A/N: I know I mentioned it in a previous chapter, but considering how often I repeat the nicknames here I thought I'd make it clear to avoid confusion: "Fast Carrier Task Force" is-both historically and here in FEAHC-the fleet based around the fast Essex class aircraft carriers of the United States Navy. Here in FEAHC, the FCTF has also gotten the nickname "Big Blue Fleet" because every Essex came back in the blue uniforms of the American Civil War. I know I've mentioned it before, but it was a while ago and just wanted to repeat it in case anyone forgot.
Some review responses:
TazalTerminals, danialzkz, War historian, AnalPoptarts: I've been placing hints as to who is coming throughout the chapters; that said, there's another large hint at the end of this one.
Danny79: Methinks she already realizes her overconfidence has come round to bite her. And yeah, I'm having lots of fun with the ODST fairies. If you like them now, just you wait...
TheEliteDucky: I'm a big World War Two history buff, as you can probably tell, and given that everyone and their brother uses "Alpha, Bravo, Charlie" I thought I'd do something different. Regarding the second point, did it really seem like I was describing a ship girl?
"Internal affairs" basically means that Section Zero is effectively ONI's secret police. "Illegal operation" probably would describe the Spartan III's, but who do you think the woman was? (Hint: she's Serin Osman's mentor, and Harvest mentions her name in the next passage.)
I mentioned I am a big WWII history buff; the translated name of the NKVD, the secret police that fueled Stalin's rule over the Soviet Union and kept the Politburo in line, was "People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs". That's not a coincidence.
BrokenLifeCycle, Guest: Thanks for the well wishes, and enjoy!
To everyone who has followed/favorited this story, thanks for your support, and enjoy the show!
Disclaimer: I own neither Halo nor Kantai Collection.
USS Yorktown (CV-10) smirked as she sailed southwest with her task group. A few days ago word passed to Pearl that an Abyssal base had been discovered lurking in the Marshal Islands. Two days ago submarines sent to reconnoiter the site confirmed a sizable base on the atoll of Kwajalein, apparently with a gigantic undersea base offshore. Yesterday the commandant of the Hawaii garrison, the original USS Lexington, judged a quarter of the Fast Carrier Task Force supplemented by escort carriers and other ship girls to be a sufficient force to defend the islands. Lexington radioed her sister, "Am proceeding south with three groups to attack enemy base at dawn."
The irony, of course, was lost on absolutely no one. Every single one of the Big Blue Fleet's ship girls rolled their eyes in unison when Lexington boasted what she said. What Saratoga said in response the converted battlecruiser told no one, but given Lex could only return a sheepish "I've always wanted to say that," Yorktown could take a guess.
Historical jokes aside, Yorktown knew they had reason to be confident: the Abyssals still seemed to be recovering from the Midway strike the Japanese had carried out months earlier, and all were excited to learn the Abyssal base in the Aleutians had been wiped out. After years of slow, grinding fights, progress now seemed to be speeding up. The end of the Abyssal war may be on the horizon after all.
Lexington turning around to face them brought Yorktown out of her musing. "We're almost in position, and light should be coming soon," the deerskin-clad carrier said, her face hidden in the predawn darkness. "Split into your groups, and load up. Bennington, keep your group as anti-ship in case anything comes up. Everyone else, as soon as the first ray of light appears over the horizon, start firing. Let's give 'em hell, girls."
Yorktown's smirk morphed into a grin as she shifted her rifle higher on her shoulder and held her left arm out. Responding to the command, Intrepid, Shangri La, and Ticonderoga revved their engines, shifting out of column behind Yorktown and into a firing line beside her. The movements mimicked what the carriers did as steel ships—Yorktown still preferred the colorful "murderer's row" over boring "firing line"—but her and many other ships in the Big Blue Fleet always got a kick out of the wildly different groups they found talking about them online. As Independence once griped half-jokingly, "Leave it to us to bring together mecha musume fans, naval history buffs, and Civil War re-enactors. Only in America."
