Three days later, the storm had spent itself.
Northern Germany woke beneath a flawless autumn sky—crisp air carrying the scent of wet earth and fallen leaves, sunlight sharp and clean, cutting through the morning like polished glass. It was the kind of day that felt chosen, as if the season itself had decided that if men were going to challenge the sky, they would be given a fair stage.
And luck mattered today.
Because the demonstration grounds were not far.
For months now, the Oskar Industrial Group—working quietly alongside select Army researchers who had already been experimenting with airships and crude flying machines—had built something new outside Oranienburg, north of Berlin:
An aviation research and development center.
A place that did not officially exist.
Gustav Lilienthal worked there.
So did Hugo Junkers.
And so did a handpicked team of German engineers and mechanics—men chosen not only for skill, but for silence. Oskar treated aviation the way he treated submarines and guns: not as a hobby, but as a future battlefield. Every worker had been vetted. Every background checked. Every loyalty weighed. Not to money, not to fame—to Germany.
Because if Germany learned to fly first, the century would tilt.
Oskar arrived early.
The convoy rolled in like a moving fortress—A-Class Muscle Motors up front, followed by trucks, staff cars, and transport lorries painted in dull practical colors. Eternal Guard motorcycles had gone ahead to secure the route; now they peeled off and took positions like hunting dogs circling a clearing.
When Oskar stepped out of his A-Class car, it was as if the vehicle had opened its mouth and spilled out an entire household.
Three wives.
A swarm of children.
And behind them—guards in dark coats and disciplined lines, watching roofs, treelines, windows, anything that could conceal a rifle.
Karl's car pulled up behind. More modest, more reasonable—Karl, Heddy, and their three children climbing out like a family that still believed in normal numbers.
For a moment the airfield looked less like a secret military facility and more like a traveling court had decided to invade the countryside.
Then the security net tightened.
Hundreds of Eternal Guard spilled from trucks and cars, fanning outward. Perimeter teams moved to the fence. Sniper pairs climbed into prepared hides and towers. Runners checked each checkpoint twice. No one smiled. No one relaxed.
If the sky was going to be conquered, it would be conquered under guard.
The base itself was not merely an airfield.
It was a fenced, guarded settlement of concrete, steel, and secrecy.
Twelve medium hangars sat in a row like sleeping beasts. One primary runway cut across the field, long and clean; a secondary strip ran beside it for lighter craft. A control tower rose at the center—modest in height, but bristling with signal equipment. Beyond it were the buildings that made the place feel more like an industrial village than a military post: design offices, prototype workshops, engine test stands, material labs, storage depots, fire crews, barracks, mess halls, a medical station.
Everything a proper research center needed to give birth to machines—
…and to bury the ones that failed.
The fences were high. Watchtowers stood at intervals. There was only one official checkpoint, and even it looked like it had been designed less to admit people than to stop them.
Here, aircraft were born, broken, rebuilt, and thrown back into the sky.
Here, pilots, engineers, and soldiers lived side by side under the constant threat of fire, failure, and gravity.
Oskar's children stared at it all with wide eyes.
To them it looked like a new kind of playground—hangars instead of stables, engines instead of horses, men shouting measurements instead of names.
To the adults, it looked like the future wearing a uniform.
Gustav Lilienthal met them quickly, his face bright with a kind of restrained impatience. He bowed to Oskar, greeted the women properly, and gave Karl the brief nod of a man who respected competence.
"Your Imperial Highness," he said. "Thank you for coming."
"Show me," Oskar replied, and the simple words carried more hunger than ceremony.
Lilienthal led them across the tarmac to one of the larger hangars.
The doors rolled open.
Inside—under hanging lamps and the smell of oil and fresh-cut wood—sat their first proper aircraft.
It was… not beautiful.
Not yet.
It looked like an ugly duckling made of canvas and struts—linen stretched tight over ribs, wires drawn taut like spider silk, a propeller at the nose waiting like a question.
A machine that belonged to a world still learning how to leave the ground.
And yet, for Oskar, it was the most promising thing in the hangar.
The air inside was thick with varnish and work: hot metal, wood shavings, grease pressed into hands and sleeves. Mechanics stood back as if the thing might bite them for staring too long.
At first glance it was a biplane—
—but only in the same way a rifle and a musket were both "guns."
