Part 23
Jersey's bow crashed though the towering waves, burying itself is freezing water and splashing up a salty plume clear back to her A-turret. The long, slender lines of her hull made her an
exceptionally fast warship, but it came at the cost of lousy sea keeping in foul weather.
And she was sailing into some of the roughest seas known to mankind: the North Pacific Ocean in storm season.
"Gaaaahhh…." the battleship let out a pathetic rumble, her hands clutching her churning belly as her hull climbed up a wave trough. She felt her bulbous bow clear the water for a second, felt the freezing Arctic air scouring against her anti-fouling paint. Then she crested the wave with a mighty crash, sending salt and surf high into the air.
But at least she had fifty-eight thousands tons of ballast to keep her steady. The destroyers were bouncing around like toys in some mad god's bathtub. "You okay, kiddos?" she asked, hoping her face didn't look as green as she felt.
Johnston offered a shaky thumbs up, her salt-encrusted feathers flapping wildly in the howling breeze.
Fletcher class destroyers had a list of positive qualities a mile long. Excellent seakeeping wasn't one one of them.
None of the other destroyers looked much happier, and even Naka was letting her cutesy Idol act slip as she tried to coral the bouncing destroyer girls.
At least White looked
moderately happy. The tiny carrier was rolling in the waves worse than even Johnston, but she took it with a happy giggle every time her bow crashed though a frigid wave.
It was fucking annoying.
"Hey, Jersey?" Heermann pulled up alongside the battleship, her arms held out in a vain attempt to keep some measure of balance.
"Yeah?" said the battleship, peeling soaking wet hair off her brow.
"I'm, uh…" the destroyer gulped, slamming though a wave almost the size of her mast, "I've… been getting intermittent radar contacts-"
"Aerial?" asked the battleship, "And at extreme range?"
Heermann nodded.
"Yeah, me too…" said Jersey, scowling as she glanced over her shoulder at White. With her deck rolling that badly, just launching aircraft would be dangerous. Recovering them would be suicide. "What's your guess?"
"J-Jersey?"
"What're we seeing?" asked the battleship, hoping she could get at least a brief moment of diversion from the stomach-churning surf.
"Uh…" Heermann dove into a wave trough, her screws nearly coming out of the water. "Uh… they're just shadowing us, so… flying boats?"
"Probably."
"Is that bad?"
"'s not good," said Jersey scowling at the rain squalls surrounding her as far as she could see. "Keep your eyes on the sky, okay? I've gotta call this in," she said, tapping two fingers against her ear in pointless reflex, "Maybe see if they can vector us around this damned storm."
Heermann gave a brief little nod, peeling off to slot back into formation.
"NAVSTA Everett, this is Jersey, um… Actual, come in, over?" said Jersey, tapping her heel anxiously as the milliseconds ticked by. Her communications gear
should be good enough to punch tough the storm, but-
"Jersey," the Admiral's voice sounded ragged, almost as ragged as Jersey felt.
"This is Everett-Actual, How's it going?"
"Uh, not good, sir," Jersey glanced over her shoulder at the cluster of green-faced destroyers, destroyer escorts, and cruisers. Plus one annoyingly chipper escort carrier. "We're being shadowed."
"Say again?"
"Intermittent contacts at extreme radar range," said Jersey, scowling as she felt her radar light up just such a troublesome contact in the very periphery of her vision. "I'm guessing H6Ks, maybe PBYs." She shrugged, "I dunno… the returns aren't quite right for…
anything I know of. But what the hell
is right about this things?"
"You think the convoy's in any danger?"
Jersey scrunched up her nose, squinting into the salty surf as she thought. "Uh… not at the moment, sir. Heermann took a few potshots when they first showed up, they've been staying at range ever since. But, uh…" Jersey wiped the spray from her face, "It's spooky."
"Copy that, Jersey," said Williams without even a moment's hesitation. He must know that feeling well. Hell, he probably knew it
better than Jersey.
"Can you send a CAP to interdict?"
"Negative, sir. White's had to chain her planes down," said Jersey. "Seas are pretty awful up here. She, uh, she already lost one over the side. I think it was a TBF?" she glanced at the carrier who shot her a beaming smile an thumbs-up. "Yeah, TBF."
"Shit," hissed Williams.
"You have your girls on Air-Defense?"
"Yeah," Jersey nodded, "we're doing what we can, but it's not a CAP." She scowled, tucking her head down as she battered though an unusually towering wave, "You got those fancy satellites, yeah? Any chance you could vector us out of this storm?"
