff bombs we’ve still got. We all go in at the same time, from different points of the compass, and hope to overwhelm the Snake defenses. Then you all bug out.”

“'You'?” Applebaum, in the back, levered himself up in his battered, soot-streaked leather chair. The ready room had only recently been cleared by the fire crews, but the Myrmidons had still chosen to have their last squadron briefing in their familiar sanctum. Rosemont nodded.

“You. My crew and I will take the bomb.” He held up his hands. “No arguments. We’ve got the best crew and probably the best bird of any we have left.” Hangar Two hadn't been hit in the Draka swarm, so all four of the squadron’s Revenants were still intact- but it was still less than half what their strength had been twenty four hours ago. “We’ll be taking the cat shot, but the rest of you will be going into Snake country unarmed, doing your best to impersonate a nuclear bomber.” He paused. “If anyone doesn’t want in on this mission, now’s the time to say so. You can always stay here and take your chances aboard the ship.” There was a pause, as all the crewmembers looked at each other. The spares, in the back of the room, looked half hopeful and half terrified as they waited to see whether any of the prime crewmen would back out. Nobody said anything.

“All right.” Rosemont walked over to the map board and pulled up his first sheet. "These are our routes. Everyone take ten minutes to look them over, grab a head break or some water, then be back here and we’ll go over them.” All of them were pretty ragged, but that’s not why Rosemont had called the break. He managed to get Walker aside before they reconvened.

“Walker, I know things were rough on you back near the end of our flight. You tell me straight, now. Can you drop another one of those things? If you can’t, now’s the time to tell me. I’ll take a backup gunner along, and as far as anyone else is concerned you got a bad cough from all that smoke and weren’t fit to fly. Now how about it?” The Englishman’s face was grey, now, soot over a bad pallor, but he shook his head. His eyes were red-rimmed from the smoke, making him look all of thirteen or fourteen, but his voice was steady.

“No, Skipper. Come too far now.” Walker swept his arms, taking in the ready room, the men in it, Reprisal, all the ships that had been around her the day before and weren’t now, the Med, the Domination, the whole damned war. “Let’s finish this job.”

Edit: Couple continuity fixes.

[declan]

A nice fitting chapter for rememberance day.


Declan

[Pelranius]

Brave men, very brave men.

[iborg]

With their logistics nodes destroyed the Draka army in Europe will very probably have to abandon most of their heavy equipment in the retreat. Syria's a looong way on foot, and Italia's a cul-de-sac.
They'd probably do a scorched earth retreat, too.

[Simon_Jester]

I'd argue that they're gratuitously vicious enough to do scorched-earth anyway.* The catch is, as von Shrakenberg already pointed out, that they can't destroy as much as they'd like, because they don't have the security troops to spare and they don't have the time. Every day they delay their march by a few miles to take time out for burning stuff is a day they risk other disasters happening, and they need to reconsolidate a defensible front somewhere soon, or they're going to run into trouble.

*This seems to me to be a fundamental aspect of the Drakan character, a predictable consequence of that turbocharged faux-Nietzschean "I am Superman and I rule everything I survey!" mindset. They'll look at things and say "Well if I can't have it you can't have it either!"

[ChaserGrey]

I'd argue that they're gratuitously vicious enough to do scorched-earth anyway.* The catch is, as von Shrakenberg already pointed out, that they can't destroy as much as they'd like, because they don't have the security troops to spare and they don't have the time.

I'd argue that a real scorched-Earth type scenario isn't likely, for the reasons you point out above. I'm sure there will be lots of gratuitous breakage and burning, and there might well be some Draka commanders out there who would indulge in such even in the situation they're in right now. von Shrakenberg isn't one of them, though. They're literally on a clock for *everything* an army needs- they can loot some of it, but not even basics like ammo. (Fun fact that also inspired me to write this: by canon, the Draka Holbars assault rifle shoots *factory packed* ammo drums. Now, imagine there's no more factories. Yup, you're pretty screwed.)

Every day they delay their march by a few miles to take time out for burning stuff is a day they risk other disasters happening, and they need to reconsolidate a defensible front somewhere soon, or they're going to run into trouble.

My, but you have a gift for understatement, sir. Would this be as opposed to their current situation, where their industrial base has just been turned into air pollution and they're stuck in a hostile Europe with all their supply ports nuked?

*This seems to me to be a fundamental aspect of the Drakan character, a predictable consequence of that turbocharged faux-Nietzschean "I am Superman and I rule everything I survey!" mindset. They'll look at things and say "Well if I can't have it you can't have it either!"

Indeed. A good real-life example would be Saddam Hussein's torching of the Kuwati oil fields at the end of the First Persian Gulf War. No military or strategic purpose, as far as I know, just wanton destruction. I don't think it even slowed down Coalition troops- they just went around it, since fighting a mass oilfield fire is not something amateurs can do.

[[R_H]]

(Fun fact that also inspired me to write this: by canon, the Draka Holbars assault rifle shoots *factory packed* ammo drums. Now, imagine there's no more factories. Yup, you're pretty screwed.)

I thought that meant that the drums came loaded from the factory, not that they were only loadable in the factory.

[ChaserGrey]

...That would be a lot less amusing, wouldn't it? Glad someone pointed this out before I brought it into the story.

[Simon_Jester]

Every day they delay their march by a few miles to take time out for burning stuff is a day they risk other disasters happening, and they need to reconsolidate a defensible front somewhere soon, or they're going to run into trouble.

My, but you have a gift for understatement, sir. Would this be as opposed to their current situation, where their industrial base has just been turned into air pollution and they're stuck in a hostile Europe with all their supply ports nuked?

Hey. I said they needed to consolidate a defensible front. I didn't say they could

...That would be a lot less amusing, wouldn't it? Glad someone pointed this out before I brought it into the story.

Rule of Funny man, Rule of Funny. But I guess we can do without that.

[[R_H]]

...That would be a lot less amusing, wouldn't it? Glad someone pointed this out before I brought it into the story.

It's almost ridiculous enough to fit into the Draka setting, isn't it.