Emergence/Arrival:
Two Bridges and a Gate.
Crimson blossoms will spring from this garden;
Out of time, out of space, out of a dream, a wish and a memory;
And from this rusted, sleeping steel, the Blade Transform will be forged.
"Remnants of our collective past, guardians of our collective future."
x-x-x-x
GATE
Old Navy Never Die.
The first question was asked: which Gate? The word brings up several contexts in the post-Emergence world.
Residents of the Southeast Asian countries will refer to the three SEA Gates, the Samudra Fortresses, the Archipelagic Redoubts built to protect the Indian Ocean and adjacent parts of the Pacific. Once simple bases, now they have accumulated in strength and lethality, incorporating massive Arsenal Ports and artillery and missile emplacements.
It has a story: the story of the Second Indian Ocean Campaign. Indonesians will refer to it as the Inland Seas War. Broadly it was known as The Scouring of the Islands, the terrible Abyssal bombings that reduced Sabah, Singapore, and the cities of Sumatera to ashes, burning them in the terrible light of antimatter dawn. Three contained Black Zones stood in their place now, a graven reminder.
Further destruction was only averted by the combined efforts of twenty nations and the newly-arrived shipgirls.
But that would be a story for another time.
The second Gate that comes to mind exists, hypothetically, in the center of the Pacific Sprawl, in the center of nearly eight hundred thousand square kilometers of storms, eddies, anomalies, and mysteries. It is the Abyssal Gate, the notional origin point and centrality of Abyssal activities on earth. Veiled in intrigue, nearly unreachable, rebuking all attempts to breach it by force. It was said that within the Sprawl horizon merges and turns pale in the fog, the sea and the sky indistinguishable. Space would locally fold over itself, logic failing under the clouded skies, making navigation difficult, though not impossible. The Abyssal Gate itself has never been seen directly. Certainly its existence is not a complete impossibility. Others maintain that the notion of the Gate's centrality is a desperate hope, an anthropocentric idea of an inscrutable enemy's ultimate weakness, a stage set for a daring heroic strike, a vain rationalization in face of an enemy unlike anything before.
Until the veil of The Sprawl is pierced, it will still be there, a wound in the seas, a gaping malignancy, the haunting sovereignty of pale kingdom in a hidden place.
But here is the Gate that matters to this story: The First Gate, the gate that appeared overnight, in a ring of islands amidst the seas, the place where the fire falls from the sky in the pursuit of the science of annihilation.
It stands in the middle of the Bikini Atoll, a massive black construct resembling the traditional depiction of a Japanese torii. On its kasagi, its topmost, upward curve, grew a wreath of red flowers of unknown provenance.
On the dawn of a misty day, six months after Fubuki first changed the world, Battleship Nagato awoke under the gate.
She remembered the final moments, when the killing sum of science and technology, the wrath of a nuclear sun crashed down on the fleet gathered there.
The burn, the tearing and crashing of waves, the pain that assaulted her, and, more painful than anything, the slow death and rot afterwards.
She took the first few breaths of air, pulling herself upright, fitted on her headgear. Under the newly risen sun and the thinning mists she walked out of the shadow of the gate.
A rapid succession of steps, a splash of water. When she turned her gaze to the source it was as if dagger had carved out her heart.
"Sakawa…"
She had sunk in the first test, gone ahead of Nagato. Nagato had hoped it would be painless for her.
But there was she was, distraught, crying in confusion, the little purple-haired cruiser, her consort in their final moments.
She did the only natural thing, to hold her close, offering what little comfort she can give, anything to stop the tears.
"Sakawa, Sakawa… come here…"
She held her arms out, taking Sakawa in to the space of her hug, the hold of her arms.
"It's ended... Sakawa. The hurt will stop. I'm here, I will never leave you!"
"Na-Nagato-san, I was so scared...!"
