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Rising from the ashes. Raising the head long oppressed to march against the oppressor.

Chapter 39: Resurrection

The slaughter of Regina had just finished when Alexis had claimed her own part of him, and Killer had been more than glad to oblige to her request... at several hours of distance, the male liger still felt amazed by just how hard and loud they had fucked. He had been high on power and lust after tearing Regina to shreds, Alexis had been as high on violent, lustful hunger...

He had mounted her in the gore, taken her with his cock red of blood and dripping gore and pieces of Regina as they had grabbed the torso of the demoness and torn it in half with growls of dark lust, before eating the raw flesh of the demoness even as he pounded into her with a force rarely before unleashed.

It had been glorious, it had been... dark and frightening... monstrous and violent... so powerful... and just so awesome... dark, bloody, and wonderful...

They had paused only to let Diana have her own ride... She had been away from Heaven for too long already, and she had to run back to the Monastery as soon as possible, but Killer thought it would have been just so rude to have her leaving without taking care of her own needs... It would have been so mean to have her going without repaying his debt for her help, isn't so...?

Even Alexis had understood it, and even if it was clear that it was the very last thing she wished to do, she had stood slowly up until his cock had popped free of her, the femme fatale leaving him free to take care of the angel's own needs.

Of course... Alexis hadn't let it be completely gratis. Once Diana had got on all fours and Killer had gently penetrated her from behind, the femme fatale, just as Rika had earlier done, sat down in front of the angel with her legs spread in a wide V, and gently holding the Healer's head in her hands, Alexis had firmly guided her as Diana eat her out, tasting the potent mix of Alexis's juices and Killer's seed.

On his part, Killer had showed his other nature with little Diana. She couldn't take the forceful pounding that Alexis loved so much, she wasn't tough enough to resist to such a ride without splitting in half, and her tastes were different anyway... and Killer knew it well. He gave his best for it, taking her with power, but with surprising gentleness, making it soft, passionate, even romantic, just as Diana most loved it. And it was even more amazing to see the gentleness he was capable of, considering that the floor around them was still scattered with the small, torn pieces that were left of Regina, tiles covered by a lake of blood and sperm, his body painted crimson by the blood of his latest victim, his enormous, potent muscles bulging and flexing out of vigor and sheer ecstasy at the complete destruction of a life that he had just completed.

It had been long and good, and he had put all his talent and experience into it, making Diana enjoy every single instant of it, every contact, until the last of so many orgasms left her panting and blissfully exhausted... until he had filled her up with his purest essence, and let her suckle and lap his immense cock clean and shiny after he pulled out of her ravaged sex. And at the end, she had hesitatingly left with a last, long and loving kiss before portaling back to Heaven.

Alexis had kept him busy for long time afterwards, yet... And when they finally had dressed back up and headed back for the barracks, Killer had decided to order Siegfried and the Predators to retreat into the underground complex. Every communication system had proved useless, however, with Vera disturbing their systems and the whole Net with her hellish powers, but luckily, Alexis had managed to use her own capabilities to contact Siegfried's mind directly and told him to see if it was possible to accomplish a reconnaissance of the area of the bay of the port to examine the consistence of the enemy positions... And then retreat into the bunkers as soon as possible, sealing the access behind their backs. It took him almost two hours to accomplish the difficult mission, but now he and the Predators were safe into the bunkers, resting into a couple of rooms made available for them as the wounded soldiers were being treated in the medical bay of the base, so now Killer was quite relieved. He and Alexis had taken a couple hours for themselves to wash up and rest a little bit, cuddling into the largest bed that the base had to offer, that still was uncomfortably small... But despite all, curling up with Alexis for an hour or so had been just awesome.

Now Alexis was following the preparations for their next military move, ensuring that their troops were ready for the incoming battle, while he was walking down the corridor of the barracks where he had first met Rika, coming up in front of the ajar door of her room.

"May I...?" Killer asked gently, smiling softly as he slowly pushed the half-open door to peer inside the room, bowing and shrinking as best he could to step across the door that, just as most things, was too small for him.

"Majesty... please, come in!" Rika immediately invited, standing from where she had been seating on the edge of her small bunk bed, looking over her young son as he played quietly with another cub on the floor, another young tigress turning from the bed she was resting upon and straightening immediately, bowing her head.

Killer smiled with some embarrassment at this, rising a hand quietly to kindly refuse all those obsequious ceremonies as he stepped into the room as quietly and silently as he could manage, looking over the two cubs with a soft smile as he pushed the door closed with his back.

"Please, be at home... no need to stand up for me." He said gently, looking from one tigress to the other and nodding as they hesitatingly sat back down on the beds, staring at him with reverence and curiosity. Even the two cubs had stopped playing and were now looking up at him with wide eyes, probably wondering from where such giant had come, as he towered tall over their mothers and seemed to fill all the room with his enormous, muscular form.

"I wanted to talk to you, Rika, if you have some time." Killer softly proposed, and Rika's face beamed up even as a bit of a blush gained her cheeks as she nodded in a hurry, placing a hand on the bed to invite him over as she blinked in surprise at his interest for her.

Killer smiled and walked forwards, pausing to rub a hand gently over the heads of the two children, who had apparently decided that the giant male was a friendly figure and posed no risk, because they were back playing and half-wrestling on the carpet already.

"I'll bring Tuomas out with me, Rika... I'll take care of him." The other tigress offered with a smile. She had to be some years older than the marine and she was evidently a mother more expert, who surely wasn't taking care of her first cub, Killer thought after giving her a gaze.

Rika nodded with a grateful and somehow embarrassed smile, not really managing to say anything back at all and blinking in surprise at one moment. Killer was almost ready to swear that the older tigress had winked to Rika with an accomplice, teasing smile, but he couldn't say it for sure.

The huge male stepped to the side and leaned against the wall to let the tigress walk towards the door of the small room, carrying both cubs in her arms, and he allowed himself to grin slightly at her as she looked up at him with a gaze that left no doubt on just how happy she would have been of caring for another son, Killer's son, soon.

"It's such an honor for me that you want to talk to me, of all people, Majesty... I don't deserve this attention." Rika said quietly as the other tigress leaved, and Killer walked towards her with a soft smile.

"I think you deserve much more than anything I can give you..." Killer answered, nodding slightly as he sat down at her side. He didn't really know what to say, and he surely did not know how to say it... But he had felt, from the first moment, that the young, unfortunate tigress deserved all the help he could give, all the affection and the protection he could ensure, all the admiration he could afford. Sure... he wasn't sure to be doing this in the right way... but... a right way exists to try and comfort a young girl that's been forced to kill his family, and not just one time, but twice...? How to comfort a girl that had lost everyone on earth because of the cruelty of that insane war...? He could ignore the events and not talk to her of them at all... but it wouldn't have been of any use. Even if he did not bring the subject up, it certainly never ceased to be on Rika's mind, minute after minute. Not talking of it would have been more of an insult to her courage and determination than anything else. Talking of it probably was going to be painful for her in unbearable way... He had thought about giving her a medal for her enterprise as soldier... He was going to, certainly, but in another moment. And anyway, it was almost insultingly reductive to condensate her sufferance in a piece of gold with a tape of colored silk.

He had thought to offer her the discharge... she had done more than she had to, and she was a mother, and all what remained of an ancient bloodline in Glacial. But he had discovered without surprise from Nigel that she had always refused such proposal. She had always wanted to continue her fight against the enemies that had caused the destruction of her family... And he could surely understand it. And admire her enduring courage and determination.

"We had a thermos of coffee short ago... there's still some, and it's still hot, Majesty. Can I offer you a cup...?" Rika asked quietly, smiling as she placed a hand over the leg of the much larger, thoughtful male, waking him up from his reflections and making him smile kindly as he nodded.

"I could never refuse. Thanks."

Rika stood and approached the small table that stood on the left of the door, reaching for a couple of cups and a large thermos, and he looked around the room a bit: two bunk-beds leaning against the side walls, facing each other, a small bedside table against the back wall, between the beds, topped by an old stereo, a table and a cupboard on the other side of the door, at the foot of the bed he was seating upon. He spotted the tactical bullet-proof vest of Rika carefully folded up and leaning against the wall, and beside it was her rifle and a submachine gun... and on the table he saw several full magazines ready to be used and another couple of clips only half-filled with rounds. Many bullets were scattered over the table, and Killer grinned slightly as he spotted a few groups, each of three tracer rounds: like even the huge male used to do, Rika put three tracer rounds at the bottom of each magazine 30-rounds magazine, as evident reminder during the fight that it was time to change clip. A more venial use of tracers, perhaps, than the original scope of helping taking aim with the machine guns, especially at night... but still an useful one.

"Here, Majesty." Rika said gently, and Killer smiled as he quietly took the cup of coffee that she offered, looking after her as she sat back down at his side, holding her own cup and smiling quietly to him, halfway between curious and reverently scared.

"Thanks." Killer said gently, and he sipped his hot coffee rapidly as Rika did the same, the male looking over her with kind affection.

"I wanted to-" He started, but in the same time Rika looked up from her cup and looked up at him while voicing her own call.

"I wanted to thank you." She said, before blinking and smiling embarrassedly as her cheeks reddened. "I'm sorry, your majesty, I... your highness first." She mumbled in apologetic town, but he shook his head quietly.

"No "majesty" and no "highness" and no other variations on the theme, please." He said calmly, smiling reassuringly to her. "Not when we are alone like this, at least. Just Killer is more than fine. And tell me... what did I do to deserve your thanks...?"

She smiled amusedly, looking up at him with a tilt of her head and then shaking her head slowly as she saw that his surprise was sincere. "You truly don't get it, Ma... Killer...?" She said, correcting herself at the last moment, and still looking uncertain about using such confidence around him.

He smiled reassuringly, however, and then he shook his head. "No. I did nothing for you..."

"Oh, you did, instead." She replied with gentle but firm voice. "You have destroyed the army of the demons that was pressing against the doors of our base. You have freed tens of us from Regina... you have killed the demoness herself, when no mortal could have ever dreamed to do it." Rika concluded, looking up at him with an embarrassed smile, her cheeks turning deep red despite her best attempts not to. "And this is just the start of it all... As soon as you've come, you have changed the fate of our desperate war. What you've done, and what you'll do for us in the future, is something that... that we'll never... never be able to repay."

Killer silently looked back over her, smiling slightly as he took in the soft redness on her cheeks, and nodding after a moment of silence. "You really shouldn't be thanking me. Alexis would have come here earlier, wasn't for me... She came to me to Kesteven when Riaku attacked, and she never left my side... much as I know just how much she worried about what was going on here in Glacial."

"To come here, you would have abandoned your own family and land... Either way, one of the two peoples had to wait and survive on its own." Rika replied with soft voice but firm conviction. "As powerful as you are, you can't be in two places at once, after all." She added with a sly grin.

"It's a major fault we have to deal with." Killer playfully admitted, smiling to her as Rika nodded.

"As everyone in the Northlands and beyond, we've heard and seen of your exploits..." The female softly said, and Killer nodded silently, realizing that those exploits enclosed also his destructive wrath, the fury that for seven years had frightened the whole world, and that represented his greatest sin. Rika seemed to notice the discomfort of the huge male, and lowered her head in shame, realizing that she had said touched the wrong, bleeding spot. "I... I didn't mean that." She assured with a blush. "We've seen the supernatural power of you. And we all know that you'll save us all."

"I wish I had the same gift of optimism." Killer sighed. "But I'm no savior. I am as cruel as the demons we fight, if not even worse. I cannot say I didn't understand Regina's lusts..." He paused, looking upwards to the roof, without really seeing it, without even noticing that the explosions of a new bombardment on the surface of the island shook the ceiling and sent some dust raining down. "She offered me to become a demon. She would change me herself... And the thought of all the power I could get almost make me say yes."

"But you said no." Rika observed, and Killer blinked, turning to her with a slight gape of surprise. "You said no, at the end... that's the difference between you and the demons." Rika said warmly, flushing a bit as he looked at her with disbelief. "Much as you lust for power, and for violence, you struggle against your hungers, and fight them back in order to do the right thing. And believe me, not many would care so much for the others, if they were to have your power."

Killer smiled, shaking his head slowly and looking amused and deeply touched at the same time as he eyed her with gratitude, even if his icy sapphire eyes didn't really betrayed his feelings. They never did. "Thank you... you make it sound like it's true." He said gently, and Rika blinked, then nodded firmly.

"It IS true." The Royal Marine firmly stated. "Do you know how many times I beat down and kicked back males that tried to rape me, during the months at the front...?" She exclaimed firmly. "Fuckers who believed they could take on me." Rika grinned, and Killer smiled amusedly as he saw in her the warrior that she was. And it was true... now, after the tragic events that had ruined her life, no one dared to bother Rika in any way. Everyone supported her entirely, both for friendship and respect and both because in years of service she had shown that she was second to none for strength and courage. But at the start of her unusual career in the army...? Hell. She was beautiful, young and hot, and her body had lured so many males that had tried to take over her. "I kicked their asses back in place whenever I didn't want to share a bed with them... fucked them dry when I pleased... But I always knew that one day I may have ended in the sight of someone stronger than me, and then I could have done nothing to avoid their assaults." She turned towards him and stared up at his eyes with a grin, her own irises burning with confidence and vitality, telling him clearly that, despite all, she wouldn't ever cease to consider him their savior. "Let's say it clearly now. We both know that you could take on all of us in any moment, and we could do nothing about it... we'd probably barely be able to slow you down if we were to resist. There's not a single person in the base that does not realize this simple fact. Yet, you care for everyone... you are being generous to us all, and doing everything you can to save us all. You respect us... when you could do whatever you want, and no one could say a word or do a thing against it."

Killer silently looked at her, letting her words reach the depths of his spirit. Soothing, loving words of confidence and support that greatly relieved his soul... It was true... the rebels in the base were a few thousands, but even so, they weren't a force capable to worry him. He had destroyed armies far greater and far better equipped, with the support of tanks and heavy weapons... the rebels would have been an easy game, indeed. Just like Newbury and all those other towns years before... easy fields for him to conquest and dominate and destroy. And it wasn't like his dark side didn't tease him all the time, trying to coax him into a new rampage. He had just learned to see the good in every person, and respect them and shut down his urges, in a way or another...

"You are far nicer than you think." Rika warmly observed, smiling gently. "For example, what is the thing you truly wish you could do, right now...?"

Killer paused, looking surprised at her question... and then amused as he immediately voiced his deepest desire. "I'd like to be home... not even in the palace. I think I'd love a small chalet somewhere, small and simple. I'd want to be there with Alexis, and be free to spend our time together as we pleased, far from everything, from the blood and the chaos. And I'd want to have our children in my arms... I'd like to have them with me, to see them sleeping, playing, eating, growing up..." Killer paused, smiling slightly. "Our race matures so rapidly... a child is a child for such a short time, that every day that passes is so much paternity that I lose." He paused again, then grinned a bit and nodded. "Well, yeah, Alexis and I will have more children in time... but... you know how it is. You certainly want to be present for your child... and I'm sure that you can admit just how much pleasure it is to just... look over your son as it grows up, and accompany his steps forwards."

"True..." Rika admitted with a smile. "A male and a female, I heard..."

"Yes... Anubis and Mriya." Killer replied softly.

"Mriya is a Glacial's name..." Rika observed, amused and almost surprised.

"Yes, it is... Alexis never forget her home and her identity. She may be the empress of Kesteven and Kendrew, but she's always Glacial's queen in the deep. Glacial is part of her... and, consequently, part of me." Killer quietly replied, and Rika smiled warmly, shaking her head slowly and amusedly before she gently leaned her head against his huge, muscular arm.

"You are so much sweeter than you let out, you now...?" The female playfully observed. "It sounds like you may be one that, just like me, on a snowy day would only stay in bed with the ones you love, cuddling as a fireplace crackles nearby with flames, enjoying the warmth as outside the ice rages."

"It would be just so awesome. And if it rains, it would still work, too." Killer replied, laughing softly. "It's one of so many things that I'd love to do with Alexis... but we've been fighting continuously, from even before we met. I didn't even have a chance to give her a honeymoon like she deserved..."

The two fell silent for a few moments, Killer absently rolling the small empty cup in his hands, before Rika stood up and quietly took it, to place both his and hers on the table.

"I wanted to..." Killer stated as she calmly walked back, and he rubbed a hand in his mane, looking to the floor in embarrassment. "You know, I dunno what to say. I've long thought about how to face the subject, but it's not like I've been able to find a true solution."

Rika sat down close to him, and gently leaned against his side, resting over his enormous, muscular arm and smiling reassuringly. "Any way you say it will be fine..."

"Well... I've been told about... what you had to face, Rika." He hesitatingly stated, and once more he was amazed by her self-control and courage, as she only sadly nodded and snuggled instinctively closer to him. He welcomed her between his arms, letting her sit in his lap as he wrapped his arms around her form, squeezing gently and protectively over her athletic, feminine form. "And I've been... so deeply touched by it all. Everything impressed me... your courage in front of things, first of all... and how you manage to be so compassionate, and such a loving mother for your son... and... everything." He concluded quietly, hating how lame it felt... but Rika leaned against his powerful, masculine chest and gently squeezed on his rock-hard arms with her hands.

"Thank you... I do it for Tuomas... he already lost his father. I can't leave him alone myself... He needs me even more than I need him." Rika whispered quietly, and he squeezed her closer, leaning his head against hers.

"I... just wanted to let you know how much I admire you, Rika. And promise that I'll always be present for you, when you'll need me. I'd like to... be of help to you, in any way possible. I..." He paused and sighed slightly. "Don't take it as I wanted to enter your life by force or erase the memory of your family and your mate at all, but... I'd love to be a father for Tuomas, as much as possible... and I'd love to help you in whatever you need."

"Majesty..." Rika warmly said. "This is so much more than I can dare asking for... Thanks..."

"It still is little stuff, instead, but I hope you'll accept my help." Killer replied calmly, smiling as she shifted in his lap to turn chest-to-chest with him and smile gratefully up at him, before she wrapped her arms around his thick waist and leaned her cheek against his enormous chest, kissing it softly. "Thank you... thank you..." She whispered, and he squeezed her closer while leaning his head over hers with affection.

He did not know how much time they spent like that, with him cuddling her gently against his chest and Rika snuggling against his reassuring presence... But he felt, for the first time in quite a lot of time, good in the best sense of the term. For once, he had no doubts at all about having done the right thing. Rika, on her side, felt immensely relieved now, with him at her side... She had never been truly alone... the other rebels had been wonderful, friendly and supportive all the time... But it wasn't the same thing. She had found relief in their friendship, but never found in them the same feelings she was now finding in Killer. Besides, she had lived horrible months: many of the friends she had between the rebels, many of the ones that had been near to her in the terrible moment of the loss, had died in the fighting as well. It was hard to keep up a friendship along time, in Argolis... you could drink a beer in the base with a friend and comrade an afternoon and have to shot the walking corpse of your friend the same evening. It was a nightmare... and Rika, just as many others between the rebels, had long before reached the point where you try hard not to develop too tight ties of affection with anyone, because you know that you may lose them at any moment, and suffer even more. Or maybe you can be the one not returning to the barracks at night, and someone will suffer for your absence. Rika had lived it too many times already. Too many... But Killer was giving her feelings she couldn't resist too. It wasn't friendship... but love. And she felt loved back, and she felt protected and safe. His arms were the supreme protection that no one could ever overcome... and they were affective, loving, caring.

