I am the USS Allen, commissioned January 24th, 1917, decommissioned October 15th, 1945. I served the full duration of both World Wars. In the first, I was one of the most active destroyers in the Atlantic ocean, performing seventeen depth charge attacks and one gunnery attack on suspected targets. I was at Pearl Harbor in the second war, afterwards, resuming my traditional anti-submarine patrol duties and went on to train many US submarines in the best ways to penetrate ASW defensive positions.
I am the USS Allen, and I have never accomplished anything of note. Nearly all of the depth-charge attacks I performed were later found to be false alarms, and none were ever found to have damaged or sunk an enemy sub. I never took battle damage, and the only real battle I ever fought in was the attack on Pearl Harbor. I downed two fighters that day, and assisted in bringing down a third. Afterwards, my captain noted in his report that "no damage to attacking forces was seen to have been inflicted by this ship."
I think with my heart and I move with my head
I open my mouth and it's something I've read
I stood at this door before, I'm told
But a part of me knows that I'm growing too old
I am the USS Allen, a Sampson class destroyer, and I am wearing a skirt. The experience is both novel and frightening. I find that novelty is a positive experience, and fear is a negative one. You would think the two would cancel each other out, leaving only ambivalence towards the skirt. I am not ambivalent. The skirt is pretty, and I will torpedo anyone who tries to steal it.
In addition to the flesh and skirt, I have my hull and my engines, my original armament of four four inch guns, two one pounder AA guns, and twelve twenty-one inch torpedo tubes. I am missing four of my AA guns, all of my depth charge projectors, and my radar array. I have my full compliment of ninety-nine crewmen. I am intact and fully provisioned.
I have woken up in unknown waters. I see no sign of land or other ships. I hear no radio traffic. I do not appear to be in any immediate danger. I will now allow myself thirty minutes to panic.
***
Allen panicked quickly, quietly, and professionally, listing off all the reasons why she was going to die, and being terrified of each in turn.
One. She was a lone, obsolete destroyer. Two. She was stranded in the middle of what she could safely assume was enemy territory. If it was friendly territory, there would be friends. Three she was missing the little bit of armament that made her kinda-sorta less obsolete. Four, she was human now, and humans are squishy and prone to existential crises. Five. She had no idea where she was, so she could only assume that she was at whatever point on earth was farthest from land. Six. She had no idea when she was, so she could only assume that she was in some far-flung post-apocalyptic future where humanity had fled the seas, the very concept of ships was obsolete, and America had fallen to the post-war Soviet Bloc. Seven. Any enemy she met would be completely outside her experience, with nature and abilities so alien she would die before she even knew she was under attack. Eight. She was bad at thinking under pressure and defaulted to previous plans in crisis situations, which are always inadequate because the universe is chaotic and uncaring. Nine. The existential crisis was already starting, leading her down the twin paths of philosophy and madness, which would inevitably lead to despair and suicide. And ten. She was making loads of assumptions, which are always fatal.
Allen was pleased to see that, by the time her thirty minutes were up, she had fully panicked over ten different ideas. Ten was a good number. The base is ten.
She had ninety-nine crew, and if she counted herself, they came to exactly one hundred, which was ten tens. A meta-ten. That seemed like a very auspicious number. Perhaps it was even lucky. The thought had serious philosophical ramifications, but philosophy fell under the purview of panic, and her allotted panic time was over. This was the time for being practical, and practicality demanded one thing above everything else. Checklists!
This was the time for checklists, and checklists demand one thing above everything else. Goals!
Allen was sorely tempted to put "Don't die," as her goal and leave it at that, but that would be lazy and ill-defined, with no completion date. It would be a box that was impossible to check.
It was actually doubly impossible to check, because death was inevitable for everything that lived, and she was alive now, which meant that she was going to die. And that was a depressing thought that she couldn't chase down because she didn't have time to panic over her newfound mortality.
Allen made her first goal, "Don't die today," her second "Don't die this week," her third "Don't die this month," and her fourth, "Don't die this year." Any goals beyond one year were not appropriate for a survival situation and would need to be determined once she was no longer in the middle of one. Since making a checklist for each of those goals would take a significant amount of time, she would limit herself to only creating the one for "Don't die today," until she was reasonably certain that she would not die today.
Nodding firmly, she started her checklist. One. Think of everything I know that could reasonably be expected to kill me today. Two make a checklist addressing those things in order of urgency.
The list was surprisingly short, mostly due to the "reasonable" limitation. She had plenty of food, fuel, and ammunition. Her crew was healthy, competent, and of high morale. Her equipment was in good condition. That pretty much just left enemies, storms, and assumptions.
Allen scanned the open ocean with her eyes and dearly missed her radar. She saw no enemies or storms, which left assumptions as the most likely thing to kill her. Task completed, she checked the box and began to make her next list.
First, she double checked to make sure that she was, indeed, a destroyer. The "being a human" thing was a little bit confusing, but since she had the full capabilities of a destroyer, she must be a destroyer.
Second. Another scan of the horizon determined that she was still alone, barring any submarines or mines, which she had no real way of detecting. Submarines and mines suck.
Third. Her obsoleteness could not be determined at this time due to a lack of peers to compare herself against. She would continue to operate under the assumption that she was until further notice, as it was usually safest to assume a worst-case scenario if assumptions could not be avoided.
Fourth. She was unable to determine if this was enemy-held territory, or even if there were enemies. She decided to assume both until shown otherwise, with the added note that she should prioritize de-assuming this assumption, since falsely assuming enemies were friendly and friendlies were enemies were roughly equal in lethality.
Fifth. She had her crew perform a manual inspection to confirm that her modern weapons and radar were missing. They were. She was back to her launch armament, and that was terrible.
Sixth. She performed a thorough manual inspection to confirm that she was human. She was, and that was weird.
To start, she was a she, though a lack of breasts indicated that she was also quite young. She had black hair cut to chin length and was wearing a very pretty outfit, composed of a pretty, black, pleated miniskirt, a pretty, white, short sleeved blouse with a collar, and a pretty black neckerchief. She would torpedo anyone who tried to take them away.
Seventh. Allen knelt down, scooped up some water in her cupped hands, and tasted it, confirming that she was in the ocean and not one of the Great Lakes. Beyond that, she still had no idea where she was. This was her second priority to straighten out. It would probably not kill her today, but could easily prove lethal on week, month, and year timescales if she didn't pick the right direction.
Eighth. She confirmed that she had no idea when she was. None of her logs showed anything past her decommissioning in Philadelphia, and she had a nasty hunch that her clocks might be off too. According to them, she was currently in Philadelphia's time zone.
Figuring this out was Allen's third priority. She decided to not make any assumption on the subject until she worked it out, because it was impossible to distinguish between a reasonably possible and a completely ludicrous worst-case scenario.
Ninth. While enemy status remained undetermined, she concluded it was most reasonable to assume any hypothetical enemies were similar to the ones she knew, but could pull out a nasty surprise at the drop of an anchor. Assuming the worst-case here would be counterproductive because she could not make any plans to counter a completely alien enemy.
Tenth. She decided it was not reasonable to believe that she could not think under pressure until she was actually put under pressure, since the ability to think at all was completely new. She resolved to still operate under the assumption anyway, since it was much more deadly to assume she was good at improvisation and be wrong than it was to assume she was bad at it and be wrong. Plus, it meant that she got to make checklists for every hypothetical scenario she could come up with.
Eleventh. Given her current circumstances, it was still reasonable to assume that the universe was chaotic and uncaring. However, certainty had not been established, and she should be ready to re-examine the assumption if relevant information came to light.
Twelvth. Her previous philosophical musings constituted strong evidence that she was experiencing Existential Crisis. Nevertheless, she resolved to not commit suicide so long as she had a choice in the matter, as that was counterproductive towards her goals of not dying.
Thirteenth. After reviewing her previous assumptions, she concluded that she was, indeed, making loads of assumptions, and, statistically, at least one was likely to be false. However, she decided to drop the assumption that assumptions were always fatal because that meant she was doomed to die prematurely no matter what she did, and panic time was over.
Fourteenth. She had been assuming that philosophy and panic were inextricably intertwined. The assumption was correct, but she needed to review it anyway for the sake of thoroughness and not ending her list with thirteen assumptions because thirteen was a very unlucky number.
Assumptions thus dealt with, Allen reviewed her goals for the day, which had expanded to "Don't die today," "Determine enemy status," "Determine location," and "Determine date and time."
After some deliberations on which goals to pursue first, she settled for time and location. They could both be somewhat pinned down through celestial navigation and would give her a nice starting point from which she could begin to attack the others.
***
Date: Unknown
Time: 0600
Location: Equator
I have determined that my clocks are not accurate. Comparing GMT with the actual time, I should be in the middle of Africa. Without knowing GMT or the date, I was unable to calculate longitude using the normal methods, so I attempted to work backwards by taking measurements and cross referencing them with every table in my Almanacs. At the end of all this, I now know that I am on the equator, and it is not 1945, 1946, or 1947.
This poses a problem.
If I am in the Atlantic, heading East or West is my best bet. Going North if I'm in the East Atlantic would get me to land soonest, and South if I'm next to Brazil, but I would be completely screwed if I guessed wrong, or if I'm in the middle.
If I am in the Indian Ocean, North is best, but East or West could work if I guessed right.
If I am in the Pacific… Every direction is bad, but South is worst. There's more islands in the West Pacific though, so that would probably be the best direction.
Taking all of that into account, I believe the best plan is to head west and hope I find land. This is a terrible plan that will probably kill me, and it has strongly shaken my confidence in my plan-making skills.
Nevertheless, I have survived until morning, and can begin a new "Don't die today" checklist. I have not been able to check off anything yet, but am reasonably confident that I can survive the day. As the first steps in my "Don't die this week" checklist, I am going to begin sailing west. I believe that I will be better served moving during daylight hours than at night, basing my decision on the assumption that my enemies have radar while I do not. Thus, they would be able to spot me at any time, while I can only spot enemies coming during the day. Additionally, it would be bad to hit a reef in the dark.
He said, One day you'll leave this world behind
So live a life you will remember
My father told me when I was just a child
These are the nights that never die
My father told me
~ The Nights, Avicii
Date: Wednesday, Unknown Day 2 (counting my awakening as day 1 and Tuesday, the worst day)
Time: 0934
Location: Equator
It has been forcibly brought to my attention that I am afraid of sharks. They're nothing less than little submarines with teeth and soulless eyes.
