Part 39: Shoot to Thrill
Crowning cradled his steaming cup of tea close to his chest as he was ushered though the guarded doors of the command bunker. It was less than an hour before sunrise off Alaska, which put Everett solidly in the later hours of morning. But the sea of fatigue-clad sailors moved with the kind of nervous energy the professor associated with student struggling to finish an all-night study binge.
The camouflage of their clothing blended together into a single undulating sea of blue as sailors hunched over their computers, ran clipboards to one another, or just sat back in their chairs and prayed. The 'pre-mission jitters' he'd heard so much about.
And in the center of the idling maelstrom of activity, Admiral Williams stood with his hands clasped behind the back. His craggy face was set in a stare, like he was trying to simply glare the Abyssals out of existence.
"Morning, Doc," Yeoman Gale smiled at the older man, giving him a wave with the hand that wasn't busy clutching her coffee close to her uniformed chest.
"Gale," Crowning managed a smile in return, raising his cup to her.
"Not what you were expecting?" asked Gale, gently leading the academic to a back corner of the room where they'd be out of the way of the seething mass of nervous sailors.
Crowning blew a breath though the corner of his mouth. Every desk was covered with computers, and every wall seemed dominated by even larger screens. "Not really," he admitted. "Especially for a battle like this."
"Hmm?"
"More… bravado," said Crowning, gesturing to the seemingly infiltrate rows of glowing consoles with his beverage-hand, "Dashing along the decks yelling 'damn the torpedoes' and such."
Gale chuckled, her nervous outburst drawing a brief glare from an officer standing watch. "Yeah well… it's the information age, those days are over." She took a long sip of her coffee, the precious liquid making a quiet sluuuuuuurp in the cheap paper cup, "At least they were."
"Jersey?"
"Yeah." Gale shrugged, "The dramatic stuff's gonna happen on her end. She'll be making the torpedo-damning calls herself."
"Probably with a lot more cussing," said Crowning, taking a long sip of steaming tea.
Gale shrugged in acquiescence, her free hand burrowing into the pocket of her fatigues. For a moment, the yeoman said nothing. She just looked over the civilian with the all-knowing eyes of a Navy NCO. "You don't want to be here, do you?"
"No," said Crowning. There wasn't any reason do deny it, the sailor seemed to know everything already. "I don't. I don't want to see her get hurt. See any of them get hurt."
"You love 'em?" said Gale, a glint of a teasing smile on her face, but only a glint.
"Don't you?" Crowning arched an eyebrow as he silently took another sip.
"Well…" Gale squirmed, her face going a brilliant red, even in the subdued command bunker lighting. "Yeah," she admitted, her blush stabilizing somewhere between Marx and Lenin. "Yeah I do. Even the taffies." She shrugged, "They're little shits most of the time, but yeah. I love 'em."
Gale bit her lip, her blush ever so slowly fading away as she focused a map projected against one wall of the bunker like command building. "So why'd you come?"
"Hmm?"
"You don't wanna see your girl get hurt," said Gale, "Why'd you come to watch?"
"It's the least I can do for her," said Crowning, taking another testing sip of his tea. "I can't fight like her, but… maybe I'll see something she missed. Something all of you-" he waved at the crowd of sailors, "missed. New perspective, new pair of eyes… something like that."
"Hell, it can't hurt," said Gale, "You're probably more qualified than anyone to deal with the magic shit."
"That fails…" Crowning forced a grin, "I can always lecture them to death."
Gale rolled her eyes, "I'm sure your lectures were fascinating, doc."
Before Crowning could respond, one of the sailors filling the computer-laden bunker bolted up in his chair, his face suddenly the picture of intense concentration. "Sir. Baseplate eta to station five minutes."
The Admiral nodded, the muscles in his jaw tightening fractionally.
"Baseplate?" whispered Crowning.
"Global Hawk," replied Gale, leaning in close to the doctor to make her whispered heard. "Drone. Should give us a live feed of the battle."
"Is that safe?"
Gale shrugged, "'hawks fly at sixty-five-thousand feet, forties' planes shouldn't be able to fly that high, but…"
"But?"
