Chapter 11: "The consequences of our actions"
======================================================================
Chapter 11: "The consequences of our actions"
_________________________________________
Perspective: Iowa, USS Peleliu dorms. Two weeks later
The door swings open and a very tired- looking blonde battleship walks into the room. She waves to another shipgirl who is lying in bed tapping at her phone. Iowa closes the door behind her with a leg, immediately opens a mini fridge and pulls out two cans of Pepsi. One of these cans gets immediately pressed against the forehead. She then walks up to the unoccupied bed and sits down. As Iowa goes past the other girl she gives her the other can.
"You alright?" asks the silver- haired battleship as she puts away her phone and sits up
"Yeah, I'll be fine, Wash. Just a bit tired." replies the blonde battleship girl and smiles. It is quite obvious that she's not feeling that smile though
Washington looks concerned and continues "...want to talk about it? I haven't seen you like that… ever... Ok, fair, since two weeks ago, but not before that."
Iowa chuckles and says "Hey, all's well that ends well, right?"
"And it ends well, right?" clarifies Wash
Iowa pauses for a moment and then replies: "You remember how two days ago Epsilon sent a message that she is now in a state to receive a representative? Well, the command chose a cruiser girl for this mission. She's arriving tomorrow evening with a small fleet. She'll rest here with us until the next morning and then she will head out to try and talk to Epsi face to face."
"That was pretty quick, but by your reaction I take it that something concerns you." Washington replies after a sip.
"It is HMAS Sydney." Iowa replies with a deadpan.
Washington thinks for a few moments and says "Perth's sister? I don't see a problem, I think she's a good choice. I didn't interact with her that much, but she seemed caring and lively. She's also not American so Epsi is less likely to be triggered. Honestly, it was either her or a Brit boat."
"She was lost with all hands in 1941 to Kormoran, a German Merchant Raider." Iowa clarifies.
Wash painfully inhales through her teeth "Ah, that explains it. Well, look at the bright side. If she wasn't traumatized by a German q-ship then this would be a nice bonding subject with Epsi."
Iowa groans and flops her back on the bed as she replies: "Rear admiral said the same thing. My worry is that the operating word here is "IF". It is hard to tell if a shipgirl is fine or if she just doesn't show how broken she is. I'm afraid that Sydney might not be as fine as the command thinks… or as fine as she herself thinks."
Washington stands up, walks up to Iowa's bed and lies next to the other battleship before patting Iowa's shoulder. "You worry too much about this. We are literally made of steel! You need to trust her to be professional. If she couldn't do it, she would have refused. Also we'll have a whole night with her on the Tender. We can check up on what she thinks and share your experiences on talking with "Miss Spooky" so she knows what to expect. I am personally more worried about the stranded girl. Is Epsi ok?"
Iowa pulls the soda can away from her forehead, looks at it for a few moments and then chuckles before replying. "She is not dead and not an abbie, hard to tell beyond that. She still distorts camera footage and now more than she used to, but less than when she peaked during the battle. She doesn't allow drone flights so we had to use satellites which is not ideal. One of Sydney's goals is actually to figure out how and why that happens as this was the main reason for her misidentification."
"…You think she hates us?" asks Wash with a mildly worried voice.
Iowa sighs as she sits back up and opens her soda. "While Epsi is not actively angry, I don't see why she wouldn't. Honestly, it is a darn miracle that she's not an abbie now. It took way less than that for Zeppelin and I won't have the guts to call her "weak- willed". Zeppy still refuses to visit Germany after the whole mess." She then downs the drink in one go, crushes it in her hand and perfectly throws it into a bin from across the room.
Wash finishes her soda as well and notes: "I think she's getting along well with Yamato."
"Mhm" replies the blonde battleship and pulls out her smartphone as it has just buzzed. "The Akagi sisters as well. Met them last time I did the convoy escort to Japan with Biscuit. She likes the culture, but the internet… less so..."
_________________________________________
Perspective: ACC Epsilon DCVN-821
Hot tropical sun blasts its rays directly in my face but I barely have enough strength to wince. I am lying on a slightly angled hard black surface that might as well be a hybrid between a rough grit sandpaper and a searing hot pan. Surprisingly, I don't feel much. I'm not in pain, thirsty or sticky with sweat even though I expect that I should be somewhere between a "heat stroke" and "you were my brother, Anakin".