It has also been brought to my attention that my hybrid ship/girl nature bestows upon me a great many potential options that are not available to either a pure destroyer or pure girl. For example, it turns out my legs are sharkproof. It also turns out that I can use my anchors as bludgeoning weapons. In celebration of my first confirmed submarine kill (biological submarines count, though I will be keeping a separate tally), I fastened two of the shark's teeth to the ends of my neckerchief. It is now both pretty and cool.
I will torpedo anyone who tries to steal them.
This brings up questions though. Is the ship-to-girl ratio fixed? Can I be all ship or all girl? Can I refuel by consuming food? What about ammunition? Do I automatically heal damage over time? Will prolonged social isolation drive me insane?
I believe that my chances of survival will be greatly enhanced if I explore the relationship between my ship parts and my girl parts. I may be able to surprise potential enemies with tactics that they have not planned for.
I will begin to test my limits by eating this shark.
PS: I am also coming to believe that the hour of 0900 may be cursed. Yesterday, I woke up, and today, I was attacked by a shark. I must keep careful watch to see if this is coincidence or conspiracy.
PPS: It's hump day! I'm halfway through the week! Or, I will be in two and a half hours.
PPPS: Raw shark is gross, but it does count as refueling. I have topped off what little I burned in my three hours or so of sailing. The ability to eat is obscenely powerful. Even if I'm in the Pacific and going the wrong way, I should be able to keep myself fueled long enough to reach land so long as I can find a way to reliably catch fish. Until I figure out how, though, I will carry the shark with me. I only needed to eat a little bit, and it is my only fuel source at the moment.
Allen sailed West, dragging a partially eaten shark by the tail while she contemplated the nature of her existence in a non-philosophical way. It wasn't philosophy because she had a goal, and that goal was to test whether or not she could go all-ship. She had briefly considered seeing if she could go all-girl at first, until she remembered that girls drown a lot more easily than ships.
So now she was doing her best to think ship thoughts.
"Anchors, radar, rats, radar, hot racking, radar, magazine explosions. Radar."
Unfortunately, all it did was make her miss her radar even more.
"Barnacles! This isn't working." Allen kicked a swell as she crested it.
She supposed it made sense, though. The whole idea was flawed in the first place. Trying to think like a ship was an exercise in futility because ships didn't really think at all, at least, not the way that humans thought. She had memories of her time as a steel hull, yes, but they were more like a translation of her experiences conjured up for her human-like mind to chew on than actual memory.
Experiences. That word sparked a hint of an idea in her. She hadn't thought as a ship, but she did experience. The thrum of her engines, the feeling of swells passing beneath her, the relief of her crew that they came through Pearl Harbor without any deaths, the guilt and humiliation of her captain as he wrote those burning words in his report. "No damage to attacking forces was seen to have been inflicted by this ship."
Bereft of any other ideas, Allen let her mind drift and just tried to feel herself, her hull and her crew.
She felt them, moving back and forth, sleeping, tending their stations. They weren't human, but they also weren't ghosts. They were people-shaped bundles of experience. They were memories in flesh, the feeling of standing watch, of tending her engines, of manning her guns, of figuring out how to hide a still from the captain, of pretending not to know about the still in the engine room. She wasn't just her hull and machinery. She was her crew too, or rather, she was her crew's experiences. She was steel and oil and a farmboy-from-Utah's introduction to seasickness. They were her, and she was them, and she was… standing on her bridge?
Allen blinked and looked around. She was on her bridge, with her crew.
Her Executive Officer turned and asked a question. "Hey hey?"
Captain? Allen mouthed the word and then looked down at the uniform she was wearing, and the words of an old poem sprang to mind. Apparently she was the captain of her soul.
"Hey?"
Allen jumped slightly."Y-yes, I'm fine, just have some things on my mind," She finally answered.
She was USS Allen, captain of the USS Allen, standing on her own bridge. She was looking out of her own windows. Was she always like this? Was this real? It felt real, with the ship swaying under her. It looked real. She could see her bow through the windows, not the obscuring bulk of a nose. It looked for all the world like she had accomplished her goal and gone full ship, except she had expected to be the ship not the captain. Was she just a little person peering out from behind her own eyes? Was she—
Allen tripped and toppled face first into the side of a rising swell. She thrashed and garbled for a few moments before she managed to get her hands underneath herself and push upright.
"I probably deserved that," she muttered to herself as she rose and tried to regain her balance in the face of the sudden realization that she was standing on the ocean rather than floating, and that it was moving under her in a way that felt nothing at all like the sway of the bridge under her feet a moment ago. "That was philosophy, and philosophy…" Allen trailed off as she suddenly realized that her hands were empty.
"No." She dropped to her knees and frantically scooped her hands through the water, looking for the shark she had dropped.
"No no no!" That was her only source of fuel! She barely had enough range to reach Hawaii from the West Coast if she took it easy! If she was unlucky, she could go twice that distance without ever seeing land! She didn't have anything to fish with either! That shark was her lifeboat, it was…
It was on her deck. She could sense it. It was on her deck, being carried away… towards. Her. Galley.
"No! Stop that!" Allen shouted, but the crewmembers didn't seem to hear her. "I need it for fuel!"
They couldn't hear her from outside. They couldn't hear her, and they were butchering her shark.
Allen tried to go back in. She really, truly tried. She tried thinking ship thoughts, feeling ship feelings, and even clenching her driveshafts until she thought she was going to pass out, but she couldn't get back in. She was too caught up with the supremely human frustration of watching a well-meaning idiot screw everything up.
She tried very hard not to think about the fact that the well-meaning idiot was probably technically her.
It didn't help her mood when the galley served cooked shark steaks for lunch and she didn't get any of it. Except for technically.
Allen goes all ship and finds out that her nature is total philosophy bait.
Allen trips and falls on her face, saving herself from a fit of accidental philosophy.
Allen loses her shark and feels really stupid.
What if I'm far from home?
Oh brother, I will hear you call
What if I lose it all?
Oh sister, I will help you out
Oh, if the sky comes falling down, for you
There's nothing in this world I wouldn't do
~Hey Brother, Aviici
Date: Thursday, Unknown Day 3
Time: 0752
Location: Equator
Something is wrong.
What little wind there was has died completely, but the waves have been getting steadily rougher since sunrise. They are six feet now, and still easily handled for the moment, but the skies are still and laying down a soft drizzle.
***
Today was not a day for Allen to work on her "Don't die this week" checklist. It was a day for concentrating on her "Don't die today" and "Don't die in the next hour" checklists. She reflected that this statement implied something had already gone wrong, and so decided not to include it in her log. Things had not yet gone wrong, yet, but it was 0900 and all was weird.
Through the magic of modern technology, she didn't have to worry about becoming becalmed, but she was still sailing along in the doldrums, and becalming was a real thing that really happened in real life. So why wasn't it happening when the weather so clearly wanted a good classic becalming? It was, once again, weird. And it proved without a doubt that she wasn't the only weird thing on the ocean.
In spite of Allen's growing realization that she didn't enjoy weirdness, it was an oddly comforting thought. Maybe there were other ships out there wearing a human body. Maybe some of her… friends was too strong a word; maybe some other ships she knew were out there. Ships who would be happy she was back, even if she was old and obsolete and too slow to keep up with even battleships.
Internally, Allen marveled at how quickly comfort had fled her thoughts. Apparently, emotions were a lot like the ocean, interesting, but fickle not to be trusted. Externally, she rolled as a wave hit her at an angle along her starboard side. One of the problems with displacing half as much as the later destroyers was that she bobbed like a cork, and that made for some uncomfortable sailing in rough waters. As it was, the seas were still worsening, and she should probably turn her bow into the waves. She wasn't in danger of capsizing, but she was starting to get a little queasy. Throwing her rudder over, she had just begun to turn when she heard a transmission.
It was faint, so faint that whatever the person on the other end said was completely unintelligible, but it was real.There was someone else out here with her.
Allen came around to a Northwest heading and rode the swells with bated breath, hoping to catch another transmission, and that she wasn't sailing away from it. She peered into the gloom ahead, cursing the light rain that obscured the horizon. Forty-seven minutes later, she heard it again.
"...anks come b… ...are you…"
It was stronger than the last time, strong enough that she could tell that it was a woman speaking. She sounded scared too. Or upset. The static made it impossible to tell exactly what the speaker was feeling, just that it was something strong, and Allen didn't think anyone would get on the horn to broadcast their happiness to the world.
Should she respond?
Allen brushed her soaked bangs out of her eyes as she considered. The answer was obvious, but she considered it anyway. Responding would give her away to any potential enemies, and even if she did, the person on the other end would most likely either not hear her at all, or just pick up nigh unintelligible static like Allen was. They were simply too far apart to talk. She wasn't even sure it was a ship that was broadcasting. It could be a mainland radio station for all she knew. And if it was another ship in distress, at least she knew she was headed in the right direction now. She was hours at least from being able to help, though. They would either sink before she could get there, or they could wait.
Allen added a few knots to her pace and tried not to wonder whether it would be worse to sink alone, or knowing that help was coming but wouldn't arrive in time.
Three hours passed. Three hours in which Allen struggled through the roiling sea, climbing each swell and sliding into each trough in turn. The waves began breaking over her bow, only the big ones at first, but they just kept growing until a cascade of water was pouring across her deck with every swell and she could feel her keel beginning to strain. Three hours passed while she tried to make sense of broken transmissions that slowly, so very slowly, grew stronger and clearer. And in those three hours, she made an addition to the very top of every checklist she had.
"Franks, where are you?" The naked fear in the woman's voice made Allen hunch her shoulders. "Corregidor? Coral Sea? Anyone? I- I think there's a submarine. I can't find it, but…"
Step one, respond to distress calls.
"This is USS Allen. Are you in need of assistance?"
Allen waited for two waves to pass before she called again.
"This is USS Allen. Can I help?"
She held her breath for as long as she could to make sure that she didn't miss any transmission, no matter how faint it was. She knew those names. USS Franks was a Fletcher, one of the amazing new destroyers that seemed to excel at anything they tried. Corregidor and Coral Sea were Casablanca class escort carriers, small and slow as carriers go, but an important part of the first wave of warships the US constructed in the wake of Pearl Harbor. They weren't meant to be the ships that won the war, but rather, made by the same man who built the Liberty Ships, they were meant to be the ships who held the line while those ships were being built.
"This is USS Allen. Please respond. Are you in need of assistance?"
When the voice came back, it was different. Where she had been terrified before, now her words were biting and hateful.
"I know what you are, Franks. Brutus. Benedict. Betrayer. You knew it was there, and you left anyway. It was too fast to be a mistake. You knew, and you left me to burn."
The sea hissed under Allen's feet as she struggled to keep her balance, both physically and mentally, in the wake of the mystery ship's transmission. Was she under attack or was she talking about something else?