Most flying machines of the era looked fragile, skeletal, apologetic. The kind of contraptions that seemed to beg the sky for permission.
This one did not beg.
It expected obedience.
The twin wings were broad and thick, their fabric sealed and lacquered until the surface gleamed faintly under the lamps. They were set close, braced by stout struts placed with a kind of cold mathematics—no chaotic forest of wire and bracework, no improvised lattice of panic. The structure looked as if it understood stress and load, as if someone had finally decided that air was not magic… it was physics.
The fuselage wasn't a naked scaffold.
It was enclosed.
Wood layered and shaped like the hull of a fast boat, smooth and purposeful. The curves looked carved, not accidental. Even standing still, the body suggested that air would slide over it rather than claw at it.
At the nose sat the engine—larger than most men would dare hang on a flying machine at all.
Its cowling was not just a cover, but a guide—shaped to feed cooling air where it mattered instead of letting it spill everywhere like smoke. The propeller was broad-bladed, solid, designed not merely to spin but to bite.
Oskar found himself circling without meaning to.
Not inspecting like a prince.
Inspecting like a hunter finding fresh tracks.
The cockpit sat slightly aft of the wings, raised enough for a commanding view. And in front of the seat—actual instruments. Not decorative brass. Not wishful thinking.
Gauges.
Speed. Revolutions. Altitude.
Tools for control.
A pilot here wouldn't just ride the machine.
He would command it.
The tail was compact and firm, control surfaces balanced with the kind of restraint that came from confidence. Not oversized flapping sheets of fabric trying to compensate for bad design—this tail belonged to the aircraft the way a blade belonged to a hilt.
Even at rest, the machine looked fast.
This wasn't something that hoped to fly.
It was something that had been built with the assumption that it would.
Oskar could almost see it in motion: climbing cleanly, turning with authority, holding speed instead of bleeding it away.
Where other aircraft were victims of wind, this one was meant to rule it.
And that was the frightening part.
It was still only wood, cloth, steel, and wire.
Nothing mystical.
Nothing impossible.
Which meant the future had arrived early…
…and it had learned how to fly.
Gustav Lilienthal stepped up beside him, hands clasped behind his back like a man trying to keep himself from touching his own creation.
"Your Imperial Highness," he said, voice proud and careful, "this is the aircraft we have developed."
Oskar's family and Karl's followed in a loose ring—wives and children and guards all drifting closer. The children stared as if it were a dragon chained indoors. Durin looked like he wanted to climb it. Imperiel looked like he wanted to own it. Heddy's hand tightened around Karl's sleeve as if to remind him not to volunteer as test pilot.
Oskar stopped near the nose, eyes on the propeller.
"It's ugly," he said quietly.
Lilienthal's mouth twitched—he'd expected that.
"And yet," Oskar continued, voice low with satisfaction, "it's the kind of ugly that becomes beautiful the moment it leaves the ground."
Lilienthal exhaled, relieved, and nodded.
"Yes, Your Highness," he said. "Under the current technological limits… this is the best we can make."
Oskar ran his gaze along the wing struts and tightened wires, reading the aircraft the way he read a war map—by the places it would break.
Around him the hangar had lost its formal stiffness. The moment the machine stopped being "a project" and became something the children could touch, it turned into a magnet.
Little hands patted the wheels as if the tires might purr. Tiny fingers traced the lacquered wood, leaving smudges the mechanics pretended not to notice. Durin tried to put his weight against the landing gear like he was testing an enemy's armor.
Imperiel circled the nose with the solemn intensity of a commander inspecting a new cannon.
Oskar, with the casual ease of a man who forgot his own strength, lifted his three oldest girls one by one and set them carefully into the cockpit. They sat there wide-eyed and stiff, as if afraid the seat might suddenly leap into the air without warning.
On Oskar's shoulders, his two other boys clung to his hair and watched everything with fierce interest—small kings perched on the shoulders of a giant, silently judging the world.
The mothers watched with an amused patience that only mothers possessed—half proud, half resigned. In their arms the youngest children slept bundled in warm cloth, oblivious to history being assembled ten paces away.
Karl stood apart, hands on hips, eyes narrowed—not at the wings, but at the structure, the engine mount, the workmanship.
He wasn't seeing glory.
He was seeing cost.