She let the sobs, the tearful recollections, all the stored loneliness run their course. At the end of it, they both walked together, one gloved hand holding another.
Another voice called out to the pair, a voice aged, but firm and confident. She spoke, wrapped in a solemn black uniform, hoisting a scorched flight-deck in her arm. Her hair was loose in the wind, the tie of her miniature funnel gone.
An instant recollection on Nagato's part.
"Miss Saratoga."
"Miss Nagato, Miss Sakawa,"
Behind her, all the other Shipgirls, the reborn ghosts of the Bikini Atoll, walked together. Prinz Eugen, with her youthful smile, longing for her home and companion. Nevada and Arkansas, still proud and defiant. Stalwart Pensacola, and many others, the ghost-array of Crossroads.
Nagato had initially interpreted the tests as a rightful punishment, a retribution for the transgressions of her Empire's sins, but an opinion irreconcilable with the presence of the America's own ships in the killing zone, all sunk in the same way as her, as a scorched, agued hulk.
In those final moments before the sea claimed them, they had talked, trying to understand each other.
They had never truly left each other, and now in this time, they found each other beneath the shadow of the Gate, cast under the light of this new world, calling them to duty once more.
x-x-x-x-x
BRIDGE I
Ghosts in the Mist
---
Several days later…
The first bridge in this story bore also the name of the Gate. Fog had rolled in the San Francisco Bay area, blanketing the region in dread. Warships and garrisoned troops in there enacted high alert, civilians moved to shelters. Fogs and low-hanging clouds prelude an Abyssal incursion.
The mist, although thick and its area wide, was by all means otherwise normal. It did not obscure any of the Abyssals inside it, does not produce any interference beyond what is to be expected from a thick cloud bank.
So it is that the various sensors and radars displayed in full the complete scope of the threat, five Abyssal fleet carriers, ten light carriers, seven battleships, and a host of swarming destroyers.
They will never reach this far was the working words, until the First Blitz broke the might of the United States Navy. Three supercarriers buried under an avalanche of keelbreakers and deckburners, the fighters shot out of the sky by shielded flying monsters. Scores of other warships ripped apart in close combat. The storied Hog's Last Run, a battle in which the all remaining A-10 Thunderbolt IIs present in the continental US, drones and otherwise, made their final attack run against an Abyssal invasion fleet in conjunction with other elements of the defending US military, rebuking their advance, but destroyed to the last.
The Abyssals had therefore established themselves as the only force in history capable of mounting an invasion and a conventional war against the continental United States.
Now, in San Francisco, the defending warships put themselves in formation, guns and missiles ready. Jets flown in from airbases filled the skies alongside swarming drones. Artillery emplacements began establishing firing plots. San Francisco is a fortress, and she must hold.
The Abyssal fleet began their answering maneuver as swarms of skull-like fighters and bombers flew out of gaping maws. Their battleships began salvoing high-explosive bombardment shells to shore targets. Destruction erupted across the cityscape, San Francisco now seeing the same fate of many other of America's coastal cities, such as Newport and New York.
But her shields and arms are not yet broken. The battle was joined. US warships launched missiles and rapid-fired their weapons, claiming hits on the massing horde of destroyers. One cruiser turned too late and received a torpedo to the bow. Another's bridge was singed by a heavy shell from an Abyssal battleship.
In the skies, the Abyssal fighters began their attack vector on the jets. American fighters fired long-range missiles alongside their drones, who flew ahead to absorb the first hits from the Abyssal fighters' answering salvo. The furball was set to be joined as tracers and speeding missiles painted the sky in the colour of killing.
But an unexpected answer struck through. Antiquated shapes, blue and propeller driven, cut into the Abyssal strikecrafts, slicing a vector of destruction within the Abyssal formation. Rather than collide in the dogfight, the modern jets added their firepower to the mix, aiding the new combatants with their own answer. Fireballs plumed and spiraled out of the sky, plunging to the seas and city below.