"T-this is USS Allen. Please respond. Are you in need of assistance?
Silence fell across the airwaves, and Allen struggled onward, not quite able to bring herself to transmit again. The rest of the day passed quietly, until, at dusk, the voice spoke again, every word filled with wonder and awe. "I've never seen fireflies before. Can you see them, Franks? They're beautiful."
Allen goes all ship and finds out that her nature is total philosophy bait.
Allen trips and falls on her face, saving herself from a fit of accidental philosophy.
Allen loses her shark and feels really stupid.
Chapter 3
Allen gets stuck in a freaky storm.
Allen uses her radio to chat with a mentally ill ship who coincidentally happens to be in the same direction as the center of the freaky storm.
I will ask you for mercy
I will come to you blind
What you'll see is the worst me
Not the last of my kind
~Muddy Waters, LP
Date: Friday, Unknown Day 4
Time: 0227
Location: Equator
I don't know how high the waves are now, but every one that passes threatens to shatter my bridge windows, I have multiple buckled plates, and my bilge pumps are being overwhelmed.
There is still no sign of wind. In theory, that means I must be experiencing a tailwind traveling the exact same speed as I am, but the waves are moving opposite to the wind direction. Also, nothing changed when I adjusted my heading yesterday. There was no wind before I turned, and no wind after.
I still do not know who the woman on the radio is, but I have come to the tentative conclusion that she is like me, a ship in human form. She says "I" and "me" where someone standing on a bridge would say "us" and "we," and she refers to other ships the way that a human would speak about other people. Normally, I might explain that away as a product of her obvious delirium, but that doesn't make sense in this context.
The waves are easily as large as anything I have ever encountered, and I must meet them head on or capsize. It makes me uneasy that they are forcing me to sail straight towards whoever the source of the transmissions. I am certain it is not a coincidence.
I still have not made any progress in communicating with her either. One moment she is giving orders to her escort fleet, and the next she is wondering where they are, or cursing them for a betrayal that she has yet to describe. She switches from terror to anger to childlike glee with a swiftness that can only be accomplished by the truly insane.
I am almost out of ideas. For all the response I have received, I could be trying to have a conversation with a recorded message. I do have one more thing I try to get her to respond, but I don't want to do it. It feels dirty, and it's more likely to backfire than help.
Correction: It doesn't feel dirty. It is dirty. Even if it works.
***
Allen shielded her face from the waves with her arm. If her situation was less dire, she would be tempted to try and figure out how that protected her bridge windows from their power. Among several other things that were wrong with the whole idea, her bridge and her eyes weren't even the same distance from the water! Right now, she was somewhere in between a ship and a girl, with properties of both manifesting at the same time, and she was pretty sure that was the only reason why she was still afloat.
It didn't even matter that she was blocking her vision either, since both the sky and the sea were pitch black. She was cruising blind and hoping that there wasn't an island or reef in her way, because she sure wasn't going to see it in time to avoid running aground. Again.
Allen wondered if this is what it would have felt like to sail through Typhoon Cobra with the Third Fleet. Three destroyers sank in that storm, and they were Fletchers! Well, two Fletchers and a Sumner, which is just a Fletcher with more guns.
How does one even fit more guns on a Fletcher, they already have enough to make a battleship think twice about messing with them! They're… well, the number of guns is fairly irrelevant to their ability to handle rough seas beyond the fact that guns are heavy and there is no replacement for displacement, unless you're a Fletcher, in which case you replace at least twice what you displace, and Fletchers already displaced twice what Allen did, which meant they were basically really fast light cruisers and they—
Another wave washed over Allen's bow, pulling her away from her slightly envious musings. It crashed against her arm and splashed up and over the top of her bridge, sending some of the spray down her first smokestack. The rough reminder of her circumstances left her hacking up water, praying her engines didn't stall, and chastising herself for daydreaming when she should be making checklists for what to do if the ship on the radio proved hostile.
"There are seven hundred and two fireflies. Why? That's too many. There's only supposed to be twenty-eight. Seven hundred and two. Did I count wrong?"
That.. was seeming more and more likely as time went on. The other ship's transmissions were seldom coherent, and when they were, they were either scared or angry. What was Allen supposed to do if she came across a battleship who couldn't understand that she was there to help, or even that they were both American ships?
That was also one of the main reasons why she didn't want to use her idea to get the ship's attention. It was bad enough that she was making plans on how to shoot or run from a ship in distress. If she did that and then shot…
Allen's bow raised as it stabbed into the face of a wave, leaving her looking at the black, cloudy sky for a moment before the surge moved far enough astern for her to fall forward. As she leveled out on top of the wave, for just a moment, she thought she saw something in the distance. Then the moment passed, and she plunged once again into a hole in the ocean.
Up and over, over and over, for eighteen hours, with no end in sight, until now. In ten minutes, Allen was sure. An hour after that, and she wondered how she failed to notice it before. There, only visible from the top of the highest waves, was a light on the horizon, a deep red glow that lit up the bottom of the clouds.
Sparks of light danced under the cloudbank, pinwheeling in and out, sometimes obscured by the glow and others by the clouds or column of smoke. Something was burning, something big.
"Where are you?," the voice sobbed. "Please come back, Franks. There's something in the water. It.. I can see it on radar!"
Suddenly, the sparks broke away from the column of smoke and began to move in Allen's direction. They swarmed in her direction, tumbling in and around each other in a dizzying display of aeronautic acrobatics that left her wondering how they avoided colliding with each other. Closer and closer they came, until the whole sky from the horizon to her position was lit up by hundreds upon hundreds of flaming airplanes. Then the first bomb fell.
Compared to the waves themselves, the splash that the bomb made was laughably small, and the only reason that Allen even saw it in the darkness was because it hit the water two yards off her starboard side, just ahead of the bridge.
Allen promptly threw her engines into Stop. She couldn't zig-zag to try and throw off the aircrafts' aim due to the waves, and she definitely couldn't send anybody topside to man her whole two one-pounders. All that left was to vary her speed and make frantic radio calls. It felt like being a submarine under a depth-charge attack. You can't get away, only do what you can, hope they miss, and try to convince them you weren't what they thought you were.
"This is USS Allen. Cease fire! Cease fire! I'm on your side!"
The waves bled a few knots off Allen's speed faster than she was expecting, and, apparently, faster than the aircraft were expecting, since another bomb impacted the water almost a full shiplength ahead of her. She glanced at the swarming sparks of light above, wondered how many splashes she hadn't seen and decided that was her signal to go to Ahead Full.
As expected, there was no reply from the other ship. Allen grimaced. There was no point in doing that again. She had been trying to get her to reply for the better part of a day with no results. She needed to do something different, and she needed to do it now, while she wasn't a flaming wreck.
She waited until the next wave finished crashing over her and took a deep breath, squashing down the nausea that rose in her all-too-human stomach.
"This is USS Franks. Are you in need of assistance?"
Just like before, she was answered by silence, but it was different this time. The next bomb didn't fall, and the next wave didn't reach her bridge windows. The one after that barely cleared her bow, and there was no third wave. Nothing was left of the strange storm but a gentle rising and falling of the water beneath her hull.
Finally, after an eternity of waiting, the other ship responded. "Franks?" she whispered. "You came back?"
"Yes, I came back," Allen softly said. "Are you in need of assistance?"
"I…" The voice hiccuped. "Yes, please help me."
"Of course. Please identify yourself and give me your position."
"What?" she choked. "Identify? D-don't you recognize me? It's… it's me!" Her voice rose higher, edging back towards fury again.
"Yes, I do! But," Allen choked over her next words. "I have to be sure, you know? We need to do this right. Please identify yourself, tell me your position and what the nature of your emergency is."
"Oh! Yes. Yes, we have to do this right, don't we? I'm a flagship now. I have to do this right. I-I am… Um, I'm…" It hurt, listening to the other ship flounder like that. What happened to her that she recognized Frank's name better than her own?
"I'm Liscome Bay!" All of a sudden, her voice turned crisp and professional. "Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is the USS Liscome Bay. My position is two degrees, thirty-four minutes North, one hundred seventy two degrees, thirty-two minutes East. I have been struck by a torpedo and everything aft of my forward machinery spaces is…" she choked, but then continued on. "It's all gone. I am on fire and sinking."
"This is USS Franks," Allen responded. "Roger your mayday. I am—" She did some quick mental calculations about how high the cloudbank was and how far away the fire had to be for the glow to barely be visible on the horizon, then ordered her engines to flank. "—sixty miles southeast of your position and enroute now. ETA is two hours. Hang on Liscome Bay, I'm coming."
USS Liscome Bay, who got torpedo'ed and sunk because one of her destroyer screen— USS Franks — was lured out of the task group to chase down a spurious radio signal...
I totally missed that this had gotten its own thread! Very much looking forward to more.
...I'm thinking there's gonna be some tears once she gets closer and Liscome Bay realizes she's not Franks. I mean it's possible that she ends up snapped out of it and Allen'll have a friend, but I'm not optimistic.
I really enjoyed this and hope to see more. I like that Allen is a unique ship I haven't seen featured in any other Kancolle fics I've read. She has a good unique voice/personality which I feel fits well considering her recent change from ship to girl. Liscome Bay should be interesting, weather she accompanies Allen as a abyssal, or Allen manages to save her she should be a fun companion. (If she's anything like her sister Gambier Bay she should be especially fun.) Assuming Allen doesn't have to kill her of course, but hopefully things won't come to that. (Also sorry for the necro if it's unwarranted, figured it'd be ok, and less weird than dming the author to say I liked their story.)
Allen goes all ship and finds out that her nature is total philosophy bait.
Allen trips and falls on her face, saving herself from a fit of accidental philosophy.
Allen loses her shark and feels really stupid.
Chapter 3
Allen gets stuck in a freaky storm.
Allen uses her radio to chat with a mentally ill ship who coincidentally happens to be in the same direction as the center of the freaky storm.
Chapter 4
Allen envies Fletchers for their everything.
A mentally ill carrier attacks Allen.
Allen pretends to be the mentally ill carrier's friend to get her to stop attacking.
Allen finds out the mentally ill carrier's name is Liscome Bay.
Allen responds to a mentally ill Liscome Bay's distress call.
A serpent lights the ancient sky
A threat of tainted stars
Evil stirs and in its wake
The souls of mortals sway
And sorrow reigns
Over fields of red
And spirits pace
Through the shadows cast by their graves
~Beauty of Dawn, Malukah
Date: Friday, Unknown Day 4
Time: 0500
Location: 2°14'N 173°22'E
I'm in the Gilbert Islands. Unsurprisingly, I don't have any detailed charts of the area since I have never been this far West in my life. Surprisingly, however, the charts that I do have are still good enough to get some useful information out of. For example, I'm pretty sure I just sailed past an atoll that I didn't see. At thirty knots. In the dark.
