Count Alfred von Tirpitz stood at the mouth of the slipway like a man who had been shown a new religion and hadn't yet decided whether to kneel or burn it.
Inside the cavernous shed, the air was warm with industry—hot metal, oil, wet timber, and the sharp bite of fresh paint. Cranes crawled along rails overhead, chains creaking as they swung steel plates like pendulums. Thousands of workers moved across the hull and scaffolding in disciplined swarms, Prussian-blue uniforms bright against the iron. Hammers rang. Rivets snapped. Steam hissed somewhere deeper in the belly of the ship.
And in the center of it all lay the thing that made Tirpitz's mind refuse to sit still:
A warship with no teeth.
No turrets. No barbettes. No main guns at all.
Just a flat, endless deck—steel stretched from bow to stern like a runway stolen from the future and welded onto a hull.
Tirpitz took a step forward, then another, as if the ship might vanish if he blinked too hard.
"Oskar… is this truly our Navy's aircraft carrier?" he asked, voice low, incredulous. "It looks almost finished."
Oskar stood beside him with his hands clasped behind his back, calm as if he were admiring a new fountain in a palace garden instead of rewriting naval history.
"It's close," Oskar said. "Main construction is nearly complete. You can already see the flight deck's outline, even beneath the scaffolding." He tilted his head toward the far end where workers were laying plates in clean lines. "Commissioning should be mid next year. Once she's afloat, the carrier air unit comes aboard immediately for training."
Tirpitz's brows pulled together. "And combat readiness?"
"A year after commissioning," Oskar said without hesitation. "That is the target. Trained pilots. Trained deck crews. Coordinated operations. No shortcuts."
Tirpitz stared up at the hull again, the way a man stared at a storm cloud he suspected would become a hurricane.
"Your Highness," he said slowly, "is it truly as you claim? Will these ships change the course of naval warfare?"
There was skepticism in the question, but it was thinner now—less dismissal, more fear of believing too fast.
Oskar's mouth curved faintly.
"Marshal," he said, "when have I ever lied to you?"
Tirpitz didn't answer, because the answer was inconvenient.
Oskar continued, voice smooth and certain. "Carriers will become the main force in naval warfare. They will replace battleships as the spearpoint." His gaze remained fixed on the flat deck as if he could already see aircraft launching from it in neat waves. "So our focus must shift. Carriers—yes. But also carrier aircraft. You master both, and you do not merely win wars."
He looked at Tirpitz then, eyes steady.
"You decide who gets to have oceans."
Tirpitz's throat moved. The shipyard noise felt suddenly farther away.
A man in an engineer's coat approached—one of the senior constructors, face lined with fatigue, eyes bright with pride. He saluted crisply and began to explain, not with poetry but with facts—the language steel understood.
"These two ships," the engineer said, "are officially listed as Pioneer-class destroyers."
Tirpitz blinked. "Destroyers?"
"A label," Oskar said dryly, before the engineer could stumble. "Paperwork. Foreign observers are easily calmed by familiar words."
The engineer continued, unbothered.
"The lead ship is Pioneer. The second is Victory. Standard displacement is about 24,150 tons, and full load approximately 26,900." He gestured down the length of the hull, letting the scale speak for itself. "Overall length 219.3 meters. Beam 26.7 meters. Draft 8.15 meters."
Tirpitz's eyes tracked the numbers like a gunner counting shells.
"And her heart?" he asked.
"Six oil-fired water-tube boilers," the engineer replied. "Two geared steam turbine sets. Two shafts. Total output 56,250 horsepower."
Tirpitz did the math in his head automatically, the way sailors did when they were nervous.
"Speed?"
"Designed for 25.5 knots," the engineer said. "Trials have reached about 26 knots under favorable conditions."
"And endurance?"
"12,250 nautical miles at 18 knots."
Tirpitz made a sound that wasn't approval and wasn't disbelief—something in between.
"A ship that can cross the world," he murmured, "and bring an airfield with it."
The engineer nodded. "Crew complement—roughly 1,187 to 1,224, depending on the embarked air group and wartime additions."
Oskar cut in smoothly. "And before you ask—yes, we have armed her."
Tirpitz's gaze flicked to him.
