This Chapter: Purge
Next Chapter: Interlude: Exodus/Flight Trials
Local Time: 2315 Hours.
April 10, 2161
Location: Hildas Asteroids.
Assigned Personnel: FFW Graf Spee (CO), FFW Farragut, FFW Hoel, FFW William D. Porter
Asymmetric Warfare Tasking
A voice lit up the interfleet communications of a small group of Fog warships currently on a lazy, elongated elliptical orbit towards the Hildas Asteroid group. The burst was local, under a second, and remained charged with characteristic humor, the warship that had sent it smirked across her bridge towards the distant speck of blue that indicated the presence of the friendly vessel.
"Farragut, are you going to spend the entire solar cruise staring at yourself in the mirror aboard your bridge? Or are you going to actually speak to me?" FFW William D. Porter said, biting humor in every word.
"Hey, I'm just admiring the scenery and the updates to my systems and hull Billie, leave me alone!" Came the snappy reply from FFW Farragut, accompanied by a burst of static that was for all intents and purposes the electronic equivalent of blowing a raspberry.
"You sure that's what you're doing~?" Came the teasing response, but before Farragut could get a single word in, her fleetmate continued.
"You sure you're not staring at your mirror because you've got actual tits and grew up after all these years of being a shortie?" Came the reply, encoded with the image of a middle finger.
"Hey! Fuck off, just because you didn't get blessed in the chest department from the years in stasis doesn't mean you get to ruin the fun for those of us that did!" She bit back, smiling even as her fleetmate flashed a burst of signal noise that was another raspberry.
Farragut smirked, pressing her "real" middle finger to the window of her bridge, aiming it at William D. Porter. While the pair of destroyers were technically within visual range, it was visual range for a group of military vessels with drone shells purpose built for scouting and thus, she wasn't directly visible to even the vastly enhanced vision that both William D. Porter and herself had.
It had been very strange to go to sleep in a stasis ring remembering all her frustrations with her age frozen, ship soul containing, body and waking up with basically none of the same issues.
Farragut had been short, and she remained short, but now she actually
looked the age she had been after the war had ended!
She was
ecstatic to finally have a face and body that looked like an adult! One of the first things she'd done when she discovered it, amidst the pod of destroyers she'd served alongside, was shout loudly enough to bring Ayanami running from a nearby chamber where she'd been waking the heavy cruisers, and Akagi, following behind and asking what was wrong a moment later.
When the aging admiral had seen it was simply happiness, she'd smiled thinly and left the room. Farragut hadn't quite forgiven herself for that mistake, even though Ayanami claimed that Akagi had found the whole thing entertaining.
One of the major crises of mental health amongst the destroyers in the past war had been that many of them were adults by the end of the war and yet remained trapped in the bodies of children, trapped forever in shells that froze and remained small. It led to immediate difficulties in the civilian sector, and even before the outbreak of violence that ended so many of them and had the remainder flee to Mars, many destroyers had found their way back to the fleets that had housed them simply because "civilized" humans weren't really comfortable with people that looked like children doing hard labor.
Not that Farragut blamed them but seriously, she'd been nearly 28 years old when the last war had ended, and she'd seen blood and guts and combat enough that, in her honest opinion, she should be allowed to buy some fucking shots of alcohol at a bar without having to be shoved in a jail cell, or ending up in front of a fleet lawyer with a pinched, very unhappy expression.
Now… she was admiring herself in the mirror, seeing a face that wasn't "cute" in it's childlike innocence anymore, but a face she herself would call beautiful. She exulted in her height, in her figure, in every small part of her she'd hated priorly, now made into an asset.
"Farrieeeeee-" Came William D. Porter's voice over interfleet comms, and Farragut snorted at the exaggerated tone, and yet before she could reply-
"Stop staring at your ass and talk to me you idiot!"
Farragut felt her cheeks flush, which in of itself was another bizarre sensation. When she'd been "mostly" human, she'd become accustomed to the feeling of a blush for varying reasons. But the way the nanomaterial making up her body now functioned it felt much more… real and present than any of her old memories of blushing.
"Shut your cakehole, stupid treehugger-" She shot back, wincing the moment the words left her mouth.
Farragut's word choice resulted in a small period of blessed silence, before her fleetmate shot back a video of her own, now older form standing at parade rest and a salute, an exaggerated video of her playing automatically, even as Farragut rolled her eyes.
"I'M FaRRaGut I THiNk I'm ToO GOod fOR sayING tHe FUcK word!" William D. Porter's tone spoke of mockery and joy at her fleetmates expense, and it wasn't one that Farragut thought was particularly necessary, so she declined to answer in kind.
"I don't think I'm too good to say it, I just don't think every situation warrants it, Billie!" Came the hotheaded reply- which was met with a very
real raspberry.
"Dummmyyyyyyy too good for us plebs with our swearing and foul mouths, Ferrie's a good noble girl gals, remember! Remember how she turns down her nose at us modern destroyers and allllll our speed and fanciness! She's the real golden oldie generation!"
Feeling herself flush with anger, Farragut smacked open her comms and whispered in a deliberately quiet voice.
"Billie~ If you don't be quiet in the next 10 seconds about any "noble lady" connotations I'll tell Graf Spee what you said about Musashi the night before we sortied."
When the response came, it was laser quick and timid.
"Yes Ma'am."
Farragut smiled to herself and leaned back, stretching her senses through the new body that allowed her to dance between the stars as easily as she fought her way through the seas on Earth. Every sense attuned, sensor clusters in her hull lancing out across the void and the asteroids that occasionally were relevant as she adjusted her thrusters to avoid them or the dust clouds that made up this particular cluster of asteroids outside of the inner belt.
Space still filled her with wonder as she looked out into the void and the beauty of that expanse. Stars speckled the heavens, and here, angled away from the dimming light of Sol, they were truly spectacular, and special beyond belief for her even more now that she could sail amongst them. Farragut had arrayed every single telescope aboard a small, modified compartment in her stern, created for her and by her. She'd done so purely for her own enjoyment of the beauty that surrounded her.
The small laboratory in the same space as her telescopes led to a few portholes and windows that were a form of transparent metal, and they themselves had been obscured by the pair of powerful, but limited stellar telescopes. Allowing her to photograph and record data from faraway stars in her free time, it was here that she'd gone as she'd argued with Billie over the comms. She'd stepped into the sterile, perfectly maintained space of her lab as she'd sent that whispering comm over to Billie, and had received her reply while peering through one of the telescopes that cast its wide, sensor laden gaze out into the great, beautiful void beyond.
She'd been delighted when her new form had been presented to her, she was still quite small by the UN fleet's standards, but
vastly larger than her prior form, and with that came a number of modular bays and blisters along her hull that she could, and had, happily used to give herself some of the telescopes she'd always wanted. They were far from the orbital satellite telescopes she'd often marveled at in the wake of the war, Farragut was still a warship, fundamentally. But the small astronomy lab and pair of telescope blisters mounted in the midsection of the stern was enough for her at the moment, even if she was desperately hoping that Akagi would build a big telescope in the orbit of Mars just for her. Maybe she'd let Akashi and Blucher visit if they were
very polite to her.
"Farrie?"
The comm seemed more hesitant and curious, so Farragut turned the majority of her attention away from her hunched over form at the telescope and answering the comm. She did not have to do any of this manually, linked in to her systems as she was, but she still enjoyed it, and chose to express that enjoyment in being… by the standards of any AI, incredibly slow.
"Yes Billie?"
The other destroyer's reply was discontent, nervous as it came through.
"Do you think there's going to be another Chapayev situation here?"
Farragut grimaced and paused while she constructed a reply, their fleet was currently lazily spread out across the elliptical of a cluster of asteroids and dust known as the Hildas cluster. Nominally it was too small to hold anything of strategic or tactical value. In reality, with data taken from another Frieden base buried in the inner belt, it pointed to at least three distinct outposts buried in the Hildas cluster or long term ships dispatched there for research. The Friedens
shouldn't have had a navy at all, and yet they did, and while it was barely at the level of the UN's fleet hovering over earth, it had been enough to catch their earth expedition off guard. The horrors that had been revealed when Atago and Takao had raided another Frieden data center had been enough to send shaking rumors and terror through the fleet.
With the UN supposedly now moving through their entire organization and rooting out Frieden spies left and right, Farragut knew they weren't an active force in the system, but in contrast to that…
Chapayev's bloodstained, half dead body floated in her mind.
"I hope not, Billie. But if that's the case, we'll provide final decommissioning for any fleet asset in the hands of the enemy."
A mental shudder manifested in the message as a burst of meaningless noise, but Farragut sent it anyway. She wasn't the leader here, it was Spee's job to be cool and professional, she didn't need to moderate her tone or force herself to be more cool and composed than she was.
"I don't want to think that it's true."
Farragut heard the silent plea in her fleetmates voice, a fear of what they could possibly run into.
"Do you have a bad feeling about this, Billie?" Farragut asked quietly, some of them had maintained various powers from their former selves, it was always something small or random, unless you were Ayanami, who explicitly could teleport between shadows of any fleet asset in her general area.
"I'm not sure Farrie… I just, something isn't right with all of this, where are they getting their ships? How did they pull a navy from their asses? It makes no fucking sense when the UN can barely pull new tech off it's production lines in time. There aren't any heavy orbital works of the scale or secrecy needed to produce anything like the ships that Takao and Atago ran into, and those ships were at the same level of the UN fleet from scans taken, sure, none of them are mounting any of those gigantic railguns the UN seem to love so much, but they're at the same level and were built prior. It makes no real sense to me, unless they're using abyssal or siren tech, but those groups were waterbound, so how did they make it work?"
Farragut chuckled slightly as she formulated her response.
"You know, much as they are human, and only human, they are a unique people and are capable of many things, I don't think you should put it past them that they could be capable of such feats of technology."
"But if they did succeed… why did it have to be the Nazis?"
Billie's response was quiet, and Farragut found that she didn't have an immediate response. Billie had drawn closer to Farragut as she'd been speaking, and they were now within visual range of their enhanced eyes. But they both lapsed into a silence as the conversation died off, with Farragut returning to her telescope, even as her thoughts warred within her.
Akagi had been tight-lipped about much of the data they'd recovered from the Friedens; she'd been quiet to their group at least for much of the time they'd spent on Mars watching and waiting for deployment orders.
Medusa had been glued to the fleet that had returned from earth, and Akashi, in all her exhausted and grumpy countenance, hadn't let anything slip beyond that Siren or Abyssal technology was suspected by Fleet Command.
Farragut couldn't focus, her eyes slipping away from the telescopes in her hull until she finally gave up and with a sigh moved beyond the door, directing it to seal with a flicker of quicksilver thought directed at the mechanisms.
Her head poked up above the deck and she stared around her at the stars above, protected by her armor and her stealth, the faint light of her ship eclipsed by everything around it, Farragut lay her head back on the deck and watched those stars slip by her as she dove into the incoming oceans of data funneling through her sensor systems.
The modularity of many Fleet of Fog Warships was something that Farragut was still getting used to. A part of her itched because her torpedo racks, something she'd kept for so,
so long, were no longer aboard her vessel, almost like she'd lost something part of who she'd always been. Instead, she harbored extra gun mounts and missile launch bays buried in her hull. The purpose of her retrofitting was to make her serve as a slapdash frontline combat vessel.
With a grand total of 9 combat capable capital ships, Akagi had been hard pressed to actually create fleets, and thus, the modularity of Akashi's upgrades had been pushed to the absolute limits of the fleet's manufacturing and outfitting facilities. With Martian airspace and orbital tracks monitored extremely heavily, Akagi had gotten creative, using Musashi's larger detachment, escorted by several of the capital ships, she'd distracted much of the UN fleet into trying to pry data greedily from the wake shadows and energy signatures of the unique, technologically advanced vessels as they flitted about, dancing above the rust of the surface.
Farragut herself had been refitted in the shadow of the Martian satellite Deimos, outfitted by a series of automatic constructor drones launched under the cover of a meteor shower and fleet exercises. The refit had torn away her torpedo launching facilities and replaced them with additional gun turrets.
Farragut was now a sword shaped sleek predator, slinking and darting along the stars in a fashion that made her feel every bit as graceful as the ballerinas of Europe were. She'd mostly gotten used to the angular smoothness to her new hull; it was far more cohesive than her old superstructure, funnel and machinery had ever been. Scuttlebutt floated amongst the smaller Fleet of Fog vessels that one or two capital ships had actually kept some old superstructure- pagodas or some other nonsense- but she'd yet to see that in actual practice.
Surely at a certain point, they'd have to face the simple fact that the new hulls and changes were vastly preferable to the older forms, right?
Along her dark grey and blue flanks burned the brilliant blue of the detachment she served under, the single, glaring eye of FFW Atlanta, the light cruiser commanding three separate wolfpacks, most of Akagi's forces within the solar system. At the rear third of her hull a quartet of dark spires jutted from the surface, retractable and collapsible, these represented her heat sinks, radiators, and her telescopes, and were extremely useful for both running dark and her own personal interests. While none of her heat sink towers were exposed at the moment, her telescopes and radiators had been left out to drink in the stars in the heavens and vent excess heat from her reactor and union core.
Along the fore and aft of her hull lay a quartet of gun turrets, dual barreled and upgunned photon cannons created specifically for the mission she was serving in and staring down. On the skirts of her hull she carried her external missile racks alongside internal bays and a single factory module for the fabrication of repair drones and more munitions.
The ventral side of her hull was a repeat of the dorsal, another 4 turrets, arranged in AB XY formation around another pair of retractable towers, these ones housing the roosts and masts where Farragut's drone shell was launched and recovered from.
She'd felt strange, larger, much larger than her prior form at nearly 200 meters long, which in of itself would be dwarfed by the Martian fleet's eventual new hulls with their capital ships and heavy cruisers. Not only could Farragut hurl herself at much higher speeds relative to her old form, she was even more responsive. As agile as Olympic ice-skaters dancing across an arena, her thrusters and RCS systems let her dash and dive, dip and ascend with the practiced ease of a dragonfly thanks to her robust propulsion and power. Dancing and diving, dipping and ascending at the speed of thought and powered by her new engines.
But even that wasn't the strangest part of her new form. She'd understood the concept of stealth in the last war, but "stealth" had meant running radio silent and with no lights beyond the most minimal even in the heaviest of seas. In the open stars, stealth meant making no unnecessary noise, but it more often meant keeping your
heat as invisible as possible, alongside your electronic signatures and signals. Careful applications of nanomaterial had been applied to her hull over her armor, it was haphazard by the standards of Fleetcom, but it meant that Farragut was more or less completely invisible after she accelerated, cut her engine and turned off her Klein field. It meant running a little hot, but unlike squishy humans, Farragut could actually open a window if she felt like it.