"That's a negative, Jersey, it'd take days to route you around."
"Damn," said Jersey, too motion sick to put much emotion into her voice. "You got that fleet composition from the SDF yet?"
"Yeah," said Williams, his voice pausing just long enough to make Jersey worry.
"Fleet composition is as follows: DesDiv 6 under command of IJN Tenryuu-"
"Ooh, you'll like her!" said White with a stifled giggle.
"Yeah, Tenryuu-san is really…" Fubuki stopped as she battered though a wave, her flare-nosed hull handling the waves moderately better than the taffies, "You'll like her," she finished.
"-IJN Ryuujou will provide CAP. And…" Williams voice trailed off for a minute, and Jersey could practically
feel the long-suffering sigh as her Admiral mulled over a series of what were probably equally-horrible options,
"A fast-battleship task force of IJN Kongou and IJN Kirishima."
"Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit," hissed Jersey, stretching the word out as long as her lungs would allow. Nearly every ship sunk at Samar—the last stand of the Taffies— had their stories end the very same way. 'And then Kongou sunk her.'
"Yeah. That's affirm, Jersey."
"Is that really the best fleet-comp they could send us?"
"They don't have a lot of hulls to spare," said Williams. He didn't sound angry as much as… spent.
"And most of what they do have's either too slow, too stuck in the old ways, or some combination of the above. Think it'll be a problem?"
Jersey bit her lip, glancing to each of her charges in turn. "I…Don't think so? Sir?" half-asked Jersey, cringing as she desperately hoped she was telling the truth. "Taffies are scared stiff of causing you trouble. We should be fine. I think."
"What about Sammy?"
"She's… an escort sir," said Jersey, praying to whatever god looked over shipgirls that her hunch was right. Off Samar
Samuel B. Roberts had fought like a caged lion, but only after her charges were threatened. Escort ships weren't born killers like destroyers, they wouldn't act unless provoked.
Right?
"You certain?"
Jersey shrugged, "Yo, Sammy!"
"What?" the little destroyer had to scream over the crash of water against steel.
"You gonna start any shit?"
"Not 'less they start it first!"
"Yeah," Jersey tapped her fingers against her ear, mentally refocusing the conversation back to her admiral, "I think that means we're good."
"What the hell, I'll take what I can get."
Jersey shook her head. It would have been funny if it wasn't so damn true. "Uh, sir… one more thing?"
"Go."
"How's the, uh… summoning going?"
—|—|—
The four marines in crisp dress blues had given Crowning a new understanding of true meaning of "loud." He'd met enough to understand Marines never really did anything without putting their heart and soul into it—at least when there were civilians around to impress.
He, however, had never experienced what marines with guitars hooked up to Naka's excessively powerful sound system could do. For almost two
hours, the band had been blasting away with all their strength. They'd tried rock ballads from the 80's, grungy stuff from when he was a kid, even Johnny Cash.
And the summoning pool remained depressingly empty.
"I'll die fighting!" boomed all four marines in a thundering harmony of excessively manly volume,
"With my brothers! Side! By! Side!"
Crowning scrunched up his face as they held the last chord. Loud, boisterous music was never really his thing, but if the girls liked it… He shot a hopeful glance at the summoning pool, hoping that something
anything would be waiting there.
Nothing. Not even 'The Power Of METAL' as Yeoman Gale had declared it, could rouse so much as a
destroyer from her well-earned sleep.
"Damnit!" Crowning slammed his fist against the railing, wincing as his flesh hit the unyielding steel. The sound echoed though the nearly-deserted summoning chamber, a pulsing reminder of his failure.
"You okay, sir?" said the marine lead singer, Master Sergeant… something or other. After so much grating music, Crowning's mind was in a permanent state of fuzz. The marine didn't sound all that better, his voice was almost raw.
"Yeah, I'm fine," said Crowning, rubbing his smarting hand with the other.
Gale shook her head, apparently too frustrated herself to bother laughing.
"Do you, uh," the Master Sergeant gave a shrug of his enormously muscled shoulders, "Do you want us to try again, sir?"
Crowning shook his head, trying to goad the ringing inhabiting his ears into vacating. "No no… we- there's got to be something we're missing here."
"Sir," rasped the Master Sergeant, "We're good to go, just say the word."