Oskar spoke like a man indulging tradition. "Twelve 12.7 cm dual-purpose guns in six twin mounts. Light anti-aircraft guns—25 mm, and we will increase them as necessary. The ship's guns exist for survival, not dominance."
He paused, letting the truth land.
"The dominance is the air wing."
At that, the engineer's posture straightened as if this was the part he enjoyed most.
"She will operate 42 to 48 aircraft," he said. "A practical ceiling in the high forties. Fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers—mission dependent. A typical mix could be 27 fighters, 12 dive bombers, 9 torpedo bombers."
Tirpitz's eyes narrowed—sharp as a periscope.
"Dive bombers," he repeated.
Oskar's expression didn't change, but his tone did—slightly impatient, as if he'd already fought this argument in his head and didn't enjoy repeating it aloud.
"Not yet," he said. "Not in a mature form. Dive bombing demands structural strength and control systems that are still expensive to perfect. And I'm not interested in burning time for a weapon we don't strictly need right now."
The engineer cleared his throat and amended carefully, "The doctrine emphasis is currently—torpedo attack."
"Yes," Oskar agreed. "Level bombing against fast-moving ships is a gamble. Hit rates are poor unless you waste absurd amounts of aircraft. Torpedo bombers, however, are far more suited to naval targets."
Tirpitz crossed his arms, eyes still on the flat deck. "And the torpedoes?"
Oskar's smile returned—thin, knowing.
"Currently," he said, "our aircraft can carry 350-kilogram lightweight aerial torpedoes."
Tirpitz's reply came instantly, blunt as artillery.
"The power of a 350-kilogram torpedo is not quite enough."
"No," Oskar said, almost pleasantly. "It isn't."
He didn't deny it. He didn't excuse it. He treated it like a temporary inconvenience.
"That is why the aircraft research and development center is already working on a better torpedo aircraft," Oskar continued. "Our goal is 450-kilogram medium torpedoes. Bigger warhead. Better lethality."
Tirpitz held his gaze. "And until then?"
Oskar shrugged, as if the world's oceans were merely a chessboard.
"Until then, the light torpedo is limited against heavily protected battleships," he admitted. "But luckily Britain's capital ships are not as well-defended as people like to pretend."
His eyes glittered with something cold.
"We don't need to sink everything outright. If we merely damage their battleships—force them out of action—then their fleet loses its strength." Oskar's voice softened into certainty. "And then our battleships will pick off the rest of their fleet with ease."
Tirpitz's expression shifted—the old confidence returning, but now sharpened by a new kind of possibility.
He nodded slowly. "If carriers can cripple British capital ships before the lines meet…"
"Then the battle becomes simpler," Oskar finished.
The shipyard noise seemed to swell around them—hammers, cranes, shouted orders—like the future applauding itself.
Tirpitz exhaled and asked the question that mattered most to his office.
"Your Highness… once these two ships are completed, will they be handed over to the Navy?"
Oskar didn't hesitate.
"Of course." His smile widened, almost boyish—almost dangerous. "They are my personal donation to the fleet."
Tirpitz stared at him.
"A gift," he murmured, as if tasting the word.
"A gift," Oskar confirmed. "And a warning."
He looked up at the long, flat deck again—at the steel runway that would soon throw aircraft into the sky like thrown knives.
"I want the world's navies to feel a little fear," Oskar said. "Just enough to understand the age has changed."
Tirpitz's chest rose with the kind of conviction that had launched fleets and sunk fortunes.
"Your Highness," he said, voice rough with certainty, "rest assured—whatever conflict comes, I will use the Navy to its fullest. I will treat it with respect." His jaw tightened, the old iron in him returning. "And it will succeed."
For a moment there was nothing but the shipyard's roar—hammers striking like distant gunfire, cranes groaning overhead, chains singing as they carried steel through the air—and the vast, silent shape of the carrier waiting to be born.
Oskar turned his head slightly. He watched a crane lower another plate into place—slow, steady, inevitable—until it settled with a dull metallic kiss, as if the ship itself were swallowing a piece of destiny.
"Good," he said quietly. "Because when the shooting starts… the sea will belong to whoever owns the sky above it."
After that they spoke less and walked more.
