In this chapter: Recovery/Vultures/Outbreak
Next Chapter: Deadtone/Negotiations/Reprieve.
Local Time: 2331 Hours
March 24, 2161
Location: Japanese Home Waters
Assigned Personnel: FFW Wasp (KIA), FFW I-401
Planetfall: Rescue
Iona surged forwards in the same motion as Z-23's barrage of orbital fire ended the life of one of the frigates chasing her. Pieces of UEG Alicorn began to rain from the sky, as Iona forged towards Wasp's hulk. She'd only get one chance at this next attack, and she had to make it count for something.
I-401 surfaced and the seas were lit ablaze around her. Debris from UEG Alicorn floated around her, larger pieces beginning to sink, but she could see directly ahead of her, as the hulk of UEG Wasp slowed. Iona paused a moment, reading into the received signals she was getting back from her active sensing.
At least four military vessels surrounded Wasp, shrouded by debris, a number of them were modern vessels, military destroyers and a guided missile cruiser loading what looked like sections of the carrier's hull aboard her decks.
But one of them was not, one of them was a modernized warship who's form was familiar to Iona, but only through historical records.
The shrouded, terrifying form of USS Newport News stared back at Iona from across the waves.
That was a problem.
The submarine flicked her thoughts over the enemy vessels, probing them, searching for reasons, searching for what they were doing.
The fleet was multinational, that was certain, and it wasn't flying the flag of any nation, nor responding to hails from the Japanese SDF forces moving in from their islands.
Iona paused, before she extended her communications arrays and rigged once more for running silent.
"Nimi."
"Yes?"
"Enemy vessels have pinned Wasp within her hull, they're swarming over her, multinational fleet, I require aid."
The reply broke Iona's heart.
"I cannot aid you immediately, the enemy orbital assets are contesting my abilities in this conflict without severe collateral damage. Can you ascertain the damage to Wasp?"
"Her union core is offline or in hard lockdown, given the presence of humans swarming over her, they are likely seeking to capture her for usage later on. For what purpose I do not know."
The connection severed a moment later, and Iona heard and felt a detonation as capital scale anti ship missiles flooded in against her sister vessel. Nimi screamed in the link, and Iona felt it as her sister's Klein field burst like a soap bubble.
She watched in horror as Nimi plunged through the cloud layer, trailing fire and the fragments of another UEG frigate.
UEG Say That To My Face had rammed her friend, destroying her defensive barriers and incapacitating several of her forward gun batteries.
The wounded destroyer splashed down hard, fountains of water erupting around her as she plunged deep below the waves. The spray was so violent that for a moment, the entire battlescape was shrouded in new seafoam.
"I need time."
Nimi's voice was hurried and anguished, her tone frantic as she raged against her circumstances. Iona could see the trails of arc welders and engineering constructs flooding out of Nimi's bays, tearing at broken and damaged hull components as nanites began stitching her fleet vessel back together.
Iona looked at the enemy fleet. How had they gotten this kind of force together? The Friedenists and Koslovics were barely an issue outside of the gravity well, how had they known about her presence here? What had happened to cause this?
The governments of the world very clearly weren't a part of this action, the UEG Destroyer was scanning the waters, but ignoring the fleet, and the JMSDF were transmitting open, hostile challenges to the array of vessels in front of them.
Iona extended her presence out, and reached into the destroyer above her. The computer network made an attempt to resist her, stretching deadcode arms and tentacles out towards her avatar, and Iona brushed them aside like so much cobwebs.
Buried in the computer, she searched, and she found it. Documents, sent to other warships in the orbital fleet, coded documents, but they hinted at a terrifying picture.
Dossiers, troop assignments, insertion windows, and projected time until awakening of the "Kansen threat". All stamped and sealed by figures high in the government on both sides. But.. who was causing that? Who was influencing it, and for what purpose?
It didn't make sense. Frustrated, Iona dove into the documents aboard the Evergreen, and found someone she wasn't looking for, but was pleased to find.