I hold as evidence that emotions are stupid and nonsensical and that I would be better off without them, the fact that I am smiling instead of soiling myself at the thought of hitting a reef at flank speed. My main theories on why this is happening are first; I am subconsciously suicidal, which is unacceptable because I promised not to do philosophy. Second; I am trying to distract myself from the fact that I am currently sailing towards a mildly homicidally insane aircraft carrier instead of away. Third; going fast and trusting your life to blind luck is inherently fun. I think the second theory is the least stupid of the three, so it is the one I am going to believe.
Going fast is fun. Blind luck is not. Blind luck is stupid, and stupid is not fun. Just ask any submarine.
***
"Okay, planning. I need to make a plan, and, and rules of engagement." Allen said to herself as she tried to ignore both the thrill of sailing stupid and the unease she felt about the burning swarm of aircraft drunkenly flitting to and fro in the dark above her head.
Why were they on fire! How were they flying when they were on fire! Why were they flying when they were on fire! Were those teeth? Why do Liscome Bay's airplanes have teeth! And why are the teeth on fire too!
"Yes. Plans are good. I will make one now."
Why was Liscome Bay out here? The coordinates she reported were about twenty miles southwest of Butitari Island, and about twenty miles southwest of Butitari Island is where she sank during the war. It was more than a little strange that she was sinking again in the same way and the same place as before, and Allen knew she wasn't lying because she could see the glow of the fire on the horizon with her own two eyes. It couldn't be a coincidence, it—
"Oh." Suddenly, like a key turning in a lock, Allen's thoughts clicked and she understood. She still had no clue on the 'how' and 'why', but she knew the 'what' now.
"She's a ghost ship."
Her first captain had brought a copy of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner aboard when he assumed command, and it had become a quiet tradition to always keep it on board. It was an old poem, beautiful and frightening, about a particularly stupid sailor and the unnamed ghost ship that kept him company. Allen knew it by heart, and the idea that Liscome Bay might be enduring the same kind of experience as that poor ship disturbed her deeply.
Life-in-Death won two souls in that game of dice, not one.
Allen looked up at the burning fighters and wondered. They really did look like fireflies. Unbidden, words bubbled to the surface of her thoughts, words that were supposed to be about the blessed moment when the mariner's heart changed, and when their torment began to end. Without meaning to, Allen found herself softly reciting them aloud.
"The upper air burst into life! And a hundred fire-flags sheen, to and fro they were hurried about! And to and fro, and in and out, the wan stars danced between," she said while disgust churned in her guts.
The water sped beneath Allen's feet, and, as she kept her eyes trained on the trails of fire above, she felt something both new and old. She had never felt it before herself, even in the hazy way that she felt things without awareness as a steel hull, but her crew had. Some of them felt it while they struggled to find any lifeboats still afloat in the heavy Atlantic swells after a U-boat broke Galway Castle's spine. Most felt it while they watched Arizona burn, and while they waited to hear how many of the trapped sailors could be rescued from Oklahoma. That whatever had done this to Liscome Bay had also corrupted a symbol of beauty and hope, intentionally or not, filled Allen with an emotion that both her hull and her skin were too small to contain.
Rage.
This was evil. Whatever held Liscome Bay, whether spirit, demon, human, or angel, deserved to be dragged down into the deepest abyss, and Allen would do it herself, with torpedos, or guns or with her own hull if needed, the instant she knew where to aim. They would suffer for this.
Anger coursed through her body, heating her boilers and flooding her steam pipes, urging her to action that she couldn't take. She would have gone to flank speed, except she was already at flank and steaming faster than she had since her sea trials. She would have sounded general quarters, except she was already at general quarters. She would have scoured the ocean for enemies, except she was already doing that too, for all that was worth on this moonless sea, and the only potential enemies in sight were Liscome Bay's aircraft.
Allen ground her teeth in frustration. She was already doing everything she knew how, but it wasn't enough. What was the point in feeling like this if it didn't make any difference! The sound of creaking steel brought her gaze down from the swirling lights in the sky and she lifted her hands up to look at them. They were clenched into tight fists, so tight that she couldn't feel her fingertips anymore, and the sound was coming from her hands as they tried to curl even tighter. A distant corner of her mind noticed that her knuckles really did turn white.
This… was unacceptable. Allen could feel it, the way that the anger was making her restless, impatient, stupid. She couldn't plan like this. She put her balled fists back down at her sides and took a deep breath. If the human part of her was getting in the way of her mission, then she would set it aside. Closing her eyes, she reached for her hull.
It didn't work.
Allen's chest was too tight to take another deep breath, so she took three shallow ones instead and tried again. A ship was more than her hull. That's how she did it last time, by realizing that, by embracing her crew. She just needed to reach for them too. She just needed to relax and let herself sink into the sea of memories they represented.
The creaking from Allen's hands grew louder, and she felt a strange tightness in her shoulders, like her arms were readying themselves to hit something while they were, at the same time, far too heavy to move under their own power. What her body was doing was just a superfluous detail though, a background curiosity that didn't matter one bit in the face of what was really important. It didn't work.
Just like with the shark, it didn't work.
Allen opened her eyes and loosed a wordless shriek into the night sky. Like her hull, like her new body, it was small, fragile, and not enough. Even when she added her horn to the noise, it still wasn't enough. It would never be.
Just like her.
Now this feeling was familiar. She felt it when a U-boat got away on her first escort mission because her shell detonated prematurely. She felt it every time she collided with another ship, or a dock, or something in the water, or the shore.
She felt it when she slipped off her keel blocks in drydock, striking Duncan again and killing one of her crew.
She felt it when Galway Castle broke in half and sank after three days of escorting the tugs that were trying to save her, after Allen's captain sent sailors over to her shifting, settling hull to re-attach parted tow lines despite how incredibly dangerous that was.
The Vice Admiral praised her for her efforts there, even though a hundred and forty-three men and one ship never came home, even though she couldn't do a damn thing except sit and watch while a passenger ship sank.
She felt it when a U-boat slipped past her and torpedoed Eumaeus, and again when Crocuz had to scuttle her after the tow lines snapped.
She felt it during every single second of Pearl.
She felt it as she sat in her berth on Oahu while her friends and students sailed west and didn't come back.
Not enough.
By incompetence, by coincidence, by orders, by sheer lack of ability. Not enough.
Not enough.
Not enough.
Not e—
"Franks, are you there? Franks! Where did you go!"
Liscome Bay's terrified voice cut through her thoughts like lightning, and she scrambled to regain her bearings while she also scrambled to answer the radio.
"I'm here!" Allen croaked around the rawness left behind by her scream. What was she doing letting herself go during an emergency!
"I'm here," she said again, better this time. "I'm here. It's okay. I'm here."
"Please come back, Franks. I think there's a submarine. I think…" She trailed off into silence for a moment before muttering, "No, I need to do it right. I'm a flagship now.
"Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is USS Liscome Bay. My position is two degrees, thirty-four minutes North, one hundred seventy two degrees, thirty-two minutes East. I have… I am… I…"
What was Allen supposed to do now? Would it be less cruel to distract Liscome Bay from her confusion, or talk her through making the distress call? Allen's words about "doing it right" seemed to have struck a chord with the carrier, so probably the latter, but how was she supposed to talk her through "doing it right" when she didn't even know what "it" was supposed to be! Allen laughed bitterly, so much for coming in with a plan.
"It's okay Liscome Bay, I'm here. Just take it slow. Look around and tell me what you see."
After five agonizing seconds, Liscome Bay whispered, "I see fire."
Allen grimaced, that was less information than she already had, but she probably shouldn't push for more. At least she'd come back with her firefighting foam. The stuff was new when she was launched, and she could easily have come back without it if she hadn't been issued it from the start. She wondered if firefighting foam worked on ghost fires. Either way, she was going to find out soon, because the fire wasn't on the horizon anymore.
"Thank you. You're doing good, Liscome. You're going to be okay."
Now what? Should she keep trying to talk her through the distress call? The next step was describing the damage though, and this whole idea was beginning to feel more like a mistake with every second that ticked by. Drawing Liscome Bay's attention to that could easily set her off.
Allen's musings were pointless, though, because the choice was suddenly taken out of her hands when the carrier snapped out a single word, echoing with notes of hate. "You!"
The drunken fireflies above her head transformed into a churning, frothing, ocean of flame, and she nearly began firing her one-pounders out of reflex before she managed to clamp down on the impulse.
"How dare you come here! After what you did? After you betrayed me! After you murdered my crew!"
"No! That's not what—" Allen desperately tried to calm her down, only to be cut off when the carrier started chanting.
"Seven hundred men in the water. Seven hundred men in the air. Seven hundred lambs for the slaughter. Seven hundred die in despair.
"Seven hundred men in the churning. Seven hundred caught in the flow. Seven hundred souls still burning, seven hundred fathoms below.
"Our kingdom come, our will be done, in heaven, as it is—"
Allen didn't know what to do. Liscome Bay was delusional, rambling, and on the cusp of violence, and Allen didn't know what to do. She needed to interrupt the carrier's train of thought and she didn't have any more ideas, so she did what worked before, disgustedly hoping that her mind was far enough gone to make it work again.
"This is USS Franks. Are you in need of assistance?"
Silence settled on the airwaves, pressing down harder and harder with each passing second while the aircraft raged overhead. One minute passed, then two, and slowly, ever so slowly, the planes slowed, drifting in lazy, aimless loops, looking once more like fireflies dancing in the sky.
Tiny ages passed while Allen waited, and the no-longer-distant inferno grew larger and larger with each passing second.
"Yes, I am," she whispered. A moment of quiet passed, and then she asked, "Franks, what's happened to me?"
You're dead, Allen didn't say as she sped past the first patch of flaming oil. She pulled her speed back from flank down to fifteen knots in order to maneuver past the floating snakes of flame in her path, not wanting to find out if sailing straight through would harm her human parts or not. You're a ghost ship haunting the seas where you sank, and I don't know if I can help you.
Instead she said, "You've taken damage to your bridge, and it's left you confused. But don't worry, I'm almost there. You've held on long enough, and you're going to be okay now."
Another now-familiar moment of silence passed while Liscome Bay thought, and Allen nosed past another circle of fire.
"Is this punishment, Franks?"
"No," Allen said immediately, trying to cut off the train of thought she knew was coming. It didn't help.
"I thought I could be a good flagship, that I could take some of the pressure off the real carriers."