They moved along the slipway's edge and then beneath scaffolding, climbing catwalks slick with winter damp, peering down into compartments still empty enough to echo. Oskar pointed out where fuel lines would run, where elevators would lift aircraft, where crews would live packed tight beneath the flight deck. Tirpitz listened like a man forcing his mind to expand to fit a new kind of war.
Two carriers. Two moving airfields. Two knives aimed at the heart of the old naval order.
It took time for a truth like that to settle.
By the time the tour was done, the sun had dropped low and red beyond the warehouse beams. The December cold crept back in through every seam of wool and leather. Somewhere near the gates, a whistle shrieked—long, sharp—signaling the end of another shift.
The shipyard did not fall silent, not truly.
It simply exhaled.
Men climbed down from scaffolding in careful lines. Tools were gathered and wiped. Crates were latched shut. Lamps flickered on beneath the half-finished hull like stars waking under a new sky.
Tirpitz remained where he was, staring up at the carrier's flat deck as if trying to memorize its shape before doubt could return.
Oskar didn't rush him.
Some visions needed time—like eyes adjusting to darkness.
At last, when even Tirpitz's breath began to show thick in the cooling air, Oskar spoke again—not to persuade, not to instruct, but to close the day.
"You understand the basics," he said evenly. "Doctrine will come later. Exercises. Failures. Arguments. That's inevitable."
He glanced once more at the carrier, then turned away as if turning a page.
"For today, this will be enough."
Tirpitz nodded—slower than usual, heavier.
"Yes," he said. "Of course, I understand."
There was no ceremony after that. No toast. No flourish.
Oskar said goodbye to Tirpitz, and a brief word to the yard superintendent, exchanged a practical handshake with the chief engineer, and left as quietly as he had arrived—already thinking in schedules, tonnage, and years.
By nightfall the royal train was pulling out of Danzig, steam rolling low across the rails as it turned south. The lights of the shipyard faded behind them—first a glow, then a smear, then nothing at all but darkness and the steady rhythm of wheels.
In his compartment, Oskar finally allowed the tension to drain out of his shoulders.
For once, he slept.
Not the shallow sleep of a man braced for alarms, but the heavy, satisfied kind—earned.
Because somewhere behind him, under cranes and lamps, the future was still being welded together.
And for a few hours, he could let it work without him.
---
The train's rhythm held steady beneath him, a gentle iron heartbeat—wheels on rails, rails on winter earth. The carriage was warm, quiet, faintly scented with polished wood and wool. Outside, the night swallowed fields and villages whole, broken only by occasional lamps and the distant orange bloom of factories working through darkness.
Somewhere in the early hours the snow began.
Not the heavy kind that smothered a country and demanded shovels, but a light, dry fall—flakes that drifted lazily, dusting rooftops and hedgerows like powdered sugar.
When dawn finally came, it revealed a Germany that no longer looked like the one he had inherited.
Berlin met him in winter grey and white. Frost traced the edges of stone and iron. Trees stood bare along the avenues, orderly as soldiers, their branches black against the pale sky. And beneath the convoy's tires the city no longer felt like mud and cobbles and horse waste—it felt modern. Asphalt ran clean and even, carrying the weight of machines without complaint.
His convoy moved like a disciplined organism: a Muscle Motors A-Class at the center, Eternal Guard vehicles flanking it with practiced precision, motorcycles flowing ahead and behind like dark insects skimming over the street. Heads turned as they passed. Windows opened. People paused mid-step.
But the city's true movement wasn't the convoy.
It was the children.
They were everywhere.
Whole columns of school groups marched along the sidewalks toward buildings that hadn't existed a decade earlier—new schools with cleaner windows, wider doors, better heating, and the faint smell of chalk and soap instead of rot. Their uniforms were neat and standardized: deep Prussian-blue coats, scarves tucked high against the cold, caps pulled low over bright faces. Boys wore tailored jackets and long coats that made them look like miniature clerks or junior officers; girls wore thicker dresses beneath shorter winter coats, skirts heavy enough to hold warmth without stealing movement.