Shaking her head at the silliness of the modern world, Yorktown set her Springfield Model 1861 Rifled-musket atop her foot to keep it out of the water and reached around to her side. The pre-war carriers, Yorktown's namesake included, had several different Revolution-era ammunition types they could choose from to mimic different strikes. Birdshot produced a fighter sweep, for example, and buckshot a bomber sweep or a scout-bomber patrol. A full strike was produced through a combination ammunition called "buck-and-ball": one large musket ball combined with three buckshot balls. The result was a powerful strike…at closer ranges. At longer ranges, however, the strikes spread out and became less accurate, even piecemeal as fighters separated from dive bombers separated from torpedo bombers. Observing a strike fired at maximum range, Enterprise griped the result was a "scarily accurate recreation of Midway, where no one knew what they were doing and everyone came from ten different points on the compass". The result came down more to luck than skill or quality, and despite being one of the luckiest ships ever known, both iterations of Yorktown knew that Enterprise despised few things more than having to rely on her luck to carry the day.
Opposed to the variety offered by the prewar carriers, Yorktown reflected as she extracted her shot from the pouch and tore the end off with her teeth, the Essex class and mid-war refits offered just one type of ammunition: the Minié ball, workhorse of the American Civil War. Accurate even at long ranges, the Minié ball Yorktown rammed down the barrel perfectly mimicked late-war American carrier doctrine: successive waves of attacks at long range, combining fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers. Though the different ship types carried enough weapons to satisfy any Civil War buff—while the Essexes came back with Springfields, the light carriers tended to appear with Sharps rifles, and the escort carriers with Spencer's, Henry's, and other carbines—the end result was still the same. Any enemy who stood in their way soon found themselves drowned in dark blue airplanes, the victim of massed carrier strikes from over the horizon. And soon, Yorktown thought with a smirk as she placed a blasting cap on the nipple before easing the hammer back down atop it, yet more Abyssals will learn the folly of daring to resist the Big Blue Fleet.
"Yorkten!" Lexington called out. Yorktown had been very intimidated the first time she met her namesake; from what little Enterprise had said during the war Yorktown expected CV-5 to be a towering giant, a symbol she always had to strive to live up to. What she did not expect was for her namesake to only come up to her nose, nor for that matter for CV-5 to slap her on the back hard enough to stagger her, before promptly christening her with that damned nickname. It seemed she did it to everyone—seeing their instructor's reaction to being called "Little E" never got old, though Cabot found out the hard way that anyone but her sister calling her that was in for a world of pain—but Yorktown still deflated a bit any time she heard that.
Still, she had to answer the commanding carrier. "Aye, ma'am?" Yorktown turned to face the deerskin-clad convert. The pre-war carriers often jumped at the chance to upgrade past their pre-war refit, though their weapon choices often did not conform to the standardization of their as-built fellows. Only Enterprise picked a Springfield like her fellow fleet carriers. Saratoga preferred a Henry for whatever reason, and Wasp and Hornet both drew Sharps rifles. CV-5, oddly enough, seemed to prefer her pre-war refit, much to her little sister's frustration.
"Is your command ready?" Lexington's choice, a Spencer, glinted in the pre-morning light. It was almost time.
"Aye, ma'am!" Yorktown had no need to turn and examine her fellow carriers. She knew more than enough time had passed for them to be loaded. One of the reasons she had been promoted to handle a group of her own was the fact that she trusted her subordinates to be competent without micromanagement.
Lexington nodded. "Then let's go!"
Yorktown turned to face her charges, who stood loaded, ready, and willing, just as she expected. Her trust was not misplaced. "Rifles! At the ready!" The carriers hefted their Springfields.
"Aim!" The firing line leveled westward.
"Fire!"
This place is a damned fortress, Albacore grumbled to herself as she observed the Abyssal base. Tang hadn't been kidding when she described the Abyssal base as "gigantic"; this thing was huge! A large dome-like structure held a pocket of air, in which sat a series of eldritch structures that set Albacore's "Abyssal-sonar" pinging like mad. And somewhere in this mass of whatever-the-hell was a special ship-girl in need of rescue, orders from Saratoga herself. The need to locate and rescue whomever was the only reason Harder wasn't charging in like the madwoman she was, but it sure was annoying hiding behind coral and rock trying to peer through the water to find this chick. And all that might well be for naught if she wasn't alive anymore.
Saratoga had repeated multiple times that the mission was a rescue, not a recovery, but Albacore wasn't too optimistic. She knew that ship-girls could survive a surprising number of environments as long as they kept their rigging, but she also knew the odds of the Abyssals forgetting to remove a ship-girls rig were slim to none. And even if the rigging did stay attached, no one wanted to know what the Abyssals might do to a live captured ship girl, and these were girls who knew all too well what the Japanese did to American prisoners during the war. It was not without reason that Albacore and the other subgirls included a scuttling charge to blow away their rig and themselves with it. It wasn't like it added any vulnerability—submarines were glass coffins no matter what—and far better to take yourself out than suffer whatever the Abyssals might subject you to. So far as Albacore knew, no subgirl had yet had to actually implement such a final act, but the entire silent service agreed that safe was better than sorry.
