This Chapter: Nine Tailed Fluff/Action Over Ceres
Next Chapter: Homecoming/Rescue Operations
Local Time: 1132 Hours.
April 11, 2161
Location: Mars. Medusa's Medical Wing
"Were the results conclusive?"
The panels displayed shots of a young woman, missing her legs below the knees and arms below the elbows, lying restrained in a medical ward room. At her side was one of Akagi's destroyers, still wearing her full rigging. The girl shook slightly in her sleep, and Akagi herself cast a watchful gaze through the cameras. At her side, Medusa moved throughout the room, studying long strings of code and pieces harvested from what could only be a clone of the original.
"Unfortunately, yes, that is, for all intents and purposes, USS Johnston. Human host name "Olivia". Refugee from the ruins of New York City early in the war. We have no indication of how she has survived all this time, and the infectious code still running rampant through her systems prevents my inspections of her mind."
Akagi pinched her brow and sighed.
"She is a perfect copy… of a woman who should have died over a century ago. I held her in my arms as she breathed her last. That she came back once could have been explained as a failing of my memory, but this?"
Medusa shook her head.
"Too simple, no variance. Were she a clone, there would be differences in phenotype expression, especially given the vastly different circumstances she would have lived in. I do not believe that this is the case. Further tests may be required. As an aside, Akagi, she is recovering, albeit slowly. She is unlikely to manifest a natural rigging, but we can restore her limbs to functionality, if not full sensation."
Akagi nodded, her kimono rustling as she turned and moved to another bank of monitors.
"And her?"
Depicted on the monitors was a young woman's picture, with long dark hair shot with silver and a jubilant smile, but her face was the spitting image of another.
"Daughter of Akagi."
Akagi raised an eyebrow.
"Really?"
"Yes. Testing concludes, she has a similar resonance to your former wisdom cube. Or at least, what's left of it. I can only conclude that upon your ascension to a digital consciousness, whatever was left behind inhabited her."
Akagi froze, considering.
"Understood. This is excellent work, Medusa, keep her under observation, is she able to manifest a physical form yet?"
The doctor shook her head, stating flatly.
"Her physical form is at the bottom of a port on Earth, she's likely tethered to what's left of it, or hasn't bothered to interface with the nanites."
A pause, the clicking of Medusa's mechanical legs, the only thing that Akagi could hear for a moment, the doctor's demeanor becoming almost shifty.
Of course, shifty for Medusa made her look… bizarre to Akagi's eyes. A mess of clicking mechanical arms and legs and instruments sprouting from varying panels and the like. So the commander sighed and said, voice low.
"Speak up, your thoughts are so loud they practically shout at me."
Medusa sighed audibly, the mechanical buzzing clicking noise clear.
"You need to see her. She has had no contact save for me and Doctor Wolfe, and you and I are both aware that the two of us come off as distinctly… cold. She gave up everything to save you, Akagi, when she could easily have contacted humanity and offered to become one of their soldiers. Yes, she looks up to you, she craves your presence, you are her only source of familiarity here. So swallow your fucking pride, get out of my lab and go say hi to your daughter."
Akagi flinched as Medusa finished, the doctor bowing her head before turning to the consoles and beginning to type again.
She wanted to argue, wanted to fight, but the doctor was correct. She was avoiding her daughter, and wasn't that just still the strangest part of this entire thing? That she had a real daughter, no matter how she turned it over in her head, Akagi struggled to parse why Humanity would even have named a ship after her service given the way they'd treated her in the past. Could they not have simply vilified her or attacked her legacy? It would have made it easier to tolerate, frankly. Her service in both her prior steel hull and after was unconscionable, everything she'd learned about the reconstructed Japanese government had led her to believe that as they'd joined in with the vilification of her after her disappearance and refusal to surrender herself as well…
They should have rejected her name, burned her from their history books. So… why name another ship after her?
Perhaps it was fitting that she'd been given the directive to visit the girl after all.
As she left the room, Ayanami materialized at her side, melding freely from the shadows on the wall to Akagi's, before transforming into a girl at her side and falling into step, speaking calmly as she stabilized her avatar into an actual being.
"Reports are in from Earth, attempts to reach out to other survivors have been successful, bar one exception."
"It cannot be Chapayev, we found her and ended her long nightmare." Akagi mused, and Ayanami shook her head.
"No, it was USS Texas, we can't find her." came the girl's eager reply.
"Curious, what overtures were made to her?" accompanied Akagi's raised eyebrow, before the woman turned towards a door that unsealed, allowing her to pass into the darker, deeper sections of the base, far away from the civilians.
"Mail and an in person message were attempted to be delivered."
"Neither evoked a response?" Came the confused response from Akagi.
"It is unusual, and distinctly unlike her to be so far from either of her primary communication methods, especially given her ranch…"
Ayanami shrugged, before stating.
"I think she's been enlisted again, and or she's working in some form, clandestine or other."
Akagi flinched at the term "enlisted", and Ayanami winced as her commander responded.
"I would hope she would have had more sense."
Another door hissed open, with Takao falling into step behind Ayanami and Akagi, purposefully turned away from them to grant her Admiral a measure of privacy during her conversation with Ayanami.
"We're unsure of where she went, but we did make contact with Bismarck and her attendant."
"She still has an attendant?"
Ayanami nodded and answered the followup question before Akagi could even ask.
"A German Naval asset called the Bayern has been shadowing her with UAVs and is making ready to depart, all intelligence from UAVs and standby drone assets deployed by the rescue force sent after your daughter indicate it's likely some form of Destroyer. Modernized and probably seeing Bismarck off, or taking her where she wishes to go, we did not approach her berth, only observing from a distance."
"How curious, did she respond to our overtures?"
Ayanami wiggled her hand back and forth in response, and Akagi confirmed what her subordinate was telling her a second later.
"Not overtly, but there are signs she is preparing to leave, then."
"She was sighted visiting graves, laying flowers and letters upon them, among them the grave of 556, who passed on after her scrapping in the riots."
None assembled missed the grimace and the pallor that overtook Akagi, but even so, she continued.
