Chapter 4: The Battle of Juan De Fuca
Naka sprinted after Jersey, her slender legs struggling to close the distance with the towering, rage-fueled American. She wanted desperately to help, Fubuki was one of her closest friends, and she liked to think the Americans aboard Shoup and Turner Joy were her friends too.
But Jersey was… was a newly returned ship. A battleship ten times her displacement who could crumple her like so much shredded tinfoil with a single volley. A battleship seething with so much bottled fury the light Washington drizzle was flashing to steam as it hit her skin.
"HEY!" barked the American as she sprinted down a pier, her voice thundering louder than a gunshot. "NAKA!"
"H-hai?" stuttered Naka, instinctively veering to the side to throw off the big American's firing solution. If that'd even matter, the girl was an Iowa class. With those radar-guided fire-control computers, she'd re-acquire in seconds. If it was even possible for her to miss at this range.
"What's your flank?" Jersey barked over her shoulder, swan-diving off the end of the pier. The air around her seemed to shimmer as she summoned her rigging, air flowing around her as guns and armor manifested themselves. But this wasn't the gentle breeze of Naka or a destroyer summoning their gear. It was a gale-force whirlwind of air molecules fleeting the furious warship.
"What?" Naka zigged to port, her legs hurling her back on track towards the battleship. Distance… if she could get close enough, maybe the American's batteries wouldn't be able to traverse fast enough…
"What's. Your. Flank." Jersey snarled, plucking the two massive revolvers from where they hung—low off those wide American hips—and spinning them around into her hands.
"T-Thirty-five knots."
"Tubes hot?"
"Yes!" Naka nodded, her own rigging swirling around her as she jumped into the water. Her guns might be pathetic, her armor tissue-paper, but the four 61cm Oxygen Torpedoes—"Long Lances" as the Americans called them—were her trap card. Her ace in the hole, as it were, her one saving grace as a warship.
Jersey smiled, her grin devilish as she thumbed her Walkman on, "Then stay on my ass."
Naka felt her mouth hang open, her turbines screaming as she pushed herself to keep up with- with a battleship? How fast was Jersey anyways!
"Let's wreck shit, you thick nip!" Jersey almost laughed, waving for the torpedo-cruiser to come alongside.
All that Naka manged to say was a quiet "Hai."
— | — | —
"She's doing what?" Admiral Williams tore his eyes from the turkey-shoot ensuing at the mouth of the straight to stare at the petty officer who'd gotten his attention.
"She's sortieing, sir," said the petty officer in question, seeming to wilt under the Admiral's gaze as he pointed to one of the dozen sixty-inch TVs filling NAVSTA Everett's CnC bunker.
A grid-overlay map of the Puget Sound displayed the location of every ship Wiliams had under his command. Shoup, Turner Joy, and Fubuki were flickering around at the northern corner. But down at the bottom, a single blue dot, labeled helpfully with "CL: IJN NAKA (KANMUSU)" was making its way up Sinclair inlet at what had to be almost thirty knots.
"Naka, what the hell?"
"I'm escorting Jersey, Teitoku," said the cruiser, her voice slipping back into her native Japanese as her tiny blue-dot representation wheeled around Point Glover.
Williams squinted at the map, which had a notable absence of any "BB-62: USS NEW JERSEY (KANMUSU)" dots.
One of the CnC techs was the first to speak up. "She arrived on-base at PNSF about… thirty minutes ago."
"Hai. She didn't have time to eat, much less get a.."
"BLUFOR tracker" said another voice. A voice low and resonant, but unmistakably female. New Jersey, it had to be.
"Yeah, one of those."
Williams shook his head. Any other day, he'd be weeping in joy at the thought of having a big-gun battleship.. the big-gun battleship rolling into brawl. "Jersey."
"Sir?"
"WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING!" barked the Admiral, not so much yelling as speaking in capital letters.
"I-"
"You were unconscious an hour ago," William's voice was a finely-tuned mixture of professional detachment and disappointing-father rage. "After puking almost a solid ton of fuel oil up."
"Admiral!" Jersey's voice dropped to a rumbling roar, "This is what I was built for. How do you intend to stop me."
Williams glowered at the single blue dot, his eyes boring at the blank space where New Jersey must be. "The convoy's a hundred nautical miles away, even at flank, it'll take you three hours to-"
"Two and a half."
