The morning after the tank demonstration, East Prussia woke under a hard, bright winter sky—snow crusted like salt over fields, forests standing black and rigid, the air so cold that even engines sounded sharper.
Oskar did not allow his father's entourage time to relax into the comfort of yesterday's spectacle.
At dawn he had already arranged the convoy.
It was not a pleasant royal drive. It was a moving fortress: Muscle Motors staff cars, trucks carrying equipment and spare parts, motorcycles darting ahead as scouts and messengers, Royal Guards flanking the Kaiser's vehicle, and Oskar's Eternal Guard riding with the quiet discipline of men who measured danger in angles and distances.
They left Königsberg behind and drove east.
Twenty kilometers is nothing on a map.
In winter, it feels like crossing into another world.
The road was cleared and widened—one of Oskar's projects, one of his "future veins"—and the convoy moved fast, tires biting into packed snow, exhaust streaming behind them like pale banners.
Then the land opened.
A wide spread of flat ground where farms had once sat—fields now leveled, drained, fenced, and remade by money and obsession.
A wall of earthworks and wire cut the horizon. Guard posts stood at intervals like teeth. Beyond them rose hangars—real hangars, not sheds. Long buildings of timber and corrugated steel with sliding doors wide enough to swallow aircraft whole. A control tower, glass-faced, stood at the center like an eye.
And cutting straight through it all was something few men in 1912 had ever seen outside a city street:
A true runway.
Not grass.
Not packed dirt.
But a long strip of dark, smooth asphalt, edged with chalk lines and drainage channels, hard enough to take weight in all weather, as if Oskar had dropped a piece of the future onto East Prussian soil.
When Wilhelm II stepped out of his car, he simply stopped.
For a moment, the Kaiser of Germany forgot to speak.
Because the airfield was full.
More than two hundred aircraft sat in ordered rows across the apron and the grass beyond—machines of many sizes and roles: trainers, scouts, light bombers, reconnaissance craft, awkward early biplanes with struts and wires like skeletal birds.
But mixed among them were shapes that did not belong to the same century.
Low, sleek aircraft with single wings.
Clean fuselages.
Enclosed canopies.
Aluminium skins that caught the winter sun and threw it back like mirrors.
Next to them, the older biplanes looked exactly like what they were: stepping stones. Necessary ugliness. The first clumsy attempts of mankind to bully the sky into obedience.
These new machines were something else.
They looked… finished.
Weapons, not experiments.
Wilhelm's entourage—generals, staff officers, ministers—began murmuring the way men murmured when they saw a new kind of war arriving and realized they had no vocabulary for it yet.
"Oskar," Wilhelm II said at last, voice low, "do these all belong to the Eighth Army?"
"Yes, Father," Oskar replied.
He did not sound proud. Pride was for ceremonies.
He sounded like an engineer pointing at a bridge and saying: it holds.
"Here in this place, the Oskar Industrial Group has created a new dedicated aviation division—research, manufacturing, training, doctrine. What you see is the result of years of failure and redesign. We had to build everything: engines, fuel systems, instruments, control surfaces… even the runway, because grass belongs to farmers, not war."
He walked them forward, boots crunching on frost, and stopped beside one of the sleek monoplanes. Its aluminium skin gleamed softly, smooth as a shell. Mechanics moved around it in silence, checking bolts, warming the engine, testing the propeller by hand.
"In the world's newspapers," Oskar continued, "aviation is still treated like a circus act. In Italy's war against the Turks, they dropped a few bombs by hand and everyone acted like it was the future."
His eyes narrowed.
"That was not the future. That was a preview."
He tapped the aircraft's fuselage lightly with his knuckle.
"This is the future."
Wilhelm II stared at the machine. His breath fogged against the cold.
"And these… are not biplanes."
"No," Oskar said. "We still have biplanes, because they're stable and they're cheap and they train pilots well. But the breakthrough came when we finally made real monoplanes—single-wing designs that cut through air instead of dragging through it."
He gestured at the aluminium skin.
"And after Africa, we could finally afford to use aluminium properly. Not just for engine castings or small parts—now we can plate the frame, stiffen the body, protect vital systems. It won't stop a cannon round, but it can survive rifle fire and fragments. A pilot can take a hit and still come home."
Wilhelm II nodded slowly.
He understood the meaning of "come home."
Oskar's gaze drifted toward the engine bay.
"But the real miracle," he said, almost quietly, "is the engine."
He didn't say Diesel aloud. He didn't need to.