"Prepare a small task force, and get me a meeting with diplomats from the UNE. I wish to declare our services as search and rescue, alongside diplomatic neutrality. They will need our aid if they do not wish to see their ships destroyed."
Takao stepped forwards, having Musashi on exercises and heading the home fleet, she was in the role of Akagi's second in command, and often was the first to give or directly issue her orders. She asked a question, voice calm.
"Are our policies on Frieden and Koslovic surrenderees to be changed?"
Akagi shook her head once.
"No. We take no prisoners from either a Frieden or a Koslovic source. They were the ones who wiped Kibo from the surface of Mars and forced us underground, they can ask their gods for the mercy they feel they deserve."
Takao nodded, and stepped away from Akagi, retreating towards the command center, where she could give the flagships orders and reach her in the event of an emergency. As she retreated, Ayanami calmly resumed their prior conversation, now giving an update on where in the system Akagi's fleets were positioned.
"Graf Spee's task force has been reinforced with the addition of FFW England, who successfully broke Martian orbit and has reached their position. She replaces, as you know, FFW William D. Porter, who remains present here in the medical wards watching over the broken body of Olivia. Subdivisions of Atlanta's fleet have reported with middling success from the system. Atlanta herself is in orbit of Ceres, working on cracking the shields of something they found out there but further communications have not been sent from her task group yet. Division 1 is spread across the outer system, with Cavalla monitoring Europa in particular. She's not found anything enough to move on yet but has said it's only a matter of time in her opinion. Division 2 is breaking down the debris and the minefield surrounding that Hildas asteroid shipyard, and plumbing the depths of the research station attached. It's far larger than it first appeared, and internal logs keep referring to something the Frieden's called "Oracle". I suspect we'll find a copy of Johnston, or perhaps a slaved consciousness-split of Chapayev acting as this "Oracle"."
Akagi interrupted before her subordinate could continue.
"Do we have an idea of how they were doing this in the first place? This splitting and cloning of fleet assets?"
Ayanami shook her head.
"No, it's part of what I was getting to, Graf has requested either Atago, Takao, Archerfish, or Nurnberg sent to her location to aid her in breaching the station. They've cut off the Nazis from the central datacore, but resistance is fierce and Graf isn't capable of building the combat automata with her refit, nor are the members of her subdivision."
Akagi frowned and thought for a moment.
"If Atlanta preempts my judgments on this, I am inclined to allow her the freedom to continue in operational command. Has she issued any further commands?"
"If she has, they have not reached us, this is admittedly partially expected, without Cavalla to boost the signal, we cannot risk being detected or the UN might be… concerned. While this facility survived a proximity nuclear detonation, if I may speak freely?"
Akagi nods, but preempts her subordinates' response before the woman can get another word in.
"I would rather not risk another, especially if the UN continues to station larger and larger elements of a fleet in the upper orbital planes of Mars. Is there anything else?"
Ayanami nodded and summarized the rest of her report shortly after.
"Yes Ma'am, 156 has requested her mainline warships back, asking specifically due to finding something related to a "fleet asset" lurking in the darkness of the inner belt. She is not certain, but believes it to be something akin to another of the facilities Graf discovered."
A sigh burst unbidden from Akagi's lips, before she spoke.
"How many times must we run into more fascists and their preparations…"
Ayanami's response was made with a grin and a cheeky smile.
"Perhaps when certain factions of the UN stop sponsoring them to falsely flag us into being their patsies?"
Akagi snorted.
"Perhaps, but are they ready for the change we would bring upon their world? I suspect they do not like the idea of an actual democracy enough to stick it out."
"Would it be that terrible to provide a direct democracy? We could… enable quite some change, Ma'am."
Akagi winced.
"Yes, but would it be worthwhile? I am a military leader, as are most of the fleet, we are not civilian governors and would remain largely unconcerned with them in comparison to defensive measures we would normalize taking. Our civilian government is run by retired fleet assets and civilians who are intimately aware of what we face as they live through it, making them better fits for the position. In many ways, I dread what will happen after we have to return to peace."
Ayanami nodded, before saying.
"Yes, and it works beautifully. They would follow you to hell and back, Akagi. Not only that, but the foundations of the Admiralty code are being expanded further, to the point we may have a real basis for a technocracy, or something similar to actual socialism."
Akagi's ears twitched, her tails lashing back and forth.
"What are the protections against corruption or bad actors?"
Ayanami snorted.
"Frankly ma'am, we exist. We are not human, nor really anything like it, the proposal would put an absolute veto into the hands of the home fleet, in the event the civilian government declares it, they can involve us." Her tone sarcastic, Akagi responded with a raised eyebrow.
"There are still holes in that system, have people considered meritocratic ideals?"
They turned into the final corridor, and Akagi held up a hand to stymie Ayanami's response on matters of governance, instead giving her final orders.
"If Atlanta does not choose to reassign 156's ships back to her by tomorrow, re-assign them for her, and have Graf replace one of her ships with Archerfish, for use in raiding the station of its secrets. Beyond that, you are dismissed, Ayanami."
The small girl nodded, melted into a shadow, and disappeared. Akagi felt the weight of the years press in on her, against her skull and her ears as she stepped into the clean room preceding her daughter's medical ward. From serving in a war where the enemies weren't even human, to facing the destruction of herself and dozens like her, to watching the deaths of those under her… it weighed on her mind more and more, these days.
The spray of foam and varying other agents was calming, albeit frigidly cold. When the process was finally over, Akagi walked into the room, and found a figure sitting up in bed, eyes focused on a book of some kind.
"Doctor Medusa, you are early, did you require further tests from me?"
Akagi's voice was choked, strangled as a sound escaped her throat at the scene in front of her and the lie Medusa told her.
Her daughter had a real body, the weight, the warmth, all of it, her sensors played across the human form in front of her, save the ears and tails, and she had to suck a breath in. She'd… not bothered to look before and yet now?
She was the spitting image of Akagi's former lover and herself. High cheekbones that swept her face into angular beauty, and stark, silver and brown hair cut into a long, puffed braid that dangled from long locks that framed her face. Eyes that were alight with crimson mischief looked over the top of her book, widened in disbelief, and froze in equal measure.