Albacore's brooding came to an abrupt end as Abyssals started pouring out of the dome and heading to the surface. She checked her watch—the Big Breasted Fuckers (a nickname the subgirls made sure stayed within their ranks, none of them wanting to face angry aircraft carriers) were nothing if not punctual. But that was the signal for the subs to start extracting the girl they were supposed to find. Albacore could see Tang snarl in frustration. Where was this bitch?
A tap on her leg startled Albacore, but whirling around brought her to face Darter, not an Abyssal. As Albacore willed her heart to calm back down, Darter pointed towards a small pit, just outside the dome. Albacore looked and smiled. There she was, and wouldn't you know it, her rig was even attached! Albacore made her way over to Tang and pointed out the same, and a predatory smile came over the sub leader's face. The smile froze, however, as the girl in question suddenly looked straight at the two subs, wiggled her eyebrows, and went back to lazily looking about, as though nothing in the world was wrong.
The subs had a moment of panic—had they been compromised?—before settling into admiration. Somehow this girl was aware of the rescue force, and was doing her best to avoid tipping off any Abyssals that might still be in the area. Maybe Saratoga's insistence on rescue wasn't so misplaced after all.
Pieces of Abyssals started sinking around them by the time the subgirls made their way to their objective. The plan had called for Dace, Darter, and Albacore to work on the girl's binds, while Harder kept watch and Tang communicated with the prisoner via grease pencil, but Tang quickly noticed that Harder's definition of "keeping watch" boiled down to "lustily staring at the Abyssal base wishing to blow it to smithereens", and swapped up the plan: Harder joined the twins on chain duty, Tang kept watch, and Albacore found herself with slate and grease pencil in her hands. She swam up to the captive girl and wrote "OK?" on the slate.
"I'm fine," sounded out inside Albacore's head. The subgirl blinked; what the hell? "Yes, I can talk to you, but I can't move my limbs underwater, so unless you want to try to read facial expressions let's get this over with." The subgirl blinked a few more times, before deciding this was something to worry about after the mission. She rubbed the slate clean and wrote a new message. "Ready?"
"I have twelve fairies inside the base. I need to extract them." Albacore frowned; though she was sure Harder would jump at the chance, Albacore knew they had far too few girls to infiltrate the base successfully. Her brow furrowed, as she erased the slate and thought how to gently tell the girl she would have to leave her fairies behind.
Before she could, though, a series of sharp cracks echoed out of the base. The five subs quickly flattened against the rocks, looking up to see the dome and much of the base rocket towards the surface, several Abyssals being sucked up in the process. Peering over the rocks revealed the supports anchoring the dome to the ocean floor had been severed, and the mass of Abyssal eldrichness had been reduced to utter chaos.
The subgirls stared, Harder's face in particular alternating between impressed and jealous. "How about now?" rang out in Albacore's head. She turned to face their target, who had a smug smile across her face.
Albacore's lips parted in a nervous smile. Tang was not going to like this…
Tang took it about as well as Albacore thought she would, but seeing as the girl's fairies had done that to the Abyssal base decided it might be worth the risk. The example of Nautilus and her Marine Raider fairies helped the subgirls relate—Nautilus was loathe to leave any of them behind on a mission, waiting until the very last moment before consenting to leave them, and even then would go out of her way to return later on the off chance they were still around.
Dragging their target behind them to avoid getting separated, the subs crept about the ruins, being careful to watch out for the slowly sinking remains of Abyssals cleaned up by the carriers as they located most of the fairies. Albacore was surprised they weren't drowned when they blew the base, but each of the black-clad fairies had an oversized helmet and a tank of air, but they were far from the old diving helmets Albacore knew from her time or even the scuba gear the subgirls saw in the modern world. Who was this ship girl?
"Last group should be coming up soon," the girl said. Albacore nodded before signaling on to the rest of the subs. Sure enough, rounding a corner beheld the last three fairies, who gratefully clambered up Albacore's outstretched arm and into the satchel she wore; according to the girl the fairies had about an hour of air left, which should be enough time for the girls to get away far enough to surface and transfer the fairies. A sudden rumble shook the base, however, and the girl's voice sounded far more worried than the whole mission so far. "Shit! Big guy coming!" Another rumble shook the sea floor.
