Part 40a
Battleship Nagato knew she was being fired upon. She knew near-misses were churning the water around her into a prismatic sea of dyed, churning water. She knew her belt sang as every hit crashed into her armor. She knew all these things the same way she knew the universe was composed of minute particles.
Interesting trivia with no impact whatsoever on her day to day life.
She was a dreadnought of the Imperial Japanese Navy, a ship born again to serve her country for freedom, not tyranny. And she was squaring off against her fellow members of the big seven with her beloved sister by her side.
It was the fight she was built for. And she held the upper hand. Her crews were drilled and precise, second to none but the Kongou sisters in professionalism and skill. Every time she straightened out from a turn, she found her guns already within mere degrees of their targets. Her guns sang at her command like a fine orchestra.
Her gun crews worked their deadly instruments like virtuoso of steel and cordite, playing out their perfect symphony for these twisted abyssal abominations.
"FIRE!" boomed the battleship, her voice thundering with the fury of an entire nation as she steadied for a full broadside.
The abyssal battleships took swift advantage of her momentary lull in maneuvering. Their guns rippled off a ragged riposte. They lacked the eloquence of Nagato, their guns spoke like thuggish brutes not skilled samurai, and their lightweight armor-piercing rounds lacked the Japanese warrior maiden's teeth.
But most crucially of all, they lacked her peerless ranging gear. Where the Japanese maiden's rangefinders were mounted high on her pagodas, the abyssal brutes carried theirs on their turret roofs. Every frigid wave that crashed across their bows fouled their optics with spray and salt, degrading their accuracy further.
The abyssal warships were forced to close the distance, lest they be annihilated from range by the three Japanese battleships. They were fully engaged, there was no hope of retreat. They had no choice but to fight, and let themselves be pulled wherever Nagato wished.
Nagato allowed herself a brief smile as she turned in to blade herself to an oncoming torpedo-bomber attack. The sky was nearly black with a churning swarm of aircraft. Some friendly, but most hostile.
And the dreadnought didn't feel the slightest bit of worry. Her escort, USS Heermann had barely said a word since the battle began. But the little destroyer had been practically glued to her hip. Not a plane had touched Nagato. Not one. Her anti-aircraft gunners were starting to get bored at their posts. The battleship could hardly believe it. The sky was black with brawling fighters, but she almost felt safer than she did at Yokosuka.
And she had her sister steaming abreast of her. The two Nagato-class battleships reunited for a decisive battle against a seemingly unbeatable foe. And with them Musashi herself, the most powerful warship ever to sail the seas. The world quaked at their power and profession-
"HA!" bellowed Musashi. The sleeves of her unzipped shirt flew out as she flung her hands in the air, showing her middle fingers to the abyssal warships as they landed a solid shot against her belt. A square hit that did nothing to faze the enormous battleship. "I! AM! INVINCIBLE!" she thundered, her voice echoing even over the sound of her colossal battery.
Nagato rolled her eyes. So much for professionalism. It was a good thing Musashi and Jersey didn't get along. Nagato didn't know how she'd be able to handle the two of them together.
b
"Nagato!" Jersey's rough, brash, typically American accent sounded in Nagato's ears, ""We're fully engaged."
Nagato smiled, her eyes narrowing to an ice-cold squint. "Copy that," she said, sticking her arm out and curving it back towards herself, signaling her taskforce to turn away from the action. "Starting the pull." She glanced at her escort, "You ready, little one?"
Heermann nodded, her entire deck aflame as her guns filled the sky with bursting flak. "Mmhm, don't worry Miss Nagato," the little destroyer flashed a toothy smile, her freckled cheeks glowing from the heat of her batteries, "Nobody's touching my charge."
"Good to know, little one." Nagato smiled in return, throwing her rudder over in concert with her sister and Musashi. The six warships heeled over in a coordinated turn, deftly stepping around shell-splashes as they extended away from the slower Abyssal warships.
"Come on…" breathed Nagato, her gaze so focused on the twisted almost-ships on the horizon that she felt time slow to a crawl around her. "Take it…"
One one thousand…
Two one thousand…
Three one thousand…
Four one thousand…
Nagato felt the seconds slip by with each passing breath. She kept waiting for the Abyssal battleships to turn away, to risk breaking contact to link up with their fellows assaulting Jersey and her Kongous.
But they didn't. Their stacks belched sickly black smoke as they powered their way towards the Japanese ships and their peerless American escorts. They'd taken the bait, now it was time to make pay for their crucial mistake.
—|—|—
Crowning stared at the shaky drone footage, his face scrunching up like a prune while his eyes bounced from confusing camera feeds to equally confusing symbolic map displays. "Uh," he leaned over to Gale, careful to keep his voice low enough to avoid disturbing anyone else, "what just happened?"
"Divide and conquer," said Gale though a mouthful of ham sandwich. It was getting close to dinner time, but neither the sailor nor the civilian was willing to leave the bunker, even if they weren't doing more than watching.
"Huh?" Crowning folded his arms, glancing back at the map where both Jersey's girls and Nagato's girls were in two very distinct, very divided groups.
"Not them," said Gale, gulping down her impromptu lunch. "Planes."
Crowning bit the corner of his lip, "You lost me."