Fleet intelligence passed between the Fleet of Fog had one advantage, with their methods of instant communication, new information was passed on almost instantly to any fleet asset in range of the transmission. With that range being measured in truly vast distances, it was likely that every fleet asset in a position to receive the updated combat capabilities of humanity had received a data packet. Iona, the one who'd transmitted that information to the fleet, paused, considering her next course of action.
Iona was carrying corrosive torpedoes, 6 of them, but the weapons were a classified secret, she would catch hell for this from Musashi, but the situation had escalated too far.
Deep within her core, Iona flicked a mental switch, and within her hull, 6 torpedoes began arming and orienting. The weapons signature was undetectable, but the "switch" she'd flipped would indicate to every Fleet of Fog asset that Iona was intending to fire her strongest weapons. Each corrosive torpedo, when detonated, tore a 10 meter hole into reality, shredding and annihilating all matter that came within it, the forces produced by the detonation sent waves of stress that would often bend whatever they ran into into a pretzel. The resulting collapse of the annihilated matter and resounding detonation would often do the rest.
However, corrosive torpedoes were loud, noisy beasts that could be shot down, which meant one simple thing.
She had to strike first, and as fast as she could with as many as she could to pollute the sensors arrayed against her.
Iona flooded her tubes and opened her external racks.
A fleet of fog submarine, especially rigged in the way she was, was not normally considered a combat vessel, but her external racks added double her firepower for a single salvo, a single salvo that would kill anything she pointed it at.
Kill.
A phrase she'd not used since the Siren War, and yet… Here she was, locking targets onto the shrouded in smoke form of the Newport News. With missiles loading and corrosive torpedoes preparing to fire, she held her finger over the button, and evaluated her course of action.
This would be firing upon human beings, upon the people she was created to protect and care for, on the people she'd sworn to defend.
But they were harming her now, harming her flagship, ripping her apart.
Iona flicked her avatar into Wasp's systems, taking control of internal cameras and scanning the decks, searching for signs of the enemy.
The contemptuous ease at which she did so felt horrible, as if she was staring out of the unconscious woman's eyes aboard her flight deck. In some ways, she was, and it made it even worse.
Boarding teams swarmed through Wasp's hull, cutting pieces of her away, but it was her central core that was under the most dire of circumstances.
Most Fleet of Fog warships did not follow standard internal patterns, they used a complex, maze-like network of halls and corridors designed to incapacitate, distract, and mislead enemy boarding parties, and often those paths led in confusing, different directions.
But the center of the ship was always the core, and Wasp's was currently being extracted by force. A trio of human soldiers burrowing into her armored housing with something resembling a thermal drill or cutter.
Iona couldn't hear it, but she knew that Wasp must be screaming as those lances cut into her housing, as they got closer and closer to her union core.
How could she fight this?
"Think, Iona, think."
She pressed her hands against her head, closing her eyes, before she retasked her ordnance, and mentally, pressed launch.
Half a dozen corrosive torpedoes, shrouded and protected by over 100 missiles devoted to sacrifice for each of the torpedoes emerged as Iona flooded the ocean with fire and bubbling water. The noise drowned out every sonar and active system within close proximity, and the submarine was rigged herself for running deep immediately after.
Nimi, hundreds of feet below her, was repairing, nearing functionality, albeit faint functionality, but she was coming back, and anger boiled across the link she shared with Iona.
Kill.
The single word message felt like a caress, and Iona tracked her ordnance as human warships scrambled into action.
Local Time: 2351 Hours
March 24, 2161
Location: Japanese Home Waters
Assigned Vessels: FW Newport News, FW August Parzeval, FW Gettysburg, FW Fukuoka, FW Evergreen
Capture the devil: Target Secured.
The assault had gone off without a hitch, EMP mines lain weeks in advance, intelligence fed carefully from the embedded mole in the midst of the devil task force. Peace would come, but only after the menace's gave up their technology into the hands of the rightful race. They were monsters, all of them, that they still lived was only because of an exercise in caution. Orbital support from the Evergreen had been key, and as the former XO of the Evergreen lay her dying captain to one side, she fixed up her ponytail and commed her group.
"The Knight of Long Knives."