Their modularity was their strongest weapon, she'd been told. With her new hull and armaments, Farragut was comparable less to a destroyer, and more to a light cruiser, fielding an immensely powerful battery of upgunned cannons and a battery of missiles that would let her rip apart lesser ships in seconds. While it wasn't perfect, and she still felt abnormally large sometimes, Farragut was largely pleased with the shifts, and Medusa's belief that it would only get easier as she continued to fly and sortie was deeply heartening to hear.
Her missile armaments boggled her mind as well, in the past war, she'd been lucky to have her single use uppercut of 8 torpedoes, which had to serve well enough for the duration of an entire fight. She'd been confident until the first time a sortie had resulted in her confronting an enemy heavy cruiser at what could be politely considered point blank range and her torpedoes had failed to do anything other than minorly inconvenience the bitch.
She'd almost been scrapped after that fight and it had made her thoroughly reconsider her stance on heavy ordnance. Namely that she couldn't have enough of it. Now, as Farragut played her gaze across the skirts of her hull, she smiled a sharklike, teeth filled smirk. Before, in the war, she'd had 8 torpedoes, but now? In a single opening salvo using her external racks, Farragut could launch nearly a thousand missiles in the span of less than 3 seconds. While it was flashy and incredibly powerful, such a strike was often completely unnecessary for any of the current threats she
might come up against. While the unpleasant surprise the Frieden's had a navy at all was part of this, their navy was not a match for a Fleet of Fog vessel in direct combat.
The problem was that the Frieden's figured that out
stupidly fast, and had changed tactics, preferring strike and fade, ambush, and traps left behind. They'd nearly won with a trap before, and it had only been through sheer luck and the power difference between the two factions that the Fleet had come out on top. Akagi had adapted accordingly, focusing on exploiting the fleet's superior stealth capabilities and their electronic warfare mastery to launch boarding actions and raids that saw them striking out at direct targets.
If the Friedens were extremely smart, the potential station that Farragut and her fleetmate were drifting towards with minute maneuvering thruster burns was a dead station with all personnel and necessary information immediately burned and nothing but empty metal left behind.
Personally? Farragut was hoping they weren't that smart. The things that they'd done to Chapayev were horrific, the things she'd seen in the footage and photographs.
In the aftermath? Farragut wanted to
hurt them. She'd wanted to lay waste to them utterly, to break them in half and drag their rotting souls to hell personally.
She knew that sentiment was a shared one, even Billie, sweet woman she often was, was nowhere
near capable of repressing the bloodthirst that often broke through her sweet smile when they were brought up.
And so, when one of Farragut's drone shell, pushed out to near their absolute maximum range from her relays, finally pinged off of something that was not matching the composition of the belt, she stood up and surveyed the result.
A moment later, her drone powered up from low resolution, snapping its powerful sensor array around and sending transmissions into the depths of the shell, arriving at her arrays after less than a second of transmission.
The sudden power up did not go unnoticed, and a moment later Billie was signaling her with not open comms, with bursts of static noise.
The length of these bursts was measured in fractions of a second, but they came in fast enough to be used for coded transmissions, although to any observers, the hope was that it would meld seamlessly into the background or be so unintelligible that no one could figure it out.
Billie pulled away from Farragut almost immediately, the pair of destroyers spreading out into flanking patterns along the contact Farragut's drone was registering. From all outward scans and appearances, it was a heavy construct of steel with sensors along-
A burst of radiation and a slight flicker of light were all that Farragut caught before her drone's signature vanished alongside the stream of data she was recording.
It could have been a micrometeorite. The drones were fragile, usually guided by the mothership's much better sensors, however, in this area, in this operation, and at this distance?
Farragut ran her tongue over her teeth, and pushed her orbital arc upwards by a few degrees, aiming to get a single good pass over the last location of her drone in a few hours. A part of her wanted to power up to full combat readiness and send a reply into that unknown zone that consisted of half her external racks. But she pushed it down, that kind of reckless thinking was exactly what had gotten the Earthbound expedition into so much trouble.
That line of thinking had almost led to the loss of an entire task force.
She would not allow that to happen again. Not on her watch.
Farragut squared her shoulders and sent a single coded burst to Billie, before she altered her orbit and tipped prow over stern. Bay towers extended from amidships, Farragut launched a pair of replacement drones, one of them direct to Billie, carrying her system logs and a link to her union core. The other one raced for the distant, tracked trajectory of their Task Force leader, while a third darted from a missile tube in the stern for the very distant IFF signal of Atlanta, sitting amidst her wolfpack in orbit over Ceres at the very edge of the system.
FFW Graf Spee
Asymmetric Warfare Tasking
Patrolling the inner asteroid belt, within range of Hildas Asteroids.
"Spee, Spee! The Photon cannons are variable! I can use normal shells in them too, and my barrels don't have to be replaced like, ever! The new caliber is larger too, I've got the same guns that Saratoga carried aboard her flanks! Did you see the new ranges and the explosive yields? My photon guns can be set for beam lengths of longer than a few seconds, I can even switch them directly to laser weaponry if I have to, like what Nimi did during the battle of the Japanese waters a few weeks ago, where she cut an enemy ship to pieces!"
The chatter rolled over Graf Spee like water, and the German ship resisted the urge to pat her young escort on the head, even as her lips threatened to crack the stony countenance she was known and cherished for.
Her escort was just… so very excitable about the varying upgrades and the very specific measures that went into their maintenance and repair and modification. It was for that very specific reason that Akashi, upon hearing of her assignment, had given Admiral Graf Spee one single, critical piece of advice.
"Never let her modify your weapons. She can work on her own, but not yours."
That was a lesson that Graf had taken to heart, and she was glad she had, because the little destroyer was a fearsome creature of creativity.
"Spee, were you listening?"
The heavy cruiser nodded gently, speaking in her flat, clipped tone.
"I had thought that you would be more interested in your new form?"
The destroyer blinked and looked down at herself, before looking to her hull.
"I mean the modularity is amazing, and the new turrets are great, but I'm honestly a larger fan of the factories, foundries, and drone hubs, have you seen these things? I mean… of course you have… given what you're carrying and all, but their versatility is truly amazing. Have you taken a look at some of the designs I've sent over to you?"
Her question prompted Spee to actually think for a moment about her answer. Several fleet assets had taken their prodigious skill with jury rigging and engineering and had begun to mess with and prototype unique designs, several were promising, and had been adopted for use fleetwide, such as Wasp's hastily modified boarding defense teams, combat drones with heavy armor and capable of using a personal shielding unit in addition to oversized shotguns.
But more than a few of them were impractical, and it was for this reason that Spee was being given pause. Thoughts of several spectacularly expensive projects that had originated from Ayanami's mind, the woman wanted a sword of some kind that was effectively made of liquid metal that could be heated and vibrated for additional damage. The power source would have used an unshielded Thanatonium reactor in the construction. Spee herself was not that skilled with engineering work, which made her somewhat of an oddity amongst the rest of her surviving compatriots, the U-boats in particular were often experts at modifying and especially jury rigging technology. They'd already carved out a subterranean laboratory and had been throwing absurd amounts of paper around when Spee had last entered the compartment they resided within, buried deep under the martian surface.
Hoel clearly had a talent for this, one of her drones was a squid like heavy weapons platform, capable of soaring through the void completely under stealth with basically zero radiance from its modified, quiet power core. The thing was, however, armed with an array of deadly, if short lived weapons capable of ruining the day of any enemy ship if it got close, there was immense potential in a defensive engagement of flooding the battlespace with the automata and letting them go to work whenever an enemy vessel drew near. Spee marveled slightly as she observed the attachments that Hoel had provided, the squidlike automata had 10 separate limbs, with between 2-4 devoted to propulsion units and maneuvering thrusts in addition to the central thruster attached at the base, simulations had them highly maneuverable and difficult to hit by conventional weapons. Lasers would cut them to pieces, but even the Fleet's Laser weapons were limited to extremely close engagements, and some of the larger capital ships had been looking at alternatives if they ever had to close to a distance where the standard photon cannon was less powerful. On each limb not devoted to propulsion, the drone could carry members of a boarding team, or it could carry external launchers for missiles of all types. In some cases Hoel appeared to have adapted repair drone tools onto some of the limbs, allowing them to cut through hull plating or sabotage other starships.
But on the negative side, these drones would be logistically complicated. Each one of the 10 meter drones had to have its own bay, and they were exclusively single use; once launched, they could not be recovered by the ships that launched them unless they were compromising module space for a dedicated recovery bay. Finally they were expensive, requiring precious thanatonium for an application that was more advanced and deadly if everything went correctly than a corrosive torpedo, but not anywhere
near as simple to build a production line for in the early days of the Fleet's ongoing expansion.
In short, they would be brutally effective, but at a later date, when an industrial priority could be given to new vessels, and when the bays and shipyards weren't focused entirely on Akagi's aggressive modernization and update project.
"I believe they are a touch too niche for combat applications on this mission."
Spee winced internally, hoping that wasn't too harsh, she was working on her tone to the best of her ability, but still knew she could often come across as too aggressive and too blunt.
"Hmm… I think I see what you're getting at, the logistical profile is really complicated, isn't it? Too much for your bays for sure, given what we're running with, and I think even Wasp or Akagi might struggle with their limited space and bays right now… then…"
The girl paused, tapping her chin and thinking, permutations and designs running across the link to Spee as the small escort ship began working on a new project, a hull shape taking formation in her hands.
It was larger than a cruiser, nearly a modernized battleship hull at near 1.2 kilometers in length, but dedicated manufacturing bays made up most of its bulk, with hangars at the fore and aft, alongside external pods on the skirts of the vessel. It looked very roughly like a double pointed javelin in shape, with a long midsection isolated from the points of the javelin on each end. Much of these midsections symbolize modular bays, and it seemed that Spee had jammed as many as she could fit into the design, while earmarking several near the fore and aft of the vessel as specifically for repair bays, foundries, and drone hubs.
Before Spee could make out much else or study the design further, a pair of contacts appeared on her passive sensor grid and she dropped her attention from the design. Fleet of Fog warships were capable of using powerful and long ranged active sensors, but they were the space fleet equivalent of more or less shouting your present for the entire solar system to hear. According to simulations and established fleet doctrine this would most likely be done during a full engagement or war, as the resolution and range of the sensors would be required in all engagements that seriously involved the fleet. But as they were not quite at war, and Spee's orders limited her to being as quiet as she could, hence the use of a swarm of reconnaissance and scouting platforms deployed vastly ahead of her hull. Spee's modifications were explicitly aimed towards expansion of her scouting platforms and the addition of missile bays and squadron hangars. Thus, along her angular and narrow hull, she sported several spires of metal and sensors designed to link with her swarm and provide her with much needed battlefield intelligence.
Drone swarms were good at using passive, small scale sensors to scan and defend the fleet via intelligence, and Spee's sphere of drones currently had been pushed out to hundreds of thousands of kilometers distant. Each one linked back to Spee's sensor towers, registering any incoming contacts and sending pictures and what limited data they could gather in passive mode. With a flicker of thought she could intensify them for active sensing, and it was this that she chose to initiate.
"Hoel, three incoming contacts detected, I do not expect hostility at this juncture, but as it crosses my shell we will get a better view of it."
She felt through the flagship link with Hoel as the destroyer took notice. Without a second thought or a response, the younger woman cut her communications and dove
hard away from Spee. The maneuver lit up Hoel like a flare briefly, before the destroyer cut her engines off and retracted her radiators, before long, the only reason Spee knew she was there was because of the IFF broadcast and her flagship authority. Fleet of Fog Flagships used a form of very poorly understood technology as a basis for faster than light and sneakier communications, it wasn't as effective as speaking or interfacing purely through code, but through careful bursts of radiation, and flares in that "link" simple messages could be transmitted quickly, though in all circumstances so far, the link was only ever used to transmit IFF's to the flagship and current condition, represented to Spee as a pulsing, blue signal she could see hovering over the approximate location of her fleetmate. It matched the other indicators from much, much farther ahead of her, deeper into the Hildas Asteroids. Content with her positioning, Spee turned her full attention to the outermost grouping of roughly 8 drones, slowly changing their course and bringing cameras and relays online as the contacts approached.
All three of them split apart, heading in different directions. One of the contacts flashed towards her, continuing to build up speed as it darted past her outer shell perimeter, she had just enough time to catch an image with her drone shell before it rocketed through the upper level of Spee's shell and towards the far limits of the system. Cameras aboard her drones accompanied scanning lasers and sensors, and all became active for split seconds, taking pictures, gathering data, and returning a positive identification on the origin of the contact.
A drone, large, carrying data, and by the slight glowing markings aboard the vessel it was from FFW Farragut, heading past Spee and on an outward bound trajectory. It took Spee all of a single second to extrapolate all possible locations it was burning to and narrow them down, finally settling on the distant, pulsing blue sigil of the FFW Atlanta's last known position over Ceres, far in the outer belt of the solar system.
The second contact was beginning to decelerate even as Hoel's momentum carried her farther down the elliptical path towards the ventral side of the cloud that was the Hildas Asteroids. The destroyer's bays remained tightly sealed, trusting in her flag vessels larger and much more expansive shell and sensor suite, although Spee noted with pride that Hoel was feathering her power plant, anticipating a full extension to action stations and bringing her systems up slowly, charging the capacitors that could flood her Klein field with energy and bring it to full capacity in seconds.
Hoel was different from Farragut and William D Porter in that she was a modified support vessel for this mission, carrying a good two thirds of her engineering space and hull as manufacturing bays, refineries, and repair shops for the larger form of Spee. They bloated the silhouette of the destroyer, and cut her speed and maneuverability by a significant amount. Hence her dropping low and behind Spee, letting the much larger flagship take any incoming pressure and readying her bays to accept damaged craft.
Spee was supposed to be a "pocket" battleship, but the Friedens had in their attack on the earth task force, exploited what they knew of prior task forces, and thus in preparation for this mission of asymmetric warfare she'd been retrofitted alongside Hoel, Farragut, and William D. Porter. Now, she served as a backline artillery and drone carrier, with swarms of attack craft within her bays and photon guns modified for longer range engagements. She could not hold the truly enormous swarms that Akagi or Wasp could bring to bear, but she also lacked a modernized hull, instead receiving merely the same "mirrored" configuration that her larger capital ship counterparts had received. Then, her skirts and inner bays had been cut apart to fit the hangar spaces for her drone shell and attack craft squadrons.