The worst part of my predicament is that nothing is going on and I can't do anything about it. I've been like that for so long that I've lost count. I don't have the strength for anything beyond lightly moving my fingers and the days in my memory have merged into a prolonged strobe of light and dark. The heat of the sun and the coldness of the night pale in comparison to the true torture of being so incredibly bored.
It is an early morning and my whole being suddenly focuses on the only new thing that has occurred in what seems like decades. A streak of light was coming vaguely in my direction. It takes some time, but eventually the meteor gets closer, stops glowing and opens a parachute. Over the next 15 minutes or so a white pod vaguely reminiscent of SpaceX Dragon lands somewhere close by.
I pull everything I have into trying to sit up. It feels like my body is made of tungsten and I fail several times, but finally I manage to get myself upright. I see the flight deck, my flight deck. It is small, it doesn't have the angled section and there's only one 160mm gun parked directly on the deck.
Strangely this all feels… normal. Of course that's my deck, it always has been. I sense a mild vibration as the dock's cargo elevator activates. The cabin arrives with a single man clad in a bulky spacesuit of the same colors as my clothes. He looks in my direction, but his eyes glance past me entirely as he just takes a cursory view of the deck before heading for the island.
I wave and try to shout him over, but there's no response. With great effort I wobble onto my feet and try to follow. He is tall, at least 50% taller than me. It makes me feel like a child catching up to a parent who walked a bit too far down the street. He takes his time getting to know the layout which allows me to eventually catch up. I try to grab his hand, but I simply phase through him. Am I a ghost? I feel like I should be more concerned about this, but I'm not. I'm just unbearably curious.
As I follow him to the bridge he opens one of the officer quarters and I manage to catch a glimpse of me in the mirror. I look like a middle schooler at most. Even my outfit looks more like an unusually blue school uniform with added military patches. My white hair is tied into a small braid and I'm wearing a pair of somewhat dorky glasses. I look like some kind of nerdy student council president which makes me feel mildly embarrassed.
Once on the bridge, the spaceman enters his credentials and moves to the engineering consoles. I feel a new vibration from deep inside my chest followed by a burst of energy. My twin gas turbine engines spin up and emergency power is replaced by the new supply as main lights flick on across my interior. A sudden acceleration follows as the docking clamps release and I feel a cool salty splash as I'm finally touching the sea.
I feel giddy, almost shaking in anticipation. Yes, YES! That's what I've been made for! Not to be built and then just rust never even leaving the dry dock! I don't know why I was activated, and honestly I don't care. I am barely half fueled, I have half of my air wing and I only carry Seals. I'm barely ready to fight school bullies, much less anything serious. But even if it is the last adventure I'll ever have, I'm ready for it.
The captain suddenly turns his head towards me and looks directly into my soul which causes me to get startled and fall on my butt. After a small delay he states: "Oy!". I am confused. "Oy, OY!" he says as I try to make sense. Something about a transmission… and then my eyes finally open.
"Gah! I'm awake!" I say as I am propelled vertically off the thin hotel blanket placed directly onto the cave's rocky floor. My body is instantly pierced by excruciating pain as my wounds, sleep deprivation and lack of soft bedding make themselves simultaneously and rudely known. "What… happened?" I squeeze out through my teeth as I wobble back onto my feet.
"Oy! Oy oy oy" replies Commander Gage. USN has just sent a message that the envoy is ready. I rub my eyes as I pull out my tablet where the captain has already prewritten the response. I probably should have done this myself, but I haven't slept since The Fuckening and I wanted a bit of a beauty sleep to look less like a ghoul. Judging by the view from a nearby UGV… it didn't help much.
I cough a few times which painfully resonates with my lower ribs on the right. I open my comms and read out from the tablet. "ACC Epsilon to USS Peleliu, I am ready to receive the envoy. HMAS Sydney is to approach 20 kilometers from Pitcairn and hold for aircraft escort." I quickly received the confirmation and two Mantas already loaded with four 500 kg aerial bombs each were waiting on my catapults for me to walk out of the cave and launch them.
It would take the cruiser around ten minutes to follow my first instruction and she should arrive here within an hour which gives me some time to get myself mentally prepared… or at least as prepared as I can get. I am not 100% sure how this would go and how the shipgirl would react to what I am and what I've done. I just hope that she won't get hostile because right now I'm only combat capable on paper.
My damage was extensive. The abyssal steel armor and shield have protected me somewhat, but I've lost basically all of my surface subsystems. All of my AA missile launchers and CIWS are just gone. My main caliber guns got misaligned in the barbettes and the shockwave has damaged the autoloaders and stabilizers. My secondaries fared better, but they were still damaged. I was completely out of 76mm ammo for them and couldn't print more as other things took priority. My main caliber ammo was also very limited. The only offensive systems that required no repairs were my cruise missile launchers.
