For Earth and Her Colonies Chapter 13: Back in the Saddle, a Halo + Kantai Collection Crossover fanfic

Sorry for the delay: Fanfiction was down for a bit this morning. Here we go!

Disclaimer: I own neither Halo nor Kantai Collection.

Nagato set her arms on the desk, folded her hands in front of her face, and glowered over the top of them. Her target smiled nervously and fidgeted, but otherwise did not respond. Finally Nagato sighed heavily. "Are you really going to make me ask you to explain yourself?"

Harvest gulped and rubbed her arm. "Well, a few weeks ago I kind of wrecked her workshop—"

"I remember."

"—and I've been wanting to make it up to her, and since what she likes most is to go really fast…" Harvest gulped again and looked around her office, flinching away every time her eyes returned to Nagato's piercing gaze. "…Well, you know what I did."

"I know what you did, but I want you to say it."

"I-I helped her go fast. Ma'am."

"You took her into orbit."

"So that she could say she went really fast!"

"You took the destroyer Shimakaze on an orbit around the planet."

"She was fine once she got her rigging out—"

"That's not the point! You are a military ship, not a pleasure cruise! I'm not having my kanmusu try to bribe you for rides when they should be focused on the war we are fighting down here, and the same goes for you!"

"A-aye, ma'am," Harvest returned in a small voice. The spaceship may have out-tonned her by orders of magnitude, but there was little doubt Nagato could be scary when she was well and truly pissed.

A knock on the office door broke some—but not all—of the spell. Nagato glowered at the frigate a moment longer before responding. "Enter!"

Mutsu nodded apologetically as she walked through the door. "Apologies for interrupting, but I just got word from Roma that their mission has sortied." Her sister didn't need to say that Harvest would need to get going to make their rendezvous.

Nagato inclined her head slightly and sighed. As much as she really wanted to keep chewing the frigate out, duty called above all. "Well, you know what to do. Get going."

Harvest quickly saluted before dashing away, but she took a brief moment to stick her head back around the door. "So, just for the record, regarding that request I got from Kongou—"

"Get out!"

Nagato buried her head in her hands, leaning on the desk and groaning; Mutsu walked over and rubbed her sister's back. "How's Shimakaze?" the secretary ship asked.

"She's still focused on the fact that her speed could be measured in five digits." As Nagato groaned again, Mutsu went on, "Want me to wait until she comes off her high?"

"That would be for the best. I'd prefer to chew someone out when they have a chance of actually listening." Nagato stood up. "Can you hold the fort for me for a while?"

Mutsu smiled softly as she sat down in Nagato's chair. "Have fun with your hamster."

"Oh, I will."

UNSC Harvest smirked to herself as she orbited towards her target. The past five weeks since her rescue had been a story of constant practice. She'd honed her flight skills back towards what she felt they should be for a light frigate, and whatever Nagato may say on her giving Shimakaze a ride, for Harvest the trip had been more of a proof of concept than repaying a debt. The fact that she could take off, round the planet, and land again without destroying or cratering anything showed just how much the spaceship had improved.

Though Harvest was practiced enough to fly without too much help from her AI, she still needed its help to slow into a geosynchronous orbit. As Copeland fired her rockets to slow her speed, she reviewed what she knew about the mission.

Ascension and St. Helena were two small islands in the middle of the South Atlantic, halfway between South America and Africa. The Abyssal base in between them, it turned out, was also one of the larger producers of Abyssal subsurface craft for the Atlantic. The Europeans planned a multi-national response: German U-boats would blow the anchors tethering the base to the sea floor, after which a combination of French, Italian, and British forces would meet the base when it surfaced and destroy it. Given the unexpectedly high resistance the Americans faced taking such a base in the Marshals, the Europeans had contacted Harvest and asked if she could soften up the base before the Europeans went in.

Harvest smiled softly. "Contacted" and "asked" were such diplomatic words, and Harvest found them rather cute. The United Nations Space Command and the United Earth Government had been the governing bodies of all of humanity for hundreds of years; even the insurrectionists were officially considered internal rebellions rather than a war between sovereign states. As far as Harvest was concerned, this distant past where humanity inhabited one world divided into hundreds of recognized nation-states was…quaint.

Then again, the one time the UEG had interacted with another sovereign power resulted in the Human-Covenant War, so what the hell.

Harvest, however, felt no guilt letting Nagato and Enterprise handle the diplomacy. She was a warship, damnit. Give her a mission and she'll do it, otherwise quit the whining and posturing. If countries decided to act like children then by God she would treat them like children.

That being said, interrupting that one envoy's speech with "For the love of fuck, I don't care!" probably had not been the brightest idea. Enterprise had a lot of fun repairing that summit. Oh well.

Copeland's notification that she was in position over the target brought Harvest out of her political musings. Sure enough, she was over the coordinates the Europeans had given her. Now she just had to wait for the submarines to send the base to the surface for her part to begin.

Harvest sighed. If there was just one thing she could run back to the future to grab and take back to the past, it would be a decent communications set. Say whatever you want about the capabilities of UNSC ground forces, but at the very least their communications allowed an infantryman to contact support not just from fellow ground forces and aircraft, but from orbiting frigates as well. When in atmosphere Harvest could contact nearby ship girls by radio, but no ship girl radio had a hope of getting a message all the way up to the frigate in orbit. That required the gigantic, stationary stations built for Earth's primitive space program, and many of those stations—particularly those in large oceans like the Pacific—had been destroyed.

