A/N: So This is the first battle scene that I have ever written, so please feel free to give me pointers in the reviews and from now on, if there is exposition that I cannot fit into the dialogue within the story, I will put it in the beginning as some sort of textbook entry or diary entry
Mobile Suits: large humanoid walkers, about 60 feet tall, generally faster and more maneuverable than tanks or fighters. Generally preferred over starfighters in space because of their lower power consumption, despite their larger size and large engineering requirements, then have a very low running cost combined with the capability to do other tasks other than combat make them ideal to any military force.
Infantry Suits (IS): Small armaments that are mounted on a person's body to enhance combat capability They are compressible into small objects with the use of a microscopic quantum IS core. Although there are standard assigned models, many commanders and ace pilots/special forces squadrons are given custom models, which are generated based on your personality traits, different people will have different sorts of IS properties
Konisch Rounds: Projectile rounds fired from ships that use the round's physical shell to punch through beam defenses and then the beam contents to melt and penetrate armor, extremely difficult to manufacture so ships and only capital ships typically carry them, and then, they carry no more than 5-10 salvos' worth
Textbook of Engineering for High School Freshmen, January 2231 edition
Everybody on the ship froze, all riveted to the nearest view screen.
"Oh cock", Jean moans as he pushes Mutsu into the First Officer's seat and straps himself into the Captain's chair, "All force mobile suits prepare to launch, repeat, all mobile suits prepare to launch" he says coolly into the microphone.
He then telepathically calls out to Zabi, who is in the Command and Control Center several floors below. in the hull of the ship.
Any plans, Ma'am?
No, charge main cannons, fire flares, missiles, anything, whatever you do, do not launch the mobile suits, we need to protect the destroyer crewmen in the colony and hightail it out of here
Mark coordinates and we need to get out of here, look at the size of those radar signatures, we are one battleship, one light carrier, and seven destroyers, there is no way in Hell we will be able to hold this line against two carriers and 3 battleships.
Yes ma'am, orders acknowledged. will have-
The radioman's cry of distress brings Jean back from his mindscape back to the bridge.
"ETA in 3 minutes, Captain, what are your orders?" he nervously asks, his eyes full of worry. His hands were visibly shaking and unsteady.
"Keep Mobile suits on standby, charge, are the destroyers ready for warp jump?"
"Sorry Sir, we got caught with our pants down and there are still crewmen from the destroyers in the colony searching for more artifacts."
"Patch me through to them"
"Yes Sir"
"Crew on colony, status report"
"Sir, we broke into what seems to be the head person's office, the person's body is actually still floating in the vacuum. We have retrieved some notebooks and taken the documents onboard the Alpine Ridge, we are awaiting extraction."
"Hold out until then, you will have 5 minutes"
Facepalming at the complication that the destroyers are not ready for warp and that a major fleet is about to annihilate the task force, Jean looks up at the view screen and says as calmly as possible: "Power up CIWS and load konisch rounds in main guns and charge particle capacitors, load Sledgehammer antiship missiles in tubes 5 through 10 and Scimitar anti air missiles in all other tubes."
He turns back to the radioman, "How long will it take and how far can the destroyers jump?"
With that, he turns to Mutsu, who has been staring out the view port with alot of worry.
"Mutsu, I need you to tell me all you know about the 'Abyssal Fleet' from your world, it may save, the task force today, Minerva is listening too," Jean said quickly, the telepathic glow in his eyes intensifying as he said it.
"Judging by the shape of the incoming ships, there are two Wo-class carriers and 3 Ta-class fast battleships," Mutsu said quickly, "but that is only my judgement based on what has been preloaded into my brain and the shape of the incoming ships. The person standing on top of the trailing full size Wo-class carrier is the real Wo-class carrier".
At this moment, the radio crackles to life with the voice of the captain of the destroyer Alpine Ridge.
"This is Lieutenant Sheryl, we have all of the personnel aboard, but we along with the other destroyers will only be able to jump 4 light-years at the most, even then, we may damage the warp drives as the maintenance teams were unable to properly align the warp coils."