Everyone in his inner circle knew who powered Oskar's century: the Diesel family, their factories, their obsession with efficiency, their marriage tie through Heddy and Karl that had made them inseparable from Oskar's machine.
Engines were everything.
Without them, an aircraft was just a kite with delusions.
---
A whistle sounded.
Two fighters were rolled out onto the runway by ground crews, then released. Their engines caught with a sharp, controlled roar—nothing like the spluttering cough of early aviation. This was clean power. Disciplined power. A sound that made the stomach tighten even before the mind understood why.
The first aircraft taxied to the centerline and stopped.
The second waited behind.
A flag dropped.
The lead fighter surged forward, wheels hammering briefly over asphalt, then suddenly the ground was gone. The aircraft lifted cleanly, climbing hard into the pale blue sky. Twenty seconds later the second followed, rising like a shadow chasing its own knife.
Oskar watched them for a moment, then spoke.
"These are the F-2 fighters," he said. "They are a complete break from the earlier prototypes. The F-1 taught us what was possible. The F-2 is what is usable."
He let them climb higher, then continued, as if reciting plain facts from a ledger:
"Maximum speed: over six hundred kilometers per hour. Maximum range: approximately eight hundred fifty kilometers. Combat radius, with reserve fuel: just over four hundred."
He pointed east.
"From here, Warsaw is within reach—and within return distance. Berlin still lies just beyond the margin of safety."
He lowered his hand.
"But this aircraft is already the fastest thing mankind has ever taught to fly."
The generals exchanged looks.
Even men who barely understood aviation understood this.
Range.
Range meant the difference between a border and a battlefield.
Range meant that war no longer waited for railways or marching columns—it simply arrived.
Reach meant threat.
"And armament," Oskar continued, his voice calm, almost indifferent. "Forward-firing machine guns. Fixed to the airframe. Timed to fire cleanly through the propeller arc."
Several brows furrowed at that.
"The aircraft does not aim around its weapons," Oskar said. "The aircraft is the weapon. Wherever the nose points, the guns strike—concentrated, accurate, continuous fire."
He let that settle before adding the final weight.
"These guns are not for warning shots. They will tear through wood, canvas, engines, crews. An enemy pilot does not duel this machine. He dies before he understands he has been engaged."
Silence followed.
The German Army, of course, had its own aviation programs—everyone did now, at least on paper. Designs, committees, test frames still shackled to wires and compromises.
But standing here, watching these fighters climb effortlessly into the winter sky—faster, farther, armed in a way no other nation had yet mastered—several officers felt a quiet, sour certainty take root in their chests.
Their projects were not behind.
They were already obsolete.
---
Oskar had prepared a simple demonstration.
Beyond the runway, on a low rise inside the fenced range, straw dummies stood in a loose cluster—men-shaped targets without faces—beside a single old truck. Fuel in the tank. Canvas on the bed. Nothing special.
Just something that would burn.
The two fighters widened out into a long, patient arc, climbing first—taking their time, as if even the sky itself were part of the drill.
Then they rolled over together and came down.
The sound reached the airfield before the aircraft did—an onrushing howl that made several men's mouths fall open in awe.
And then the guns spoke.
Not the pop-pop of rifles.
Not the slow hammer of a Maxim.
This was a hard, tearing chatter—fast, continuous, mechanical—like a saw biting through bone.
The straw men exploded.
They didn't fall over; they came apart. Stuffing and splinters leapt into the wind, erased in midair as neat lines of dirt stitched across the hillside.
The truck shuddered as rounds punched into metal.
A heartbeat later flame burst from under the hood, and the fuel caught. The whole vehicle bloomed into a bright orange fireball, smoke rising in a thick black column that climbed straight into the winter sky like an accusation.
The fighters climbed again—smoothly, effortlessly—engines fading to a distant, circling howl.
For a moment nobody spoke.
Then the airfield filled with the sound men make when they've seen something too effective: half disbelief, half hunger.
One general muttered a prayer without realizing he had done it.
Another, pale-faced, stared at the burning truck as if expecting it to get up and walk away.
Wilhelm II stood rigid, eyes locked upward, following the fighters as they wheeled like hawks above East Prussia.
He had seen artillery.
He had seen ships.
He had seen tanks.
But this was different.
This was war leaving the ground entirely—war becoming a hunt from above.
Oskar turned slightly toward him.
"Now you understand why I built this base," he said quietly.
Wilhelm did not answer at first.