Williams scrunched up his face. "Jersey-"
"I haven't eaten," said the battleship "I've got two-hundred tons of fuel left. Loaded that light I can make thirty-five knots." A pause, Williams almost swore he heard tiny voices speaking just barely loud enough for the mic to pick up, "If I overload my boilers, I might be able to push it to thirty-six."
"Sir," one of the CnC techs leaned back in his chair, waving for the Admiral's attention, "At that speed, she'll only have four hours before she's dry, maybe less."
Williams nodded, "Jersey-"
"I know, I've run the math. You can tow me back. Drag me before a tribunal… fucking… scrap me, throw me in Miramar until I rust away. I don't give a fuck. I'm not running from this fight."
"Naka?" asked Williams.
"H-ai?" came a tiny voice, almost a wimpier. The cruiser had bad odds against a pissed-off Jersey and she knew it.
"You have your cell phone with you?"
"Oh, yes!" the cruiser's voice staggered back to its normal bubbly sweetness, "An idol is never-"
"Toss it to Jersey," said Williams, snapping his fingers to draw the attention of a C3 tech, "We're down-linking all the recce data we have."
— | — | —
Jersey deftly caught the slender black… plastic? glass maybe? rectangle Naka's tossed her, spinning it around in her fingers as she held it up to her face. "What the hell…"
They were aerial-recon photos, like she—or rather her crew—had seen a hundred times before. Photos of ships, older-ones, but ships. Dreadnoughts by the look of them. Jersey counted six twin turrets, each with a pair of long-barred guns—probably 12 inchers—, in the hexagonal arrangement so popular before the war.
But there was something… wrong. Something twisted and evil about the photos that made her want to hurl the phone away in disgust. Her stomach churned at the jagged… teeth lining the dreadnoughts' waterlines, the hungry mouths to those blackened gun barrels, the pillars of sickly black smoke bellowing from their triple stacks.
"Abyssals," said Naka, her quiet voice almost lost in the foamy churn of Jersey's wake.
"This… this is what we're up against?"
Naka nodded.
"Hell…" Jersey gave the photo another glance. She closed her eyes, focusing on the boiler rooms deep within her citadel. She knew her faeries were doing their very best… but today she asked them for just that much more. She willed herself faster, tapping every shred of steam her body could generate and sending it straight to her turbines.
She felt her screws bite into the water, churning it white with foam as she plowed ahead into the sound. "You with me, Naka?"
Naka nodded, her face tight as she sprinted to keep up.
— | — | —
Crowning hunkered down in his seat, surrounded on all sides by a sea of navy-blue uniforms as sailors huddled around the CNN broadcast. "Isn't it dangerous to have a chopper that close?" asked the professor, his eyes not moving from the scene.
"Nah, those old barges don't have any AA," said the worryingly unsure voice of a sailor off his shoulder.
Crowning nodded, trying to make sense of the chaos unfolding on the jerky camera feed. Three destroyers—one sleek modern-looking one, and two clearly-older designs— jinked left and right though the towering waves, their bows kicking up sheets of spray as they bounced about like toys.
Ahead of them, barely visible in the corner of the camera's view, were the lumbering masses of two container ships breaking for safe harbor with all the speed they had.
"They're chasing splashes," said a Sailor.
Crowning glanced at him for the briefest of seconds.
"The DDs. Big guns like that aim to bracket their targets," said the Sailor, his own eyes equally fixed on the screen. "They're running for the one place they know those bastards aren't aiming."
Crowning nodded. With the size of those splashes though, he wasn't sure that was comforting at all. One destroyer, the smallest one that ran low in the water, the one— Crowning blinked—the one in the blue sailor-suit with her hair in a short ponytail, slalomed between two splashes, her stern flicking out to just barely miss an incoming shell.
"WOO!" the room erupted in cheers of "Way to go, Fubuki!"
Fubuki heeled over as she swerved hard in the other direction, the turrets on her low-riding hull opening up with tiny pop, pop, pop noises just barely audible though the camera's microphone.
"C'mon! Hit'em with the lances!" barked a strong southern drawl.
"Can't, she fired them already," replied a crisp Midwest accent, "bastards dodged 'em like champ."
"What about that one," said Crowning, pointing at the modern-looking destroyer as it zigged to cover Fubuki, it's one little gun barking a steady PakPakPakPak.
"What, Shoup?" said the southern drawl.
Crowning nodded.
