Alternate Histories: Skylark

By GeekSeven


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DOWNLOADED FROM
http://www.superwomenmania.com/storybank
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"Higher still and higher
        From the earth thou springest,
      Like a cloud of fire;
        The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest."

    - 'To a Skylark', Percy Bysshe Shelley


September 1940

Flying Officer Cecil Hawsley was manning the turret guns of a Boulton Paul
Defiant night fighter when he saw her.

The Defiant's design had proved to be fatally flawed when going up against
German fighters during the daytime, since it lacked maneuverability and its only
armaments were in the turret, which faced backwards. The Defiant was now used as
a night fighter, flying at an altitude below that of the German bombers and
(hopefully) raking their undersides with fire from the powerful twin machine
guns mounted in the turret.

Hawsley scanned the night sky carefully. The moon was almost full, which gave
him better odds of spotting suitable targets above him, but which also left him
and his pilot vulnerable to the guns of German bombers and escort fighters.

An explosion lit up a portion of the sky; anti-aircraft fire had probably made a
lucky hit on the fully-laden bomb bay of a German bomber and the enemy plane had
gone up like a roman candle. "Jack!" said Hawsley. "Turn her around, we've got
Jerries coming in above the river."

As the fighter turned to make a run beneath the approaching bombers, Hawsley
thought he saw something impossible out of the corner of his eye. Silhouetted
against the moon was the shape of a young woman, flying through the air; long
locks of hair flowed behind her as she moved to intercept the same group of
bombers that Hawsley's Defiant was heading for.

"Jack, did you see that?" asked Hawsley. "I thought I saw a girl skylarking
about in the air!"

The young pilot, an American volunteer, snorted. "I'm not falling for any more
of your practical jokes, Cecil."

Cecil craned his neck to scan the sky in the direction of the mysterious woman's
flight. "No, really. I saw..." He trailed off when he saw two German bombers
come apart and dive towards the Thames; somehow the wings of the large aircraft
had been torn away. "What the bloody hell is going on?"

*****

May, 1945

Conrad Meissner was nervous. He had once been a pilot in the Luftwaffe, but he
had been a prisoner of war in Britain since 1940. He had been treated very well
during his captivity and had been expecting to be repatriated soon. But the men
who had snatched him from his bunk, placed a sack over his head, and transported
him to this dingy basement room had not come to take him home.

Meissner sat on a flimsy chair in front of a plain wooden desk. A bare light
bulb hung from the ceiling, casting a harsh light over the dusty furniture and
boxes of damp, rotting files piled up a few feet behind him.

A thin man in a gray suit entered the room, holding a slim file. Meissner
recognized the type immediately: a British civil servant. The man sat in a far
more comfortable chair behind the desk and took his time getting himself
settled; if his intention was to make Meissner more nervous, then he was
succeeding. Clearly the British intended to interrogate him before letting him
return to Germany.

The man broke the silence, surprising Meissner by speaking perfect German. "Herr
Meissner, please tell me about the night of September 15th, 1940."

That was the night that Meissner's plane had been brought down over the Thames.
Meissner's heart sank a little. He had a pretty good idea what this was about
and he wanted nothing to do with it.

"My memory is a little fuzzy. That was a long time ago, Herr? I am sorry, you
did not tell me your name," said Meissner.

"No, Herr Meissner, I did not and I will not tell you my name. Please answer the
question," said the man.

"Germany surrendered months ago. Why are you interrogating me instead of letting
me return to my wife and children?" asked Meissner.

The man smiled. There were few things more terrifying than an Englishman when he
decided to smile. Meissner had seen one of them on that night five years ago.

"One war is ending," said the man in gray, "but another, larger war, is perhaps
about to begin. Suffice it to say that I need you to answer my questions and I
do not need you to ask me questions. September 15th, 1940. Remember!"

Meissner spat on the floor. Of course he remembered that night; he would never
forget. He had sworn never to speak of it, at first because he worried that
people would think he was mad, and later because he was afraid that they might
take him seriously.

"My aircraft was part of a bombing raid on the docks in the East End of London.
We were hit by anti-aircraft fire and went down in the Thames. I was captured. I
regret the part that I played in acts of aggression against the British people,"
said Meissner.

The man shook his head. "You told your navigator that you saw 'Die Lufthexe' -
the sky witch."

Meissner kept his mouth closed.

"The only way out of this room is for you to tell me what you saw," said the
grey man.

Meissner snorted. "You want to know what I saw?" he said, angrily. "I saw
destruction. I saw death. I saw the impossible. I saw the end of mankind."

He took a deep breath before he continued. "It was my first big raid on London.
Before that we had been concentrating on the RAF bases, but somebody decided
that we should destroy British morale by bombing their cities to dust. I did not
like it, but I was not in the habit of disobeying orders."

"We went in at night. I thought that all we would have to worry about would be
anti-aircraft guns and a few half-blind night fighters. I was not expecting her.
There was a full moon; we could see for miles. I was looking to my right. I
could make out two of the other Heinkels. Suddenly, one of them exploded. There
was no anti-aircraft fire, no barrage balloon: it just blew up. I thought I saw
a woman's figure silhouetted in the explosion, but I could not be sure."

"I was looking at the other Heinkel when it just dropped out of the sky. A
searchlight beam swung across the area and I saw the sky witch. She was holding
one end of a wing from a Heinkel, like she had torn it from the aircraft."

"She was young, blonde, beautiful. Like a Norse goddess. She wore a blue jacket
and a short - very short - blue skirt. Her legs were so long and beautiful, I
could hardly take my eyes off of them. I looked up, slowly; I admit that I
lingered on her chest for a little. I only saw her face for a second; our eyes
met, she smiled, and then she disappeared. I lost control of my aircraft. I
bailed out and deployed my parachute."