Now, Spee carried a trio of squadrons of heavily armored attack craft, with two directly built for assaulting light vessels, while the other packed combat automata alongside a trio of heavily armored gunships. The trio made up the primary force of her offensive might, and when combined with Hoel's support refit, she could outfit and keep the squadrons in action for most of a week of continuous sorties if all went well, that the smaller destroyer was carrying Thanatonium within the depths of her hold, designed to replenish the stocks of Spee's attack craft and top off her own corrosive torpedoes, especially given their intended use cases as long range support for her fleet.
It was a very good thing she didn't need a human or living crew, there was almost zero space in her hull now, especially when considering the average dimensions of a human being and the food and supplies they needed for any sort of long journey. Spee really only had the bridge, her quarters adjacent to the bridge, and a chute leading to varying escape vessels attached at points to her hangars and drone bays. She'd initially thought it was overkill to have separate launchers and escape vehicles for both her human body and her union core, but in the wake of the mission to earth, she was no longer disagreeing with the extra slots. From a tactical perspective she could also appreciate just the usage of decoys for shielding her own escape from a battlespace, especially if that escape was aboard a cloaked stealth drone, wherein her body could then be reconstituted. In short, she had almost zero room, and no creature comforts beyond a few books she'd brought with her on the long, long journey.
She was looking forward to receiving a full, modernized hull in the wake of this mission. The things that her destroyers had said were delightful enough, it was just a shame that they couldn't simply nanomaterial a new hull for her or other classes of vessel like they could with the mirrored design. Of course the new hulls were vastly more efficient and larger and Spee wanted them for that reason too, but there was another reason as well. She had to admit that she was more than a little jealous of the way that Farragut and the others had transformed from being adorable, into being well… beautiful women after their modernizations. She'd been 18 when the soul of the cruiser Graf Spee had possessed her, and she'd been in her 30's by the time the war ended. She thought it was a touch unfair that she still didn't really look like she was an adult.
Why did Musashi get to look like a tall, elegant, pretty lady and she didn't? It wasn't fair.
Akashi had given a long, technical briefing of exactly why they were shifting towards adult states in the wake of their retrofits, something involving less restrictive construction requirements among other things, but she very explicitly had stated that it wasn't a surefire thing, for example, Hoel had ended up looking like a runner, but she remained fairly small, standing only around 4'11. Graf, now being shorter than Hoel, one of the shortest women in the fleet was
not happy about this, but she tolerated it as best she could for the duration of the mission even as frustration over her old, outdated hull boiled away at her like armor after a photon cannon strike.
She couldn't blame Fleet Command for prioritizing destroyers and Martian defenses alongside shipyards and docking facilities beneath the Martian surface to store the more damaged members of the fleet and their sleeping, comatose bodies. She couldn't blame them for prioritizing the faster, more useful ships that were easier to retrofit and easier to equip, alongside being less expensive, but it still hurt to feel rejected every time another destroyer was called up to be refitted and she'd simply had her old hull gutted and slapdash refit to be good "enough" for this mission. At least her new hull was more powerful… In her prior form she carried a battery of six 28 cm main guns spread across two triple turrets, now she carried double that number, spread into four turrets allayed across her hull, in a break from tradition, one of each was mounted on the dorsal and ventral hull, and the remaining two were attached amidships, each gun had additionally been changed, overcharged to provide higher yields and damage. But it wasn't exactly what she wanted…
Spee shook herself free of her self pity spiral, and focused on the contact decelerating as it came in past her drone shell on a course direct for her. Targeting scopes and drones, kept fanned out from her original location, painted it with lasers and scans, squawking a hostile challenge to the drone's primitive, limited intellect. A challenge that was answered with a correct identification and had Spee's automatic defenders standing down as it came in close, flipping around and firing its primary engine to bring it in close enough that it was soon in visual range. It bore no signs of battle damage, nor anything in its logs indicating it had been launched on or attacked since its launch from the FFW Farragut's drone spire almost three hours prior to its arrival within her "reach".
Spee opened a small bay on her upper bow and extended a crane as the drone decelerated to match her speed, bringing the small vessel onboard and immediately interfacing with the communications array and specific uplink attached, tethered to her scout some 500000 kilometers distant from her location.
Accompanying the communications was an invitation for tea. The sheer attitude meant only Farragut could have sent it, and with a slight smile curving her lips, Spee accepted the request.
"You have a report?"
The form of Farragut, clad in casual clothing as opposed to the uniform and bodysuit she typically wore appeared at the table opposite her, cup of tea already held in one hand. She inclined her head to Spee and began immediately. Knowing that her flagship appreciated immediate reports and efficient uses of her time over pleasantries.
"My shell ran into something, and while the drone that found it stopped transmitting before I could get a closer look. Based on the preliminary pictures and scans I am fairly sure of what we're looking at."
She tapped the table, and a sugarcube rose from the bowl in the center, and took a form that Spee had been briefed on, breaking apart and transforming in front of her. The space that Spee and Farragut currently shared was not a physical, real place, instead a virtual representation of a communications channel that was directly connected to their union cores, while Spee, as the flag vessel, could shift the room to appear like whatever she felt like it appearing as, she usually just preferred to see what her fleetmates used for their own communications. In this case, Farragut preferred a tea room.
Spee turned her attention to the sugar cube diagram constructed in front of her, studying it with one hand on her chin. From a casual inspection it appeared to be nothing more than a large steel mine, but the slender tendrils that locked around its metal shell revealed the truth, alongside the faint radiological signals lurking in the center of it.
"They're identical to what was discovered in the logs of the aftermath of the attack on our fleet on Earth. My suspicion is that they're double to quadruple the size and likely by ratio as dangerous, but I'm approaching for a closer look as we speak. If the mines remain active and the technology is fresh, or there's signs of it being something worth pushing, I'll advise you further."
Spee nodded and fizzled the communication, but not before replying.
"I will move myself and Hoel into the engagement range of the center of the affected area. Send further messages when your survey of the area is complete."
As it shut down, Spee turned her gaze piercingly towards the stars and inky void that stretched out in front of her. Somewhere out there, her fleet probed into darkness, searching for the Nazi scum that sought their destruction, searching for an ideology
her original creators had made popular.
The thought distressed her, and she felt her lip curling.
"It's going to be alright, promise!"
Hoel's voice snapped her out of her locked focus, and she looked towards the dim light of her escort and support ship.
"Farrie and Billie are there, and they're unstoppable, with you as support? Flag, we're going to ruin the day of those bastards. Promise!"
Her optimism was infectious, and Spee found herself faintly smiling, even as she sent a quicksilver thought directly to her systems, and flared her ship from stealth to activity. Klein fields capacitors glowing a brilliant red inside of her hull as her powerplant charged them for immediate deployment. Spee's sensor suite went from passive to active, her drone envelope pushed out even farther as her arrays and receivers powered to full, their own power sources kicking on like fireworks as they powered up hard and fast, scanning arrays and oculus systems pushing her visible and known envelope to enormous lengths. This decision would serve two purposes, it would light her up to the entire system, and particularly to her other fleetmates, with Atlanta's task force over Ceres being one, and Batfish's task force deep in the belt being the other.
Spee felt her ship respond, felt its acceleration and her power core's hum as her capacitors charged and as her systems began to shift towards full readiness. A flicker of feeling, pulsing sensations of open pleasure and delight across her body. She didn't grin, but she smiled, just the slightest hint of bared teeth.
Maybe she'd get to experience Atago's "favorite game of all time." She'd heard from the woman herself that "hunting the nazi" had been intensely fun, and she wanted to have some fun too and disprove a rumor in the process.
Who dared say that Germans had no sense of humor? She'd show them!
Spee's hull tipped forwards and flipped
hard, maneuvering thrusters igniting and her primary drive igniting into a blaze as she accelerated towards the locations shared by William D. Porter and Farragut. Precisely ninety seconds later, Hoel followed, executing a perfect turn and burn exactly on the heels of her larger flag vessel.
FFW
Atlanta
Asymmetric Warfare Tasking: Wolfpack Leader
Orbiting Ceres
Atlanta frowned as a brilliant ping appeared on her sensors. A rapid response courier drone of some kind, burning out its engines as its dumb little drone brain drove it to overclock its reactor. Her drone shell, provided courtesy of the heavy cruiser Atago on this flank, pinged it and queried its IFF, several of Atago's nastier strike wings hiding fully stealthed amidst the drones they orbited. When the IFF had been verified, a distinctly audible "mou" of displeasure echoed across her communications, and Atlanta sighed.
"Atago… not every contact is a potential Nazi, didn't you get enough on your little raid?"
The fox woman, Atlanta's second in command, responded in seconds, an animated expression of annoyance cartoonishly drawn across her sigil on the detachment display.
"Not enough, not yet, not ever. Besides… my darlings are hungry for more Nazi blood~"
At the beginning of their tasking, and immediately after Atago's mirrored, modified hull had slid clean of the drydocks. The fox woman had begun complaining
incessantly about the way her armored skirts(graceful curves) were now replaced by a pair of large hangar bays(stupid dresses) and her internal machinery, aside from engines, gun turrets, and reactor, had been ripped apart and gutted to store the factories and refineries that would let her field, repair, and replenish a full 4 squadrons of strike craft. To Atlanta, it didn't matter, Atago could complain all she wanted, but she was the escort carrier for their little fleet, and she'd have to just suck it up and make it work. At the very least the woman had shut up after being shown how her little monsters could cause pain and death from over a four hundred thousand kilometers away.
That she'd gone on to stick pilots in the things had confused the living hell out of Atlanta, because seriously, none of the fleet used pilots, they weren't even necessary! With that said, she understood at least vaguely that Atago had a reason for it but she suspected that the real reason was Atago's
barely contained sadism. A shudder ran through her body, the response was a relic of when she actually
had an organic body, but she let it happen anyways. The genuine wish that the wolf woman's sister was here to deal with her was never far from her mind, Takao at least seemed to be the
focus for much of Atago's blatant pranking, sadism, and bizarre delight in humiliation. Which meant that Atlanta herself would have been quite safe, unfortunately, Takao was in the home fleet, patrolling around the orbital pathways of Mars. While she personally didn't care whether or not the sadistic gremlin of a second in command she had, actually used her pilots or just enjoyed seeing the combat androids die, she also wasn't about to start shit with one of the most lethally, unfairly pretty women in the fleet. She wasn't stupid, depressingly single, yes, but stupid, no. Atago's psychotic murder bees performed well in all the combat tests they'd undergone so far. Although given the way the woman cooed over them sometimes, Atlanta wondered if the heavy cruiser would ever go back to her prior form, or if this new depiction of Atago was here to stay.
The rest of her detachment were picking over Ceres, scouting for remnants of the sizable Freiden fleet that had lurked in orbit of the dwarf planet for quite a few months. Data seized in Atago's past raid indicated there was a staging ground of some kind here for operations and patrols in the inner system, though why the hells the Frieden's would haul their asses all the way out here Atlanta had no answer for.
"Flag, 156 reports old signatures of technology on the south pole of Ceres, she's gone dark in response to a potential targeting laser, but her location data and scans were picked up before she moved away from the planetoid." Came the cool, composed voice of KMS Nurnberg currently orbiting the equatorial line of Ceres, she was in an ideal place for relaying any pertinent communications up the chain of command to Atlanta's holding position.
Atlanta finally smiled, because Atago was singing to her little monsters and she just wasn't built to tolerate or deal with that. Her response was quick, and delight filled her tone.
"Good, I'm sending Atago and Z36 on a course to that location, prepare to land your troops."
While Atlanta was fitted for full combat and Atago her carrier, Nurnberg had had her entire missile arrays and magazines gutted, instead fielding a large bay for assault teams and boarding crews alongside the blocky, large torpedoes that would deliver them directly to any target that was targeted for aggressive recovery. Several of these teams of combat androids had already been bloodied, with Nurnberg herself leading from the front on several occasions, the vessel desiring to rise against the ideology that built her even as they praised the earth she walked on. Several clouds of circling, orbiting debris marked a few of these ships, scuttled after Nurnberg's teams finished their destructive, cruelly efficient work aboard.
"Atago, Z36- U-156 has found something on the South Pole, disperse to the coordinates and support Nurnberg in her ground assault, resistance expected."
As she cut the transmission a flare of energy announced Atago flipping into a dive and accelerating, her drive leaving a blaze of energy in its wake as she lit up a hundred kilometers like a second sun. Fleet of Fog drive systems were incredibly powerful when an annihilating reactor was in play, and Atago did not just use her drive to maneuver, she soared and flew like a destroyer half her size.
It was this flare that slowed Atlanta's reaction times to the sudden burst of energy detected across the system by a slight amount. But when she'd recovered enough sensor resolution to parse it, she interfaced with the small drone immediately.
Unlike a shorter range communications drone, this was a specially built ferry drone, designed to take data and observations from a target ship and run to another ship or installation, in this case, the drone had come from FFW Farragut, on assignment as a member of Spee's task force, orbiting the Hildas Asteroid cluster just outside of the inner belt. The data contained within wasn't overtly concerning, but the information her sensors caught in the wake of Atago's drive flaring
was important.
Spee had powered up from silent running and was closing on the Hildas asteroids, in her drive signature's wake lurked a smaller drive, what was likely to be FFW Hoel, the support vessel for the wolf pack. That indicated they'd found
something out there, perhaps one of the targets they'd been looking for.
Atlanta took a moment to consider and called up the roster of her task force. Aside from herself, Nurnberg, Atago, and U-156, she had another pair of lighter warships, the destroyers Z36 and Kawakaze. It was these that she looked carefully at, before directing new orders to their hulls and comming both of them. Kawakaze on her flanks and Z36 dutifully following in the wake of Atago cut their drives and began drifting.
"New orders, Z36, Kawakaze are to make best speed for the Hildas asteroids in the expectation that Spee finds something there. Atago, I will be escorting you for the remainder of the surface bombardment and invasion. 156, make best speed towards the inner system rally point and enable direct communications between myself and Spee." Atlanta spoke with the confidence of years leading flotillas of lighter and heavier ships, and as she finished, she cut her own drive off and dove, her bow pointed straight down towards the planetoid below her.