"Gun's all she's got left. She fired all her RIM-66s-"
"Which isn't much," interrupted the Midwest. "Convoy duty gets the sloppy seconds when it comes to ordy."
Crowning nodded again, watching the third ship—the USS Turner Joy, as the subtitle crawl helpfully pointed out— flick her tail out in a turn, barking away with all three of her turrets. He'd never been a particularly religious man, but… in the face of demons, a little supernatural aid never hurt.
He closed his eyes, offering up a wordless prayer to… anyone who'd listen. God? Allah? Hell, Davy-fucking-Jones, Someone! Keep those men safe, keep those girls safe… Bring them home alive, even if it takes a miracle.
— | — | —
Turner Joy shook as a barrage of twelve-inch shells landed far to close to her fantail, sending the destroyer's bow plowing into the next unearthly wave. Her masts were smashed to hell, which would mean a damn, if the abyssal dreadnoughts weren't so close that the mark one eyeball could acquire targets faster than radar. And from the increasingly-desperate pleas coming from the 26MC, she'd bent a shaft, maybe even snapped it.
"I don't fucking care" growled Commander Dave Marquez, his voice reduced to a raspy growl as he clutched for the captain's intercom. "We slow down and we die!"
The pleading from engineering didn't stop, but it at least damped down somewhat. Fucking fine, he had his room to maneuver. Precious little room, but room.
"XO, status on the tubes!"
The XO shook her head, her scruffy blond hair matted with blood seeping from the gash across her brow. "Tubes red. We fire those fish DC says they'll blow in the tubes."
"CO! Shoup signals she'd down to her last thirty rounds," said yet another of the panicked voices filling Marquez's bridge. "She's going for an end-run."
"Bring us about!" snapped Marquez. Shoup was an Arleigh Burke. A fast motherfucker if there ever was one. If she could close the distance, get under the dreadnoughts' guns… she stood the best chance at taking one of those coal-black bastards down with her. "Signal Fubuki, tell he-FUCK!"
Marquez ducked as something zoomed right past the destroyer's bridge. Something… tiny and blue with-
"Is that a floatplane?"
Marquez glanced at the BLUEFOR tracker map, one of the few goddam instruments on his bridge that still worked, and it was the one item he hadn't needed this entire fight. "Holy shit."
Along with the five frantically jinking dots of Turner Joy, Shoup, Fubuki, and their two lumbering charges, was a sixth dot. A dot racing towards him at what had to be almost forty knots. A dot labeled "CL: IJN NAKA (KANMUSU)" with a second line below it, "BB-62: USS NEW JERSEY (KANMUSU)." A dot not twenty miles away. Which, if memory served-
"Sir, incoming message on fleet-wide," said the XO, not even trying to hide the laugh of relief slipping though her teeth, "It's transmitted in the clear."
Marquez yanked the bridge phone off what was left of it's cradle, pressing it tight against his hear to blot out the chaos of battle around him.
A scratchy, throaty voice, barely intelligible though what was left of Turner Joy's radio system, crooned with all it's passion. "There was no help! No help from you!"
"Sir, look!" The XO frantically waved past Turner Joy's bow. Six flaming tracers raced though the air, barreling towards the nearest dreadnought like the dogs of hell itself.
"Sound of the drums! Beating in my heart!"
Marquez swore he saw the dreadnought's turrets do a double-take, the whole ship seemed to recoil in horror just before the six sixteen-inch shells slammed home.
"The thunder of guns, Yeah! Tore me apart!"
For a brief second, nothing happened. The 2700 pound armor-piercing shells burrowed though what little deck armor the abyssal dreadnoughts had. Armor that had bounced five-inch shells for hours was little more than tissue-paper to the best-damn armor-piercing round ever developed by mankind.
"You've been…"
Then it happened. Explosions ripped the dreadnought open from the inside, splitting it in-half as magazines and boiler-rooms exploded, spewing flaming ordnance, burning coal, and flying shrapnel in a massive cloud over the burning oil-slick that was once an abyssal warship.
"THUNDERSTRUCK!"
USS New Jersey had arrived.
Jersey plowed though the waves, her massive hull steady as a rock in swells that sent the wounded destroyers-and even little Naka-bouncing like toys. Her turbines were at flank, her screws tearing though the water as she sprinted forwards, not even bothering to unshadow her after turret.