Out of my aircraft elevators only one of three was working and most of the closed but still exposed systems like ammunition elevators and refueling points were damaged and jammed shut which increased rearming and refueling time to multiple hours. The aircraft would need to be lowered into the hangar deck to rearm each time.
The carrier island was almost completely torn off and would have to be rebuilt, but it was not critical for drone operation thanks to the CIC backup. I was pleasantly surprised that missing the bridge didn't mean missing a chunk of the head like in most KC fics, but it was still painful and resulted in a messed up hairstyle, visible wounds and cracks in the skin and skull as well as some hefty migraines and… apparently tinnitus that lasted until I got a radar installed again.
Structurally, I had a major haphazardly sealed breach on the starboard aft where I was missing my two right screws, drive shafts and electric engines. This translated into me missing my right leg below the knee. I previously fitted an improvised prosthetic to retain a degree of land mobility, but it wouldn't allow me to sail until I repair the structural damage and replace the engines.
Further to the middle I had a collapsed but not breached section also on the right which translated into what felt like three broken lower ribs. This is the damage which caused the primary coolant loop breach on the second reactor. It was also the main load bearing superstructure damage that I've sustained as some of my "bones" in the region had long fissures and significant cracking. Most of the other structural damage was limited to my outer hull and turned into what's basically bumps, bruises and hematomas all over the place.
Regarding the reactor… I'm moderately permanently fucked. I have two reactors each with its own turbine assembly and two distinct coolant loops. The outer coolant loop runs distilled water from the heat exchanger to the turbines and back while the inner loop runs molten FLiBe (lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride) mixed with uranium tetrafluoride at 700 degrees celsius flowing between the core, the heat exchanger and the reprocessor. THAT is the part which got breached.
There was no breach from the outside, but the concussive force of the princesses blow caused the pipes to burst and flood a section of the engineering with turbo carcinogenic salt which solidified and was a titanic pain to clean up. Luckily my bulkheads were sealed and robots could just deal with it eventually, but I couldn't just put it back into the system. I had to seal the salt in special containers and store them for later recovery.
The main reason for the irreversible damage is not just the damaged corrosion resistant piping. Molten salt coolant operates at normal atmospheric pressure unlike pressurized water reactors so it is mostly a material science and maintenance problem. It wasn't even the tainted coolant as I have the entire facility to extract all the various fission fragments directly from the molten salt as a part of the fuel reprocessing system.
No, the issue is the reactor core. It didn't melt down and it wasn't directly damaged, but it did suddenly lose the coolant and even when scrammed it was already too hot. The sudden heat cycling caused the rods and the inner housing to develop internal stress fractures which meant that I'll need to replace the ENTIRE reactor core assembly.
I'll need to disassemble an eighth of my body to extract and replace the entire housing with the dock crane. What's worse is that I can't print the new reactor piecemeal, I'll need the dockyard facility to produce the replacement and until then my energy supply is practically halved. Should I even mention that it periodically feels like a cross between a hefty heartburn and a heart attack?
I had two weeks to do emergency repairs and I did what I could. The primary concern was the coolant breach and internal decontamination, after which I prioritized the main guns, the high importance structural damage and the island systems like radar and comms. The bridge is still barely there and my crew are still using the internal sealed CIC, but now I at least have my own radar. I felt nearly blind without it.
I even managed to fish out the two lost Mantas remotely so I should have enough materials to replace most of my lost units and repair most of my systems with the exception of the reactor and the two electric engines. Unsurprisingly, I can't synthesize high temperature superconductors. I do have blueprints for the previous generation electric engines that just used copper, but their performance would drop by a quarter and I'll have endurance issues due to waste heat accumulation. Fan-fucking-tastic…
After AWACS had confirmed that the shipgirl was on the way, my two Mantas launched and moved to intercept. Within minutes I had the visual feed on the young brunette with a ponytail wearing a blue skirt and a green vest over a white shirt. An Aussie boat, judging by the southern cross decoration on the collar. Very similar to Perth's uniform. How did I recognize it when I am not a huge KC fan? The 2020 bushfire memes and fanart, mostly.