Then he exhaled, as if letting go of something old—some ancient belief that wars could still be contained by borders, rivers, and marching speed.
"Yes," he said at last.
His voice was low, but there was something sharp in it now—ownership. Desire.
Oskar let the fighters remain aloft.
Let them circle.
Let the sound linger long enough for every man present to accept the new truth: the battlefield no longer ended at the horizon.
Then he looked back at them—at his father, at Moltke, at Tirpitz, at the ministers who were already silently calculating costs and consequences.
And he allowed himself the smallest hint of satisfaction.
"If you found that impressive," Oskar said, "then you should come with me."
He didn't wait for permission.
He simply turned and began walking toward the far side of the field—past the neat rows of trainers and scouts, past the older biplanes that suddenly looked like antiques.
Toward the biggest hangars.
The doors were already open.
Inside, shadows moved around larger shapes.
Wilhelm II had expected more of the same—perhaps another sleek monoplane, perhaps a heavier fighter.
Instead, something rolled forward that made even veteran generals slow to a stop without realizing they had stopped.
It was not elegant.
It was not clean.
It was imposing in the way a locomotive was imposing—built for work, for weight, for violence.
Twin engines sat out on the wings like clenched fists, each propeller turning into a blurred disk as the mechanics warmed them. The fuselage was long and purposeful, built around the simple idea that something heavy would be carried inside it—
—and then dropped onto someone else's day.
A bomber.
A real bomber.
Oskar waited until his father was close enough to see the rivets, the seams, the dull gleam of aluminium skin over reinforced frame.
"In addition to fighters," he said, "the Eighth Air Force also has this."
He set a gloved hand against the fuselage as if introducing a warhorse.
"Designated H-1."
Wilhelm's eyes moved along the aircraft—down the length of the slim fuselage, over the broad wings, to the twin engines mounted out on the nacelles like muscles, and finally to the belly where the bomb bay doors sat flush and closed, hiding their purpose with almost insulting neatness.
It did not look like a circus contraption.
It looked like a system.
"This is not a scout," Tirpitz muttered. It came out half disbelief, half reverence.
"No," Oskar agreed. "This is a bomber."
He stepped closer and began pointing—not theatrically, but like a man explaining a machine he expected them to buy by the dozen.
"Crew of four," he said. "Pilot, navigator-bombardier, radio operator, and gunner. Enclosed cockpit. Real instruments. A proper radio set. You don't fly this by prayer and luck—you fly it by procedure."
He indicated the glazing along the nose and the forward compartment.
"The navigator lies up front with charts and sighting gear. He finds the target. He calls the run. He releases the bombs. The pilot's job is simply to keep the aircraft stable long enough to make the mathematics lethal."
A few of the officers leaned closer, drawn in despite themselves.
"And it defends itself," Oskar continued.
He pointed to the positions—one in the nose, one high on the spine, one along the belly line—places where a man could sit behind a ring mount and turn sky into danger.
"Machine guns covering front, rear, and upper arcs. Any fighter that chases too close learns a simple truth: this bomber bites back."
Wilhelm looked from the gun ports to the engines.
"And what does it carry?" he asked, voice quiet.
Oskar answered with numbers—because numbers did not exaggerate.
"Up to one thousand kilograms internally," he said. "And it can deliver that weight at ranges beyond one thousand kilometers. Maximum speed approximately four hundred kilometers per hour."
Moltke's brow furrowed, mind already trying to cage the idea inside the old logic of war.
"One thousand kilometers," he repeated, as if saying it twice might make it less real.
Oskar nodded once.
"Deep strike."
The generals exchanged glances that were not quite triumphant and not quite afraid.
Reach meant options.
Options meant escalation.
Oskar did not smile.
"Words are cheap," he said. "So we will demonstrate."
He gave a short order.
Ground crews rolled five H-1 bombers out onto the apron. Chocks were kicked away. Mechanics signaled with gloved hands. The twin engines on the lead aircraft caught, not with a sputter but with a disciplined roar—clean, synchronized power that sounded less like aviation and more like a factory deciding to become weather.
One by one the bombers began to taxi, noses dipping slightly with the weight in their bays.
Wilhelm watched the first reach the runway centerline and pause.
The second and third lined behind it.
Then the fourth.
Then the fifth.
A green flag dropped.
The lead bomber surged forward, wheels hammering briefly over asphalt, engines pulling with a steady, confident violence. It did not wobble. It did not hesitate. It simply gathered speed and lifted cleanly into the winter sky.