Hide! Albacore quickly signaled the other subs, but as they ducked down they realized the girl hadn't budged. They frantically waved her over.
"I can't move! You gotta send me up to the surface and make your own way out; we'll transfer the fairies another time." Albacore stared incredulously; did she really expect them to let their objective go to the mercy of the battle raging above? "I'll be fine, trust me!" the girl insisted. "But you gotta get me to the surface! As long as you're dragging me you'll never make it out in time." The floor shook again ominously as Albacore grit her teeth.
Damn it, Albacore thought, but she rushed out of her hiding spot, the other subs following behind. When Tang realized Albacore meant to shove their objective towards the surface, she gave her subordinate a glare that speared the sub from end to end, but there was no time to argue as one of the ruins gave way to something that froze the subs in horror.
It was massive, a mass of chitin, claws, and any and everything else, an Abyssal on a size and scale Albacore could never have imagined. It towered over the small group, its sheer size and mass blocking the light from above. And somehow through the ocean, the beast roared.
"Hurry!" The girl's plea broke Albacore out of her stupor; nudging the other subs, they chucked their objective upwards as hard as they could. The girl shot towards the surface, and to the subs' incredible relief, the beast roared again and jumped up after her.
The five submarines needed no order to de-ass the area. They ran as far away as they could, though Albacore made sure to remember to surface long enough to take the fairies in before resuming her run. There wasn't much that could spook a submarine, but Albacore knew whatever that was would be keeping her awake at night for a long time to come.
Yorktown fired her Springfield again, more to keep planes in the air than anything else, as she sailed within sight of Kwajalein Atoll. That, she reflected, had been a surprisingly difficult battle, and she was grateful Lexington had the foresight to keep Bennington's group on the deck at the beginning. The three groups had wound up frantically loading and firing as fast as they could, especially when whatever the hell that dome thing was broke the surface and every Abyssal known to man poured out of it. Yorktown was certain if she was human her hands would be burned and blistered from the heat of her weapon, and she had a new appreciation for the battleships and cruisers escorting her as her fairies hosed her weapon enough that it wouldn't blow up when she rammed more powder into it. But at long last the waves of Abyssals were finally trickling down, and the battleships were now occupying themselves shelling the dome whatever-it-is to oblivion.
As Lexington returned to formation with six odd black-clad fairies perched on her head—where did she get those from?—Yorktown turned to congratulate her group on a job well done. All of them were far too exhausted to speak, but the appreciative glances and pats on the back got the message across. They'd done good work—another Abyssal base down—and though there were many more to go the achievement deserved celebration once they got back to Pearl.
Yorktown turned back to face the island to watch that dome whatever finally sink back into the depths where it belonged when a figure suddenly broke the surface. She was small—about the size of a destroyer—but her rig was painted a grayish-black opposed to the navy gray most ship girl rigs were colored. The girl leaped into the air a good four feet, but as the gears slowly turning in Yorktown's tired brain started to move beyond "huh" into "what" territory, something else emerged from the deep.
Ice spread throughout the carrier as whatever it was surfaced, her exhausted body combining a fight-or-flight reflex, sputtering denial, and pure unadulterated horror into one gigantic cocktail as the building-sized Abyssal (for what else could it possibly be) shot out after the girl with a massive roar.
And then a massive blue and white flame shot out of the girl's rig.
The sound was incredible—the only comparison Yorktown could find to describe it is some of the rockets in the program Hornet was a part of—as the Abyssal cried in agony as the flame melted its face and upper body. As fast as it appeared, the Abyssal crashed back below the waves into the depths, while the girl just seemed to shoot up into the heavens.
It took a good five minutes for the cocktail in Yorktown's body to subside enough for her to move, and as she gazed around she beheld every other ship girl in the same horror-stricken pose she suspected she was in. Yorktown slowly made her way towards her commander. "Lexington?"
The carrier in question blinked numbly before tearing herself out of her stupor. "Yorktown?" she mumbled softly.
"When we get back to Pearl, permission to break out the medicinal—"
"Granted," the convert bit out quickly. "Jesus H. Christ, granted."
'How fitting. As we were honored, so was it. As it has been dishonored, so have we.'
'Our shame is indeed complete, but that does not mean we are to lie down to die.'
'Instead you wish us to descend to the level of primitives?'
'Watch your tongue, young one. We have been humbled, yes, but we shall persevere, and by doing so prove ourselves worthy of our battle-poems yet.'
'As you say, Hierarch.'