A/N: Updates may slow down for the near future. I'm headed home for two weeks for family stuff, and though I'm taking my computer with me I'm not sure how much time I'll have to write. For all I know there might be no problem at all, but I wanted to let you all know just in case. Thanks for all the wonderful support you guys have shown my little story, and I look forward to seeing it through to the end!
That short announcement out of the way, on with the show!
Disclaimer: I own neither Halo nor Kantai Collection.
UNSC Harvest had never felt so useful in her life.
Sure, the frigate had done plenty during the Covenant War, but all her actions there were tempered by the fact that the UNSC had been forced to retreat anyway. Here, on the other hand, she felt like she was contributing to real progress.
Not even two weeks had passed since the base by Ascension Island had gone down and already two more joined it in oblivion. There had been a pause of a few days as the lessons from Ascension were disseminated amongst the world's ship girls, Richelieu in particular having some rather pointed insights, but then the targets started coming in fast.
A small Abyssal base between Norway and Iceland—deemed a threat more for its location than its size—had been the first to go. It was a rather straightforward affair in Harvest's opinion, though she did laugh quite a bit when she later learned the ship-girl charge after her bombardment had been sparked by a destroyer named Gurkha drawing her knife and hollering, "Let's go get the bastards!"
Second to go had been a base near where the Centennial Orbital Elevator was in Harvest's time. The location aside, the base was also a straightforward affair, which put Harvest on edge. Things were going too easy.
Just months before, Harvest would have believed things were so easy because she was unbeatable, but getting dragged to the bottom of the sea had changed the frigate, even if it took her a bit to really notice the difference. As Harvest thought about the ease with which the last few bases had fallen, she remembered some words from the American carrier sent to look into her. "Remember you are mortal," Enterprise had said. "If you do not remember, the enemy will be more than happy to remind you."
Enterprise and Harvest had really hit it off in the weeks since the kidnapping, so much so that Harvest didn't begrudge Enterprise too much when the American admitted she had been sent by ONI to spy on her. The bit of her that was part-Prowler had raised some hackles, but Harvest knew that ONI forced Fleet to do things all the time. She still wasn't willing to trust ONI directly, but she would begrudge that someone might front for ONI and not necessarily subscribe to their beliefs. She didn't know what Enterprise thought about that line of thought, but Harvest still felt proud for her open-mindedness.
A notification from Copeland brought Harvest back to the here-and-now. Located off Indonesia and halfway between Australia and Singapore, the Abyssal base on Christmas Island was the last remaining close threat to the Southeast Asia trade lanes, though the fact that it could be bypassed left it lower on the to-destroy list for the world's naval forces. But now with Harvest knocking bases down left-and-right, Christmas Island was the highest-priority target for the ship-girl forces in the area.
Stabilizing into her orbit—something she was getting rather good at with all the practice—Harvest scanned the base with her sensors. Unlike the one holding her captive at the Marshalls or the first one Harvest bombarded in the South Atlantic, this base was constructed atop the island itself. Harvest could see many of the eldritch structures dotting the island, along with what looked like a chimney…or a very large gun.
Harvest fired her thruster, darting to the side just as whatever it fired shot past her. They'll always try to counter, the frigate thought, no matter how big a longshot it is. The fact that the Abyssals had put so much effort into trying to counter her alone, however, spoke to just how big a threat they believed her to be. That thought made an evil smile spread across the spaceship's face. They're damn right I'm a big threat!
Ignoring Copeland's warnings, Harvest stayed above the island long enough for them to fire a couple more times, recording her observations to report to Nagato when she got back on the ground. A little under five minutes between each shot. Interesting. From what she could see, the gun was just a super-sized Abyssal gun modified to fire vertically. Long reload, little aim beyond "point in general direction", projectile seems like a similarly enlarged standard Abyssal shell. For the moment, Harvest felt relieved; the gun seemed like a desperate half-measure rather than a MAC modification the frigate feared they might make. That said, nothing guaranteed they might come up with something like that in the future…
Harvest frowned and decided she was tired of the game. She prepped three Stiletto bundles for launch. One for the base complex, one for the ship buildings, and one for you mister gun, she thought with a smile. Fuck you very much, and have a nice death!
