This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights:

He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses,

and they will run in front of his chariots.

Strangely, she wasn't the odd sister out when it came to appearances. That unfortunate burden was laid on Iron Duke – poor Arthur. She had severity and wisdom to match that grey hair, but her frequent scowling over maps hadn't quite given her wrinkles to match yet. That obligated an extra layer of secrecy on top of the usual required for their excursions, a layer that Arthur was rarely willing to suffer.

That was not to say that Benbow, Marlborough, and Emperor of India went unnoticed. They didn't have that initial grace period of shipgirl strangeness about them… the officers were supposed to be keeping the men in line when it came to the girls, but India had a feeling that the poem tucked under her door was an officer's handiwork. If the calligraphy didn't prove it, the waxing poetic about 'Kashmir sapphire eyes' and comparisons to Greek goddesses seemed to hint at an education.

Her men weren't the only ones ruminating over her looks: she had spent more time than she'd admit standing before the mirror, leaning in and squinting in hopes of finding some miniscule hint, any meager suggestion of Anglo-Indian breeding. She was not so desperate as to pull out calipers and compass for her features, but the lack of anything distinctive gnawed at her, belied the way she felt. How she felt had to mean something, right?

That didn't mean she was going to shout it from the rooftops, though. Any strangeness she might have felt was secondary to doing her job and doing it well – she couldn't continue to struggle with her sense of self if she was dead, after all.

Her sense of self… she was Emperor of India. India for short, which wasn't absurd, as a woman's name, but a bit on the nose. It was an Anglo-Indian daughter's name, and if you discounted her lack of a father, she was, perhaps…?

All this contemplation was probably a waste of time. Her identity was a warship – it didn't particularly matter where the parts came from if they all worked, right? Their fleet was an odd, patchwork sort of team already: human and not quite, women in a traditionally male environment, Australians and Malayans and New Zealanders.

"India?"

She had gotten lost in thought again. India turned to look at her sister – that voice was Benbow's – and… wow. "Isn't that a bit… chintzy?"

"There isn't a scrap of chintz on me," Benbow smiled back at her.

"My point still stands," India replied.

"But chintzy means being like or covered in chintz, no?" Benbow argued, leaning towards India with a raised eyebrow. "Or are you saying it means something else?"

"Tacky. It also means tacky."

"Me, tacky?"

"I'm afraid it's looking that way."

Benbow grinned. "Would a new dress change your mind?"

"The last dress you suggested came with a spancel."

"Spancels are for livestock," Benbow said, as if wearing a human fetter was somehow better. "And it wasn't it worth it to see the look on the salesman's face when you broke it?"

"We don't need to rely on cheap tricks to impress people."

"Snapping leather is a cheap trick?"

"Compared to controlling a battleship."

While not exactly Ramillies, Benbow had an eye for clothing beyond the hastily adjusted uniforms that tried to tread the line between Wren and proper officer. They all had an officer's pay to throw at the problem – that battle was won before India's time, by the hellacious force of the combined Queen Elizabeths – although India tended toward saving her pay.

(More grimly, she had already arranged a will, her witnesses drawn from men on shore. Her savings were to be split among her sisters and the neediest widows of her crew. She'd hope some of her sisters survived whatever got her, but India was realistic enough to realize that her death would almost certainly see a few of her men dying too.)

A visit to old London town wasn't possible, but they had leave sufficient to head out for the occasional shopping trip. Honestly, it made India feel a bit guilty, even if she demonstrably contributed more to the war effort than any civilian who passed them by. Sometimes they'd stop and stare as Benbow dragged India around, arm-in-arm.

Part of it, India thought, was the novelty. While her sister was prone to buying on impulse, she seemed to like the process best. The walking around, the comparison, the interaction with staff who thought her a remarkable human woman instead of something more…

Below pinched the sleeve of a handsome coat in black and grey. The cuff was dark, whorling patterns across it like someone had cut out a portion of the midnight sea. "What material is this?"

The saleswoman grinned. "Astrakhan, ma'am. A sort of fleece."

Benbow's eyes narrowed, and the woman gulped heavily. "To be specific, it's taken from stillborn or very young lambs…"

Benbow's nose wrinkled, and the saleslady shrunk. India didn't particularly like the sound of that, but she had a feeling Benbow's distaste had started about a sentence earlier…

(Where, after all, was Astrakhan? Russia.)

"What about your gloves?" Benbow asked. "I've heard good things about slunk leather."

If the woman saw any hypocrisy in preferring the skin of slunk calves to slunk lambs, she didn't remark upon it. Girls like Benbow had already built up reputations… the positive kind, that was. Welcome boosts to the nearby town's wartime economy whenever pay came in.

The leather gloves Bebnow was trying on flexed and creaked. India would be honest and say she wasn't interested in anything from a slunk animal; the suspicion that the manufacturing process was abortive (or that they just killed the mother along with calf) was intolerable. It felt… cruel. Perhaps that was hypocritical, considering her record when it came to her treatment of the human animal, especially the German variety…

"Are you interested in something, ma'am?"