They didn't know how much time had passed when, finally, Rika sighed and looked up at him hesitatingly, flushing deep red on the cheeks. "Majesty, I..."

"Killer." The huge male gently corrected.

Rika nodded and smiled a bit, looking flushed as she leaned fully against his enormous chest, breasts touching his masculine musculature as her clothed groin rested over his own, touching the massive, monstrous flaccid cock that made his pants bulge. "Killer... I... don't want to sound like a whore now... but... I feel that I need you... I need you so much... I need you to make love to me, Killer, please..."

Rika was young, beautiful, and strong. Any female with these characteristics has sexual needs and urges and desires, that arise all the stronger after many months of loneliness... Besides, Rika had always been quite a lustful girl herself, so her needs were greater still. And the attraction she felt for Killer was incredible, admittedly... leaning so intimately against his powerful body could only awaken her needs at full force. It couldn't have been different.

Killer himself couldn't say no to such a request... She was young, beautiful and strong, and had all the rights to fulfill her needs. And honestly, he could only be happy of being asked to help in that special way. How could I not be...?

"Whatever you want, Rika, I'll give you... It's my promise." Killer replied, squeezing her closer to his form as her hands slid down his powerful back, feeling, exploring and stroking every potent muscle as her breath grew hotter and heavier, the female gaping slightly as she pressed into his chest, feeling the hard, thick ridges of his musculature against the softness of her bosom, feeling each flex of his potent form and wondering on just how strong he was.

At each small movement of the giant male, his thick musculature bulged even thicker, showing off the excess of vigor he had, and letting her know that he could have in any moment wringed her like a rag. She was just a toy in his hands, and in any moment he could have crushed her out of existence without effort... and the awareness of it make her tremble in his hold.

But perhaps it wasn't fear... Surely, at the very least, not just fear. It was arousal, it was need... pure and simple. He was gentle, compassionate. He cared about her, more than anyone else...

He's got an incredibly handsome, incredibly-powerful body, too... he feels so powerful... he oozes sheer power...

She had never felt such an attraction for anyone else. His huge, powerful muscles fascinated her, admittedly... but it was a deeper feeling than simple interest, than marvel, than... anything.

She felt she wanted to curl up against him... she craved to have his strong arms embrace her, day after day, forever, letting her feel his force and his affection, his power and his protection. She only wanted to stay with him, curl up against him, feel his magnificent body against hers, have him owning her...

And that's admittedly without even mentioning the monster between his legs...

"Take me, Killer..." Rika breathed, staring to his eyes with a light tremble, feeling the adrenaline, the want, the fear and the lust that he gave her. "Make me yours, please... I want to stay with you... take me."

He smiled and kissed her, standing slowly up from the bed and lifting her in his arms.

Rika saw his enormous, corded muscles bulge a little as he lifted her up, but it was more than obvious that she was nothing to him in terms of effort... his musculature bulged with each little movement, not for effort, but for sheer excess of vigor. She almost expected to see his muscles explode out of his own hide of skin and fur as she absently figured that his arm lifting her was probably making the same effort of a crane tasked to lift a crumb of bread.

He went down to his knees in the middle of the small room, seeming to fill the whole space with his imposing, huge body as he gently deposed her on the floor, his legs on either side of her, arms on either side of her head as they kissed.

He covered her entirely. And his body above hers gave her a feeling of love that she had long forgotten... and it made her feel safer than any nuke-proof bunker could ever had.

Each move of his body, each expert touch of his hands as he slowly, teasingly undressed her, the soft brush of his lips over her body as he kissed her cheek, then a breast, then the other... it all made her arch her back in lust.

Her sex felt on fire with need. The void inside her longed to be filled, stuffed, crammed full of his cock, full of him.

Rika trembled as she reached her shaking hands up to undue his fly, and he suckled over her nipple lovingly as she did, his eyes grinning teasingly up to hers as the skilled moves of his large tongue made her moan and shiver in delight...

She struggled to get rid of his pants, and then of his boxers, trembling in fear and excitement and need, knowing well what she was about to deal with, and yet feeling like it was the first time she saw his cock...

It was barely turgid as it came down, freed, and slapped lightly into her face and chest, immense and powerful, feeling so hard and so incredibly strong even if still mostly flaccid... His enormous testicles rested over her crotch, and still the head of his gigantic member rubbed along her cheek on its upward path of growth, her eyes wide as she followed it with wonder, shivering in time with the mighty throbs of the colossal cock.

It smeared a thick trail of pre over her face as it hardened and grew, bigger and stronger, until the humongous tower of flesh stiffened in place above her, towering over her and casting a long, thick and frightening shadow over her form.

Rika took a deep, breathless sigh as she took in all his majesty, her eyes moving down his immense length as she felt weak at the knees now that she faced his fully erect, glorious 97 inches cock. She took a moment to marvel at his balls, at how full and heavy they looked, at how they seemed on the point to burst forth with the immensity of his thick load, even as they rested between those wonderfully muscled thighs.

She leaned her head in for a closer look, and was struck by the potent masculine scent emanating from him. Crushing, powerful, and capable of crushing her thoughts by filling her nostrils with complete lust.

He let her do. He had no hurry at all... he let her suck him out, he let her polish his cock with her mouth, he let her worship his immense shaft, and waited her times with patience before taking the teaching post to show her all the skills he had refined and perfected in years and years of experience, showing her how about him not only the sizes were extraordinary.

If his cock was huge and powerful enough to ensure that a female would release one orgasm at the very least... the many others he gave her where pure, incredible mastery.

And for the first time ever, Rika couldn't help but feel her mind empty. All the pain, the sufferance, the loses of family and friends... everything was gone, replaced by a mixture of pleasure and physical pain as he thrust his immense shaft in and out of her with amazing ability. So much so that even the agony of her sex stretching and tearing as he ravaged it with his cock, literally reshaping her as he pistoned in and out of her hard, changed into pure ecstasy.

She begged for more, and he gave her more. And then more, and even more. He made love to her, and then fucked her brutally, hard enough that someone had come in and entered to see what those rumors were, why Rika screamed so much, and left with a furious blush and an excuse. And she enjoyed every second of it, clinging to him for dear life, feeling like she had entered paradise from the main gate. No one had ever been able to make her as happy as he did.

No one had been able to soothe her pain, not even for a moment. None had been able to chase away the painful memories of her lost family.

He did it.

The Unseen was an immensely comfortable submarine... but always a submarine. Even if the latest Kesteven's submarine class was the first ever to provide a bunk-bed for every single man of the crew, erasing the old tradition of the warm bunk, shared by at least a couple of sailors that used the bed in turns, even if on board there was even a small gym and provision of space for embarking a squad of divers of the Special Forces and their gear, the space was still obviously very reduced. Only the commander had a small, independent room and, more importantly and luxurious by far, a personal toilette.

Of course, for that special cruise, that was true no more, since Sandy and Baker shared the room, using it in turns... But that, Sandy thought with a slight smile, wasn't a problem, especially because in the last days the submarine had almost constantly been on First Grade Alert, and no one had had a chance to lay in his small berth and sleep. The First Grade in fact was the combat state, with every single man of the crew manning his battle station, ready to react to any possible event, with the Emergency Teams prepared in full gear to try and plug a leak or fight against the flames if the vessel was hit by enemy action.

It was such a radical level of alert that everyone was constantly busy, with no chance to eat (and none to prepare the meals for the crew, since even the cook was called to help the operations) and to rest... it was extremely stressing, and Sandy could not remember another occasion when he had been forced to call his vessel on First Grade for such a long time.

But after all, he couldn't remember a single occasion when he had been surrounded by so many enemy forces at once.

The RA had been shocked and disbelieving at first... but when the enemy had understood that, somehow, an unknown number of Submersible Ship, Nuclear (SSNs) had managed to reach the waters around Argolis to attack them, the immense fleet had started a ferocious, merciless hunt.

Sandy was glad for the advances in the technology of Kesteven's shipyards, because it was greatly merit of the excellence of the Unseen itself if they were still alive.

The submarine was fast... and its pump-jet propulsion was extremely silent, so much that the enemy was having headaches to try and find them, much as tens of submarines listened obsessively to the sea to catch any little noise that could give them away. Even more helicopters flied low above the waters, using their dipping sonars every few moments, changing position after just a few minutes to try and cover the whole, wide sea. Sonobuoys were continuously dropped into the waters to form true fields of passive and active sonars that scanned the depths to find the enemy submarines. The frigates and destroyers of the surface fleet zigzagged back and forth, towing their sensible sonar arrays to listen, sprinting to 26 or more knots of speed before stopping their engines to drift ahead, reducing briskly their speed to just a few knots to ensure that the submarine they were searching wasn't following them, or hiding under their hulls...

Sandy grinned a bit. The Unseen was faithful to its name: the machinery was silenced, the hull wrapped in rubber that made no noise against the water, tiles of anechoic material were placed beneath the rubber, absorbing as much as possible the signals of the active sonars, so that there was a reflection too weak for the enemy to hear it, unless they were pretty close...

And the Unseen had also the other major characteristic that changed a submarine into a destructive, unstoppable machine: good ears.

Being so silent, off course, the Unseen almost didn't disturb at all its own sonar sensors: even the "Blind Sector", the 180° degrees behind the aft of the vessel, where the performances of the sonar are greatly degraded by the noise of the propeller, the Unseen could listen almost as well as many submarines could with their frontal area.

The passive sensor was incredibly powerful, and they had so far never needed to use the active mode to gain a perfect image of the surrounding world and aim the Spearfish torpedoes on the targets... and that was a major advantage. Listening was the stealth mode for excellence. Listening, you make no noise, and the enemy is unaware of your presence.

Sending loud "pings" echoing across the ocean, instead, is obviously a whole different matter.

Besides, Sandy considered, there's a few impatient enemy commanders that do the work for us. The old admiral grinned, remembering the last action, taking place only an hour or so earlier... They had been listening with attention to a low noise of machinery that indicated an enemy SSN on patrol in front of them. They had been silently starting to make a 90° degrees starboard turn to use the side-arrays of the sonar and the long, sensible towed array to try and triangulate the exact position of the evanescent contact to get a firing solution for the torpedoes... And in that very same moment, a helicopter hovering above had dropped its dipping sonar in the depths and had turned it on.

The ping that followed had illuminated the scene like a neon turning on in a dark room, and the sonar officers of the Unseen had listened to the reflection of the enemy signal to get a complete image of the surroundings, and a perfect firing solution for not just the submarine they were already tracking, but for another that was at a greater distance.

The Unseen, that had been already preparing to attack and had the tubes 1 and 2 already opened and flooded, fired its two Spearfish units immediately, sending both out on high-speed and releasing the guide cables as soon as both torpedoes locked on targets with their own sensors...

And as the Unseen veered to get out of the area rapidly, they had fired out a Triton missile and destroyed the chopper as well, before it could understand what had happened, and attack them with its torpedoes.

It had been one formidable victory... made historic by the fact that the Unseen had slipped away from the area unnoticed, despite the several helicopters that had immediately converged on the zone of the attack and started dropping sonobuoys and using their sonars. Shortly after, the destroyers and frigates from which the choppers had took off maneuvered towards the same spot as well... But the Unseen had already descended to a safe depth, and had been rapidly putting distance between itself and the pursuing enemies by sailing silently at almost 20 knots of speed.

After that last blow, Sandy had ordered to veer away from Argolis, and move towards the far deeper waters of the open ocean, sailing north-west to approach the second area of the chase.

The RA fleet around Argolis was made up by an immense group of warships, from frigates to the massive Retaliation battleships: the latest, monstrous creation of the enemy organization, vessels with the firepower of a whole fleet packed into a gigantic hull... Other than these, there were a few support ships, mostly transports of fuel and ammunitions that ensured that the other ships could keep their place in the fleet and keep firing their guns on Argolis, day and night, day after day.

But Sandy knew that the most precious targets were at greater distance, in the open ocean north-west of Argolis, at nearly 100 miles of distance. They had originally been at a greater-yet distance, out of the firing range of the artillery and missiles batteries that had defended Argolis... but now, after the long siege and the endless bombardments of the island, no such threats were left, and the whole fleet had greatly diminished the distances.

The precious targets were, of course, the battlegroups centered around the massive aircraft carriers, the true elements of power that the RA had in the area.

Each aircraft carrier was a behemoth ship as big as a town, with nearly 8000 members of crew and well over 130 planes carried, plus several helicopters. Propelled by a massive nuclear plant with four cores generating electricity to move 4 enormous propellers, each ship could move at nearly 35 knots, and had no limitations of range, needing no fuel. Each carrier could have made a full nonstop cruise around the world in less than 90 days... and with over the 70% of the population of the world living in a range of 300 hundred miles from the sea, the fighter-bomber jets on board of each carrier could attack mostly everyone on earth as soon as an order came.

The vessels themselves were armed with vertical launch missile silos that carried tens and tens of missiles, mostly for self defense, but also for long range strike, some of them fitted with nuclear warheads.

And around each precious carrier, a whole fleet mounted the guard to protect the floating air base: on a range of several miles, a fleet of twelve or more destroyers and frigates guarded the surrounding area and worked to shoot down any aerial threats incoming, from unmanned aircrafts to missiles, providing firepower against surface targets and detecting and destroying enemy submarines.

And even under the surface of the sea, several submarines worked at a distance from the noise made by the fleet, listening and searching, mainly for enemy SSNs, to destroy them and defend the carrier.

At a distance from the carrier, under this formidable defensive umbrella, followed several support ships, from replenishers that carried the fuel for the aircrafts and for the escort ships to the Solid Replenishers that carried everything from cooled food to missiles and bombs and spare parts for ships and aircrafts both.

The Unseen was sailing north to face such enormous fleet, advancing with a typical Sprint and Drift approach: the submarine alternated sprints that brought the speed up to over thirty knots to moments when the machines were stopped and the vessel merely derived onwards, silent, giving the sonar officers the chance to listen attentively to the surrounding world to find the enemies in the area.

As soon as he had guided the vessel into the open ocean and left the relatively swallow waters around Argolis, sailing past the continental plate and the edge of the abyss, where the depth rapidly reached over 4000 meters in a steep, vertical fall, Sandy had ordered to use a thermal buoy to measure the different temperatures and conditions of the water.

Apparently unimportant, those were in reality factors of extreme relevance: the water of the oceans creates several layers, each characterized by different temperatures and by several other particular environmental aspects that greatly influence the transmission of the sound, and thus determine the performances of any sonar system.

Sandy had collected perhaps the greatest experience in the world about such mutable factor of the undersea warfare, and now he was making sure to transfer such experience to the new generation of submariners, like Baker... he had ordered to bring the Unseen to a depth of 210 meters, to hide the vessel under not one, but two different layers, ensuring that an enemy sonar had a very complex day trying to hear the minimal noise that the submarine let out.

Sandy straightened, sitting up a bit and yawning. He was tired like Hell, but had only managed a nap of two hours, and he had practically slept with one eye open. He had been drinking loads of coffee in the last days, and his whole being was in tension and his sharp mind as attentive and receptive as it had rarely been... It sure isn't like staying in a bar watching the ships exit and enter the port... He thought with irony. He had dreamed to get back in service all the time he had spent as a retired, hating how the word and the inactivity made him feel like he was old and useless. And now that he was back in action, facing the largest and most powerful fleet he had ever seen, he was happy in the deep. Despite the risk, the tension, the fears and the tiredness, he was glad to be back on a submarine... And Hell, he was going to try and realize the dream of every submariner in the world: sunk the most impossible, precious and desiredtarget of the world. Sunk an aircraft carrier at sea.

"Maneuver to sonar and torpedo. We've established new contacts. Sonar room and torpedo room in First Grade Alert!" Baker's voice came from the interphone of the submarine, a system of communication that covered the whole vessel, with several lines: one, the MC1, had loudspeakers in each corner, and allowed the commanders to give orders and messages to the whole crew. Several other lines instead connected the Maneuver room to the various, specialized sections of the sub, either the Reactor compartment or the torpedo room.

Anyway, it was by now tradition on the Unseen to communicate on the MC1 line the acquisition of new contacts: after all, they all were on the same vessel, and everyone from the cook to the commander ran the same risk of horrible death on the seabed.

Sandy jumped up and shot out a hand to grab his beret from the small desk as he pushed the door open. A couple of officers of the sonar compartment shot past him down the corridor, running for their battle stations and still chewing the sandwiches they had been eating, and three men of the torpedo room followed closely, overtaking him as he entered into the Maneuver Room, the brain of the Unseen.

"What kind of contacts...?" Sandy asked, and Baker turned towards him immediately.

"Diesel-Electric SSK submarines surfaced, running on their diesel engines. They must be reloading their batteries... and are all sailing close to a large, noisy ship that I suppose it's their Support Replenisher. At least one of them is being resupplied, judging from the noise. Contacts named Master 55, 56, 57, 58 and the SS has been named Master 59."

"Distance from the targets...?"

"We've got the contacts across a convergence zone... the computer esteems a range of roughly 60 miles north from our position. We're still well out of the range of our torpedoes... and from most of their weapons too." Baker replied, and Sandy nodded silently, looking thoughtful.

A convergence zone is one of the consequences of the formations of different layers of conditions in the ocean's waters. It is an acoustical phenomenon that happens usually past the 200 meters of depth in the adequate thermal conditions, which causes the sounds emitted to bounce back up towards the surface of the sea at intervals of roughly 30 miles. In the lucky cases, a good sonar crew could so sense contacts that could be as far away as 90 miles.

The other important factor of the news was about the kind of contacts: SSK, the conventionally-propelled submarines, could be very dangerous when on chase. A SSK has a double propulsion system in which a couple of powerful diesel engines move the vessel when it's surfaced or when it's sailing just below the water, intaking air with the snorkel. The diesel engines are noisy, and when a SSK is surfaced is easy to spot and destroy... but the engines also generate electricity for the tens of enormous batteries hidden in the hull of the sub, which are used for the navigation once the vessel is submerged. And these are extremely silent.

Even if the SSKs are smaller than the nuclear propelled subs, even if they carry fewer weapons and have a range limited and are forced to surface every few days to reload their batteries, a well-built diesel-electric sub is a mortal threat, because when submerged, it is even more silent than a SSN. A nuclear submarine in fact needs to never shut down the system of pumps that grants the cooling of the nuclear reactor plant, and those pumps, as silenced as they are, still make up a source of noise that an SSK doesn't have. Find all those subs surfaced offered an invaluable opportunity to get rid of several deadly threats, before the enemy vessels could submerge and become silent killers in waiting to ambush them.