Seeking the source of this reprieve, An F-15 fighter flew low, circling the top of the Golden Gate Bridge's suspension towers. Three figures stood on top of one of the towers. One wore a grey, hooded cloak.
Below, in the mist-covered waters, the Blue Navy emerged from out of the fog. The shipgirls of the US Navy emerged in the thick of the battle upon the Bay, immediately scattering the menacing Abyssal forces.
On top of the bridge, Enterprise drew her grey cloak close around her, seeing the sprawl of her nation laid beneath her, hurting and burning. Beloved sister Yorktown held her gaze. Hornet stood beside her, eyes ready and aiming.
She held up and fired her bow rifle, sending another wing into the fray.
The Grey Ghost and her sisters has returned. The Greatest Generation has returned. The storm is reborn, and it was time for the Abyssals' reckoning.
x-x-x-x-x
Bridge II
Arose From Out the Azure Main
---
The second bridge, almost half a world away, in the Old World:
"London Bridge… has fallen down."
Then-General Hawthorne of the British Army found grim humor in the transmission. His small hovercraft sped downriver Thames. The Thames Beast smashed the London Bridge into smithereens with a roar, angered and fuming-literally, as the heat spikes on its back radiated scorch produced by the biomechanical processes propelling its immense body.
Here, at the heart of the waning empire, the greatest chase. The Thames Beast had broken off its parent fleet and Princess, swum upriver Thames, leaving devastation in its wake. The hulk of the
Queen Elizabeth supercarrier and a dead First Sea Lord bore testament. It had first passed London and Tower Bridges without destroying them (the same cannot be said of the moored HMS Belfast) but Hawthorne and his men had successfully baited it down on a reverse course, to the oceans.
The serpentine Beast swum rapidly, drenching the streets and buildings around it with the wakes of its movement.
On either side of the river Challenger tanks fired armour-piercing shells. Some tanks might be lucky enough to be loaded with the rare prototypes of the Beast Hunter shell, whose impacts on Abyssal organomusculature lattice armour are more pronounced, cracking small blotches of blue wounds.
"Faster lads! This is not yet over!" He beckoned the soldier at the hovercraft's controls. The Tower Bridge is rapidly approaching. On the corner of his eye he noted the eight-legged Strider combat robots leaping from rooftop to rooftop, relaying targeting data to the artillery deployed around the city. Shells made huge splashes on the river's water, smashing less-fortunate stonework.
A movement caught his eye again. One of his soldiers signaled the same. A figure was moving alongside the Striders. With a powerful kick the figure, now identifiably female, leapt
towards the Beast. One of the Striders followed. As she flew through the air, an array of rapid-firing cannon turrets materialized on her personage, firing a barrage before she landed in an elegant poise.
Her gunfire hurt the Thames Beast far more than even the Beast Hunter shells. Shrieking in pain, it swiped at the girl, but she was too quick and had already leapt to another rooftop. It was a statement for the Strider's motor programming that it was able to keep pace with her.
A transmission went in the General's radio.
"Admiral, I am Belfast. Please continue the chase—"
"Wait! Admiral? What are you talking about? Who are you? Under whose command!?" demanded Hawthorne, as his hovercraft passed under the Tower Bridge. The Beast dove low after him. Hawthorne's hovercraft leaped a little, landing in the water with a spray. Hawthorne turned back, and saw several figures leaping from the bridge, armaments drawn at the Beast below. The foremost had not only the warship turrets at her, but also a red cloak, brandishing a greatsword.
As they struck the Beast with unprecedented and unrestrained wrath, delivered via gunfire and the strike of blade and spear, another transmission was received. The speaker was none other than the lady in red, the swordbearer, a voice steeled with age and experience, dripping with ferocious pride.
"Under my
command. Warspite's command."
Returned, under the time of her greatest need, her royal protectors and stewards, with the eternal battle cry:
"Britannia rules the waves!"