The others followed at measured intervals, rising in sequence like a doctrine becoming visible.
They formed up above the field—five slim, twin-engined shapes sliding into a precise V, wings steady, spacing tight, as if the men inside had trained for years rather than months.
Oskar watched the formation climb, five slim shapes turning into dark strokes against the winter sky.
"Watch how it works," he said. "They don't throw bombs by hand. They don't guess."
His voice stayed flat—almost bored—because he wanted them to understand this was not a stunt. It was a system.
"They level out. They hold speed and altitude. The bombardier takes the sight, corrects for wind drift and ground speed, and releases on command. The bombs fall where the mathematics says they will fall."
The five bombers flew toward the test range: a barren rise of frozen earth marked by flags and painted panels—an imitation of a depot, a bridgehead, a supply dump. Something a general might pray to keep hidden behind distance and weather.
For a moment there was only air and cold.
Then the formation straightened.
From the ground, it looked almost gentle—five aircraft becoming unnaturally steady, as if the sky itself had locked them onto rails.
And then—faint at first, then unmistakable—came the opening of the bays.
Small dark shapes dropped away in clean sequence.
Not a scatter.
A pattern.
A sentence written in explosives.
A heartbeat later the range answered.
Detonations walked across the hillside in a tight, deliberate line—each blast feeding the next—fire and smoke and shockwave merging into one rolling violence. Earth and stone were thrown upward like surf, then collapsed outward in a spreading wave, as if the ground had tried to flee and failed.
The hill did not look damaged.
It looked erased.
When the sound finally finished arriving, nobody spoke.
Not because they were polite.
Because they had not just seen bombs.
They had seen precision—repeatable, organized destruction delivered from above at speed.
War no longer had to crawl.
War could simply appear.
Wilhelm II stood rigid, breath fogging in the cold, eyes locked on the smoke column still climbing into the pale sky.
He had seen artillery.
He had seen ships.
He had seen tanks.
But this was different.
This was the battlefield being reached without permission.
"Excellent," he said at last—quietly, with the tone of a man signing something he could not fully read. Then, louder, turning to Oskar as he had turned yesterday beside the tank tracks:
"We must have these."
He took a half step closer, as if proximity could somehow make the numbers smaller.
"How much?"
Oskar didn't hesitate.
"Not cheap," he said. "Thirty thousand Marks for a fighter. Eighty thousand for a bomber."
Somewhere behind them, a staff officer made a small sound—half cough, half choke.
Moltke's face tightened in that particular way cautious men had when they smelled a budget turning into a fire.
Tirpitz, who loved expensive things as long as they floated, looked as if he were calculating how many battleships this would steal from him.
Wilhelm II blinked once. Twice.
Then he did what emperors always did when presented with a miracle they wanted:
"We will purchase them."
Oskar raised a hand—not to refuse, but to steer.
"You can," he said. "But understand what you are buying."
He pointed toward the runway, the hangars, the fuel trucks, the mechanics, the tool carts, the stacks of spare parts lined like a second army behind the aircraft.
"These are not rifles," he said. "They are a system. Engines tuned daily. Crews trained for months. Ground crews trained for years. Fuel depots, spare parts, hangars, workshops, paved fields that can take weight in rain and snow. If the machine breaks and you cannot fix it, it is not a weapon—it is an expensive sculpture."
He let that hang for a beat, long enough for the eager faces to harden into something more sober.
Then he added, deliberately:
"And our production capacity is still low."
Wilhelm frowned. "Low?"
Oskar nodded. There was no pride in it. Only the blunt honesty of industry.
"Aluminium is available now—yes. But not in the quantities a true air force demands. Every sheet we hammer into a fighter's skin is a sheet we cannot spare elsewhere. The engines require precision alloys. The instruments require glass and fine machining. Even the propellers demand consistency we are still forcing out of factories that were built for wagons and steam pumps."
He tilted his head slightly, as if weighing a second problem beside the first.
"And the radios," he added. "They exist. They will be fitted. But radio technology is still primitive. Range is inconsistent. Reception is weak. Interference is everywhere. Half the time it will hiss like a snake and tell you nothing."
A few of the generals looked offended—as if Oskar had insulted the future itself.
Oskar did not care.
"That will improve," he said. "But it must be developed, standardized, trained. Until then, pilots will still rely on signals, flares, and discipline."