"But forties planes shouldn't be able to give a Hornet a run for its money, but they do. It's how we lost the Stennis."
Crowning scowled. "What's that mean for the bombers?"
Gale shrugged, "First time we've ever tried this… I'll tell you once we know."
"That's reassuring."
The two watched in silence for another few moments, both waiting anxiously for the camera feed.
"Sir, Baseplate is on-station."
"Put it on the main," said Williams, "And pipe the fleet net though the 1MC."
"Aye aye, sir."
The projected map that dominated the bunker flickered into a rock-steady aerial camera feed. There was just enough light to make out the familiar shape of Jersey's long, slender hull, along with her equally long, toned legs.
Along side her sailed two girls Crowning recognized as Kongous—probably Kongou and Kirishima if Jane's had told him anything. Their flowing miko-like outfits snapped in the breeze, and each was flanked by a destroyer-girl in a tiny skirt Crowning didn't recognize.
"Akizuki and Teruzuki," said Gale, pointing to the girls in question. "Air-defense destroyers. Protecting the Kongous."
Sailing at the front of the formation, grouped up like a wedge on either side of Jersey's pointed bow, were four of the most adorable little destroyers had ever seen, with another girl—a cruiser, maybe? He was still learning his ships— leading them in formation.
"Tenryuu and her kids." How Gale could read his mind was beyond the good professor, but he welcomed the help. "They're Jersey's escorts."
Crowning nodded, his eyes glued to the screen as it held on the American battleship and her Japanese allies for another minute until they vanished into a fogbank.
"Using the fog to close," said Gale as the camera panned over the icy waters, "American radar master race and all that."
The camera panned over to the other pincer of the allied attack, and Crowning almost dropped his drink once it stabilized. Three battleships sailed in echelon, each with a watchful taffy practically glued to her hip.
Nagato and Mutsu he recognized, their matching wardrobes and busty yet athletic builds made it easy to identify their class, and their differing hairstyles let him tell the two sisters apart easy enough.
But the middle warship of the battle line… she was something else. A towering woman with dark-tanned skin and an absolutely monstrous bustline. No wonder Jersey wanted reassurance that her breasts weren't too small—they weren't— Dolly Parton would be jealous next to those. And that was before considering the battleship's… less then modest outfit. "Holy hell."
Gale let out a snort as she tried to contain her laughter. "Yeah… that's Musashi."
"I…" Crowning gulped, "I can see why."
"Why what?"
"Nothing."
Gale offered a twinkling smile, "If you say so." She shrugged, staring up at the screen with a studied look her her face, "she is pretty hot though."
"Not my type," muttered Crowning.
"What is?" said Gale as she took another long sip of her coffee.
"Leggy."
The yeoman gagged as she tried to avoid a spit take while the Admiral was right there. Crowning just offered a sly smile.
—|—|—
Musashi smiled as the salty sea spray plumed off her bow, kissing her Imperial Chrysanthemum with jewel like droplets. The icy water around her stung like knives against the steel of her hull, the iron-gray sky above her sang with the sound of a hundred planes, and the freezing air bit at her skin.
And she didn't care.
She'd gotten her hull under her. She'd learned to sail her new body. The freezing knives in her hull only stoked the fires burning withing her twelve boilers.
The planes above her were friendlies, flown by the best pilots the Imperial Japanese Navy—or any Navy in history—could produce. The first rays of the Rising Sun warmed her face, casting a towering shadow behind her as she steamed into battle.
She would have her chance at redemption. She would prove herself in battle. She would have her vengeance.
"Target spotted, bearing zero-six-zero," said Nagtao, her steel-hard voice utterly devoid of emotion as she relayed the information. Her red-brown eyes were fixed on the horizon, never moving from their focus even as the super-dreadnought crashed though the waves at almost twenty-seven knots. "Heavy division. Three Nelrods… three cruisers."
Musashi cracked her knuckles, her massive turrets grinding to life as they slewed over towards their targets, nine of the biggest armor-pricing naval shells ever devised waiting ready in their barrels.