"They're making for open ocean!" said Naka, her voice almost lost in the thunder of a quarter-million horsepower roaring away in the battleship's machinery spaces. "If they disengage-"
"We'll never catch them again," scowled Jersey, her guns dropping down into battery as her faerie crew scrambled to reload. She closed her eyes, 'looking' though her floatplane as she searched for her next target.
The last dreadnought was steaming for the pacific, its stacks belching ugly coal-fired smoke. Jersey could sense its fear, the terror in its choppy wake only fueling her rage.
Trailing behind were two- no, make that three cruisers. Ugly twin-stackers with short barreled guns bristling along their sides in casemates. The three were desperately criss-crossing behind the dreadnought, laying down a blanket of sickly black smoke. Not one of them was making more than twenty knots.
Jersey glanced over her shoulder, past the enormous forty-eight star flag she flew from her main mast, camouflage be damned. "Turner Joy, you guys okay?"
"We'll manage," came the scratchy reply though what was left of the old destroyer's radio."Go get 'em Black Dragon!"
Jersey smiled, her teeth glinting razor-sharp in the evening sun. She couldn't see a thing though the curtain of smoke the abyssal cruisers had laid, and even her float plane was struggling to keep them sighted. Against a ship two years her junior, the tactic might have worked.
She'd be reduced to firing at random and hoping her spotter plane saw the splashes. With sixteen-inch guns, it could take her hours to land a good salvo, hours that the abyssals could use to sprint out to the depth and fucking fade.
But smoke worked both ways. And her guns were radar guided. "Die," she growled, her turrets slewing over as the gunnery computer on her watch locked in a perfect firing solution. "Die you son of a bitch!"
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM Her six guns rippled off one after another, each one sending shock-waves though the air and cratering the ocean as it spoke. A turret focused on the nearest of the cruisers, but B turret… B turret had the dreadnought all to itself.
— | — | —
Admiral Williams stared slack-jawed at the battle unfolding before him. Battleships were an awesome sight in the truest sense of the word, he'd had that proved to him time and time again by Abyssal dreadnoughts. But an Iowa class… she was a force of nature.
The lone remaining dreadnought survived by the very skin of its teeth. Two of Jersey's shells bracketing it with towering splashes, while the third flew long, ripping the entire bow off as it detonated.
The cruiser wasn't so lucky. Jersey's volley landed square amidships, her massive shells simply cracking the hapless armored cruiser in half at the keel. Secondary explosions raced down the rapidly-sinking wreck as ready-ammo stacked outside the magazines torched off, churning the water to froth as it sunk beneath the wave.
"Hot DAMN!" yelled someone with a thick New England Accent.
Williams smiled, he was moments away from doing the very same himself. "Naka," he growled, trying his best to present the calm, collected Admiral, not a laughing man with a shit-eating grin that just wouldn't die.
"T-teitoku?" said the light cruiser, her voice hovering at between terror and giggling triumph.
"Are you good to press your attack?"
There was a pause, and Williams swore he saw Naka glancing ever so briefly at the towering American rage monster she was 'escorting' before responding. "Uh, yeah. Yeah, okay."
"Naka…"
"I'll do my best!" said the cruiser, her voice slipping back into the good-hearted Idol.
"You got four fish," said Williams, "Put 'em to work!"
— | — | —
Naka set her jaw as she stared down the smoke cloud off her bow. She wanted to surge ahead, to run screaming into the fray and drop her oxygen torpedoes in a flurry of decisive action.
But her turbines were maxed out just keeping abreast with the howling-mad American, and without radar, that cloud could just as well have been a brick wall.
"Swing south," barked Jersey, even the little twin-turrets along her flanks slewing ahead, their barrels barking in a rhythmic "PakPak! PakPak! PakPak!"
"What?" said Naka, already heeling over in the turn. Whatever the reasoning, anything that took her further away from the American with her loud music, louder guns, and unending rage was a good thing.
"Last cruiser's too the north," said Jersey, her smirk elevating into a snarl as her guns drew a bead.
Naka, nodded, slewing all her guns hard starboard. Her torpedoes were hot, she could feel them begging to be let fly. Once she punched though that smoke-screen, it would be chaos. No visibility, enemy ships at close range… this was what she was built for.
— | — | —
"Admiral, new surface contact!" yelped one of the CnC techs, his voice a solid octave higher than it should be. "Designate Skunk-Six. She's coming in from the Pacific!"
Williams' glare was fixed on the pulsing red dot sliding up the mouth of the straight. "Speed?"