Half the code phrase sent, the reply came instantly.
"Did not go far enough."
With a satisfied nod, the woman sat upon the chair and leveled her piercing gaze across the bridge at her subordinates.
"Stations, find that destroyer and level it, give our ground teams cover."
Her soldiers, her crew bustled about, and Emma Hess, captain of the Freiden Navy, and infiltrator, smiled a tight lipped smile. She was fighting for the good of all mankind here, even if they just didn't know it yet.
"Ma'am! Contacts in the water, enemy launches detected, sonar is ineffective, it's too noisy with the debris!"
She flicked her gaze to the map, noting the positions of the launches, and the dozens of lines racing towards her vessel, and the vessels of the wet water navy.
"Save the puddle jumpers first, we can take the hits!"
Sure, that destroyer could have hurt them badly, but she'd been badly injured when Say That To My Face had rammed her, the resulting collision shattering the frigate, but giving Emma just the time she needed to launch her coup.
Evergreen shook under her feet as detonations resounded against the hull, but the battered destroyer absorbed the damage and kept moving. To keep fighting at all costs and under all circumstances, until death severed that connection.
"Ma'am, launches splashed down, no signs of damage."
She frowned, of course it wasn't that easy.
"Status on our fleet?"
The news she received did not fill her with confidence or joy.
"Newport News reports heavy damage to frontal compartments, they've flooded the magazines but the ship is burning and she's dead in the water."
"XO Aboard Fukuoka is reporting his ship's been shot out from under him, one of those torpedoes snuck through, our scans are showing almost total casualties!"
"Parzeval is dead in the water! Two of those torpedoes hit her dead on, she's breaking up now!"
" Gettysburg has engine power, but no weapons, most of her communication equipment was slagged by a missile hit, she can only text to us and is requesting aid!"
Emma swore under her breath.
"Take us lower, reload our launchers and get our heavy guns pointed down, if we see that submarine again, fire at will! Prepare boarding teams to aid the Gettysburg, and ready our pinnaces!"
She grinned a fierce, shark like grin, this was a real fight. Even if good men and women had died aboard most of the fleet, they weren't out of this yet!
A killer stalked the halls of the FW Gettysburg, it's sleek black and blue carapace studded and pocked with bullet holes, but the killer kept moving. It had paused briefly to relieve a compatriot of a spare magazine for the large rifle it cradled in one hand.
The machine paused for a moment, as an updated line of commands flashed across the screen, strings of text playing about. It then turned and marched down the hallways.
Wasps' killers had predicted much of her external attempts to fight them off, but her internal ones had stymied them, and the battered, wounded carrier had snapped off a final command before she'd been forcibly shut down.
Kill.
Dozens of black and blue automata had come online, designating anything without a valid Fleet of Fog ID as hostile, they'd boiled out of her lower compartments in a swarm of nearly 50 bodies, armed with heavy sub machine guns and melee weapons. More than a few carried oversized shotguns in their arms.
Fleet of Fog warships were not troop carriers, in fact, despite their size, their garrisons were often far, far smaller than would appear. Maintaining drones was painfully irritating, and so, oftentimes they kept a skeleton guard and would manufacture more when they were needed. A vessel like Wasp could carry upwards of 300 of the machines at a time, and yet in reality often only used a sixth of her space for them, stashing more drones and aircraft in the freed up compartments.
But 50 war automata, developed by Medusa during her long years of isolation, were often more than enough.
Screams painted the air of the engineering rooms aboard the FW Gettysburg as a trio of killers found their way in, and cut down a dozen engineers before the startled crew could react.
A squad of killers punched handholds into the hull and hauled their way up the side of the vessel, swarming over one of her CIWS mounts and reducing it to scrap and broken machinery in as many seconds.
Internally, Wasps' invaders fought desperately against a scourge of machines that would appear from the darkness, kill one of their number, and then disappear back into it.
Each machine was an unthinking automata, and where one would fall, another would take it's place.
Yet even then, they were losing ground aboard Wasp.