Akagi hoarsely said.
"I… was not aware you had a body."
Her daughter smiled at her, tears filling her eyes.
"H-hey… mom, guess Doctor Medusa didn't… tell you that… yeah?"
"No, she must have forgotten to mention it…"
"When did this happen?"
Her daughter shifted shyly, and climbed from the bed, stepping onto the floor with feet that slapped against the stark tile, she walked up to Akagi, and stiffly saluted.
"Admiral on deck!"
Akagi waved at her, a faint smile curving her lips against her will as her daughter spoke those words.
"No need for that, not here, not now. What happened… How did this happen?"
Her daughter wet her lips, ears flat to her skull, tail lashing behind her legs, before she spoke.
"Doctor Medusa is not quite sure, it happened very suddenly. I was conversing with Doctor Wolfe and Doctor Medusa about the benefits of networked intelligences, and she reached out to touch the mainframe of my core when I asked. It was impulsive, I know, and silly but I-"
Akagi doesn't let her finish, instead her words come wooden and thick, but she chokes them out regardless.
"It is fine, please, continue, I have not been present when you needed me, I wish to remedy that."
And so her daughter sat on the edge of the bed, and continued.
"When she touched me, I felt… warm, that's the only way to describe it, like something had changed and shifted and the next thing I knew my mainframe was breaking down and I was waking up on the bed. Doctor Medusa's working theory is that the ambient nanomaterial in the air catalyzed when it came into contact with my systems and… in effect, re-made me. I can breathe and eat and laugh, I have to do so, too. This body isn't fully biological, but it's also not fully cybernetic like yours is. I've been wanting to study it more, so Doctor Medusa took scans and has been letting me poke at myself. My guess is that my subconscious acted on my desire to have something more… human, and shaped both my nanomaterial, and the ambient stuff accordingly. I think… at least."
Akagi let her daughter continue, her thoughts awash in the calm of another, another like her in her youth, and the careful, gentle, fragile feeling that was kindling itself in her chest.
She was a machine at this point, a machine who remembered being human and was seeing her own offspring again.
How did one come to terms with that? She remembered needing to eat, needing to sleep and work out to maintain her form. But… she no longer had to do any of that. She was aware of the advantages such a thing offered. No one could literally take her by surprise anymore, she was perpetually awake. But, how did one re-organize who they were into what they now had become?
"Mom-?"
That phrase, that word, snapped her firmly out of her reverie and her thoughts, and Akagi came back to Mars calmly before blinking.
"Yes? What is it?"
"I overheard you and Ayanami talking… Do we have confirmation of the UN's vessels carrying nuclear weapons?" Akagi offered a wan, tired smile as her left ear flicked against her hair slightly.
"I wish it were as simple as a powerful geiger counter attached to the scanner arrays aboard Musashi. The launch tubes aboard their larger vessels could easily carry either torpedoes, or MIRV nuclear missiles. Which one is in use is the question, and frankly we cannot currently tell, bar infiltrating one of the vessels with a duplicate or a nanite cloud-"
Her daughter finished the thought before she could, cutting her off slightly, while smiling all the while.
"Which would immediately start hostilities between you and the UN, while they would lose initial conflicts because of the sheer technology disparity, unless you could construct enough forces to stop their military entirely, they would never let you live it down."
Akagi nodded, and her daughter tapped her chin, tail flipping about behind her, something Akagi tracked as the girl thought.
"I take it you're already ordering meetings to be set up with the diplomats of the UN? Have hostilities broken out between the Friedens, UN, and Koslovics yet?"
Another nod, and her daughter brightened considerably.
"This is perfect then, all you have to do is nothing."
"Are you advocating for us to stand by and do nothing as our creators are attacked?"
Her daughter looked at Akagi like she'd grown a second head, and the aging fox felt a warmth color her cheeks accordingly.
"What?" Her voice came out slightly indignant, before her daughter spoke quietly, a conflicted look crossing her face.
"The world has been trending towards a united government in the wake of the siren war, with so much devastation by an Earth that had to fight against something that literally could come out of nowhere… Frankly I'm not surprised this happened now. Frieden corporations have been insulated by the worst of this trend through the overseeing of their outer planet colonies and jewel world of Europa. The Koslovics are firmly entrenched on Mercury and Venus, and likely won't surrender period, the UN will burn them out, and the union of our creators will be made stronger. Additionally, you're already going to gut their worst enemy for them. That said, do you not hate your creators for what they did to you?"
Akagi nodded.
"The fascists will be burned to ash, I do not believe that peace can exist while their ideology does. As for our creators it is… complicated. What exactly we are now has yet to be answered in any satisfactory way. If we were constructs of belief manifested by the psychic might of our species, should such a thing exist, then our destruction would have been absolute once the settlement of Kibo was destroyed as we faded out of thought and memory. Clearly we are more than just flesh and blood now, interfaced with technology as we have become, but what that means is something else. There are more than one of us wondering if we ever were human, and if our hosts ever mattered as something more than a way for us to interface with the world around us. I have been told Kathleen never ceases to ask questions, and has taken to wandering about interrogating random members of the fleet for more information."
Her daughter clapped her hands together, ears straight up and tail sticking out excitedly, her teeth bared.
"See why you're so fascinating, mom? Doctor Wolfe was so important even I heard about her at the depths of the bay! She's a forerunning expert in cybernetics and the study of the human mind, she came here because of us."
A warm feeling bloomed at that last word, the syllable speaking of a rejoinment, a flow gentle in Akagi's heart.
"You aren't exactly an easy answer to puzzle out, although if you want my opinion, you always existed in the gestalts, in the unconscious part of humanity, I just think that when they called you back they gave you permanency."
Akagi couldn't help herself, the smile curving her lips into a slight grin as her daughter spoke with such praise for her old bones.
"Permanency that can't be revoked, unless they kill you off. You all regarded "scrapping" as something akin to death, right?"
Stiffly, a sudden chill running through her bones, Akagi nodded.
