War and Peace: A Pokémon meets Silent Service Fic.

Author's note: For those of you who know a little about me, here we go. I've been suppressing a desire to write something like this somewhere for awhile. Just recently, I came upon an old, abandoned fic with a very smiliar premise. I was disappointed to see that while it was well done, it had stopped very early on. I decided that I would like to give it the chance it didn't get before. While all of the below writing is original, I cannot claim credit to the idea. I suggest looking at .net/s/4564869/4/ for the old writing if you wish.

Dedicated to the 52 Still on Patrol: Pride Runs Deep

Characters will be introduced by chapter of appearance.

Dramatis Personae

Crew of the Killifish

Lieutenant Commander Robert Clarkson, Commanding Officer

Lieutenant Harvey Bennett, Executive Officer

Lieutenant Anthony DiCamaro, Engineer

Lieutenant Richard Millunzi, Navigator

Ensign Jeremy Watson, Weapons Officer

08 April 1945

100nm Southeast of Kyushu

Territorial Waters of the Empire of Japan

The sun was just dipping below the western horizon as Lieutenant Anthony DiCamaro climbed the ladder up the inside of the conning tower to the bridge to relieve the watch. The ship, the Balao-class submarine USS Killifish, was cruising northward on the surface at a steady speed of eight knots, heading for the last remaining shipping channels of the war.

The off-going officer of the deck, Lieutenant Richard Millunzi, carefully scanned the horizon ahead with his binoculars, searching for any sign of traffic as the twilight deepened. "Night orders have us heading due north 'till midnight. Captain thinks that the Japs might try to send out a convoy."

DiCamaro grunted an acknowledgement as he began scanning the horizon as well. "Any contacts so far?" he asked.

Millunzi shook his head fractionally. "Nothing on radar or visual. Seas have been pretty calm; weather looks like it'll be clear for the night. Should be an easy watch."

Through the hatch below, they heard the faint echo of the ship's announcing system. "Duty section two, relieve the watch. Duty section two, relieve the watch."

The Killifish had been at sea for two weeks after heading east from Midway on the twenty-fifth for the fourth patrol of the year. Responsible for sinking enemy shipping, the Killifish had been sent to the southern end of the Japanese home islands to hunt the steadily dwindling merchant ships that braved increasingly hostile waters.

DiCamaro shook his head. The Japanese had to know by now they were dead; it was over. The fact that the Killifish was two weeks into a patrol without sighting a single convoy was testament enough that the war was over. The Japs didn't have ships left to send out—the islands were effectively blockaded. While it was frustrating to not be able to find anything, it was as hopeful a sign as possible that they would soon be going home for good.

Millunzi pulled the binoculars from around his neck and handed them to DiCamaro. He reached for the sound-powered bridge circuit. "This is Lieutenant Millunzi; Lieutenant DiCamaro has the deck."

DiCamaro took the talker in his turn. "This is Lieutenant DiCamaro; I have the deck. Belay your reports."

Millunzi smiled amiably. "See you in a few, Tony," he said before descending down into the submarine. DiCamaro nodded his acknowledgement before returning his eyes to the horizon. The next six hours would be his.

888

DiCamaro yawned. With an hour to go until midnight, the seas were still as clear of shipping as they had been when he had started his watch, and the risen moon had illuminated barren seas. It looked as if the skipper's hunch had been wrong. Shifting his feet, he tried to settle into a more comfortable position on the bridge. Five hours was a long time to stand.

The bridge comm crackled. "Sir, we've got a radar contact on the SJ unit, bearing three-three-zero, range one thousand yards."

DiCamaro instantly swung his head to the bearing, trying to see if he could make out the distant shape through the gloom. Raising the binoculars to his eyes, he scanned the bearing again. A radar contact at a thousand yards should have been visible, but the fact that it had taken that long for the radar to detect it meant it must be small. "What's the speed?" he asked.

The phone talker's voice came back sounding confused. "Radar lost the contact at nine hundred yards, sir."

That was enough for the lieutenant. "Man Battle Stations Torpedo!" he ordered over the circuit. "Left standard rudder, steady on course three-three-five." A chorus of acknowledgements greeted him as the battle stations alarm started ringing in control. DiCamaro was fully alert, his eyes straining for any sign of the contact. If it was a Japanese sub, it could have submerged, which would explain the loss of contact.

From behind him he heard the sound of booted feet on the conning tower ladder. A minute later, the captain, Lieutenant Commander Robert Clarkson, was on the bridge. "What is it?" he demanded.

DiCamaro didn't take his eyes from the sea in front of them. "Sir, we had intermittent radar returns from a close contact. It might have been a Jap submarine."