And many of the girls wore the new ear-warmers—padded bands that sat snugly over the ears, leaving hair loose and faces uncovered. A small invention, almost ridiculous in its simplicity, and yet it changed a winter morning completely. No tangled caps. No flattened curls. No complaints of aching ears. Tanya had insisted on that part: warmth without ugliness, practicality without surrender.
Adults were there too—of course they were—but they felt fewer, almost diluted by the tide of youth. Policemen patrolled in crisp lines, some stationed in the middle of busy crossings like living signals, turning traffic with flags and sharp hand motions. It wasn't easy work; the cold bit through boots and gloves, and the constant attention looked exhausting. But the rhythm held because another officer always waited nearby, ready to switch in before fatigue became a mistake.
Still, what struck Oskar wasn't order.
It was the imbalance.
The adults moved with purpose—workers heading for factories, clerks toward offices, women on errands, men hauling crates from trucks—but they did it through a city that felt… younger than any European capital had a right to be.
And not only with schoolchildren.
The streets were thick with toddlers—small bundled shapes tugging at gloved hands, wobbling along beside mothers who moved with practiced patience. Infants filled prams in every direction, faces pink and angry, crying as if competing for a prize. The noise should have been unbearable.
Instead, the city had adapted.
Men on their way to work didn't scowl the way they once might have. Many simply stepped around prams without complaint. Some even stopped—briefly, awkwardly—to help a mother adjust a blanket or lift a dropped toy. It created small public moments of kindness everywhere: quick, ordinary scenes that would have been rare in the old Berlin, back when life was harsher and people had less time to pretend they were gentle.
Germany had tilted young.
Its center of gravity was not in ministries anymore, not even in factories.
It was in classrooms.
In homes.
In prams.
In the endless, stubborn noise of children who had arrived in numbers no one in Europe could ignore.
As the car slowed near a school crossing, the nearest groups noticed him.
The reaction rippled outward—first a pause, then smiles, then the salute.
Fists to hearts. Backs straight. Faces bright with something that wasn't fear and wasn't obedience, but pride.
A few younger ones waved instinctively, like children do, only to be corrected by older boys who snapped their own hands down with stern seriousness, forcing the proper gesture instead. Even that made Oskar's mouth twitch.
He lowered the window and returned the wave anyway—once, then again—the winter air biting at his knuckles. The convoy rolled on, leaving the children behind, their voices already returning to chatter and argument as if history had only passed through and not stopped.
Oskar leaned back and watched Berlin slide by.
Four years.
That was all it had taken.
In 1908, Germany had stood at roughly sixty-two million—after the exodus, after the laws, after the upheaval. People had panicked then. Ministers had whispered about labor collapse. Foreign newspapers had written gleefully of a nation hollowing itself out, predicting Germany's decline as if it were a fact already printed.
They had been wrong.
The empty houses had filled.
The vacant jobs had been claimed.
Ethnic Germans had returned from abroad in numbers no ministry would have dared forecast—drawn home by wages, housing, safety, and by something harder to measure but stronger than money:
Hope.
The feeling that Germany had stopped apologizing for existing.
And beneath it all, the births had come.
Not a trickle.
A surge.
Tax structures that rewarded children. Housing priority for families. Safer work. Cleaner air. Cheaper food. Maternal leave that actually meant something. Infant mortality cut down year by year. Schools expanding faster than bureaucrats could comfortably manage.
And above all—example.
Germany had not been persuaded into this new shape by pamphlets or sermons alone. It had been pulled into it by a man who refused to live like a sterile symbol. Oskar did not stand on balconies preaching "family values" while keeping his own life clean and distant. He did the opposite: he made his private life impossible to ignore, and then he made it work.
He had taken Anna—widowed, already a mother—and raised her children as his own without apology. He had married three women publicly, and he had filled the palace with laughter, noise, quarrels, and the constant motion of small hands and small feet. For a nation trained to see princes as porcelain, it was shocking.
For a nation desperate for a future, it was intoxicating.
The New Dawn had grown in the cracks between law and need. It was not "official," not in the clean administrative sense—yet it spread faster than anything official ever did. Its priests spoke the language people understood: Old Testament certainty, covenant, duty, fruitfulness. They preached that Germany's strength was not only steel and ships, but blood—children—continuity. And when men listened, they didn't only listen with their ears.
