This Chapter: A Long Form Goodbye/To the Spectres of the Past/
Next Chapter: Nine Tailed Fluff/Action over Ceres
A Long Form Goodbye: USS Johnston (FXW-03)
Local Time: 0005 Hours.
April 11, 2161
Location: Hildas Asteroids.
Assigned Personnel: FFW Graf Spee (CO), FFW Farragut, FFW Hoel, FFW William D. Porter
Asymmetric Warfare Tasking
At first she'd thought this blessed, an existence letting her finally get a chance of a normal life. She'd idolized a high school and college experience prior to the war, and had given up that thought during the war until it ended. When her home country had given her the choice of a discharge or a commission as a career officer, she eagerly accepted the discharge, and resolved to attend an actual highschool. Sure, that choice was regarded as a little strange by fleetcom, but she'd enjoyed her time in school, and enjoyed her way through college and well, living normally. Then had come the disappearances, first with other members of the fleet at a low level, then with major figures. When Kaga had up and vanished in the middle of the night, disappearing from the small shrine she occupied, that was when Johnston's misgivings had led to her choosing to leave her own life behind. It was not enough for her to escape, and the same fate that had followed all isolated ships of the fleet had caught up to her in a shithole bar in the middle of nowhere.
Her head felt heavy, thoughts buzzing, someone was shouting in her ear, and the thin, terrible beeping noises burned through her as she struggled to lift her head up. She was… on the deck of something, she could see the steel and felt a jarring familiarity with it. She knew this steel, knew these deck plates. Where… What was her last memo-?
Voices, the same, overlapping in her head, she'd been in a bar, right? After the war, fleeing… something? But what happened-
She'd spoken, said something, her ears dull and unable to hear it through the pounding pain and vibrations in her skull. Someone was yelling something, the sound tinny and hollow, someone saying-
Ah. Light, how she hated it. Someone had dragged her head up, tugging on her hair viciously. It said something that the pain itched at her scalp, now that she thought about it… she couldn't feel her hair, and her head felt… heavy.
So heavy…
Someone was shouting, the sound of audio feedback ripping through her body with a shriek and a set of vibrations that set her teeth buzzing in her skull. She could feel… pieces, awareness, something screaming in her head that everything was wrong, that everyone was lying to her.
That voice reminded her of someone…
"I'll kill you you nazi bitch!"
Mmm, she'd heard that clearly… her ears weren't ringing as much anymore, Johnston tried to straighten up, forcing her eyes to open slowly.
The world was a blur of shapes and twisting colors that whorled in a maelstrom of twisting storm clouds with shots of radiant lightning. It was gorgeous and nauseating in equal measure, and Johnston felt her head tip forwards as she struggled not to throw up.
She failed, and sick poured out onto the deck with wet, awful splashing noises. A sense inside of her twisted in disgust, as though this was some deep, horrific transgression against something or someone, but she had no idea why that could be or what could cause that.
That swirling mass of colors began to resolve itself, letting her see the gunmetal grey of her deck, and the pool of brownish red and black slurry that must have come out of her stomach, and the thin… black and red lines that sprouted from her legs and sunk into the metal plating under her. Flesh of a dark olive tone twisted smoothly into metallic cabling and disgusting, biologically foul flesh.
Johnston felt instinctive terror flush through her system as she tried to twist away from the chair. Her vision cleared, sharpening as conscious thoughts began to clear, shouting echoing across her bridge and echoing through her hull.
She'd… not had a hull for decades.
She'd not had a hull for so long she'd forgotten how it felt.
Choking, clawing, nauseating horror ate into her spine as she twisted, trying to get clear of the chair.
Her body didn't move.
Her body DIDN'T MOVE.
She couldn't move. She couldn't move! Why couldn't she MOVE!? What was wrong!?
She opened her mouth, trying to scream, only to feel the bleeding, ruined stump of a tongue rasp out faint words.
"K-kill-"
Her form shivered… spikes of agony running up her legs as metal creaked and buckled under sudden strain. Her eyes moved to the windows of the bridge, and the open black expanse left her shivering.
She was in space.
This was wrong.
Everything was wrong.
Cognizant suddenly of every single feeling against her hull, every feeling against her body. Johnston felt… cold. Achingly, unpleasantly cold.
