The Island princess fell to her knees with a thunder of shattering concrete and a wail of anguished fury. Her talons clenched until rivers of icy blood oozed between their beaten iron plates. A despairing cry tore itself from her lungs, and if she had eyes she knew they'd be streaming with tears.
She was a minor princess,a nobody in the Abyssal Hierarchy. Her tiny island was important only out of an accident of geology. Her position was merely to hold what the other great queens had taken. She was small. Weak.
She had no great fleet, no army of thousands answering her every word, just her three demons. The flesh of her flesh, forged together in her loving womb, suckled and nurtured on her very breast… they were as much a part of her as her own body was.
And those
traitors had
taken them from her.
Murdered them.
Torn them into scrap like so much flotsam, reveled in their pain, gloried in sending her
precious children to the depth without a single hesitation. To them, this was just…
sport.
They'd torn children from their loving mother's breast, and they were
proud of it.
The princess was beyond enraged. For the first time in her life, she didn't care about victory. She didn't care about expanding her territory. She didn't care about growing her fleet. She didn't care about surviving. She didn't even care about her constant hunger.
She was consumed by a roaring, hateful fury that cared only about making those that hurt her
suffer. She wanted, needed, her foes to
hurt for what they'd done to her demons. What they'd done to
her.
"Ready the jets." She spat out each word with a spray of blood and spit. The traitors were drawing close. Soon even her stormbirds would be in range. And when they were, she would blot out the sky.
—|—|—
Arizona felt her blood run cold as jets by the dozen blackened the horizon with pillars of coal-dark smoke. Her breath caught in her chest, and her muscles shook as she forced herself to stare down the hateful things bearing down on her faster than any aircraft had any right to. Her hands were cold fists at her side, her knuckles white under the supple leather of her gloves.
All the logic in the world couldn't stem the primal terror gripping at the old standard's mind. The part of her mind that knew Shinano's Shidens, Jersey's secondaries, and the great host of friendly destroyers were all looking out for her was hiding behind bolted doors while the rest of her bridge crew stood frozen in abject horror.
Even if she could bring herself to do something, it wouldn't have mattered. Arizona lacked the vast secondary batteries of Jersey, she lacked the graceful agility of Kongou or the cruisers…
All she could do was hold her course and trust her escorts to defend her.
And she
did trust them.
But all the trust in the world meant nothing in the face of her irrational terror.
"All Ships!" Jersey's thundering contralto muscled through the standard's petrified musing with the same graceless force as the battleship herself. Yet… Arizona wasn't sure if she was projecting, but for a moment she almost thought she heard a tiny catch in the bigger battleship's voice.
"Weapons fucking free!" snapped Jersey.
In an instant, the vast horde of twinned five-inch mounts bristling along her shapely hips snapped to attention. Barrels by the hundreds trained on the black stain blemishing the horizon, thousands of faeries crowded the seemingly limitless forty- and twenty-millimeter gun tubs mounted to nearly every flat surface
on the American warships.
The jets would be in range
awfully soon, and Arizona couldn't shake the creeping dread that even this gratuitous display of anti-aircraft artillery wouldn't be enough to stop the horde.
"AEGIS boats!" Jersey barked out another order. Her mirrored shades glistened in the evening sun, and her half-gloved hands were balled to tight fists by her massive thighs as she bellowed orders. "BRING DOWN THE SKY!"
Arizona glanced over at the lithe form of
McCampbell just in time to watch the valiant little steel-hull destroyer explode. She only saw it for an instant, but her terror-stricken mind filled in ever gruesome detail. The standard gasped in horror as tongues of fire belched from the ship's deck and shrouded it in smoke.
A magazine explosion, it had to be. Arizona watched in mute horror as flaming debris climbed skyward on pillars of smoke, remnants of a once-proud American warship.
But then the standard noticed something.
Jersey was grinning.
And her smile consisted of nothing but glistening canines filed to a razor edge.
Arizona glanced back at the destroyer and her horror turned to awe. What her terrified mind had seen as flaming debris were actually
missiles. The standard felt a happy whoop slip through her lips as the missiles arrested their skyward climb and with one mind cranked over in a hard yaw and threw themselves at the oncoming jets.
"HELL FUCKING YEAH!" Jersey's roar thundered over even the sound of her own secondaries erupting in sheets of fire.
The three Fletchers unleashed their own rifles only an instant later, and every last one of them wore the same gleefully predatory smile of their amazonian minder.
Arizona had read about the awesome power of an American battlegroup. But never in her life had she experienced being in the
thick of it. It was more than she could ever imagine. The constant thunder of flak pounded at her chest until she more felt than heard it. The air around her burned with cordite and steel, and the horizon glowed with a constant dawn of burning tracers and exploding proximity shells.
Anything that made it past the AEGIS destroyers' rippling tidal wave of missiles crashed into the solid wall of iron her escorts threw up.
Missiles streamed all but exploded from the steel-hull destroyers, only to hurl themselves into the maelstrom with almost giddy eagerness. Battleships and cruisers alike turned the sky to steel, while over head Shinano's Shidens effortlessly danced around their firing solutions to smack down any jet that came staggering through the impossibly thick barrage.
Arizona felt a smile grace her lips as she let the rolling thunder wash over her like a wave.
This wasn't war.
This was a
symphony of fire and iron. Rifles thundered out a pounding chorus, punctuated by the staccato chatter of auto-cannons, the shrill howl of rocket motors, and the occasional whine of massive radials.