"I saw my plane beneath me, tumbling towards the ground. It had been torn into
two pieces; I think the sky witch did it. That is all I saw."

Meissner paused. "I will give you a little extra, though. Some of the other
Luftwaffe prisoners told stories about her. One of them was a gunner on a
Heinkel He 111 and he said that he shot her."

The man tried to suppress his excitement and surprise, but Meissner could tell
that this was new information that the man desperately wanted.

"What happened?" he asked.

Meissner laughed. "Nothing. He said that he made a direct hit. That she just
hung in the air, looking at him with those cold, blue eyes while a hundred
rounds bounced off her chest. I have seen what a 13mm machine gun can do to a
man and it is not pretty. She did not even flinch. Then she ripped the engines
off his plane."

"Can you imagine what that is like? The only thing keeping you up in the air is
a fragile piece of machinery and you find yourself face to face with a woman who
is completely free of gravity, who smiles in the face of a hail of bullets, and
who can tear your fragile machine to pieces with her bare hands. You are looking
for this woman, perhaps. I hope for all of our sakes that you do not find her."

"Why not?" asked the man.

"Because what hope is there for ordinary men when such a creature exists?" said
Meissner. "A woman who is as far beyond us in power as we are beyond ants. You
have studied the classics, I imagine: when gods fight their wars on the Earth,
it is mortals who suffer the most."

*****

June 1940

"...We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the
seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in
the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on
the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields
and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender..."

Winston Churchill's voice rang out from the large radio in the corner of the
workshop, the power of his oratory winning out over the indifferent reception
and the sound of welding. Samantha Quigley shut off her welding torch and looked
back at her father, Terrance Quigley, who was hunched over his drafting table at
the back of the room.

"What do you think of the speech, Dad?" she asked. "Pretty stirring stuff."

Terrance Quigley looked up from his designs and at his daughter. She was now 19
and she looked so much like her mother, who had died during childbirth, that it
broke his heart a little. Her blue overalls and work shirt were stained with
grease and her long, blonde hair was tied back in a red scarf.

"He has a way with words," he said, "but we are going to need more than words to
win this war."

"Do you really think we can win, Dad?" asked Samantha.

Terrance laughed. "If we can get this bloody engine working, then I think we
have a shot!"

"Point taken, Dad!" Samantha returned to her work. They were both working late,
as they had for many weeks.

They were in Terrance's workshop at Quigley Aircraft Engineering, which produced
the Quigley Quickfly: a cheap, quick to build and easy to fly monoplane that was
widely used as a training aircraft for new RAF pilots. The saying was that if a
trainee could not learn to fly a Quickfly in a week, he would never learn to fly
a Spitfire.

Terrance Quigley had submitted designs for a number of fighter planes, but none
had been accepted by the Air Ministry. If he wanted to contribute a combat
aircraft to the war effort, then he would have to make a breakthrough of some
kind to put him ahead of the larger manufacturers. The breakthrough had fallen
into his lap, or rather it had fallen into a field behind his house.

The strange meteorite sat in a cradle of copper wiring at the center of the
prototype 'Quigley Engine'. Terrance had been the first to discover that the
space rock could generate enormous amounts of power, but it had been Samantha
who had figured out a way of harnessing it to generate thrust.

Terrance had done his best to raise Samantha on his own, and she had grown into
a fine young woman who made him proud. When other girls her age had been
learning how to cook and sew, Samantha had been learning how to strip and
reassemble an aircraft engine from memory. She had a natural gift for
engineering that, he suspected, far exceeded his own. She was also a skilled
pilot and she frequently tested Quigley's aircraft.

"Samantha," he said. "What do you think about tightening the focus on the dorsal
accumulator?" Working with such an unusual power source had necessitated the
invention of new components and terminology unlike anything seen elsewhere.

Samantha thought about it for a second. "Yes. That might help the alignment
issues."

She reached for a spanner and carefully adjusted a bolt on the side of the
machine. A small shaving of metal dropped from the interior, through the cradle
of copper and struck the meteorite with less force than a feather. The meteorite
immediately exploded.

The prototype Quigley Engine was torn apart in a millisecond. The network of
components in the engine held together for just long enough to do their job of
focusing the energy from the meteorite in a single direction. That direction was
straight into Samantha Quigley.

Terrance Quigley looked on with horror; the events unfolded so quickly that he
barely had time to shout for his daughter before she was engulfed in a blue
inferno of alien energies. He saw her body fly apart and the pieces disintegrate
into dust, scattered in all directions.

As quickly as the incident had begun, it was over. The energies subsided,
revealing the ruins of the Quigley Engine and a large hole burned through one
wall of the workshop. Impossibly, Samantha stood in front of the ruined wall,
apparently unharmed. She looked at her father and said, "What..." and then
immediately collapsed.

****

It was late and all of the employees at Quigley Engineering had left for the
day. Terrance Quigley stood in the center of a large hanger, where a half dozen
Quigley Quickfly aircraft were in a state of partial construction. The one
completed aircraft was currently suspended in the air, just below the ceiling.
The plane was supported by Samantha, who floated in the air, holding the
aircraft above her head as if it weighed nothing.

Her motion became unsteady. "I am starting to lose it, Dad!" she shouted.

"Come down!" he replied. He pressed a button on his stopwatch and watched as
Samantha gingerly lowered herself and the aircraft to the ground. "Ten minutes,
Sammy!" he shouted. "You were up there for ten whole minutes!"

When Samantha had returned the aircraft to its spot, she ran over to Terrance
and carefully hugged him. "It felt as light as a feather," she said. "It is
amazing. I wish I could stay up for longer, though."

"You are getting stronger all the time, Sammy. Maybe the flying ability is like
a muscle that you have never used before. You just need to keep exercising it to
make it stronger," said Terrance.