"You are a real carrier!" Allen shouted as she sailed deeper into the inferno, fire raging on either side of her like fever dreams.
"But I sank without doing anything at all," Liscome Bay continued, unhearing. My crew died for nothing, because I couldn't do it right."
"You did!" Allen snarled into her radio. "You did it right. You did all of it right, and anyone who says you didn't is lying!"
Ahead, amidst the patches of burning oil, Allen could now see the figure of a woman on her hands and knees. After she finished speaking, though, the woman began to move. She got her legs underneath her and shakily stood up while Allen stared in horror at what she had become.
Liscome Bay's torso ended below her ribcage in a twisted mess of flesh and steel, and the empty space below had been filled in with a mass of writhing filth and licking flames loosely shaped into the form of a human body. The little flesh that still remained on her upper body was corpse white, and the only clothing she wore was a gauntlet on her left hand and an amulet forged of blood red fire hanging from her neck which protected her modesty, not by obscuring her body, but by causing the skin it touched to blacken and flake off, burning outwards across her chest and shoulders even as the flesh grew back in from the ragged edges with visible speed, stuck in an endless cycle of healing and immolation. In her right hand, she carried the back half of a shattered rifle made of pitted black steel and lined with ivory teeth along the stock. The gauntlet on her left supported a shattered five inch cannon on her wrist and anti-aircraft guns across the back of her hand.
For all that Liscome Bay's body was horrifying, though, her face was even worse.
Her lower jaw had been torn off and filled in the same way as her legs, and an undulating black tendril had grown from somewhere behind her back, like an obscene vine, rising up around her neck and the side of her face before plunging into the ruined pit that was once her left eye. Her waist-length raven black hair was caught by the rising heat and smoke that surrounded her body and swayed back and forth above her head like that of a drowned woman sinking into the depths. The only part of her that still looked alive was her brilliant blue right eye, a window that utterly failed to contain the unfathomable pit of anger, despair, and suffering that lay behind it.
"Then why am I in hell?" she snarled as she raised her gauntlet, pointing her cannon straight at Allen, and fired.
AN: I made some minor edits to the previous chapters. Nothing important enough to re-read, mostly formatting and flavor stuff, with a few small corrections.
While researching for this chapter, I found some diagrams of the damage that Liscome Bay took. Whoever the purple and green lines represent have one hell of a story to tell.
While researching for this chapter, I found some diagrams of the damage that Liscome Bay took. Whoever the purple and green lines represent have one hell of a story to tell.
Her first captain had brought a copy of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner aboard when he assumed command, and it had become a quiet tradition to always keep it on board. It was an old poem, beautiful and frightening, about a particularly stupid sailor and the unnamed ghost ship that kept him company. Allen knew it by heart, and the idea that Liscome Bay might be enduring the same kind of experience as that poor ship disturbed her deeply.
Life-in-Death won two souls in that game of dice, not one.
... You know, I never thought of what shipgirls would think of tales of ghost ships. And now I want to explore that further, because there's quite a few out there that would be much more horrifying to a ship than to a human.
The Eliza Battle was a paddle steamer that burned in 1858 on the Tombigbee River, Alabama, U.S. She is reported to reappear, fully aflame, on cold and windy winter nights to foretell of impending disaster.
The Lady Lovibond is said to have been deliberately wrecked on 13 February 1748 off Goodwin Sands, Kent, England, and to reappear off the Kent coast every fifty years.
Following the wreck of the SS Valencia in 1906 off the coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, there were reports of a lifeboat with eight skeletons in a nearby sea cave, lifeboats being rowed by skeletons of the Valencia's victims, the shape of Valencia within the black exhaust emanating from the rescue ship City of Topeka's funnel and a phantom ship resembling the Valencia with waves washing over her as human figures held on to the ship's rigging; sailors also reported seeing the ship itself in the area in the years following the sinking, often as an apparition that followed down the coast.[8][9] One of the lifeboats from Valencia was found adrift in 1933.[10]
The schooner Jenny was supposedly discovered after spending 17 years frozen in an ice-barrier of the Drake Passage. Found by Captain Brighton of the whalerHope, it had been locked in the ice since 1823, the last port of call having been Lima, Peru. The bodies of the seven people aboard, including one woman and a dog, preserved by the Antarctic cold, were buried at sea by the crew of the Hope, and Brighton passed the account on to the Admiralty in London. The Jenny is commemorated by the Jenny Buttress, a feature on King George Island near Melville Peak, named by the UK Antarctic Place-Names Committee in 1960.
The Ourang Medan is said to have been found adrift off Indonesia with all of its crew dead. The boarding party found the entire crew "frozen, teeth baring, gaping at the sun." Before the ship could be towed to a home port, it exploded and sank.
Mary Celeste has to take the cake: Found seaworthy, undamaged and completely devoid of life, recovered, sold off, and then continued to be cursed with misfortune until she was deliberately wrecked (which must be an especially horrific fate for a shipgirl; being betrayed by their own crew). Something that didn't end well for the people who did so, since her owner died in poverty three months later, one of his co-conspirators went mad, and another committed suicide...
(... and writing that down made me realize that it sounds a lot like a cursed ship embracing and then using her own curse for revenge, which has certain implications...)
Or maybe there's a different perspective to them; the Flying Duchman's captain is doomed to eternally sail the seas, but is the ship also cursed, or staying with her captain and crew out of loyalty?
Allen goes all ship and finds out that her nature is total philosophy bait.
Allen trips and falls on her face, saving herself from a fit of accidental philosophy.
Allen loses her shark and feels really stupid.
Chapter 3
Allen gets stuck in a freaky storm.
Allen uses her radio to chat with a mentally ill ship who coincidentally happens to be in the same direction as the center of the freaky storm.
Chapter 4
Allen envies Fletchers for their everything.
A mentally ill carrier attacks Allen.
Allen pretends to be the mentally ill carrier's friend to get her to stop attacking.
Allen finds out the mentally ill carrier's name is Liscome Bay.
Allen responds to a mentally ill Liscome Bay's distress call.
Chapter 5
Allen gets angry at whatever hurt Liscome Bay, then she gets frustrated that getting angry doesn't help.
Allen decides to stop being angry and frustrated, it doesn't work. This makes her angry and frustrated.
Not enough. Not enough. Not enough.
Allen takes advantage of Liscome Bay's mental illness to get in close. This makes her feel guilty.
Allen tries to make Liscome Bay feel better. It doesn't work.
When the fires, when the fires are consumin' you
And your sacred stars won't be guiding you
I've got blood, I've got blood
Blood on my name
Not a spell gonna be broken
With a potion or a priest
When you're cursed you're always hopin'
That a prophet would be grieved
Oh, Lazarus
How did your debts get paid?
Oh, Lazarus
Were you so afraid?
~Blood on My Name, The Brothers Bright
Allen dug her foot into the water and threw herself to port, but even a destroyer's maneuverability wasn't enough to dodge cannonfire at this range. The only thing that saved her was luck. The shell from Liscome Bay's five inch gun detonated in a blinding flash before it had even travelled halfway to its target. Allen wasn't as happy about that as she should have been. In fact, she almost wished that it had hit, because her wild maneuver sent her sailing into the fire.
Inferno raged all around, cutting Allen off from the world. She screamed as it tore into her. It clawed at her skin, stole the air from her lungs, filled her ears with an endless roar, and her eyes, when she could pry them open against the heat and smoke, only showed her visions of hell.
Over the course of six agonizing seconds, she came to the realization that she wouldn't even be granted the dubious mercy of destroyed nerve endings that human burn victims enjoyed, because, no matter how human she looked and felt, she was still a ship, and steel doesn't burn. The real danger to her wasn't heat, it was the way that the fire pulled the oxygen out of the air, choking both her boilers and crew. If she didn't find her way out quickly, she would die slowly, and she would feel every second of it.
Allen stumbled as the fire suddenly parted before her, and she sailed into a clearing in the middle of the burning oil. Blessedly cool air washed over her body and she gulped down great breaths of it to try and clear her lungs. The only thing that kept her upright was the vague notion that she didn't want to find out what falling over while steaming at fifteen knots in the middle of combat would do to either her ship or her girl parts.
Combat.
She was really going to do this. She was going to have to choose between sinking an American ship—a carrier no less—or dying.
For one horrible second, Allen was tempted to go with the second option. Her chances of winning a duel with a carrier were somewhere between zero and impossible anyway, and the idea of firing on a ship of her own fleet made her want to throw up. It would be quicker if she just opened all her hatches and valves and waited for the next bomb or cannon shot. It would hurt less too. Did she really have to turn herself into Lady Macbeth first if she was going to die anyway?
"Heh," Allen forced herself to chuckle through her raw throat. "That sounds like philosophy, which means it's stupid and wrong."
She would fight, and she would do it right.
Allen steadied herself and slowed one third in order to get some time to examine her new surroundings. She had stumbled into a large pocket of clear water dotted with patches of fire, surrounded on all sides by roaring flames and billowing smoke. The light from the fire danced across the surface of the water, intertwining with the smoke to make it so that she couldn't tell if she was actually surrounded or just caught in the middle of some burning labyrinth. She couldn't even tell what Liscome Bay's position was anymore, beyond a vague 'somewhere to my right', maybe good enough for a lucky torpedo spread, but certainly not enough to return fire with her guns. Just about the only good part of all this was that the smoke was thick enough that she couldn't make out any planes above, which meant they couldn't see her either.
Suddenly, the water erupted as dozens of lines of small shell splashes criss-crossed the clearing. One of them stitched it's way across Allen's belly and she felt the sting as dozens of Oerlikon rounds raked her deck amidships. The bullets sent the crew manning her starboard center torpedo turret scrambling into whatever cover they could find. Luckily, none of them were hit. Two hundred yards ahead and to port, a larger splash showed where a five inch shell hit, and Allen felt a moment of profound unfairness as she realized that the jeep carrier had somehow managed to magic her way into firing a stern-mounted cannon and all of her AA guns forward.
That feeling was immediately overtaken by fear as she swerved to avoid another line of larger splashes that must have come from a 40 millimeter Bofors. Another eruption from the five inch gun, closer this time, turned her fear to terror as she remembered something important. Liscome Bay had radar, and it wasn't being blocked by the smoke!
Two of the larger lines curved to cut across Allen's bow, and she turned hard to port to avoid them, her new heading taking her parallel to the wall of fire and almost directly away from the carrier. Even with the maneuver, an exploding Bofors round still managed to gouge a marble-sized chunk out of her right bicep.