He was already doing the arithmetic that every good administrator did instinctively:
How many of these? How fast? And what will it bleed from the budget?
Then Hugo Junkers stepped forward.
The hangar quieted—not completely, because the children refused to understand solemnity—but enough that the adults could hear the shift. Engineers and officers and observers all turned toward him as if a verdict were about to be delivered.
Junkers cleared his throat.
"Your Imperial Highness," he began, careful and controlled, "the aircraft you see was built according to the principles you laid down."
He gestured toward the fuselage.
"It remains a biplane by necessity of material," he continued, "but its structure is not conventional. The wings are thick, load-bearing, and closely spaced—designed to produce lift efficiently while reducing useless drag."
Karl's eyes flicked to the struts. The close spacing. The unusually purposeful geometry.
Junkers's gaze shifted to the nose.
"It is powered by a new four-cylinder engine from the German Engine Corporation—one hundred and twenty horsepower."
A murmur moved through the adults.
That number wasn't merely impressive.
It was aggressive.
Junkers didn't smile. He simply kept going, like a man dropping weights onto a scale.
"Length: seven-point-three meters. Wingspan: nine-point-five. Height: two-point-four." He spoke them cleanly, then added the numbers that mattered. "Maximum takeoff weight—five hundred kilograms. We estimate a top speed near one hundred and twenty kilometers per hour. Practical ceiling—two thousand eight hundred meters. Endurance—about ninety minutes under full load."
He paused.
Then turned slightly, looking directly at Oskar.
"As you insisted, Your Highness, it is not merely a flying machine."
His voice hardened by a fraction.
"It is a weapon."
The word landed differently in a church of engines than it would have in a cathedral.
Junkers raised a hand and indicated the forward fuselage.
"The nose has been reinforced to accept a fixed machine gun installation." He hesitated, then added with dry honesty, "Officially, it remains 'experimental.'"
A few women stiffened at that.
"An experimental heavy-caliber design," Junkers continued. "Twelve-point-seven millimeters. Limited ammunition—two hundred rounds."
Even Karl's expression changed at that.
Two hundred rounds of heavy fire in the air was not a toy.
It was a new kind of threat.
"No existing doctrine supports such a weapon in the sky," Junkers said plainly, as if he were quoting a fact rather than challenging a century. "But your projections demanded it. We have addressed recoil, mounting, pilot sighting, and structural reinforcement."
He pointed beneath the lower wings.
"Additionally, the aircraft is fitted with two external mounting points. Each can carry a twenty-five-kilogram aerial bomb." He said it like he was discussing cargo. "Manual release via cockpit linkage."
Silence tightened among the adults.
Because everyone in that hangar—engineers included—understood what it meant to drop a bomb from above.
You didn't need trenches.
You didn't need artillery.
You only needed height.
"It must be stated," Junkers went on evenly, "that no nation currently fields an aircraft capable of carrying such armament while maintaining speed and control."
His eyes flicked back to Oskar.
"But this one will."
A faint smile touched Junkers's mouth—more grim satisfaction than pride.
"In the air it will climb faster, turn tighter, and hold its speed where others bleed it away. Where existing aircraft wobble and drift, this one will obey."
He let the words settle.
"It is not a machine that merely flies."
The children were still running around it, laughing, touching, daring the adults to smile.
But the adults did not laugh.
Because in that moment, everyone with sense felt the same thing in their gut:
This aircraft did not belong to the present.
And if it was unleashed upon the sky of any coming war…
…it would not simply participate.
It would decide who lived beneath it.
Oskar stood with his hands behind his back, studying the aircraft the way he studied a new gun—by imagining what would happen to it when something tried to kill it.
"It's a good start," he said at last.
His voice was calm, even a little generous.
"But if war came tomorrow, at best… it would be an annoyance to the enemy. It can't take hits. Not yet. No aluminium skin, no real protection—wood and cloth don't forgive bullets."
He turned his head slightly toward Lilienthal and Junkers.
"Still," he added, and there was real approval in his tone now, "I am impressed. You solved the first problem."
You made it fly.
"That alone matters," Oskar finished. "Well done, gentlemen. Consider me satisfied—for now."
Lilienthal exhaled as if he'd been holding his breath for days.
"Yes, Your Imperial Highness," he said, nodding quickly.