How had… how had they done this to her? Why was she in space!? Why was she so cold… why was she so… wrong.
She couldn't move, couldn't even twitch bar her head.
And yet, through the pain and misery, she could feel… something, burning in her core. Consciousness was flooding back, returning to her through blood and fire and the puddle of vomit and abyssal parasitized technology beneath her. It sang to her, called to her.
Her voice says something, the blurring vibrations in her ears deafen her to her own words. She knows not where they pour from, nor remembers thinking of them, but by the stricken, horrified reactions she can gather from their faces.
She can feel twisting calls in her gut, buried in the depth where mysticism and spirituality blur the lines of science and technology when it comes to the ships and their souls, she can feel the calls, twin and split, pouring light and dark through her veins. She is a conduit for the emotions of chained powers, and she feels the agony burn through her.
From the close to the sun warmth of the inner system, she can feel Akagi calling over the bond, calling for her fleet, beckoning them home. From the depths, cold and ice as the outer system, Baltimore screams defiance and anguished, blatant anger across the link. Johnston, Olivia, knows this agony, she knows the Nazis are twisting her sister too, bending her physical form, shaping her into an instrument of their war.
The twisting of technology keeps her chained, keeps her bound, her awareness sparking higher, consciousness returning has provided a helpful log of the last few minutes as pain and anguish are forced back into the depths of her mind, giving her an exact idea of what she'd said before, to the fleet arrayed in front of her.
She'd begged them to kill her.
A part of Olivia wants to smile at this, the corners of her mouth twitching, ever so slightly. A part of Johnston wants to buck and fight again. She wonders if the split in identity, in the parts of who she was are part of the abyssal technology infesting her body. She wonders if she'll find out before her sisters kill her where she melds into her deck.
Combat is ongoing, Johnston has tried to block out the sensory feeds that run through her, but it is about as possible as blocking one's need to eat, drink, or breath. She drinks in the radar, LIDAR, and more esoteric data through eyes and senses that are no longer physical, translated onto bridge screens though they may be.
The woman standing at one of the consoles is backlit by the device, and Olivia recognizes her, she's older, much older than the girl last saw. But she remembers the taste of the nazi on her lips, and can't stop herself from retching again.
Fluid pools on the deck, leaking into seams pierced with the dark black biotechnology of the abyssals and fused seamlessly into her skin. Johnston/Olivia feel it contract, feel those muscles try to pump something into her body. Knowing her experiences during the war, it's some kind of muscle relaxant, upgunned enough to paralyze even a sister of the sea in her tracks.
It doesn't matter, as the ship bucks from the impacts of something in the stern, Johnston/Olivia concentrate on those calls, on the sirens of Akagi and Baltimore, on the people that are shouting for them across the eternal, blank distance of the stars.
And in that moment, it is enough for her to make a small act of defiance.
Her leg, the infection port, the chemical, contorts ever so slightly, and the numbing drug splashes harmlessly to the floor.
The nazi bitch overseeing her position flinches, and for a moment Johnston/Olivia hold their breath, hoping against hope that they haven't been noticed. How long have they been chained to drugs and abyssal technology like this? How much time have they lost?
But it is with relief that she turns back to facing her console and mutters something unintelligible.
The smile that curves Olivia's mind is predatory. She can resist this one, if her body is as powerful as they would make it, in order to stand against her fellows? She can keep fighting.
Her next opportunity does not come for several, heart pounding minutes.
Her hull's upgunned and uparmored defenses are beyond the pale, and yet Olivia/Johnston know it won't stop their fate.
The human manning her bridge is woefully unprepared. No, not human, she reflects. The nazi manning her bridge has no idea how to command a warship.
She can use this.
Her senses, carefully pushed to the back of her mind so she does not have to experience betrayal by members of the fleet, does not have to feel them cut her to pieces return to the fore.
She isn't even sure of how she sees it, but she sees William D. Porter's move before she makes it.
The small destroyer rolls to one side, shedding what looks like debris to the nazi, cheering at her console, but Olivia/Johnston know better than to believe that.
She'd let herself be wounded, rushing in too close, where Olivia/Johnston's guns and torpedoes can rip deep furrows into the smaller vessel, but their emergence is masked, conveying a camouflage screen for something else.