They acted.
In some places, quietly at first, a new sight became less rare.
A man walking through a market with two women at his side—one older, one younger, or sometimes both young, sometimes both worn by life. A widow who had refused to become a burden. A girl who had refused to become desperate. A household stitched together the way households had always been stitched together in hard times—except now it happened with ceremony, with blessings, with a kind of sacred permission that made it feel less like sin and more like survival.
Not every man did it.
Not every woman accepted it.
But enough did that it became visible—an undercurrent rising toward the surface of German life.
And it mattered most for those who had been left stranded by the exodus.
There were more women than there had been before. Fewer young men in some districts. More widows. More girls who would have been forced into quiet poverty if the old rules held.
New Dawn offered them a different door.
Not always romantic. Not always gentle. But a door nonetheless.
And in a Germany that had decided children were not a private hobby but a national resource, those new households were praised rather than punished—as long as they were loyal, lawful, and productive.
Yet even that had limits.
The Empire's citizenship laws did not soften merely because people married or gave birth.
Germany had become generous in work and housing… and merciless in belonging.
Foreign women who stayed—whether by choice, fear, or love—could build lives here, yes. They could marry German men. They could bear German children. They could speak German, attend church, work, pay taxes, and live quietly inside the nation's rising prosperity.
But they were still watched.
They carried the stamped reality of guest status—ten years of proof demanded in advance.
Marriage did not guarantee citizenship.
Children did not guarantee citizenship.
Not for the mother.
Not even for the child.
Only time did.
Only loyalty did.
Ten years of conduct. Ten years of language. Ten years of culture, law, church, and visible integration. And only then—only then—did the state decide whether a person was truly German… or merely tolerated.
It was harsh.
But it created a strange kind of clarity.
Those who stayed understood the rules. Those who wanted belonging earned it the hard way. And those who could not endure it left.
So the nation's growth came in two streams at once:
Ethnic Germans returning from abroad, pulled home by wages, safety, pride, and the sense that Germany had stopped apologizing for existing—
…and a second stream, quieter and more conditional: the guests who remained, building families under the shadow of the ten-year judgment.
And beneath both streams, the births came.
Not a trickle.
A surge.
Tax structures that rewarded children. Housing priority for families. Safer work. Cleaner air. Cheaper food. Maternal leave that meant something. Infant mortality cut down year by year. Schools expanding faster than bureaucrats could comfortably manage. Mechanization racing to keep up as bodies multiplied faster than jobs could be invented.
Even Oskar—watching it unfold in real time—had not fully anticipated the scale.
Nearly two million added each year.
And now, by the end of 1912, Germany stood near seventy million—surpassing the growth that history had once promised her.
The numbers were real.
The census did not lie.
But the age pyramid told the deeper truth: a swelling at the base, millions too young to work, too young even for school. A future deferred, not denied. A demographic weapon that would not mature until the 1920s—
—and then would arrive all at once.
There were costs, of course.
Housing pressure. Food logistics. Classrooms packed tight. A workforce strained in the short term as automation and mechanization raced to keep pace with bodies that had not yet grown into labor.
But Oskar accepted that gladly.
A young nation was a dangerous nation—if guided poorly.
A young nation was unstoppable—if guided well.
Factories now needed fewer hands, not more. Machines carried the weight—lifting steel, hauling goods, performing tasks that once broke men down piece by piece. Work became safer. Slower to kill. Easier to return to after injury.
And around the edges of the city—along roads, between apartment blocks, beside rails and workshops—green returned. Not ornamental gardens meant to impress visitors, but fruit trees, berry bushes, edible plants grown with intention. Food that belonged to the people. Food that waited patiently for hands that needed it.
No one starved because a harvest failed.
No one went hungry because a factory closed.
Germany had not grown soft.
It had grown resilient.
The car turned toward the palace district, tires whispering over clean pavement as snow continued to fall. Flakes settled on stone and iron, on bare branches and lamp posts, softening the city without weakening it.
Oskar watched it all pass by and allowed himself one quiet certainty.
Britain still counted ships.
France still counted alliances.
Russia still counted men.
Germany, now, was counting generations.
And generations—once set in motion—were very difficult to stop.