Prologue
"Officer on deck!"
"As you were." Admiral Roshiyu Goto stepped into the situation room, and the handful of JSMDF officers and their compatriots resumed their posts. The black-haired Japanese admiral, barely in his thirties, was the personification of professionalism that one could only expect of a trained officer. "What's the status on the forward operation?"
Nagato was already waiting for him. "Proceeding smoothly. No reports of enemy activity. Yet."
"Let's hope it stays that way," Goto said, already chiding himself for jinxing it in his head. Nothing about these operations went according to plan. At least, typically. It was up to individual ships to make sure everyone got out alive if fights did break out, his job was to make sure they were well-trained and well-equipped for the job.
And yet, today, of all days, he felt uneasy. It was just a simple resource gathering expedition, he knew that. But, well, it was hard to fight the feeling of dread that had been hanging around him most of the morning. He looked up at the nearby board, proclaiming the names of the ships he had sent on the mission earlier.
"Problem, teitoku?" Nagato's companion, Mutsu, asked Goto.
"It's nothing," Goto tried to shake it off. "Just keep me posted."
Emile Hartford was not quite sure how these walks down the maintenance deck were getting harder for him. He'd gone hiking in Bolivia for only a couple of days and now he was just finding it hard to breathe most of the day. A lot of his friends aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt were giving him shit for it, saying he was already starting his transformation into an armchair admiral. He laughed it off. Usually.
That was nearly a week ago. Now this was starting to get less funny and more worrying.
"Hartford!"
The bark of the nearby petty officer got his attention, and he quickly made his way over. "Sir?"
"I need you down in row 7, that Harrier is up to its usual antics."
Emile rolled his eyes. That jump jet was quite the recurring pain in the ass for any of the mechanics. "What's the problem this time?"
"Hydraulics, probably. Pilot said he was having some trouble with the stick during the last recon flight, couldn't bank worth shit and had to do a vertical landing on the flight deck. Captain was not the least bit pleased with that."
"I'm sure he wasn't, sir."
"We need that thing airworthy, Hartford, and you're one of the best mechanics I got. Think you could do it?"
"Say no more, sir, I'm on it."
"Good. Ramirez! Greer! Follow Hartford and help him with the Harrier, we gotta have everything ready in case we need to launch in a hurry!"
"Yes sir!" Two of Emile's friends, Ignacio "Iggy" Ramirez and Randy Greer, followed Emile down the line of jets cross-hatched across the floor to the offending Harrier.
"I swear to God, that Harrier's gonna be the death of me," grumbled Randy.
"It's gonna be the death of somebody if we don't fix it," Emile said, trying to not sound more tired than he already was.
"This is the second time in almost as many weeks since it's been down here," Iggy nodded. "You'd think we'd just scrap it and get us one of those new F-28s."
"Why, so we can spend more time fixing that than the Harrier?" cracked Randy. "Nobody wants to pay us more money doing what we're already doing. Now, if we were Congressmen, on the other hand-"
"Har har," Emile grunted, though internally he concurred with the statement. "I'm gonna get in the cockpit. Randy, do a walkaround. Iggy, head to the back and help me check the rudder. And pray it's simpler than a hydraulics issue, petty officer's not gonna like it at all if it isn't..."
Far out to sea, Haruna stood guard as her compatriots Fubuki, Mutsuki, Yuudachi, Shimakaze, and Abukuma continued to round up their find off of a nearby island. They'd been sent out on resource expeditions the last week to help prepare for their next attack, so that meant rounding up fuel and ammo wherever they could. But much like her commanding officer, something about all this was off to her. She was hardly the tactical genius like Goto or her sister Kirishima to a lesser extent, but something about this was too easy. They'd run into barely any resistance on the way here. A few scattered fleets of light cruisers and the odd carrier, but with four destroyers on anti-air duty, all she had to do was open fire from at range and that would be it.
So why did everything still feel strange? She hadn't felt like anything was wrong up until now, probably because she was so happy to get out and get some time out at sea for once, even if it wasn't in actual combat. Hiei was quite jealous. Mostly because Kongou was usually out with one of the main combat fleets with Kirishima.
"We're almost done! Just one more round to go, poi!" called Yuudachi, carrying their prize behind them as the rest of the group joined her.
"Is something wrong, Haruna-chan?" asked Fubuki. "You look worried."
Haruna sighed. It was probably nothing after all. If they were going to be attacked, they would've done it by now. "It's nothing. We should return to-"
And then, something erupted from the sea beneath them. Whatever it was, though, didn't seem to interact with anything in the world...except them. A distorted, pulsating soundwave, seemingly coming out of the world around them.
