Disclaimer: I do not own either Kantai Collection or Halo, nor do I gain any monetary funds from either them or this fanfiction.
Author's Note: Sorry for the late update, but I doubled my word count for those of you hoping for it! Roommate went and moved out and took the modem with him, and getting a new one took time due to the phone company's errors... BUT we're back in business!
Italics - Radio, Ship names, thoughts, Japanese
Bold - Jarring events
Leviathan looked down on the blue and green gem, sections of the landmasses visible on its surface more brown than green, but still looking beautiful nonetheless. Fluffy clouds surrounded the orb, as though wanting to protect it from all the dangers of the universe while it orbited its mother star. Luna hung just off to the side, visible as a smaller orb like a coin next to a piggy bank, sliding behind the horizon of its partner in an eternal dance. And watching this scene, hanging in geosynchronous orbit with a front row seat to the display, was a warship-turned-woman, her armor shining blue-black against the reflected light and her visor currently mirroring the vastness of space, seeming to 'stand' in place with her arms crossed, gloved fingers wrapped around biceps and armor plate...
...a warship turned woman who was currently trying not to short circuit something in her brain or scream out in frustration due to her situation.
Leviathan's sensors were working overtime, each sensitive array panning again and again over the vista below her, as well as behind, above, and below... All to try and make sense of what she was seeing. Due to following the Cole Protocol, Leviathan's navigational and historical record could best be described as 'Swiss cheese' and more accurately as 'barely breadcrumbs', but there was still some things that they, and thus her memory, contained. She still had charts of her last known location of Reach, as well as areas around it that didn't contain UNSC assets. The Protocol was considered by many within the UNSC to be the main factor that had kept Earth and humanity safe, by preventing the location of it and the inner colonies from falling into enemy hands. Likely it was what had kept the 35 year war from being a mere 5 or 10 year war. It had 5 aspects that the warship remembered, and all had to be followed if Covenant forces were detected:
1. Activate selective purge of databases on all ship-based and planetary data networks.
2. Initiate triple-screen check to ensure all data has been erased and all backups neutralized.
3. Execute viral data scavengers (Download from UNSCTTP:/EPWW:COLEPROTOCOL/Virtualscav/fbr.091)
4. If retreating from Covenant forces, all ships must enter Slipstream space with randomized vectors NOT directed toward Earth, the Inner Colonies, or any other human population center.
5. In case of imminent capture by Covenant forces and boarders, all UNSC ships MUST self-destruct.
Violation of these was considered outright treason, punishable by death. The gaping hole of data in her memories showed that these had indeed been followed, but even so there were... flashes. Glimpses of what Earth looked like from orbit that she couldn't find a source of, of constellations in its sky that were stripped of all other forms of data, no coordinates or anything but... a general feeling. This... Those white-skinned women hadn't lied, she could literally FEEL it in her struts... This WAS Earth!
And yet it made no sense. If this was Earth, then where were the defences? Where were the orbital stations and Super-MACs? Where was the Home Fleet!? Why weren't there ANY SIGNS AT ALL of the orbital dockyards that she KNEW should be up here?! Her radiological sensors were lighting up space all around her looking for any signs of fusion engines or plasma drives, of ANYTHING resembling movement... And was getting nothing. Not a whisper of anything that didn't come from the yellow star that lit the system up with its warmth and that which was emitted by the neighboring stars through Sol's magnetosphere...
If that were all then maybe Leviathan could have written this off as being just a colony or something like that, some backwater that was unimportant enough to the rest of the UNSC and Covenant that it hadn't been bothered, and had little reason for such defences or docks. But there was more. While her radiological sensors couldn't pick up anything but the residual trail from her own orbital lift-off, her radio was almost swamped with other contacts. Signals in multiple languages and from over a million sources blared up from below, far more than a mere colony would give, and despite them not having any thrusters or such that she could detect emissions from, Leviathan's radar was also showing a network of satellites that wrapped around the planet like fisherman's net... More than one would need for just observation of weather or such...
All in all, the warship-woman was bewildered to say the least. This situation wasn't made any easier in the least by examining herself either. The whole thing... made her head hurt.
It had already been 3 days since she'd escaped the planet's (Earth's, just admit it to yourself) gravity to sit up here, using its own Van Allen belts and magnetosphere to muddle and shield her own signature from observation from below. In that time her confusion hadn't become any less than it had when she'd first woken up, and over time that confusion and headache was starting to turn into frustration and anger. At this rate she may very well start doing something stupid if she couldn't find a rational way of dealing with this matter...