Samantha had remained unconscious for five days after the accident. Terrance had
very quickly realized that there was something different about her when a nurse
had tried to take a blood sample and had been unable to pierce Samantha's skin
with the needle of the syringe.

The meteorite that had once powered the prototype Quigley Engine was now an
inert lump of rock. All of that stored energy was now inside Samantha, it
seemed.

"We should measure your strength," said Terrance.

Samantha picked up a thick steel bar and gripped one end firmly in her hand. She
squeezed hard and the metal distorted in her grip, she stopped when the bar
snapped into two pieces; the portion in her hand had been squeezed out like a
piece of fresh clay.

"Five seconds," said Terrance, consulting his stopwatch.

It had taken one broken force gauge for them to realize that there was no way of
accurately measuring how strong Samantha was, so they had improvised by timing
how long it took her to squeeze a solid steel bar. This had confirmed what
Samantha suspected: that she was stronger in the air than she was on the ground.
If she had been flying, then she would have been able to squeeze the same steel
bar in a fraction of a second.

The same was true of her invulnerability, it appeared. When she was on the
ground, she was extremely tough; but when she was in the air, she was completely
impervious to anything they had been able to get their hands on. It had been a
nerve wracking moment when Terrance had first fired a pistol at his daughter,
who had been hovering in the air in front of him, but the bullet had shattered
against her thigh. She said that the impact of the bullet tickled a little, but
caused her no pain and no damage.

The strangest thing was that the invulnerability extended to her clothing. It
was as if she projected a defensive shield that extended over her clothes.
Bullets were unable to penetrate her overalls when she was wearing them, but
when she was not, they appeared to be normal cloth. The same was true of
whatever outfit she wore.

"That is enough for tonight," said Terrance. "We shall conduct speed trials on
the morrow!"

*****

May 1945.

Matthew Beaton tightened the sash of his dressing gown and opened the door of
the small cottage that he shared with his wife. A thin man in a gray suit stood
on the path. The man smiled at Beaton.

"Squadron Leader Beaton? John Peacock: Ministry of Special Projects. I was
wondering if I could talk to you for a few minutes?" He said.

Beaton harrumphed. "I do not see why not, but stop calling me 'Squadron Leader'.
There are no squadrons for me to lead in my living room!" He shuffled to one
side to let the man in, putting his weight on his good leg and holding himself
up by gripping the door with his good hand. He had been shot down while on
patrol over France a year ago and had spent sixth months as a POW.

"Of course, Mr. Beaton," said John Peacock, as he stepped over the threshold
into the cottage.

They settled into two chairs in the sitting room and made small talk about the
progress of the war in the Pacific while Mrs. Beaton made them a pot of tea.
'Liberty Belle' and the new American supergirl, 'Amber Waves', were making
mincemeat of the once-feared Japanese war machine.

"So what does the Ministry of Special Projects need with a crippled old warhorse
like me?" asked Beaton.

Peacock leaned forward and spoke in a low tone that would not carry into the
rest of the house. "What can you tell me about the 'Skylark'?"

Beaton snorted. "The 'Skylark' is a stupid bloody fairy tale. Something Cecil
Hawsley invented to wind up the new recruits. No such thing as the 'Skylark'!"
he said.

"Really?" asked Peacock. "It was my understanding that you saw her."

"Harrumph," said Beaton. "I do not know what I saw, Mr. Peacock."

"Just tell me what happened in August 1940," said Peacock.

"What happened is that I made a complete mess of my second sortie," said Beaton.
"Got separated from the rest of my squadron with two 109s tight on my tail. I
was flying a Mark I Hurricane: solid piece of kit, turned on a sixpence, but
slow. I was not experienced enough to shake the bastards."

"This was close to RAF Hornchurch?" asked Peacock.

"Yes," said Beaton. "This was when the Luftwaffe were still going after the RAF
stations rather than bombing the cities. I was a few miles east of Hornchurch at
that point, I think."

"The 109s found my range and some rounds hit my left wing, which somehow stayed
in one piece. I thought I was done for, but all of a sudden they stopped firing.
I turned to take a look and saw both 109s spinning towards the ground, one of
them missing the right wing and the other missing the left. I assumed that they
had gotten too close and collided."

Peacock frowned. "What else did you see?"

"Look here," said Beaton, "If this is a trick to get me sent to Bedlam..."

Peacock lifted his palms up. "No, no, no," he said. "I just need to know what
you saw. This will go no further: I give you my word."

"Well, all right," said Beaton. "It was just for a fraction of a second, but I
thought that I saw a young woman hanging in the air, above the 109s, looking in
my direction. If the 109s had still been on my tail, then she would have been in
their path. Our eyes met for a moment and then she just disappeared. I still
think that I was seeing things. Heat of the battle, one too many high-gravity
turns; you know the drill."

"Was she wearing a blue jacket and a short blue skirt?" asked Peacock.

"No she was not," replied Beaton. "She was wearing a pair of overalls, like a
mechanic. I did hear a couple of chaps spinning yarns about the 'Skylark' later
on and they said she had long blonde hair, a blue jacket and a short skirt. The
girl I hallucinated had her hair tied up in a red scarf. I really do not give it
much thought. I mean, it is ridiculous! The idea of a young girl flying around
and bringing down German aircraft with her bare hands..."

Beaton trailed off as he heard what he was saying. Since the appearance of
'Liberty Belle' during the Arnhem operation the previous year, such things did
not seem so ridiculous after all.

"Bloody hell," said Beaton. "It really happened. It was her, wasn't it? The yank
supergirl?"

Peacock shook his head. "No, it was not her. 'Liberty Belle' was not active
until 1944." He rose to his feet. "Thank you for your time, Mr. Beaton. Please
do not repeat any of this conversation to anybody."