Flares of brilliant exotic energy burst into the skies over Ceres, as a grouping of warships cut their power and burned
hard in a starburst of directions. With her fleet broken up into task groups with their orders given, Atlanta increased her power plant to maximum, and snapped her screens into active configuration, her klein field boiling to life in the void around her vessel, casting hellish unlight across the void, a bloodstained, sobbing eye opening on her bridge, the brilliant lines illuminating the surface of Ceres below her.
Atago ahead of her initiated the same shift, similar screens of hellish, burning fury snapping to life around her form as they plunged into the unknown that lay below them on the mysterious dwarf planetoid. Whatever lay in their path, be it secrets or monsters, Atlanta would drag into the light of their new dawn.
FFW
Farragut
Asymmetric Warfare Tasking
Approaching Inner Core of Hildas Asteroid Cluster
She crept into the mess of dust and asteroids, the cloud wasn't thick enough to directly interfere with her sensors, but it made for annoyances everytime a micrometeorite hit her at speed, sure she could easily absorb the minute amounts of damage such things impacted with, but it chipped and scraped at her paint, and lighting up her repair drones would give away her position immediately to anyone watching her. She didn't want to spook the damned Nazis if she could avoid it. If they were really using Siren and Abyssal tech, she didn't want to run into some technological monstrosity built out of stitched together abyssal corpses.
Sure, she'd seen things like that in the last war, but there was propriety and even the abyssals didn't desecrate the dead, and they were soulless monstrosities from the depths. Farragut idly wondered if anyone had ever figured out what their purpose was, or where the hells they'd even come from when they'd splashed down fighting the Sirens.
She shrugged, letting her drone shell continue to path through the asteroid field and dust cloud. Most asteroid fields were very different from depictions in earth films and fiction, often times even "close" asteroids had gaps of thousands of kilometers between them, which meant that you could gather a number of very important pieces of information based on whether or not a grouping of asteroids was actually a natural grouping or something less natural.
The cluster she was scanning seemed to fit the bill, a distance of some 1 thousand kilometers between them, small rocks, but large enough to hold a station if one was careful, or if one mined out one asteroid for a purpose. They orbit normally, not a shred of information given away from their rocky surfaces. But Farragut just… felt something wasn't right with them, something about the low resolution scans was telling her wasn't correct.
This was new to her but it felt old in practice. She had little to no experience with void combat outside of simulations she could run through in her head, but the instincts she was feeling were biological in origin. They didn't make sense to have in a completely mechanical body that only simulated organic necessities and needs because it was designed to do so at the request of Farragut's own mind. Several of the German submarines had chosen to simply forgo those biological "necessities" in their new bodies. Creating a disconcertingly silent and still human being that warred at her own mind because a human being should just
not be that still or that quiet. Because of this, Farragut felt that having a gut instinct in her position was completely bizarre and utterly bullshit and she was
still going to listen to it.
The limited scans were frustratingly low resolution, but they indicated some level of construction on the asteroids, at least, from the shapes appearing on the surface that her drones had picked up on, but the low power scans couldn't tell if there was any truth to the square and rectangular projections on the surface of the asteroid being anything
other than just strange formations on the rocky and metallic surface of the asteroid.
She inched closer, and her drones continued their sweep until-
There.
A sphere, cleverly hidden in the dust cloud, but pinging off of the low power beams her drone had accidentally hit them with.
It matches the earlier one found, and Farragut let out a hiss of genuine delight as her drones flowed in on it, one of them taking careful, low powered scans of it's intended track and orbit, while the other flowed upwards and scanned over the surface, looking for engines and maneuvering thrusters.
She found neither obvious engines, or thrusters, but tracing the orbit revealed something very, very interesting.
This sphere was on a collision course with one of the closer asteroids, it would run into it in a day or so, but if it
was one of the mines, it would run into it and explode, sending its EMP detonation into the void and disabling ships around it, although-
Farragut smirked, the orbit of the likely mine was clever,
very clever, but not enough to fool her systems. Her drones swarmed around her at long range, beginning to mimic a meteor swarm on course for the presumptive "station" atop the asteroid. She grinned and flipped them on, cutting the systems and identifiers from 4 drones and sending them flooding towards the station on a collision course.
She was completely unsurprised when 2 of the drones winked offline instantly, accompanying a rapidly growing cloud of radioactive debris that blossomed into existence at two separate points, while the other two made it just a touch further before they were also snuffed out. The sudden destruction confirmed that yes, there was a minefield there, and unfortunately she couldn't get a better view of it without powering up and that would ruin all the surprise of their purpose here.
This facility had
no reason of existence, the Hildas asteroid cluster was metal rich, like much of the belt, but it was so far
away from other places of settled contacts that it would have been logistically difficult at the very
best to keep supplied, and Farragut doubted that they had anything resembling a biodome, Akashi got away with it because A. She was Akashi, and B. She had klein fields that tended to laugh at such silly things as "micrometeorites". That single more or less crutch of their technology did tend to simplify things, Farragut thought.
So, the question did remain, what were they
doing out here?
Her own scanners remained low power, sweeping radar out across the void and receiving faint returns. Farragut's headset and her focus remained fixed on the station and her drones as she began tasking the small automata further, deciding what they needed to do and how they should execute it.
Under radio silence and running dark, Farragut didn't even directly have confirmed IFF's of any friendly vessels nearby, even Billie had vanished from her sensors as her hull contained all heat emissions it could, never radiating anything, she could theoretically run her communications arrays and fully power up her radars, but the active scans would give her away to the station, and the Frieden's might just detonate it in a supremely irritating outcome.
A groan filled the bridge of Farragut's hull as the girl realized.
She'd have to do this the annoying and hard way.
Farragut winced as one of her few remaining drones winked out of existence. She'd spent the better part of the past day probing the field and finally had what she believed to be a comprehensive overview of the field surrounding the station.
It was densely layered, with tens of thousands of mines flowing like tides around the station, very occasionally a gap would appear as an asteroid moved into the space maintained by the mines, but would be closed quickly afterwards as the explosives moved back into their place. They made no visible noise on radar or any detection wavelength that Farragut could sense. But they were absolutely there, and were becoming frighteningly good at popping her drones. The larger annoyance was that the station replaced the mines as quickly as she destroyed them, and she was fairly sure they'd caught on to the meteorite swarm being more than what she was pretending it was.
She'd weakened her drone swarm significantly, with maybe around a hundred spread out across her flanks and forming the basis of her shell, but with the data she'd gathered now more than adequate in regards to finding out the existence of the base, Farragut kicked off her maneuvering thrusters, let slight acceleration begin to carry her on a trajectory outside of the asteroid field, and leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes and letting her hull do all the hard work.
Once she was clear, she could re-establish communications with the rest of the fleet, and she could-
Wait a second-
There.
She'd thought she'd missed it initially, opening her eyes slowly as she leaned up and reviewed the last few seconds of something briefly surging in radio waves, followed by a burst as a mine detonated.
There were more than a few explanations for this, it could have been one of her fleetmates, likely Billie, getting bored and probing the area herself, it could be an actual meteorite impacting one of the finely tuned mines. But she wasn't sure.
Running her tongue over her teeth, Farragut focused a cluster of radar arrays from her drones, and one of her stellar telescopes on the area she'd received the ping. It could very well be a sensor echo, but her gut had clenched, she had a bad feeling there, and wasn't sure what was causing it in the slightest. But… what was causing it?
The flare had been a detonation, she could taste the burning radiation on her tongue as her sensors played out over the cooling debris field, using careful, gentle touches along the debris, jagged chunks of rock and metal, nothing that screamed drone destroyed…
Radiation interfered with the sensitive instruments and programs used in sensor clusters, this was a factor for most if not all sensors, and while Farragut knew that newtype ships in the fleet of cruiser class or above could be fitted with certain forms of esoteric energy detection, she herself couldn't sustain the power draw to operate them without losing most of her armaments and more of her fighting maneuverability. No, she'd leave that to the submarines and the flag vessels.
So… was this a genuine detonation or was it a distraction? And if it was a distraction, what was it covering? The Friedens might have had ships, but if they did then what were they hiding? What would a ship burning out of the station accomplish? Was it a runner? Was it something else entirely? Farragut focused her attention on the brief flare of energy her passive arrays had picked up and puzzled over it further, curiosity pulsing through her hull as she reviewed theories.
Frieden Yard 139 Yotta
Refitting Acquired Assets Tasking: Doctor Alexis Anders
Hildas Cluster
Alexis frowned, wiping sweat from her brow as she focused on the systems readout from the minefield that protected the yard from meteorite strikes and the prying eyes of the UN. The Frieden cause was lucky to have been able to profit from the assets acquired in the wake of the siren conflict. It had been her father, Maximilian who'd developed the earliest transportation and construction ships they'd needed for their presence within the belt. Unfortunately the UN had monitored their initial forays into extrasolar colonization and industrialization efforts, necessitating secrecy and unique, special modules in their ships disguised as redundant safeties.
It made the yards and scattered, secret facilities that lurked in the sol system all the more precious, so when one had been breached, and another leveled from orbit earlier in the year… their leadership had taken notice of such things and acted accordingly, pushing for inspections and updates to their defensive layouts.
The mines were behaving strangely, Alexis knew that they tended to drift with the dreamer's laxing control over her lucidity, but she was the best option they had available. An Oracle platform was exceptionally difficult to source from any identity that might be loyal, and the one they would have preferred to have taken, Bismarck or ideally, a naive american battleship would have been suitable, but the fucking Americans had scrapped much of their fleet and murdered the rest, and while they'd successfully dragged one of them back from the depths, it was the heavy cruiser Baltimore, not their ideal.
So no, they'd been forced to use a copy of a copy, the reconstituted soul of a seer platform, granted, she was a copy of the first seer program, but that didn't bode well for her long term stability.
"Lexi- are you alright?"
Her coworker, Bill, sitting across from her at the table, and smiling jovially, he was a heavyset older man, with a deep belly laugh and a love of fine drink, she'd wondered many times how he'd ended up in this quiet, yet important station on the edge of the system, he seemed to be a much better fit in the schools and the public forums on Europa. On the other hand, she wasn't sure she wanted to know how he'd ended up here.
"Fine, Bill, just… something's rubbing me the wrong way with these mines…"
The man's brow creased in worry as he twirled his fork around rehydrated Spaghetti and meatballs, he tapped the plastic against the tray before responding to her.
"Is the Seer acting up again?" His tone was dry, but worried, the Seer protected the entire facility and her precious cargo in the cradles, and it was critical that she remain functional, if she became fully lucid, or was able to reconnect with the other half of her persona inside the hull hanging in one of Yotta's three cradles. She could cause irreparable harm.
"I'm not sure… I've seen quite a few malfunctions near the perimeter, a surge in destroyed mines from micrometeorite impacts I think, but also a few extraneous detonations. It doesn't make any sense."
"Well, it could just be a higher failure period, maybe she's gotten deeper into the hallucinations or her dreams?" He was being gentle on purpose, trying to reassure her.
"It's just not matching the schedule we've come to see from her, she's a few months out from a waking period and at least three weeks from a dreaming period. The foundries have already replaced the mines and they're behaving normally now but-" A clenching knot of worry fixed itself inside of Alexis' gut as she stared at her tablet, before Bill cut her off mid-sentence.
"But you're worried about future complications and if it preludes something worse?"
She looked at him and he was smiling at her, that gentle smile she'd seen only when he looked at pictures of his wife and kid. She'd never asked what had happened, but she did catch him fondly running his hands over the images on his phone.
"I'm worried that it might be something worse. I've got a funny feeling… Do you remember how frazzled and harried the supply crew seemed last week?"
Bill nodded, taking another bite of his dish before responding to her.
"I thought it seemed a bit strange at the time, but they really didn't seem that well off, like they'd not been sleeping at all." He mused, chewing and swallowing.
"I saw it too, they looked like men sent to their deaths when they broke from the station, and did you see how they didn't burn for almost a day after they left the station? Just drifting?"
Bill chuckled at that before he gently responded to her.
"Alexis, not all of us are hotshot analysts with data and personally assigned to this yard for observational purposes."
She rolled her eyes at him.
"Normal practice is to disengage, float for 4 hours and burn maneuvering thrusters to dodge any asteroids while building speed, then ignite the main drive. Why the sudden break from protocol?"
Bill frowned.
"Look… you didn't hear this from me, but-"
She nodded as he paused, and he beckoned her in, when she leaned in, he whispered into her ear, his tone worried and quiet.
"They say Oracle station got hit 15 days ago. They say there weren't any survivors and the station is a wreck full of blood and bodies…"
She punched him in the shoulder, hissing.
"That's not funny!"
She was ready to keep arguing, to demand why he thought it would be funny to attack her in that fashion, only to pause as she saw the lack of humorous light in his eyes.
"Wait… you're serious?"
He nodded, wincing and rubbing his shoulder, answering her subtly stated request for further details.
"Look, the suspects make it even stranger because it wasn't the UN. They're stuck in the inner system because of the ongoing negotiations with that new group on Mars. That new group shouldn't be able to reach out and touch us but- there are rumors about them too."
Alexis felt the blood drain out of her body and into her feet.
"Fuck. What rumors?"
Bill looked at her, worried and asking-
"Are you ok?"
"Just a really bad feeling, is all…"
"Yeah… this might make it worse but- the rumors say that it's the daughters of the sea, that the abyssals have come back and they tore Oracle apart as a form of retribution."
He paused, staring at her face, sighing before stating.
"Look, if you think it's worth acting on, go to the commandant, he'll know what best to do."
She nodded, standing up from the table.
"Yeah… I think I'll go do that. Thanks Bill. Uh… if you don't mind me asking, before I go, I've always wanted to know. But what happened with your wife and kids?"
The man's face hardened, then softened, and he almost whispered.
"When I joined the cause she left, took the kids with her and told me she couldn't "find the words to express how betrayed she felt." As though she was some sort of saint… maybe they got her too, I don't know."
"Ah… I'm sorry…"
"S'okay."
His response was only half heard as she exited the small cafeteria, taking the steps and the halls as fast as she could.
She tapped on her data, reviewing the last months of progress, and a stony, cold sensation of dread began to build.
The station she stood on used Abyssal and Siren technology, alongside reverse engineered construction techniques and the skeletonized hull of two more warships alongside Seer's hull.
Could it really be possible that the Fleet of Fog were the monsters she'd heard about in her childhood? The degenerate horrors that had advocated for homosexuality, for equal relations between the races… Had they returned? Was she having to truly tolerate their existence again? The filth that should have been exterminated, the filth that their planet should have removed from itself long ago. Was it actually possible that they'd returned weak and yellow bellied!?