"This is HMAS Sydney. Epsilon, I am in position and I see your aircraft approaching me." she states over the radio. Her voice sounds peppy, but I do note some worry as she says the last part. I reply with instructions stating that she needs to approach within 2km, circle around the island to reach the point in front of the Bounty Bay pier and wait for further permission to approach, which she acknowledges.
I start making my way to the pier as I see the corpse of the BB-Hime. I didn't have the time to salvage her. My engineering bots were too busy, I had plenty of steel stored already and it could be considered as a bad look to say the least so I didn't even try. I wince as I note the massive marks left by my mace as I pull out a plastic tarp, cover her and nail it to the ground so that it is not blown away.
She was a tough enemy, even after a near point blank nuclear strike, mass fires and several minutes of being pounded by a mace into unconsciousness she still refused to die. I had to resort to flooding her with the bot marines and methodically killing off her entire crew once she was in no state to resist.
I really don't want a repeat. It was stupid and it worked, but it was still stupid and I got lucky. Unfortunately, it was the only acceptable way to win in this case. It quickly became apparent that I couldn't match her, and the choice was either this… or the Voice. I decided that if I was to die that day then I'd die as myself and at least take her along with me.
I really should have known that having so much abyssal steel in close contact with me would have side effects. I guessed that it would be the case which is why I didn't wear the armor frivolously, but I didn't expect that the effect would be that… overt. Luckily, there's nothing permanent.
My skin was weirdly white in places once I removed the armor after the battle, but the effect slowly reverted to normal within an hour. The same could be said about the peg leg as the interface point has a large spot of porcelain white skin regardless of the thick plastic separator. It also reverts to normal quickly, but I try to keep the false leg detached when I don't need it.
The main abyssal influence was in my mind. I didn't even put the two together at first. I thought that I was having my usual waves of anxiety and intrusive thoughts until they started poking the subjects of abandonment and anger. Whether the friendly fire was a betrayal and if I'd ever be accepted with all my juicy technology and… concerning problem solving approaches. I didn't agree with most of it, but some things made sense and ended up burned in my memory.
Once I realized what was happening, the Voices referred to me directly and offered a way out. I was promised [Power] and [Freedom] in exchange for [Alignment]. The power and treatment worthy of royalty, worthy of a goddess… of a [Hime]… if only I agreed with a few points with all my heart. And at that point I decided that the price was unacceptable.
I can't really describe it fully as the offer was conceptual rather than put in words, but essentially the Voice wanted two things: existential hatred for all mankind and anathema for the [Traitors]. I didn't even touch the first subject, I… it is embarrassing but I got hung up on the latter.
The Abyss considers all shipgirls to be traitors for its cause. But being a traitor implies working for one side and then switching sides. I strongly doubt that all shipgirls used to be abbies which makes that statement factually false. Yes, in a large part I didn't fall to the Abyss because I was being pedantic, but for some reason it felt personal. This shit is why we can't have good phenomenology.
That was a no- sell for the Voice. The Abyss wasn't happy and proceeded to repeatedly implant thoughts about "traitors" along with some kind of limited influence of my emotions. I've never had such severe mood swings between anger, shame and sadness before. Honestly, I've never had mood swings or anger problems ever. I'm a very low emotional person.
Luckily or not, I did have plenty of experience in dealing with massive floods of shame or apathy. It wasn't a cakewalk, but the Abyss would need to get in line if it wished to be in the top 10 subjects that ever tormented me. In the end, the Abyss stated that shipgirls were the enemy and I replied that they are "legal enemy combatants" which made it happy enough to fuck off and let me finish beating the princess into the ground.
I guess it decided to try a longer con. Still, this behavior suggested that the Abyss can't directly corrupt me. It couldn't force its will over me. It could only mess with my emotions and implant ideas in ways that are hard to detect. As such, it needs me to practically agree to become a lovecraftian ghost boat before it can do anything permanent. This is risky, but this can probably be hedged against and exploited.
However, I don't trust that I can handle the influence indefinitely. It was hard to tell apart what ideas were mine and what thoughts were implanted. The longer I am in contact with the stuff the higher is the chance that it convinces me or tricks me into thinking that it convinced me. As such, the armor was stripped from non- abyssal components and scheduled for disassembly into bulk abyssal metal once I have a spare engineer bot.
I guess I should come back to the nukes and what my plan was. My cruise missiles have a range of 1500 km which allows me to hit targets at the edge of my built in radar. This means I could have nuked the BB-Hime before she got a chance to leave her island.
Unfortunately that was not an option. The US cruise missile hit took out my communication array and as I wasn't intended to communicate outside the bot network often I didn't have backups even though I still had encrypted narrow band radio for drone control.