Clarkson scanned the seas in front, not seeing anything. "It's a good drill if nothing else," he commented. "We'll run with it." He started to give the order to clear the bridge when a flash in front of the submarine caught his eye.

"Radar has it again!" the call came. "Range four hundred yards and closing!" Clarkson didn't even acknowledge the report, his eyes never leaving the eery white cloud that had materialized in front of them. DiCamaro dropped his jaw, completely mesmerized by the billowing, ghostly white shape directly in front of them

Clarkson snapped out of it sooner. "Left full rudder!" he ordered. "Starboard engine ahead full!" Behind the submarine, the water at the stern began to froth violently as the rightmost propeller spun at full power. Slowly but surely the bow began to swing away from the apparition.

The white shape vanished once more to the officers' surprise, but this time it reappeared directly ahead, almost touching the submarine. Clarkson shouted in horror, slamming the collision alarm before bracing himself for the inevitable crash. DiCamaro threw up his hands, yelling something, but in the confusion it went unheard. Then the apparition enveloped them and the world went black.

888

Clarkson opened his eyes hesitantly at first, looking up from his bracing position to find the situation completely different than it had been seconds before. The sun was shining down brightly overhead on an azure plain, lighting up what should have been the darkest time of the night. The ghostly cloud had disappeared without a trace, and there had been no gut-wrenching collision to mark their passage through it.

He looked over to his left. DiCamaro had stood back up, blinking his eyes as if in disbelief as he looked around. The lieutenant turned to him. "What the hell just happened?" he asked.

Clarkson shook his head. "I have no idea. I've never seen anything like that before." He turned his head to see that the Killifish was still turning to the left. "DiCamaro, steady us up on an easterly course, bare steerageway, until we can figure this out."

The younger officer nodded and grabbed the bridge circuit. "Control, bridge. Steady as she goes, all engines ahead one-third." The submarine reluctantly eased out of its turn and began running straight nearly due east at about four knots.

Clarkson, still utterly confused, turned to go belowdecks and confer with the control room crew and the other officers. He was starting down the ladder when one of the lookouts piped up. "Object in the water at ten o'clock, sir, about a hundred yards. Looks like…what is that?"

Clarkson climbed back up and followed the lookout's pointing arm. DiCamaro already had his binoculars on it.

"I'll be damned," the younger officer muttered. "I've never seen anything like it. Is it some kind of sea serpent or something?" The creature looked like something out of the pages of H.G. Wells or some ancient mythology—it had the body of a turtle, the fins of a sea lion, and the neck of a giraffe. The creature's coloration was unlike any other marine animal DiCamaro had seen—almost otherworldly.

Clarkson raised his own binoculars to his face. "Hell if I know," he replied. "As long as it doesn't give us any trouble, I'm fine with that." Lowering the binoculars, he turned to DiCamaro. "Maybe it's just me, but to you have the feeling that maybe we aren't where we think we are anymore?"

"Mast on the horizon," the second lookout announced before the lieutenant could reply. Once again, both officers swung around and looked along the direction of the seaman's arm.

"Sure as hell," Clarkson muttered. "Coming this way." He turned to DiCamaro. "Clear the bridge, rig for dive."

"Rig for dive, aye." DiCamaro was going down the bridge hatch in seconds. Clarkson looked up at the men on the top of the tower. "Lookouts below!" he thundered. Raising the binoculars back to his face, he took one last look at the distant ship, making sure he had interpreted the contact's movement correctly, before hitting the diving alarm twice.

"Dive, dive!" he ordered before following the lookouts down and dogging the bridge hatch closed. Sliding down the conning tower ladder into control, Clarkson felt the ship begin to angle downwards as the ballast tanks flooded and the hydroplanes moved into the diving position.

"Robbie, what the hell is going on?" asked Lieutenant Harvey Bennet, the executive officer.

"Later," Clarkson cut him off. "Mr. DiCamaro, take us to periscope depth. Mr. Watson," he said to the ensign manning the torpedo data computer, "make ready all bow tubes with the exception of opening outer doors."

"Aye, sir," they both answered. DiCamaro called down the ordered depth to compartment immediately below the conning tower where the diving officer had the planes. The phone talker relayed the other orders to the torpedo room.

Clarkson gave two thumbs up to Bennett, signaling him to raise the search periscope. Kneeling, he brought his eye to the viewport and swung the periscope in an arc over the front of the submarine. "Deck's awash," he announced as the first waves crashed against the superstructure. "Good dive. Fast."

"Passing five-zero feet," the diving officer announced.