She rapped her knuckles against an office entitled "Commandant, Emmett" and waited.
"Enter."
She walked in and saluted.
"Sir!"
"At ease, specialist… what's on your mind?"
The stern face and brilliant blue eyes of Commandant Emmett stared her down from behind his desk as he paused in his paperwork.
"I've been reviewing data from around the base, specifically the mines, and there's… been a few rumors that are going around-"
He cut her off, any semblance of warmth vanishing from his eyes.
"Let me stop you there, Specialist. The defenses remain intact and we have no reason to believe that anything has changed, if this is a concern over Seer, she is contained, and under a heavier dose of sedatives."
Alexis visibly relaxed, an easy smile coming over her face.
"Ah… that must've been what it was… thank you so much Commandant."
The man nodded and flashed her a faint smile, before speaking.
"Dismissed, specialist, but if it would help, you can visit Seer's carapace yourself, to re-affirm our advantages and our devotion to the cause, along with a review of the safety procedures keeping it contained."
She blinked, and flushed brilliantly, such an honor… even though she was here on special assignment… it was truly remarkable that she would see such a thing occur, that she would see such a thing of pure, unadulterated righteousness.
"Yes sir, thank you, sir!"
She practically ran out of the Commandant's quarters, the doors hissing shut behind her. Alexis could barely contain how she felt as she let herself almost squeal for sheer joy. Practically skipping, she darted towards the inner depths of Yotta yard.
The doors to a compartment buried deep into the hallowed halls of their yard, containing the highest protections and the thickest armor hissed open, and Alexis breathed out a sigh of pure wonder as she gazed upon the corpse of an abyssal, a creature of strange biomechanical modifications and unearthly, deathly pallor. Their Seer platform, constrained by a carapace built around her and kept eternally for use by their righteous, glorious cause.
Seer's carapace… the life-giving mix of abyssal biotechnology and siren computer viruses that kept the dormant shipsoul copy from going rampant and insane, and enforced obedience and pliant attitudes on the trapped creature when it was awake was a sight to behold. Resembling a large coffin, the transparent metals that made up the viewing panel allowed one to look onto the body of the monstrous creature that had once been Humanity's enemy. It had been the body of an abyssal destroyer when they'd found it, buried in cold storage in a bunker on the coast of the United States, now buried beneath 30 feet of ice cold water. When they'd extracted it it had nearly slain the group who'd foolishly awoken it with its bare strength alone, screaming in that awful, singsong mix of vocals and language their inferior race used. It had been transformed into its current form after invasive surgeries and half a vivisection, whereupon its brain had been modified to accept the neural structure of a ship soul. It was so strange to look at it, wondering how it had adopted the face and half body of a human being, where it had come from and why it had chosen that image.
Its eyes, a frozen, brilliant purple in color, were forever open, its mouth faintly moving as the consciousness plugged into its wet, bone stripped skull pulsed in her enforced sleep. Probes and electrical stimulations injected into the grey matter to ensure its obedience and provide an instant decapitation strike if it ever showed any signs of true awareness again. The transparisteel was thick, protective and shielded from any signals bar the ones originating from the consoles. The ingenious use of their enemies continued to fascinate Alexis, and she wanted to continue with their usage. If they could find a living shipgirl… a living veteran from the last war… the things they could have learned. The loss of the arctic base, the vivisection and material science data lost in its destruction due to ignorant fools failing to dodge a tail… It was a true shame that kidnapping a secret service agent was out of the question. USS Texas would have catapulted the cause forward hundreds of years if she could be immersed into a carapace like the one in front of Alexis' eyes.
Alexis ran her hands over the screen that separated them, and sat down in front of it, studying it carefully as her mind traced the potential applications of the technology that fused to the creation. The Siren code was delightful in its rampant, limited self improvement, continuing to hack into and exploit the natural firewalls of the trapped consciousness, even as it waged an arms race against them eternally. The research into its wormlike code would advance their cause tremendously. When even the darkest secrets of the richest and most powerful factions on the planet could be brought to light as a simple threat, well. Then the UN would be truly de-fanged, when their weapons failed in their hands and their armor fell apart around them. When the monstrous forces allayed against their superiority fell, when their dreamed of life collapsed around them and the lesser races revealed their true selves… Alexis would be there, to welcome the survivors with open arms and a warm bed.
She felt her mouth moving, her voice sounding in the darkness and the quiet, stale air as she addressed the monster in front of her.
"You are beautiful… and a weapon we will use to advance the cause forever…"
She was surprised when its eyes flickered, dilating, sharpening, and then focusing,
focusing on her presence. She flinched when the automatic tones of its foul language hit her ears, broadcast from the terminal designed to communicate to its sleeping mind.
The things it said rang hollowly through the room.
"Jess Barrows. Host to DD-557. June 19th, 1928. October 27th, 1943."
It rarely spoke, and when it did it was almost always permutations of the same string of words and numbers. Strange that it still thought it was human, after all these centuries. Alexis thought for a moment, before she answered it, speaking through the console, her fingers typed her response.
But strangely… the figure's eyes were brilliant and piercing today, a light that was absent usually present as they burned into Alexis' soul with a piercing, smug lavender gaze. It shouldn't have been able to speak, kept in so much pain it's nerves were always on the verge of being shut down. It shouldn't have been able to remember anything other than the battle plans that were injected into its primary cortex and harvested from the remains afterwards.
While the vast majority of knowledge on the actual differences between shipgirls and humans was more or less lost with the arctic base when it plunged into the black, miles down to the seafloor. Several crucial pieces of knowledge had been preserved, namely that a soul's host's brain worked very differently to a normal human. Constructs of metal and flesh melded seamlessly in the core of the mind, often cube shaped, and referred to as the wisdom cube. In practice, this held most of the consciousness of the shipsoul and its host, from experiments conducted on Kaga including the removal of the device, and it was comparable to having one's entire personality and consciousness removed going off of waterlogged test notes. But the more important information had not been figured out until Alexis' father had truly begun to probe the living abyssals. Their brains lacked a similar "wisdom cube" instead holding what might have been the preliminary structure of it, but the biotechnological brain left behind was a damned near miracle. Effectively an organic supercomputer optimized entirely for battle, if there was consciousness and life connected to it, one could funnel battle plans into it and observe the way the host and soul reacted, so long as they were in a dreaming or semiconscious state. This necessitated heavy production of powerful hallucinogenic drugs and sedatives, with several stations buried in the belt and the outer system devoted to just such a purpose. If the supply ran out, they risked the Seer platform becoming completely conscious, and such experiments usually ended entirely in failure, with two precious research stations having been destroyed when the fully conscious shipgirl/abyssal hybrid had torn it's way free of it's bindings and rampaged through the station in search of an explosive big enough to destroy it.
Alexis hummed idly as she tapped on the keyboard, asking a simple question.
"What has you in such a mood? Feeling up to answering a few questions?"
As the translated speech broadcast into the carapace, Alexis swore she saw the thing smile in its harness and chains. She swore that the look in its eyes turned vicious, but all it did was reply with the same sequence of letters and numbers.
"Jess Barrows. Host to DD-557. June 19th, 1928. October 27th, 1943."
The woman hummed as she issued a response.
"Truly… we can't hope to help each other much if that's all you'll say, I know it's quite difficult for you to construct human speech or even think like one of the civilized people, given your unique place in the world, but surely you could at the very least
try to help your betters."
She twisted a dial, and watched with satisfaction as Seer's head twisted and bucked in its restraints, spikes of painful venoms burning into its body as the carapace locked it tighter to its restraints. The look in its eyes turned into concentrated, pure and simple hatred. Blazing in those violet orbs with unrestrained brutality.
"Don't you see it? You're nothing more than an animal, barely capable of speech and language, and practically an insult to the proper race of man. This pain is deserved, for daring to not answer the questions of a superior being. You remain fortunate that we have use for that organic computer in your head. It's the only reason you live."
The thing's eyes widened slightly, its hateful glare intensifying and focusing on her console, as it listened to Alexis' words, before it smirked again and restated.
"Jess Barrows. Host to DD-557. June 19th, 1928. October 27th, 1943."
Alexis huffed slightly, leaving the pain venoms flooding its system, she turned away, muttering to herself as she went.
"Stupid things, should be vivisected."
Yet as the doors sealed behind her, Alexis couldn't put the image of that smug, satisfied grin out of her mind. What did it know? Was it hiding something important? How did it wake up? Or was that just a long, semiconscious dream?
She tried to ignore the way her stomach was clenching like tension and stress was building. The station was secure in its stealthy positioning, the mines had been replenished, everything was fine. Right?
FFW
Admiral Graf Spee
Asymmetric Warfare Tasking: Wolfpack Leader
Orbiting Hildas Asteroid Cluster
"Farragut's clear of the field, she's squawked a request for comms to you again, Flag."
Hoel's voice was far from cheery, a steely undertone marking Spee's support vessel as she relayed the message to the artillery vessel high above the cloud of asteroids. Spee was operating at power, but her offensive measures were currently simply pointed towards the targeting data Farragut's drones continued to feed them. Photon cannons trained on the cluster of asteroids, precision shooting at ranges in excess of a hundred thousand kilometers, even with the speed of her photon cannons, was difficult, and she enjoyed doing the ballistics by hand, rather than letting autonomic instincts take complete control.
"Push her through, is there any communications from Atlanta over Ceres?"
Her escort vessel flashed a thumbs up, and as the connection established answered Spee's question.
"She's dispatched Z36 and Kawakaze directly to our locations, they're burning hard but will take a few days to arrive given the distance between our forces."
Spee frowned as the question was answered. She'd have preferred to have support from Batfish's task force. Atlanta's people were good, but Batfish had specialized in hunting Frieden escape vessels and was frighteningly good at it after so much practice over the past few weeks. Spee wasn't worried about the fleets defending the base, she was worried about their escaping scientists and data. The announcement that they'd been experimenting on abyssals and sirens was one thing, but the horror of Chapayev, of being kept alive for that long… had the Russian woman simply failed to destroy her wisdom cube? Spee wondered at it, wondered how she'd been brought "back" into that twisted, rotting body and what they'd done to her to convince her to help.
She shuddered, imagining the horrors inflicted, and how Chapayev must have inevitably broken down. Must have finally cracked under the pressure and given in. She wondered what it had taken to snap the honorable, tough old soldier she'd remembered.
"Flag, she's connected."
Spee nodded and turned to face the side of her bridge as a fully realized avatar of Farragut, a lithe woman with dark skin and olive eyes stepped into view.
"Flagship, glad to see you're in one piece and in the AO, I've discovered what is almost certainly a research installation."
Farragut gestured, and a map of her data constructed itself from spare nanomaterial, a wireframe map of the asteroid and the small building on its surface taking form. Spee nodded and gestured for her subordinate to continue, which the woman did so.
"There are additional struts and structures poking out here, here, and here. They could be yards for ship repair work, or radiators or even solar panels. But I'm not sure and can't get closer without either alerting them or powering on my drones sensors and radars, which will get us detected."
She tapped gently and the wireframe expanded outwards, a rough sphere forming of pinpricks of light.
"This is the minefield from my probing work, one of the asteroids has been mined out completely to support the production of these weapons and I'm fairly certain that we'd run out of nanomaterial to make more drones before they run out of mines. Each one is likely an abyssal EMP mine followed by a conventional nuclear detonation. The field is cleverly overlain and it seems to have a measure of actual intelligence piloting it."
She pushed her fingers through, and as soon as they were clear, the mines moved back to their prior place, Farragut paused before she spoke once more, biting her lower lip. To Spee, she seemed nervous, unsure of what she should say.
"Speak, I value your input, Farragut, if your gut is telling you something you should voice it."
The woman paused again, her hands knotting in her grip.
"There's something… wrong with this picture. Of the Frieden installations we've hit so far, there's been a strangely… lacking response to defenses. Their ships cut and run when they could be fighting, they clearly have been studying us, but we don't know where. Now we find this station on data logs stolen in a raid, and it has some of the heaviest static defenses we've seen since the war. Here, I wasn't able to get enough data to independently verify these existing but inside of the minefield there are blurry images that suggest ships as well as stationary turrets."
Small boxlike and cylindrical structures appeared on the wireframe.
"If these are turrets or static defense constructions, they're very well hidden. If you remember from the logs of that small skirmish with Frieden and Koslovic assault boats over Mars that Musashi and the home fleet had some trouble establishing positive target locks on the gunboats because of a strange compound in the paint that made them sneakier than they were intended to be. I suspect that they've figured it out if these new platforms are actually platforms. They're like fuzzy spots in my vision with low power scopes, and hurt a bit to look at for any length of time. But that's not all."
She indicated the three struts with meshes of blurry metal surrounding them and poked at their shapes.
"These keep rubbing me wrong, we're too far from the sun for appreciable solar energy, and the base can't be producing
that much heat given the size of these things, I think they're shipyards, cradles for hulls. Which would make this a fleet yard, and indicate that not only are there likely to be turrets, there are likely to be ships that I
can't see past the minefield unless I turn on active sensors and they're likely to launch escape vessels the moment they detect us."
Spee thought for a moment and watched the orbits pan out.
"Have you considered the way these asteroids pierce the field?" She asked Farragut, who nodded, a grin appearing on her face.
"Anchor's Aweigh?"
Spee felt an actual smile curve her lips, she'd not heard the term in hundreds of years.
"Yes. We have the forces here, there's nothing wrong with waiting for Z36 and Kawakaze to arrive."
Spee nodded, before Farragut continued.
"But I'm not sure that's the right option."
She shifted her feet and Spee spoke softly.
"What's wrong?"
Farragut looked at the ground and said.
"I think I got detected. There was a launch from the station I
think but I'm not sure, my scans couldn't see the object, if there was one, or where it was heading. Nothing's changed but they-"
Spee cut her off.
"They might just be using that to cover an escape."
She rested a hand against the head of the nanomaterial clone. With a slight amount of frustration at the fact she had to stand on her toes to actually headpat the taller destroyer.
Life was so unfair sometimes.
"You did the best you could, with a new body and a new mindset, alongside senses, that you evaded detection for so long on its own is an impressive feat. But I have an idea for how to infiltrate, and we can simply have Batfish's squadron destroy any stragglers, assuming their last known positional data is correct."
Farragut blushed, her face darkening to a deep red color as she flustered at the headpat. It helped to lessen the tongue of frustration at her being taller than Spee slightly, and made the flagship feel better, so that was a victory in her books.
"I'll require some time to think, and send out orders and requests, but you can position yourself and William D. Porter, accordingly."