Crowning shook his head, "No… no… it took Jersey
one song to summon those destroyers. We're missing something here."
"Like… Jersey?" said Gale, tapping a tuneless little rhythm out against her laptop.
Crowning gave her a confused look.
"Maybe… you need a shipgirl to summon another one?"
"If you do we're fucked," opined the Master Sergeant.
Crowning let out a long sigh, collapsing into one of the folding chairs set up next to the mess of audio equipment. "No other ritual requires a shipgirl," he said, "Not the Brits, not the Japanese…"
"We… we're already pretty different, sir," said Gale.
"Well…" Crowning bit his lip, taking in a breath of the salty air and holding it in for a second. "Well, if that's the case, there's nothing more we can do here. So let's assume it's not."
The marines chorused their agreement, and Gale offered a resigned nod.
"Look, sir…" Gale drummed her hands against her belly, "I'm not saying we stop, but… Maybe we should break for chow? Sometimes… it's good to step away and think."
Crowning scowled, "It's only-" he glanced at his watch. "Oh…" He let out a long sigh, his shoulders slumping as he stuffed his hands into his sweater pockets. "I guess you're right."
"Part of working with Jersey, sir," said Gale, "I always know when it's mealtime."
Crowning let a faint smile cross his face, "Yeah… imagine taking her out for dinner."
Gale smiled, her eyes twinkling in a brief almost-wink. "Funny you should say that, sir."
"What?" said Crowning, glancing at her in honest confusion, "What? I… pardon?"
"The kiss, sir," said the absolutely mountainous Master Sergeant with utter stoic aplomb.
"At the docks," said Gale, "You, uh… you won me fifty bucks."
"No, no…" Crowning felt his face go cold and white, "That- she kissed me."
For a moment there was silence. Then Gale wordlessly handed the Master Sergeant a crisply folded twenty.
--|--|--
It was almost sundown—or the closest thing this god awful place could
get to sundown this late in the year—before the skies finally started to clear. The monolithic pillar of steel-gray thunderheads dumping seemingly infinite amounts of freezing sleet
right on Jersey's nose was gone. In its place was a ragged mix of freezing rain squalls and equally freezing patches of clear sky.
"Fuuuuuuuk," grunted Jersey, cupping her hands to her mouth and trying to breath some circulation back into them.
"Jersey-Sempai?" Fubuki glanced over, her face dripping with concern and… actual, literal saltwater. These seas must be
hell for her.
Jersey growled in response, taking her hat off just long enough to pull her salty bangs out of her eyes before smashing it back on. "'m fine."
"You don't really look fine," said Naka. The torpedo cruiser was really… more of a glorified destroyer. She didn't have the displacement to weather these seas properly… But she'd made this run before, and was doing an admirable job of still somehow looking put together.
Jersey scowled, scrunching up her face until her nose buried itself in her sopping wet scarf. If a cruiser could do it… "I'll be fine," she said, forcing her voice into a calm, friendly tone she
really didn't feel.
"Just a few more days," said Naka, idly playing with the frilly hem of her stupidly short skirt. "Then we'll be back in tropical waters."
Jersey glanced at White, "Yeah… that's what I'm worried about."
Naka tilted her head to the side, letting out a quiet little "hmm?" sound.
"Plan has us making the dash to Hokkaido at 20 knots," said Jersey, her eyes flickering from point to point as she referenced one of the maps in her bridge. "That's… what, fifteen hundred nautical miles?"
Naka nodded, "Something like that."
Jersey sighed, balling her hands to fists at her side. "That's more than three days. Three days White has to run
at flank. I can't even do that."
"Well…" Naka glanced at the little escort carrier, who was of course blissful oblivious to the conversation as she bounced over a wave, giggling all the way. "She's got uniflow engines, right?"
"Yeah," said Jersey, giving the cruiser a sidelong look, "How'd you know?"
"I ran a convoy with her," said Naka, "She… talks a lot. Look, uniflows are meant to run closer to max RPM than our turbines."
"Closer, not
at," said Jersey, "And it's still three days at emergency power, which is called that for a fucking reason."
"She's…" Naka bit her lip, peeling off just slightly to put a few more yards between her and the battleship, "She's a tough girl, and the docks at Yoko- what?"
"What?" Jersey's icy glare didn't move from the horizon.
"You just looked at the sky," said Naka, building up steam just in case, "Every single one of you Americans looked at the exact same point."
"Yeah," said Yuudachi, "It was,like really creepy."