At this, Maxim directs the destroyer captains back to Minerva, who is the commodore and should be conducting force coordination instead of him. He then turns back to Mutsu:
"What kind of capabilities does the Abyssal fleet have?"
"They are capable of converting people into ships, and they are also capable of absorbing knowledge of people and things that come with the people"
"well that explains why the Abyssal fleet is in space, were they in space when your colony left your Earth?"
"No, they were completely based in the ocean, the came from there and destroyed pretty much the whole world, that's why we left, to preserve what was left of the human population"
At this, the targeting computer flashes green as the abyssal ships enter range of the main battery. The fire director works quickly directing the gunners in the turrets to target the lead Wo-class carrier as it opens its maw, revealing hundreds of little white balls inside.
"Well shit, we got to deal with fighters too, how much longer until the warp drives are ready for emergency jump on the destroyers?" Jean takes a look at the time, well, at least we only have to hold them off for a couple minutes. He turns back to the viewport and firmly says, "Main cannons fire away"
Outside the ship, the three double 14-inch dual ammo turrets light up and begin final preparations and adjustments, and then, six bright flashes of electrical energy as the shells are electromagnetically accelerated to nearly a tenth of the speed of light and a moment later, six spectacular explosions as the eyes on the lead ship are shattered by the sheer force of six 2-ton shells slam into eyes, releasing what appears to be more glowing blue gas.
The secondary Explosions were even more spectacular, as the whole ship seemed to rip itself apart in a brilliant blue ball of fire, with collateral damage knocking the opposite flanking battleships out of line, but before the explosions happened, the small white balls took off from the mouth, almost like bats taking off from a cave. Their eyes were glowing a sort of satanic fire red and a third of them carried a machine gun in a pod underneath their smiling teeth, another third carried a mysterious tube underneath their bodies, and the last third carried a bomb.
Then the six guns of the Gunter Lutjens flash again, but this time, instead of an electrical discharge following the guns there is one long pink beam that is projected from the barrels, but instead of the brilliant flash, the beam hits some invisible barrier in front of the abyssal Battleship and splits into several smaller beams and they arced around the battleship before joining back up as open beam aft of the battleship. Simultaneously, the destroyers and Gunther Lutjens launch a large amount of antiship and anti air missiles. Many of the missiles run into the large group of fighters and the fragmentation detonations of the Helldarts cuts huge swaths of destruction into the spherical fighters, but they were still coming, next, the small 5-inch guns of the destroyers and finally, the gatling guns of the ship's CIWS start cutting down the fighters one by one, but it is not enough, the small fighters, no larger than 5 feet in diameter kept dropping bombs at the destroyers, but thanks to their laminated armor and physically-impervious phase shift armor, the destroyers weather the barrage nicely.
After 5 minutes, the destroyers signal that they are ready for jump. Maxim orders: "All destroyers slave jump calculators to us, we're booking it!"
"YES SIR," they scream in unity
"Jump controls to you, my commander" Jean projects to Minerva.
At that instant, 7 ships simply vanish in a puff of smoke and a short trail of green glittering powder pointing the way that the ships went.
"What the hell was that, Zeon in their hands friggin' explains how their technology matches ours, it took Konisch rounds, something invented after he was gone to defeat the ships, we only have 4-5 salvos left after that, and I was pretty sure that those more heavily armored battleships had something else up their sleeve than beam countermeasures"
"The Abyssal fleet had enslaved the majority of the human population and had begun conversion of most of them into smaller ship classes and the ones deemed more intelligent into flagship classes."