John Peacock was very satisfied as he left Beaton's cottage and returned to his
car. He felt that he was getting closer. Beaton's encounter was by far the
earliest sighting of the 'Skylark' that he had tracked down, and the fact that
she had been wearing different clothes was very suggestive. That dogfight might
have been one of the first times she had been in action. There were more answers
waiting for him in Essex, he was sure.

Peacock was part of Project Isis, which had been put together under the auspices
of the Ministry of Special Projects in order to create a British superwoman.
Recruitment had borrowed heavily from Project Ultra, the wartime code-breaking
effort at Bletchley Park. The 'science' of the German Ubermädchen project, as
contained in the hoard of documents seized from a fleeing German U-Boat by
British special forces, was a mixture of mathematics, ancient myth, quantum
physics and insane speculation. Picking it apart to find the truth of the matter
was just the kind of puzzle that the Bletchley cryptanalysts lived for.

While looking through the journals of one of the German researchers, John
Peacock had come across references from the Battle of Britain and the early
months of the Blitz to something the Luftwaffe called 'Die Lufthexe' - 'The Sky
Witch'. German pilots blamed this apparition of a flying, blonde-haired woman in
a blue jacket and a short skirt for bringing down a large number of Luftwaffe
planes, mostly bombers conducting night raids on British cities. Peacock would
have dismissed it as a myth, concocted by German pilots attempting to excuse
their failures, had he not stumbled across an RAF investigation into sightings
of the 'Skylark'.

The investigation had concluded that the 'Skylark' was either a hallucination
brought on by combat stress, or a tall tale told by veteran pilots to wind up
new recruits; but the RAF sightings matched up too well with the stories from
the German side. John Peacock was convinced that a supergirl had patrolled the
skies of Britain for three months in 1940, and he was determined to find out
what had happened to her.

Herr Meissner might have been right when he said that normal humans would end up
paying the price for the creation of superwomen, but the genie was already out
of the bottle. The Americans had superwomen, the Russians had captured German
scientists from the Ubermädchen project and were no doubt working hard to create
a Russian superwoman, there were still rogue elements of the 3rd Reich hiding in
South America, and god help them all, even the French were rumored to be working
on the problem. If Britain was to maintain her position in the world, then a
British superwoman was a necessity.

****

August 1940

Terrance Quigley was not used to being up and about so close to dawn. He rubbed
his eyes and tried to stay awake. Samantha had no such problem; since the
accident she had boundless reserves of energy. The only thing that tired her was
flying.

Samantha was on the other side of a low hill, a precisely measured distance of
two miles away from Terrance's position. At 6am exactly, Terrance started his
stopwatch. Shortly after, there was a deafening boom.

"Hello, Dad," said Samantha.

Terrance clicked the stopwatch and looked at it. "Six seconds," he said, in a
stunned voice.

"That is twelve hundred miles an hour," said Samantha. "I am fast!"

"You certainly are, Sammy," said Terrance. "How do you feel?"

"Good," said Samantha. "A little tired. It takes a lot more energy to fly fast
than it does to just hover in the air."

"That would make sense," said Terrance. "In so far as any of this makes any
sense." He slumped to the ground and sat on the grass, unconcerned that the cold
morning dew was soaking through the seat of his pants.

"Are you all right, Dad?" asked Samantha, concerned.

Terrance sighed. "Yes. I am fine. You are just impossible, is all. How can you
do these things? What are you going to do? You are beyond anything..." he
trailed off.

Samantha lowered herself to the ground and took her father's hand. "It is all
right, Dad. We will figure it out. I am still your little girl."

"A bulletproof girl who can fly faster than sound," said Terrance.

"There is that," said Samantha. "I can do good things with these abilities. I
can fight the Germans."

"I do not want to put you in danger," said Terrance.

"We are at war," said Samantha. "Just being in England puts me in danger.
Besides, when I am up there, nothing can hurt me. I am like a goddess of the
air." She smiled so Terrance knew that she was not taking herself too seriously.

*****

Samantha landed in the field behind Quigley Engineering with a loud thud,
sending a small shower of mud and grass flying in all directions. Somewhere in
the sky above her, the remains of two German bombers were tumbling towards the
ground, their airframes torn into uselessness by direct impacts with Samantha
Quigley's invulnerable form. Her overalls were spotted with mud from the ground
and soot from exploding German aircraft.

Her father ran over to her. "How are you doing, Sammy?" he asked.

Samantha sounded a little groggy. "Pretty good. That last one took it out of
me."

The time that she could spend in the air was increasing all the time, but it was
still limited, especially when she engaged in the high-speed maneuvers that were
necessary to avoid being spotted. The strategy they had settled on was for her
to target two or three planes flying in close formation. She would launch
herself into the air at 700 MPH, just below the speed of sound, and hit one or
two planes on the way up, her invulnerable body cutting through the steel
airframe like a hot knife through butter.

She would keep going for a little way and then turn and head back towards the
ground, hitting another one or two planes on the way. Then she would rest to
regain her strength before repeating the sequence. The Luftwaffe seemed intent
on knocking RAF Hornchurch out of the war, so there was no shortage of targets.
Samantha only hoped that she was making a difference.

"Take a long rest, Sammy," said Terrance. "I think things are easing off."

Suddenly, Samantha turned her head. "Do you hear that?" she said.

"I do not hear anything," said Terrance.

Samantha looked up and away into the distance. Her senses had been enhanced
almost as much as her strength and toughness. What would have appeared as tiny
blobs to her Dad easily resolved themselves to Samantha's powerful eyes as a
dogfight in progress.

"A Hurricane with a pair of 109s on his tail," she said. "He does not stand a
chance." She got to her feet and prepared to launch herself into the sky.