"Radar master race," half-heartedly bragged Johnston, her feathers quivering in the breeze as her gaze was locked on a point just above the Northern horizon.
"Sush," Jersey waved her hand at the destroyer girls.
For a few tense seconds, the flotilla was deathly silent, even the sound of waves crashing against steel and the thrum of steam turbines seemed to die into nothing.
"Torpedo bombers," said Jersey and Johnston in near-harmony.
"At least twenty," said the battleship.
Naka felt her heart drop like a cannonball, her knees going shaky as she scrambled to build up more steam. Her anti-aircraft armament was anemic on paper, and the triple-mounted 25mm guns had
never lived up to their already humble promises.
"Johnston," barked Jersey, "You, Hoel, break and engage."
The two destroyers nodded, their wakes churning white as the slammed their engines to flank. As they peeled off, Heermann gracefully slotted into formation to take their place.
Naka gasped. Against air attack, the smartest thing to do was tighten up the formation and hunker down. Two destroyers couldn't
hope to hit
all those targets, not without joining their fire with the rest of the fleet, right?
"Naka," said Jersey, smirking that utterly incandescent American smirk, "Bet you twenty bucks they don't get a single fish in the water."
Naka just nodded wordlessly as she stared at the two destroyers sprinting headlong into certain doom. With the torpedo squadrons ducking in and out of the clouds… even
with radar, there was no way they could maintain their firing solution!
Then, as suddenly as the two girls has ripped out of formation, they heeled over in hard turns, their sterns flipping out as they raked huge white scars though the churning Pacific sea. Their 5in turret traversed to starboard and…
And Naka wouldn't have believed it if she hadn't seen it with her own eyes. The destroyers opened up with their guns. Bursts of flame and gritty black smoke appeared in the sky, taking whole squadrons down at once.
Blast and fragmentation tore the evil black aircraft apart, shredding their carapaces, stripping skin from their skeletal wings, or simply erasing them from existence.
"P-poi~" stuttered Yuudachi, her jaw hanging loose as she watched the Americans at work.
And work it was. There wasn't a shred of the usual bravado, besides occasionally calling out targets, the two girls barely spoke, each locking their iron-hard gaze on the oncoming aerial assault.
But it wasn't enough! The torpedo planes kept coming, they had to be almost in range!
And then the destroyers exploded. Tracers in both 40mm and 20mm variety poured from what seemed like every flat area on each ship, raking the sky with burning light.
Every plane they touched burst into flame, spewing an ugly trail of sickly black smoke as it augured into the surf.
Naka had to scoop her jaw off the ocean surface with both hands.
"Aw shit," scowled Jersey, her eyes stuck in that glassy far-off look ships got when they were 'seeing' with their radars. "New contacts, on my two and ten."
Naka gulped. The classic hammer-and-anvil attack of the IJN. Two spreads of torpedoes that were nearly impossible to dodge.
"Fuck the bastards learn fast!" Jersey waved at the last of her destroyers, "Heermann-"
"On it!" said the last of the
Fletchers, her turbines spinning up as she joined her sisters on the air-defense picket.
"Sempai!" screamed Fubuki, frantically waving at something off Naka's stern.
The torpedo cruiser twisted to see what Fubuki was-
Oh.
Oh
fuck.
--|--|--
Fubuki wasn't jealous of her American counterparts and their ridiculously overdeveloped Anti-aircraft suites! That much topweight crammed into a slender destroyer hull just wasn't suited for rough North Pacific seas.
They were bouncing all over the place, unlike the Special-types who crashed though the waves with aplomb. Still… it was kind of impressive to see Johnston and Hoel tear into the oncoming-
"Aw, Shit," Jersey scowled, her hands reflexively tightening around the revolves hanging off her broad hips. "New Contacts, my two and ten!"
Fubuki saw her sempai tense up, the muscles in her bare legs going taut as she steeled herself for combat maneuvering. The battleship might not want to admit it, might not even fully understand it, but she was scared. Terrified, maybe. Fubuki didn't blame her, torpedoes were a battleship's natural foe, even one
without Jersey's compromised torpedo-protection.
As Jersey barked orders, Fubuki turned her eyes to the horizon. She might not have Air-Search radar like the
Fletchers, but her long 10cm guns were potent anti-aircraft weapons, and-
And… The special-type destroyer let out a sharp intake of breath, her hands tightening around her turrets. "Sempai!" she shouted, waving frantically off her stern.