How to engage, though...? The distance was largely excessive to engage the enemy vessels with torpedoes... The Spearfish had a range of 35 naval miles, and it was always better to fire the unit at distances greatly inferior, or the target may be able to flee by speeding up to its maximum and run away from the torpedo until the latter ran out of fuel and simply sunk ingloriously towards the seabed.

Besides, Sandy had already used many torpedoes, and he had to exploit in the best way every single one of the eighteen Spearfish left on board. He would have loved to have Sea Eagle missiles available... but they had fired all the stock available on board already.

The Unseen had eight massive missile silos mounted aft of the conning tower: each tube was meant to contain and launch the enormous 180000 pounds Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles ICBM L12, but thanks to its great sizes, each tube could be used for a wide variety of roles... For example, they could be fitted with a vertical, multiple rack with Sea Eagle anti-ship missiles. Unfortunately, the submarine had left its homeport in a rush after an emergency call, and there had been no time to change the fit of weapons in the silos.

The Unseen had been scheduled to take on a Surveillance role, and the vertical silos had been filled with the subsequent, land-attack oriented gear: two tubes contained Sea Gull drones, small aircrafts without crew that could be used for reconnaissance and strike missions deep into enemy territory. The other six tubes contained Tactical Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs) in multiple canisters of 7 missiles for tube.

All those targets surfaced and vulnerable... I must find a way to get rid of them...

"What kind of TASM we have available...?" Sandy asked, turning slightly towards Baker with a questioning frown. The second in command looked surprised for a second, then half-nodded as he answered.

"We have an equal number of TASM C and TASM D on board."

Sandy nodded silently, crossing his arms as a plan started to take shape in his mind. The TASM C was equipped with a massive unitary warhead of high explosive capable to pierce into bunkers and resistant structure to hit and destroy high value targets deep into enemy territory. Like all TLAMs it was guided on its path by the GPS and by a TERCOM - Terrain Contour Matching - system. It meant basically that a digital representation of an area of terrain that the missile is going to fly above is mapped, based on digital terrain elevation data or stereo imagery taken by satellites or other recon platforms. The map obtained is then inserted into a TLAM mission data which is then loaded onto the missile prior to launch. When the missile is in flight it compares the stored map data with radar altimeter data collected as the missile overflies the mapped area and the results are used to update the missile's inertial navigation system and correct the course as needed to ensure pin-point accuracy. The missile is also equipped with a thermal TV-camera for battlefield observation loitering that allows warfighting commanders to assess damage to the target and to redirect the missile to an alternative target. Additionally, the TLAMs were able to be reprogrammed in-flight to attack one of 16 pre-designated targets with GPS coordinates stored in its memory or any other GPS coordinates sent to the weapon. Also, the missiles could send useful data about its status and images back to the commanders. When on target, the TV camera used DSMAC - Digital Scene Matching Area Correlation - to compare the image of the target in front of itself with a digitized photo of the objective inserted into its memory before the launch, to ensure a correct and accurate engagement, with no possibilities of error.

The TLAM D was equally guided, but the warhead was different: the D version carried a large dispenser of combined-effect submunitions for wide-area attack. It was meant principally to interdict airbases by destroying parked planes, killing personnel and digging deep craters in the runways to make them inoperable.

The guidance system wasn't very effective for use against targets at sea, obviously... but using GPS coordinates and sending a Sea Gull ahead...

"Maneuver, veer for 1-8-0 degrees. Machines stop!" Sandy ordered, and Baker immediately repeated the order as the officers in the control room made their moves.

The Unseen rapidly lost speed, drifting ahead silently as its machinery was stopped even as the vessel began to turn on itself, making a complete U turn and allowing the sonar officers to listen to the noises of the ocean, covering even their "blind sector".

Sandy had never forgotten the basic rule... "Watch your 180". Watch your ass, if you want to be rude.

The noise of its own propeller made every submarine almost deaf when it came to the rear 180 degrees, and despite the fact that the towed sonar array, with its length of almost 1 mile, largely supplied to the problem, it was wise to give a more attentive look around every now and then.

Especially when you are going to make a lot of noise that an enemy could hear...

_ _

"Sonar...?" Baker asked, and Hadley, the infallible sonar officer that could tell you who exactly was playing out of time in a symphonic orchestra of hundreds of musicians by listening to the concert registered on an old, crappy cassette, looked up from his console and communicated that everything was clear save for a couple of whales and the distant contacts they had already registered.

"Maneuver, rudders 5° climbing, depth 30 meters." Sandy ordered calmly, and as the procedure started he added: "Weapons team, prepare for vertical launch. Navigation, we'll need a perfect ship-position data in one minute."

"Aye aye, commander. Coordinates available. I'm checking." Drew Shawn, the navigator officer, answered looking up from his computer-map.

The Unseen climbed up from the depths, slowly and under control, making the lesser noise possible... But, of course, the different pressure of the ocean over the hull still caused the steel to groan a bit as the structure relaxed after the compression imposed by the depth.

At thirty meters, the submarine was stopped and leveled, and Shawn controlled once more their positions and took new, updated note of the relative coordinates of their targets.

"Silo 8, preparing for launch of the drone."

The personnel in the Weapon Management area of the large control room started the procedure, with the officer in command of the sector getting a small silvery key from Baker and using it to open the panel of the missile console, turning a first switch from the label "Peace" to "War".

Another key was used to activate the systems of the silo 8, and Baker stood one step behind the officers, supervising the process as they programmed a route inside the computer of the drone, setting in a series of parameters for the speed and the altitude and compiling a list of waypoints. Those GPS coordinates signaled points at roughly regular intervals between their position and the esteemed position of the enemy ships they could hear with the sonar. The Sea Gull would have autonomously flied from point to point, sticking as much as possible to the speed and altitude pre-programmed and autonomously taking decisions to adjust its route for obtaining the maximum fuel-efficiency and for avoiding potentially dangerous streams of air or other atmospheric factors.

As to the enemy presence, Sandy, Baker and Shawn had worked together on the map to draw an elliptic loitering route a good few miles port side from the route that the enemy ships were keeping. The Sea Gull was going to loiter on that route at slow speed, keeping the ships in sight with its powerful thermal imagery sensor, which was mounted on a pivoting turret under the belly of the small plane and could so continuously keep the focus on its target, no matter the maneuver that the drone was carrying out. The distance, added to the small sizes and the stealth design of the Sea Gull and coupled with the fact that the drone would have shut down its radars in order to be invisible on the ESM sensors of the enemy ships would have hopefully ensured that the drone could do its work without being spotted and targeted by the missiles of the escort ships of the RA.

After the drone was prepared, the external hatch of the massive missile silo opened in the top of the Unseen's hull, revealing the over ten-foot wide cylinder that was meant to contain a devastating multi-warhead ballistic missiles loaded with nukes.

Now, through, the cylinder was filled by a capsule of plastic composites that contained a small launch ramp with a Sea Gull drone waiting to unfold its wings and take off. The capsule sat above a modified jet engine that topped a tank filled with thousands liters of water: when the launch sequence was started, the jet turned on and rapidly heated the water and changed it in a massive amount of hot steam that surged up into the silo and pushed the massive capsule out of the launching tube and across the thirty meters of water, straight up to the surface.

Had it been an Intercontinental missile, the capsule would have jumped many feet up in the air as its first-stage rocket engine ignited to propel the vector up in the sky, towards the low orbit, but the mission of the Unseen that day wasn't about starting a nuclear Armageddon, and so the capsule merely opened in half, floating over the water long enough to allow a small rocket booster to fire the drone off the ramp and into the sky.

In a few seconds, the rocket brought the drone at the right altitude and at a speed of nearly 300 knots as the wings of the small plane unfolded and locked in place. Then the booster finished burning all the solid propellant and it was released from the back of the Sea Gull as the small but reliable jet engine of the drone turned on and supported the flight by itself.

In the meanwhile, the silo on the Unseen had filled up with water to balance for the weight lost with the capsule, and then the enormous hatch had been sealed again.

"Sea Gull drone operative. Track name D1." The Communication officer reported as his console signaled the current status of the aircraft and started displaying high resolution images coming from the suite of sensors of the drone. The signal was received through Low Frequency data link that connected the Sea Gull to a mile-long floating antenna that the Unseen towed in the water.

The submarine could so receive images and data, and intervene in any moment to re-program the route or the mission of the drone.

The small aircraft spent a few minutes to reach the loitering area, but there were no problems in finding the enemy fleet at sea: twelve minutes after launch, the Sea Gull was sending back to the Unseen real-time images of 5 SSKs sailing alongside a submarine support ship, and at a distance, the circle of escort warships with the gigantic aircraft carrier in the middle.

One frigate followed the submarine support vessel at a couple of miles of distance, acting both as escort for it as an advanced first-line of detection and defense for the main group.

And with those images, the true attack could be staged.

"Open silo number 1. Prepare for launch of missiles 1 and 2, TLAM-D." Sandy commanded, and the operations were rapidly carried out following the rigid procedure that, while looking maybe ridiculous to a casual observer, was vital to ensure that everything was done in the right way.

This time, the jet engine worked for much shorter time, changing only a seventh part of the water in hot steam that entered one of the seven channels in the revolver-like canister fit into the silo 1.

The steam fired the first Thunder TLAM-D missile out of the sub and up to the surface, where a rocket booster pushed the weapon in the sky and leveled it on its attack route before falling off and letting the TLAM fly on its own jet-engine.

The second missile followed closely as another eruption of steam was unleashed, and both soon were flying at nearly the speed of sound, low over the waters in order to escape radar detection as they approached the target area.

The Thunder missiles had a range of 1400 naval miles, so they were over-kills for an engagement over barely 65 miles... but they were the only weapon that Sandy had that was capable to complete that bold, never-before-tried attack. The long reach wasn't entirely wasted, besides, since it allowed the crew of the Unseen to program both Thunder missiles to head north-west, away from their targets, to make a wide turn on the open ocean and approach the enemy formation from the back and from two different angles.

Besides, while the Unseen was on the west side of the enemy formation, the missiles would have come from north and from east, confusing the RA on both the number of platforms staging the attack and on their effective position.

The two missiles flied side to side on their route north, almost brushing the high waves of the raging sea as they whizzed at nearly the speed of the sound in the wicked, glacial winds of the arctic, before they made different turns, taking on their new route.

The Sea Gull drone, meanwhile, kept flying in a circle, slowly and prudently at distance from the enemy, taking them under sight and updating in real time the coordinates of the targets and the images of it stored into the Thunder missiles.

The missiles flied on routes smartly drawn to ensure a nearly simultaneous time of attack over the target-area, and as they approached the ship and the RA subs around it, the TLAMs flied low under the radar signals of the escort ships.

When the frigate's radar finally got a first "spike" at the two missiles, it was too late: the time left was too little to react effectively.

The frigate fired a couple of interceptor missiles from the vertical launch tubes grouped on the bow, and a couple of six-barreled mortars vomited immediately up enormous clips filled with anti-radar chaff, that formed four immense clouds of metallic hay in the air around the ship, in an area of over a square mile.

The frigate was practically hiding itself between four enormous decoys that, on the radar-seeker of an anti-ship missile incoming would have looked exactly like ships... But it was all useless. The frigate wasn't the target, and the Thunder wasn't an anti-ship missile. Nor was it radar guided anyway.

The two TLAM missiles popped up at the last moment, climbing up into the air to the optimal attack altitude as they approached the enemy ships: the SAM missiles fired from the frigate were on chase, but the Thunders had won the race.

The TLAM-D missile contained 168 sub-munitions in 24 canisters independent canisters of seven each. The canisters were dispensed two at a time, one per side, by the moving missile. The Thunder could perform up to five separate target segments, which enabled it to attack multiple target-areas on its path. However, in order to achieve a sufficient density of coverage, typically all 24 canisters were dispensed sequentially from back to front.

Not this time.

The SSK submarines tried an emergency submersion towards the depths, but the missiles were far faster, and they rapidly fired out their canisters over the areas occupied by the targets.

Each of the 48 canisters opened in midair, firing out a total of 336 large mini-bombs that were meant to destroy battle tanks, troops and to open deep, large craters in the enemy runways: they had never been used before to strike an as difficult target as ships at sea.

The result of that first try was flattering, to say the least: the bomblets rained down over a wide area of the sea, and explosions boomed in the air of the arctic as the small devices hit the top bridges of the submarines and dug into the hull just like they would have with a runway, tearing holes in the steel and exploding deep inside the vessels.

The SSKs imploded from inside, one of them all but breaking in two as another, hit at the height of the torpedo room, exploded in a massive ball of fire as its own weapons ignited...

But the greatest hit was the large, enormous support ship: the vessel was sailing with a submarine docked on each side, tubes connecting the vessels as the SSKs were supplied with hundreds of tons of fuel, and when the sub-munitions rained down, explosions tore the men on the decks apart, digging deep into the ship, destroying the huge cranes on the deck and ripping apart the tubes, sending fuel splashing everywhere as it ignited and started a tremendous arson.

And then, some of the bomblets exploded deep inside the ship, into the holds crammed with torpedoes, missiles and mines and spare parts, and into the large tanks filled with petrol, and the ship performed a very convincing imitation of a nuke, vanishing in a frightening explosion that raised a mushroom of flames and smoke visible from miles and miles of distance.

The Thunder missiles exploded in midair, hit by the SAMs of the frigate... but their mission was successful.

"Maneuver, here sonar." Hadley called with evident excitement in his voice. "I hear... a great number of explosions. One massive detonation, followed by two more... and hull-breaking noise. At least two subs are sinking, I already heard one crushed by the pressure."

"Confirmed." The weapons officer communicated with professional coldness. "We have the images from the Sea Gull: the Submarine Replenisher is exploded, along with the two SSKs that were being refueled. Four more SSKs sinking right now."

"Congratulations, Unseen." Sandy calmly said at the microphone of the MC1 line, so that the whole crew could hear him. "You have been the first crew ever to get such a multiple kill. And you have been the first ones ever at using a TLAM-D against ships at sea. We've proved our worth."

The crew didn't cheer, but many nods of congratulations and handshakes were traded along the men at their battle stations: there was nothing to be happy about in having just killed hundreds of guys that did their own same, dangerous work. They had killed a lot of submariners like themselves, and none was happy of it.

Still, the pride for such high, exceptional results was high in that elite crew that had trained for so long time before being praised with service on the most advanced vessel in the world.

"Depth 200, 20 knots for route 0-9-5." Baker commanded after a short moment, and the submarine descended back down in the depths and speeded up, sailing towards the enemy formation as it resumed its Sprint-and-Drift approach.

Listening was essential... they had no idea of how many more submarines may have been hiding in the depths around the aircraft carrier to protect it, but they were sure that at least a couple more, either nuclear or conventional vessels, had to be lurking somewhere. After all, it would have been idiotic for the RA to do otherwise, since a submarine is the best defense against another sub.

At thirty miles of distance, they slowed down even more, moving at less than 15 knots for maximum prudence and drifting more frequently, to ensure to Hadley the best possible chances to listen for any possible threat.

"Maneuver, here sonar. We've got another spike from the aircraft carrier... at 0-8-5. They are speeding up and veering for 1- 4-2. The escort vessels are maneuvering to maintain their circle around the carrier. Twelve surface ships, sir. Two nuclear destroyers, four Udaloy destroyers and 6 missile frigates. I've also a lot of noise from at least fourteen choppers in the air."

"The carrier must be veering to get the wind for a take-off maneuver. Soon you'll hear a lot of noise from fighters as well." Sandy observed, and Hadley nodded with a grimace, knowing that it was very true. He reached a hand up to level the volume in his headphones. So sensible were the hydrophones of the sonar that he would have soon been deafened by the noise received otherwise.

"Anyway, torpedo room in readiness level 1. Tubes 1 to 4 loaded with Spearfish torpedoes... open external hatches and flood the tubes. Ready for emergency launch." Sandy, in his experience, knew well that from now onwards, the chances to trip into an enemy submarine were tenfold higher, and the short time needed to open the torpedo tubes and flood them for the launch become potentially vital.

Besides, it was a bit of a noisy process that the enemy sonars may catch. Having two tubes ready was going to be of help. The last two tubes were fitted with the quadruple capsules of the Triton multimission missiles, that could come handy for a variety of situations, and Sandy was going to keep them at the ready.

Even though a couple more Spearfish loaded and ready would make me feel better...

_ _

Baker smiled slightly to himself as he noted this last little tactical smartness of the master, and made note to himself to remember the trick for the future even as he ordered to further reduce their approaching speed and to veer to gain a better angle of attack for the aircraft carrier.

Hadley, curved over his console a few steps ahead of the two commanders, was listening with attention to the sounds coming to his headphones, eyes fixed on the multiple screens were the computer showed the graphic lines of every noise track caught by the thousands of hydrophones in the side arrays, in the bow sphere and especially along the mile-long towed array.

A system of computers more powerful and complex than those used for the space-exploration programs analyzed every signal, trying to pick up any hint about machinery, about a mechanic-originated noise... even a bolt not properly fixed that thudded against the steel of the hull, anything at all was vital and relevant.

Yet, it wasn't the computer the greatest element of the system, but the formidable sensibility and skills of the sonar officers, capable to pick up tiny, fleeting noises than the computer either missed or misinterpreted. Hadley was the best in the world at his work, and Sandy owed him much of the success of their missions together, much as Hadley, on his part, always firmly claimed that the merit was all of the old admiral and of his ability of always taking the right decision to keep their own sub invisible as they chased their contacts.

Years of experience had made Hadley a perfect machine. His formidable ear, that made of him an excellent connoisseur of classic music, was the most precious sensor on board the Unseen, and Sandy and Baker knew perfectly well by now that following with the greatest attention the suggestions of their sonar official was the key to success.

Hadley, on his part, only made sure to do his best to supply his comrades on the sub with all the information they desperately needed to complete the mission and get back home alive. It was pretty simple: the noise he was to tragically miss one day, could have easily been the source of their death.

This mission was proving tremendously stressing on him... he had got almost no sleep at all in the last days, and he was now gulping down the hundredth coffee in the last 24 hours, his eyes almost crossing as he looked over the screen, following each line that the computer drew. He was the most experienced sonar officer on board, and the other men of the sonar team needed his support in such a crazy, dangerous mission.

Alone against a whole, enormous fleet! It was the first time it happened for real, even if it was the proudly declared mission of every nuclear attack submarine. It was an experience that, one day, once lifted the secret, would have written a long page of history of the sea warfare.

At least, it's not boring... Hadley thought to himself. In peace-time, staying on the sonar for so long would have been, absurdly, far worse. Now, of course, after hours and hours of service without rest, he had to cope with the tiredness and the stress and the pressure of the battle. He had to live with the fear caused by the fact that they were constantly surrounded by contacts both under, over and above the surface of the sea. He had to cope with the frightening awareness that this wasn't an exercise: one error here most likely meant dying without having the time to understand what was happening.

But even so, it beats the shit out of sitting here in peacetime and only getting the chant of a whale every now and then. Hell, I've never had so many contacts before...

And now a new noise was coming, muffled, to his headphones...

What are you...?

It was a metallic noise... shrill... and it comes with regularity. A two-times rhythm... An oscillation.

