Re: Blood and Iron

The room reeked of coffee, sweat, and disbelief.

Maps sprawled across the central oak table. Tactical overlays, reconnaissance reports, and grainy aerial photos that looked like they'd been taken during an eclipse.

The Catalonian ridge was gone. Flattened. Carved open like a wound on the earth.

General Félix Moreau stared at them, jaw clenched so tightly the muscles along his temple pulsed.

"We lost how much?"

Colonel Baptiste, fresh from the night shift adjusted his fogged spectacles. His voice quivered despite the practiced military cadence.

"Everything, sir. From the Sierra de Llers to the fallback line at Castellfollit. Communications went dark just after 0300. We believe the Republican command post was vaporized."

"Vaporized," Moreau echoed, his voice low. "Not destroyed. Not overrun. Not taken. Vaporized."

A tense silence. Then he turned on his heel to face the others in the room; chiefs of staff, intelligence analysts, and representatives from the General Directorate for Armaments.

"Explain to me how an entire sector of hardened defensive positions, reinforced over the last six months with French materiel, flak batteries, radar guidance, and Republican manpower just vanished into thin fucking air!"

No one spoke.

Then a thin, sharp voice broke the stillness.

"They must've sent hundreds of bombers. A night raid; possibly staged out of Corsica, or Sardinia. We're still checking the Spanish and Algerian airspace logs."

Moreau gave the analyst a look that could pierce steel.

"Hundreds of bombers," he said flatly. "Which somehow crossed the entire Iberian Peninsula, dropped ordnance equivalent to a field artillery division, and returned home without being spotted, tracked, or challenged?"

The man swallowed and lowered his gaze.

Moreau turned to another officer, this one wearing the red-trimmed kepi of the Air Defense Bureau.

"Etienne. Was there anything, anything at all that was picked up on our radar arrays?"

Colonel Etienne Desrosiers looked like a ghost. His uniform was crisp, but his eyes were hollow.

"No, mon Général. Nothing. We reviewed the tapes from Perpignan, Béziers, even Marseille. The early-warning net recorded no large-scale approach, no electromagnetic signatures, no aerial clutter."

"So either our radar is faulty," Moreau said, voice rising, "or the enemy has developed aircraft we can't detect."

He let the words hang.

Someone tried to interject, muttering about Catalonian crews sleeping at their posts, or separatist sympathizers deliberately blinding defenses, but Moreau slammed a hand on the table hard enough to rattle pens.

"Spare me the excuses. I've seen the photos. That wasn't a Republican blunder. It wasn't sabotage. It was annihilation."

He gestured to the grainy overhead stills taken by French reconnaissance planes that flew in at first light.

Where once there had been fortifications and trenches, now there were only blackened scars, craters two stories deep, and what looked like melted steel.

"The Americans think it was a fuel-air device," muttered someone from Intelligence. "like what the Germans used to end the war with Japan last year. But this… this was different. Cleaner. Quieter. Deliberate."

One of the younger aides, pale and visibly shaken, finally spoke.

"But wouldn't that mean the Germans flew just one or two bombers? Maybe even a new kind of long-range platform? That would imply…"

Moreau answered without turning.

"That would imply their range is global. That would imply our doctrine is obsolete. That would imply we're a decade behind and counting."

The room remained still.

He stepped toward the window, watching Paris slowly awaken to a new kind of war; one not marked by the roar of hundreds of bombers overhead, but the silence of death delivered from beyond comprehension.

Behind him, someone finally whispered what no one else dared voice aloud.

"If the Germans can do that… to a fortified line… in a war they claim they're not fighting…"

Moreau turned his head, voice cold as iron.

"Then pray they never do declare war."

However, the dread did not last for long as General Lannes stabbed a trembling finger toward a dossier lying on the table unopened.

"Are we all going to forget that this exact pattern of destruction happened across multiple Japanese cities just a year ago? No planes. No warning. Just silence; then craters, melted bunkers, and hospitals buried in their own foundations."

Moreau turned. "We all remember how the Germans crushed the Empire of Japan. That was different. The Germans admitted to using missiles."

Lannes barked a bitter laugh. "Admitted? They bragged. Do you recall the term? Vergeltungswaffen. Retribution weapons. Rockets the size of trains, launched from God knows where. Sub-orbital in trajectory. And you're telling me you think this wasn't the same doctrine?"

A naval officer with silver in his beard and disdain in his eyes cut in. "You're suggesting they launched missiles over Spain without so much as a radar signature? From where exactly? Berlin? Vienna? And no one saw it?"

Lannes slapped the dossier shut and shoved it aside.

"From anywhere. They could have forward sites in North Africa. U-boot-style container launchers, maybe. Hell, they could've fired from the Canaries or the goddamn Alps for all we know."

An intelligence attaché at the far end spoke up; quiet, but with unnerving calm.

"If it were missile-based, we would expect a heat bloom. Ionization. Early warning radar would've caught the signature, even if the trajectories were hypersonic."

General Lannes didn't flinch.

"Unless we didn't see it because it wasn't hot. Or not in the conventional sense. What if they've cracked something else? Fuel-air propulsion? Cold-launch vectors?"

The naval officer sneered. "What are you proposing now that they've reinvented science? That they've gone from crude rockets in the Pacific to science fiction in six years?"

"It's not science fiction if it's already been fielded," Lannes snapped. "Call it what you want. Missiles. Glide bombs. Hell, call it sorcery. But I refuse to believe an entire ridge evaporated from a single bomber no one saw coming."

Moreau exhaled hard through his nose and sat down finally. He looked exhausted.

"I'll admit, the damage pattern is… suspicious. There are traces of secondary pressure collapse. Flattened terrain, but no obvious high-explosive residue. That does match Japan. But we have no confirmation of launch, and no missile debris found at the site."

Lannes leaned forward, voice low now; measured.

"They wouldn't leave debris if they used aerosolized weapons. Not conventional warheads. If what our scientists have said is true. The Germans used a new form of explosive in the Pacific, the theorized term being 'thermobaric' but who is to say they have not scaled this technology beyond anything we've imagined? Imagine a cluster system not just designed to destroy bunkers, but to erase a battlefield ecosystem. The Germans don't bomb to win. They bomb to punish."

A long pause followed.

Then, for the first time that morning, someone from the diplomatic corps spoke.

"You realize what you're implying?"

Lannes didn't blink.

"I'm implying we are dealing with a state that can strike anywhere, with impunity, and is under no obligation to explain how. Whether it's from bombers, we can't see or missiles we can't detect; the result is the same."

He jabbed his finger down on the map, on the location now labeled only as:

CATALONIAN RIDGE: VOID.

"They're showing us what they'll do if we ever try to fight them on an even footing again."

Moreau leaned back. His eyes were still on the map. But the map no longer mattered.

The war had not yet begun.

And already, they were losing ground in a battlefield of ideas.