The humans had burrowed into her core, and pried the union core out of it's housing, they'd secured it within a lined box, and were withdrawing when Iona's avatar smashed into the network running the killers and took full control.
Instantly, the murderers aboard Gettysburg moved to the bridge and the forward magazines.
On decks that were more red than clean, a machine leaned into the console, and pinged a request for help from the Gettysburg to the Evergreen. When the larger vessel moved in close, the machine updated the command, and watched as several vessels detached from the larger destroyer.
Within the forward magazines, a squad of killers let the last ratings and crew slide off of claws and thick, heavy maces.
A third squad, made up of half a dozen killers and one smaller, more articulate drone, lay within the CIC of the crippled cruiser, the delicate manipulators of the smaller drone rising at and entering the computer core.
Iona grinned as her avatar found access.
Alerts screamed onto Captain Emma's screen.
"Ma'am! Gettysburg is firing on us!"
"Pinnaces 1 through 3 are down! Her CIWS guns turned on them!"
Her hands shook, and she sat into her chair.
"What-"
"Wha-"
Stuttered, her ambush had been perfect, the abominates shouldn't have gotten a chance to-
What could have possibly-
"Fire on that ship! It's compromised!"
Too late.
"Ma'am! Enemy vessel rising to meet us!"
Shimmering with dark and silver highlights, the form of the fog destroyer burst from the waters below, her defensive fields annihilating salt water into steam as she climbed towards the UEG destroyer, with murder in her heart and vengeance in her guns.
Emma clawed at her eyes.
"Fire, target both vessels, somebody FIRE!"
Her shouts spurred a crew into action, and yet it did not matter in the end, which actions she undertook.
Heavy gun barrels ripped into the Gettysburg from above, as CIWS and point defense guns strove to knock the incoming salvo of fog missiles out of the air, and yet, it didn't matter.
Screaming from the sky, Nimi's grouping was perfect, and a quartet of photon cannon beams lanced into the core of the Evergreen. Almost lazily, the fog frigate began a roll, slicing the beams across four decks and over three dozen compartments.
Armor boiled to vapor, ammunition exploded, and missiles overloaded in their tubes. A cloud of boiling plasma, bursting from a conduit slashed open, turned crewmen into atmospheric gas as they screamed in agony.
Overwhelmed, Evergreen detonated in a fiery spray of bubbling armor plate, shattered missiles and launch systems, and more than a dozen hull chunks.
Emma Hess, fascist, supporter of the Freiden movement, never saw the beam that killed her, as the CIC turned to plasma, flame, and vapor. Her ship cracked around her like a rotten egg, and the Fleet of Fog vessel arrayed against them fired twice more, targeting the corpse of the vessel as it fell.
Gettysburg fared no better, seconds after the initial attack on the pinnaces splintered the three of them and doomed their crews to a watery grave, four torpedoes found their way into the ships keel and hull. Whereupon the resulting detonation lifted the vessel out of the water and cracked it into three components.
Single transmissions blared out to Wasp's hulk.
"Kill."
The voices, speaking in unison, announced it, and a pair of artificial intelligences turned their gaze to the machines sweeping Wasp's deck, without a second word, both of them moved as one.
"This is Rochester, report."
"Wasp, b-back online."
"She's going to be fine, but she's banged up, and we're going to have to debrief with Akagi as soon as we return to Mars."
"I'm glad to hear that. They got tired of playing with me up here, are we mission complete?"
"The asset has been recovered and sequestered within my primary hull, Wasp has been rescued, but will need to be towed out of atmo and taken to one of the fleet yards on Mars."
"Understood Iona, Z-23, good performance you two. Wasp… I'm glad we didn't lose you."
"M-me too."
"Mission complete ladies, I'm dispatching tugs to you now, Musashi's landed the diplomat safely on Mars and will meet us en-route."
A/N: Humanity has teeth, who would have thought, huh? While Fleet of Fog warships are incredibly powerful in direct fights, certain groups of humanity have tricks up their sleeve, and some of them have been preparing for this war for a long, long time. But, with the first true battle fought, the victor is firmly in the Fleet of Fog's corner…
Or is it?
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