"No, wait!" shouted Terrance. "You need to rest before going up again."

"I have to help," said Samantha. In a flash, she was gone.

She was in pain as she approached the dogfight, flying at a mere 200 MPH. Her
reserves of energy were spent and she was flying through sheer force of will
alone. Spasms of pain shook her body as she pushed herself forward.

Samantha approached the pair of 109s from beneath, with her arms straight out in
front of her. She punched through the left wing of the first fighter, sending it
spinning towards the ground. She continued for 100 yards, then stopped in
mid-air, spun 180 degrees and flew down towards the second fighter.

She was so tired that she let gravity do most of the work, falling towards the
the plane's left wing like an Olympic diver. She did not have enough momentum to
punch through the wing, but the force of the impact was sufficient to snap it
away from the body of the aircraft.

Samantha rested in mid-air, floating while she caught her breath. Her head was
pounding and every muscle in her body was screaming out in pain; she thought she
would vomit. She looked over towards the Hurricane that the 109s had been
tailing. It was a little shot up, but looked like it would hold together long
enough for the pilot to get back to base. The plane turned and she saw that the
pilot was looking straight at her. She panicked and launched herself back
towards the ground where her father was waiting.

She landed with more than a thud this time. She barreled into the ground like a
human cannonball, sending debris flying for a hundred yards and carving out a
small crater in the field. She lay at the bottom of the crater, unconscious.

*****

After nearly 48 hours, Samantha Quigley awoke. She was in her own bed. Her
father was asleep in a chair to one side.

"Dad?" she asked, groggily. "What happened?"

Terrance Quigley woke with a start. He got up and went to Samantha's side.
"Sammy? How are you feeling?"

"Like I was trampled by hundred horses and then hit by a train and then fell off
a cliff and then the train fell off the cliff as well and landed on me," she
replied. "What happened?"

"You went up and took on a couple of Messerschmitts when you should have
rested," he said. "You crashed to Earth and you slept for nearly two days."

Samantha groaned. "Oh! I remember. The Hurricane pilot saw me."

"You should be more careful," said Terrance. "Maybe you should concentrate on
the night raids? The Luftwaffe is doing less bombing the in the daytime. I think
you have made a difference."

Samantha nodded. "Yes. I can see perfectly well in the dark. I need a different
outfit as well. Too many people from RAF Hornchurch have seen me in my
overalls."

Terrance was confused. "An outfit? Like one of those costumed adventurers in the
comic strips? Are you going to wear a mask?"

"I do not know," said Samantha. "I will think of something."

*****

May 1945

The station commander at RAF Hornchurch had little patience for John Peacock's
questions and it was only a direct order from the Marshal of the Royal Air Force
that had stopped him from throwing Peacock off his base.

"Yes, Mr. Peacock, I have heard all the stories about the 'Skylark' and I give
them no credence whatsoever," he said.

Peacock's investigation indicated that the 'Skylark' was usually spotted during
night raids; a woman's shape silhouetted against an exploding German plane or a
brief glimpse as she was caught in a searchlight beam. The few occasions when
she had been spotted during the day were clustered around RAF Hornchurch. Pilots
from this station had caught glimpses of her on a half dozen occasions during
daylight hours.

During the Battle of Britain, RAF Hornchurch was a sector station, responsible
for coordinating RAF activity from a number of other stations. This made it a
prime target for the Germans, but it had suffered very little damage during the
worst of the German attacks against RAF bases.

From the Luftwaffe reports, and from talking to former German pilots, he had
also plotted a rough vector that the 'Skylark' must have followed when flying to
intercept German bombers heading for London. That vector passed through this
area. Everything indicated that she was based nearby.

Peacock spread a map over the station commander's desk, much to his annoyance,
and began asking questions about various landmarks in the area around the
station. A few miles to the north east was a cluster of buildings and a small
airstrip.

"What is this?" asked Peacock.

"I do not know," said the station commander. "Taffy has been here the longest. I
can ask him."

Taffy was one of the mechanics who worked hard to keep the planes in the air. He
had been at the station during the darkest days of the Battle of Britain and he
also knew the surrounding area well.

"That is the old Quigley Engineering place," he said when asked. "They used to
make the Quickfly there."

"What happened?" asked Peacock. "Was it bombed?"

Taffy shook his head. "No. Never took a hit as far as I remember. It closed down
at the end of 1940. Quigley was going to move the factory to Coventry, I think.
Then his daughter Sammy - lovely girl - got sick. I think he just sold
everything and retired to look after her."

Peacock's head was spinning. He felt the sensation, familiar from his days as a
code breaker, of the pieces of a puzzle suddenly slotting together. Coventry:
the greatest mystery of the Blitz. He should have known there would be a
connection.

*****

September 1940

Terrance had insisted that Samantha take a night off for rest and recreation
before going back into the fray. He had pressed some pound notes into her hand
and told her to go out with some of the girls who worked at Quigley Engineering.

"Going out" meant having a couple of pints of Victory Bitter at the Kings Head.
The pub lay about halfway between the Quigley plant and RAF Hornchurch, which
made it popular with Quigley's workers and ground staff from the RAF base. The
pilots preferred to drink in the officer's club on the base itself.

The girls would have preferred to be flirting with young pilots, but they were
happy to flirt with the ground staff in a pinch. A young mechanic called
'Taffy', barely out of school, was their most popular target, since they could
always make him blush. Samantha tried her best to rescue him whenever she could,
but it required constant vigilance.

Samantha did not know much about fashion. If it had been up to her, she would
have worn her overalls to the pub. Instead she had been persuaded to put on an
old skirt and blouse that had seen better days. The other girls had dressed up
for the occasion, using wartime shortages as an excuse to shorten the length of
their skirts and to leave "missing" buttons on the top of their blouses
unreplaced.