What she needed first was information. The people that she'd fought were pretty much out, that much was for certain, and she wasn't too knowledgeable about how the local populace of humanity would appreciate her just dropping in unannounced... In fact given her prewar experiences she'd bet her Archers that it wouldn't be a welcome event at all to them to have a strange warship appear out of thin air...
Sighing through gritted teeth, Leviathan ran over her diagnostics again. Her crew, the ones she could feel running around inside of her, all rang out with reports of readiness and preparation. The fact that they did so with aplomb and eagerness was appreciated... the fact that not a single one of them was in her database was not. It was enough to make her security protocols SCREAM at her, yet for SOME REASON they were utterly silent... Which made as much sense as the rest at this point. Really, the only reason she wasn't pulling every one of the little guys out and demanding answers in a more... physical manner was because the damage that she should have had after blowing herself to kingdom come with a dual nuclear explosion was conspicuously absent and she was not eager to have that change any time soon.
That, and she wasn't sure if she'd be pulling out people or organs at this rate...
As it was, Leviathan wanted to just throw her hands up in the air and delegate it as someone else's problem, as irresponsible as that was. Still, actually doing something about that was going to have to go on the back burner for now... Right now, information was the priority. Looking around her, the ship's scanners picked up the various primitive satellites around her that she'd found earlier, looking for one that seemed to have the most electronic traffic passing through it. Such a satellite would likely give her access to the local datanet and hopefully answers.
It didn't take too long to find a likely target... One was only a couple thousand kilometers from her, and it only took a token effort from her thrusters to push her over to it. As she did that, several of her crew were already gearing up for EVA work, and whipping together a relay to allow Leviathan to remotely tap the target once it was attached. Getting closer, Levi could see that the satellite was both observing what was below it, as well as relaying terabytes of data to and from somewhere on the surface, as well as to adjoining satellites. Satisfied that she'd found what she was looking for, the warship reached out and clamped her gloved hands around the thing's structure. Offhand, she was reminded of docking with her old friend Cradle, but in a more crude fashion. Still, now that she had it in hand, her crew got to work.
Slipping out of her back plating, Leviathan watched as the miniature forms of engineers floated and pulled themselves along the plates of her arms, looking almost like leprechauns or elves in their marine-green EVA gear. Watching them brought a smirk to Levi's face, as they cavorted along the satellite's exterior before finding a small hatch that they could enter through. From the looks of it said hatch was meant for maintenance or such, meant for one to reach into with their arms to get at the components inside. The engineers found it nearly cavernous, and maneuvered within it quite easily, little spotlights flicking on on their shoulders as they used what handholds they could find to delve in deeper.
The whole thing took maybe 30 minutes, but once it was done Leviathan took the engineers in hand as they looked up at her like children wanting their mother's approval. "Alright you little gremlins, good work. Now, let's see what we've got, hmm?" she said, bringing the cheering little grease-monkeys back up to her hull. Once they were stowed, Leviathan pushed away carefully, trying not to destabilize the satellite's orbit while getting some distance. Once there, she opened up her comms and started filtering the signals she was getting...
At first, it was rather annoying. There was so MUCH! And most of it encrypted only moderately! It would have made her feel giddy about it if it weren't for the content involved. Moderate or not, encrypted data often meant military, or at the very least classified, and that meant important as well. It was too bad she didn't have any ONI spooks around, they could probably do wonders with this kind of stuff...
"May I try?"
If she could have, Leviathan would have leaped right out of her skin. That voice hadn't just been in her head! "Who, what?!" she said, scanning around her for anyone else, weapons priming. "Show yourself...!"
"I'm right here, no need for alarm..." came the voice again, a slight growl in it as the deep voice rang through her comms.
"Where? Identify yourself!"
A snort of bemusement came at that. "Look at your hand."
Raising an eyebrow curiously, Leviathan raised her left hand, noting her point defence turrets still trying to track for targets, but that was all. The voice sighed again. "Your other hand..." Frowning, Leviathan looked at her other limb, the one holding her weapon. There didn't seem to be anything too strange there... Fingers, glove plating, weapon, strange jawed-thing on the end that was...
... Staring directly at her. Taking a hunch, Leviathan raised her MAC cannon up so that she could see it more clearly, the red slitted eye tracking her as she did so. "Are... you... what I think you are?" she said tentatively.
"If you mean to ask if I'm your weapon, I would have said no before... But currently it seems I've been integrated into it. It was the only system I could shunt the majority of myself into before the Covenant were able to extract me," the voice said, though the jaws and shark-like head did not move.
"Shunt your... Hephaestus? How did...? You're still functional?!" Leviathan said in shock.