Harvest released the bundles and watched with a smirk as they fell into the atmosphere. Her mood was ruined, however, as one last projectile shot past a few dozen kilometers away. That gun might be inaccurate as hell, but it still was a warning that her dominance from orbit was over. Simply orbiting overhead and blasting them into oblivion wouldn't work anymore. The Abyssals had upped their game; Harvest would have to as well. Nodding at the impacts on the island, Harvest broke herself out of her orbit, and headed back towards Japan.
Saratoga crossed her arms and glowered. She wasn't mad at any one person this time, just the situation. Still, though, it may not have been bad, but it wasn't good. "Are you sure of this?" she asked, glancing back up at the screen.
The two capital ships looking back at her, Nagato and Yorktown, both had similar expressions as Saratoga as the only non-capital ship in the conference, Harvest, nodded. "I'm sure. The Abyssals have a gun able to shoot into orbit. It can't do so quickly or with much degree of accuracy, but…" Saratoga grimaced. That but carried a lot behind it. "But it's only the Mark One," "but it's just a prototype," "but in decent concentrations," "but…"
"The first anti-aircraft guns were field artillery modified to fire upward," Yorktown mused. "They were inaccurate as hell, and really didn't pose too much of a threat on their own." Though that was true, Saratoga knew that was beside the point, and Yorktown's tone said that she knew that too.
"It's still an escalation," Harvest responded. "I just didn't think it would happen so soon."
"You'd be surprised the things one can do when their very existence is on the line." That line came from Nagato, of all people, but it didn't change the fact that she was right.
Harvest nodded. "The longer we wait, the more time the Abyssals will have to build and deploy these guns. We need to accelerate our operations tempo."
All three ships grimaced at that. Though many ship-girls had operated at a high tempo when they were steel ships, such practice fell out of use during the Abyssal war. Logistical complications coupled with the need for defense alongside any offensive strike had led ship-girl operations to trend towards large, dedicated operations rather than a series of strikes. In addition, the fact no ship-girl wanted to admit was the fact that attacking Abyssal bases was still a novel experience.
Before Harvest's arrival, the largest factor restricting the ability of ship-girl forces to attack Abyssal bases had been the ratio of force required to assault the base verses the gain humanity would receive from the bases' destruction. After the initial panic and defensive focus in the wake of the Abyssal's appearance, the primary targets had been bases that obstructed major sea lanes or cut off friendly forces or supply routes. Early ship-girl actions had thus been aimed at major bottlenecks or forcing through supply routes, like the European assaults on Gibraltar and Suez, the tenuous supply line the Americans forced through to Australia, and Japan's efforts to connect to that supply route through Malaysia and the western Pacific. After that had been major roadblocks directly threatening supply routes, like Malta or Okinawa, and then so on down the line.
Operations aimed not at freeing up supply routes but attacking the Abyssals directly came far down the list; the American assault of Hawaii and the diversionary Japanese strike at Midway, in fact, had been the first one planned in the entire Abyssal war. And the massive resistance the Americans had faced showed such operations had to be a planned assault, not part of a series of strikes. The Japanese had risked a lot bypassing so much Abyssal territory to hit Midway; had the Americans not assaulted Hawaii and drawn the Abyssal attention back eastward, it was entirely possible Japan's entire kanmusu force could have been surrounded and wiped out.
Even with Harvest's help, taking on the Abyssal bases had been no easy task. Any supplies Japan had stockpiled after Midway had been spent taking the Aleutians, the Fast Carrier Task Force faced an unexpectedly fierce fight in the Marshalls, and despite the valuable lessons the Europeans had been shaken by the assault on Ascension Island. One of the reasons why Harvest had been sent to Christmas Island was because it was one of the dwindling targets that could be assaulted by fresh ship-girls. Saratoga grimaced again; as much as this new threat meant they needed to accelerate their operations, the fact remained that the world's ship girls needed to rest and resupply before taking on more major Abyssal bases.
The looks on their faces said that Nagato and Yorktown were both well aware of that fact too. Harvest's voice broke Saratoga out of her contemplation. "What about outlying bases? Are there any minor places we can strike while we prepare for the big ones?"
Saratoga blinked. There were plenty of small Abyssal outposts all over the world, places too small or out-of-the-way to rank a high threat on humanity's radar. Clearing them out was busy work, something ship girls had universally agreed could be done after the big targets were taken down. But striking them while preparing to take down the big targets…
The American carrier brought her hand to her face. Leave it to the spaceship to come up with the idea that should have been fucking obvious. "Alright, then. Let's look up all the tiny, insignificant Abyssal bases across the world and draw up some plans. We'll sweep away all the small fry and go from there." The other ship girls all nodded; Saratoga did as well in response. "Anything else?"