"Princess has way to fucking many planes," explained Gale, "even with Akagi and RJ spotting nothing but Reppus, there's no way they can hold the line. Not against everything at once."
Crowning nodded, patting himself down for his notepad. He was studying whenever he got the time, but he still knew painfully close to nothing about naval engagements. He wasn't gonna waste a prime opportunity to study up before Jersey got back. He needed some common ground beyond 'pie' to hold a real conversation after all.
"Okay, so…" Gale pointed to a coffee carafe sitting on the back table. "This is the princess. That-" she tapped the creamer, "is her CAP. The planes she's got in the air ready to go right this second."
Crowning scribbled furiously before offering another nod.
"This," Gale waved the box of sugar packets, "is her reserve air wing. Stuff that's on deck but not in the air." She turned back to Crowning, "When Nagato and Hammer showed up, they were the biggest threat, so the whole CAP ran off towards them."
"But…" Crowning scrambled for whatever shreds of naval knowledge he had, "the dreadnoughts can take torpedoes better?"
"Yeah," said Gale, "And they got the taffies and Shield's… well fighter shield at full strength."
"So…" Crowning drew circles in the air with the tip of his pen. The point was hovering somewhere right in front of his face… he just had to reach out and grasp it. "That lets us fight just their CAP with everything we've got."
"You got it!" said Gale, smiling as she offered a teasingly enthusiastic wink. not unlike the typical over-caffeinated children's show host. "With that many planes in the air, it'll be hard for the Princess's planes to set up good attack runs."
"And all the while…" Crowning paused. It wasn't quite a shot in the dark, but given his current level of nautical knowledge, he'd call it a shoot in the gloom. "Hammer's pounding the heavy battleship division, right."
"Yep. The heavies can't risk disengaging while Naggy and her girls are right there," said Gale as she took another bite of her sandwich.
"And the Princess's cap already dropped all their bombs," said Crowning, "so all it's got left to throw at J are the reserve planes?"
"And the battleship QRF."
"That too," Crowning shrugged, "It's still a lot for her to get through."
"Not enough to stop her," said Gale, smiling as she leaned in to give the professor a one-armed hug.
"Let's hope."
—|—|—
"New Jersey," Akgai's sweet, friendly voice sang in Jersey's head, somehow audible over the roar of almost a quarter million American horses, twenty five-inchers, and nine of the best damn naval guns ever built. "You've got another squadron heading your way. Vectoring Reppus to cover."
"Yeah, I see 'em," said Jersey, squinting into the distance as her radar acquired the seething horde of fighters and bombers rolling her way. She lost count at forty, there were just too many contacts flying too close for her radar to crank out solid target tracks. All she could see was an enormous blob of flying malevolent fuckers screaming straight for her and her girls.
Not that she was the least bit worried. She had almost a hundred next-generation Jap carrier fighters flown by the best pilots the Kido Butai had ever produced flying topcover. She had two the terrible Akuze- Akiz- the AA destroyer twins watching the air with those super-fucking-high velocity ten-centimeter guns.
And she was a battleship with flak out the ass, and she had quite a nice, generous ass. Jersey was slinging more flak than certain countries.
"Yo, Akuzi!" growled the battleship, dispatching a burning Abyssal cruiser with a backhanded volley from her after turret.
"Akizuki," corrected the anti-aircraft destroyer, her extra-long-ass hyper velocity cannons scanning the sky as she effortlessly skimmed around shell splashes, her hull rolling hard enough to flash glimpses of her antiquating paint.
Jersey blinked. "Whatever, you ready to kick ass and take names?"
The little destroyer shook her head, "I'm afraid not," she said. "But Chou-10cm-Hou-chan is!" The animated turret in her fore mount waved its tiny flipper hand at Jersey, its barrels slewing around to point in a generally fuckhuge-mass-of-abyssal-planes-ward direction.
Akizuki smiled, giving her foremost turret a little kiss on its armored roof, "Chu chu!" Her turret… fucking blushed at the attention, its adorable little eye… hole things glancing away as it suddenly found the splintered clouds utterly entrancing.
Jersey shook the bizarre image out of her head, focusing herself on the matter at hand. "Yo, Akagi?"
"Hmm?" the Japanese carrier's voice purred though Jersey's head, sounding distinctly like every word had to run a blockade of instant noodles to reach the battleship.
"You got eyes on the princess?"
"Ahmm…" a pause, "I do now."
"How's her deck looking?"
"Uhmm…" a slurp of noddles, "maybe half a dozen fighters on CAP," said Akagi, "Everything else is either headed your way or landing for resupply."
"Copy that," said Jersey, almost absentmindedly rippling off a perfect broadside at an abyssal fast-battleship, bracketing it with towering pillars of spray. "Bonecrusher flight," she smiled at the call sign. Such a fucking cool name. "You there?"
"That's afirm, Jersey," came a drawl that somehow managed to be both lazily relaxed and perilously tense, "What can the US Air Force do for ya?
"You know that fuck-huge iceberg?" said Jersey, matching his tone with an equally bored drone of her own. She even managed a pouty teenage sigh as she tore a battleship's superstructure to shreds with a volley of high-explosive shells.
"I do indeed, miss."
"Make it go away."
A small laugh echoed though Jersey's radio room. "Sure thing, miss."