She hissed and clutched her arm. This was bad. Liscome Bay's radar wasn't good enough for targeting, or else Allen would be dying already, but the carrier would still cut her to ribbons if she kept this up. Allen wasn't wasn't big enough to just shrug off AA guns like a cruiser, and even the Oerlikons were catastrophic for her because all of her weapons were manned by deck crew, and then there were her torpedoes. They could go up with one well-placed shot! She was lucky those rounds amidship hadn't set one off.
Allen's mind racedAl's fast as the beating of her heart, and she threw together something that almost looked like a plan if she squinted hard enough. She needed to dump her torpedoes as soon as possible, which wouldn't be as easy as it sounded since she could only fire a half-salvo in her target's direction at once. She would need to either waste half of them, or take the time to make a full u-turn while under fire. After that, she needed to either get a visual on the other ship so she could open fire with her own cannon and AA, or find a way to defeat her radar.
Before all that, however, Alken needed to do one other thing. She initiated a turn to bring her starboard side to bear on her best guess of Liscome Bay's position and radioed, "This is USS Franks. Are you in need of assistance?"
Allen didn't want to wonder if she could have talked Liscome Bay down again.
"Please say something," she pleaded. "We don't need to fight."
Allen didn't have long to wait for an answer, just long enough to complete her turn and aim the starboard torpedoes. She didn't really expect one anyway, now that the carrier had begun firing. She still needed to try, though.
"I'm sorry," Allen whispered. She whispered it, but she also made sure she was broadcasting. It was important to broadcast this, even if she didn't know why. Liscome Bay needed to hear it.
Or maybe it was the other way around. The carrier would neither understand nor forgive what she was about to do, but Allen needed to say it anyway.
"I'm sorry. I don't know how to help you."
If she said it to Liscome Bay, it would be real. If she only said it to herself, it would just be an excuse.
"So I'm going to sink you instead." Allen fired her torpedoes.
Five torpedoes flew out of three turrets attached to her right thigh, hip, and shoulder. They fell into the water and proceeded to swim at a plodding thirty-four knots on slightly diverging courses, chosen to better her chances of getting a hit.
The sixth torpedo only ejected a third of the way out of the middle tube on her hip before it slid to a stop. The shrill scream of its engine reverberated in the tube and Allen's heart stopped beating. She had a hot-running fish.
She needed to get rid of it now before the engine overheated from lack of seawater. If she didn't, the fuel tank would explode and send steel splinters scything across her deck, and that was the best-case scenario. Worst case, the warhead would detonate.
Allen screamed and she slammed her rudder all the way to port in order to try and dislodge the stuck torpedo, but it didn't budge. Her human instincts took over a second later, and she scrabbled at the torpedo with her hands. For an instant, she thought she was going to die when her flailing pushed the torpedo a little way back into the tube, but then she managed to wrap her fingers around it and yanked as hard as she could.
The grease that coated the torpedo—lubricant from the tube—ruined her grip, and her hand instantly slipped off, but it was enough. She managed to pull the torpedo part of the way out and the lean from her turn kept it from binding again. The shrieking wail of the engine cut off as the torpedo slipped into the sea and swam off.
Allen gasped and clutched her hands to her aching chest, and then she noticed that she was sailing straight towards the edge of the clearing. She had turned a full one hundred and eighty degrees.
A good distance off to starboard, great gouts of fire went up as the bubble trails from the first five torpedoes broke the surface underneath the burning oil. For an instant, Allen considered loosing the other six, but they weren't aimed yet. She didn't have time to do it before she hit the fire either, and she couldn't bring herself to just dump them.
Too late, Allen realized she also didn't have time to turn or stop. The feeling of fire flashed through her memory, and she did the only thing she could think of and pushed her ship-self away.
Going full human was, for some unfathomable reason, much easier than going full ship. The weight of Allen's equipment disappeared at the same instant that her feet caught in the water, converted her forward momentum into downward, and flipped her face-first into the ocean. She choked as seawater forced its way up her nose and closed over her head. For a few panicked moments, she thrashed wildly, and it was only a supreme effort of will that allowed her to get back control. She knew how to swim. Three of her crew had swam to her during Pearl harbour, and she remembered everything they did during the time they served aboard her.
Suddenly, Allen's left arm broke the surface and she knew which way was up. She oriented herself and lifted her head out of the water, gasping as she tried to wipe the liquid away from her eyes and see where she was.
Fire roared in front of her, so close that she could feel its heat through the water that streamed off her face, close enough that she could have reached out and stuck her hand in it. Her eyes widened, and she swam backwards until she was a much more tolerable fifteen feet away.
When Allen was confident she wasn't about to burn, she tried to survey her surroundings. Losing the five feet of distance between her eyes and the water did bad things to her ability to see. Losing the thirty feet between her bridge windows and the water did far, far worse. The scene around her was a near incomprehensible tapestry of fire, splashing water, and exploding AA shells, 'near' being the operable word.
Liscome Bay's firing seemed to have gone crazy. The lines of AA splashes were no longer neat and straight, nor were they curving towards her position. Instead, they jiinked back and forth, doubling back on themselves and skipping from one side of the clearing to the other. For the first time since the battle began, Allen smiled. She'd beaten her opponent's radar.
Her smile didn't last long, however. Twenty millimeter shells flew over her head and impacted so close behind her that the spray cascaded over her. She was all-girl right now. A hit from those guns wouldn't leave a bleeding pinprick that stung in salt-water, or dig out a little chunk of flesh, it would splatter the top half her body between here and San Francisco.
Allen let out a frightened squeal and allowed herself to sink up to her nose. She needed a new plan, and she needed it fast.
As best Allen could tell, she had two options. First, she could summon up her ship-parts and fight. If she did, she would either have to fight blind and get slowly cut to pieces by AA, or else sail through the fire again. She looked at the flames and shuddered. It wouldn't be quick this time either. She would have to start from a dead stop, and then Liscome Bay would have line-of-sight on her with one five-inch cannon and a few dozen anti-aircraft guns. If the smoke continued to keep the aircraft from targeting her, it would actually be a pretty even fight against Allen's own armament of four four-inch cannons, two one-pounders, and her remaining six torpedoes, too even for her tastes. A hit would do far more damage to her than it would to Liscome Bay. Worse, all of Allen's weapons were manned by deck-crew who would either be slaughtered or driven below deck the second those Bofors and Oerlikons got a bead on her. She'd be lucky to get a full salvo off. The best she could see herself actually managing like that would be a mutual kill.
Her second option was to try and take advantage of the fact that Liscome Bay couldn't see her on radar anymore. She wouldn't even be able to detect her with sonar either; there was no way that the splashes from Allen's swimming would carry over all this gunfire. This was the closest she would ever get to being a submarine, and Liscome Bay was right to be scared of them.
Allen would have to deal with the fire somehow, though. All she would accomplish by staying here was a quick death delivered by an inevitable lucky shot.
Allen took a deep breath through her nose, careful not to inhale any water, and did some math. It took her six seconds at fifteen knots to sail through the fire, which meant she would need to swim a minimum of one hundred and fifty-two feet underwater if she wanted to get past it.
That actually left her feeling somewhat hopeful,the distance was less than half her own length, it would only take her… somewhere between thirty seconds and two minutes to swim the distance, depending on how fast she could move underwater.
That left Allen feeling somewhat less hopeful. She was pretty sure she could hold her breath for thirty seconds, even while swimming hard. She was also pretty sure that she couldn't hold her breath for two minutes under any circumstances, not as a fragile little girl.
Allen flinched when another stray round landed close enough to spray her. Her choice was obvious, even though she didn't want it to be. A mutual kill wasn't good enough, she needed to make like a submarine and dive.
Allen switched from treading water to a slow front crawl, drawing as close to the heat as she could manage before she paused again. She took a few deep breaths, kicked straight up to get as far out of the water as she could, and then bent over and threw her feet up in the air and began kicking to drive herself as far beneath the surface as she could manage.
The water closed around her in a way that felt utterly wrong. It wrapped around her and squeezed on every side, making her ears hurt more and more with every foot she descended, and she instinctively knew that manifesting her ship-self now would kill her instantly as seawater surged down her stacks and into her boilers.
She was sinking!
Allen's kicking faltered and her chest heaved, trying to draw in breath, but she managed to keep her mouth closed in spite of the human instinct telling her to breathe.
I'm a submarine. I'm going to hold my breath because I'm a submarine now, and submarines hold their breath and they swim.
Allen forced herself to begin kicking again, and, as she leveled off and began to swim forward, she opened her eyes. It was the most beautiful hell she could have ever imagined.
She was swimming through a void as black as the depths of space and every bit as mysterious. All around was emptiness, and there was nothing to indicate to her if she could see a foot or a mile before the darkness swallowed everything. Up above was a silver sky, alight with dancing reds and yellows that just barely managed to project their color through the blue sea.
It was difficult to swim while looking up, however, so Allen tore her eyes away from the inferno above and concentrated on swimming forward. Her chest burned more and more with every stroke. She lost count of the seconds almost immediately, and the only thing that allowed her to keep her nerve was watching the play of light across her hands and arms as she slowly swam forward. She couldn't even tell if she was swimming in a straight line anymore.
Stroke after stroke, Allen crawled her way through the abyss, and with each one, her lungs burned a little more. Before long, she began to feel her diaphragm spasm, almost like she needed to vomit. She began to feel dizzy and her limbs became leaden, barely moving at all while she put every bit of energy she had into them to keep swimming. She forced herself to kick again and again and again. Her thinking was fuzzy, and the light from the fire was beginning to grow dim. Then Allen felt her hand break the surface.
Visions of burning oil stuck to her skin, melting her flesh while she drowned trying to scream in agony flashed through her head. She needed to dive!
Allen found her strength but lost her coordination. She flailed, and her feet broke the surface, and then her arms again, and then her head.
She shrieked and breathed in a mixture of air and water, immediately coughing it up and repeating the ordeal again before she managed to get her arms and legs under control and tread water. After she realized she could breathe, she also realized that she wasn't in pain. Slowly,swiped the water away from her eyes and tried to get her bearings.
Allen had made it through and more. The fire was blazing merrily away at least thirty feet behind where she had broken the surface, and she wasn't in any danger of burning. She would have cried in relief if she had the breath to do it with.
The boom of a cannon shot echoed across the water, and Allen immediately sucked in a deep breath and sank up to her eyes, waiting for the following splash, but it never came. Hesitantly, she turned in a slow circle, trying to catch sight of the escort carrier.
Allen made a full rotation and saw nothing. Her aching chest protested against holding her breath so soon after the dive, and so she lifted her head out of the water and took in a few deep gulps of air. Feeling a little big better, she made a second rotation, examining every inch of ocean in sight to try and catch a glimpse of Liscome Bay's silhouette against the fire, or her pale skin against the black smoke, but she found nothing.