This also hadn't been isolated to just the fleet out at sea.
"What on earth is going on!?" Goto asked.
"It's some kind of radio signal, but the frequency and intensity aren't anything we've seen before," said Mutsu.
"Friend or foe?"
"Neither!"
"'Neither' is not helpful! Find out what that is!"
It wasn't even isolated to Japan. Back aboard the Theodore Roosevelt, Emile suddenly snapped up, his head suddenly ringing with whatever it was apparently only he could hear, and it took all his willpower not to curl up in a ball in the cockpit of the broken Harrier as his friends suddenly wondered why their friend wasn't talking to them anymore.
I do not have much time left.
Something has broken into this place. This holy place, left to me by those who came before. They seek to take my power for themselves.
But if this message is reaching you, then there may yet be hope.
I am a guardian of time and space that defends this place and many others like it. And that is why they came for me.
They seek to use this power, my power, to disrupt the dimensional balance. They will have it, though I delay as hard as I can.
But I will take it back.
Until then, stand strong.
And just like that, it was over. The six girls looked up as the sea and the world around them resumed being normal. Mutsuki, Yuudachi, Fubuki, and Abukuma had covered their ears from the mysterious assault, and Shimakaze was affected at all, Haruna couldn't tell.
"What was that?" asked Abukuma.
"Some kind of radio signal, poi?" offered Yuudachi.
"Too powerful for a radio signal," Fubuki shook her head. "It felt like whoever it was that was speaking was right next to me...that's not a radio transmission like one we'd get from the Admiral at this distance..."
Haruna hummed in agreement, even as Abukuma and Yuudachi went to grab the last of the resources. Fubuki was definitely one of the brighter ones of the destroyers, and her thoughts made sense if she thought about it hard enough. The question was, what was that signal and why did it feel like it came from directly below her…?
Mutsuki, however, had redirected her attention, and her single-barrel cannon, out towards open sea. "Enemies inbound! Submarines!"
Haruna immediately broke out into cold sweat. Submarines. It just had to be submarines. The one kind of enemy she couldn't fight. But then, much to their surprise surprise, the units, about five in total, surfaced, revealing units that most certainly were not any enemy submarines they were used to. See, the submarines she had seen, even if they were mostly corpses of ones already torpedoed, looked like human girls, much like her, with black hair and scuba gear and carried their toothed torpedoes in their arms. No, these looked more like robots, though they retained the same toothed faces like the others.
And as for why they'd surfaced? Well, that revealed itself as their shoulder units opened up, revealing two missile boxes (or were they torpedo tubes?), and opened fire, missiles cutting a short but speedy arc from ocean back towards the island.
Right where Abukuma and Yuudachi were.
"Get out of there!" Fubuki screamed.
The two girls quickly shot out of the way right as the missiles impacted, destroying the rest of the resources in the explosion. Fubuki, Shimakaze, and Haruna readied their own cannons, but the new submarines were already gone, dipping below the waves.
"Everyone okay?" asked Haruna.
"That was a close one, poi," panted Yuudachi.
"My bangs are all crispy..." moaned Abukuma, touching at her hair.
Normally this would get a laugh of the group, as it was well-known Abukuma was very sensitive about her bangs, but the situation was already too fraught for the tension to deflate. Haruna had already sent a message that they'd been ambushed, but what could do they do in the meantime? And then, Nagato's message came through. And it was pretty much what she wanted to hear.
"Everyone retreat, now! Line abreast formation, and keep it spread! Try to get to the base, the main fleet will try to intercept on the way there!"
The girls quickly spun around, forming into a single line as they all headed out to sea, with Haruna in the middle, as she was the flagship. As she checked behind them, the seas were calm, although she could see shapes moving on the island behind them. She shrugged it off, it was probably her own imagination.
"Isn't the main fleet composed of ships for surface warfare?" asked Fubuki.
"DesDiv 30 is with them, they've got a few ships that can get whatever these guys are, poi," said Yuudachi.
"Speaking of, what are those things? I've never seen them before!" said Mutsuki.
"Same," said Abukuma. "But if I can get away from these guys, that's fine by me, 'cause I don't wanna know!"
Haruna concurred, but remained silent. She chanced another look behind. Nothing. Then, two of the mysterious subs crested, pods opening for more missile fire. "Incoming!" The missiles arced over their heads as they ducked, and as the missiles hit the ground, nothing else happened. Haruna could only assume those particular missiles were only meant for coastal shelling, otherwise they'd have been cut off by the explosions.