"Any progress on a comms system?" Harvest asked. "It would really come in handy if I'm going to be anything more than strategic bombardment."
Saratoga pursed her lips. The contractors had given her a litany of reasons why it would be troublesome, most of which were variations on simple incompatibility. If they had access to the spaceship in question, they said, they could see about downgrading its systems enough to be able to access satellites in orbit, but even that was far from a sure thing. Needless to say, that was not the direction Saratoga wanted them to take.
Finally some of the radio contractors said if they had access to the system Harvest used, they might be able to jury-rig a system that could enable them to talk, but Saratoga didn't know where she could get an example of the system other than Harvest herself, and she didn't want to sideline her most powerful ship-girl just for that.
Saratoga opened her mouth to fill the spaceship in on the difficulties, when she suddenly halted. For the past few weeks Saratoga had gotten almost daily requests from her sister for Harvest to stop by Pearl Harbor and retrieve her fairies. "Nevada's airborne and Narwhal's Marine raiders are bad enough on their own," Lexington had complained, "without them being stirred up by some unholy combination of the two." But those fairies had been dispatched to set up communication equipment, and Saratoga knew her sister had retrieved the equipment as well from the Marshalls.
A smile grew across the American carrier's face. "As a matter of fact, Harvest, we might see some progress soon after all."
Yorktown took in a deep breath, reveling in the salt smell of the sea. It's been far too long, the carrier thought. Always preferred going out than being behind a desk on dry land.
The past month had been a whirlwind of small strikes, Harvest coming and going with barely a break for resupply. Yorktown didn't know how the tiny frigate kept up the pace, but she guessed having a water-fueled nuclear reactor as a powerplant explained a lot.
"It really has been too long," the carrier sailing beside her said. "I can't remember the last time all three of us sailed together."
"I was thinking the same thing," Hornet replied. "And for the record, the last time was Midway."
Yorktown's smile faltered slightly, expecting Enterprise to wax lyrical on the need to be careful, or in any other way relapse towards the ball of worry she once was. Instead, the famous carrier just nodded. "Yep, definitely need to do this more often." Internally, Yorktown sighed in relief. That could have been bad.
"I've got eyes on target," a voice sounded in her ear. "There's a lot of orbital guns all over the island. Releasing the first wave of Stilettos now." After a moment Yorktown remembered that Enterprise and Hornet hadn't heard Harvest check in, and relayed the information. The assault on the Abyssal outpost at Iwo Jima was the first combat test of the jury-rigged communications system based off what the Fast Carrier Task Force had recovered from Kwajalein. The contractors only had enough parts to make a few of them, and there was a sizable dead zone between atmosphere and low orbit in which the system just would not work, but it was still better than before. Harvest agreed to donate more of her spare tightbeam sets to make further communicators if the proof of concept worked, but even then once distributed amongst the world's ship girl forces the sets would be rare enough for only commanders to have one.
Nagato had offered the American carriers one of the spare earpieces, but Enterprise had insisted Yorktown be the one to carry it. When she protested, Enterprise responded, "You are our big sister, York. You're the class leader, not me."
A warm feeling spread in Yorktown's chest thinking of that exchange, as the three sisters loaded their weapons. Already they could hear Harvest's rods landing, coupled with the loud bangs of the orbital guns firing. "I'm taking a lot of fire up here," Harvest called. "I'll drop some more Stilettos as a parting gift, but then I'm gonna have to break my orbit and re-engage. You'll be on your own for a couple hours."
"Understood, Harvest. Let us know when you're available again." Nagato switched to the general net. "Our support is taking a lot of heat and needs to reposition. Wouldn't it be a shame if she came back to find the show over, neh?"
Every single ship girl, Japanese and American, yelled out in response to the challenge. Yorktown grinned. This was going to be fun.
This bastard is a lot tougher than it should be, Yorktown thought glumly as she rammed yet another strike down the barrel. All the intel photographs and estimates had said Iwo Jima was a small, insignificant base to the Abyssals. Of course, as Enterprise pointed out, the Americans thought the same thing about the Japanese base there in 1945. Instead, the island hid massive bases underground, for both the Japanese during the war and the Abyssals now. Nagato and some other Japanese ship girls had still been alive when the Americans assaulted Iwo Jima; imitation it may have been, but the Japanese were not flattered.