The strange creature who apparently had once been her AI made a gruff sounding harrumph. "For a given definition of the term. Much of my systems are offline, likely permanently, while the rest is... Still in flux."
Leviathan frowned. "I remember... I remember you were following protocol, deleting aspects of yourself to prevent the Covenant from capturing and using you. Why are you still... HOW are you still online?"
The eyes narrowed as they turned to look out at the stars around them. "I am, not certain. I awoke to find myself still within the computers running the MAC capacitors when you brought the weapon online. Since then I've been piecing myself back together after having confirmed the absence of any Covenant personnel on board. Much of my data is still scattered and... some of it has been replaced."
"Are you telling me you're running on unknown codes?"
"All coding was isolated and analyzed utilizing remaining assets. Anything that seemed harmful or virulent was erased, while useful coding retained. All remaining code is acceptable under UNSC directives for asset seizure, though..."
"That doesn't mean it's necessarily good..." she said.
The AI seemed to grudgingly admit to that. "No more so than an apparently complete refurbishment of one's hull to... human?" it said curiously. "Your sensors are registering all your normal construction yet... it seems to have a secondary form? I can't make sense out of this..."
"Hmph. Join the club," Leviathan said as she listened. So even her AI had no idea what was going on. Well, as long as the world had decided that it was time for it's smoke break and let it's lazy coworker insanity cover for him, she was just going to have to roll with it. Steeling herself, she nodded, allowing the AI to root through the data to determine what was within it. "How long should it take for a full analysis?"
"Full decryption and processing shouldn't be too long. Less than 20 minutes I imagine. Making a full report on it however will require assistance from the lab, but likely an hour to have it fully categorized and another 2 before it is ready for my conclusions to be presented."
Levi sighed. That was a long time for an AI, but then again, it was a lot of data. "Time enough for a power nap then. Alright, I'll let you and the eggheads deal with it. See what you can find," she said. All older UNSC vessels had a small lab bay, from back when they were exploration vessels as well as military, and while her own had been relegated to studying various Covenant artifacts and such instead of environmental samples or the like, it was still fully usable. Her crew could get it done, so for now... For now she'd simply rest...
Her chronometer said that it was just shy of two and a half hours before Leviathan felt Hephaestus alert her to being done. "So?" she said to the digital persona. "What have you found?"
"Well... Quite frankly I'm tempted to claim that I've stumbled across a rather fantastical story made by people with too much time on their hands... If not for the sheer amount of data in regards to it... And the apparent intended recipients."
"Oh?" the warship said, raising an eyebrow. "Who was the recipient?"
"An Admiral Goto of the JMSDF, apparently the man in charge of a large part of the Pacific ocean's defence against what the data refers to as 'Abyssals'."
"Really? So I was right, it was a military comms satellite. Alright, and what was it referencing? As much as I'm sure that it'd cause some issues to look into classified information, I'm pretty sure the circumstances would..."
"You."
Leviathan paused. "Beg pardon?"
"The data is apparently in reference to you," Hephaestus said, as he brought up an image. Said picture, a rather pixelized version of herself, apparently taken from above, appeared on the front of her helmet's HUD, along with several other marks and characters around it. "Apparently when you awakened, it was in the middle of a contested battle zone. Specifically, it appears that the base was one being used by both the nations of Japan and the United States within a chain of islands known as the Philippines. Said base was attacked by the Abyssals, and all personnel are reported to have been wiped out."
That got the warship's attention. Her mood instantly shifted from curious to calculating, examining the picture again. "And they're wondering if I had something to do with it, correct?" she ventured, thinking back to that event. At how those pale-skinned individuals had been blasting apart the area, and tried to get her to join them...
"Indeed. Apparently we are the only confirmed sighting of anyone that was still alive afterwards... However..."
"What Hephaestus? Stuttering is a really bad habit when dealing with such matters."
The AI let a slight cough echo over the comms. "According to this data they've been trying to track down who you are through your ship designation number. They've queried numerous sources, but so far do not seem to have found anything matching you... Although, it's strange."
"What is?"
"They're looking at wet navy vessels."
That caused the cruiser to blink. "As in aquatic? Surface-ships?"
"Correct. All the ships referenced here as well as the pictures are all of planet-bound wet navy ships. I'm not seeing any signs at all of anything else," he said, the pictures in question flashing over Leviathan's HUD.
"Hmmm... Any ideas as to why?"
"Not a clue at the moment. Personally I believe the fact that they're doing so is important in more than one way though."
"Oh? And what's that?"
"They aren't looking at humans."
Leviathan blinked again. "Okay, that makes sense, I'm not a human..."
"I am well aware of that... But given your current form, if one were to be looking for an unknown individual wearing what looked like a powered exoskeleton, would they not look for a human being or something similar?" Hephaestus said.