The computer confirmed it... there were lines that appeared on the track on the screen with regularity, and all had the same base characteristics.

And then he also heard a... a splash... Something had been thrown in the water, he was sure.

And he knew that metallic noise. A chain of enormous links of steel that screeched because the sea that day was restless, and the waves forced the chains to rock from side to side.

Remember when the rebels had been mining the waters in front of the oil fields in the Yellow Sea "to make a joke" to the petrol tankers...? It's the same noise.

"Sir, we have a problem." Hadley called, turning towards the two commanders to underline the urgency of the moment. "Cluster bay mines, sir. A field is being posed down on route 1-3-2."

"Drift! Machines stop, no cavitation!" Sandy ordered immediately, his voice almost losing his usual coldness. The mines, after all, were his only rear terror.

Gods, bless the rough sea! Had it been calm, the mines would have been impossible to detect... and we would have just exploded."

The order was executed immediately, and the machines of the vessel stopped, letting the Unseen slide forwards silently and without propulsion, until they were motionless. They could have slowed down more violently, but the change of pressure too sudden and abrupt caused by a sudden loss of speed would have caused cavitation, with the water being deflected away from the hull with the creation of bubbles and noise.

And the mines known as Cluster Bay all but eagerly waited for such noise. A Cluster Bay is a technology advanced mine meant to survey a wide area of the ocean, in depths of up to 2000 meters. The mine did so by holding inside a passive sonar sensor that could release an active-homing torpedo towards a contact identified as a submarine.

Normally, leaving no chances of survival, because the submarines passed too near to the mine without even locating it... and simply exploded one moment later, hit by a torpedo that left the crew not even the time to imagine what had happened.

"How many mines...?" Baker asked, and Hadley shook his head.

"Many. But I can't figure out the shape and size of the minefield just by listening."

Baker nodded, even thought Hadley had already turned back to the screens of his console. The Cluster Bay were a serious problem... they weren't normal, inexpensive and dumb mines that exploded only at contact and that could be eventually detected and mapped by turning the sonar on active and sending out a couple of pings, much as it was a give-away of the sub's position to whoever was eventually listening.

Send out a ping was absolutely a suicide move now, with so many ships, subs and choppers chasing after them... And anyway, turn the sonar on active and the Cluster Bay answers throwing a torpedo straight in your face.

"They'll have at least one submarine somewhere past the minefield, motionless and silent, listening for any noise that gives our position away." Baker observed, turning towards Sandy and trading with the older commander a glance.

The admiral nodded silently and crossed his arms, looking thoughtfully down to the floor without really see it. "We cannot move forwards blindly into a minefield. We'll have to use the FORMIDD, and hope that it really works as the technicians claim."

The FORMIDD was a very special piece of equipment that had entered service in its first version not much before Sandy's retirement from the submarine career, and the old admiral had never had a real need or chance to use it, if not in exercise. But even the most realistic exercise is nothing like the true battle. We always based the parameters of our simulations on the supposition that the enemy sonar sensors were 25% better than the data we had available from the secret service about the enemy technology. It still wasn't on par with our own sonar systems... What if they are in reality better than ours...?

The Fiber Optic Remote Mine Detection Device of the Unseen was the most advanced device available of that kind. A new, more effective version was present only on the draw-boards at the Science & Technology section of the Admiralty. The device was one with the underwater drone that the Unseen could deploy up to 15 miles away thanks to a robust fiber optic cable. That drone carried sonars, a mast with cameras and sensors and antennas for communications... and in the nose section it also carried an acoustic sensor that worked exactly like an active sonar, but using signals of a frequency so incredibly high to be 4 or 6 times greater that the spectrum of frequency that a passive sonar could detect. In practice, it meant that the short-range detection device could emit its own "pings" to detect the mines around itself without being detected.

Hopefully. We can't hear it, and no one else should be able to... But there may be something we don't know.

It still beat the past, though. Once, Sandy would have been forced to use the sonar of the sub in active mode to map out the minefield, or use the Ice-Navigation sonar, a second active device at higher-frequency that was meant to allow the navigation under the ice by mapping the surrounding area around the vessel.

Or launch a torpedo and use it as a drone, keeping it connected with the cable and guiding it around with its sonar on active to explore the surroundings. I hated wasting a torpedo that way...

"I truly hope it does. In exercise, I had to use it once while the Ambush was in the same area listening. They didn't detect it... if our sonars can't get it..." Baker said, nodding at the end of the statement. Theirs truly shouldn't. "Bring the drone closer, Hadley, and get it scanning the area of the minefield. Torpedo room, ready for a Snap-Shot, Machines room on first grade alert, ready to move."

"They will not hear it, Sir." Hadley claimed with firm confidence. "If they could hear the FORMIDD, their sonars would have been able to detect us long ago."

"Excessive confidence is never as good as it sounds." Sandy countered calmly. "No battle plan survives the impact with the enemy, after all. We must be ready to the unthinkable."

Outside, in the darkness of the depths, the unmanned mini-submarine moved, guided from a console inside the Unseen and receiving the orders thanks to the long fiber optic cable deployed from aft. The drone approached the area where Hadley had detected the noise of the chains that kept the mines anchored to the sea-bed 2000 meters below. It moved silently, not faster than 2-3 knots, and it prudently turned on the FORMIDD as late as possible.

As soon as the first pings were fired, on the screens back on the Unseen appeared a map of the minefield.

"Reactions from the enemy...?" Baker asked, a pearl of cold sweat running down his temple as he contemplated the possible consequences of being detected at that point.

"None, sir." Hadley answered with voice as calm and controlled as he could manage. "I've detected a low but continuous noise... more akin to a helicopter than anything else. But it is flying at... two feet above the water and deploying more mines, so I'm betting it's one of those goddamn hovercraft-corvettes that the secret service has signaled one month ago."

One report from the Enemy Equipment Evaluation sector of the Secret Intelligence Service had announced recently that a new kind of hovercraft, heavily armed and equipped to lay down minefields had been detected by a spy plane in the Abukirk Sea. This had to be the same kind of vessel.

"It is the closest enemy unit I've on the screen... four miles starboard. It's going away slowly, on a straight line, and dropping mines on regular intervals. Every two miles, one mine." Hadley continued, making a bit of a face as he acted on the sensibility of the hydrophones to follow the signal. A hovercraft is very silent, since it floats over an air cushion and does not touch the water at all... but he could hear the noise of the enormous propellers that kept the vessel hovering. Hell, they are taking no chances with us... a Cluster bay every two miles! They must have cash to burn, with how much a single mine of those costs... with the range of the torpedo packed in a single Cluster, this is... OVER-overkill. "No reactions at all from the hovercraft, sir... but the secret service wasn't able to say if these hovering corvettes have one sonar at all. Anyway, the RA fleet is acting normally. I hear the planes landing on the carrier, sir."

"Perfect." Sandy said, grinning a bit. The S&T guys deserve one monument. Sandy selected the MC1 line on the interphone and launched his message to the whole crew of the Unseen. "General Quarters, all hands man his battle station. General Quarters, all hands man his battle station."

It was time for the vessel to return to first grade of alert, with everyone, from the commander to the last cook, ready to face any event and to obstacle a leak in the hull with their own body if needed.

"Machines, 3 knots ahead for 1-6-5. No sound at all, boys. We're gonna cross a Cluster-Bay minefield." Baker added, and a shiver of tension and excitement crossed the whole submarine as the Unseen swiftly speed up and moved onwards, silent as a grave as it followed the drone on the path between the mines.

Every noise could be their condemn. The Unseen fell silent entirely. Many men of the crew stopped breathing without even noticing it as everyone braced at his position, fearing to hear a torpedo in the water at any moment.

"Veer for 1-5-0, Cluster bay ahead." Hadley announced, his voice impersonal in a weird, frightening way, and the order was immediately confirmed by Sandy and repeated by the drivers as the command was executed. _ _

And then, shortly after, they veered again as they overcome another mine: the field had been disposed on three lines, with the mines disposed at different intervals, so that mathematically a vessel had almost no chance to avoid all of them without knowing their position.

Hadley and the other sonar officers, who all had to listen for three long minutes to the frightening screeching of the chains of the mines all around them, trembled and dripped cold sweat even as they maintained their professionalism and continued to work at their best from their small seats.

It seemed to last forever. They had to veer three times, keeping the maximum possible distance from the weapons and moving slowly to produce no noise and no cavitation at all. And even when, finally, Hadley confirmed that they were out, they continued to move prudently, taking the speed to six and only later to ten knots, until the distance became more reassuring and the probability of being heard by a Cluster Bay and torpedoed dropped to a minimum.

The problems didn't end, though. The RA admirals on board the gigantic aircraft carrier had evidently decided that the mines, the escort ships and all the choppers in the air searching for the enemy weren't enough to protect the carrier vessel. It was a sensible assumption, since they really couldn't have created a circular minefield of hundreds of miles all around the carrier, after all...

We were pretty unfortunate at ending up in the middle of one, indeed...

But the new security measure that the RA adopted surely did piss off everyone on board of the Unseen: all of a sudden, noise literally deafened them across the hull of the sub. Many of the younger men of the crew almost panicked as tens of sonars bombarded them with loud pings, and Hadley all but grit his fangs and threw the headphones away as he lowered the volume of the hydrophones. Hadn't it been for the automatic regulation imposed in real time by the computer, his ears would have probably exploded.

"Fucking motherfucking bastards fuckers fuck!" Hadley growled, and everyone turned towards him for a moment, wide eyed at the sight of the usually irreproachable, elegant expert of classic music that had a degree with praise in both Physics and Nuclear Engineering. Baker all but turned away and coughed in a way that gave easily away the laughter that had surged up and he had tried to suffocate.

"Pretty much." Sandy said agreeably, nodding a bit as he talked loud enough to be heard over the infernal cacophony.

Hadley blushed and just ignored the stares as much as he could, grumbling something as he put his headphones back up.

Outside, the depths of the sea shivered as the sounds came like a shockwave: the pings of so many sonars echoed loudly and obsessively against the depths, and a confused, insistent noise made up a chaotic background that filled up a big part of the spectrums of frequency of the passive sonar. Hadley listened with attention, and in the meanwhile his eyes darted back and forth along the room, to see the pale faces of his comrades, the sweat rolling down their cheeks at the frightening sound of so many sonars searching at full power.

"They won't be able to pick up our position." Hadley stated firmly after a moment. "There's just too much noise. Too many echoes. They will never be able to notice our echo in the middle of this chaos."

"They don't even want to." Sandy observed calmly, ignoring the surprise that flashed on the faces of the sonar operators and of many of the younger officers.

"They are hiding the carrier, isn't so...?" Baker asked quietly.

"Yes. A wall of noise... a solid wall of ruckus that blinds us completely and makes it impossible for us to calculate a firing solution for the carrier vessel." Sandy answered calmly, nodding to himself.

"Each escort ship is towing a false-target device." Hadley confirmed. Each of those towed drones was designed to produce the same noise track of the ship that was towing it, effectively hiding the vessel and luring the torpedoes towards the wrong spot of sea. Hadley stared in amazement and irritation to the screens of the sonar system: the chaos was so incredible that the screen was literally white with hundreds of lines.

"On top of that, they are making pure chaos with their engines, noise to powerful and irregular to cover every spectrum of detection... I've got echoes of propellers and shafts of engines turning that seem to come from every direction." The second officer at the sonar system exclaimed. "I can't find a sense at all in this mess, sir."

"The propellers of the escort ships are making... 100 turns for minute. But I don't hear the sound of a powerful push forward. I hear propellers running on backwards, too." Hadley slowly explained as he concentrated on the noise. "Each ship has one propeller set on 100 rpm forwards and the other propeller at 60 rpm backwards. And this generates so much cavitation to blind us with noise."

"Yes. Burning an infinite amount of fuel... But evidently it is not a worry for them." Baker observed bitterly. "The carrier is past that wall, four of five miles into the formation, I'd say. And we have no chances at all to detect her and get her position."

"Well, we won't run away without trying." Sandy barked, and he walked towards the weapons console, putting a hand on the shoulder of the officer in charge for that vital sector. "You have piloted torpedoes past the false-targets already, when we first fought around Argolis. We'll do the same."

"But we cannot use the periscope, they'll see it on the radars! We can't guide the torpedoes acoustically with all that noise, we won't be able to understand what sound is the carrier and what is not!" Baker observed.

"The carrier is in deep waters. The sonars in the torpedoes will work at their best in those conditions, and once we guide them into the enemy formation, we should be able to find our target. It won't be easy, but we can." Sandy objected. "We will guide the torpedoes manually past the escorts and their towed decoys. We'll move them slowly and silently, in passive mode. No automatic release and engagement. Once the torpedoes are inside, we'll turn their sonar on and will use the active mode to detect the carrier and will authorize them to attack it at the maximum possible speed."

"The enemy escort fleet is at 15.900 meters. Speed 18 knots... We've got a good solution of launch for the wall of noise." The Weapon System officer stated, looking up to the old admiral. "We can do it, sir." I think.

"Good work." Sandy exclaimed in his deep voice. "Tubes 1 to 4 ready for launch. Torpedo One ready."

"Torpedo One ready, commander!"

"Torpedo Two ready."

"Torpedo Two ready!"

"Tubes 1 and 2, Swim Out!" Sandy ordered, and the men in the room in the bow of the Unseen immediately confirmed as the two Spearfish torpedoes slowly moved forwards in their already open, already flooded tubes. The Swim Out was the longest launch procedure, but it was also the most silent one: the torpedo slowly moved out of the tube with the engine set at minimum power, silently swimming forwards.

"Both torpedoes under control and normal, sir." The Weapon System officer announced. Sandy all but squeezed friendly on his shoulder as they both looked on the screen and followed the course of the two units.

"Arm torpedoes."

"Torpedoes armed and ready." The two Spearfish now had their massive piercing warhead activated and ready to be detonated. Both torpedoes advanced menacingly in the water, programmed for a slow, silent navigation in the depth, diving to almost 1000 meters below the surface, almost 800 meters below the Unseen, where the submarine couldn't go without being crushed like a can. At such depth, the sonar works better... the signals are received far more clearly.

The passive sonars in the heads of the Spearfish were indeed dealing much better with the noise coming from the RA ships. It was almost possible to actually guess exactly where each ship was. The noise coming from the vessels, after all, was in reality slightly different, changing from ship to ship because of all sorts of causes: to change the noise track it was enough to have a propeller slightly damaged or worn out, for example. The newest propellers made far less noise than the old and already long-used ones...

The Spearfish meekly swam forwards, unrolling after them the solid fiber optic cable that connected them to the submarine and that carried all the data in the two directions, allowing the commands to reach the computer mounted just behind the warhead of each torpedo.

It took 12 minutes and 48 seconds for the Spearfish units to reach the wall of noise, and when they did, both established passive contacts and prepared themselves to attack.

"Ignore it all." Sandy immediately commanded, and the officer kept both torpedoes under manual control, pushing them forwards.

"Ok. We're inside, commander." Hadley announced, noticing the change in the noise that he could hear from the passive sonar of the two torpedoes.

"Confirmed." The Weapon System officer agreed, letting the torpedo search... and search... and search...

"We got it, sir!" Hadley announced as soon as he heard the distinct noise of the four immense propellers that pushed the behemoth carrier vessel. In the same moment, the torpedoes heard it themselves and the weapon officer let them shift their search from passive to active, starting immediately to send out their lethal, acute and short pings.

"Unleash One and Two on self-guidance and reload tubes 1 and 2 with Spearfish torpedoes!" Sandy ordered immediately.

The two Spearfish units suddenly speeded up to over 60 knots of speed and turned towards the carrier that now they could see so clearly, dropping their guide-cables and cutting every link with the Unseen.

On board of the behemoth warship targeted, the RA commanders were sure to be completely safe, because the wall of noise blinded any kind of submarine... and if the enemy was to deploy its periscope and take a peak, all their radars were active and sweeping over the desert waters, ready to detect any threat and allow the escorts to pulverize it in no time. Besides, the choppers flied all above to drop sonobuoys and use their own dipping sonars to detect the enemy.

And of course, there were by now four large "line of defense" made up by Cluster bay mines that almost formed a solid square around the fleet. A submarine could still have attacked... but it could have hit only an escort ship... and it would have been detected and destroyed immediately after.

No one could get to their carrier this time.

Two carriers had been lost in the last days: the first had been damaged heavily by the very first missile attack of the Kesteven forces, and wrecked so badly that all aircraft operations from the fire-blackened vessel had had to cease. The massive, once-glorious warships had had to be towed by a couple of enormous support ships... but it had been useless. Kesteven's Typhoon fighters had chased after the damaged warship like hounds, attacking it over and over again, every few hours, and at the end of a massive air battle against the RA Mantis fighters that tried to defend the vessel, a couple of Typhoons had managed to sneak between the defenders and finally sink the ship with several heavy laser-guided bombs dropped with merciless accuracy.

A second carrier had been lost the day before after another tremendous air attack: a swarm of Sea Eagle missiles had targeted the fleet and they had been so many that they several had managed to overcome the defenses and strike the carrier vessel, sinking it. Luckily, it had been a second-line carrier, pretty old. It was a small comfort, but better than losing the mighty RA Hangzou.

No, the modern and gigantic Hangzou was not going to be hit. Alone, the immense carrier had been able to welcome most of the Mantis fighter and the choppers that had survived the two other lost carriers, and even if now the deck was truly pretty cramped and the hangar was crammed, the ship was still able to fight at the maximum level of efficiency.

But the RA admirals didn't realize that a seawolf like Sandy didn't really need a precise image of the target. He could find alternative approaches.

Something that the RA still had difficulties doing.

And now, the "wall of noise" that blinded the Unseen also made it impossible for the carrier to hear the incoming torpedoes and their pings, so that no evasive maneuvers or launches of decoys were tried at all. It would have been late anyway. The explosions shook the enormous ship before any of the over 8000 persons on board could understand what was happening.

The first Spearfish smashed into the aft of the ship, and the explosion torn off the rudders and sent the propellers sinking into the sea as the immense, redwood-like shafts that made them turn were bent and wrecked like toothpicks by the power of the explosion.

The torpedo had come straight from below, rising almost vertically from the depths, and the explosion thus raged upwards in the enormous machinery room, destroying most of the instrumentations and sending slivers of steel ripping across everything around. There were very few victims, only because the ship was largely automated and most of the machinery was controlled directly from the compass bridge.

The second torpedo rose shortly after, smashing into the keel ahead of its comrade, and opening an enormous hole in the belly of the gargantuan warship, which seemed to almost bend in the middle with the power of the explosion.

In that moment, the second couple of torpedoes was already incoming. This time, knowing well how to guide them, the Spearfish were launched at their best: the torpedoes were soon speeded up after the Swim Out, and both units generated a gas bubble around themselves by deflecting outward the water thanks to their specially-shaped nose-cone and the expansion of gases from their engines. By keeping water from coming into contact with the surface of the body of the torpedo, drag was significantly reduced, allowing extremely high speeds. In effect, the Spearfishwas more of an underwater missile than a torpedo. The Spearfish controlled their route using four fins that skimmed the inner surface of the supercavitation envelope. To change direction, the fins on the inside of the desired turn are extended, and the opposing fins are retracted. Plus, the rocket engine propelling the torpedo has its vectored-thrust system to make sharp, rapid turns.