Farragut, smiling now, cheerily saluted and replied with an "Aye Ma'am!" before the nanomaterial clone, representation of the asteroid and factory, and all relevant data disappeared, logged into Spee's mind.
They would need to find a way around this type of stealth technology, the fact that she lacked the ability to pierce the Freiden's veils was a problem and would only continue to cause risks to any fleet operating in their suppression, and really, their destruction campaign.
"Hoel, get me Batfish and her task force."
"Aye Ma'am!~" Came the chipper and immediate response as her escort vessel sent a comms request out across the void.
"The fuck do you want, German cow?"
That voice, that tone, casual insults… Spee grinned.
"Besides your head on a pike you American cunt? No, I have information for your vicious little sisters."
The image of Batfish flashed sharklike, razor sharp teeth and canted her head to the side aggressively.
"Do tell, you ignorant bitch~"
Spee chuckled, it was refreshing to talk to Batfish, her bluntness a cool balm on her recently promoted soul.
"Apparently the Nazis have some issues with premature evacuation."
"Let me guess, you want us to be their fucking Hellraiser?"
"I was thinking more about their evil witch in the woods, but I know an unsophisticated American wouldn't understand the classics."
"Fuck offfff I read Hansel and Gretel, the original grimm version too!"
"Then give the Nazis a taste of their own medicine, teach them how it feels to be hunted and stalked."
"Fuck yeah. Cavalla! Archerfish! Get your asses in gear, we're going Nazi hunting!" She roared, her voice carrying over the comm.
"Did you forget to mute yourself?" Spee said, only to receive a middle finger in response as the catty, snarky submarine cut her connection, cat ears flickering atop her head.
Hoel's timid voice spoke up.
"Ma'am… if you want me to I can file a report-"
"No need, Batfish has always been vulgar and crude, her enhanced hull and appearance have only emboldened her, besides… it is enjoyable to have someone with whom to exchange vitriol with."
"If you say so, Ma'am." Hoel shook her head as Spee finished and cut her comms, transmitting the packet of collected data that predicted possible launch trajectories. It wasn't
much but it would hopefully be enough for the little murderers to find and slaughter the nazi escape pods.
That Batfish would enjoy it was an entirely separate matter, and contributed to why Spee liked the tall tomboy so much. She was openly bloodthirsty and reveled in it, though several in the fleet had hypothesized she was insane, Spee knew that it was just how she expressed joy. Batfish was just hurting, and unlike much of the fleet, she made no attempts to hide that she was hurting. What you saw was what you got, and anyone who chose to get close to her usually learned she was capable of being kind, it just wasn't kindness in a traditional sense.
But she was only one part of the equation, and so Graf Spee turned towards her own positional data and spooled up her engines, descending towards the cloud of dust and asteroids that marked their latest hunt.
"Hoel, transmit the plan to Z36 and Kawakaze as soon as they arrive, then have Z36 hold position out of the expected range of any direct attackers or static defenses, Kawakaze is to catch stragglers and eliminate them."
Hoel flashed a thumbs up her way, and Graf Spee shifted her vessel, igniting thrusters as she burned into the asteroid field.
Nominally, Fleet of Fog munitions could engage at well over 300 thousand kilometers with their missiles, and 200 thousand with their photon cannons. The Hildas Cluster, being a triplicate group of asteroids orbiting Jupiter at extreme range, did not complicate this as much, but it did mean that Graf Spee was closing slowly to the 200 thousand kilometer limit, keeping her missiles pointed towards the asteroid station, keeping the tubes open and the electrical signal only a few seconds from being fired.
She hung there in the void, markings glowing, capacitors for her klein fields charging, a stalking big cat in the depths of the jungle. Eyes concentrated like a razor focused on the pinprick of reflected light that represented the asteroid, and on the friendly IFF signals that showed the locations of her fleetmates as they encroached closer and closer to the station's perimeter, and the thousands of kilometer exclusion zone that surrounded it.
Asteroids would periodically enter the minefield, and the mines would move to avoid them, no sense in wasting the explosives on the chunk of space rock and metal, especially when it could be used to fuel the potential shipyards. For that purpose, they simply moved out of the way, and thus, an opportunity was presented to the fleet. Every fog ship had anchors, they'd shifted in the intervening centuries, and now resembled grapnels more than anchors, but they would be sufficient for the plan.
Spee watched and waited, and was almost startled when a blare announced a new pair of contacts, IFF's masked as they began to decelerate. Hoel initiated contact, a hostile challenge blaring out across the void, Spee orienting her lower turrets towards the incoming contacts as they decelerated, then letting out a sigh of relief as the IFF signals were replaced with updated, clear names.
The forms of Z36 and Kawakaze took shape out of the black, appearing on the force distribution map resting in the center of Spee's bridge, and she watched with glee as the form of Kawakaze directly began burning for the underside of the Hildas asteroids, she'd reach the intended position in approximately 2 hours. Z36, on the other hand, took up a position between Hoel and the distant celestial body of Ceres, and after a spike in power broadcast her first communication directly to Spee.
"Flaggschiff, Z36 on station, all towers report nominal function, electronic warfare suites are powering up to full, my torpedoes are at your disposal."
Spee grinned and cracked her knuckles.
"Hoel, open channel to the fleet."
"Aye Flagship!"
A moment passed, and when all of the IFF's confirmed their presence, Admiral Graf Spee took a breath and spoke.
"Commence operation, in the words of our American friends… give them hell."
Orders issued, Graf Spee flicked a mental switch and relaxed as banks of enormous capacitors discharged power directly into the klein field machinery. Defensive screens flickered to life, their hexagonal plates snapping to glowing, brilliant relief. As though a star had lit up the heavens above the Hildas cluster, Spee waited and watched.
FFW
Farragut
Asymmetric Warfare Tasking
Assaulting Hildas Asteroid Cluster
Farragut slowed her breathing and pulse, cooling her engines and power cells, dumping every shred of energy she had into the klein field's capacitors and power cells. She'd need every single scrap of the energy to ensure the next part of this went well.
Her hull was clinging to one of the Hildas clusters many asteroids, slightly under a kilometer in length, she'd fired her grapnels and anchors into the rocky surface, using drones to attach herself to the metallic, rocky surface with chains. The process had taken most of the orbital period of the asteroid, and she was now closing in rapidly on the perimeter of the mines. Going in stealthed was potentially the only way to get a peek behind the "veil" of the protective mine barrier that surrounded the station. With Spee having given them the all clear, Farragut breathed a sigh of relief as with a single, last puff of metallic and rocky flakes, the last anchor attached and secured her to the asteroid. She held on tight as her hull creaked slightly, settling in to wait and watch nervously, hands mentally hanging over the switches that would accelerate her from cold as the vacuum to combat ready in fractions of a second. It was nail biting, she was a warship, to have her screens and shields down, to have her defenses disabled like this, it was as though she were naked in front of the public, and once again, Farragut reminded herself that submarines did this all the time, and a part of her cursed them out and was jealous of them in equal measure.
The asteroid rotated another quarter turn, and Farragut flickered her maneuvering thrusters. Every motion had to be perfect, every flicker of speed had to match the baseline of the asteroid and its orbit, lest the station pick up on the difference and fire upon them. Certainly, they might not need to do so, but in equal measure, Farragut would have detected such a thing if she was in a defensive orientation. She would have noticed, she would have seen it coming, and she would have extrapolated that the rock needed to be destroyed or at the very least redirected.
The minutes
crawled by, and Farragut wanted to scream and tear her hair out. Stealth, sneaking, this wasn't her scene, she would much rather be charging into combat, would prefer it
vastly to this sneaking, cloak and dagger shit that was making her teeth itch from sitting still, anchored and
vulnerable to any dick who decided to lock onto her and wreck her. Yes, her hull was armored, but even with the advances made in materials sciences by Akashi and Medusa in the intervening centuries, she was still a destroyer and still lacked any real form of protection beyond her Klein field, and
that was currently disabled to keep her power signatures next to nonexistent. No one knew if the reports of scavenged siren or abyssal technology would let them detect the fleet's assets in advance, and so they'd been powered down near completely for the entirety of the trip, Farragut was lucky that she had a body grown from nanomaterial and it could run similarly to organic bodies, she couldn't imagine how Kawakaze must've felt, having to completely shut down and trust to a reactivation signal. Her mental model fueled not by biological processes and internal batteries, but instead purely via wireless power transmission from her union core. The thought of having to completely shut down, to effectively fall asleep while tethered in such a vulnerable position filled Farragut with secondhand anxiety for the other girl, even if said girl was hardly vulnerable and seemed entirely comfortable with doing it as she'd powered down first.
Finally, nail bitingly, painfully slowly, she scraped through the mines, the field closing around her and Farragut felt herself smile in relief, she was through, now came the hard part. As far as she could tell in this powered down state, she'd been undetected. Though she suspected that if she'd actually been detected by the minefield there wouldn't be any room for her to have second thoughts or doubts, and she would have been detonated violently by now. Now she had to wait just a little longer, her mind waiting for a predetermined time and place as the asteroid she was tethered to tumbled end over end until she was clear enough of the minefield.
The use of a minefield presented many advantages to anyone who left one there, but the primary issue with it was if your opponents could slip inside. At the distances involved and with most mines only have small scale, tiny engines and thrusters designed to push them out of the way of predictable, tracked obstacles, and the speeds involved in any real engagement, mines couldn't respond to threats as fast as missiles, if Farragut put herself in the realm of 10 or so thousand kilometers outside of the reach of the mines, then they'd never be able to catch her before the engagement should be over.
Should be, being the operative, important term.
Of course her presence within the minefield complicated her maneuverability. In open space, Farragut had no limits to her ability to dive, duck, and move out of the way of incoming autocannon and shellfire. Inside the mines, her speed had to be kept limited, lest she overcompensate and slam into the same minefield she'd just painstakingly slipped through. And while Frieden warships might not be capable of killing her in any even fight or even an uneven fight, their mines, based on the yield she'd seen, were absolutely capable of causing serious damage to her hull. The ones on earth had been enough to gut Wasp, turning her hull into deadtone metalflesh, locking her out of her own systems and killing her physical body.
And they didn't even have the nuclear payload these void mines had.
She slowly began increasing the power output of her reactor, her sensor array, a cluster of LIDAR and AESA type radar arrays powering online. Her photon cannons began rotating, and the sensor systems remained in low power, passive observation mode as systems came online and her klein field machinery began to spin up. She held her position, waiting until a midpoint wherein the asteroid passed into the midsection of the field. As soon as it happened, drones holding the chains she'd spiked tight to the asteroid powered up, and cut her free, her hull tumbling out into the black and an expression of joy on her face. That joy turned to nervousness as her passive systems began identifying targets, now with little to no risk of lost data, she was able to catch much higher resolution.
There were 16 distinct contacts with clear energy and engine signatures blazing in a tight formation around the station. With now much clearer resolution, it was a repair yard of some kind, not even remotely large enough for a full shipyard, but there were cradles and engineering machinery wrapped around the objects within them. Her passive scans could now see the distinctive, splintered bone spires of the yards, hugged in tight to the station like ribcages bursting out of it. Shadowy hulls hung clustered together in the cradles but whether they were under construction or being repaired Farragut couldn't tell. Each was a large hull too, nearly 300 meters in length and silent as the grave from what she could see. The formation of other enemy vessels had already positioned themselves in orbit over the shipyards, and were holding that position in a defensive sphere. Perhaps 3-4 dozen squadron equivalent groups of small craft fluttered through the cradles and the fleet, and just from passive sensors Farragut could feel their radio transmissions burning against her skin as they communicated with each other.
Easily dozens of turrets decorated the space, boxy missile launchers accompanying rotating clusters of autocannons. They were cheap, and would falter in a stiff breeze but they didn't need to do anything beyond open their doors and flush their lethal payloads into space. With how vulnerable Farragut was as her Klein field built to full power, preparing to deploy, a single missile might be all it took to cause a mission or mobility kill, and she could not, would not tolerate that. Farragut cracked her neck and straightened up on her bridge as the machinery hummed in her gut, the synesthesia of physical sensation corresponding to her hull was not something she had words to compare to, but when she was running perfectly, when she was at full power and full functionality she felt good, ready for action. She sucked in a deep breath and brought her AESA radar system online.
Friendly IFF's bloomed into her sight as Kawakaze and William D. Porter detached themselves from similar asteroids and set their course towards the station. Large red circles bloomed over enemy turrets and mines, signals received from both Graf Spee and Z36 hovering far above and below the asteroids.
Farragut sucked in a deep breath, her stomach relaxed, and she felt the shift as enemy vessels started to squawk and alarms began blaring. Radar signals blooming across her skin as her vessel went from cold to hot in the span of less than a second. She had to give credit, the turrets were very well programmed. Instantly upon her heat signature becoming distinct from the cosmic background, doors on 6 turrets snapped open and a total of 18 long, slender torpedoes kicked on engines, screaming towards her. For one heart stopping moment she felt the malicious, hateful gaze of their targeting sensors, felt the way their small thrusters changed, separating her hull into zones and allocating missiles per hull quadrant. She felt their gaze like a sunburn, the faint tingling on her skin, her limbs and body and waist. For a single stretched out second, she felt the radio traffic pause as the defensive sphere of vessels began to lock to her form even as torpedoes sped towards her at velocities that would have caused shockwaves in atmosphere.
Her klein field snapped to life, reactor flaring into the red and heart pounding as she overclocked it to bring her defensive screens, PDC turrets, and main battery to life as fast as she could. The fizzing, snapping rush of electricity flowed through her, sending tingles from her head to her toes as her ship came
alive around her, and Farragut smiled a sadistic, monstrous smile as the sunburn faded into a cool breeze across her skin. She flung her communications channels wide, and broadcast a hail into the black of the void.
"Hello Nazis~!"
External missile racks unsealed their doors, and Farragut ignited over a hundred missile trails in the first few seconds of the conflict, ejecting the long, slim weapons into the void around her and sending them soaring out in long, diving arcs towards the first of the enemy vanguard. Her PDC photon cannon opened fire, short bursts of particle and laser fire matching the glow from her klein field in brief, staccato bursts as they locked to incoming signatures and fired as fast as they could. Her AESA radar arrays focused on the enemy fleet, and as adrenaline pumped into her arms and legs she locked every single vessel, defensive structure, and enemy identified
object in her path.