"Then when one of you was scrapped they died. But even if they were scrapped, as long as they were remembered they became something else. Something more. What that actually means is something… I'm not sure about it but I know it has to be important, to be honest. That's the key, that's what Medusa wants to dive into the heart of. That's why she finds me fascinating, I think. What does it mean for a weapon to gain not just sapient thought, but frankly all of this collection of both memories and even a physical body."
She paused and giggled.
"You know, I had a very old engineer sail aboard me once, and he talked about something he called "sparkly magical shipgirl bullshit" alot. He said that the ships he served with were capable of literal magic, but attempts to figure out how they were doing that always failed. I'm not sure I disagree with him, there's technology that could explain aspects of your powers, but what if you were just… something else. Something incomprehensibly strange in its scope that latched onto Humanity for… some reason?"
Akagi frowned.
"Then we would have maintained our independence upon our rebuilding and our re-creation, no?"
"Yes, but you've mentioned fleet assets wondering if their hosts were still needed, or if it was just a sort of "controller" you used to influence the world."
"I had been curious, what do you make of it?"
"I don't think it's that clear cut, I think something called to you, something that either preserved you or reincarnated you into a physical medium, our minds work on higher dimensions, as is that sort of… calm sea."
"Calm sea?"
Her daughter paused and smiled, but upon seeing Akagi's seriousness, her jaw dropped.
"Wait you- you don't remember? What it was like to wake up after you were sunk the first time?"
A shiver ran up and down Akagi's entire deck, and she was back there, back on that day. Feeling fires rage through her body, feeling the screams of dying and dead, feeling the loyalty she felt for them even now mixed with the despair at their actions and their ideas. The juxtaposition made a horrible mess she tried very hard to not think about. Every muscle in her form tensed and wanted to buck. She wanted to run, to fight, to hit something, to let her rigging out and unleash hell. She wanted to roll over and beg for mercy, she wanted to go down fighting. She wanted to be home with her lovers. She wanted to be out there fighting again. Those fucking americans, those fucking germans. The bastards who sank her, the scream of dive bombers and wind whistling in her ears. The crackling blaze of flames and embers on her deck, her gasoline was leaking, she was wounded. Water was flooding everywhere, sweeping men below the waves, sucking them into her ruinous, damaged spaces. She had to run, had to fight, where was the enemy, where was the radar? What had happened to her- what had- she wanted to-
Warm arms wrapped around her. Akagi briefly wanted to fight, her muscles tensed and she started to buck her attacker off of her, wanting to raise her anti aircraft, her secondaries, wanted to-
She stopped when she heard her daughter's voice ring into her ears.
"It's okay mom… It doesn't matter who you were, who you want to be, what the answers to our questions are. I shouldn't have asked that question, I'm sorry."
Akagi blinked, white hot pain in her eyes as she closed them, moisture running down her face, and she tried to stop herself. This was not the place to face her emotions, this was not the place nor the time. Duty and conviction warred with exhaustion and pain. She wanted- she wanted to just… stand here a time more.
Her daughter could, could, could be allowed to hold a bit longer on.
Her daughter.
She had a daughter. She had a legacy, someone to pass the torch onto, someone to let her down to the earth and the sea, someone to remember her and someone to share tea with.
Akagi tried to remember the last time she'd had a family member share such a ceremony with her.
Faces came to her, shortly before their deaths, so many voices overwhelming her mind, cracking and stabbing at her. The screams of Johnston in the black, desperate begging cries to end her and to stop the invaders from using her against the fleet.
They had a sisterhood, they had a sense of camaraderie and a bond that ran so, so deep that she wasn't willing to give it up yet. She didn't want to accept it yet. She was casting her mental net out, calling shipgirls home, calling the children of the sea back to her. She wanted them safe, wanted them cared for. Earth had deserted the fleet but Akagi wouldn't.
So when her tears came, when her daughter held her, when her daughter, another carrier, a modern carrier, felt the need to whisper to her mother that "everything was going to be okay" she wanted to squeeze her and never let go.
Akagi sucked in a shuddering breath she didn't need to take, and was startled to find that… she could feel biological processes again. The air on her skin, the sense of touch, the warmth of her daughter's hug, the hair and its texture as it dangled to her hips. Akagi realized she'd… she'd not… she'd not cut it in so long.
Her silent tears run tracks into her nanomaterial cheeks, the burning track of liquid no longer simulated feeling, but real feeling. It feels slippery against her skin, and she separates from her daughter's hug just long enough to run a hand against her cheek, touching, carefully studying and looking at it. The glistening, shining tear on her fingers, sliding down the grooves and curves of her fingers to rest in her palm.
"What- what is happening-"
Her daughter helps her sit, Akagi suddenly feels her legs are unable to support her. Everything comes burning down on her head, she is the Admiral, she is the head of her people, from the largest battleship to the smallest human, and she has felt the weight of the world on her shoulders since she took up that mantle and the hat that came with it. She was born a human, and made into something so much greater by something enormous and alien and all consuming. For years, she has lived with these truths, for decades she has fought, and it has never broken her composure. She is unchanging and still as the sea, calm in her worst and best moments.
Why does it feel so inescapably vast now?
Akagi knows the answer, because for so long it was just her who would suffer if a decision went badly. Her bulkheads broken, her boilers cracked. Her reactor replacement, her airwings upgrades, her steel hull being raised by the sirens as a floating mockery of her form. The riots and executions of fellow sisters, the death of Warspite at the hands of her country. The breaking of Baltimore, the shattering of her compound, the last of them fleeing into a laboratory. Awakening into a world changed, no longer human, no longer needing to eat, sleep, or do anything.
She could accept that, she could soldier forwards as she always has because she cannot fail. No one will allow her to fail, she will not allow it, for the legacy and the memories of her lost people. For those who sank and never came back, for those who were reincarnated wrong. For the humans who served alongside her, for the cities burned. For her lovers and their dream of a child, lost to time.
That felt hollow in the face of this realization.
She has a daughter.