Nagato's brows knit, her nostrils flaring as she stared down the hostile ships on the horizon. "Remove it."
Musashi grinned, adjusting her glasses as she slipped into a zen state. She might not have the fancy radars of her American counterpart. But she did have the finest optics ever constructed tied into the best optical fire-control system ever devised.
Her fifteen-meter rangefinders were the largest ever built, and she had no less than four of them. Each director fixed her target in its deadly glare, feeding its estimates into her fire-control-computer which averaged them for a perfect solution.
"Range, thirty-two-thousand-four-hundred meters," growled the battleship, her eyes narrowing to sits as she stared down the twisted mockeries of once-proud warships. She had the range, her own course and speed were known and constant… all she needed for a perfect solution was their course and speed.
And she'd just got them.
"All batteries! FIRE!" The battleship's thunderous scream was all but drowned out by the booming report of her nine 46cm guns. Just one of her monstrous rifles spoke with the wrath of an angry god. Nine of them at once shook the very foundations of heaven itself.
The West Horizon erupted in a fire to rival the dawn as Nagato and Mutsu added their 41cm shells to Musashi's opening volley.
Beside her, Musashi's escort—the young American destroyer Hoel—stared with slack-jawed amazement. The little girl's hands hung limply at her side, and her face burned with furious excitement. "HOLY SHIT!"
Musashi smirked. A crass statement perhaps, but one fitting enough for the wrath of a sea-going god. She felt her guns drop to their loading angles, her crews scrambling to their stations as a fresh load of Type-91 armor-piercing shells were winched up from her underwater magazines. She threw her rudder over by half, spoiling any return fire as she watched her shells arc though the air.
Her guns slammed back into battery before her first salvo even hit. The battleship smirked, her guns traversing on target as the Abyssal warships opened fire. She gritted her teeth. She wasn't changing course, wasn't ruining her firing solution for them. Not at this range. Not when she was loaded down with more armor than any battleship in history.
"FIRE!"
Her guns bellowed in response, erupting in colossal fireballs that thundered across the ocean surface and dug mighty craters in the water with the very force of their voices. Hoel nearly tumbled into the water from the concussive force, and Musashi felt her loose cape snap tight from the sudden blast.
As her guns dropped for reloading once more, the battleship threw her rudder hard over, turning into the incoming sixteen inch rounds to protect her vulnerable—relatively speaking—citadel. And that's when her first salvo hit.
six of her rounds were misses, the massive shells kicking up towering pillars of emerald-dyed spray as they crashed into the surface. One smashed into an Abyssal cruiser just aft of its' forward stack, burrowing deep into its boiler rooms before it exploded, simply erasing the hateful abomination from existence.
The last pair landed mere feet away from the lead battleship, their specially-designed caps stabilizing the shell as it hit the water and guiding it into the abyssal's hull. The explosive filler blew the ship's bow clean off. Any lesser ship would've been stopped in its tracks by such a hit.
But not a battleship. A battleship was built for this, and the hateful thing barely seemed to notice as it unshadowed its turrets.
Nagato and Mutsu's shells joined mere seconds later, sending another cruiser hurtling to the seafloor and bracketing all three battleships with near-misses or hits to the superstructure.
"Incoming!" barked Hoel. The little destroyer somehow made her voice heard over the thunder of 46 and 41cm guns, her tiny hand frantically jabbing at a sky turned all but black by a horde of incoming planes.
Akagi's reppus roared overhead, tearing into the roaring pack of twin-engine heavy fighters with their cannons while carefully staying out of the destroyers' firing solutions. Seconds later, the roar of piston engines was joined by the staccato growl of five-inch guns as Hoel and her sisters lit up the sky with proximity-fused weapons.
But even that was not enough. The abyssal torpedo bombers were solidly-built planes. The ones that didn't break off and tear into the reppus simply shrugged off all but the worst of the destroyers' volleys.
"NO!" growled Musashi, throwing her rudder over again to spoil the incoming planes' torpedo solution. It meant giving up her own firing solution, giving up a chance to thunder her righteous invocation to these hateful monsters. But she couldn't fire her AA at the same time as her main battery, the thunderous over pressure was simply too much for any mortal creature to endure.