It also became obvious that I was mistaken for an abyssal. There would be absolutely no reason to ignore my transmissions and attack me otherwise. The only explanation was that they saw me as a threat and wanted to kill me in a surprise attack and they wouldn't want to do that to anyone who was not a known enemy, right? Any other explanation would require the American military to be incompetent or outright malicious which is not how such things work.
As such if I used nukes early they'd assume that they were dealing with a nuke armed abyssal and the response would be predictable: I'd be preemptively nuked in minutes. Regardless of how bad things went I had to delay launch until either my printer made another radio assembly or until Essi managed to rewrite the firmware so that botnet transmitters could be used for open transmissions.
By the time the solution for the comms was complete the princess was already too close for a direct strike. If I hit her she'd die but the island was too small and with too few features for me to feasibly shelter from the shockwave. As such, I took a risk and decided to see if I could 1v1 the princess at close range. By this point I was expecting her carriers to start launching the second wave so I sent two nukes at them and timed them so that they'd hit shortly after I engaged the princess to give me as much time as possible.
Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that I'd lose. I was comparably strong to her, but I was slower, clumsier due to the missing leg and she had the numbers advantage due to her separate beast rigging. After I had to scram my second reactor I realized that I had mere minutes until I could no longer lift my own shield. I had to come up with something drastic. And sometimes if you aren't willing to shell your position you aren't willing to win.
My plan hinged on two facts about nukes that I really hoped were true. The first one was that ships are surprisingly resilient to nukes. Anything within the fireball is vaporized, but ships are big and made of steel so the primary hull could reliably survive the shockwave. I've heard that some ships during Crossroads tests sank only because they were too contaminated to send in the damcon. Some ships even survived both bombs and were sunk weeks later as target practice.
Unlike the Hime, my crew was primarily robotic and all of my fairies were in a shielded compartment so I should be more resilient against both the radiation and the fallout. I merely needed to make sure that Hime got hurt more than me, which is where the second fact comes in: the shockwave of a near surface nuclear detonation reflects off of the ground and interferes with itself, focusing the energy into a razor edge that "shaves off" the surface structures.
My potentially braindead concept was to be directly below the explosion. If the nuke was far enough away I'd avoid the fireball and thus had a chance to survive. I'd be hit by the blast, but before it had the chance to produce the shockwave edge. While I'd merely lose all surface systems the Hime might get ragdolled across the island while suffering proportionally more blast damage.
What I had going for me was the armor and my shield. It was triple layered battleship armor and it was large enough to cover me like a tent as its two edges touched the ground. It completely protected me from the heat flash and I think that without it I'd have significantly more blast damage. Unfortunately, it was not a hermetic seal and shockwaves can somewhat flow around obstacles. You should have seen the other guy though.
The Princess was almost entirely blinded, deafened, concussed, immobilized and mostly disarmed as she was thrown hundreds of meters while impacting the trees, boulders and ground. I was in pain, but I could still move and see so I got up and finished the fight. It might have not been too dignified to finish off a mostly disabled opponent, but it was a matter of life or death and I wanted to live.
One of the few silver linings in this situation is that there was very little fallout. The main contributor to the radioactive contamination is the material vaporized within the fireball. As I blew up a 150 kiloton bomb at over 550 meters the fireball only stretched for 498 which meant the only thing that was vaporized was the missile itself. Alternatively, vaporizing iron rich materials like buildings or ships gives the most fallout, but the evaporated Wo and Re were far enough away to basically not matter to Pitcairn.
My counters suggest that the radiation exposure on the island right now is around 45 mSv per year which is merely 15 times the standard background. Pre-eco collapse civilian annual recommended dose was no more than 50 mSv while for astronauts and nuclear industry workers it was 5 times higher so it should be safe for a human to go around without protection for arbitrary long periods of time.
I finally make my way to the concrete pier, extend my rigging and wait for the shipgirl to reach the marker. I can now clearly see her in my optical rangefinders as she fumbles with a gas mask before looking in my direction with a shocked expression and then taking almost half a minute to call in. I ignore the delay and reply with the simple permission to continue the approach. I hope that it was nothing serious…
_________________________________________
Perspective: HMAS Sydney
I knew that this shipgirl was hurt and paranoid, but I didn't expect such an extent. She was obviously hurt, her uniform was tattered, her stomach and head were bandaged and her right leg was clearly missing below the knee, replaced by a crude prosthetic of black steel. Her rigging also displayed significant damage, but she was still standing tall in defiance of her wounds.