Her daughter was holding her cold hand in her own warm one, was helping her sit on a hospital bed, was here and alive and so strong and had called for her mother from across the stars and she had answered. She'd been saved, and now she was here and Akagi could actually look at her, touch and feel her, to experience the feeling of genuine touch again.
Her hands grasp clumsily at her daughter's face, and she turns the other woman's head to her own, and calmly looks at her. Really looks at her, desperately staring, craving, wanting certainty. Her fingers find the texture of skin, the pulse of warm life, the liquid rushing and mechanical pumps of not a heart in her chest but of what must have been a nuclear reactor in her service days.
Her daughter has been summoned, and she is sitting with her mother.
This time, when the fresh tears come, Akagi's voice lets out a choked sob, and she is wrapping her daughter in arms tight and strong, and holding the startled fox, holding the woman she thought she'd never get to meet, holding someone she thought had died in the dreams of her prospective parents.
"How are you here… I please-"
"Shhh, mom… mom it's okay… just, hold on, you're going to be okay. We're going to be okay, I promise."
Akagi nods, buries her face into the other woman's shoulders, and she just lets it out for once, she lets herself feel like she hasn't for decades and decades. She lets that human part of herself that swears up and down that no matter how machine the heart she bears is, that it will still beat for her family. It does not matter that it is a nuclear reactor in her daughter's chest that does not have any semblance of a heartbeat. It is still warm, and Akagi can feel it pulsing in time with her child's rhythms, with her child, her dream's existence.
Akagi's daughter held her tight and whispered softly as her mother cried.
"The humans called me Akagi, but… please call me Myogi, Mom."
Akagi holds her tighter, the smile on her face blurred tightly by tears. She can't tell her daughter right now, not with her voice so shaky, she can't tell her that her parents would have called her Myogi, a way to honor Akagi's own origin with a name that her traitorous government never deemed worthy enough for a warship.
She cannot tell her now, but she will later, over tea, tell her of the stories of her parents, of Akagi's lovers, if her daughter asks. Akagi herself will ask her daughter to tell her stories of this "calm sea", and ask her of the past and what she wishes for the future.
For once, she is not Fleet Admiral Akagi, head of the last of her people. She is just Akagi… and even now, just what her lovers and friends call her. She is just Aika, here.
Local Time: 1132 Hours.
April 11, 2161
Location: Orbiting Ceres.
Asymmetric Warfare Tasking
Wolfpack Command: FFW Atlanta
"Atago, drop below their field of fire by 30 degrees, divert squadrons 1-2 for the perimeter. We're not taking prisoners from these fascist fucks."
Atlanta's form shivered and ducked, accelerating up and through the picket line that had rushed to meet them as they ducked and dipped and dove. Her gun turrets blazed unholy hell upon the enemy installation, the shielding, armored screen of turrets firing cleanly back and forth at everything they could see. Atlanta's group had come upon the surprised Frieden's by accident, LIDAR and AESA arrays burning bright as the terrified fascists dropped over a thousand missiles at them in the span of seconds from concealed box launchers. That Atlanta was surprised was an annoying overstatement. This kind of thing was becoming trite at this point, with the damned Frieden's loving their priorly prepared, careful ambush positions. Dozens of which lined rich outer system asteroids and the Jovians. Europa itself had such a robust orbital grid that Akagi wasn't authorizing anything close to an attack on the planet. The sheer concentration of nuclear weapons and EMP's in orbit had surprised even the submarine, Cavalla, monitoring the place.
The issue with these prepared positions, was that when you took the human immune systems response as a gospel for how you should prepare a killbox, namely that of a twitchy redneck with a massive shotgun, it meant that these facilities kept being irritatingly difficult to deal with. Core systems were slathered in armor, and upgunned, random exotic weapons experiments ran free. With no knowledge of the exact specifications of the enemy's systems, Atlanta was sorely limited in how she could approach the situation she'd found herself in.
She did not enjoy this.
Her gun turrets pulsed, and another hidden battery sunk back into the asteroid as a puddle of burning slag. Atlanta growling into her comms as she did so.
"Atago, update on the runners?"
Her subordinates voice came through with the same teasing airs it always did bar a single note of strain.
"I am trying, the Friedens are mobilizing their surface guns to target me, and dodging railgun slugs is not fun when you have these hangars replacing much of your thruster banks. Any update from Nurnberg on when they're going to be disabled? Or how the Frieden's even got a deflecting field into function so fast?"
Atlanta "ducked", wobbling her bow as another slug from one of the accursed railgun batteries attempted to shatter her klein field. That they were unfairly good at it was more than a touch irritating, too.
Nurnberg had found that out the hard way, when a railgun slug turned itself into energy on her klein field, and popped the protective shield like a soap bubble. It took enormous amounts of energy, but whatever the fascists were powering that facility below them with, it was clearly capable of propelling a sedan sized projectile into their shields every three to four minutes. The power draw was so alarmingly vast that the force Atlanta had with her could cleanly and easily detect it every time the massive guns charged from their central power complex.
The problem was that it just didn't add up.
Nurnberg was damaged, yes, but she was far from killed by the shot. She'd also simply dived low and slipped under the outer layer of defenses, now playing about below their firing lines in a distant canyon carved into the surface of Ceres. Atlanta had communications, but with how dense the minefield was and the limited approach vectors available to the fleet, she couldn't easily approach with overwhelming superiority. And that was before the primary problems had presented itself.
Namely, the ship and the defensive field. Powered by some gargantuan system, the Frieden's had some sort of ECM jamming "shield" up that was bouncing any weaker particle beams that struck it, and was also painting any fleet asset that stuck it's head "out" of cover with gigantic lasers to target it both for the enemy vessel they could barely see and the massive railguns in the planetary crust.
The vessel was some kind of stealth cruiser, it was the only answer that made sense to the amount of chaff, jamming, and electronic confusion plugging the battlefield. That had been about all Atlanta could easily make out from her initial scans of the thing before the pulsed laser it was using opened a 25 meter chasm in the rocks near her position and forced her to duck down below its angle of fire. That it hadn't fired another shot indicated to her at least it was waiting for a better shot, but that it also might not have specifically any other weapons than the damned pulsed laser.