Samantha was astonished when she saw the effect that this simple strategy had on
the men in the pub. Hardly any of them were looking at the faces of the women,
which were quite plain in many cases, because they were too busy looking at
exposed legs and the suggestion of cleavage. That gave her an idea.

When she returned home after having made sure that the other girls returned to
their lodgings safely and unaccompanied by men, she began sketching the design
for an outfit that would ensure that nobody ever remembered her face. She would
not even have to wear a mask...

She was no seamstress, having rejected any attempt to teach her how to cook,
sew, or otherwise learn any of the things that her teachers thought it was
important for women to know. Making her new costume was one of the hardest
things she had ever had to do.

She could see by starlight, she could navigate through the air with pinpoint
accuracy without a compass, and she could disassemble a German bomber with her
bare hands, but cutting fabric and sewing the pieces together into something
more stylish than a potato sack was harder than any of those things.

She had tried to use her mother's old sewing machine, which was powered by a
foot pedal, but she had broken it almost immediately. She had been concentrating
so hard on sewing a straight line that she had forgotten how strong she was. Her
foot had crushed the metal pedal into nothing, and snapped most of the
connecting cables.

She sewed the rest of it by hand, clumsily. The good thing about being
invulnerable was that when she pricked herself with a needle, it did not hurt;
the bad thing was that the needle would be ruined. She went through two dozen
needles before she was finished.

When she was done, she modeled her tight, long-sleeved blue jacket and short
matching skirt for her Dad, who looked totally aghast. The low cut of the jacket
emphasised her bust, and the high hemline of the skirt revealed a pair of legs
that seemed to go on forever.

"The skirt is very short! Is that even a skirt? That is totally inappropriate!
What is that?" he spluttered.

"The idea is that if I am wearing this, then nobody is going to be looking at my
face!" she said.

"So no mask, then?" he asked.

"No, but I'll wear my hair loose," she replied. "Even if somebody does see me at
night, they will not connect the glamorous maiden of the skies with frumpy old
Sam Quigley! I think the new improved Samantha is ready to take on the
Luftwaffe!"

*****

May 1945

John Peacock had picked through the abandoned buildings of Quigley Engineering,
looking for clues. There was not much to be found, but in one corner of a old
hangar he had found a bar of solid steel that had been crushed in somebody's
hand. He could make out fingerprints that had been carved into the metal.

A small amount of research had confirmed that Quigley Engineering had closed
down at the end of 1940 after Terrance Quigley had sold all of the assets to a
company in Coventry. He had been in Coventry on the night of November 14th,
negotiating the deal.

That was the same night that the Luftwaffe had launched its disastrous raid on
the city of Coventry. Over 500 German aircraft had left their bases in northern
France that night with the intention of turning Coventry into a firestorm of
destruction. Only 53 German aircraft returned, all from the first wave of
bombers, and the damage to Coventry had been relatively slight.

A number of possible explanations had been offered for the Luftwaffe's failure,
ranging from freak weather conditions or faulty munitions, to a disastrous
failure of the Luftwaffe's 'X-Gerat' radio direction finding system.

John Peacock was now positive that the truth was that Samantha Quigley had
intervened to ensure the safety of her father.

*****

November 14th, 1940,

Samantha Quigley lay on her back on the roof of the construction hangar at
Quigley Aircraft Engineering. She looked up at the night sky and relished the
relative calm of the night. She used her incredible vision to examine the
mountains of the moon.

For the past two months she had patrolled the night skies above London and
South-East England. Her endurance was increasing all the time and by
concentrating on the night raids she did not have to move as fast, or maneuver
as tightly in order to keep from being seen. Every night she was taking out more
and more German bombers. Every night the German pilots seemed more anxious. Half
of the planes were dropping their bombs miles short of their targets and turning
home, as if they were afraid that if they got too close to London then they
would become Samantha's next victims.

She wished that she had the stamina to fly across the English Channel and take
the fight to the Germans. She knew that Hitler had nothing at his disposal that
could harm her when she was in the air, but there was no way she could stay up
long enough to end the war. She was getting stronger all the time, though. Maybe
one day she would be able to fly to Berlin and teach Corporal Hitler a lesson he
would never forget.

Her father had decided to sell Quigley Engineering's assets to a rival firm
based in Coventry; he was in Coventry to negotiate the final details. He had
been so distracted by Samantha's activities that he had been unable to
concentrate on running the company properly, and it had suffered accordingly.
The plan was to turn Quigley Engineering into a training facility and base of
operations from which Samantha could carry out her one-woman war against Nazism.

She had continued to wear her new outfit, over the strenuous objections of her
dad, who was convinced that she would catch a cold going out like that. She told
him that she did not even feel the cold when she was flying through the thin air
at higher altitudes, but he was an old-fashioned man at heart.

Tonight, there was no raid on London. Samantha wondered if the Luftwaffe was
finally going to give up and leave Britain alone. Samantha's hearing was
sensitive enough that she could listen in on RAF Hornchurch, which was five
miles away, and monitor the radio operators. So far, most of the chatter
concerned the non-appearance of the raid they were expecting on London that
night.

Suddenly, Samantha sat bolt upright. "They're hitting Coventry!" said one of the
radio operators at RAF Hornchurch. "Sounds like it could be a big raid."

Her dad was in Coventry! Samantha launched into the air and headed north west,
moving faster than she ever had before. She scanned the sky in front of her,
testing the limits of her super vision to try and spot the German planes from a
hundred miles away. She saw a wave of bombers drop their munitions over the city
of Coventry and turn back towards occupied France; she saw more bombers
approaching the city.