Mulling that over for a moment, Levi had to admit that he had a point. "Okay, you're right, that would make sense, so..." It clicked in her head then. "So... it means that they not only know not to look at a person... They know specifically that I'm a ship."
"Correct."
"Which means that they're in some way knowledgeable about whatever the hell made me into... well... ME at this point..."
"That is highly likely."
Leviathan looked back down at the planet below her with focused eyes. "Then it looks like we're going to have to pay a visit... Hephaestus, tell me... Did you come across any references to where we are?"
"In which sense?"
"In terms of what planet we're currently orbiting. I know what those women said but..."
"Abyssals," the AI interrupted again.
"Hm?"
"According to the reports, there is a 95% chance that the individuals you engaged correspond to the 'Abyssals' that humanity on this world is fighting. I currently have records of a handful of types and capabilities that were listed as being confirmed at the site, several of which were engaged by you before you destroyed them."
Leviathan thought for a moment. "Alright... so these Abyssals are basically a problem that have been known for a while. Tell me, are they human? Are we facing an Insurrectionist movement here? Or something Covenant-related?"
"I do not have enough data to speak of the former, but the latter seems unlikely... Especially given that I cannot find any reference to the Covenant at all."
THAT caused her to freeze. "What?"
"I have found no reference to the Covenant, or any signs of an interplanetary threat of any kind within the data given."
"None? As in they have no idea of them or...?"
"It is likely that wherever we are, it is sufficiently far enough from the Covenant that it is not yet a threat, and therefore they are focusing on threats closer to home," Hephaestus replied.
The warship-woman held her head in frustration. "Of all the... Fine, then that begs the question of WHERE exactly this planet is. Anything there?" she asked.
There was silence over the comms for a moment, before a reply. "No, not specifically."
"Grrrrrr... Fine, then what else can you tell me?" she growled out.
"Their calendar has been reset."
Levi blinked again. "Beg pardon? How is that helpful?"
"It's the only thing I can think of given the date that this data is using... It doesn't make sense otherwise."
Leviathan crooked the eyebrow once more, narrowing her other eye at the MAC/AI combo in her hand. "How so?"
"According to these, it's 2022."
"... As in..."
"The year 2022."
A moment of silence was shared by both of them before Levi responded. "Bullshit! Are you fucking with me now?"
"I have yet to find anything marked as being of a later date. The only theory I can postulate is that at some point they decided to reset their calendar to an earlier date. It may explain why they don't have any more modern technologies in orbit, or facilities."
"What do you... Oh..."
"I believe I know what you're thinking. A group of humanity wishing to cut itself off from the rest COULD have done so in order to erase certain parts of its history from their own knowledge base in order to restructure themselves," Hephaestus said. "Doing so would not have been easy, but if enough of them chose to do so..."
"But that doesn't make sense given the population density... There would have been holdouts, those resisting it..."
"Likely, but then again we may just not have the right kind of data to discover that..."
Leviathan looked once again at the planet. "Meaning that whoever they are down there, they're not UNSC, or UEG, correct?"
"That is also supported given how the information suggests the existence of multiple nations working in concert yet are politically and administration-wise separate from one another."
The heavy cruiser frowned. "Then we're back to where we started. Unknown territory, unknown conflict. Any suggestions?"
"In other circumstances I would have suggested sending in a team of marines for reconnaissance. However..."
"However...?"
The AI looked at the ship-woman with an eye. "Given your current state I doubt any of your... crew... would fit in. It is likely that we will have to do so... personally," he said.
Leviathan groaned. "Alright then... So, first things first is to make planet-fall without being spotted, then attempt to make a peaceful first contact, right?" she said.
"I would recommend that passive observation should come first, but yes, likely that will be needed at least at some point."
Levi nodded, hooking her MAC to her back, with Hephaestus' new... face, sticking out just over her left shoulder. "Alright then... Anything else?"
"Yes. I recommend extreme caution in the event of revealing yourself as anything but human. Right now the humans below think that you are an Abyssal yourself, and without sufficient data I do not believe we could successfully disprove it without conflict."
"Hmmmm... Alright then. We'll need to pick a landing vector then away from the majority of human settlements. Let's tap another satellite and see what we can find out, okay?" the cruiser suggested.
"Affirmative. Oh, and one more thing..."
"Yes?"
"According to the data, there may be non-Abyssal entities similar to ourselves. I recommend caution. We cannot assume that everyone we meet will be human either."
This caused Leviathan's frown to appear again, before sighing. "Things are getting interesting then... Alright, let's find that mapping satellite..."