Defensive turrets opened fire on her position instantly, heavy autocannons and missile launchers expelling lead and explosive death directly towards her location. The mines closest to her location on the outer shell immediately kicked on engines too late to respond but moving as their dumb, primitive computer programming told them to when an enemy got within their field. Blaring alarms filled her mind and bridge as spikes of dopamine and cortisol poured into her organic systems. CIWS and PDC turrets snapped to life, blazing lines of laser and particle beam fire targeting missile trails first, and then closer enemy vessels. Farragut flared her drive, diving and rolling to one side as her turrets traversed to the left and locked tightly onto the first of the squadron of defensive ships hovering over the shipyard. Its enormous exposed radiators and solar panels clustered at the rear, its front armored with torpedo bays and large gun turrets, weapons already in motion and leaving brilliant flares from their primary thrusters flooding towards her.
She waited a fraction of a second, time seeming to slow as she watched the expected trajectories begin to line up with the enemy ship. A moment passed, two, a trio of her missiles got too close to a PDC burst and jinked to the side, into the path of a close mine on the flanks. The devastating, blinding flash went off, her teeth shaking in her jaw as the EMP, reduced in intensity over such a vast distance, hit her klein field and rattled her form, the insulating energy field providing a measure of immediate protection from the worst of the reduced effects. That said, it didn't help her trajectories or her firing lines until the flare faded and her blinded sensors could see again, X rays scattering across the field and illuminating her target in stark, beautiful detail. Fire control RADAR and LIDAR systems locked tight to its rugged, industrial hull, and Farragut smiled and swept her fingers forwards.
Her photon cannons fired.
In the fractions of seconds that the early part of the battle had been decided, Kawakaze's contribution to their side was the first to be visible. A destroyer, far on the flanks of the battle, and distant to Farragut's position twisted and bucked, throwing itself wildly to the side, thrusters flaring brilliantly as it spun out of control. Directly into a pair of torpedoes, slipped under its defenses and protected by a contingent of decoy missiles that puffed into brilliant bursts, dying so their deadly escorted vessels could arrive at their target intact.
The torpedoes smashed into the hull, ignition occurred. The corrosive warheads flared into radial bursts of radiation and something horrific and unstable. A spatial rift tore into existence, its unholy, eldritch doorway pouring out redshifted light into a second sun for a brief moment. An unstable wave of gravitons bubbled out of the hellish portal in a tidal wave in four dimensions, lashing the area around it with energies that
screamed in Farragut's ears, blaring across her sensors and scopes, she cut them off, directing them to look away from the portal, her AESA systems cutting the target lock off even as her visual sensors kept a watch on it. The enemy vessel buckled, titanic forces bending and twisting it as it struggled like a canoe in hellish seas. For a moment, Farragut thought it would remain in one piece, burned out and ruined as it may have been, thrusters dimmed and cracked, venting atmosphere and boiled metal into space.
Then a second star bloomed off its ventral side as Kawakaze's second torpedo burst into an infernal, joyful radiance. The Frieden vessel
shattered as another wave of unstable gravitons tore it to pieces. Armor flash froze, cracking and splintering at the site of the detonation as forces it was never going to withstand lashed it with tongues and teeth of monstrous energy, missiles died mid launch, and within their tubes, rocket engines choking to death in the sudden pocket of absolute zero temperatures and gravitic force more comparable to a black hole than anything contemporarily measured from a blast.
Each detonation flared with the fury of a hurricane, condensed into a ball of redshifted light that hurt to stare at.
Fragments of the hull impacted her klein field, skating off it as Kawakaze calmly purred.
"Target destroyed."
Farragut's photon cascade was not forgotten, and the vessel, an aged ship, attempted to skate to one side, firing its RCS' systems as the blasts of particle energy soared towards it. It was a venerable vessel, and recognized its death coming even as it lost speed, the initial dodge not enough to push it clear. Every rack, every door aboard opened, and nearly a hundred missiles and torpedoes, ranging from small interceptors to towering torpedoes kicked on engines in a bright cloud and targeted her hull and skin. She could feel herself burning under their targeting lasers, and braced herself. This range was too close, her PDC's and CIWS' guns couldn't cut them all to pieces in time. She manually retasked them, aiming for the largest ones, torpedoes blurring in the center of the swarm of interceptors and defensive/offensive cruise missiles.
Missiles cut against Farragut's klein field, and the woman rolled, distributing the punishment as best as she could, letting most of it bleed into the dimensional folds of the shielding. Rippling flares of light poured from the hexagonal plates that made up the visible portions of her Klein field. The dimensional construct began to fill as Farragut bled off as much ordnance as she could from the enemy vessel.
In a fight like this a single, near car sized torpedo, if it punched through her klein field, would be lethal. Even if she could weather the first hit, the follow ups and the vicious pack of friends any nazi ship brought with it would rip her apart. Graf Spee, refitted for artillery duty would not be able to pull her free, and she would die screaming. She was bleeding as much force as she could, pouring it delicately from facings of the klein field that weren't taking enemy fire, only safe to bleed off excess energy from in the span of fractions of a second before they inevitably were exposed again. She chose to take most of the enemies' punishment onto herself, allowing her to shield her teammates from harm, but it was overtaxing her wave force armor and fundamentally, she was still a destroyer. She was not meant to be the center of a battleline. Her fields weren't invulnerable, and this level of punishment, if the Nazis could sustain it, would lead to its collapse faster than she could bleed off excess force.
But her target, the Nazi vessel
Ahnenerbe, died screaming, photon cannon shots perforating her stem to stern. Armor and ablative plates boiled, solar panels and radiators shattered into blazing spew as deadly particle beams ripped their way through her upper decks and into the magazines beneath. She bubbled visibly, structural reinforcement struts and slapdash, bolted armor visibly pushing into ugly, swollen masses as secondary detonations tore her armory and magazines into pieces. The ship guttered, spinning out of control as its remaining RCS system flared, sending it soaring out of line in the defensive sphere.
Farragut tore her gaze from the beautiful sight of nazi death as faint stinging on her left shoulder revealed a series of incoming torpedoes, another series of turrets flushing their racks to add to the incoming wave of death as it roared ever closer. Quick calculations told Farragut everything she needed to know, if she took these hits directly, her wave force armor wouldn't just collapse, it would burst, all that force detonating in every direction, damaging her in the process. But the plan had worked, and Farragut felt an anxious, nervous smile flit onto her face as she stared at the incoming death, watching and whispering.
"Any moment now Spee… any moment-"
A blinding flare of radiation illuminated the battlefield from above and below. Missiles slammed into the mines, targeting explosive charges and the unstable power cores that fed each one. Following every detonation, before even the flare of the explosion had dimmed out entirely. Lancing, sharp beams of energy, particle attacks from Spee and Z36 punched into the cloud of missiles targeting Farragut and another nazi destroyer. For a split second the vessels' armor held, it a modern design boasting ablative plates and competent design resulting in boiling clouds of metallic gas and plasma ablating some of the force of the photon cannon's power.
It wasn't enough.
The armor melted and failed spectacularly a second later as the last torpedoes detonated well short of their intended target. Farragut let out a sigh of relief and a bark of laughter as charged particle beams, originating from Admiral Graf Spee cut deep into the vessel's decks and detonated
violently a moment later. Sprays of fractured armor plating exploded into the void like water from a geyser, the actinic blaze of the explosion swallowed into the cold darkness of the void. Glittering streams of metallic strips, rapidly cooled from the colossal forces of the detonation poured from her shattered hull like birthday streamers dangling from a tree, and she went dark a moment later, her reactor, overtaxed and damaged, engaging it's safeties and shutting down
hard to save any survivors aboard. Farragut calmly blinked as Billie marked it with a brilliant yellow marker on the shared tactical map, the hulk was useful simply for material purposes, and if they could tow it clear they might be able to plumb or probe it's datacore for anything of relevance, but that could come later, and Farragut refocused on the splintered hulk as Graf hit it
again with her secondary armament, cutting into it a final time before shifting her targets.
Farragut cheered on her bridge as she rolled end over end, nimbly cutting an incoming wave of missiles apart with half her CIWS turrets as the others vented heat and cooled in the void of space. Another vessel had made the misfortune of closing to engagement range with Billie, Farragut's nimble fleetmate wove and rolled, her form shimmering as she danced like sharks in the water. Her opponent had been wounded, but it wasn't until that Farragut watched a near suicidal approach that she figured out what Billie was doing as she whipped into a sharp emergency burn, whipping past the enemy vessel with her bow pointed dead on at their stern. The enemy destroyer foundered, engines flaring as she tried to keep up with the extreme force and maneuver her enemy had just executed but the deep rents on her hull venting crew and debris into space slowed her down. A desperate emergency burn kicked off of her engines, radiological alarms spiking as her nuclear reactor pushed into the red. It wasn't enough to dodge the followup salvo.
Farragut closed her eyes and followed her fleetmate's missiles in, as the destroyer detonated explosively. Shards of armor and shattered machinery bathed Billie's hull and klein fields as she deftly wove and darted through the ruined remnants of the destroyer that had made the choice to pick a close range fight with her.
Missiles splashed against her Klein field again, shaking her in her seat and staggering her body as burning, lancing pain hit her entire form. This time, her alarms began to blare in a new tone, her klein field was reaching saturation, her screens flickered in her view. Hexagonal plates darkened only to relight shortly after, but it was too much too fast. She'd taken too much damage and would have to pull out. The ache in her bones continued even as the incoming fire began to drop off, turrets spiraling their arcs away as junk targeting data was force fed into their fire control radars. Z36, almost certainly working her EW skills for the benefit of the fleet.
It had hopefully been enough, if the plan was still in play she'd needed to shift away to vent the force from her armor, letting Billie take the incoming fire for the next part of the engagement. Farragut shunted more power to her drive and opened the remaining doors on her external racks, preparing to flush them, powering down her larger caliber photon guns to increase her speed and maneuvering thruster power. Few things had the potential to be worse for her than open bays and unexploded ordnance casually near the surface of her hull when her Klein field was this close to failing.
She waited for an opportunity, broadcasting openly.
"I'm going to flush my racks and pull away, let my field recharge, you two ok to take the heat for a bit?"
"Aye, fuck em up!" Came Billie's joyful reply.
"Acknowledged." Kawakaze followed Billie's words, her tone once again dull and emotionless.
Another destroyer's CIWS turrets failed to slow a payload in time, and Farragut watched the FWS
Pride lose her primary drive to a missile plunging into her engines. A catastrophic, runaway reaction set off radiological alarms in every ship within a hundred thousand kilometers as a supernova overwhelmed the reactor containing it and turned half the ship into slag, and the other half into melting, refreezing chunks of hull and shattered autocannon floating into space.
It was into this supernova that Farragut's screens finally failed, and she fell to the bridge as immense G forces shunted her vessel to one side
violently. She hit her head hard on a corner of the briefing table at her side, and felt the deep sense of discomfort as her klein field shattered under the continued assault. An enemy destroyer deftly weaving towards her at speed. Getting her bearings, Farragut had half a second to note the incoming missile signatures as her AESA Radar
screamed at her. She responded instantly, one hand holding to her head as blood and nanomaterial trickled down her face. At the speed of thought, she cut her external racks loose and signaled every remaining missile to fire.
800 missiles poured out from her flanks, splitting into clusters that Farragut let out of her control instantly. Z36 was outside the Hildas asteroid cluster looking in, but with Farragut, Kawakaze, and Billie broadcasting positional data, contacts, and every single scan they could to the EW specialist, her influence was felt all over the battlescape. In this case, the enemy destroyer suddenly snapped to one side as every RCS thruster on the port side fired at maximum burn for a few seconds. The crew got her back under control as fast as they could, but it was too late, with her aggressive position screwed, their distracted nature was unable to stop Z36 as she wove a tapestry of death with Farragut's external racks. As automatic guidance was suborned by the machine mind of Z36, a change came over the enemy fleet instantaneously. Of the remaining ships, a squadron and a half of them immediately fell back towards the shipyards, igniting maneuvering thrusters and locking CIWS turrets onto Z36's symphony of munitions as they spiraled out on suborned, maliciously intelligent paths towards anything tagged as an enemy.
For a moment it looked as though they wouldn't get through, a withering barrage of defense gun fire shredding missiles as they came within 7000 kilometers. Even the station contributing to a withering barrier of flak and cannon shells that filled the void with so many explosions it obscured the enemy ships from visual view. For a moment it looked as though the Nazi fleet would hold out against the onslaught. Farragut cut her engines and flared forward RCS and maneuvering thrusters, rolling herself behind the drifting hulk of the destroyer Kawakaze had claimed earlier in the battle. A dead corpse that served as decent cover while she vented accumulated force and energy into the void around her. It would take her out of the fight for the moment, but that didn't mean she couldn't participate with her remaining munitions. Launch doors on her stern opened, flooding their pressurized compartments with void, and venting each missile into space. A flicker of her quicksilver mind, and Farragut's ordnance ignited, a dozen corrosive torpedoes haring up and away from her. This was her knockout punch, a weapon of not quite last resort, but one that was difficult to replenish and wouldn't be loading quickly even as they hared off towards the enemy fleet.
On the flanks of the enemy formation, one of the enemy vessels suddenly locked it's PDC's onto one of it's fellows, tearing into her flanks with autocannon and machine gun fire as her reactor locked into the red. The response from the enemy fleet was confused at first, Farragut felt the whispering static of radio traffic flicker across her face as she "peeked" into the battlescape with her sensor arrays, hidden behind the bulk of the holed enemy destroyer, just in time to see Z36 execute a death blow on her parasitized craft. Fissures of brilliant light opened across her hull as corridors, airlocks, and hangars slammed open. She depressurized, sucking the crew into the black void of space screaming. Z36's voice cut across the silence, pouring in her monotone fashion into Farragut's ears.
"Siren derived networks protect the hulls in the center of the shipyards, I cannot breach them without risking my health and mind. Conventional missiles and torpedoes will be required."
Spee answered.
"Acknowledged. Fleet, I'm vectoring a torpedo strike on top of the enemy flank, give it cover."
Farragut sucked in a breath and clenched her stomach, feeling a protesting whine for a moment before hexagonal plates of energy flared to life and her klein field burst back into crackling, burning radiance.
"Yes, YES YES YES!" She roared jubilantly, her field purring to life.
An emergency burn ignited her drive and sent her racing clear of the corpse she'd used to hide her hull. Normally such a close maneuver would have been insane to attempt, let alone pull off successfully, but Farragut managed to skate tightly around the corner of the broken frame, her drives and maneuvering thrusters accelerating her to combat speed.