Even where the stations still provided coverage, the message still had to travel from the girl, to the station, up to Harvest, back down to the station, and back out to the girl. Needless to say, a snowball stood more of a chance surviving in Hell than this system did in the heat of battle. When Harvest griped about this, Enterprise and Saratoga were surprisingly familiar with the problem. Apparently during the battle to retake the Philippines during World War Two, the Army commander in charge forbid the admiral leading the invasion fleet from talking directly to the admiral in charge of the main naval forces, forcing any messages to be routed through a small station at Ulithi which was promptly swamped with just the day-to-day communications. Both American carriers agreed it was a system that, almost by design, would break down in an emergency, but unlike the historical example options for overcoming the downside for Harvest were rather limited.

Saratoga promised she'd ask some contractors to look into a solution, but cautioned that it could take months to years before progress could be made on a communicator powerful enough to punch into orbit yet small enough for a ship girl to carry. And though Harvest's tightbeam array could punch down to talk directly to anyone in an emergency, it took no small amount of concentration on Harvest's part to make the system work, effort that was usually better utilized responding to the crisis than speaking to someone who could not talk back.

Given these difficulties, the Europeans and Harvest agreed that the frigate would be better used for strategic rather than tactical support: the Europeans gave Harvest all the information they had while she was still on the ground, and once in orbit Harvest would bombard the Abyssals when they appeared before holding fire to allow the ship girls to move in.

The call from her sensor operator brought Harvest out of her musings. Sure enough, she could see a domed Abyssal base breaching the ocean surface. Smiling to herself, she prepped her weapons.

The Mark 5 Kinetic Bombardment Weapon, colloquially known as the "Stiletto", was the primary orbital bombardment weapon of UNSC light frigates and other ground-support spacecraft. Consisting of merely a large tungsten rod launched out of the belly of spacecraft at eight kilometers per second, Stilettos came in bundles of twelve, and could be fired individually on AI control to strike a specific target, or by the bundle for a saturation bombardment. Twelve to fifteen minutes after launch—depending on the altitude of the launch vessel—the Stilettos would strike their targets.

Harvest waited a couple moments to allow the Abyssals to file out of the base and assume defensive positions before releasing two bundles: one bundle on saturation duty at the base, and the second bundle fired individually at large Abyssal targets that her research said posed the greatest threat. A counter helpfully provided by Copeland told the frigate the time-to-target for her strike, and now there was little to do but sit back and wait for the fireworks.

As the timer ticked down, Harvest's attention drew northward towards the approaching force of ship girls—or rather, the three approaching forces, for though they sailed together the differences between the forces were easy for Harvest to see. The first group, clad in combinations of green, white, and red marking them as the Italians Harvest interacted with most planning for the raid, stopped first. The second group, clad largely in reds like Prince of Wales enjoyed, continued a little farther before halting. But the third group, clad in red, white, and blue, seemed to disdain stopping and continued onward.

Harvest's brow furrowed as the third group—presumably the French—continued onward far past the point the plan said for them to stop, their advance drawing the British and Italians in their wake to keep the force intact. The orbiting frigate deflated as the advance drew some of the Abyssals Harvest hoped to strike out of position, but her disappointment grew to worry as the fighting down below drew closer and closer to where some of her Stilettos were supposed to land. As more and more Abyssals moved to intercept, Harvest realized with dread that at their current rate of advance, the vanguard of the European force would be right near the outermost Stilettos would impact.

"Ninety seconds to impact," Copeland said in her head. Harvest cursed under her breath; she had no choice. She summoned her concentration to tightbeam the approaching ship girls.

"This is not the plan," HMS Warspite said reproachfully, hardly paying attention to her main battery as it roared against the Abyssals. "We need to pull back or we risk running into our own artillery fire."

"Perfidious Albion!" Richelieu responded, her own batteries slinging shells downrange. "You may be perfectly happy to re-enact the trenches, but I have no interest in copying the tactics that destroyed an entire generation!"

Warspite frowned. She could not argue that the plan King George V relayed sounded like an old-fashioned "artillery bombardment and then infantry rush", but at the same time though she disliked the connection she had looked into the communication difficulties enough to realize there really was no other choice. She doubted Richelieu had done the same, and she also doubted Richelieu knew how bad it was when infantry got so overeager that they walked into their own artillery bombardment. And from everything she had heard about the spaceship hovering over their heads, Warspite had no inclination to find out if she would fare any better than a poor bloody infantryman caught under her guns.

On the other hand, Warspite conceded it probably wasn't the best idea to show up with a trench whistle around her neck. Her comment, "we wait for the artillery to soften them up, and then we go over the top," could also have probably been better phrased. Richelieu was launched in 1939; she knew all too well how an entire generation of French sons had been wiped out by the Great War. Warspite had made the comparison out of her brand of gallows humor, but the moment she saw the horror flicker across the French battleship's face she knew she had made a mistake. After all, France's revulsion of World War One and everything it stood for was the reason they decided to surrender in 1940 rather than continue the struggle in exile.

Her own errors aside, Warspite still knew that the fighting was drawing their forces closer and closer to the enemy's base, where the artillery still had yet to hit. Any veteran of the trenches knew to avoid that mistake, but if someone refused to distinguish between good trench tactics and bad… "Richelieu, enough! We must cease our advance!"

Richelieu opened her mouth to respond, but all conversation amongst the ship girls halted as a voice sounded out inside Warspite's head. "Incoming orbital strike, at your position."

Richelieu blinked. "Did you hear that?" she asked softly.

Warspite started to nod, but froze still as her ears picked a noise no ship girl had ever heard before.