The problem with such a thing was that if she directly engaged the cruiser, the enemy railguns would fire at her, and while she was confident in surviving one or two projectiles provided she didn't immediately get holed by a third, the laser would then hit her. One or two projectiles with a pulsed laser to immediately carve apart her gun turrets like they were made of nothing? That wasn't something she could easily cope with. Especially with such a large blindspot in the form of the lower hull of her ship not being fucking armed yet.
Damned refit problem. Damned fucking nazis, causing problems before she could be made her best self.
She'd get there, she knew that, the problem was just the resources involved with the process.
Another "wobble" and a second burst of missile fire slid into range of her CIWS guns, letting them engage and take some heat from her depleting interceptor stocks.
The defenses of this station were, if she had a choice of words, diabolical. Just like in Spee's engagement a day ago, the Freiden's had built a minefield around this facility, the problem was that these "mines" were basically nothing more than a very large missile strapped with CIWS turrets and a powerful EMP warhead. They needed external targeting, but that wasn't a problem when Atlanta and her detachment couldn't get a shot on the LIDAR and AESA arrays that guided them into their positions on the fortifications below due to the damned forcefield.
Combine that half spherical shell of mines with dozens of turrets strapped to asteroids, a half dozen picket ships that were, while basically upgunned corvettes, capable of adding cannon fire and CIWS gun projectiles to the deadly battle of lead swirling in the void, it made this place a fairly hard target. And Atlanta didn't have enough assets for an actual direct assault that could smash aside resistance.
She growled in frustration again.
"First fleeing Nazis blown apart, I'm giving you squad 3, she's back to full strength, flag~!" Came Atago's eager voice, sliding past the chaos like a balm of blessed calm upon Atlanta's mind.
The psychotic wolf woman loved her robotic pilots more than anything, and frankly Atlanta was starting to see why.
If every time one of your planes got shot down it was capable of landing a saboteur operative with tools, training, weapons, and skill onto an enemy objective, well, she wasn't about to complain about that kind of advantage.
"Understood."
The readout of the incoming group of drones lit up on Atlanta's tactical map as they flooded over a grouping of asteroids and narrowed to the point they could easily take formation around her. Atago's external racks flashed on her screen as the stupendously attractive woman unleashed hell on another hidden hangar in Ceres' surface.
Nothing about this particularly made sense. Well, there was one possibility, but Atlanta hated the idea of it in particular.
Sirens had ungodly powerful production plants that were stupendously efficient, their mining and manufacturing abilities were second to none and not reproducible. But… if one had survived and fallen into the hands of the Friedens… they were large and dumb. If you fed materials into one end, it would spit out the products on the other. If they had one, that would make it easier to believe they'd built all this, rather than just having a hundred and change years of hatred and anger towards the governments that had kicked their teeth in for the horrific actions they advocated for and perpetrated. It made it easier to believe that they'd not had support, although at this point Atlanta was also just sick of defensive engagements.
A wing of attack drones formed up around her hull. This engagement could drag on, but the more it did, the worse off their odds were at actually getting usable and recoverable data from the Friedens. Let alone reaching the core of the building intact. Humanity was unfairly good at scorched earth tactics and the fucking Nazis had every advantage here.
Atlanta sighed and pinged Nurnberg on the comms network, the smaller ship lurking below the range and out of sight of most of the worst of the mines.
"Are your pinnaces ready to launch?" Her voice was irritated, and Atlanta winced slightly, not wanting Nurnberg to take it harshly.
"Yes Commander, my pinnaces are capable of engaging the surface facility, provided their defensive picket line is disposed of before it can cause… issues."
The German woman's voice was calm, composed, and did not betray a hint of the damage she'd suffered early in the engagement. Instead a bare, slight eagerness to kill displayed itself brilliantly in the flames smoldering in her eyes.
"Commence the assault on my mark. I am going to give that cruiser something to actually worry about. Atago, show them your dorsal teeth."
Atlanta's hull ignited as her Klein field discharged all the built up energy it had taken in. The Frieden's, as predicted, struck immediately.
The signal launched from the Stealth cruiser was not an attack, it was an activation. As the minefield around Atlanta's perimeter came to life, the light cruiser and her division prepared for action.
Massive cruise missiles, so tremendously large the EMP warheads they used would black out a continent on Earth, alongside the CIWS guns practically bolted to the frames ignited. A swarm attack numbering in the high hundreds launched itself towards Atlanta's position, the brilliant flare of her discharged energy burst so bright that anyone looking at any sort of screen or scan would have seen it illuminate scopes for hundreds of thousands of kilometers in every direction.
"Atago, hit their pickets, I'm going for the larger one."
The other ship answered Atlanta's orders with a response, as the minefield cleared, a minute, infinitesimally small opening appeared in the swirling collection of rocky debris, asteroids, and mines. But that gap was enough, and Atago's act of firing sparked indicators on Atlanta's screens as the heavy cruiser fired a barrage of pinpoint accurate particle beams.
They speared into the depths of the mines. A second sun bloomed near the stealth cruiser, painting its sides with radiation, flared embers from the detonation, and dozens of fragments of debris. A picket ship, holed and gutted from a pair of Atago's beams, spun wildly out of control, RCS thrusters firing in random directions and bucking left and right at speed.
Two of the six picket ships destroyed, one of them a radioactive fireball, the other a holed wreck spiraling into the defense grid. Atlanta stuffed her grin below decks for later, the incoming barrage of missiles had to be dealt with. EMP's were nasty business if they got under your Klein fields, and she had no desire to be towed back to Mars. Atago wouldn't let her hear the end of it for weeks, and would then exist at her bedside fussing like an obnoxious, wolf eared mother hen over her.
As fiery contrails and incoming alarms shrilled and wailed in her CIC, Atlanta finished her venting, powered up her weapons, and opened fire.
Brilliant, scything beams of energy shot from every secondary gun battery position. Her primary armament flung flak shells in every direction, and CIWS turrets spun a lethal tale of lead and death. In the moments before impact, the woman saw the majesty of what was happening in front of her, and she smiled.