Arizona closed her eyes and let the music of battle unfold around her. Her own guns stood manned and ready, but they were anemic compared to the ludicrously overdeveloped flak farms carried by Jersey, Lou, and even the Fletchers. What little damage she suffered were mere papercuts.
Scrapes from errant cannon rounds skipped over her armor and left almost imperceptible trails of red on her face. Bombs hastily dropped by shaken pilots slammed harmlessly against her massive belt.
She was safe in the maelstrom.
Every barked order, every howl of glee, every crash of burning metal against saltwater drove home a twin-trusted point.
Arizona was steaming through hell. And not all the demons therein could
touch her.
She was a battleship. This was where she was born to be.
—|—|—
She'd lost. The princess was certain of it. She'd spent her last jet in a futile attempt to stall the coming storm, and all she'd gotten for her price of blood was scratch damage at best. Her attack had barely even slowed the traitor fleet down, and while she
had forced them to expend more of their precious missiles, that small victory rang hollow next to its crushing price.
Her demons were gone.
Her jets were gone.
Now battleships, cruisers, carriers, and infantry in their thousands bore down on her lonely island and there wasn't a thing she could do to stop them.
She should be… something. Scared that her island—her very life—was about to be stolen from her. Furious that she'd allowed herself to be so bested. Enraged at the foes that had so callously slaughtered her own beloved children.
But all she felt was despair.
She'd lost.
She'd lost and there was no one else to save her.
Even if the archipelago princess could send reinforcements in time, she couldn't spare the hulls. Not with battlecruisers from Australia smashing down her front door. Perhaps… if the archipelago princess could hold the Spratlys, she dispatch a fleet to retake the princess' island home.
But the princess knew she'd never live to see it.
Her foes would take her island. That fact was irrefutable.
But at what price?
The princess had nothing left to loose. Nothing left to feel but rage and despair. They would take her island, but they'd have to drown it in their own blood.
Behind every blade of grass would be a rifle barrel.
Around every corner and behind every building would be a tank.
When the traitorous battleships shelled her, she'd retreat to her bunkers beneath the earth.
But the moment the first marine set foot on her soil, she would inflict such terrible horror upon them it would be spoken with hushed tones for the short remainder of human civilization.
Forget victory.
The princess wanted
vengeance.
—|—|—
Captain Richard Knight was an armor officer, and a
Marine armor officer at that. He was practically legally required to treat the navy as nothing more than a glorified, inexplicably homosexual taxi service that hauled the
real heroes and took far more than their fair share of the credit once the dust settled.
After all, he was a tanker. He was lucky if he got a warm engine deck that wasn't encrusted with sand to sleep on with a day-old MRE congealing in his stomach. Sailors got to go home to a warm bed and a hot meal fresh from the mess every night. And while Knight accepted them as an important part of the amphibious-assault doctrine, he also accepted his asshole as an important part of his digestive tract. That didn't mean he went around showing it off to everyone.
That said, watching the sun rise on a proper gun-line of proper battleships formed up to properly shell the everliving
fuck out of a Nazi-occupied island awakened something in him not even the thunder of a one-twenty sabot could.
He'd never even seen a battleship fire a full broadside, the
Bonnie Dick had hung back with that timid Japanese carrier during the battle. He hadn't seen, but he didn't care. Just watching the sun rise on that much steel put a smile on his face and a raging freedom-on in his pants.
"Rick," Nate Hawk, Knight's gunner and would-be identical twin if not for the tattoos spiraling up his arms onto his back, shot Knight a smirk. The gold-rimmed aviators he'd found… somewhere gleamed almost as brightly in the morning sunlight as his smirking teeth.
"Nate." Knight stuffed his hands into his pockets and smiled at the battleships limbering up for their bombardment.
It was strange, really. The rational part of his mind
knew he was looking at floating castles of steel almost as big as ol
Bonnie Dick herself. It knew he was just seeing turrets slew on their mounts, radars scan on their masts, and vast hulls heave with the gentle roll of the seas.
But the rest of his mind didn't care. With every twitch of a turret, he saw a young woman shrugging her shoulders and cracking her fists. Ships who were also girls. Who would've thought?
"I'm excited," said the Marine. "You know why?"
Hawk shrugged, and cracked open a can of rip-it with his teeth.
"No fucking ROE," said Knight. Rules Of Engagement were the bane of a Marine's existence. Constantly second-guessing yourself and everyone around you, fighting an enemy who hid in a crowd when every mistake would be broadcast large to a public ready to pass judgement was hell.
But not anymore.
Now him and his Marines were fighting Nazis.
Not just Nazis. Literal demon Nazis from the very pit of hell itself. The Dalai Lama himself wouldn't think twice about putting two through the chest of those bastards.
"You know why
I'm excited?" Hawk slammed back the rip-it in one long gulp.
Knight just smiled at his gunner.
"Big. Motherfucking. Guns."
Knight's smile only widened. The rational part of his mind saw the battleship
Arizona training her rifles at a tiny rock in the middle of the South China sea. But he
saw a young woman with copper-red hair and a cover pulled low over her eyes like an old-west gunslinger staring down the island with pure hate as she slowly thumbed the hammers back on a pair of navy colts.
BOOM! Arizona's rifles thundered, followed an instant later by the rippling choir of Pennsy, Jersey, and even Kongou. The other ships fired too, of course. None of the cruisers or even destroyers could let a chance to shell Nazis slip through their fingers.
But it was the battleships who owned the stage. Every roaring volley sent a hammer blow of sound crashing into his chest, forcing him back a half step with each volley.
Hell yeah, battleships!