Clarkson turned the periscope towards the last bearing of the contact and rotated the handle, swapping in a high-power lens. "Mark this bearing."

Watson glanced at the bearing indicator. "Two-nine-five."

"Angle on the bow, port thirty." Clarkson frowned as he studied the ship. "I'll damned if I've ever seen anything like it, though." He squinted, trying to see if there was anything recognizable about the ship. "For a second it looked like a Buenos Aires Maru-type, but…" He pulled his head back and turned to the XO. "Take a look, Harve."

Bennett moved over and put his eye to the glass. "It's not painted in camouflage," he said. "Looks like a passenger liner. But what would a passenger ship be doing here?" He moved his head from the viewer and looked up at Clarkson. "Troop transport?"

Clarkson shook his head. "Where would they be sending troops? And if it's a transport, where's the escort?" He sighed. "This is just getting weirder."

"You want to start a run on it?" Bennett asked.

"No." Clarkson shook his head before turning to DiCamaro. "Lieutenant, you have the deck. Secure from battle stations and have all off-duty officers muster in the wardroom. Keep tracking that passenger ship but don't come any closer than a mile."

"Aye, sir." DiCamaro answered. "Secure from Battle Stations Torpedo," he announced on the internal communication circuit.

888

Thirty minutes later, Clarkson sat at the head of the table with the assembled wardroom members. He cleared his throat. "Gentlemen, we're here now because the ship's chrono says it's one in the morning and the sun is in the middle of the sky. Last night, we moved into some kind of cloud, or object, or God knows what, and now I'm…well, I'm not even sure we're in the Pacific anymore."

He told them about the other things that had happened—spotting the sea creature and sighting an oblivious passenger transport sailing through the middle of what should have been an extremely dangerous war zone. Around the table, the different department heads muttered to themselves.

Lieutenant Millunzi raised a finger. "Captain, before we submerged the RBO set picked up a broadcast on medium-wave AM, around a thousand kilocycles, from the presumed direction of the Japanese home islands. The signal was a little spotty, but it sounded like English."

Clarkson thought for a moment. "The closest land mass we can verify our position to is Kyushu. I had intended to head that way before, and the signal you picked up just reinforces that intention. When night falls, we'll surface and track that AM broadcast, and see if we can pick up anything on the HF-DF."

Ensign Watson frowned. "Sir," he began, "How could any of what you've told us happen? Do you think the Japanese are using some new weapon? Shouldn't we send a message to ComSubPac?"

"Easy, Mr. Watson," Clarkson said. "We're certainly going to send a message to Pearl once we've passed clear of our surface contact." He turned his head to the navigator. "Mr. Millunzi, have the radiomen draft a message for ComSubPac with our position and situation. As to this being some kind of new Jap weapon, I find it extremely unlikely that they would spring something this late in the game."

He paused and thought for a moment. "Besides that, what purpose would it have as a weapon?" he asked. "Confusing us? We don't even know what happened, so we can't really speculate yet." Clarkson shook his head. "In the meantime, we're going to verify out position and see about continuing the mission."

888

"Captain, I think you should listen to this." Millunzi poked his head out of the radio shack, still holding one side of his headphones against an ear. "It's like nothing I've heard before."

Clarkson nodded back to him from the control room. "I'll be right there, Dick." He glanced back over at the plot. They had been running northwest on the surface for several hours and had passed the point by which they had expected to see Kyushu appear on radar. Still, the AM signals they had picked up had been increasing in strength and clarity, so Clarkson figured they were going in as good a direction as any. Even if they missed Japan entirely, they would eventually run into mainland Asia, and the Killifish still had more than enough fuel to return to Midway.

Walking forward, he squeezed through a narrow hatch to enter the forward passageway. From there it was only a handful of steps to the radio room. As he entered, Millunzi handed him a headset. "It's pretty weird stuff."

Clarkson frowned and put on the headphones. Through the background static he could fairly easily make out what sounded like a radio broadcast. "—so always be sure to buy the best quality Pokémon supplies at your local Poke Mart. This Saturday we will be offering a special to all trainers under the age of fifteen—two-for-one essentials! Keep you Pokémon in fighting shape!"

The commander didn't bother listening to any more of the broadcast. Instead, he took off the headset and turned to Millunzi. "That sounded like English. But what the hell is a 'poh-kay-mahn'?"

Millunzi shrugged. "Damned if I know. But that word seems to pop up on a lot of their signals. We're receiving several other signals now, all in the thousand-kilocycle AM bands…they all seem to be coming from the same general direction, and they're getting stronger."