The lack of a nearby splash after the last shot indicated that Liscome Bay still didn't know where she was, but the piece of good news was undercut by Allen's inability to see the carrier. If Allen allowed her ship parts to manifest right now, she would take at least one shot from Liscome Bay's main gun before she would even be able to tell which way to send her torpedoes. If she just stayed human, then she would eventually drown.
"No," Allen muttered. She could still win this.
Liscome Bay wasn't where she should be. She had been on Allen's left before the dive, which meant she should still be on her left if she put her back to the closest patch of fire. The fact that Allen couldn't see her now meant that either the fire had shifted, or Liscome Bay had.
If it was Liscome Bay, then Allen had already lost, but she didn't think she was facing that scenario. The carrier was obviously injured, barely able to stand, and Allen had difficulty thinking she could move at all, let alone quickly enough to be completely out of sight by the time she surfaced.
It had to be the fire that moved. It made sense anyway. Every shell splash would make the oil slick spread, carried away from where Liscome Bay was aiming with every ripple.
Allen rotated to put the fire at her back and then turned a little more until it was forty-five degrees off her stern, and then she began swimming with a slow, gentle breaststroke in order to conserve energy and keep from disturbing the water. She should be able to find the other ship if she could just round the point of this island of burning oil.
Swimming this way was exhausting. Allen didn't need to hold her breath anymore, but it still felt like she was. Every stroke stole energy from her arms, which felt much weaker without her boilers to provide strength, and she had to force herself to keep from getting distracted by the idea that this tiredness would manifest as empty fuel tanks when she changed back. Allen was swimming with all the might of a little girl now, and she was tiring every bit as quickly as one would expect. Even worse, she could feel her ship-self trying to come back. It was a pressure inside her soul that made her feel like she was holding her breath again.
A long stretch of black water lay beyond the island of fire that lit up the underside of billowing black clouds of smoke. Allen lifted her head every few strokes to try and catch sight of Liscome Bay's form silhouetted against the glow, and every time she found nothing. Had the carrier moved after all? Or had Allen gotten turned around? She didn't think she had, but she couldn't be sure without her compass. Finally, after what felt like hours, and must have actually been ten minutes, Allen found her.
The carrier's hair was what caught her eye, black undulations amongst the flames that didn't rise like smoke should, swaying instead like strands of kelp anchored to the sea bed. Allen's swimming grew slower and slower, until she found herself treading water as she watched her enemy.
The distance, combined with Allen's low angle of view, made it difficult to see the carrier through the flames. She could just make out Liscome Bay's arm moving as she swung her gauntlet wildly and fired her cannon in the wrong direction. Somehow, in the confusion of the battle, Allen had managed to circle nearly forty-five degrees around Liscome Bay, and was now treading water maybe two thousand yards off her port bow.
This was it.
Allen took a deep breath and readied herself. Once she started, she needed to move quickly. Liscome Bay would spot her on radar within seconds of the moment she stopped suppressing her hull, then the four Bofors and fifteen Oerlikons on that side would focus their fire
and turn her deck into a slaughterhouse. If Allen was lucky, she would be able to get a salvo off first. If she wasn't lucky, she would be turned into a sinking, mangled mass of steel before she could even aim.
Allen took another deep breath and began to let go of her control.
Suddenly, an idea struck like a flash of lightning, and she clamped down on the just before her hull materialized. Liscome Bay was firing her cannon forward, her stern cannon. It was also traversing faster than it should, coming to bear on her target as quickly as the jeep carrier could swing her arm. All of her anti-air guns were doing the same, as if their turrets were actually mounted on that oversized gauntlet instead of along the edges of her flight deck. Did that mean Liscome Bay was limited to human movements? What would happen if Allen got behind her?
Allen eyed her opponent and the water between them. She would have to swim a long way to get behind her, and she was already tired. Worse, she would be out in the open the whole time. She couldn't dive under any more patches of fire, not without knowing how far she would have to swim. Was it better to take the one second worth of surprise attack she had already won herself, or gamble everything against the possibility of extending it to ten seconds of surprise attack?
Put like that, the answer was obvious. Allen sighed and began swimming again.
Between the dive and the exhaustion of Allen's fragile human body, her sense of time had been thoroughly obliterated. She couldn't tell how much time passed, she only knew that she was exhausted but she still needed to give her full concentration each stroke, not to move forward, but to ensure that she stirred the water as little as possible. Now that she was out in the open, any ripple could catch the carrier's eye with a flicker of movement or glint of reflected firelight.
Allen's strokes didn't feel like they were pulling her along at all, and her position relative to Liscome Bay never seemed to budge. She couldn't even look elsewhere for a few minutes to take her mind off her progress lest she lose sight of the other ship behind a drifting patch of fire, or miss the moment when the carrier spotted her.
Her movements gradually became less coordinated as exhaustion took over, until they were little more than wild flailing. She had reached the point where she was afraid that she wouldn't be able to keep her head above water for much longer. She had managed to out herself maybe thirty degrees off Liscome Bay's stern, which left her open to fire from both the stern cannon and a full broadside of her AA guns if the carrier wasn't limited to human movements, but Allen didn't think she could go any farther, not without the risk of drowning.
Her heart was racing, whether from the exercise or the looming fight, she couldn't tell. Allen took in a deep breath, filling her lungs until they felt like they were going to burst, and then she pushed. The weight of steel settled on her back, and she instantly knew something was very wrong. Her deck was underwater. The change didn't kill her though. Her intakes were mere inches above the surface and no water came rushing into her engines, neither had her watertight hatches or portholes given way.
Allen got her feet under her and, sending an order to her engine room to go to flank speed at the same time, she stood up. Her raised forecastle broke the surface first, and her bow leapt entirely out of the water as she powered forward. Hundreds of tons of water streamed off her deck, flowing backwards over her guns and torpedos, around her stacks and the walls of her radio room, and tearing her whaleboats from their cranse as eleven hundred tons of steel forced its way to the surface.
Her deck crew, who had been waiting just inside, forced the hatches open as soon as the water subsided enough to let them out and began to wade their way towards the weapons as fast as they could. Some of the ocean water flowed in the open doorways, but it wasn't enough to put her in danger. Allen was on the surface and running as fast as she could.
Her crew worked as if they had practiced this a thousand times, and they had. Two crewmen made it to the pom-poms and tilted them forwards to make sure the barrels were drained, and Liscome Bay, whom Allen could see much more clearly now, paused. Her four inch gun crews uncapped the guns and slammed the first shells into the breeches and began to rotate them into position when the carrier looked over her shoulder. Liscome Bay snarled as the first rounds from Allen's pom-poms strafed over the AA gun wells on her port side, one working from the bow back, and the other from the stern forward.
Allen hadn't managed to get behind Liscome Bay, and that opened her up to the possibility of a full broadside from the carrier, but it also gave her an opportunity. Her torpedo turrets swung into position at the same time as her cannons, and she loosed a full broadside of six torpedoes and four cannons while Liscome Bay tried to pivot around and point her gauntlet at Allen.
Allen aimed her weapons at the ship instead of the woman, and her aim was true. At this range, she almost couldn't miss. One armor-piercing shell tore into the stern turret and exploded inside. Two star-shells burst against the hull in between the paired Bofors gun wells forward and aft, raining white phosphorus down on the gun crews that her pom-poms had been strafing.
The last round nearly missed. Liscome Bay's bridge was on the starboard side, and Allen was on her port stern, putting the bulk of the ship and her flight deck in the way of her guns. Just enough of it stuck up, however, for Allen to put a high-explosive shell into the upper portion of her mast, destroying the carrier's main antenna and radar array.
Allen had achieved total surprise. All that was left was to be proud of it.
Liscome Bay, for want of a better word, flickered. All of a sudden, the ship was in the front of the woman, metaphysically speaking, and she let off a full broadside from the fifteen Oerlikons that were still operational on her port side. Most of Allen's crew crouched behind their weapons, trying to get as much steel between them and the guns as possible before the enemy corrected their aim, but the two men at her pom-poms stayed standing and returned fire, doing their best to drive the enemy into cover. Her gun crews, still crouched down behind the cannons as best they could manage, loaded another set of star shells and changed their aim to send all of them into each of the doubled up gun wells that were left, cutting the number of operational guns in half.
Allen could have easily done more damage to the ship with high-explosive, but she was better off trying to clear out the enemy gun wells instead. Six torpedoes should be more than enough to send Liscome Bay to the bottom, even if they were underpowered Mark Eights.
The first of the plodding torpedoes impacted Liscome Bay's stern. It must have hit an ammunition or bomb storage compartment, because the entire back half of the carrier disintegrated in an explosion that turned the night into day. Liscome Bay screamed, a sound of utter pain and terror that came to Allen across both the waves and the radio. Then the rest of the torpedoes began to hit. A line of explosions walked forward from the mangled mess of steel where her stern used to be, each one opening up every compartment that might have still remained watertight and allowing the ocean to rush in.
Liscome Bay flickered again, and the woman was once more in front, falling forward. Her legs were gone, and her left arm was shorn off at the shoulder. Her hair had been burnt away too, leaving only short, patchy clumps clinging desperately to her head. She used her one remaining arm to roll over onto her side in a desperate attempt to stem the flooding, but it was no use.
Allen cut her engines and drifted to a stop. She watched as the water crawled up and over the broken carrier's body. A burning airplane broke through the smoke cover, plummeting towards the ocean below, and then the sky let loose in a torrent of fire and falling planes and bombs. Allen didn't move. There was no point in trying to dodge. They couldn't see her through the smoke and she couldn't see them. Luck would have decide if she deserved to live.
Bombs and burning wreckage fell like rain around Allen, but she only had eyes for Liscome Bay. "Don't you dare look away!" she whispered to herself. "Not from this."
As the water climbed up Liscome Bay's face, black tears began to pour from her eyes. They spread across the sea like oil that wouldn't burn.
I'm sorry," Allen blurted out, unsure if the other ship even still had a radio to hear the destroyer tell more lies that felt like truth. "I'm sorry. I made a mistake and you paid for it. I didn't think there would be a submarine there. There shouldn't have been a submarine there, but there was. I messed up, not you. You did it right."
The water closed over Liscome Bay's head, and Allen was left alone in a burning ocean. She didn't move for a long, long time, only stirring when the sky began to brighten on the eastern horizon.
Allen shook herself and then whispered, "I'm tired of watching other ships sink."
Allen goes all ship and finds out that her nature is total philosophy bait.
Allen trips and falls on her face, saving herself from a fit of accidental philosophy.
Allen loses her shark and feels really stupid.