"Musashi, hard starboard NOW NOW NOW!" Hoel barked at the battleship. The little 2,500 ton destroyer boomed with such command that even the 72,000 ton battleship responded on instinct.
She threw her rudder over again as she saw the cause for the destroyer's warning. A dozen planes had slipped though the defense umbrella, and their fish were already in the water. Musashi pushed her engines as hard as they could go, steering into the attack to present her armored bow instead of her fragile screws or rudder.
She might sink this day, yes. But she refused to go down without earning her place as a warship. She would not be taken out like this again.
She almost made it. The first eight torpedoes sailed past her bow, the last missing her by mere inches. The next four weren't so misguided. They smashed clean into her hull, punching though her structure and exploding against her armor and torpedo bulkheads.
At almost the same instant, a volley of shells from the abyssal battleships slammed against her belt and superstructure, hammering every exposed part of her hull with their bursting charges.
Any other other ship would've crumpled under such a powerful barrage. But Musashi was not just any ship. The finest battleship every built simply shrugged off the tears to her thigh-highs and unshadowing her guns for a decisive reply.
"Bring it on!" she bellowed, throwing her arms wide in challenge, "I'm right here!"
—|—|—
"Twenty degrees to port on my mark," called Jersey, her eyes glued to the real-time satellite imagery displayed on her tiny cellular phone. The tiny little device might be shifty and borderline magic, and it might be utterly useless for detecting Abyssals, but it was a godsend for steering around foul weather.
Or in this case, into it.
"Mark." Jersey glanced up from her telephone, staring into the uniformly gray soup surrounding her little task force. The fog was so thick, even Kongou's bouncy little body was little more than a vaugley-battleshipgirl-shaped dark spot in the wall of dark haze.
Normally, maneuvering with such limited visibility would be suicide, especially when all ships involved were sprinting at twenty-seven knots—except Jersey, of course. twenty-seven knots was more of a leisurely trot for the leggy American.
But these ships weren't just any ships. Kongou and Kirishima had been "kai ni'd." Jersey wasn't sure what that literally translated to, but she did know it meant both battlewagons were carrying Type 22 surface-search radar. It wasn't nearly as good as Jersey's own set, and it wasn't tied into their fire control like hers.
But it gave the sisters enough situational awareness to cruise in a fog bank without fear of collision.
Radar master race. Suck it, Musashi!
In the back corner of Jersey's mind, some lowly rating reported that all ships had completed their turns. Judging by the lack of horrible metal-on-metal scraping sounds, they'd all pulled it off with parade-ground precision. Not that Jersey expected any less, Kongou and Kirishima were some of the best-crewed battleships ever. They knew exactly what they were doing, probably more than anyone save maybe a few of the RN boats. Maybe.
And this time they were on her side. The battleship couldn't help but smile as she peered out into the foggy gloom. She relaxed her eyes, letting her radar punch through the fog like smoke being parted by a well-thrown brick. She saw Hammer engaging the Abyssal heavy division almost thirty miles off her rear-port quarter. She saw the giant furball of aircraft brawling their way around the sky. Most importantly of all, she saw the abyssal quick-reaction force, four battleships and their escorts making circles in the water as the debated what to do.
"C'mon," growled Jersey, her fingers tensing around the grips of the forty-four magnums hanging off her hips. "C'mon… take the bait…"
The Abyssals battlewagons finally started to move. Jersey couldn't see for sure, but she could just imagine their stacks belching clouds of inky black soot as they built up steam, forming a ragged battle echelon.
"Yes," hissed Jersey, indulging herself in a brief fist-pump as the abyssal QRF pulled away from their patrol station and broke for Nagato's task force. And in the process, left themselves utterly exposed if, say, a group of fast battleships just happened to be hiding in a nearby fog bank.
"Task force sword!" barked Jersey, her face split by a toothy grin, "Break port and engage!"