"Flying" underwater at more than 200 knots, the Spearfish was the ultimate torpedo. And none of the two weapons did miss its target. Even the Hangzou, a modern super-carrier, couldn't bear easily four blows of such unbelievable violence, especially overloaded to the extreme with planes and personnel as it was.

It would have took quite a long time for the immense ship to vanish under the surface of the ocean, considering that a normal ship would have been rapidly obliterated with one only Spearfish... but it would have undoubtedly sunk, and that was what mattered.

Usually. Because that time, they had no time to cheer or realize at all their historic success.

"Torpedo in the water at 3-2-0! Class Test 65, speed 65 knots! Torpedo incoming!" Hadley suddenly exclaimed, sounding the alarm for everyone on board.

Baker held his breath as the tension, already high, in the maneuver room became as sharp as the edge of a knife.

"Passive homing for now, sir." Hadley announced. The torpedo was listening for a noise to investigate and eventually track with the pings of the active mode.

And 3-2-0... it is not heading straight on us, but roughly on the point where the Spearfish speeded up... Sandy brightened at the thought, realizing that the enemy commander had been more surprised in finding them than they were of detecting a torpedo in the water: an enemy submarine must have been motionless underwater, completely silent and listening... The Unseen had missed it, but the RA vessel had heard the noise of the last two Spearfish when they had speeded up.

It was the price of the super-cavitation: it was super noisy.

I've been imprudent. I should have ordered to keep them slow until later on.

"Sonar active, ONE single pulse on 3-2-0!" Sandy ordered.

"Torpedo moving straight towards starboard, moving towards our bow." One of the sonar officers announced.

"Sonar contact, route 3-2-4, 32.700 meters, target designed Master 102!" Hadley communicated the contact obtained with the active sonar. It was a Diesel-Electric SSK. It had been motionless, in ambush, running only on the electric batteries, making no noise at all. Baker bit his lower lip. Until it stayed motionless, that SSK was silent enough to escape even the sonar of the Unseen. It simply made no noise... the enemy sub had been in ambush, so close, for all the time.

Luckily the Unseen is silent. They only heard our torpedoes... otherwise we would have been detected and sunk well before attacking the carrier vessel...

"We have it!" Sandy exclaimed.

"And the torpedo...?" Baker nervously underlined.

"It doesn't really know where we are. Let's get out of its way... slowly. Veer for 3-2-4, 4 knots, don't cavitate!" Sandy ordered, and the men at the twin cloches that controlled the rudders immediately executed, repeating the order received so that everyone was sure they had heard correctly.

The Unseen turned away from the torpedo and moved slowly forwards, making no noise, and at the right moment Sandy ordered to launch a "rubber-duck". The small device was fired off to a distance aft of the submarine and started emitting gas to generate bubbles and noise, simulating the cavitation around the propeller of a submarine vessel as it moved away, sailing forwards in the opposite direction respect the Unseen's course.

And doing it well enough that the torpedo, hearing the noise, immediately charged towards it, believing to have detected the Unseen... But when it reached the right range and turned its sonar on active, it wasn't able to find the massive contact it had hoped for. Nor did it find a hull of steel generating a magnetic field strong enough to cause the detonation of the torpedo by proximity thanks to the magnetic fuse of the weapon.

The torpedo kept moving forwards, but it wasn't able to impact into the small decoy, far smaller than the enormous submarine that had launched it, and so the Test 65 began to run in the circle as it was programmed to do, continuing to try and hit the target somehow...

"Contact lost with Test 65. It's sinking... it ran out of fuel running around." Hadley announced, and everyone on board visibly brightened as many sighs of relief escaped.

"Tube 1 open and ready. Spearfish out for 3-2-4!" Baker ordered, and the crew immediately moved to follow his directions. The external hatch of the launch tube was opened and the water flooded around the huge torpedo before it ran out at over 50 mph, soon deploying its bubble of gas and whizzing at over 200 knots.

"Noise of torpedo tubes being open on Master 102!" A sonar officer warned. The enemy submarine had heard the Spearfish incoming and was trying to respond with a Snap Shot, the "launch of the revenge", a desperate attack in conditions of emergency that was launched without calculating a true solution, just by sending a torpedo in the direction from where the enemy one was detected incoming.

"Spearfish on active homing, cut the cable and veer for 1-8-4, speed 8 knots. Let's move out of here." Sandy said with cold, professional calm, and his tranquility greatly eased out the nervousness in the crew as well.

"Master 102 has fired a Test 65. Contact moving on 3-2-5." Hadley exclaimed. But a moment later, the Spearfish smashed into the hull of the enemy SSK, exploding and tearing open an enormous hole in the double hull of the vessel, that almost immediately groaned a frightening, metallic whimper as it started to break in half, sinking rapidly towards the seabed, over 3000 meters below. No chances at all to survive for any of the men that had been on board.

The good news for the Unseen was that the Test 65 lost its guidance, and went wasted, pulled down in the depths by the thick cable that connected it to the submarine that had just launched it.

"Sir, detected noise of navigation from a new contact, labeled Master 103, coordinates 2-9-6." Hadley announced. "It is veering towards us and slowly advancing. SSN, Sir, and definitely not one of our comrades. The reactor's pumps are way noisier than ours."

Baker almost held his breath for the excitement. "Where's the thermal layer?"

"100 meters of depth, Sir."

"We wouldn't be able to hear navigation noise if it wasn't below the layer, like us." Baker observed. Underwater warfare is a complex science. Almost every man on board a modern nuclear submarine has at least one degree in science, nuclear physics or acoustic science. Without counting the endless, challenging training faced to become submariners. The thermal layers are one of many complex faces of this extreme, particular battlefield. They greatly influence the capability of hearing noise, because the different conditions of the water change the way the sound waves move.

"Correct, captain." Sandy observed with a sly smile. "They have heard the exchange of torpedoes and the breaking noises coming from their sinking buddy, but we are too silent to be heard by their sonar, so they are sneaking closer to try and detect us."

"Yeah... it is taking a bit of risk making noise to rapidly come closer and understand what's happening. It will soon slow down until acoustically vanishing. Hadley, keep it in our aiming sight." Baker nodded firmly. "Torpedo room, tubes 1 and 2 loaded and ready, Spearfish."

A couple of moments later, the weapon system officer announced that a passive firing solution for Master 103 was available.

"No sonar contact anymore with Master 103, Sir. It is surely drifting." Hadley was forced to announce.

"It doesn't matter anymore. Tube 1, set Spearfish for Swim Out, low speed, passive research at 500 meters of depth." Baker commanded, and Sandy grinned as he followed the sequence of the events with a grin. He learns just so fast.

Baker continued calmly: "Gentlemen, I plan to sit here comfortably and spur the baddies on with our torpedoes. We'll fire the Spearfish 1 and 2, and let them get to the search-depth. We'll guide both units until they are at very short distance from the enemy sub, if they don't hear us." The young commander paused as he fully drew out the strategy in his mind before exposing it. "We'll fire the torpedo 2 purposefully starboard, just below the last known position of the target. We'll then turn the unit towards the enemy vessel and unleash it on active homing and high speed. If it believes the attack comes from west, it'll veer east firing its decoys west, and not towards us. The second Spearfish will be waiting for them on port side. They'll never know what hit them."

"Excellent." Sandy observed, and the weapons officer's voice came on the interphone from the torpedo room. "Just like shepherd dogs with the herd."

One moment later, both torpedoes swam silently and slowly out of the tubes in the bow of the Unseen and moved towards the area where the enemy submarine was hiding. It took a few minutes, during which the entire Unseen fell silent as everyone privately dealt with his tension and fears. It was the coordinator of the attack that tore Baker out of his private, silent thinking.

"Spearfish one and two searching."

"Turn Spearfish one 20° degrees to the left. Then, once it's out of the trail, turn it straight to the right, over the target, and unleash it on maximum speed and active homing." Baker commanded, and he stared to the screens to control as the weapon officers maneuvered the torpedoes.

"Spearfish one unleashed and active!"

The reaction of the enemy SSN was immediate and perfect, like the manual suggested. The submarine veered to the right and launched its decoys as it speeded up and ran away from the incoming torpedo.

"Sonar contact back with Master 103. It is veering as forecasted. I hear decoys in the water too." Hadley calmly announced.

"Spearfish two acquired its target. Maximum speed, active homing."

The second Spearfish found its target veering towards itself, coming straight forwards: a perfect contact that the passive sonar of the torpedo didn't miss. The sonar turned on active, sending out its pings as the bubble of gas was deployed and the weapon flaked forwards. The fiber optic cable was dropped, now superfluous.

Baker took a depth breath. They were not going to get any other signal from the Spearfish.

"Explosion, explosion from Master 103!" A sonar operator exclaimed.

"Noise of secondary explosions and breakings." Hadley added after a short moment. "It's a kill, Sir. Master 103 imploded right now."

The enemy submarine, hit, had rapidly sunk deep enough that the ocean's pressure had crushed the hull like a can. Once more, no survivors.

Baker traded a nod with Sandy as the news of the latest victory of the Unseen was launched on the MC1 channel, so that everyone was informed. The old admiral all but patted the younger commander on the back: he had definitely proved he was learning every malice and smartness of their cruel job.

"Well, Gentlemen, this place is gonna be very hot soon. Let's get the hell out of here. Route 3-2-8, speed 15 knots, depth 300!"

Killer walked across the small, armored door that lead to the docks, saluting the sentinel that stood on attention as he approached, and then the liger rubbed a hand into his quite-ruffled mane, trying to comb up a bit the long, thick bangs. He soon abandoned any vain attempt, knowing all too well how rebel his mane was... it was already half a miracle than it grudgingly accepted to stay in the general form of the Mohawk that he had by now adopted as favorite hairstyle... And of course, a tigress as ravenous as Rika wasn't of help, especially since she had seem to love to move her hands into his mane while he thrust inside her from above and then as they laid on their side, and then even while they had tried yet another one position and he had pistoned his huge member inside her standing...

He grinned a bit at the fresh memory, but he had to resign itself to push the images of the panting tigress aside as he faced much more important urgencies.

He quickly walked down the stairs of concrete that lead down to the bunkerized docks, and he had to spend a moment admiring the immensity of the armored, underground port than the Glacians had dug inside the rocky cliff of Argolis, under so many meters of stone that no bomb from above could have pierced inside the structure, bunker-buster or not.

The hangar was hundreds of feet wide, with three quays that stretched into the water of the sea for the length of nearly 500 feet. From the end of each quay to the three immense doors of reinforced concrete and titanium that were the exit for the ships to the bay, there was still a good one hundred feet of water to cross. At each quay was docked the black, frightening silhouette of a modern nuclear submarine, which made it easier to fully understand the massiveness of the underground port... And the roof was tall like the one of a cathedral, giving to the immense artificial cave such imposingness to make it look like some sort of God's home.

The docks were crowded with soldiers, sailors, officers and skilled workers of what had once been Glacial's navy: over each submarine, a crane mounted on the roof of the hangar was working to help delicately pulling out the torpedoes from the vessels. It was an operation far longer and far more complex than many dared to imagine: the torpedoes were loaded on the submarine across a circular hatch on the deck of the bow. An overture that was just wide enough to welcome the girth of the various kinds of weapons that the vessel could embark and use, and that lead into a diagonal passage that reached the weapon stowage locals behind the torpedo room, in the depths of the massive vessel.

A couple of officers, each there to control and support the other, oversaw the complex operations, guiding the sailors and workers in the delicate phases, while two more officers, one the Weapon chief of the sub and the other a men of the Navy's weapons depots, controlled the identity of each weapon, making sure to keep note on their laptops of the identification code of each torpedo or missiles that was embarked or disembarked.

Each weapon was accompanied by a manual with all the info about the kind of warhead, the software in use, the techniques of the regular maintenance and all the other data. There was no space for making errors: the Navy needed to know everything, in any moment, about its weapons.

Killer walked down the dock, looking briefly to a team of sailors that carefully pushed a trolley loaded with a couple of massive torpedoes towards the depots of the port, and then he walked around a pile of crates that contained supplies and other instrumentation that had been removed from the three subs, heading to where he had seen Alexis, Nigel, Siegfried and a few officers of the Navy standing and looking over the operations of the personnel.

"Welcome, lover." Alexis said gently, smiling to him... but her smile turned quickly into her usual, taunting grin as she eyed him over with amusement. "I know that bright sparkle in your eyes. Who, this time...?"

"Rika." Killer answered simply, grinning back to her with equal amusement even as he rubbed his hand in his mane with a bit of embarrassment as the officers and Nigel looked at them with curiosity surfacing over their stony, reverent faces.

"Your good taste always leaves me pleased." Alexis observed, grinning as she tilted her head upwards a bit and winked to him. "Besides, it tells me that I must be special, if you picked me up over all the others."

"You are. Very, very special." He said lovingly, squeezing her gently around the shoulders as she pressed firmly into his side.

"Oh, I know." Alexis grinned, nodding slightly, and Siegfried smiled knowingly as he looked away with amusement sparkling in his eyes.

"So. How are things going...?" Killer finally asked to the officers, after giving an amused nuzzle to Alexis and shaking his head a bit at her taunting absence of modesty.

"We'll soon be ready, Majesty. We've been removing all the not-indispensable equipment from the submarines to free space for transporting people, and we are almost done. We must complete the removal of the torpedoes from the Resolution and the Repulse, while the Revenge is completing the reactor-start sequence, and will soon be ready to embark the passengers and leave as soon as possible." The first officer, an old white tiger with a thick beard and the ranks of admiral on the shoulders of its dark-blue uniform said. He spoke of experience, and his face was signed by many, many years of life on the sea... and Killer liked how decided and competent he sounded. He inspired confidence, even in the light of the difficulty of slipping out of the port and out of the bay with the submarines to slid silently under the hulls of a few hundreds enemy warships to bring out unharmed civilians, wounded and sick personnel.

"We are going to man the submarines with the personnel strictly indispensable for the operations, and with just four torpedoes, one into each of the tubes, just to grant some chance of self-defense to the vessels." A second, younger officer of the navy said. "And we have disembarked most of the supplies, as well, Majesty. This must be a very short travel, because there's no food on board for a long cruise, and there will be no sailors on board to make turns. No rest for the men until they dock somewhere." His voice expressed his concerns, that Killer fully understood and shared, but there was no other way. The submarines offer very little space already: they were going to cramp them up with people that urgently needed to be evacuated from the island, loading up as many as possible, filling up with wounded guys even the torpedo room... And still, it wouldn't have been enough to evacuate everyone.

And besides, there was currently no other way to leave Argolis: the submarines were the only means stealth and silent enough to be able to flee undetected from the RA fleet that was still keeping the island under siege.

"I know, captain... But this will be a short travel, indeed. I'm sure that Zangwill is in our hands already, but if that's not the case, then you are just going to drop the people at Gehena, 50 miles south of Zangwill. That port had been captured by our forces already before me and Alexis came here, so you can certainly seek help there, and then return here to be either reloaded with other people or armed for an attack mission." Killer said calmly, exchanging a look with Siegfried: he had been with the Predators team in the bunker-hangar of the airport, on the surface of the island, fighting off demons until Alexis had called them down into the bunkers... But they hadn't had a chance to communicate with friend forces anyway: Vera had been disturbing their radios and technological equipment all the time, and the communications had been lost and never restored, to Siegfried's everlasting shame and irritation. All his attempts to use his own unrivalled skills of software-writer and hacker to overcome Vera's tremendous powers had miserably failed: she was incredible, and it took her no effort and no time to override every password, every protection and firewall he created. Her mind was millions of times more powerful than even the sophisticate computers that kept the Joint Warriors Network of Kesteven's Predators running.

The officers of the navy nodded at his words, well knowing that there was no way to communicate to the external world at the moment and contact Kesteven's forces to know about the progresses of the campaign... but they all hoped, of course, that Zangwill had fallen in their hands in the time elapsed. "Yes, Majesty. Your word will be followed. And the gods know how I'd like to take on an offensive mission when I get back here with the Revenge, sir." The captain said, and Killer nodded.

That young officer was aggressive in the right amount: he had initiative and courage, and his crew was ready to follow him everywhere. Their efficiency was a proof of his own value: it wasn't a case if the Revenge had been ready long before the two other SSNs.

"I figure." Killer honestly admitted, and Alexis nodded firmly.

"If we can ensure some more security to this island, making an evacuation less urgent, your next mission will give you ample chances to get a revenge on the RA." The blond femme fatale promised, nodding with cold, firm resolution.

"But no one can leave the docks if we don't clear the route first." Siegfried pointed out, nodding as he crossed his muscular arms. "Around the bay, there are all sorts of artillery positions and missile batteries of the RA, and we must erase them all before opening the doors of the port. Otherwise, the subs will be pulverized before we can have a chance to understand what is going on."

"Did you manage to get a peek to their positions before coming down into the bunkers...?" Killer asked calmly, and Siegfried nodded, reaching back into the large pouches of his utility belt to pull out a super-flat Infantry Command Panel, a computer touch-screen with Data-Link capability that was issued to commanders of the Predators on the field and allowed to create a battle plan only by moving the finger on the screen, drawing it digitally on the map or the images coming from a satellite or drone above. With its capability to immediately send along the net the plans made and the multiple possible uses of it, not last the capability to keep in memory maps continuously updated by the recon platforms, it had completely substituted the old block notes around which soldiers had crowded for years to be instructed over the next operation to accomplish.

"Yeah, I got it, bro. I left the boys defending the hangar from the demons and sneaked out from the hole in the roof to go and take a look from as close as I could get." Siegfried answered with cold professionalism, turning the panel on. It hadn't been easy... the bunker-hangar had been surrounded by hordes of demons for all the time, and they had long ended the ammunitions and started "exploiting enemy's resources", aka stealing their weapons and ammo, to defend the position, when he had sneaked out, fought his way past the siege with his swords and gained a small hilltop from where he had spied over the bay with his thermal binocular with laser-rangefinder to detect as much as he could. Before fighting his way back inside and guide the Predators into the underground complex, from the same way that Killer and Alexis had followed long before, of course. The last surprise he had left had been explosive, in a word: when they had safely retreated, barely managing to keep at distance the demons that had flooded inside the hangar as soon as they had left their firing positions, he had detonated all their PE4 explosive, expertly placed inside the hangar. The massive, already damaged structure had collapsed onto the demons maimed by the explosion, and the ruins had sealed the passage behind their backs.