Chapter 3
Allen gets stuck in a freaky storm.
Allen uses her radio to chat with a mentally ill ship who coincidentally happens to be in the same direction as the center of the freaky storm.
Chapter 4
Allen envies Fletchers for their everything.
A mentally ill carrier attacks Allen.
Allen pretends to be the mentally ill carrier's friend to get her to stop attacking.
Allen finds out the mentally ill carrier's name is Liscome Bay.
Allen responds to a mentally ill Liscome Bay's distress call.
Chapter 5
Allen gets angry at whatever hurt Liscome Bay, then she gets frustrated that getting angry doesn't help.
Allen decides to stop being angry and frustrated, it doesn't work. This makes her angry and frustrated.
Not enough. Not enough. Not enough.
Allen takes advantage of Liscome Bay's mental illness to get in close. This makes her feel guilty.
Allen tries to make Liscome Bay feel better. It doesn't work.
Chapter 6
Allen gets shot at.
Allen finds out that fire hurts.
Allen tries to talk Liscome Bay down in order to make herself feel less guilty about her impending murder. It doesn't work, and it doesn't work.
Allen goes swimming.
Allen shoots a mentally ill carrier in the back.
Carry me home
I lost my way on roads ever weaving
Home
Where darkness fades and hearts are ever believing
Carry me home
I close my eyes and cling to you ever dreaming
Find me
Oh don't forget the child for whom you are grieving
~The Place I'll Return To Someday, Erutan
Allen sniffed and wiped her nose with her arm, then glanced at the sun rising over the horizon. It was on her right, so she was sailing north.
"Heh. Tired after only six? I can do better than that. I'll get tired after— after eight. No, thirteen. One for each year of service, then I can get tired. They'll decommission me again before that happens anyway. Maybe it'll even stick. Fourth time's the charm, after all, right?
"It won't be like before either, humans get to retire. I'll go see Boston again, and New York. I can take a shovel to Long Island, teach the stupid pile of dirt not to get in my way again. And I can find out what's on top of those cliffs in Ireland. I'll go see Germany and Japan too, I can do that now since the war is over. That'll be really cool. Then I can settle down in Hawaii. I can go surfing! No, that would be stupid, what kind of ship goes surfing? That's just asking to have my bottom ripped out.
"I can get new clothes though. I'll try on dresses, and swimsuits, and those grass skirts, and a coconut bra."
Allen looked down at herself.
"I should skip the coconut bra. I could try one of those wrap things though. I'll bet I look good in red. And maybe I can grow my hair out too. I could try braids, and french braids, and… and other hair stuff. There's magazines for that, right?
Allen clapped her hands against her cheeks a few times to get her blood flowing. "So yeah, I can do thirteen. I can keep going until then. I can do it.
"I just need a plan."
Date: Friday, Unknown Day 4
Time: 0932
Location: 2° 34′ N, 172° 30′ E
So, the Gilbert Islands. This puts me in a bit of a pickle. In theory, I have just enough range to make a straight shot from here to Hawaii. I could just... go home, so long as nothing else goes wrong.
And therein lies the rub. I may be a destroyer, but I spent enough time training submarines to say that I've got some pigs belowdeck, and I would never be able to look one of my students in the eyes if I made a plan that assumed nothing would go wrong.
They'd say "Allen, that's stupid. Are you stupid? Why are you stupid! Don't be stupid Allen!" And then they'd swear at me, a lot, even though they should be more respectful because I'm their teacher. That's just how submarines are, though. They don't do stupid, and they don't do respect, and there's nothing wrong with that.
I'll bet I'd make a good submarine. I wonder if sinking is more or less scary for them.
I miss Dolphin.
Date: Friday, Unknown Day 4
Time: 0946
Location: 2° 34′ N, 172° 30′ E
On the other hand, I am a couple hundred miles closer to Australia, and there's a lot more islands in between here and there than there is between here and Hawaii for me to refuel at. The Solomon Islands are almost exactly halfway there, for example, and I know I could find US personnel on Guadalcanal at least. There's no way that we'd give up Henderson Field after what we went through to take and hold it.
They. What they went through. I wasn't there. They went through… a lot. Guadalcanal was bad. It was really bad. It's where Aaron Ward sank.
I should go and pay my respects. I can do that now. It wouldn't even be dereliction. Guadalcanal really is a good option, maybe the best one I have. There's nothing wrong with it if it's on my way.
I could go visit Aaron Ward, and Walke, and Preston, and Monssen, and Laffey, and Cushing, and Barton, and Duncan.
None of them were Fletchers.
Date: Friday, Unknown Day 4
Time: 1054
Location: 2° 34′ N, 172° 30′ E
I suppose I could visit the Japanese destroyers while I'm there too.
Yeah, they're the bad guys, but the war is over now. It just seems disrespectful to pretend like they're not there, you know? If I do that, then it's like saying there wasn't any point. If they're not there, then why were we?
They. I wasn't there.
I wonder if any of them came back too.
Date: Friday, Unknown Day 4
Time: 1132
Location: 2° 34′ N, 172° 30′ E
I suppose, technically, Japan is an option, but it's a stupid one. It's farther away than either Australia or Hawaii. It is another place where I can find a guaranteed US base, though. It doesn't matter if it's nineteen forty-six or twenty forty-six. We are going to hold Tokyo Bay until the end of time.
I kind of want to see what it's like over there too. We spent so long fighting them, but I don't actually know much about them, do I? Why do their battleship masts look so weird? Aren't they top-heavy?
Date: Friday, Unknown Day 4
Time: 1141
Location: 2° 34′ N, 172° 30′ E
I feel like there's something wrong with my reasoning. I suppose the obvious thing is that I haven't taken into account how the Navy is reacting to the weird stuff going on out here. They do know that there's weird stuff, right? They couldn't not know.
Right?
Oh my God, they might not know. Are there any major shipping routes in the Gilbert islands? I don't remember what it's supposed to be like out here in peacetime!
Okay, what does this change? I guess it means that speed is more important than destination. I need to find the nearest inhabited island with a city or base large enough to contact the outside world, regardless of whether or not there's any Americans there. It needs to be someplace big, a port, or an airfield.
Airfield is better. Planes are faster than ships.
I don't think there's anything like that in the Gilberts, and if there is, then the outside world probably already knows because that storm Liscome Bay had going covered at least half the chain. I have to assume they don't know, though, so I should probably write off the Gilbert Islands altogether.
There were a couple airfields in the Marshall Islands, weren't there? Kwajalein? I know we definitely had a base on Kwajalein at least, I remember the celebration after they won the battle. It's only about five hundred miles Northwest of here, too. It's a big base, so we probably still have it even if I'm in the future.
Hah, if. I already established that I am definitely in the future. The only question is how far.
What if it's not there anymore? Would they even keep the islands after the war? I know there were little airfields all over the place, but the only other one I remember is Midway, and if Kwajalein is abandoned, it could be too. I don't think there's any islands big enough for what I need that don't have a military base until… where? Fiji? Useless, that's farther than Guadalcanal. Guam is just as bad, I might as well just sail for Hawaii instead. It's only about a thousand more miles.
You know, sometimes I just have to take a step back and realize how big the Pacific Ocean is. It would be really cool if it wasn't so inconvenient.
Actually, it's still really cool. If you look at a globe from the right angle, you'll see almost nothing but water and Islands! Still, the inconvenience is what's important right now.
It's settled. I'm going to the Marshall Islands, with Midway or Guadalcanal as my backup plan, depending on how things look at Kwajalein.
Date: Friday, Unknown Day 4
Time: 1152
Location: 2° 34′ N, 172° 30′ E
Wow, this is a smart plan. I'll just contact the US Navy by sailing away from the United States. Surely this is the pinnacle of strategic thinking. They'll give me a medal for this plan!
In case it wasn't clear, I was being sarcastic. This is the stupidest plan to ever grace the mind of man or ship, but it's the best I can do with what I remember.
I'm really selfish, aren't I? Only remembering the big battles and the places I've been, as if Midway was all that happened between Hawaii and the Solomons. As if the people who died out here don't matter.
Liscome Bay mattered.
I wonder if that's what happened to her, everybody forgot, so she did too. It doesn't make much sense, but what about any of this does?
I hope that isn't how it works. If we forgot her, then what's happened to the other jeep carriers? What about the destroyers? There's too many for anyone to remember us all.
Maybe that's why I'm here. Maybe the Gilbert Islands are just where God sends ships that no one remembers. Or, if that's not how it works, maybe something out here makes ships forget themselves.
Am I going to forget too? Is it already happening? Would I even notice?
I don't want to forget, I just started remembering.
Date: Friday, Unknown Day 4
Time: 1220
Location: 2°41' N 172°34' E
You know where else would be cool to visit? Antartica! It's like the complete opposite of Hawaii, but it's only six hundred miles off the tip of Chile. I'd even have enough fuel to do some exploration while I'm there. I could be a modern-day HMS Challenger!
It's kind of disheartening to realize that even Challenger displaced more than I do. She was a nineteenth century corvette!
I wonder if anyone's ever managed to sail to the North Pole. Probably not. You'd need the world's biggest icebreaker, and those girls aren't built cheap. I'll bet they're all surly from the cold, too. Like Russians.
***
The morning passed into afternoon, and the sea began to change as Allen sailed. First, the breeze came back and began to stir up the waves. They weren't like the unnatural waves from that windless storm, just normal waves. Soon, the cloud cover began to break up, allowing Allen to catch glimpses of the bright blue sky.
Not long after lunch time had come and gone, Allen began to hear static over the radio, and then garbled transmissions that repeated over and over again, for hours on end. She couldn't tell what direction they were coming from, but they gradually grew stronger and stronger over the course of the next couple of hours, until, eventually, she was able to make out what the voice on the other end was saying.
"This is USS Harder. Allen, you are behind enemy lines, so stop broadcasting, you stupid bitch!"
Allen hiccupped, and then a strange sound came out of her mouth. She couldn't tell if she was laughing or crying, and she didn't care.
AN: And that ends the first arc.
In case you are wondering, the six ships she watched go down are Eumaeus, Galway Castle, Arizona, Oklahoma, Utah, and now Liscome Bay. She counts ships that didn't technically sink, but were a total loss like Utah, and doesn't count ships that sank but were returned to service like West Virginia. And no, she's not mean enough to exclude the tugboat. Sotoyomo had USS in her name and earned a battlestar. As far as Allen is concerned, she was a ship, and would have been included if she hadn't gotten re-floated.
Abyssal!Harder would make Allen very sad, I think. She's also out of torpedoes, so said "sad" would probably involve extensive fighting. She was just thinking about how she missed the submarines, and here one shows up.