The three battleships accelerated as one, their wakes churning to foam as their screws bit into the freezing arctic water. Both Kongou sisters had their guns at the ready, their turrets traversed hard-port, ready to acquire and engage the instant they broke though the fog wall.
But Jersey wasn't a Kongou. She was an Iowa. She had radar fire control, and computers that constantly re-computed her solution. She couldn't just fire on the move, she could fire blind. She felt her turrets slew around as she smashed her way though the waves, her slender bow kicking up a solid wall of freezing spray.
The Kongous knew their targets. Their fourteen inch guns would struggle with the abyssal battleships, but they'd make swiss cheese of any cruiser who dared show its twisted excuse for a hull. The battleships… they were Jersey's. And she fully intended to make them her bitches.
"GO LOUD!" bellowed the battleship, all nine of her sixteen-fifty rifles responding with their thunderous chorus. The sheer concussion from the guns punched a hole though the wall of fog, revealing Jersey to the Abyssals mere seconds before her shells found their marks.
It took a full second before the abyssals even processed Jersey's sudden appearance. Then all hell broke loose. The cruisers wheeled around, desperately hiding their broadsides as whatever instincts they had kicked in. There was no strategy, no tactics to their movement. Just sheer pants-darkening fear and the override urge to survive.
The battleships too broke formation, scattering in every direction to foul up the American's firing solution and get their own fourteen-inch guns on target. But they weren't nearly as mobile as the cruisers. They couldn't capitalize on what little warning they had before Jersey's shells crashed home.
The American landed five close bracketing shots and four solid hits with her first volley. Her Mark 8 super-heavy shells burrowed though the abyssal battleship's armored belt like it was tissue paper and buried themselves deep within the warship's gut before exploding. Gashes tore across the warship's rusting, rotted hull, belching clouds of oily fire and gritty smoke.
Jersey smiled, throwing her rudder over to hide her broadside while her guns reloaded. The terrified, surprised abyssals threw up a ragged volley in return.
Jersey just laughed as the cruisers' six inch guns lazily arced their shells though the air. They might have the range to hit her, at least on paper. But at this distance a mildly-alert barge could dodge their fire, let alone the most powerful battleship ever put to sea crewed by the finest four decades of Navy service could provide. The splashes weren't even in the same zip code as her by the time they finally landed.
Only a single salvo of fourteen inch shells connected with the battleship, their lightweight armor-piercing rounds slamming into her inclined belt at a steep angle. The outer-layer of special-treatment steel, a luxury that only American Economic Might could afford to lavish all over a battleship, shattered the incoming rounds' ballistic caps.
Jersey grunted as her inclined cemented-armor belt absorbed the new-declawed rounds. There wasn't a hope in hell of them penetrating her armor, not at this range. Not at this angle. But it still hurt like hell.
Behind her, Kongou and Kirishima burst though the fog, their guns slewing to target the abyssal cruisers mere instants later.
"ALL BATTERIES!" Boomed Kongou, her face a picture of furiously energetic rage, "FI-YAH!" She threw her arm out, knife-handing her target as her guns barked in response. The concussion sent her billowing sleeve flying. Abreast of her, her sister mimicked the movement, her glasses glittering with stoic fury as she erased a cruiser from the face of this earth.
"Hell yeah!" cheered Tenryuu, her sword flashing in the morning sun as she thrust it threateningly at the nearest battleship. She and her kids broke formation, bolting out of the line of fire to set-up for a torpedo run.
Jersey roared in approval, her long hull gracefully smashing though the waves in a monument horsepower, the American god of Large Fast Things. The abyssals were cobbling their scattered ships into a proper battle line, but it just gave the American a neatly-ordered set of targets to pick from.
"You die," she growled, heaving into a hard turn as her guns rippled off a full broadside into the already-wounded abyssal battleship, crippling it with hits to the bridge and screws. "Nagato, we are fully engaged!" she barked, deftly slaloming between the splashes of reprisal shells."
"Copy," came the Japanese woman's terrifyingly calm voice, "Starting the pull."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
A/N: To Be Continued! You really think I could manage a battle of this magnitude in one sitting?