She soared back into action, photon cannons blazing. AESA tracked, turned and guided in lethal ordnance at the lead enemy vessel, this one was a larger vessel, some sort of analogue to perhaps a cruiser type vessel? She wasn't sure, but it didn't save it, decks boiled, and a series of detonations tore the upper deck of the cruiser apart, exposing it to the blank, frigid coldness of the void around her. Farragut laughed, dancing, flying, delighting in the mayhem, her photon cannons splitting apart at the barrel, glowing machinery within the barrel beginning to glow as it overcharged, the core of the particle weapon heating to a brilliant, dark red light.
Fleet of Fog photon cannons were versatile, effective pieces of weaponry, capable of reaching out to shatter armor and boil decks of enemy warships hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. But as Farragut closed to what would be a range that openly approached
suicidal she cackled across an open hail. Her cannons finished overcharging as she drew alongside the enemy broadside, at a distance of less than 50000 kilometers, the engagement would be over in
fractions of a second. Farragut focused and licked her lips, anxiety pooling with the heat of her reactor as firing trajectories were calculated and her sensors poured information to her guns in a deluge that made her mind buzz. She had just enough time to suck in a single, long breath before her photon cannons discharged.
A flash of brilliant light emerged, detonations bubbling along the enemy vessel as Farragut's armament, overcharged and at point blank range tore enormous gashes in the enemy warships armor. As it's firewalls and EW flagged, she ripped into its computer banks and watched as the light Cruiser
Damnation of Lessers burst into flame, venting plasma and boiled deck armor as her reactor shut down, her hull skewing to the side as Farragut fired
again, soaring past the enemy vessel. Her armament punched deeper holes along the spine of the vessel, stripping away the last of her outer armor and crippling the vessel as she screamed past her, striking deep into the formation of destroyers and the prize they were guarding.
The shipyard and station stretched out before her, three large cradles resembling a ribcage hard at work on one hull while two others lay silent. Dark paint coating their hulls, Farragut leveled her photon cannons at the rear of another destroyer and let fly.
The drive plume of the Zeta-Class Destroyer
Pillar of Liberty flared brightly as its structure failed, particle beams punching deep into the hull and severing fuel and coolant lines. The Zeta class had been fairly modern, a PDC ship built around sets of large, advanced torpedo tubes, and it was
nothing to the guns and sheer toughness of Farragut as she kicked on maneuvering thrusters and swung
wide around her hull, photon guns firing non-stop. Her enemies PDC's sputtered and died screaming, jamming and choking on empty belts of ammunition or fouled gun barrels as melted metal and slagged armor choked her form in a silvery, boiling cloud. Debris smothered the ship's sensors in a thick and obscuring mist, another brilliant blaze igniting the distance between her location and the Fog warship that tore her apart, shot by shot.
Farragut grinned fiercely as she cleared the flaming hulk of the Frieden vessel, soaring and flying on wings of radiant energy as Kawakaze surgically breached another's reactor with a corrosive torpedo guided
into the ship's hull where a prior blast had holed it. The resulting detonation sent up plumes of radioactive death as its hull spun out and apart in a catastrophic explosion. The few remaining turrets surrounding the battlespace kept firing upon the incoming fleet, before jamming and interference from Z36 locked up their firing mechanisms or caused missiles to detonate within their tubes. Graf Spee hung high above them on the orbital plane, torpedoes streaming continuously into the minefield, accompanied by particle beams that sundered armor and opened holes in defenses if they did not just outright cripple or destroy whatever she pointed her battery at.
"Billie, are the nazi's escape attempts successful?" Farragut called over comms, smiling at the manic expression on her friend and fleetmate's face when it appeared, her eyes alight with the joy of combat and the pleasure of causing death to nazi scum.
"One got past my perimeter, but I'm not worried about it, she's leaking radiation across the whole system and if her crew survives long enough to patch her hull and reactor Batfish will hunt her down and break her in half! If Graf Spee doesn't catch the other one I'd be surprised, that accounts for most of their fleet. Are you still plundering data cores~?"
"I can't help it when their infosec is so shit I can hear them calling out to each other as they die screaming!"
Billie laughed over the communication they were sharing.
"Understood!~ I'd tell you I'd save one for you, but I don't think you need my help!"
Farragut snorted and went quiet, turning her scopes back towards the battle as her fleetmate cut the communication.
The initial chaos had declined, with much of the enemy fleet scattering and fleeing out towards the edge of the minefields. A single squadron of 5 enemy vessels held strong over the shipyards, the most stupid, perhaps the most bold in Farragut's mind. They were still flagging, two of them leaking glowing flames and smoke into the void from open fissures in their hulls, while the remaining three jinked back and forth, sending desperate tracer fire into the void, attempting to kill the incoming missiles that Graf Spee continued to guide in and let fly.
Farragut wasn't out of the fight yet, but her stocks were running low and she was flagging, losing her entire external rack payload near the start hadn't crippled her, but she had little to offer save her particle cannons. She had missiles, but her torpedo stocks were more or less exhausted for the moment, and her few missiles wouldn't be of use here, being mostly interceptor platforms. She elected to direct her drones and factories to begin restocking, prioritizing the torpedoes in their bays first, then moving down the line. Her photon cannons pulsed again, a shudder of the recoil hitting her physical form on the bridge with a sensation like one's stomach clenching tightly from euphoria. The particle beams reaching out across the
immense distances involved to punch holes into one of the flagging destroyers. Farragut felt and saw Z36's influence take hold over the enemy ship's systems as her beams punched home. The computer systems' feeble firewalls attempted to stop her intrusion, but 36 swept them aside like cobwebs and then she was slamming doors shut on crew, turning on internal defenses, and laughing in terrible monotone as Nazi scum were cut to pieces by their own ship.
Aboard the flag vessel of the squadron, the destroyer
Blazing Pillar, firefighting crews attempted to stop an out of control blaze that had ignited in a forward magazine, unaware that while they labored to put out the frustratingly resilient fire, their ships reactor crept into the redline, the safeties aboard it disabled, Farragut's electronic ghost slithering into safeties and secondhand parts with speed, aided by Z36 as she shifted her gaze around her position. Atmospheric gasses flooded most compartments aboard the space traveling vessels. In a combat or emergency situation, crew were directed to wear space suits with oxygen supplies and vent the compartments before something breached them and caused more damage than was necessary. Onboard the frigate
Secured Future, however, her crew hadn't successfully vented the compartments leading to the bridge in time, caught by surprise when the attack had begun. Z36 slammed open their airlocks, and the bridge crew had a few horrified seconds to feel the hungry pull of the stars outside before the atmosphere rushed out and took them with it. Farragut set automatic detonation timers on the vessel's missiles, disabling their safeties from her relatively safe position at the edge of the fight.
Before Z36 and Farragut could continue their rampage of destruction, Graf Spee sent a quartet of photon cannon particle beams into the core of the parasitized, dying frigate. Holed and burning, her power cut off, leaving a single, blazing maneuvering thruster shoving her out of formation of the fleet and opening a hole in their defenses.
A hole that Billie was there to exploit. The destroyer had been waiting in the wings, occasionally committing to mobility or kill an enemy hull, but now she took the chance she'd been offered.
Screaming in from overhead of the enemy fleet, William D. Porter, fog warship, shook with barely contained glee as her photon cannons burned with actinic light. Streams of exotic particles condensed into a concentrated beam with a surface temperature more closely resembling that of the
sun in their fury cut through the upper decks of the flag vessel of the destroyer squadron.
Righteous Glory, Freiden destroyer, keeled and buckled under the strain and her armor sundered, an unholy screech of joy hit the open hailing frequencies as Billie claimed her fourth kill of the day, circling the flagship like a ravenous piranha, tearing into her armor and weapons with precision cuts and bludgeoning axe hits from missile and photon cannon alike. When the wounded, guttering flame that was the destroyer's life cut out explosively, Billie whooped to her fleet.
That act of destruction heralded the end of the battle.
Righteous Glory's sister vessels, the last destroyers in her wolfpack, shattered under the guns of Graf Spee in one case. While Farragut, Z36, and Billie D. Porter ripped apart the other ships computers, causing an immediate and irreversible reactor overload, flooding every deck and corridor aboard the last nazi ship with enough ionizing radiation to reduce the crew to microwaved eggs in their environmental suits.
As the chaos of the battle fading, Farragut felt herself slowly come down from the high of adrenaline, staring at the devastation around her. Of the ships forming a defensive perimeter around the shipyard, none remained capable of putting up a fight or even initiating combat.
She turned her sensors to the repair yards and outfitting rigger, cutting her acceleration down to a cruising speed, plotting in a circular course that would take her in for a close view of the shipyards. Her drones spooled out from their towers, firing ahead of her and swooping down towards the docks, initiating penetration scans of enemy vessels using powerful, but short ranged LIDAR sensors, before broadcasting them back to Farragut.
They were dark and slim vessels, oddly familiar to Farragut's gaze through her drones, but she couldn't quite place where their elegant hulls, narrow and almost bladed, were from it reminded her almost of Fog vessels, at least new type hulls, but something just… didn't quite fit. She felt an almost itch in her mind, struggling to place it. Each vessel floated in their cradles, one of the hulls was half complete, her decks and turret structures visible to the void, engineering manipulators and drones silently hanging in orbit of that frame. The other was perhaps 75% complete, but was notably missing its primary armament. The gaping holes where her turrets would be exposed to the hungering void around her. Shadows playing across her as she rotated like a floating corpse in the void.
The final vessel hung silently in open space, having been cut loose during the battle, faint lines of paint traveling across its hull like markings and accompanying the scorch marks of what seemed to be radiation burns.
Farragut slowly floated closer, her drones panning their view across the hull.
It was William D. Porter, sweeping in for a closer examination, who spotted the distinctive lettering on the hull, covered over by peeling, cracking paint that was failing to truly adhere.
It had been filed off the hull, but the faint impression of the numbers and letters remained.
"Five… five… sev-"
Billie froze on Farragut's view, a horrified whisper.
"No- she, she died, she died! Farrie, she's supposed to be dead!"
Farragut, Graf Spee, Kawakaze, Hoel, and Z36 only had a few seconds to process the panicked shouts before something screamed across open space and void, an open communication.
"K-k-kill"
It was a whisper, broadcast across their comms as the lines on the completed vessel's hull began to pulse a harsh, horrible brown, the color of spoiling, rotting blood.
"M-m-mme"
The voice grew louder, a hissing rasp that hit upon the minds of all warships that could hear her. It was sibilant, reminiscent of family, whispering and shouting in their ears as the vessel began to power up.
"Pl-ple-ase-"
Its, no,
her voice lapsed into lucidity.
"I- I can hear her ca-calling… pl-please ki-kill m-me"
The voice echoed from the open hail, growing stronger and louder.
"Farrie she's dead! We watched her die! We watched Atlanta kill her! Weeks ago, I cried because she was gone!" Billie's voice had grown, the girl's panic intensifying into near hysteria.
Hoel spoke, her quiet voice trembling.
"Why- why her… why- why now…"
As the echoing spectre of USS Johnston, DD-557 powered to full, cannibalized, foreign engines of abyssal technology and siren code blurred to life across her form. Where elegant curves had been now lay twisted, bulky panels of armor. Upgunned main batteries flickered with flashes of lightning. Farragut felt twitching fingers spasm in her hands as she accepted the hailing frequency and finally got a view into the twisted, broken form of USS Johnston.
A woman stood next to the captain's chair, a slumped over form pressed into the seat at her side, her sweat slick hair plastered to her forehead, she bore an iron cross on her breast and wore a pressed uniform, her eyes holding a manic, insane gleam.
"You thought- you could kill us, abyssals? The Real humanity was waiting for you! Look how we've broken one of you to our will! Look at what we've made of her!"
She twisted the figure up, and Farragut retched onto her deck as it came into view of the cameras.
With numb fingers, she keyed in launch codes manually, her mind unable to process the
horror that lay in front of her view. Missile doors snapped open, her torpedoes replenished as her Klein field sparked to life.
"She's so obedient now! In her proper place at the foot of humanity!"
When Graf Spee spoke, it was quiet, but thick with her native accent, Farragut vaguely remembered her prior form, before she'd been possessed by the shipsoul, a quiet German girl from Berlin.
"You call us abyssals? You would not know the
meaning of the term. I will find your homes, your people, I will search out your cities and I will
burn every filth laden fibre of your twisted ideology until there is naught but-"
Her voice cracked and she cut off, only to return, roaring her fury into the hail, hurling a promise to the nazi in her view.
"
ASH AND GLASS REMAINING AS A TESTAMENT TO YOUR COMPLETE AND FLAGRANT ABUSE OF THE RIGHTS OF ALL SAPIENT LIFE! FOR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY AND HER DAUGHTERS, YOU WILL DIE A THOUSAND DEATHS SCREAMING FOR WHAT YOU HAVE DONE TO HER!"
Farragut
felt the next order, the weight it carried as Graf regained her composure in the face of the unholy horror that lay in front of them.
"All vessels. Burn the infection out of her, but take her alive."
As the communications closed, Farragut thought she saw a faint, grief stricken smile appear on the face of the thing that she recognized.
A/N: So this is a monster. Hopefully it flows well, expands on this AU a bit more, and gives further reinforcing to the nazis being fucking nazis. As the Author, I condone absolutely zero of the views that fucking nazis espouse, because they are filth themselves. As an aside, I do love this chapter as an example of writing and the beautiful ranting of Graf Spee, finally hitting her breaking point, even if I hate how long it took me to get it out to everyone, my apologies, all! Initially this was supposed to be about 5k words, and then it just kept getting bigger and better. I had an enormous amount of fun writing this one and we'll see how things go for future chapters. I don't expect all of them to be these massive behemoths, but now that I know I can write them, they may show up for climactic, big moments.
If you thought Akagi was angry at the exploitation of the veterans of her wars before this… you're in for a treat during the interlude or the chapter after it.
A force distribution of Akagi's ships will be coming soon, I just needed to get this written before settling that. It'll give a direct overview of the forces currently at her disposal and where they are in the sol system.
As always, thank you so much to my patrons, who make this entire thing possible.
Ascendant Hearthkeepers: MITH HAT, Danielle Young
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Voidborn Hearthkeepers: UNSC Kawakaze, Shay Lewis, Ben Holmes, and Argon
Without your support, I would not be able to do what I do, thank you from the bottom of my heart for every ounce of support you've given me.
Thank you to my fans on discord, and my lovely beta readers, keeping the works in check and allowing me to write freely.
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