Abyssal torpedo boats were roaring though the surf, their glimmering black hulls skipping though waves. Glittering red eyes glowed with the power of concentrated hatred as the tiny boats zipped around the splashes of Fubuki's near-misses.
They weren't stopping, their hatred almost palpable as the cluster of boats angled for their attack. As they angled to put torpedoes into her convoy, her Sempai.
That wasn't going to happen.
"Yuudachi-chan! Naka-Chan!" called Fubuki, her engines roaring to flank as she heeled over into the tightest turn she'd ever pulled. Her tail flicked out into the surf, scraping a broad wake of churning foam.
"Follow me!" she screamed, her turbines pushing fifty-thousand horsepower though her shafts as she churned the water white. Some back corner of her mind recognized the other two ships peeling off to join her, but it was almost a haze. A half-remembered dream. They didn't matter now, only one thing mattered.
The Torpedo boats.
Fubuki hunkered down as she slammed though a wave, salt spraying off her flared hull and dripping down her flanks. She didn't care if the Abyssals sank or ran, she barely even cared if
she sank.
Those boats were
not getting their fish in the water.
Fubuki brought her gun up to her eye, her vision tunneling in until her universe consisted of nothing more than herself, her Sempai, and her targets. Her high-angle 10cm gun wasn't the biggest, and she didn't have the fancy air-search radar of fire control computers of the Americans.
But she
did have months of experience in hash arctic seas, her crews had trained with her optical range-finders until they could acquire a polar bear in the middle of a snowstorm. Fubuki would do her best! She'd protect her friends!
Bang Bang her twin 10cm guns spoke in unison, neatly bracketing a torpedo boat and sending it and its mates scampering to break her solution. An instant later, the splashes were joined by the thunder of Yuudachi and Naka's 12.7cm and 14cm guns.
"Dump the fish!" barked Jersey, her voice booming over the rumbling thunder of her 5in anti-aircraft mounts.
"H-hai!" stammered Fubuki, traversing her torpedo launchers in the general direction of the oncoming swarm of torpedo boats and firing them all in a rough salvo. 61cm oxygen torpedoes were her trap card against bigger ships. But against small, maneuverable torpedo boats with next to no draft, they were little more than fire hazards lashed to her deck.
Judging by the splashes behind her, Yuudachi and Naka had done the same. Fubuki didn't bother looking. Her universe was in front of her. The torpedo boats were still pressing their attack.'
She wouldn't let them. Fubuki pulled a hard turn, unshadowing her after guns and exploding in a string of ripple-fired 10cm high-explosive shells.
Her first volley was a near miss. Columns of spray washed over the torpedo boats, jostling them like bath toys and spoiling their firing solutions.
Her second was better, a shell slammed into the water mere inches in front of a torpedo boast. The boat was physically lifted out of the water as the shell blew under its keel, then it slammed back down with the force of a thousand sledgehammers, snapping its hull clean in two.
Her third was perfect, she caught two torpedo boats clean amidships. Her shells buried their way though what little armor they had, detonating in their sensitive machinery spaces.
One simply crumpled as her shell tore it apart, letting out a scream of pain in the instance before its hull was torn apart like wet paper, leaving nothing but a slick of burning gasoline behind.
Her other shell must have hit a torpedo. The entire front half of the boat was simply gone, what remained flipped stern-over-bow to land with a crash of twisted, blackened metal and flaming carapace.
"THAT WAS FUCKING AWESOME!" screeched Sammy, throwing an enthusiastic thumbs up as she re-targeted her guns to focus down the next wave.
"Way to go, Fubuki!" boomed her Sempai, the battleship's voice somehow carrying over the frantic roar of her 5in and 40mm guns.
The Special-type destroyer blushed, she'd never felt so self-conscious in her life.
"C'mon!" cheered Yuudachi, grinning as she pulled alongside her sister, "We'll, like tag-team the next wave!"
Fubuki gulped, squinting into the surf. Torpedo boats. Torpedo boats as far as her eye could see. She tensed and un-tensed her fingers around her turrets.
"We can take them," said Naka, forming up on the little destroyer like it was the most natural thing in the world. "Together."
"With you, skipper!" cheered Sammy, pulling up abreast of the torpedo cruiser.
"Hai!" said Fubuki, tucking into the surf as she and her ad-hoc squadron surged into the fray. She'd do her best, everyone would! She only hoped it would be enough