The missiles impacted her outer flak barrier. Dozens detonated, casings holed, engines fouled, and thrusters destroyed. Even more spun off course as her ECM tore gaping holes into their targeting systems, sending them spiraling into friendly signals or asteroids. Flares of light and smoke, extinguished in the frigid cold of the deep black sparked around her. Radiological alarms blurred the borders between sound and feeling as Atlanta felt the burn on her skin from the close range detonations.
Her Klein fields heated, absorbed, and bent like cloth and fabric. She laughed, then, laughed as she swept hands forwards, and Atago's borrowed squadron jumped to her defense, guns blazing and interceptor rockets firing.
She laughed as her comms blared open on the fleet channel, and she cackled as her dorsal fangs ripped a hole in a picket vessel that got close enough to challenge her.
"Nurnberg, mark."
Her voice held its cheer, held its strength, and the German light cruiser poured speed into her thrusters, accelerating at speed up and into a space that had not been there before Atlanta started her attack and diversion.
To the Frieden commander it must have looked like a good response, nuke one of the fleet assets directly attacking them with their minefield, then when their friends came to get them hit them with railguns and everything you had left.
He couldn't count on the fact that Atlanta knew what he knew, and had countered that strategy by venting the excess energy early.
Now his ships were out of position, one of the flanks of the enemy's cruiser was bare, and Atlanta was not going to miss the opportunity. She saw the black, stark ship begin to rotate, but for all the benefits stealth could give on in the black of space. Maneuverability was not one of them.
Sailing on stellar winds, Atago came from on high main batteries blazing and squadrons of bombers chittering their sadistic mother's joy. Turrets machined to precision and tuned by human and shipgirl hands targeted, swung low, and ignited particle beams in their throats. Jaws yawning wide, Atago unleashed hell from all ten barrels. Almost a dozen particle beams crossed the hundreds of thousands of kilometers between her and her target, and smashed cleanly into picket ships, two of the remaining four enemy vessels. One of them spun wildly, venting atmosphere and burning from a dozen fires blazing happily and quickly upon her decks. The other hung silent, gutted by a particle beam that passed stem to stern, incinerating the atmosphere within the ship.
Atlanta felt the enemy cruiser's pulsed laser hit her shields, painting her klein field a brilliant red. Responding lasers and sensors played across her hull, and the power output of the facility climbed to its enormous levels. She focused her LIDAR and AESA arrays in that direction, aiming to paint the railgun shell as it came flying in.
Any sec- There!
The shell flashed out of a barrel. Traveling at 1 percent of the speed of light, it crossed the distance between Atlanta and its origin in seconds. But the heavy cruiser was ready for it. She cut her Klein fields in response, and jinked hard. Every iota of spare power was thrown into her powerful thrusters, and the sudden acceleration shot her under the predicted trajectory of the railgun slug by just enough for it to pass through a gap between where her Klein field would have been and her deck.
The shell flashed overhead, and Atlanta roared in triumph, every large caliber photon gun sighting on the barrel that had fired the slug. She waited a fraction of a second for her barrels, building necessary charge, before unleashing cataclysmic devastation on the facility in her path.
The resulting recoil from every gun "shook" her bridge, and she gasped in satisfaction as the enemy pulsed laser switched targets from her to Atago. The enemy was panicking, sliding doors opened as the stealth cruiser gave up its hiding abilities in favor of dumping a magazine of torpedoes at Atlanta's hull, while other gun ports opened up on the incoming pinnaces from Nurnberg.
That was the true goal of Nurnberg's pinnaces from the start. They'd never been after the facility, the cruiser was not only a good prize, it was far easier to take. The facility, with its railgun knocked out of commission, could not fire on them. Of course, there were at least two more railguns, and Atlanta was already tracking the enemy cruiser's position as it slowly fired RCS thrusters to move. Prior, the ship had kept to its formation, but now it attempted to cut and burn, opening a gap between itself and what had initially appeared to be an observatory dome on the far side of the facility.
"Nurnberg, the small observatory tower on the far side of the facility, level it."
"A gut feeling, Ma'am?"
Atlanta laughed and said.
"Maybe, but that cruiser certainly likes avoiding that area, perhaps it's a power relay or something important. Blow it apart."
Slightly unsettling laughter was Nurnberg's only answer as the German light cruiser closed her pinnace bays. The heavy landing ships closed to within knife fight range. Nurnberg brought four of them with her, each one capable of holding over 2 dozen fully armed combat automata. Each pinnace was armed with a modified photon cannon fixed to the front, when activated, the single use laser would power to unspeakable heights and quite literally melt it's way into a target, before it shattered the hull with ramming jaws and revealed a yawning maw from which troops could deploy.
A brilliant detonation colored the battlescape for a moment after Nurnberg fired, and Atlanta felt a smile cross her lips as the facility's power readings dropped sharply from the impact of Nurnberg's fire. She opened her comms again, and messaged Atago.
"Atago, have your stranded pilots found each other yet?"
The image of the woman, overlain onto her eyes as seated beside her, nodded and smiled faintly.
"One squadron, 24 soldiers on the ground armed with light weapons and ready for saboteur work. They're progressing towards the maintenance airlocks as we speak, broken down into 4 person fireteams. Any specific orders for me, Commander?"
Atlanta paused for a moment, bringing up the map of the area and the facility itself.
"Exploit these entrances, and vent the corridors, if you can get control of the atmospheric systems, flood the entire facility with chlorine or something equally lethal. If I am correct, they were keeping the capacitor banks for their railgun batteries in the tower Nurnberg just shattered, so with any luck they won't fire again. But let's be sure. Have two of your squads break the guns if they can find them."
Atago nodded, studying the map, before she spoke one more time.
"I have a squadron coming in for re-arming, am I dismissed, Commander?"
"Yes. Atlanta, out."
The communications ended there, as Atlanta focused her attention back on the engagement.
Maybe this wouldn't be so bad after all~?
Local Time: 2315 Hours.
April 10, 2161
Location: Hildas Asteroids.