At 1500 MPH, it took her only 4 minutes to reach Coventry. The cathedral at the
center of the city was on fire, as were several other streets; she could see
fire teams down below working hard to get the blazes under control, but even if
they succeeded there were hundreds more bombers on their way to add to the
conflagration. That was where Samantha came in.

She ignored the planes that had already dropped bombs and were returning to
France to refuel and reload. She angled herself perpendicular to a line of
bombers and flew at them, smashing through the fuselage of each and making the
minor course correction required to hit the next in line. Each bomber exploded
in turn as Samantha impacted and ignited the bombs in their bays.

Samantha had become expert at taking out German bombers in the most efficient
way possible. She could take out the "greenhouse" at the nose of a Heinkel He
111 with little more than a love tap, sending pilots and gunners tumbling to the
ground. She could punch through the wings or tail of a plane, sending it into an
uncontrolled dive. The problem was that a fully-laden, albeit damaged, bomber
could still do a lot of damage if it hit the ground almost intact. Tonight,
Samantha needed to completely destroy the planes in the air.

The most thorough approach was for her to hit a plane head on at high speed.
Invulnerable to any damage from the impact, she would fly through the length of
the plane, tearing it apart through the force of her passage through the
structure. As she passed through the bomb bay, she would fly into the munitions,
detonating them and completing the demolition of the plane.

A quicker method was to hit the plane side-on, aiming directly for the bomb bay
and relying on the detonation of a cluster of 2000 pound bombs within the narrow
confines of the aircraft to do her work for her. This was usually sufficient and
took less energy for her to carry out.

If Samantha saw any particularly large pieces of debris falling to the city
below, she would swoop down and intercept them, throwing them far to the west,
where they eventually fell into the Atlantic.

Samantha threw herself against the current wave of bombers with such ferocity
that little remained of them to fall on the city of Coventry. No more bombs hit
the city, giving the fire teams the respite they needed to gain the upper hand.

She turned in the direction of the next wave of planes that were still
approaching Coventry. She was tired, but she was also determined that none of
the approaching bombers would reach the city to continue the attack. With a
guttural roar, she put her arms together in front of her and streaked towards
the oncoming planes.

*****

Terrance Quigley was cold, tired and covered in soot. For an hour, he had
organized a bucket brigade to fight the fires that had threatened to destroy the
street containing the little guest house where he had been staying. The fire
brigade had bigger blazes to concentrate on, so they had been on their own, but
they had finally gotten things under control. It helped that no more fire bombs
had fallen on the city. Terrance had a pretty good idea of why that was.

He looked up at the sky, facing south. He saw a half dozen flashes in the sky,
one after another. Each flash was an exploding German bomber. He imagined his
daughter driving herself to keep attacking the oncoming planes, even though she
must have expended her reserves of energy long ago. He wished he could tell her
that he was safe, that she could rest. It probably would not have made any
difference; if he knew his daughter, then she she would be determined to see the
fight through to the bitter end. The Germans had inadvertently made the conflict
between them and Samantha personal and there was no way that they were going to
come out winners in that contest.

A whistling sound filled the air. Terrance looked straight up and saw a large
piece of debris - most of the front fuselage of a Heinkel He 111, falling
towards him. A flash of blue appeared from nowhere to intercept the chunk of
metal, which disappeared to the west.

"That's my little girl," said Terrance. "Be careful, Sammy. For god's sake be
careful."

*****

Samantha Quigley was way beyond being careful. She was running on instinct and
adrenalin, forcing herself to keep going and to ignore the shooting pains that
spasmed up and down her body. If she stopped moving for a moment, she suspected
that she would simply drop to the ground. There were still too many bombers
incoming for her to take the rest that her body craved so badly.

She was flying slower than she usually did in an effort to conserve what little
energy she had left. German night fighters and the gunners on the bombers had
spotted her a number of times, and had wasted little time in raking her with
their powerful machine guns. She may have been tiring, but Samantha was still
invulnerable to the German weaponry.

She approached a pair of Junkers Ju-88 fighter-bombers that appeared to be
acting as escorts for the heavier Heinkel He 111s. 8mm machine guns on the front
of each plane opened up. Samantha did not attempt to dodge the incoming fire;
the bullets might have been capable of tearing a Spitfire to pieces, but they
were less than gnats against Samantha's diamond hard skin.

The planes were flying close together so that they could more effectively
combine their fire against Samantha, not that it did them any good. She closed
the gap and grabbed one of the spinning propellers of the first plane. Samantha
had learned that when she needed to she could see fast-moving objects as if they
were almost stationary, allowing her to grab one blade of the propeller without
being hit by the other two. She held firm and the plane span over on its side;
with a little shove from Samantha it collided with its companion and the two
planes tore each other to pieces.

Samantha moved on to her next target without pause.

*****

"We must retreat! 'Die Lufthexe' is tearing us to pieces." The young
navigator/bombardier on board the Heinkel He 111 was panicking as he saw the
other aircraft in the current wave destroyed one after the other. Die Lufthexe
was a one-woman wave of destruction and the wave was coming closer.

"Scared little mouse!" mocked the gunner. "I will blast her out of the sky."

"Shut up, both of you," said the pilot. "If we turn back before dropping our
bombs on Coventry, then we will be shot when we return. The new orders are very
explicit."

"The new orders were given by people who think 'Die Lufthexe' is a myth," said
the navigator. "Does that look like a myth to you?" He pointed to a rapidly
approaching blue shape; they could just make out her long blonde hair streaming
behind her as she closed with their aircraft.

"Finally," said the gunner. "Come to me, my little sky witch!"