So why even bother…?
"Torpedos astern!" Fubuki called in a panic.
A distraction.
That wasn't the real attack. It was a feint!
A torpedo struck Haruna's right leg, causing her to flounder wildly as she fell onto the water, smoke trailing from her body. Water washed over her as two more struck, one hitting Abukuma on her port, and a little from farther off starboard. There was already overwhelming pain in her ankle where she'd been hit; maneuvering was going to be a lot harder from here on in.
"Mutsuki-chan!" Fubuki's cry identified who'd been hit, and she was carrying the unconscious redhead destroyer in one arm while trying to aim her torpedoes where she could with Shimakaze, but even the latter seemed unsure of where to fire the spread.
"These things are fast, poi! I can't track them that well!" said Yuudachi.
"Like I'm gonna be outran by these things," spat Shimakaze.
"We need time for the fleet to arrive, but how much can we get…?" Abukuma asked the obvious question as Haruna helped her to her feet. Unlike Haruna and Mutsuki, Abukuma's hit was probably just glancing, so the damage appeared to be minimal.
"They're still subs, they'll act like them," Fubuki said, already assessing the situation in typical Fubuki fashion. "They'll find somewhere to attack us and fire from head-on..."
"With their speed, that could be just about anywhere, poi!" said Yuudachi.
"Maybe, but they'll still need time to orient...there!" Fubuki spun about forty-five degrees and fired a spread of eight torpedoes, still holding onto Mutsuki's body. They waited a few hopeful seconds for the sight of an underwater explosion…
And there was one.
Just not the one they wanted.
"Poiiii-!"
"Yuudachi-!?" Haruna looked to her left again, and sure enough, Yuudachi was in the water, having just tanked another torpedo.
"They attacked me from behind again! That's just dirty, poi!" moaned Yuudachi.
"So they didn't move at all!?" asked Abukuma.
Then, there was a second explosion in the general direction Fubuki had fired.
"Direct hit! Enemy down!" reported Fubuki.
"Then...what hit Yuudachi…?" began Haruna.
And then dread sank in.
Oh, no. There's more of them.
And that was promptly when another one of the subs surfaced not four feet from Haruna, from the direction of where they just escaped from, for a point-blank shot right at her.
Emile looked up from inside the Harrier cockpit, wondering if the assault on his ears had stopped, even though they were still ringing. He could still hear everything else on the deck, from the yells of the petty officer to the odd clanging of metal to Iggy and Randy -
"Yo! Emile! You fall asleep or something!?"
Emile suddenly remembered what he'd been doing before, and poked his head out of the cockpit. Iggy and Randy were pushing up on something on the left wing. "Yeah?"
"We think we found the problem!" Randy said. "This aileron's stuck!"
Emile was suddenly all focus as he went back to his assigned task. A quick test of the stick confirmed there was definitely something up with the steering, as you really couldn't fly anything if one of the ailerons, the main wing flaps that helped guide the plane while airborne, wasn't acting the way it should. He quickly crawled out of the cockpit back onto the wing, sounding at the metal before stopping at one point. With a quick pause, he clasped his hands together and brought them down on that section in a two-fisted smash.
CLUNK.
"Holy-"
"Jesus Christ, I thought I was gonna shit myself…!"
Emile stood up, even more tired than usual (somehow). "Knew it. Hydraulics issue."
"Leak?"
"Not really. At lower temperatures, metal will contract around certain panels of the plane and gum up the hydraulics that control the ailerons. No need to patch a leak, just smack it and let it reset," Emile said.
"You'd think that wouldn't be an issue with military hardware," observed Iggy.
"Welcome to government work, Iggy. Where everything's built by the lowest bidder," Randy quipped. "Guess we can tell the petty officer we're all set here, right?"
Emile didn't reply, he just leaned over the open cockpit hatch, gripping at it for dear life. Randy's words were being drowned out, and his head was getting a lot heavier than usual. And then…
"Ooo-kay, I'm seeing stars now."
Iggy and Randy shared a look. That was never something anyone wanted to hear ever.
"Emile, whatever you do, do not stay standing. Just slowly sit down on the edge of the wing," Randy said quickly. "Iggy, find a phone and get Doc."
"On it!" Iggy ran off as Emile slowly started turning around to take a seat, but blackness was already swirling around him, the echoes of the voice only he heard drowning out Randy's shouts as he slowly fell into nothingness.