Jean sighs as he turns on the ship PA: "All personnel, we are downgrading condition to yellow, off duty crew may return to activities, all crew are to remain on high alert"
Unbuckling herself and standing up, Mutsu, looks at Jean with eyes of curiosity, wondering what could finding her have done to them. Jean looks back at her, his eye full of worry at what they may have brought on to the people of Solar, their home system and the first iteration of Earth to go interstellar. She notices that the dull yellow glow has left his eyes and that they have returned to their normal lime green. as he straightens out his uniform, he beckons to Mutsu to follow him/
"Well then, that was rather hairy, why don't we go back to the galley, like we were supposed to, i still need to grab my breakfast," Jean grumbles, "and maybe they can send us some copies of the notebooks they found in the office so we could analyze them"
They found themselves sitting across from Minerva in the ready room 10 minutes later and a steaming hot breakfast in front of them as they began pouring over the documents of the notebooks on the tabletop screen, examining them for any sort of clue as to the origin and the purpose of the abyssal fleet.
Minerva suddenly stops reading and stares at the screen, her eyes growing wide with concern.
"Abyssal Admiral: Jacques de le Cuzel, does that sound familiar to you, Maxim?"
"Wasn't he the guy who was responsible for 3 colony drops on the earth back in 2017 and basically wrecked Europe, Russia, and Japan, hence, why we are all on separate planets within the same solar system. He also was responsible for the development of the original IS that we still currently use and was the head of mysterious human experiment projects, often including cloning, so I actually would not be super surprised to find out that I have more than some passing genetic relation to Mutsu, but what the hell was he doing in some undeveloped world?"
"With all due respect commodore," Mutsu pipes up, "Jaques was one of the heads that directed the team that constructed us. I was unaware that he was an admiral of our enemy, they did not appear until after he mysteriously died in a plane crash after the first 5 kanmusu were constructed, part of the 188 fleet directive."
"What you don't know is that, according to this, he was the one that constructed the original abyssal fleet as well," Minerva responds shortly, "how he did it, we have no idea".
"Another issue is what was he doing on your planet in the first place? He was born on our planet and he should have died several years before the invention of FTL travel, there are people still alive that witnessed the event, of the execution of the world's most heinous warmonger by beheading, for stirring civil war within the old United Nations and mass genocide." Jean responds in a textbook manner.
"Whatever, aside from details of exactly how you guys were made and stuff, these notebooks have done nothing other than confuse the heck out of us even more," Minerva says flatly.
"Actually, Mutsu," Minerva says, "you say that you are a so-called 'ship girl', can you show us what your ship armaments are and what kind of capabilities they have? Not here, of course, back in the medbay, it is reinforced relative to the rest of the ship and has a high enough ceiling while being private enough for the rest of the ship to show anything that needs to be hidden from prying eyes."
They all stand up and simultaneously leave the room for the infirmary.
"Well then," Jean breaths, "your arms seem to be deployed the same way as ours, but damn, they look very graceful, you got four twin 16-inch turrets, if memory serves right"
"Yea, it is, but due to limitations of the source code input into my brain, it seems that I cannot move beyond a slow walk with my ship arms deployed, but I believe that my ship's guns are actually larger than your ship's main battery, i believe that I would be of some use to this ship as a turret in battles at least"
"Would be a nice addition if we were in an atmosphere, where we could actually test it out, but for now, I think that our best bet would be to make a beeline back to Mars and report this personally to the Empress, I have the ability to meet with her at most of her free times, plus, I know her personally, which would be a huge help, and she also knew Jacques from her time as a supersoldier candidate before the Lylat Wars."
Jean, looking rather doubtful, responds, "and why don't you take this to Admiral Zeon, he is the head of our fleet anyways, he would know what to-"
"Do you think that some idiot admiral would simply give his own little brother a suicide mission to attempt and simply ignore his death? I for one would like to see Gunther removed from the Admiralty," Minerva seethes, tears of anger beginning to form in her eyes, "why, why did they have to bring him back like that?!"
She loses control and cries hard grabbing Jean's shoulders and digging her face into his chest.
The small task force of ships continues to make their way back to Mars, the light years whizzing by and the crew full of uncertainty at the future prospects of survival. Minerva cried on Jean's shoulder for several minutes before realizing that she was crying in front of a junior officer. With that, she ran back to her room and stayed there, she did not come back out for the rest of the day.