Despite the gunner's bravado, his guns proved no match for 'Die Lufthexe'. The
gunner screamed with frustration as he pumped dozens of rounds into the young
woman. The last thing he saw in his life was the flash of bullets exploding
harmlessly against the top of her head. Moments later, 'Die Lufthexe' plowed
through the cockpit of the bomber, through the torso of the unlucky pilot, and
into the bomb bay, where her passage ignited the fire bombs that had been
destined for Coventry. The bodies of the crew burned as they fell through the
air.

*****

In the end, the Luftwaffe's assault on Coventry ran out of planes and Samantha
ran out of energy. As the last of the bombers spiraled towards an empty field on
the outskirts of the city, Samantha followed. She fell, unconscious and
uncontrolled and struck the ground at terminal velocity, carving out a small
crater.

*****

May 1945

John Peacock entered the drawing room of the Quigley house, which he quickly
realized had been turned into a hospital room. There was a large bed, in which
lay the apparently sleeping figure of a young woman in her early 20s.

Terrance Quigley sat in a leather armchair next to the bed. He turned to face
Peacock when he entered the room, and Peacock was shocked at his appearance.
Terrance Quigley was clearly very sick. His figure was emaciated, his posture
was twisted and stooped, and his face was covered with virulent red lesions.

"Come in, come in. Sit down," said Quigley. He gestured to a second chair and
Peacock sat down. "I cannot offer to shake your hand; I am quite fragile and
prone to bleeding."

"Mr. Quigley, my name is..." began Peacock.

"Irrelevant," interrupted Quigley. "You are an interchangeable cog in the
machinery of state. You tracked us down, which shows some degree of initiative
on your part, though. Who did they put in charge?"

"In charge of what?" asked Peacock.

"Please do not treat me like I am stupid, Ministry man," said Quigley. "I may be
dying, but I still have most of my faculties. I know that Churchill must be hell
bent on making a British superwoman. Now I would like to know who you are going
to turn my daughter over to when your Ministry goons take her out of here. Who
did he put in charge?"

"Alan Turing," said Peacock.

"Hmm. Never heard of him. What is his field?" asked Quigley.

"Mathematics," replied Peacock.

"Could be worse," said Quigley. "Could be a lot worse."

"If you do not mind me asking," said Peacock. "What is wrong with you?"

Quigley laughed. "I am riddled with tumors, old chap. I have cancer in places
that they did not know could get cancer. I was in the same room as Samantha when
she received her powers. The same energy that made her super-powerful poisoned
me."

Peacock looked at Samantha, lying peacefully in her bed. "What happened to her?"
he asked.

"Coventry happened," replied Quigley. "She pushed herself to her limits and then
way past. She did not rest until the last of the German planes had been
destroyed, then she fell to earth."

"It took me two days to find her. A farmer outside the city had found her in his
field and taken her to the nearest hospital. She has been in a coma for four and
a half years."

Peacock was stunned. After that amount of time spent unconscious in a bed,
Samantha should have looked worse than her dying father. Instead, she appeared
to be in perfect health. Her muscles had not atrophied, her skin tone was
healthy and she appeared to be a normal weight. Her face should have been grayed
and sallow, but looked like a beautiful young woman in her early 20s, sleeping
peacefully.

"Is she still..." began Peacock.

"Super?" said Quigley. "Yes. She is still tough as nails. I am sure she will
wake up one day; I just hope that I am still alive to see it. If not, then I
will have to trust that you and your Mr. Turing will look after her."

"Why did you not turn her over to the military when she first gained her
powers?" asked Peacock.

Quigley snorted. "Because she is not a fighter plane, or a new kind of bomb: she
is my daughter. She is a human being and I did not want her to be turned into a
weapon. I need you to promise that you will not let them use her like that."

"I promise," said Peacock.

*****

July 1945

John Peacock was one of only a handful of mourners at Terrance Quigley's
funeral. The engineer had not lived to see his daughter awake from her coma.

A lot had changed in the last few weeks. Churchill was no longer Prime Minister,
having been swept out of power in a surprise landslide victory for the Labour
Party. The researchers at Project Isis did not yet know how high a priority the
new Prime Minister, Clement Atlee, would give to superwoman research.

The war in the Pacific was drawing to a close. Allied forces, spearheaded by the
unstoppable Liberty Belle, had swept the Japanese aside across a huge swathe of
the Pacific. The other American supergirl, Amber Waves, had destroyed every
Japanese ship and submarine that had dared to leave port, leaving the home
islands of Japan completely isolated.

Allied troops were gathering on the newly-conquered island of Okinawa, preparing
for their final assault. Everybody expected the Japanese to surrender rather
than face the prospect of Liberty Belle tearing apart the home islands, but then
everybody had expected the Japanese to surrender months ago, and everybody had
been wrong.

Project Isis was still a long way from being able to create a superwoman. Turing
had advanced their theoretical understanding of the strange energy that they
called 'Flux', which could turn an ordinary woman into an unstoppable maid of
might, and which would turn an ordinary man into a smoking pile of ash. They
knew enough to know that they would need a new generation of computational
devices to accurately map the ever-changing gradients of Flux.

Until then, Britain's only hope of obtaining a superwoman was for Samantha
Quigley, now sleeping peacefully in a bed at the mansion that had been converted
to the headquarters of Project Isis, to wake up.

John Peacock hoped that she did not wait too long.


[Author's Notes:

This story is set in the same universe as 'Liberty Belle' and 'Amber Waves'.

The historical attack on Coventry was far more devastating than my version. It
fell short of the firestorms that were seen later in the war in Dresden and
Tokyo, but most of the historic city center was destroyed or damaged beyond
repair.

Mythology says that Churchill knew about the impending attack but did nothing in
order to preserve the secret of Project Ultra. The evidence is that this is not
true at all. What is true is that British countermeasures against the German
radio navigation system failed that night, allowing the Luftwaffe to navigate
more accurately than usual.]