"Here it is. The image is not updated, since the last image I got from our satellite before Vera screwed the network up was hours late already when I was spying, and I did not get any while down here." Siegfried grudgingly admitted, making a bit of a face as the image loaded on the flat screen. "So ignore the position of the single soldiers and patrols, because I'm supposing they have definitely moved around in the last nine hours." He added with cold sarcasm, pointing with a sharp gesture of his head to a couple of RA soldiers that could be seen chatting and smoking on the screen. He hated seeing the Joint Warriors Network, which he had largely designed and programmed and that was his most vaunted pride, made powerless by the fearsome power of Vera. Normally, the panel would show amazing-quality images took from a satellite 36000 kilometers above the surface of earth and updated in real-time by the observation of a long-endurance Zephyr drone, so that the Predators literally had the "God's view" of the area, and normally started their attacks knowing the position of every single enemy. They knew where to go and where to fight, and took them by surprise was nearly impossible.

This time instead, the images were hours old, so they could not count on that supreme advantage.

"At least, they can't have moved around the trenches and positions they have prepared, so we still know where to look." Siegfried specified, and he pressed a button-icon on the flat screen, pulling into view all the notes he had took. Several small hand-drawn icons and a few lines of notes in Siegfried's always elegant handwriting came into view as Killer and the others crowded around the screen. He had took note of everything not easily recognizable on the image: position and number of the machine guns, estimated caliber, eventual mines he had been able to spot exploiting the thermal capability of the binoculars and such.

"They are organized very well: they dug three concentric trenches on top of the cliff of north-west, along the sleep of the hill, so that the men in each trench can fire above the heads of their comrades below. I counted at least 25 machine guns, each in a pit slightly advanced from the line of the trench itself, so to have, in theory, a full range of 180°. On top of the hill I've spotted at least a full platoon with heavy mortars, and there's also a battery of six heavy howitzers that can beat with their fire the entire island, from coast to coast." Siegfried said, and Killer half-bit his lip as he nervously looked over the screen, realizing that it was worst than forecasted.

The trenches cut from side to side the peninsula that closed the north-west side of the bay, so that there was no hope to turn around the position and attack it from the back: it was protected on three sides by the sea.

"The two extremities of the trenches are protected each by a battle tank... And let me be sincere. I don't know what the fuck those are." Siegfried exclaimed, getting the attention of Killer back: it was very rare to hear his brother use such a language... he, the almost-aseptic, cold and perfect warrior-prince. Whenever he used a word like "fuck", something was truly wrong.

"By the size of those things on the image, they must be almost three times bigger than the usual Tiran tanks." Alexis observed with neutral voice, crossing her arms and turning slightly to look to Siegfried questioningly.

"Indeed. It must be nearly three hundred tons of steel... And they are fitted with every kind of protection: blocks of explosive reactive armor cover most of the vehicle, there's an evident layer of Fire-Retardant Thermal Armor against incendiary cocktails, spaced-add on armor and so along." Siegfried explained, nodding slightly and grimacing a bit. "It is also heavily armed... I cannot tell what the exact data may be, but I'd say they mount a rail-gun in the region of the 350 mm of caliber, with a coaxial 40 mm gun..."

The officers around them exchanged worried looks and a gape of astonishment at the evaluation, and some of them sneaked worried glances towards the group of soldiers that was lining up on the dock below, preparing for the assault.

"...the tank is also armed with a couple of two 40 mm guns mounted on the sides of the turret, with an apparent elevation range of 180° degrees... They probably can use it even against low-flying planes and choppers. And last, they have one remote turret on top, armed with another 40 mm gun and eight missiles in two quadruple launchers." Siegfried finished explaining, and he stared for a long moment to the horrified, silent officers in front of himself, frowning. "What...?"

"Sir, how we counter those monsters...? We only got infantry, charging out in the open towards fortified positions that could repeal a whole army... They are all going to be massacred." One officer clad in the uniform of Glacial's army observed, looking out towards the assembling formation of volunteers on the docks below.

"We've got the Javelins." Nigel counted firmly. Glacial had bought from Kesteven huge stocks of Javelin portable missile launchers in the past, and the Predators of the small team of Siegfried had a few more of the latest version. They were incredibly-effective anti-armor weapons, and to date, not a tank had been tough enough to be a problem for a Javelin.

"I fear it will not be enough this time. Those are not Tiran." The officer counted with a cold look, expressing their common fear. Siegfried, besides, had confessed it only to Killer and Alexis, but he was pretty sure that the new tanks were fitted with even a radar system on top of the turret, which would spot them immediately and target them...

And, even worse, it seems designed to lock in the incoming missiles and shot them down somehow, like our most advanced Active Interception systems...

"He may be right." Siegfried admitted, silencing Nigel as he opened his mouth to reply, all the officers turning with horror towards him.

"But if that is the case, I'll take care of the tanks myself." Killer added immediately, nodding with cold resolution. "I'll throw both tanks down the cliff, if I have to."

Siegfried and Alexis grinned slightly, nodding imperceptibly in amused knowledge, while Nigel and the Glacians officers turned to stare at him a bit: even coming from a huge, muscular giant like Killer, such a statement sounded still like an arrogant call... But on the other hand, Nigel had seen the king tear open a massive shutter of titanium that was far greater and heavier than any tank, and that had been designed to resist even to the shockwave of a nuke... and everyone had seen him crush Regina under his foot. After such demonstrations of brutal power, the feat of lifting a giant tank up and throw it down a cliff took on the look of everyday's routine job.

"Anyway..." Siegfried continued. "The groynes of concrete that protect the bay are covered by a whole platoon of Missile Walkers..." The tiger stopped, then looked around at the puzzled faces around him and sighed, rubbing a hand in his mane. "Ok, I choose the name myself. I can ensure you that it works: basically we are talking about massive, armored exoskeletons with improved all-terrain mobility, carrying missiles on rails on their shoulders. Apparently, the SAS super-soldiers are closely supported by platoons equipped with these machines to supply heavy fire to counter anything from a battle tank to a warship to a wing of bombers. Nasty machines on feet, in other worlds. I thought about calling them "Big Feet", but it sounded like a joke."

"Missile Walkers is fine, thanks." Killer observed idly, waving a hand dismissively before Siegfried could list out the other ridiculous names that had likely crossed his mind.

"On the other side of the bay there's another fortified position very similar to the western one, and that's all." Killer completed with a shrug.

"You speak like it was little stuff." Nigel observed, arching his eyebrow a bit.

"Well, technically it is easy. There's no other option for us but a frontal attack against an enemy that overcomes us largely for number and fire-power." Siegfried answered with a sly grin. "No need to spend hours coming up with an actually smart battle plan."

"Charlie-Fox." The Glacian admiral muttered, and Killer turned towards him to nod with resignation, his face serious even as he felt a bit of amusement at the choice of terms. Charlie-Fox, C - F in military radio signals. Cluster-Fuck, for everyone... An operation confused, badly-planned and generally with high probability to end up being self-destructive.

"We don't have a choice, complaining will not help." Alexis stated firmly, and the Glacians around her bent their heads immediately. "We'd come up with a nicer and more spectacular plan if we could communicate with our forces out there to call in support fire, missile attacks and helicopters. But we have none here, and have no chance to call them. So it's better not to think about it at all. Wars are not won with wishes."

The communications were a major problem. Alexis wasn't capable to reach Alexander's mind with her powers at such distances, and anyway the demonic corruption in the area of Argolis greatly reduced the reach and effectiveness of her mental powers: it had been complex enough to just contact Siegfried earlier and tell him to retreat with the Predators into the bunkers... contact their forces on the other side of the sea, at Zangwill, was currently impossible.

And Vera kept interfering with their technology, ensuring that no radio, no satellite terminal, could work to either send or receive messages... and that worried Killer greatly for a very good reason. There were 5 deadly attack submarines lurking in the waters around Argolis, chasing the RA fleet like hungry, ferocious hounds... and he could not warn the Unseen about the imminent sortie of the Glacial's submarines crammed with survivors to evacuate.

It would have been the most horrible event ever if the Glacians submarines were heard on the sonars, identified as enemy ships and sunk by Kesteven's submarines, killing all that people... sadly, it was a very serious possibility, and all what Killer could do was warn the captains before the sortie: the submarines had to slid out at sea silent like graves. They couldn't run the risk of being heard, not even by friends.

And for once, the incredible performances of the sonar suite of the Unseen class were a nuisance. Killer could only hope that, if one of his SSNs heard the noise of the Glacians machineries, the computer would recognize the noise-track and identify the sub as friend.

For god's sake, make no noise.

"How many soldiers we have for the assault...?" Killer asked immediately after, and Nigel looked down to the dock, where three platoons had lined up, plus a large group of Berserkers and the Predators that weren't wounded or incapacitated, plus another section of snipers, all armed with X12 Anti-Material heavy guns and covered in the camouflage vest. They looked like messes of grass, shrubs and long bangs of hemp at a close look, but what truly mattered was that, once laying down in the tall, dry tangled brushwood that covered the island, they would have been completely invisible. It wasn't as incredible and shiny as the Death Cloak, the super-technologic uniform issued to the Predators snipers that could warp the light to such level to make the sniper truly invisible, like it was transparent... but it was damn effective, anyway. Killer knew of snipers that had been literally stepped upon by enemy soldiers, but that had remained silent and motionless and had been completely unnoticed.

Of course, differently from the Death Cloak, effective anywhere, the old camouflage was of help only in the correct environment, but that was their case, luckily.

"Nearly 500 soldiers have volunteered for the assault." Nigel assured, and he turned back to Killer. "We'll have to equip them all, and then we can send our forces out up through the secret passages to the surface."

The bunker-complex of Argolis also had several underground passages that from the barracks brought to the surface of the island, into small bunkers well hidden that had been built to allow the garrison of the island to emerge whenever was needed to rapidly counter a beach-landing attempt or to emerge by surprise behind the back of the enemy to destroy it. They came handy in that moment of crisis, and made once more Killer wonder on just how well the whole complex had been designed.

Killer turned back slightly to look over his shoulder, and he smiled gently as he saw Rika walking towards them, clad in a black and form-fitting wetsuit, with the air bottle secured on her back and the respirator-mask hanging from the bell, a silenced submachine gun fully-waterproof hanging from her shoulder as she lead twenty similarly outfitted Royal Marines that stood on attention at respectful distance.

Everyone, from Nigel to Siegfried and saved only Alexis that just grinned amusedly, turned to look with amused curiosity to the tall, proud female, knowing that she had been sharing a bed with the king until minutes before... And Rika only blushed slightly, avoiding their curious eyes with malice.

She didn't fully realize that all the officers, and Nigel himself, were only happy for her, and wished for her nothing but the best: she had been one of the rebels that had suffered the worst pains during the years of desperate struggling against the RA and the demons... she had lost everyone she had loved, and she still carried courageously on with her role of officer of the marines and, especially, she carried on her role of loving, affective mother for her beloved son, hiding away all her pain, fears and despair.

Everyone in the base wanted nothing but some happiness for her... and they were all glad of knowing that she had found in the king not just a sovereign and master, but someone that she could trust, love, and see as the father of her son... and of other children to come in the future, too.

"We'll secure the exit of the bay, cleaning the minefield." Rika stated with proud, firm voice, and the marines behind her nodded with silent, stony determination. They had long learned that there was no shit with Rika. When she was on duty, she was hard as granite and sharp as a knife. And there was no kidding on duty.

The exit of the port had been mined by a RA missile-hydrofoil long ago... along the whole expanse of the exit of the port, from groyne barrier to barrier, three rows of mines had been deployed with scientific precision: a ship or a submarine trying to exit could have sailed between a mine and another without impacts and overcome one row, maybe even two... but it was impossible to exit alive from the minefield. Overcoming the first mine by 50 meters to the side, the second mine would have been at 25 or less... and the third mine would have hit the bow of the vessel squarely.

Apparently, the mines were the old, but always effective Contact version... they had to physically hit the hull of the ship to explode, and they floated a few meters below the surface, without emerging in view because they were anchored with a chain to a counterbalance weight on the seabed. Each mine carried more than one ton of high explosive, and was an inexpensive device... capable, on the other hand, to almost crack in half a destroyer costing billions of bucks.

There were mines of every kind, by now... some extremely technological, containing a homing torpedo that was released to strike at miles of distance if the sonar built into the mine heard a ship passing within its range, some others capable to explode when triggered by the magnetic signature of the hull of steel of a vessel, and so along. All versions were mortal, and the best thing to do for a ship was stay well far away from a minefield.

The Royal Marines of Rika couldn't be sure of what exactly had been placed to block the port's exit... but whatever it was, they were going to dive underwater, find it out and make it harmless before the submarines could leave the docks.

"The tide will change in an hour or so. After the change, the currents will pull outside the bay and towards the open sea, so, when we dive, we are going to cut the mooring chains and the mines will emerge and drift slowly out of the bay... When they are at distance, you can shoot them from the cliff and detonate them all if you please. Mines sailing the sea are a big danger for any ship, after all." Rika explained, and even the admirals in the group listened to her with deep respect, quite an indication of her experience and of how trusted she was. "If we find more sophisticated mines down there, we'll place explosive charges on the seabed and detonate them on the spot as soon as possible. Either way, when the passage is clean, we'll warn you."

"Fine." Alexis stated, nodding. "I'll be arming the volunteers now. We'll move to the attack points when the submarines have been loaded and prepared for the submersion. Update here within an hour, guys, and let's try to be all ready for that moment."

The Armed Forces synthesize the operative order for a new mission with the acronym SMESSCS. Apparently horrible and without a meaning, it stood for Situation, Mission, Execution, Service and Support, Command and Signal. Situation it's the complex of the available basic information about the mission: what the soldiers on the field need to know, the position and consistence of the enemy forces and every other useful data available.

Mission is the description, in a phrase, of the aim of the operation.

Execution groups the indications of how the mission must be carried out.

Service and Support lists the eventual support, either of firepower or of additional services like Engineers, is available from outside the unit itself.

Command is a list of who exactly gives the orders for the operation, from the highest level of the General HQ to the last of the soldiers that may have to take the command of a section during the mission because of the unavailability or death of the designed officer.

Signal groups up the info about the communications methods and instruments to use in the mission.

The SMESSCS order that Killer had prepared for that operation was one of the smallest ones he had ever had to complete: the mission was to raid the positions of the RA artillery around the bay and destroy the missiles and guns to allow the submarines to leave the docks. Once submerged in deep waters, after all, the submarines were virtually impossible to detect, and they should have been able to reach a friendly port without too much trouble. The execution was forcedly a "crazy charge": they were dramatically overwhelmed in terms of numbers, firepower and they even had the disadvantage of facing battle-hardened troops of the enemy elite that had had all the time to choose its positions and fortify them up. The only chance of success was a full out attack based on surprise and on the use of the highest firepower they could deploy. There was no external support to rely upon, either... They were alone. Almost surely, the rebels and the troops of Kesteven had by now conquered Zangwill, on the other side of the channel, but the communications with them at the moment were impossible, and anyway, even if they managed to contact them later, it was to be seen if there were already artillery batteries in position that could help. Command started from Killer and Alexis and went down the line passing for Siegfried and Nigel and the other officers... And signals were pretty much limited to the Personal Role Radios and visors. The distance to cover, after all, would have been reduced to perhaps a mile or two at the most, if a squad on the peninsula of North West had to talk to the groups tasked of the assault on the eastern positions, on the other side of the bay.

In order to have a chance of success against superior forces entrenched and well prepared, deployed on a dominant position by means of a desperate frontal assault, Alexis and Killer had tried to ensure to the troops the greatest firepower possible: their only chance was to force the enemy to duck into the trenches to save their lives, instead of taking aim at them.

In other words, who fires the most is going to win this absurd match.

Every machine gun available in the arsenal of the base had been recovered, fixed, prepared and armed and issued to a volunteer, together with several long belts of ammo and all the grenades they could bring around.

Same had been done with the Javelin missiles, which had been issued around the platoons in the largest possible numbers: its enormous power and its versatility made it invaluable to face the nastier threats... not to consider the new-model giant super tanks.

And apart from the Javelins, lots of much less sophisticate, unguided rocket-launchers RPG-style had been dug out from the ammo depots of the base and issued to the soldiers: every volunteer that didn't carry a Javelin missile system had on his shoulders a rucksack from which stuck out several RPGs. Submerge the trenches with a rain of unguided rockets would have greatly helped their effort: even if unguided and not really accurate, the rockets still carried enough explosive to cause massive damage over a rather wide area.

The equipment was completed by the bullet-proof tactical combat vest and swords and knives for close-combat, and a small radio. All the weight they carried came from weapons and ammo.

The snipers were lead by Alexis, and had the task of "disabling" the machine guns that littered the sides of the hill... and since the X12 rifles fired massive rounds capable to pierce even across armored vehicles, their fire carried both an enormous impact power and an even greater psychological intimidation: one soldier hit by an X12 was slammed meters backwards, after all, and reduced to a bloody heap that little conserved of its past look.

Besides, the X12 rumbled like thunder when it fired, adding to the effect... they called it "God's Voice", and for a good reason.

Considering that Alexis used her own special rifle, the X13, that was even more of an anti-tank rifle, the sniper section had enough firepower to stop the charge of a platoon of battle tanks in its tracks.

Last, there were two small teams of volunteers armed with portable, handheld light mortars that could be fired rapidly, holding them with just the hands and pointing the bottom against the ground for leverage and stabilization, and that could be moved around with incredible rapidity.

Sure, the range was just above the kilometer and the accuracy wasn't much, but it still was an invaluable way to unleash a lot of explosive over the enemy in a short time, and its ability to create a solid, very wide and thick curtain of IR-masking smoke was very welcome, considering how many enemies were gonna be trying to put a bullet into them as they charged.

Roughly 250 rebels were gaining their positions on the western peninsula, where Killer was going to take the lead, and just as many were climbing the secret passages to the surface of Argolis to reach their start point in front of the RA fortifications on the eastern side of the bay, lead by Nigel. Each group had a small team with handheld mortars for the fire-support.

Alexis and her accurately-selected snipers had already taken position on the highest point of the cliff, roughly in the middle of the distance that separated the two formations, so that they could easily offer their support to both, and take down enemies on both sides.

Siegfried, instead, was leading the rest of the rebels: everyone able to fight was going to take on a half moon formation, half a mile behind the back of the assault teams of the bay, with the task of fighting back the hordes of demons and whatever other monstrosity could surge up to attack.

It's not that great a plan... but it's not like we could do better with what we have available.

Killer was standing inside a small, square room of concrete created inside one of the small "dunes" that covered the surface of Argolis. Almost every other dune on the island contained a similar little bunker: each one had long, horizontal loop-holes along the walls, on all the cardinal points whenever possible. They were firing posts that the Glacial soldiers could use to fight against enemy troops attempting to land on the island, either from the sky or from the sea, and each bunker had a long shaft with a simple metallic staircase that brought down to the various barracks of the underground complex.

Each fire-position also had a well-hidden hatch in the roof to get out to the surface.

The huge liger walked towards the loop-hole that looked towards the peninsula they were to assault, and he reached out with a hand to move aside a bit of the shrubs and tall grass that had grown with the time and covered all the overture, while the rebels came up behind him, emerging from the stairs and into the small space.

"Ok, we are gonna have some busy time here." Alexis announced on the radio, and Killer snorted knowingly. "I'm sending you the images." The femme fatale continued, and a window popped up on the left of the lens of Killer's visor, starting to show amazing-quality images coming in real time from the scope of her rifle.

