RAF Station. Lincolnshire. Winter, 1944.
Time: early. Weather: as always.
The mud was permanent. It didn’t freeze. It didn’t dry. It just changed flavour—soupy, clotted, streaked with petrol or the blood from a ruptured knuckle. It soaked into everything: boots, bedding, mess trays, the corners of your dreams.
The fog clung low like guilt.
And the cold—it wasn’t just temperature. It was a decision made by the earth and sky to withhold comfort until further notice. Even the fires in the common room burned in grayscale.
~ ~ ~
Daily routine:
· Wake before light.
· Briefing in a room that smelled of pencil lead, mildew, and the memory of shouting.
· Maps laid out like surgical diagrams.
· Targets circled with a calm that belied what those circles meant.
“Leipzig again.”
“How many went last night?”
“We’ll find out when they don’t return.”
They flew nightly.
· If they were lucky, the enemy missed.
· If they were less lucky, the flak found them.
· If they were unlucky enough, they came back mostly intact—but without a piece of themselves they could name.
Some started talking to their planes. Not metaphor. Actual conversations.
One pilot kissed the fuselage before each mission. Another pressed his ear to the wingtip and swore he could hear the last crew screaming very faintly.
The base kept its own rhythm. The mechanics slept in shifts. The radio officers stopped asking for names. The mail came late. Always. Usually to the wrong person. No one corrected it. Sometimes they opened letters addressed to men already vaporised. Sometimes they read them aloud.
Sometimes they laughed.
The chapel stayed full, but no one prayed. They just sat; heads bowed—not in reverence. In readiness.
They called it fatigue.
They called it strain.
They called it nerves.
But it wasn’t any of those things. It was the slow unreality of survival.
Coming back, night after night, when your name should’ve already been painted over on the nose cone. Eating stew next to a man who lost both legs three missions from now. Hearing your voice crack on the comms—not from fear, but because you recognised the voice of the enemy gunner as a boy you’d once played football with in a different version of the world.
Sleep came late, if at all. When it did, it came as a crash. A chemical switch. A shutdown. No dreams. Or too many.
One rear gunner, 18, had a dream of a black aircraft shaped like an apology, drifting through silent sky. He told no one. But he woke up with blood in his nose and a spiral drawn in charcoal on the wall beside his cot.
No one made it through the war whole. Most didn’t make it through at all.
They weren’t heroes.
They weren’t saints.
• They were kids in wool uniforms, flown like ordnance
• Kids, in wool uniforms, shaken loose of sleep,
dropped again and again until they either stopped coming back or stopped caring that they had.
The war never felt real. That was the trick of it.
Real things end. This just kept happening.
~ ~ ~
And then, one day, a plane arrived. No engine noise.
The mud didn’t stick to her. The fog parted around her.
The crew didn’t know it yet, but she’d been sent to remember what they couldn’t afford to.
~ ~ ~
The war machines never slept.
They didn’t breathe—they cycled atmospheres, wheezing ghost-oxygen through turbines tuned to frequencies not safe for human organs.
Belt-fed, grease-slicked, their innards clattered like machine-language prayers—every drumbeat another line of code in the gospel of annihilation.
Kindred land-based machines didn’t roll—they infiltrated terrain, crawled like algorithms in steel jackets, treads steeped in permafrost and infantry pulp, dragging behind them the historical scent of damp linen, bad orders, and rust.
Overhead, they rewrote the sky, line by line, issuing cease-and-desist letters to constellations. Cities didn’t fall—they misremembered themselves, turned inside out by math no one had authorised. And the maps? The maps were haunted, folding in on borders drawn by men who never made it home, updated hourly by machines who didn’t care who lived there anymore.
It wasn’t movement. It was procedure.
Steel begat steel, in the genealogical sense—great-grandfather rivet giving rise to the half-track, who in turn fathered the autocannon, the tank, the jet, the godless war-engineer smoking Camels in a wind tunnel at Whitehall.
Command begat command, a chain reaction of clipped vowels and increasingly abstract paperwork, forms authorising other forms, and decisions made by committees convened to verify the existence of other committees.
Death stopped being a metaphor or consequence and was instead converted to format—itemised, stamped, filed, and operationalised into something that could be flown, refuelled, and dropped.
Not killed. Implemented.
~ ~ ~
Pearl—
not built, exactly, not born either.
She emerged.
Skin like lacquered dusk.
A spiral etched just behind her nose section. The arcane glyph where no rivet ever touched metal.
She flew when no one scheduled her. She heard orders and didn’t obey. Not out of malfunction. Not refusal—something essential.
Interpretation.
She read the coordinates. She calculated the yield. She paused.
And then she said:
“This will not be remembered well.”
And closed her bay.
