Tyranny of Steel

Berengar stood in the middle of the marshal islands, which had been evacuated of all life except for a small number of German scientists and military personnel. In the middle of the island was a launch platform with an exceptionally large rocket.

As the head of rocket design within the German Space Program, Zara was naturally by her father's side, with a wide smile on her pretty face. Her wedding to Brandt was quickly approaching, and during this time she had made great strides towards creating a proper atomic propulsion rocket.

Zara was more happy than usual today, as she explained to her father exactly what he was looking at. Something which shocked him, perhaps more so than anything had ever done so in his life. The girl's alluring voice spoke aloud, explaining a brief summary about how this rocket functioned.

"Okay, so, Daddy, this is what Zara likes to call the Mjolnir Rocket! It is the first prototype that we have made of a proper nuclear propulsion rocket. Zara doesn't want to go into too much detail, but essentially the nuclear fission reactor generates an insane amount of heat, which is then transferred to the liquid propellant, that is then expanded and exhausted through a nozzle to propel the spacecraft.

As always, when handling nuclear material, we have used the utmost caution to construct this rocket, and have made sure that if something goes terribly wrong, that we are far enough away from any major civilization to cause any serious harm.

There is a fortified bunker from which we will be viewing the launch from, so even if this thing explodes, we will be more than safe from the effects. If this rocket works, then we are one step closer to landing on Mars! Zara dares to say, that if everything goes as planned over the coming decades, then it will be another fifty years or so, before we have established mining colonies on the surface of the red planet! So, are you ready to watch the Mj6lnir take off?"

Berengar looked over at his daughter's excited expression, before nodding his head in agreement with her words. He then pet her golden hair, which caused the woman to blush, before voicing his own excitement towards this project.

"Show me what you are capable of, Zara."

After hearing this, Zara wore a pretty smile and hugged her father before informing her team to send the rocket into space. And after a brief countdown, the launch had begun.

The rocket instantly began to take off from the marshal islands, and towards the sky above. There was a look of intense anxiety on Zara's pretty face as she watched the rocket climb higher and higher, each passing second felt like a lifetime for both the young woman and her father, as they watched the rocket continue to head straight for the barrier of space.

However, something went wrong, and just before the rocket could pass the Karman line, it detonated, creating a massive explosion within the atmosphere. This immediately caused Zara to curse out loud, in a way that she had never done so in front of her beloved father before.

"God fucking dammit! I swear to fucking christ! Just when I thought we had something fucking viable, it has to go and fucking explode! Fucking shit!"

Berengar looked bewildered at his daughter, who had so suddenly broken character, and when she realized this, she immediately put on cutesy display, in a desperate attempt to conceal what she had just said.

"What I... What Zara meant to say was oh noes! Daddy, Zara's rocket exploded!"

The young woman then reached out to her father for a hug while wearing a pouting expression on her beautiful face. Berengar had decided to totally ignore his daughter's sudden change in character, and instead hugged the woman, pretending that he had not seen a thing. Which caused her to smile as she nuzzled her pretty little head into her father's broad chest.

It was only after several minutes of silence passed that Berengar posed a question to the woman that dumbfounded her.

"So, has Brandt seen this side of you yet?"

A perplex look appeared in Zara's eyes, as she suddenly stopped hugging her beloved father, but it was quickly masked by her normal cheerful and childish facade, as she avoided the question entirely.

"Zara has no idea what daddy is talking about...."

Berengar chuckled when he saw this behavior, before informing Zara that she had nothing to worry about.

"Don't worry Zara, your secret is safe with me."

This only caused Zara to smile and hug her father once more, while expressing her familial love for the man.

"Zara loves daddy!"

Berengar did not really care what kind of masks Zara wore, instead he was more concerned with just what kind of damage such a catastrophic failure would have on the world's environment.

"Well... I suppose you should figure out just how much damage that explosion is going to have on the world. Believe it or not, a single nuclear detonation within the atmosphere can have long-term effects on the planet, and I would be seriously pissed off if after all the work I had done preventing the weaponisation of nuclear power, that we still end up with background radiation in all of our steel production..."

When Zara heard this, a look of horror appeared on her face, as she immediately yelled at one of her staff members to immediately research the effects that the nuclear detonation would have on the world.

"You heard the man! Get to work and find out an answer! ASAP!"

As the local task master of the German Space Program, nobody dared to disobey Zara's orders, especially when they considered the fact that she was perhaps the Kaiser's most favored child, and thus they immediately got to work searching for an answer to the question that Berengar posed.

Zara then assured her father that he would have an answer soon enough, before shooing him out of the facility and back to the Reich.

"Daddy, Zara promises to have an answer within a month's time, maximum, so just go back to your business in the Reich while Zara cleans up this mess."

Berengar chuckled and kissed his daughter on the forehead before doing as she suggested. It was only after he was on the jet back to the Reich that she began to tear her team a new one. She had never shown her father one of her failures before, and she was previously assured by her engineers that this rocket would function flawlessly.

Yet, it had blown up, and had potentially caused quite the disaster for the world. At least in terms of steel production. This was perhaps the worst day of Zara's life, as she was forced to clean up the mess she had made.

Berengar, however, did not hold a grudge against his daughter for her failure. After all, a functional nuclear propulsion rocket was something that had not even been successfully produced even in his past life.

The fact that the Reich now had a semi-functional prototype design for such a device, and only after a decade or two of the German Space Program, existing was beyond impressive.

The fact that Zara had been instrumental in its creation was more than enough for Berengar to be proud of her.

And though this test had resulted in a failure, it would provide valuable data for the later attempts that the German Space Program would make in the coming years. And the next time Zara attempted to launch a nuclear propulsion rocket, she would make damn well sure that, at the very least, the damn thing did not explode within the Earth's atmosphere.

Thus, the German Reich continued to invest heavily into the space industry, something which the United States of America had all but abandoned after defeating the Soviet Union during the great Space Race of the Cold War during Berengar's past life.

After all, Berengar was a forward thinking man, and he knew that the future of Germany was not Earthbound, but in the stars themselves. And though he would probably never see the day that humans began settling other worlds, much like he had failed to do in his past life, Berengar could take pride in knowing that he had set humanity on the path to achieve this, far earlier than they would do in that alternate timeline.