She was already in position in another small bunker along the coast, roughly above the middle of the bay, with the two enemy strongpoints at the sides, and scouting over the enemy lines to decide what needed to be destroyed first.

"They've got a MANSTAR radar in position in both the fortresses, but I'll take care of them immediately. And we've identified a Sound-Ranging detector, too, but we'll put it out of service as well." Alexis coldly stated as the scope framed a small, rotating radar antenna mounted on a tripod. The MANSTAR was portable by a couple of persons, and offered a handy help in detecting the enemy: it wasn't a powerful radar capable to detect a plane at three hundreds kilometers, of course, but it was special nonetheless, since it could search with extreme accuracy at surface-level. It could detect a soldier sneaking on the belly at a distance of over 4 kilometers, and track a battle tank out to 30. The sound-ranging detector, equally dangerous, could easily detect their exact positions as soon as they opened fire and the noise of the shoot provided the sensor with the data for a perfect triangulation. Nasty stuff, considering that the enemy had howitzers, heavy mortars and the artillery of two hundred warships at sea ready to crush them all out of existence as soon as they were detected and located.

"Take off those Claymores just after the radar." Killer added as he looked over the images on the visor and spotted the small, deadly mines in place at regular distances in front of the trenches: in the tall grass, roughly one hundred meters in front of the RA lines, must had been placed the tripwires. A nasty surprise provided for whoever was to assault the defensive line.

Killer also spent a moment looking over the new super-tank that the RA had fielded... Just as the massive battleships they had put at sea earlier, it was a monstrous, gigantic machine to which nothing known compared. It was nearly three times as big as a "normal" Tiran tank, and it looked definitely like it could climb over an enemy tank and crush it like a can. Two enormous mine-plows were ready to allow the monster to take a walk over a minefield without worries at all, and a snorkel system stuck out from the engine compartment, currently folded but ready to be used to sail underwater in a too-deep river. Of course... there's no road or bridge that could take such a massive monster. It can't be less than 250 or 300 tons... They must have built some kind of super-landing craft for it, otherwise I really don't know how they managed to land two of those here...

The enormous tracks in rubber-encased titanium were just so wide that a car would have vanished under just one, and the whole body of the vehicle was wrapped in add-on armor and blocks of Explosive-Reactive Armor. The weapons load was equally frightening: the main gun had to be 352 mm in caliber, and it clearly was a rail-gun system, which all but promised to be absolutely lethal against pretty much everything. Coaxial to the main gun there wasn't a normal machine-gun but a 40 mm gun capable to fire over 100 rounds for minute... Two more weapons of the same type were mounted in pods at the two sides of the turret and currently aimed skywards, leaving no doubts about the ability of the vehicle to work nicely even as a SHORAD system (SHOrt Range Air Defense). To take care of the infantry, a Remote Weapon Station with a further 40 mm gun and 8 large missiles arranged in two quadruple launchers was fitted on top.

The two monsters stood between the first and the second trench of the two strongpoints, majestic and frightening, their guns at the ready... And what worried Killer the more was perhaps a small turret on top that rotated rapidly with what was unmistakably a radar antenna. It must be for the SHORAD role... but if it has the same capabilities of the MANSTAR, it's big trouble.

Besides, the small turret had lenses on all sides... and while it could have been just a sort of periscope fitted with thermal TV cameras, the male had the feeling it was something far worse.

"Take care of those antennas over the super-tanks, too." Killer stated calmly, and Alexis agreed.

The rest was general nastiness: Siegfried hadn't exaggerated in his report. The enemy was in excellent position and was heavily equipped to counter any kind of assault. They had enough machine guns in place to plow the ground with their bursts... and all the rebels relied heavily on Alexis and her snipers for silencing those weapons as rapidly as possible.

For the rest, the rebels were heavily armed themselves. Killer looked around himself, and every soldier around him carried a machine gun and many long, heavy belts of rounds, plus a large rucksack on the back, from which jutted out several RPGs.

They all carried a massive amount of firepower: their only hope to succeed was to crush the enemy under raging, endless fire.

Despite the tremendous risks, anyway, the mood was high to the stars: for the rebels, it was already a victory. Better still, more than just a victory. Months had passed from the last time they had seen the surface, the sea, the sky: they had been forced to hide in the underground and fight hard in order to survive.

For them, returning on the surface to fight was a resurrection. A walk back from Hell.

"Ok, I'm ready." Killer announced on the network. Luckily, at short range now it seemed to work... but every attempt to connect to the broader net was still failing. Contact Alexander and Murray, who had to be in Zangwill with artillery, choppers and a whole division of tanks at their orders merely on the other side of the strait, was still impossible. Worse still, Alexis was being disturbed as well... much as her power wasn't technological, but psychic, something, or someone, was heavily interfering with her capabilities. There was no choice other than going the hard, old-fashion way.

"Ready for action." Siegfried announced on the radio: his group was the most numerous, and had to protect the back of all the others from the uncountable demons and zombies that still raged on the island despite the defeat of Regina and of her army. "Remember, guys. Teamwork is important, since it gives the enemy someone else to shoot at. Do your part, everyone."

"So reassuring." Nigel replied on the radio. He had been equipped with a visor from one of the injured Predators, since he was commanding the assault group on the other side of the bay and needed to stay in touch. "It is just nice that for once mine aren't the wider shoulders on the field. I should just hide behind you big guys and let them waste their bullets on you. Anyway, we're ready for the show."

"Wait for my order, then." Alexis stated firmly, and even though she couldn't see them, they all instinctively nodded.

Alexis was in charge for the diversion as well, and Killer and the others who has a sight on the peninsula stared in admiration as one Alexis made of energy suddenly appeared from nothingness, different from the original only for the slight shade of sapphire that the figure betrayed under the light every now and then.

Alexis was taking aim on her rifle and in the same moment generating and commanding two clones of herself, one on each side of the bay... so it was natural that some imperfections surfaced. Hell, it still is so much more than I could ever do with my own powers... And they will not pick up the difference anyway. Killer looked out of the bunker and stared as the Alexis-clone sprinted up the hill, running straight for the trenches of the enemy, and grinned at the chaos that immediately raged as soldiers screamed, officers shouted orders and alarms and the machine guns started firing furiously in direction of the charging tigress.

Being made of energy, the clone passed across the tripwires of the mines without troubles at all, and the furious bursts of bullets pounded across her like across air itself, smashing into the ground and plowing the earth, throwing up clouds of dust and dirt.

Grenades whistled in the air as the mortars and even the howitzers desperately fired against the femme fatale, explosions digging enormous craters in the ground and throwing up rocks and earth all around as burning slivers of steel flaked uselessly in the air.

The clone didn't even slow down, running up the hill headless of everything they threw against her: when the false Alexis was close enough, tens of hand-grenades arched in the air from the trenches and rained down around her, but the clone didn't even sway for the shockwaves.

"They must be pissing their pants in terror!" Someone observed behind Killer's back, and he grinned widely, even before someone else answered: "Wouldn't ya?"

In the meanwhile, the true Alexis had rapidly started taking down targets: Killer observed with something like fascination as the MANSTAR radar exploded in fragments, the same bullet that had shattered it investing the soldier in service at the system and blowing his chest in a spray of blood and gore as the body was thrown a good ten feet away, just as an officer was hit by the same round and his head exploded.

Meanwhile, the MANSTAR on the other side of the bay had ended its days in the same way, and Alexis had already fired another huge round and dispatched the sound-ranging too, and her hand was already working the lever of her bolt-action, monstrous rifle for a third shot. In little more than a second, she could fire 3 times... A feat that went far past any hope of emulation. And now the other snipers at her orders were firing, too, and all of a sudden it was like thunders had decided to rage over Argolis, and for many RA soldiers that day God's roar had the shape of a bullet.

"All out!" Alexis roared on the radio, and Killer, Nigel and Siegfried lead the way, opening the hatches on top of the small bunkers and sneaking rapidly out, followed by the rebels: now the enemy had no radars capable to detect them, and the rebels sneaked out in the open and crawled to their positions.

The teams of Commando-Mortars gained their positions and, fixing the mortar against the ground and holding them angled with their hands started firing smoke-grenades to lift a dangling curtain of fog in front of the enemy, hiding the moves of the other rebels from the RA's reaction.

The rebels armed with Javelin missile launchers went down to their knees and shouldered the heavy tubes, framing their targets in the Thermal scope of the weapon, eye fixed against the aiming sight, and a second later their fingers squeezed the triggers.

The first salvo of missiles left the tubes almost simultaneously, making only a loud hiss at first as the rounds were shot out of the tubes by an electric pulse that caused a magnetic field of repulsion strong enough to throw the heavy missile at several meters of distance, in the air.

As much simultaneously, the rocket-engines of the missiles ignited in midair with a frightening whistle - WHOOSH - and a thick blade of fire erupted from their tails.

The soldiers were already detaching the aiming sights from the empty tubes and plugging the thermal scope onto a new, sealed and full launcher when the missiles, after climbing rapidly skywards, dived violently down towards the RA positions.

A couple of heavy howitzers exploded in a ball of dark, dirty fire and black smoke, throwing away the maimed corpses of the men that had been serving them, and a machine-gun position was obliterated by the explosion of another missile that rained on the head of the gunner like a punishment of God.

More Javelin missiles dived down from the dark clouds above, leaving streaks of white smoke behind as they ran towards the immense tank, but this time something amazing happened: the turret that Killer had earlier noticed took life and rapidly moved to frame the incoming weapons.

It all happened in a second: a red, blazing laser, intense enough that they could see it from their position, so far away, was fired into the first Javelin, then into the second and even the third.

The missiles were fast, but a beam of light was obviously infinitely faster, and the Javelins exploded uselessly in midair.

In that same moment, Killer looked up from the sight of Cobra and as he slammed a new belt of long, huge rounds in place he sneaked a gaze around.

He immediately noticed a lot of things that the hurry of the battle had hidden to his eyes until then: the RA fleet had moved from when he had come on the island. The warships had been sieging the island from very close to the shore, and had been blocking the strait between Argolis and the continent entirely ... but now, almost the whole fleet had retreated considerably, grouping up in the open ocean, north of the island, in a far tighter formation than before, leaving behind only a few huge destroyers that were cruising close to the groynes of Zangwill's port, on the other side of the strait. Those destroyers were acting as vanguard of the fleet: they were furiously launching missiles and firing their gigantic guns towards the mainland, from where came missiles and artillery shells in answer, judging from the explosions and the immense columns of water that erupted around the warships when a cannonade missed the target.

Zangwill is ours. Killer thought simply, grinning a bit as he looked over the scene: the six destroyers were desperately trying to intercept with their SAM missiles the swarms of Sea Eagles coming from the hinterland and heading for them and especially for the main fleet at sea. And simultaneously, the immense warships were fighting a furious battle against the Kesteven's forces that, occupied the town, were now firing their artillery and their missiles at the ships that blocked the port.

Killer could see that all the six destroyers bore the clear signs of the successful hits scored by Kesteven's gunners, and a seventh warship was drifting, abandoned and burning furiously, flames eating the vessel from the hull to the top of the radar antennas.

And eighth destroyer had been sunk in the relatively-swallow waters near the shore and its blackened, burned superstructures jutted out of the waves like bizarre monuments.

Considering it all, the situation on the sea was definitely turning in their favor, despite the crushing inferiority in terms of numbers. Sandy and his boys must have been hitting them hard. Killer thought with a grin, and he also looked up to see the battle going on in the sky above: the Typhoons of Kesteven were battling with the small, black jet-biplane fighters of the RA, the Mantis.

That new airplane had capabilities that went far past the limits of even the Typhoons and of the Su30, which had been the best fighters in the world until only a few days before... but the Mantis greatly overcame both models in every performance. The engines mounted in swiveling pods at the extremity of the wings gave it extreme VTOL capabilities... the biplane-architecture and the very small sizes gave it an agility absolutely stunning, and the aircraft also had an excess of propulsion power so great that it could speed up to well over mach 3. Someone said it could brush mach 4, but that perhaps was an exaggeration.

What was sure was that the Typhoons were in serious difficulties against those planes: in the first battle between them, only Talon had returned, and Maverick had been injured as their Typhoon was damaged. And the desperate fighting continued every time that the Typhoons met the Mantis... Killer had already ordered to urgently implement a few modifications to the fighters of the fleet, in particular to the radar, to make it capable to detect the stealthy Mantis, and to the Meteor missiles. But still, the real change was to come... Roger Nellis and the whole Research & Development centre of the air force were working hard to prepare for the confrontation a whole new jet, starting from the X57 prototype that Killer and Alexis had stolen in the fortress captured in Brunei.

Killer absently looked over the fleet in the distance, spotting the explosions in midair and a couple of parachutes slowly descending, but he was too far away to recognize the small black dots that danced at suicidal speed above the ships. Typhoons or Mantis, from there it was impossible to say which dot was what.

Killer snapped the new box of ammo in place and turned back to its work, blasting a couple of RA gunners off their feet with a burst even before his eye actually went to the aiming sight of the massive rifle, and then he aimed off to the right and sent a grenade flying over one of the pillboxes of the enemy trench, detonating the device in midair and shattering the machine gun position and the people in it with the slivers.

He rapidly changed target, squeezing the trigger and maiming an enemy sniper with a burst of huge rounds that all but tore the unfortunate to pieces, before he instinctively closed his eyes as a mortar round smashed in the ground nearby and sent up a hail of slivers, earth and dust.

Several of the deadly fragments rained on him, but they barely bruised his muscular form, bounding off his steel-hard body instead of tearing it to pieces like they should have... And as he tried to spot the goddamn mortar that had fired to take down the servants with a grenade, he heard the roar of jet-engines pushed to the extreme and the hiss of a plane diving down from the sky.

It was so loud and deafening to be heard over the ruckus of the battle and the explosions, and Killer instinctively rolled on his shoulder a couple of times, changing position and then facing upwards to look up...

And a damaged Typhoon, launched at full speed, emerged from the underside of the dark clouds, firing Chaff & Flares out of its tail, and it made a violent maneuver to stabilize itself, just in time to avoid the ground.

It roared above them, flying so low that Killer was almost sure that, standing up and making a jump, he could have touched the plane... but immediately after, like a hawk on chase, a Mantis fighter came down on the pursue. It was evidently far faster, but it still effortlessly avoided impact with the ground as his two engine-pods swiveled and pointed vertically for a moment, stopping the fall and stabilizing the plane far more elegantly and rapidly than the Typhoon.

The Mantis briefly fired its four Vulcan guns down at the rebels on the ground, and Killer rolled to the side as the mortal rounds plowed a long furrow in the earth where he had been laying, and he snorted, tempted to fire back to the aircraft... but knowing all too well that it would have been useless.

Some of the rebels armed with the Javelin missile launchers fired a couple of SAMs towards the Mantis, but the aircraft all but slid to the side as the missiles approached, and both missed it, overtaking it in the impulse and then uselessly trying to make a curve tight enough to get back at it...

Hell... they are impossible to hit...

_ _

The fleeting Typhoon veered from side to side and avoided a missile, but the Mantis was far more agile, and easily pursued its prey, following it in every tight turn with even tighter ones. The Typhoon's pilot was expert and talented, and was saving himself and his second officer by flying low, skimming the surface of the island, and forcing the Mantis to renounce to most of its advantage in terms of speed. Yet, the Mantis could outmaneuver the Typhoon thanks to its VTOL technology, and it appeared to be gaining the upper hand... It fired a missile, but the Typhoon veered violently to the right and the weapon missed, not managing such a tight turn. The Mantis, however, vectored the thrust of its potent engines to the left and slid to the right like it was moving on top of an air cushion.

The four Vulcan guns in the lower wing of the biplane opened fire... but in that moment, a second Typhoon dived down from the clouds, firing a short-range thermal-homing missile.

The Mantis ceased its assault and its engines rotated to thrust violently towards the ground, pushing the plane rising in the air like a chopper and sending the missile wasted... But the pilot of the second Typhoon knew every possible trick, and had easily forecasted the move: as soon as the Mantis climbed up in the air, the BK27 gun of the Typhoon fired a long burst, and didn't miss.

The rounds of depleted uranium tore across the black fuselage and along the left wing, striking into the left engine pod and sending it detaching and falling to crash on the cliff as the Mantis lost control and rolled violently to the side, turning upside-down and immediately smashing into the dark, tall waves of the ocean, exploding in a hail of fragments as the two Typhoons roared above.

Killer had recognized the coat of arms on the rudder of the second fighter, drawn just above a long list of crosses... It was Talon, and he and Maverick were going to add yet another cross once back at the base.

Killer had no time to reflect on what his mind had diligently registered, since he was firing from his enormous rifle as bombs and bullets angrily whipped the ground all around them, but he sure had had another proof of how urgent the introduction of the new X57 fighter jet was.

A soldier in the trench of the RA ran towards a machine gun, ready to take over the comrade that one of Alexis's rounds had killed, but a burst of Cobra nearly cut him in two at chest height, and a second brave volunteer was fulminated by a gigantic anti-tank round from Alexis's rifle, which sent the unfortunate flying backwards like a rag-doll, crashing into a group of riflemen that immediately were taken under the aim of the snipers team.

Killer changed target and fired again, but he followed with one amazed eye the performances of the clone of Alexis as it jumped straight into the first trench and drew out a Blue Vixen made of energy, which worked excellently to cut in two at waist-height the first RA soldier that tried to stop her assault.

Nothing incredible, for Killer, who had learned during a training duel that Alexis could easily "solidify" the energy of her clones to hit things. To hit hard. In fact, battling one Alexis was already more than enough to drive you crazy. Battle two or three was simply an impossible task. When the clones solidified to act on the world surrounding them, though, they became finally vulnerable to the enemy blows... and there stood the true feat of the whole game: Alexis was developing her powers to such levels that her ability to foresee the future events by now worked for three.

Killer had a proof of it when the clone ducked and shot a foot up backwards to kick a RA rifleman under the chin as he opened fire, sending him crashing in a lifeless heap ten feet away. The energy-Alexis then faded slightly as it charged forwards along the trench, and the bursts of bullets of the terrified soldiers nearby uselessly whizzed across her body.

Killer could swear that the clone was grinning.

The soldiers in front of the false Alexis turned towards the clone and fired furiously, emptying their magazines uselessly as they backstepped in terror, and the true Alexis fired three times in the usual, absurdly-rapid way, sending five of them crashing in shattered, bloody heaps out of the trench with the power of the bullets. Killer sawed the rest of them with a long burst over the group, from left to right... And the clone leapt high into the air, over the enemy fire, solidifying and then diving down in the middle of the remaining soldiers, taking them all down with a rapid slash of Blue Vixen.

As Killer fired, at his side, a couple of rebels shouldered the RPGs they had carried in the rucksacks and fired the rockets down into the first trench: the rockets joined many more fired from other soldiers along the line, leaving behind streaks of white smoke that the wind sent crossing and mixing up, almost creating a fog, so many had been launched.