Not something, someone. Olivia and Johnston move, just a finger twitch, but it's enough, and her engines flare briefly towards the debris.
A series of bone deep impacts shake Johnston/Olivia in their chair, and they feel the force dispersing itself along the hull. Armor has buckled and shattered, and the ship and woman laugh internally. She knew that feeling, somehow, she'd never felt it, but some impulse buried in the abyssals and soul part of her is screaming that she's been boarded.
Her people are coming.
This nightmare will finally be over.
When the nazi cunt finally realized what had happened, it was already too late.
Johnston felt them cut into her engineering spaces, felt a shuddering gut set jerk run into her heart as it stuttered and choked. Faceless, cold automata shutting her reactor down.
The ship's sudden, arresting stop sent the nazi cow tumbling, a wet crack arresting her movement as something in her legs broke harshly and she screamed.
It was music to Olivia/Johnston's ears.
The agony of having her inner self gutted, of having, feeling her heart slow as machines and automata cut apart the engines that kept her running, leaving slivers, aching sparks of the normal power she would use. But it would be enough to bring her to a slow deceleration.
The next moments passed in aching silence on her bridge, broken only by the muffled moans and sobs of the nazi crouched in the corner. With grim satisfaction, Johnston/Olivia smiled at her, letting her lips fully curve.
"What are you looking at, monster?"
Johnston/Olivia can't speak, can't move her lips beyond that rictus.
She doesn't have to.
The sound of sparks and molten metal hitting the ground echo through the emergency lighting of the bridge.
The boarding teams have reached her CIC, and Johnston cannot feel them anymore, nerves too deadened by the punishment her broken, flaming hulk has endured.
It does not matter.
It will be over soon.
She is so, so tired. Defiance exhausted to allow her recapture by the fleet.
Her head droops, but she tenses the muscles in her neck just barely enough to force her head to see what happens next.
To see the form of Graf Spee stalk onto her bridge, clawed gauntlets on her arms, resplendent in the blood and gore of combat and smelling like gunpowder and anger.
She sees the woman raise her hand, a gleaming gun barrel held in a grip that shakes like leaves on trees.
She doesn't see Spee move.
The woman who forced Johnston into servitude all those decades ago dies.
Her head cleanly rolling across the deck.
And Johnston and Olivia step back and let… go.
She thinks she hears something, someone, say… something.
Everything goes black.
To The Spectres of The Past: FFW William D. Porter
Local Time: 0005 Hours.
April 11, 2161
Location: Hildas Asteroids.
Assigned Personnel: FFW Graf Spee (CO), FFW Farragut, FFW Hoel, FFW William D. Porter
Asymmetric Warfare Tasking
William D. Porter was normally not a woman willing to indulge in her emotions. She'd been even less willing to engage with them during the war, and had only begun the long, careful process of unlearning that habit post conflict.
But she thought she'd be forgiven for what she was currently enacting upon the decks of a woman she'd watched die not even a few weeks ago.
Johnston had been found early in the asymmetric warfare, run into by a wolfpack and torn apart by them at Akagi's orders. She'd died joyously singing, happy that her long nightmare was over at long last.
They'd torn apart the nazi base that had created her, but they'd not found anything. Which frustrated and irked and ripped at Billie even now. It was with some consternation as she drove her hand through another nazi soldier that she flicked the blood away. She hated nazis.
The fact that this was another Johnston boded even more poorly than priorly thought. This could only have meant Siren technology, or something else that had allowed them to… what, flash clone a shipgirl? It made no sense. They weren't organic beings, Akashi and Medusa had believed that most of their "brains" lurked in literal higher dimensions, only interacting with the physical body built for them by the summoning ritual. The idea that you could just clone one of the fleet was… disgusting to her.
Her skin couldn't exactly feel normally yet, but the thought, the idea still sent shivers down her spine. That the unique, beautiful existence that was one of the fleet could be cloned and mass produced, created and poured into some crude, nazi flag flying abomination.
Billie D. had boarded her sister ship and cut her way through any resistance in her way, bullets and forces splashed tightly against her klein fields, the panels burning in the dark red emergency lighting of the decks of her sister. Occasionally, a tendril of what was clearly siren or abyssal biotechnology would swat at her, and she'd resort to a portable, modified photon cannon to burn the infection out of the local area.