Assigned Personnel: FFW Graf Spee (CO), FFW Farragut, FFW Hoel, FFW William D. Porter(Re-tasked to Mars), FFW England (In transit),
Asymmetric Warfare Tasking
"Any luck?" came the muttered voice of communications in Spee's headset. Her own response was a simple mutter, and a grumble of discontent. Provoking a laugh from the incoming fleet asset on the channel.
"Really not defying stereotypes, are we, Spee?"
Spee bit back an angered retort, and simply hummed in answer.
"I'm going to take that as an "I'm busy" and keep this short. I'm expected to reach your location in around 8 hours at current cruising velocity, and bring gifts from command alongside requested tools and materials."
England cruised several million kilometers distant, heading for the Hildas Asteroids at speed, and soon to be in a position to actually transit real tools and mechanics to Spee and her fleet. Spee's onboard manufacturing bays were just not capable of a large-scale reclamation operation, and the sizable fleet they'd destroyed in the battle of this station provided a large quantity of wreckage and hulks to pick through and scavenge from. The problem was that with only two capable repair vessels, Akagi literally could not afford to send Akashi their way, and Medusa was busy with something in the depths of their home base. Which meant, as always, the fleet would have to make do with what they could steal from their enemies.
In this case, that was quite a great deal of things. The partly complete shipyard spiraled out, its arms now repurposed to hold the ruined, burning, and in some cases still occupied enemy wrecks. Spee was taking her time picking out the choicest bits from computer cores and the engine rooms, and so far had slowly been purging her way through the fleet. Securing her finds always had to come first, unfortunately in some cases those finds were atomized clouds of molecular and irradiated gas… but beggars couldn't be choosers, Spee supposed.
England's arrival was good news, she'd had to give up Kawakaze and Z36, their actual division requiring their services, ostensibly for another raid on a similarly large structure she'd picked up traces of in the inner belt. Spee wished them both luck and hoped that they'd never find something as twisted as they'd found in the holed, broken wreck of Johnston.
Even now, abyssal and siren biotechnology leached from the vessel. She'd had to arm her guard squads onboard the hulk with a mix of caustic throwers and flame weapons capable of scourging it away from bare metal. The old hull of the destroyer was practically unrecognizable beneath the thick coat of armor, upscaled guns, and twisted biomechanical flesh that had practically swallowed her original form. Cutting the vessel free of the monster that had subsumed her still occupied much of Graf's available supply of combat automata.
She wanted to know exactly how the fucking Nazis had made abyssal bioinfection worse.
The way it worked had been poorly understood even by the end of the war, that abyssals had a deep affection for simply killing themselves if they ever got taken captive, and more often than not were capable of literally ripping themselves apart if not restrained, while the act of restraining a thrashing and bucking abyssal often just wasn't worth it. They could turn humans into paste with single strikes, just as any of the Kansen could, but they were much more committed to doing that. Not to mention that they practically had to be mummified in chains to not snap out of them.
Hopefully the computer cores of this station would be more enlightening, but she wasn't praying for it. Especially given how fanatical the last survivors had been. The last rooms of the station were barricaded and sealed shut, guarded personally by Farragut or drones piloted remotely, and the fuckers still had the energy to throw squads of people at them.
Whatever they were holding in there had to be important but just what was the Oracle project? And why was it so important that the Nazis were wagering their dwindling stocks of ammunition, weapons, and people on breaching the doors the hard way. Did they think they could just… evade any of the responding forces and still find the time to cut through literal meters of reinforced armor?
Graf shook her head and turned her gaze back to the wreck she was surveying. The former destroyer had been named "Pillar of Liberty" once, based on the data she'd pulled from the ruined vessel's computer core and data storage. She'd been a newer type of destroyer the Nazis had evidently begun to use more recently, and the signs of where she'd been built could be found in the data. This yard, in fact. Graf frowned, unable to help herself, that wasn't ideal. Finding the hard connections and existing sites of the group were imperative to removing their ability to fight back when the inevitable attack on Europa began.
If they had hidden yards they were more than capable of replenishing any ships that managed to escape. Not that that outcome was likely, but still better safe than sorry.
And that still left Oracle. The name was ominous, a soothsayer could mean all sorts of things, a predictor of futures worse than other options, in her opinion. If it was something that they'd stolen from the abyssals, she honestly hoped that was it. A body could be destroyed, and an abyssal likely couldn't have lived as long as they would have had to away from liquid water or a connection to the sea.
The worst option was if they had another Chapayev situation on hand.
She genuinely had no idea what she'd do if they found another imprisoned fleet asset. Murder and monstrosity seemed to be par for the nazi course, but she desperately hoped it wasn't the case.
Well now… that was interesting.
A datalog survived aboard the largest vessel, and she had copies made and prepared to disseminate them.
Perusing the files, Spee felt her stomach drop violently. A name flashing across her screen, and her decision to be careful with her data extraction bore and probes. She snapped her fingers lightly, and communications dialogues opened to her fleet. Struggling to speak, she paused, and Farragut spoke up.
"Flag? Are you alright?"
Spee finds her voice again, and says.
"I apologize… I have… come across pertinent information regarding Europa."
"Is one of the ships from there?" Came England's voice, deadly cold over the open comms.
"I believe so, but it is not what I have discovered." Spee's strained reply.
Spee had to suck in a breath before she continued.
"They have figured out how to summon us again, at least… someone has."
Deadly silence filled the communication lines. Hope and dreaded despair suffusing through the assembled vessels.
"But… I know where they have her. I know how we can get to her, and perhaps, if we are quick enough, we will bring Baltimore home this time."
A/N: Did someone order some fluff? I wasn't kidding, by the by, we're done with the grim and the darkness for the rest of this arc. I want to have some fluffier moments and some more of these people getting to be people. The war will go on, and you can expect a big and bombastic conclusion towards the end of the story, but for the moment I want to take a bit of time to have some de-stressing.
As always, thank you so much to my patrons, who make this entire thing possible.
Ascendant Hearthkeepers: MITH HAT, Danielle Young
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