Moltke exhaled through his nose—the first sign of relief he had shown since the bombs fell. A slow build was a build he could budget. A slow build was a build he could explain to ministers without being stabbed in the back by arithmetic.
Tirpitz looked less relieved. Tirpitz saw every new branch of service as a hand reaching into the Navy's pockets.
But Wilhelm II—
Wilhelm II looked like a boy who had just discovered that the world contained dragons and that his family owned the eggs.
His generals were not much better. They watched the smoke over the test range like school children imagining victory parades: banners, medals, maps redrawn cleanly with ink and confidence.
Oskar saw it plainly, and for a moment something colder moved behind his eyes—not fear for Germany, but a faint, uneasy pity for anyone who would one day meet these machines from the wrong side of the sky.
Because it was not simply "advanced."
It was absurd.
These aircraft were not a few years ahead.
They were decades ahead—more than thirty years ahead of what the world was prepared to fight, or even understand.
A cavalry officer in 1912 could not "adapt" to a fighter doing six hundred kilometers per hour any more than a man with a spear could adapt to a machine gun.
Wilhelm's chest rose with a slow breath, intoxicated.
"No one can stop Germany now," he said—not as a boast, but as a conclusion.
The generals murmured agreement, already seeing conquests that did not exist yet.
In their minds, power demanded use.
It would be a crime, almost, to not do something grand with it.
Oskar did not share that hunger.
He did not dream of conquest.
He dreamed of deterrence.
He dreamed of a world that looked at Germany and decided, quietly, that war was no longer worth the risk.
So he forced the conversation back onto rails—production, logistics, doctrine—because rails were how you kept emperors from leaping off cliffs.
"We do this properly," he said. "Slow. Controlled. Strategic."
He turned slightly, letting them all hear.
"We start with small airfields—not showpieces. Working airfields. Each capable of holding at least one hundred aircraft, two hundred if expanded. Hardened hangars, workshops, fuel storage, and paved runways like this one."
He stabbed a finger toward the west on an invisible map.
"One near the Belgian and Dutch approaches. One further south, closer to France—near the Swiss line as well, so we can shift quickly."
Then his finger drifted east.
"This base covers the east. I will oversee the eastern network facing Russia."
A pause—another piece placed into the board.
"And if we must support Austria-Hungary quickly, we build a smaller field near their border. Not for vanity. For speed."
Wilhelm looked as if he wanted more. Faster. Immediately.
But the numbers were starting to do their work, and even he could feel the weight of infrastructure behind every aircraft.
Oskar continued.
"Each airfield begins with a balanced wing," he said. "A mix of fighters and bombers—enough bombers to strike, enough fighters to protect them."
He did not let it become fantasy. He made it sound like doctrine.
"Six bombers per field at first," he said. "A core. A hammer we can actually maintain. Fighters in larger numbers, because fighters are what keep bombers alive."
Moltke's eyes narrowed. "And the cost?"
Oskar's expression didn't change.
"That is why we do not fill the sky with F-2s and H-1s immediately," he said. "The expensive machines are your spearhead. The bulk must be cheaper."
He gestured back toward the older biplanes—the ones that had looked impressive yesterday, and now looked almost quaint beside the aluminium monsters.
"The F-1 biplanes," he said. "Buy those in quantity."
Some officers looked confused—almost insulted.
Oskar didn't care.
"They do not require aluminium," he said. "They are simple to manufacture. Cheap to repair. Easy to fly. Perfect for scouting, for patrols, for light suppression if needed—rifle fire, exposed infantry, columns on roads."
Then, most importantly:
"And they are perfect for training."
He let the word land like a weight.
"Without pilots, the F-2 is a coffin with an engine. Without trained mechanics, the H-1 is a luxury toy that dies on the runway. We build a pipeline—hundreds of men who can fly, navigate, repair, refuel, and coordinate."
He glanced at Wilhelm, at the generals, and saw the war-dreams still shining behind their eyes.
So he softened his voice—not into weakness, but into something like warning.
"If we grow this force properly," Oskar said, "then no one will want to fight us. They will look at the risk and decide it is madness."
Wilhelm's gaze remained bright.
In his mind, madness was something other people did.
Germany would simply win.
Moltke still looked pained at the thought of budgets bleeding.
Tirpitz still looked as if he were watching the Luftwaffe steal his battleships one Mark at a time.
But none of them argued.
Because they had seen the sky hunt.
And they knew—whatever their dreams of peace or conquest—Germany had stepped into a different century, and it would not be stepping back out.