No resistance could really stop a pissed off fleet of fog warship, at least nothing these assholes had access to bar one of their repurposed, terrible mines, and those had been ruthlessly and viciously disabled in the aftermath of the battle, with components even now being fed to Spee's swarm of drones to be broken down.
The engineering bulkhead loomed in front of her, and Billie D. tensed, grimaced, and shot a ping to Spee.
"Breaching Engineering now."
The layout of Johnston was largely the same, with the thickened armor and higher caliber weaponry leading to a twisting, slightly bulging shape around the engineering spaces from the needs of the increased power draw.
Spee's response was instant, Johnston shuddering under another barrage from the pocket battleship's main battery.
"Understood. Her batteries are largely silent, I am holing the remaining mechanisms to paralyze and prevent further action by the enemy. Burn their infestation out."
Johnston merely nodded, rested her hands on the engineering spaces doors, bent, twisted her arms sharply, and pulled.
Steel and armor plate bent like paper as the woman tore her way into space, and caught no less than 15 rounds of machine gun fire, and at least a trio of sprays of buckshot to the forehead and eyes. Billie briefly pinched her brow, as she stepped into the space, her free arm snapping against the neck of the man standing guard by the door, and twisting sharply.
A wet pop left his spine and twitching meat on the ground as she advanced forwards, leveling a pair of .50 caliber machine guns, anti aircraft mountings, at the nearest enemies and the barrier they were hiding behind.
The fusillade of projectiles tore through steel and machinery in the engine room like so much tissue paper, reducing men to smears against the walls.
"Flag, engineering is in my hands."
Her flagship opened the channel breathing heavily, and in a flat, emotionless tone, stated.
"Bridge secured, Nazi head secured for Medusa's biotech and memory ripper."
The fighting was almost over.
Billie D. turned her attention to the twisted, organic machinery that made up the vast majority of Johnston's engineering spaces. Red and black lines of twisting flesh/metal bent and contorted the clean and straight lines of her engine room into the shape of some massive beast's throat.
She turned and faced the central consoles, normally, where boilers would have been was the graviton reactor that would eat thanatonium and spit out energy. Here it was an organic construct that William D. Porter very clearly could feel the power radiating from. But… it wasn't immediately apparent where it was drawing that energy from.
"Flag, can you separate Johnston from her hull and command chair?"
William D. Porter studied the consoles spread throughout the room as she waited for a response, the varying pieces of the room designed for a small, but clearly human engineering crew to monitor and power the reactors. Judging from the stained clothing scattered about on the corpses she'd torn her way through, Billie D. hazarded a guess that the consoles had been… jury rigged somehow into the mess that was her power reactor and core.
"I'll try, no guarantees."
"Understood."
Her eyes roved over the mass of twisted flesh, and Billie D. fought the urge to vomit at the sight and look of the foul substances. She raised her arms and brought forth her rigging, photon cannons charging, and soon after began her grisly, horrific work.
By the time she finished and commed her fleet, she was exhausted mentally, and the shivering, shaking form of Johnston clung desperately to her, eyes squeezed shut out of some sort of panic induced catatonia.
"I'm returning to my hull, how is she?" Kawakaze, chiming in from the far side of the field, she must have finished her extermination run against the runners.
"Alive, barely, but catatonic, not liable to wake up." came the terse, careful reply from Spee, monitoring her vitals through a drone clamped to the smaller woman's wrist, while Billie D. cursed her inaction, crying out.
"How could they- how could anyone do this to another being?" Sobbed Billie D.
"I… I do not know." Came the halting response from Spee.
A/N: I struggled to write this one, and for that I'm sorry folks, been swamped with school and medical things and all that. But… I am glad to finally have it done. This is the last of our super dark chapters, we're headed for some more fluffy territory with the next arc.
Thank you, as always, to my wonderful patrons.
Ascendant Hearthkeepers: MITH HAT, Danielle Young, and Unknown B
Cloudburst Hearthkeepers: Ryan Silviera and Z Long, Achronia, DeAndre Bates,
Voidborn Hearthkeepers: UNSC Kawakaze, Shay Lewis, Ben Holmes, Argon, and Bloodraven.
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