"Nineteen, maybe twenty knots." The tech frantically glanced over his shoulder at Williams. "Sir, from the return I'm getting… it's gotta be big."
"You certain?"
"Aye, sir," the tech waved at the monitors dominating his console, "Clear track. It's like it's not even trying to hide."
"Shit." Williams balled his hands into fists. "Jersey, you've got-"
"Yeah yeah, I see her," said Jersey with a roaring laugh, her voice punctuated by the rippling thunder of her forward turrets.
— | — | —
Naka cringed at the American's laugh, willing herself to be small as she slammed prow-first though the abyssal smokescreen. Anger, she could deal with, especially if there was something more… threatening than a lone torpedo cruiser to attack the ire of those nine sixteen inch guns.
But she'd gone laughing mad! Naka forced herself to push those terrible thoughts to the stern-most corner of her mind, gritting herself for a torpedo run.
Then she heard it, the humming, rumbling sound of aircraft engines ripping though the air. Torpedo bombers, Avengers, they had to be! Naka let out a tiny whimper. Memories flashed though her mind: the sound of Avengers hurtling towards her, the splash of torpedoes dropping into the surf, the sound as her hull ripped in two. Then… nothing.
"I'm sorry, Admiral," she said, turning broadside-on to the Abyssal dreadnought. "I did my very best!" she screamed, letting her torpedoes splash into the chilly straight.
"Shut up, you dipshits! You're not gonna die," said Jersey with a roaring belly-laugh.
"Jersey, what the hell?" scowled Williams. Between a fatalistic torpedo cruiser with kamikaze aspirations and a battleship that'd apparently lost her shit, he'd had enough with the kanmusu strangeness.
"Check your track again," said Jersey, "She's steaming into the wind."
— | — | —
Williams' eyes went wide, the pieces clicking together in his brain. "Check that!" he said snapping frantically in the general direction of the radar-tracking techs.
"Confirm, sir! Skunk-six is tracking into the wind."
— | — | —
"Yo, WHITE!" barked Jersey, her bow plowing though the smokescreen as she laughed, her armor shrugging off the pathetic volley of six-inch rounds the lone remaining cruiser was peppering her with like they were mere insults, "Nice of you to join us!"
Naka glanced up, cringing as a squadron of six TBF Avengers roared right over her head… then peeled off towards the limping dreadnought, their bomb bays opening in ragged sequence.
In the next ten seconds, a thousand and one things happened all at once. A volley of six sixteen inch Mark 8 armor-piercing shells, two Type 93 long-lance oxygen torpedoes, and six Mark 13 air-dropped torpedoes slammed into the dreadnought's flanks and stern.
Explosions raced along its flank as warhead after warhead blew enormous gashes in the hull, even as Jersey's volley gutted the abyssal from the inside, lighting off magazines, bursting boilers, and sending flaming coal arcing though the sky.
Jersey threw her hand up in salute to the pudgy torpedo bombers, her stern swinging out as she brought the last cruiser under the guns of her stern turret.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! at this range, she simply couldn't miss. Three sixteen inch Mark 7 rifles sang in murderous symphony, joining the chorus of 5inch/38 twins barking like wild dogs.
The mess hall erupted in roaring, wordless cheers. Every sailor, contractor, and civilian lept to their feat in with thunderous cheers. Crowning felt someone grab him in a crushing hug, hands slapping hard against his back.
The abyssal wasn't merely sunk. There was no wreckage, no burning oil sick to memorialize the hell it'd caused. The cruiser was simply gone, erased from this earth by the combined fury of one severely pissed-off Battleship and her newly arrived friend.
— | — | —
"OHRAH!" barked someone, setting off a chorus from even the blue-uniformed sailors. "Way to go, Big J!"
"Hey, Admiral?" Jersey's voice was uncharacteristically quiet, so soft it was barely audible over the roar of applause filling the CnC.
Williams waved for his crew to quiet down. "Yeah."
"Heh… I do good?"
"You did outstanding, Commander."
"Okay," on the CNN feed, Williams saw Jersey offer a faint smile, her legs starting to wobble beneath her. He checked his watch… poor girl must be running on fumes. "I'm uh… gonna take a nap now, if that's okay."
Williams smiled, "request to nap granted, Jersey. You earned it."
A/N: IJN Naka was sunk by a combined Helldiver and Avenger attack in February of 1944. She dodged the first two waves, but the third nailed her with a torpedo and a bomb, cracking her clean in half).