She hadn't even noticed that the saleswoman had peeled away from her sister. India blinked. Might as well get business out of the way. "Do you carry shoe polish?"

Many of her comrades had non-martial pursuits: Malaya devoted herself to study of England, George V cooked, Tiger had her parties. India supposed she understood how some of those things could increase cohesion, improving their fighting ability in a way that couldn't be measured as easily as the number of hits during target practice.

Perhaps it was fitting that her talent was something of a solitary pursuit. Maybe she could have taken steps to make it less so, but she always had a preference for landscape and still life over portraits.

Of her sisters, she had the best eyes. In terms of vision, not in the flatterer's sense. Despite attempts on her sister's parts, they never managed the same rangefinder perspective trick she had. That may have been a good thing, considering it gave migraines like you wouldn't believe: imagine four eyes all working at once, one normal pair separated by inches, a greater pair separated by meters. Enough time in that perspective did occasionally make her feel as if someone had lodged a wedge in her skull and worked the two halves apart.

Whether it was an urge to avoid that pain or natural talent, she had a tremendous memory for what she saw. She could draw outlines that'd trump the recognition handbooks, capture landscapes with a brief glance. Funny how she wasn't a cruiser with her eyes…

But drawing went beyond what one had seen with their own two eyes. You could draw things that never existed before, pulling them out of nonexistence in some limited way. Some of these things were completely alien – shading practice creating broad vistas where bizarre shapes hung in the air like impossible blimps – but some she knew, even if she had never seen them.

A circular face, black like ink. Big, circular eyes without irises, rimmed in red. A crimson grin. Those came easily. The real effort came with the crown and the rich garlands – she traced out petals – and intricate patterns on the face's garb. Foreign, something she had never seen with her own two eyes, yet familiar.

An Indian… no, that painted with too broad a brush. An Orisha would call him Jagannath, the lord of the world. She was not so alienated from her English comrades as to be unaware of the alarm bells that phrase might set off in some of their minds, but she thought Jagannath was more similar to God uppercase, the font of true goodness – moksha? – that the 'god of this world' distracted from.

Again, beliefs varied widely, but the Vaishnavas saw Jaggernath as Him. Well, she wasn't sure if Indians did the uppercase 'H' in he and him thing, but Jaggernath was Krishna, who was Vishnu, who was Brahman, who was… similar. She struggled to form a precise definition. Her job was directing a warship, not in-the-weeds comparative theology.

She could find a minor comparison to Jagannath in her own duty. Maybe that was some sign of the pervasiveness of Brahman… or perhaps it was only natural to think of herself as the lesser sort of juggernaut. For that was how the Lord of the Universe had been anglicized: he was Juggernaut.

Juggernaut gained its current meaning from one of the ways Jagannath received his worship: the great cart festivals. Imagine a cart a dozen meters tall and weighing tons, decked in finery, hauled through crowded streets by the great, heaving masses. The god and his companions took their summer excursion, and if the stories were true, zealots threw themselves under the crushing wheels, religious ecstasy superseding self-preservation. Sacred wheels were dyed red… but at least it wasn't made for that purpose alone.

She filled in the details of the cart around Jagannath, starting with a looming outline that gave it a sort of terrible majesty. The perspective was a bit close, give an impression of a high roof, a stretch…

To compare a temple cart, a juggernaut, to a battleship like herself or even the landship concepts prowling the battlefields of Europe felt profane. Alien to the Indians she might have been, but hoped she was sensitive to them.

(Moreso than her namesake? She didn't know.)

A battleship had the power of some great war god, thunder-hurling, city wall destroying, but before shipgirls, there was no face attached. They had names, quirks that almost hinted at personalities, but they didn't speak. They were dead. Now… now they spoke. But could you fashion a god?

She wondered if they might become too attractive, in time. Not in the sense that they'd be beating the boys off with sticks, but rather, in the sense that they'd become their own miniature juggernauts. A churning force of nationalism, propelled by hundreds or thousands, equal parts beautiful and terrible, seductive and lethal. While India was more than willing to hone her skills and do her duty as best she could, the thought of becoming a symbol, some thing that compelled men to war…

It was a tiresome duty. The last thing she wanted was for war to be attractive. Opinions varied, but no small number of the girls were chomping at the bit to make their debut, to dazzle the world and claim the respect due to them. India wasn't so anxious. What the world think of her, Emperor of India? What would they make of her?

She would never outweigh the man himself, of course, but she'd become some part of the grand British machine whether she liked it or not. (Maybe that was one minor way she was like the Indians. Or the Malayans. Or the Zulu…)

Her train of thought wandered, but she kept on drawing, filling in fine details. Jagganath remained, but some details had slipped in between the garlands and the detailed garb. Lines traced the fine cracks and seams of bark, the stump that Jagganath idols were made of. And the fabric of the tent seemed more threadbare than she had hoped, the detail work suddenly seeming gaudy.

At the very least, she hadn't managed to ruin the face. No hints of grain or chipping paint in the broad, white eyes – there was just the stare of an ancient, inscrutable god.

I was thinking about slipping a Ramanujan reference in here somewhere but I'm not sure if any of the girls are mathy enough for it.