Clarkson shook his head. "That can't be coming from Japan. They can't broadcast openly like that anymore, we're direction-finding their radio stations and bombing them when they transmit." His voice rose in frustration. "And if they were doing general broadcasting, it wouldn't be about these crazy 'pohkaymahn' things, it would be about the war."

Millunzi didn't have a satisfactory reply for that. "Well, sir," he said, "if it isn't coming from Japan, then we're nowhere near where we thought we were."

Clarkson sighed tiredly. "Sorry. I know none of this is your fault. There's been no reply from Pearl yet?"

The younger officer shook his head. "Not a word, nor any operational bulletins. The tactical radios have been completely silent."

"Damn," Clarkson swore. "This is just too unreal. I don't know what to make of it. Could atmospherics be hampering our ability to receive?"

Millunzi shrugged helplessly. "No real way to know for sure, Captain. HF's not always the most reliable system. We'll just keep on trying."

Clarkson smiled faintly. "I know you will." He noted the dark circles under Millunzi's eyes. "Millunzi, when was the last time you got some sleep?"

"A while," was the honest answer.

Clarkson clapped him on the back. "I think the radio guys can probably handle monitoring for now. Why don't you grab some shut-eye in the meantime?"

The lieutenant nodded. "Aye, sir."

Over their heads, the main shipboard announcing system crackled as it was keyed on. "Captain to the bridge." The dull rumble of the diesel engines lowered in pitch as they slowed down significantly.

Clarkson looked up at the speaker, then nodded to Millunzi before ducking back into control and climbing up the ladder to the bridge. He emerged into the open air, enjoying the feel of the cool air on his face. He loved the sea, which was why he'd spent his life at sea. As long as there was an ocean for him to sail on, no place could be too foreign.

Harvey Bennett was perched at the front of the conning tower. Hearing Clarkson come up, he turned and smiled weakly. "I guess it's a good night, Robbie," he said.

"Yeah," Clarkson replied. "Any luck trying to get a celestial fix?"

Bennett shook his head. "Not a chance. I even had Chief Riggins come up here, but he said he couldn't make heads or tails of the constellations."

The Killifish's captain shook his head tiredly. "Where are we, Harve?" he asked. "What have we gotten ourselves into?"

Bennett pointed to the horizon. "That's part of why I called you up. If you look hard, you can see that the sky isn't as dark over there. Given that it should be about local midnight wherever we are, that can't be the dawn. The only explanation I can think of is backscatter from artificial lighting—a city. It reminds me of before the war, before the blackouts."

"It's hard to believe that that's Japan, if you're right," Clarkson commented. "There's no way they would light up their cities—not now. Hell, I can't think of any port right now that would."

"I wasn't so sure about this whole 'portal' thing you talked about," Bennett admitted, "but more and more now I can't ignore that something's happened. The thing is, what do we do now?"

The captain sighed. "I have no idea. We can't stay out here forever. We don't know our position and we can't get a navigational fix. We haven't been able to raise anyone on the radio. DiCamaro says we can keep running west for two days before we need to think about turning back to Midway—if Midway is still where we think it is. What are our options?"

Bennett sighed in agreement. "It's a gamble no matter what we do," he finished for Clarkson. "But whatever we do, we should do it soon. The crew's getting mighty curious as to what's going on, and we still need to worry about food supplies."

Clarkson didn't speak for a long minute. "You're right," he said at last. "We need to act. And I'm not going to sit around here making holes in the ocean." He pointed towards the distant light on the horizon. "We're going to head for those lights and see if we can figure out where we are. How far do you think?"

The lieutenant considered for a moment. "No more than sixty miles," he said, working the figures in his head. "Probably fifty or less. We could make the coast in less than three hours at flank."

"Yes, but we'd be off an unfamiliar and possibly hostile coast in the dark," Clarkson countered. "We wouldn't have the right charts or information for close piloting at night. No, let's do this: Ring up nine knots—that way we can arrive in sight of land around nautical twilight. It'll be light enough for us to navigate, but still dark enough that we can slip away if we need to."

"You heading down to grab some sleep?" Bennett asked. "I can take it from here."

Clarkson nodded. "Yeah. Wake me up when we're fifteen miles out. Stand by to station the maneuvering watch as well." He started to move back to the hatch, but paused. He looked up at the XO. "Harve, we're going to have to play this one by ear. Be ready for anything."

It would only be much later that they would realize the absurdity of such a request.

Comments/Feedback always appreciated.

Research Sources:

- San Francisco Maritime National Park Organization

- Fleet Submarines: Historic Naval Ships Association

- Submarine Operations/KC2AIO