Junkers nodded too, tighter, more controlled—but his eyes shone the same.
Oskar moved to the cockpit and lifted his girls out one by one. They came reluctantly, as if the aircraft had already claimed them.
One of them—Juniel, stubborn as a nail—wrapped her little fingers around the control stick and refused to let go, glaring at the world as if daring it to remove her.
Oskar leaned in with exaggerated seriousness.
"You intend to fly it yourself?" he murmured.
Juniel nodded fiercely.
Oskar's eyes warmed.
Then he attacked with the only weapon guaranteed to break a child's will—tickles.
Juniel squealed, laughter exploding out of her, and her grip finally loosened. Oskar scooped her up and set her down, and she immediately tried to run back toward the aircraft before Tanya caught her with a hand on the back of her night-dress like a professional jailer.
Oskar straightened and glanced toward the hangars.
"Alright," he said simply. "Let the pilots begin. My children are becoming impatient—and Karl's little ones too."
He didn't have to say more.
The engineers scattered. Ground crew moved like ants around a sugar cube. Tools clinked. Commands snapped. The hangar, which had felt like a museum for a moment, became a workshop again.
Oskar watched the preparations with that familiar, quiet certainty.
It wasn't combat-ready.
But it was a foundation.
And once you had a foundation, you could build anything.
---
The test pilots arrived—three men in leather coats and fitted caps, faces already wind-burned, eyes clear in a way that only belonged to people who made a habit of trusting machines with their lives.
Oskar greeted them with a nod that carried weight. Not a prince acknowledging servants.
A commander acknowledging the brave.
Then the pilots disappeared into three hangars.
A moment later, engines coughed.
Once.
Twice.
Then roared into life.
Propellers spun into pale discs, the sound filling the airfield until it seemed to vibrate in your ribs.
One by one, the aircraft rolled out—nose down, wings wide, ground crew jogging beside them, hands steady on struts and tailframes. They formed into a loose triangle on the runway, three ugly ducks lined up like they were about to become something else entirely.
Karl stood to Oskar's side with the newest camera model in his hands, filming with obsessive care. The machine whirred softly, capturing not only the image but the sound—the engines, the wind, the moment itself.
"Hold still," Karl muttered to himself, as if speaking to history. "Don't you dare ruin this."
Heddy stood nearby, her expression somewhere between amusement and awe, while their children hopped and pointed and made excited noises that sounded like small birds discovering thunder.
The pilots released their brakes.
The aircraft began to taxi.
Slow at first. Then faster.
Two hundred meters down the runway, the noses lifted—subtle, confident, like a predator raising its head.
Then the first aircraft left the ground.
Then the second.
Then the third.
They climbed one after the other, not wobbling like circus toys but rising with intent—arrows fired into the sky.
A cheer burst from the ground without permission.
Even the strict men clapped.
The children were openly delighted.
Oskar did not clap.
He watched.
He watched the formation hold for a few seconds, then break apart cleanly, each pilot turning into the wind and beginning their maneuvers—gentle banks, steady climbs, controlled dips. Not stunts meant to impress crowds.
Tests meant to measure the future.
Flying in the early twentieth century was not romance.
It was death waiting for a mistake.
A wing spar failing. A gust hitting wrong. A stall. A bad recovery.
And yet those three men moved through the air as if they belonged there.
Oskar noticed the small, modern details too—head protection that looked ordinary but was reinforced, and, most importantly, the emergency packs: compact parachutes of new synthetic fiber, lighter and stronger than anything the world had seen before.
Oskar had insisted on them.
He refused to build a future out of corpses.
Still… he knew death was always nearby.
He leaned slightly toward Karl.
"Afterward," Oskar said quietly, eyes still on the sky, "each of them gets a bonus worth remembering."
Karl nodded without looking away from the camera.
"Already planned," he muttered.
Above them, the three aircraft continued their series of maneuvers. Clumsy compared to what Oskar knew would come—but unmistakably different from the fragile drifting kites of the era.
They held speed.
They responded to control.
They obeyed.
Oskar felt something tighten in his chest—a mix of satisfaction and impatience.
Good.
Now make it better.
The aircraft carved a wide circle across the autumn sky, and for a moment the future looked simple:
A machine.
A pilot.
And a nation learning how to climb.