What was supposed to be a quick operation had turned into a multi-hour long, full-fledged battle, dragging re-enforcement ship-girls in from the Kure detachment as well as the Okinawa garrison, with Yokosuka having to deploy its own forces to cover the gaps.
And re-enforce the battle as well, apparently. "What on earth did you all get yourself into here?" came the distinctive stiff voice of the aircraft carrier Kaga.
"A battle, toots. Did you really not notice?" Ryūjō shot back, flinging planes into the air off her scroll.
"Enough, both of you." Nagato quickly stepped in. "CarDiv One, we need you to join in air operations to suppress the enemy defenses. Yorktown is heading carrier operations for me today. She will direct you."
"You honestly expect me to take orders from an American?"
"I expect you to do your damn job, unless you wish me to sic my little sister on you. Again." Yorktown supposed she probably should be more polite to an ally, but over six hours of battle would erode anyone's patience. For what it was worth, the threat worked in silencing Kaga.
"Got it!" Fusou shouted triumphantly, as the largest Abyssal structure finally collapsed. "Wait, what the… Look out!"
Ice flowed down Yorktown's spine as something huge clambered out and roared. It looked down, taking in the comparatively diminutive forms of the battleships staring it in the face. It started to advance towards Fusou and Yamashiro…just as a series of bombs blasted it in the face. The beast roared in pain, swiping at the dark blue planes to no effect. "Scatter!" Enterprise called. "Surround it on all sides! Blast it with whatever you can!"
Yorktown fired her musket as the ship girls repositioned. She keyed her mike. "Harvest, I'm not sure if you can hear this, but if you can, one of those giant things you told us about just popped up. We could really use some help!" The frigate had needed to reposition again just over an hour ago. She should be popping back into range soon, but until then…
Until then, we'll just have to survive on our own, Yorktown thought as she tore open yet another strike and poured it down the barrel. She looked up at the beast, which seemed to be readying some sort of ranged strike aimed to her left. Yorktown glanced that way, and beheld Akagi and Kaga staring wide-eyed.
Yorktown cursed and dashed over, her ramrod sticking out of the barrel. She crashed headlong into the two Japanese carriers, bowling them over just in time for something unhealthy to sail overhead. "Watch out, damnit!" she yelled. "Stay in the game!"
The three carriers picked themselves up and spread out, firing as fast as they could. The beast roared in frustration. Deprived of groups of easy targets, it moved out away from the island, trying to get the ship girls into melee range. The ship girls were able to keep away well enough, until Yamashiro tripped and fell.
Shit. The ship girls' weapons were damaging the beast, but there was nothing anyone had that could kill it in time. Fusou called out in despair, and Yamashiro picked herself off the surface, but not quickly enough. As a shadow loomed over her, Yamashiro paled in fear.
A missile slammed into the beast's face, causing it to roar in pain. It turned to the new threat, just in time to catch another two Archers on the nose as Harvest shot by just over the water, her limbs aflame from rocket exhaust. The smoke finally cleared, revealing the beast to be badly damaged, but still alive. It roared its defiance at the spaceship.
Harvest fired her MAC.
The projectile moved so fast that it looked like a beam of light exited Harvest's weapon, the round boring right through the beast before continuing to the horizon and into outer space. As it slumped over and sank beneath the waves, the frigate moved onward, missiles flying out of her rig and into the island. Soon enough, the Abyssal fire coming out of the base tapered off at last. Iwo Jima was finally cleared.
As the adrenaline finally began to taper off, Yorktown collected her sisters. She patted Enterprise on the back. "Thanks for the save, Big E." Yorktown didn't want to think about what might have happened had Enterprise not yelled at the battleships to scatter.
To her surprise, however, Enterprise just glared back. Yorktown blinked, her heart stopping in place. Oh, God, don't tell me she's gone back again! Luckily for Yorktown's heart, however, she was able to glance away just enough to see the smirk on Hornet's face. "Thanks for the save…Little E?"
Enterprise grinned and threw her arms around her older sister. "Jeeze, York, you should know better by now!" Yorktown laughed, willing her heart to restart as she returned the hug. At long last, her sister Enterprise was back again.