The rockets, notoriously not very accurate, smashed all along the line of the first trench, drawing a line of fire as the explosions nearly destroyed the first line of defense.

In answer, the super-tank turned its turret towards them and fired its main cannon: the air filled with a deafening hiss and then with a tremendous thunder as crackling, blue electricity whipped the air around the large mouth of the piece of artillery, firing off a massive projectile at an unconceivable speed.

Killer snarled, feeling his musculature instinctively flexing as a massive shockwave slapped him, the enormous shell passing by at a speed so many times higher than sound's one, and he rolled on his side to the left, feeling the earth under his body ripple and bulge, before an enormous explosion nearby vaporized the rebels that had been at his side.

The enormous shell had pierced into the ground and exploded, leaving a crater that had to be at least 30 meters in diameter.

Killer stared at this for an instant, shocked, and he tried to ignore the rain of small pieces of bloody gore that followed, turning instead to see the two 40 mm guns on the sides of the turret of the massive machine rapidly dropping to aim straight ahead and firing their first bursts, as the other two weapons of the same caliber furiously opened up against the rebels as well.

It was the apocalypse on the left side of their front: the 40 mm grenades exploded in midair, and each sent down a hailstorm of mortal slivers of reinforced steel that tore across bodies like swords. Explosions followed up as yet another barrage of mortar rounds rained down from above, and Killer saw with horror many of the rebels torn to pieces by such raging firepower.

A barrage of RPG rockets invested the super-tank, and this time the laser-gun on top didn't even bothered to intervene, since the massive amount of steel-encased depleted uranium of the armor was more than enough to stop such offensive.

More Javelin missiles came diving from the sky towards the monster of steel, but it was no use, and the monstrous tank moved forwards, firing furiously over the positions of the rebels and maneuvering to shield the trenches from the enemy fire with its impenetrable, vast side.

The ground trembled under Killer's feet as the monstrous machine moved, and he was amazed of the rapidity and agility that the tank showed despite its sizes... It wasn't a tank, it was a super-fortress on tracks. A battleship on the land. And it was invulnerable to every weapon of their arsenal.

Killer sprinted up to his feet and charged forwards with a snarl, firing over the trenches with Cobra until the enormous rifle clicked uselessly, empty, and he shouldered it with a snort as his other hand drew Wyvern out.

The gigantic tank framed him and fired its 40 mm guns, and Killer closed his eyes as three, four, five, uncountable explosions stained the sky just above him black, sending down a hail of slivers that plowed the ground around him and torn to pieces the rebels that had jumped up and followed him in the charge.

He snarled as he felt gashes opening along his body, groaning as several bleeding cuts opened in his huge arms, but it was the greatest result that the slivers obtained, whenever they were designed and thought to be able to tear a lightly-armored vehicle to shreds. The curtain of smoke that the mortar teams of the rebels kept up to hide the charge was useful, but not decisive at all, since the guns of the super-tank merely saturated the whole frontal area with slivers.

No one could have crossed such a rain of steel and fire.

And in fact, when Killer emerged on the other side of the smoke, he was alone: none of the other rebels that had charged had survived.

He saw the enormous tank fire the missiles of the Weapon Station on top, and he looked with horror back to the positions he had just left to see the missiles explode in midair, throwing all around a super-flammable, thick, dense jelly that immediately exploded in a violent arson at the contact with the air.

It glued onto everything it touched, and the flames raged high... he spotted several soldiers changed in walking torches, and heard their shrieks of agony with more pain than he felt coming from his wounds.

Some of the RA soldiers had crowded around the tank, and they all jumped up in evident surprise and terror as Killer emerged from the hell of the battlefield: even before they could rise their rifles, two were cut in half by a slash of Wyvern and another was crushed against the side of the tank by a kick powerful enough to rock the vehicle itself.

Killer heard his roar like it came from a great distance, and in his rage, he felt music in the frightening noise of a skull exploding in fragments as he squeezed in a hand the head of a RA soldier... and he snarled when the remaining ones turned their backs and fled, running away towards the top of the hill.

The Alexis clone, though, jumped in and slashed Blue Vixen out to the left and then back to the right, sending all of them down into a pool of blood before they could understand what had happened.

The tank speeded up violently and moved backwards as fast as it could, turning the turret in the same time to frame Killer, aiming the gigantic rail gun at him... and the huge male ducked and rolled forwards under the long bore just before it fired.

The shell all but pierced into the ground and crossed the cliff of stone to emerge on the other side, smashing into the sea and raising a column of water. The power of that cannon was monstrous.

Killer halted into a crouch just in front of the tank's hull, and without thinking on it he grabbed the monstrous vehicle with his hands, just in time to restrain the titanic machine as it sprinted forwards to invest him and crush him into nothingness.

Killer grunted in surprise as he was pushed back a few feet, his feet drawing deep trenches in the ground, before he forced back with all of his tremendous might, feeling his bones creaking as his great machine of muscles unleashed his monstrous force against the mechanic monster, and he grinned as the treads of the tank cried, maiming the ground uselessly as the immense vehicle was stopped in its tracks.

Then, with a roar, Killer gave a violent push and the tank slid backwards of many feet, sinking into the ground with its tracks... and the huge male grinned, arching his back and giving a coup like a heavy-lifter in a competition as his godlike muscles bulged with power.

The monstrous machine was lifted off the ground by the front, Killer laughing darkly as he pushed the immense machine high over his head, and the soldiers that had been assaulting him and that the Alexis-clone had been fighting backwards stopped on their feet and gaped, paling as they stared at that show of supernatural power. Just as their comrades had earlier done, they turned their shoulders on him and ran away as fast as they could, a couple of them all but jumping down from the tall cliff as Killer threw the tank forwards with a roar, sending it flying into the air past the edge of the cliff, the massive vehicle turning upside down as it began to fall and smashed into the waves of the ocean over one hundred feet below, sinking rapidly into the bay.

The rebels left of the large group, now that the tank was finally gone and most of the defenses of the RA had been destroyed, charged across the smoke curtain and invaded the second and the third trench, advancing finally to secure the position on top of the cliff as Killer and the Alexis-clone opened the way by crushing the hardest threats with their strength.

"They're in troubles on the other front." The clone of Alexis said after touching Killer's shoulder to obtain his attention even as he smashed a fist into a RA rifleman and sent it crashing away in a lifeless heap of meat and blood. He turned in surprise and blinked, and the clone made a bit of a face.

"Don't come saying that it's weird to talk with an energy image. You can't even imagine how weird it is to see me and you talking like this across the scope of my rifle." The clone-Alexis quickly exclaimed, and indeed, in that moment, the rifle of the true Alexis fired, with its deafening roar of thunder, and the bullet smashed into two RA soldiers that had been charging towards the back of the clone.

The splatter of blood and gore reached all the way to Killer's chest, but he was too used to it to really notice it.

"The radio is once more being disturbed... But Nigel and his group are having troubles with the other tank." The clone announced, and Killer ran over to the edge of the cliff, looking in the distance to the other side of the bay.

The gigantic tank was advancing over the rebels' positions, crushing bodies of dead and alive people and maiming them into gore as it overcame every attempt of resisting.

The other Alexis-clone had smashed the 40 mm guns at the side of the turret of the vehicle and crushed the weapon station on top into a wreck... And Killer spotted Nigel standing on the front of the tank, forcing with his hands the rail gun cannon to face skywards, so that it couldn't fire on the rebels. It was a feat of strength absolutely amazing, and Killer could see the muscles of the rebel flexing and bulging from where he stood... but the invulnerable vehicle was running forwards, intent to crush under its treads every rebel that he could reach.

"Tell him to get the hell off!" Killer ordered, and the clone nodded as Alexis immediately took the initiative and nudged Nigel's mind...

And the rebel jumped off from the machine, letting go the cannon that heavily plummeted down, smashing into the front of the tank and aiming down to the ground as smoke rose from the inside of the turret, meaning that the mechanisms of the elevation and stabilization of the immense gun had lost their battle against Nigel's strength.

In that same moment, Killer rose his hand and fired all the energy he managed to summon to his palm, sending off a blazing beam of golden light that smashed into the side of the immense tank and all but vaporized it, the beam of force running over everything it met on its way and erasing the first trench of the RA fortress and everything and everyone inside before the powerful laser continued its run over the ocean, leaving behind itself a smoking, deep furrow in the ground, the earth made bright red by the insane heat. Everything that had been in the trajectory was simply gone into nothingness.

"You so have to learn to control your force." The Alexis-clone observed mildly, and Killer made a bit of a face as he nodded.

The resistance on the two peninsulas was crushed quite rapidly after that... Alexis and the other snipers did most of the work, and many RA soldiers on panic eased things by jumping off the tall, rocky cliffs as Killer approached. Anyway, it was never fast enough.

Siegfried and his group were having serious difficulties restraining the assaults of the demons: every single monstrous creature and zombie that Regina had brought to life on the island was trying to break through the line of defense...

And since bullets, even the largest, were useless against the bigger and nastier creatures, the fight was growing more and more desperate, and Siegfried had to intervene along the whole line to kill the Gigataurs and the Samanhi demons.

Those goddamn minotaur-scorpion hybrids must have been a favorite of that fucking Regina bitch...

Now the two groups on the peninsulas moved to the edge of the cliffs, above the bay of the port, and engaged the cannons and the "Missile-Walkers" that the RA had deployed on the groyne barriers to sink everything that might try exiting from the underground-port facilities.

The definition that Siegfried had come up with worked indeed well to describe the machines: the Missile-Workers had probably born during the design stage of the much more dangerous Unmanned Combat Walkers, and had been the first prototypes of the system. They were basically massive exoskeletons, thick with armor, guided by a soldier standing inside the chest of the machine. Some, the less sophisticated, had loop-holes in armored glass through which the soldier could see... the others were fully enclosed, and used TV cameras to project a 360° sight into the cockpit. Each exoskeleton carried a Minigun mounted on a shoulder, and rails on back fitted with missiles ready to launch, making up a firepower absolutely impressive.

Killer fired with Cobra into the loop-hole on the front of one of the exoskeletons, and the machine swayed as the pilot was killed, backstepping awkwardly and falling down over the rocks even as the minigun continued firing, the bursts of rounds going wasted in the sky.

Alexis now had ran over to the cliff herself, and she threw with a growl a small sphere of sapphire energy from her hand, hitting squarely one of the Missile-Walkers armed with anti-ship missiles, destroying it in a ball of fire as the two massive weapons on its back detonated.

The rebels had recovered all the Javelin missiles left, and now were making sure to use them in the best way: a few brave soldiers sneaked to the edge of the cliff even as the Exoskeletons plowed into the stone with thousands of bullets, firing their miniguns furiously, and the courageous used the Javelin aiming sights to acquire the targets.

Other rebels staid back, several feet away from the edge of the cliff and from the bullets of the enemy, the launchers shouldered and ready, receiving the target data over a short-range data link. And when the targets were locked, the missiles once more were fired, and many white streaks climbed to the sky and past the low clouds... and then back down as they dived over the targets and smashed into the exoskeletons from above, destroying them.

"Done! Marines, to me!" A feminine, well know voice called, and Killer turned to the side to see Rika throwing a Javelin aiming sight aside and jumping up to her feet. She met his gaze and grinned, winking to him as he stared at her sword, dripping with blood, and at the black swimsuit she wore, made crimson by splatters of gore and life fluids.

He had tried to convince her to stay back and let the others move in first to clean the peninsula from the enemy... she was going to risk more than enough dealing with the mines... but she simply couldn't stay inactive. She had fought in first line all the time.

Killer and Alexis escorted the group of Royal Marines down over the groyne barriers, walking between corpses and wrecks on flames, avoiding the sharp pieces of warped metal littered all around and finally reaching the exit of the bay, where the RA mines waited silently in the depths.

"Ok, now let us do." Rika said firmly. "The mines will surface when we cut the cables, and the tide will bring the mines towards the open sea... fire into them when they are at distance, so they'll be gone once and for all."

"Fine. Good luck." Killer replied, nodding firmly and giving her a smile before she elegantly turned and dived into the waves like a knife, swift and elegant like perhaps only Alexis could have been. Immediately, the Marines followed their intrepid commander and dived under the surface as well.

Killer and Alexis waited patiently over the barrier, looking off over the waves of the cold Glacial Sea as the rebels left after the assault gathered up behind them.

The losses had been very high... most of the volunteers had been killed in battle, and the other were often wounded and always exhausted. Overall, it had been a desperate fight, and when Nigel reached them, bringing in his own group, they saw that on the other front it hadn't gone any better.

Siegfried reached them after some more time, covered in dark blood and green goo from head to toe. The splatters of green muck were ridiculous over his muscular, powerful form, but no one was in funny mood... and the tiredness evident on the liger's face told them of another harsh fight.

"I've sent the guys back into the bunkers." Siegfried announced. "We have killed most of the demons left on the island... Luckily, they've left the interest in charging forwards when they've realized that both the fortresses here had fallen. We were able to break the contact with the last ones... evidently, they were as tired as us."

"Good work, bro." Killer answered quietly, and the two traded a smile and beat their fists together quietly, before Siegfried all but left himself fall seated over the parapet of the barrier.

"You know, I don't like it." Alexis observed calmly after a few moments.

"What?" Killer asked, looking with interest to three of the snipers of Alexis's team that started firing in the massive mines that had surfaced and drifted towards the middle of the strait. The immense explosions and the columns of water that rose to the sky were quite impressive.

"The destroyers." Alexis stated firmly, pointing off towards Zangwill with her finger. Killer looked in that direction and noticed that the warships were running away at full throttle towards the open sea.

All, except one that sailed at full power towards them.

"Oh, shit." Killer grumbled, but Alexis shook her head.

"I don't sense danger from the destroyer coming here. I feel that something is wrong with the ones running away." She observe, crossing her arms with a puzzled look. "I know, it sounds absurd. But there's something in the air that I dislike... while the people on that warship feel... friendly. Besides... we are at range. They should already be firing their guns at us, if they wanted to."

It was true... they were well within the range of the ship's artillery already, not to talk of its missiles. But nothing came, much as now all the rebels looked over to the destroyer with evident worry as it came closer.

And then it happened: the massive gun turret on the bow of the ship turned and fired, and some of the rebels jumped down to the ground, covering their heads with their arms... The veterans like Nigel, though, had already noticed that the fire wasn't aimed at them.

The fire of the cannon smashed on top of the cliff, investing some demons that had been advancing towards them, and more and more shells were fired... And as Rika and the other marines surfaced after accomplishing their mission and staring in surprise to the enemy warship by now at less than a mile and half of distance, Alexis paled.

"A nuclear missile is heading here." She said, her voice firm and cold as always, and everyone turned to stare at her in amazement.

"No, I'm not joking." She précised, even before someone could ask for it. "I've felt this kind of energy signature once, when we've visited our nuclear arsenal. It's a Strategic Warhead... 550 kilotons, give or take. Very similar to ours."

The destroyer now was all but approaching the barrier, and Killer immediately ordered to board it. It seemed completely irrational, but with a cruise missile fitted with a nuclear warhead incoming, no one dared saying a thing against that order.

Killer jumped up and grabbed the edge of the parapet of the ship's flank, and lifted himself up with a grunt, hefting a wounded rebel with the other hand... and suddenly, from above, someone grabbed his arm and helped him come onboard.

"Move your ass, we don't have all day!" Alexander exclaimed, and helped his older and bigger brother up on the deck, before both helped as many rebels as they could. In a second, Murray hurried out of a thick door of the superstructure and ran forwards to help as well, and the Praetorians, Pamela and Nikita first of all, popped up around Killer, hefting the rebels on board.

"Never leave us back again, Master." Pamela pleaded even as she lifted an injured, bulky rebel from the wrist like he was little more than a doll. "We live to serve our Master and Lord, and we couldn't bear being away from you during this time."

Alexander, standing on the other side of Killer, exclaimed: "I think the team of Research and Development of the navy will just love this gift! We'll have to find a new name for the ship once we post her on duty in our fleet."

"No hurry. The guys of the Research department are first probably going to dismantle this vessel to the last screw and then get it back together to learn all its secrets." Killer replied with a grin. "How did you get the ship?"

"Pirating. I've taken the praetorians and a bunch on Predators with me and swam to the ship... once we've climbed on board, we've had a few minutes of struggles with the crew, but we've silenced them." Alexander replied calmly.

There was no need to explain that the over 200 men of the crew had all been killed and put into a large net found onboard and filled with a few heavy crates. The true feat had been throwing the net into the sea without the other RA destroyers seeing and getting suspicious.

Nigel ran back and forth from the deck to the doors of the superstructure to help the rebels on board and guide them into the armored, NBC-proof citadel of the warship: the cruise missile was incoming, even though they could not see it.

The destroyer speeded up to its maximum when still the last rebels were hanging from the flank of the ship, climbing onboard, and Murray veered to gain the middle of the strait and put as much distance as possible between them and Argolis, squeezing out all the power that the machinery of the ship could give.

The others quickly ran into the ship and made sure to seal all the armored doors. The NBC system was already working to ensure that the locals were airtight and no radiations could reach them, and as soon as they gained the deep waters of the strait, Murray lowered the massive shutters of steel to cover the windows of the compass bridge, sailing only thanks to the images coming from the TV cameras deployed along the ship.

In the meanwhile, the three Glacial submarines exited the underground port and submerged, running out of the bay, as the rebels left on the island closed all the doors and hatches of the bunkers and waited, deep underground.

The explosion came shortly after: the stealth-cruise missile, fired from the RA fleet at sea, was detected on the radars of their stolen destroyer only a moment before it detonated in midair.

It was like a second, bigger and brighter sun had dawned over Argolis, as a tremendous nuclear explosion vaporized everything had been on the surface of the island, flattening everything into a deep crater, annihilating everything and everyone. Demons, RA soldiers, injured soldiers that had been missed and sadly left behind and every rebel that, for a reason or another, hadn't been fast enough in running back down into the bunkers, the only safe place available in such an apocalypse.

And as the tragic shape of the nuke mushroom started rising to a sky suddenly crimson, the tremendous shockwave and the wave of heat invested the destroyer, shaking it like a leaf and nearly knocking it over as it bent on its side and almost turned upside-down. The windows exploded in fragments even with the shutters lowered, and all the TV cameras blackened over and sent to the screens only statics as the infernal heat nearly melted the hull of steel. All the radar and radio antennas were either torn off and shattered or melted, but the destroyer survived, even if badly damaged, and it slowly rolled back to some stability after the shockwave passed.

Killer looked in the eyes of Alexis as they slowly stood back up from where they had fallen at the moment of the impact, and he hugged her tightly like perhaps never before.

They had seen and faced any kind of monstrosity. But it was, even for them, the first time they faced a nuke. And of those monstrous power, besides!

The RA had committed a new monstrous act... one that opened whole new scenarios of horror and destruction. An act so barbaric and unreasonable to frighten even Killer deeply, because that nuke was the supreme declaration of hate and cruelty. They were ready to destroy everything. To bomb even their own soldiers, their own allies, everything and everyone, in order to win.

How far was the RA ready to go...?