She was looking directly at me. Her face had a focused, serious expression and from this distance I couldn't tell if she was displaying malice. What I could clearly tell is that two of her cruiser-grade cannons were tracking me directly. If the jet bombers circling above me like vultures didn't make this clear, she did not trust me.
It took me a bit of time to gather the bravery to contact her. She replied instantly with the permission to approach the island. I think she noticed the delay, but her voice sounded neutral, professional and near emotionless.
I equipped my gas mask, a newer model which was provided for the mission with a full face visor and a voice amplifier so that I could be heard better through it. My crew retreated from the deck and sealed all the hatches. I tightened the straps on my backpack, rearranged the duffle bag and made sure that the body camera with the uplink and the geiger counter were working before I closed in at half speed.
As I was getting closer the extent of the damage became clearer. There was not a single spot on Epsilon that wasn't hurt in one way or another. Her prosthetic also appeared much less crude than I first expected. It wasn't a mere peg leg, instead it had a hinge with the "foot" supported by some large hydraulic pistons likely taken from cannon recoil absorbers. It was entirely made of abyssal steel and merely looking at it made me shiver.
Once I got close enough I put up a smile and waved. I was about to introduce myself, but Epsilon extended her arm with a flat palm in a gesture to stop. It immediately wiped my smile, but I followed this instruction and stopped maybe ten meters away from the short concrete pier where she was standing.
"HMAS Sydney, I understand that it is not the best way to start the talks but I need to inform you before we can continue further. Be advised that my scuttling charge is armed and connected to the dead man's switches. Nothing personal. I expect that you may have a way to incapacitate shipgirls. If me and my crew simultaneously lose consciousness the device will initiate."
I gasped. She was not just disgruntled, she distrusted me so much that she would be willing to kill herself to prevent a hypothetical capture and she was on a hair trigger. Such disregard for her own well being. I was not expecting this. "I promise that I have no intentions to hurt you. I'm only here to talk."
Epsilon nodded and sighed before saying with her neutral voice: "Just as long as you understand my position and the consequences. Well met, you may make landfall." She then walked up to the ramp and offered me her hand which I hesitated to take. The incline was a bit steep though, so I ended up taking her offer and she pulled me up to the pier. The moment I was on land I retracted my rigging to show that I had no intentions to harm her.
"I'm sorry that you feel such distrust towards us. I feel that I should be honest with you on this. I don't know of any way to safely incapacitate an unwilling shipgirl so you don't need to fear such a thing. If one of us is out of control it is preferable to call multiple shipgirls with bigger tonnage to help with their strength. I probably have an order of magnitude less tonnage than you so there is very little that I could do to you."
Epsilon listened with a blank expression on her face which made me uncomfortable and nervous. "Also you should know that scuttling is not as lethal to shipgirls as it is to ships. The charges tear big holes in the hull making a ship sink quickly, but we are on land so it would cause you a lot of pain and harm but it wouldn't end you. So… can you please disable your scuttling devices?"
Having live charges is risky as any faulty wire could erroneously set them off so I decided to try to talk her out of this. It was a bit of a gamble as this could have frightened Epsi, but instead she wasn't even mildly surprised. "Thank you for your input. I understand your concern, but this applies only to conventional scuttling explosives."
She then looked as if everything was normal even though she dropped such a huge bombshell. She implied that her scuttling charges were nuclear! Blood flowed away from my face as my heart sank into my feet. Epsilon noticed and almost looked concerned. She retracted her rigging which disappeared in an orange glow. "Please don't worry, nothing bad would happen to you unless you use force and I have no other option." I swallowed nervously and nodded.
"Are you okay?" I asked with some worry as I glanced at the bandages around her waist. She painfully chuckled and replied "It is just a flesh wound. I have enough materials to repair most of the damage within three to four months. The reactor and engines would be trickier to deal with, but I've survived here for months and if need be I can handle myself."
"You said you had a reactor leak… and you've lost your leg! Are you sure you're okay?"
"Coolant leak, but yes. MSRs don't melt down, but one out of two cores is totaled and I'll need to replace it entirely. As there was no full breach to the outside I managed to prevent the contamination from getting out, but I won't lie, it felt quite nasty. As for the leg, that's half of my engines missing. A cruise missile tore my foot clean off and I can no longer sail. So I had to improvise…" Epsilon sayed before leaning forward and backward onto her prosthetic for demonstration. It creaked, but the foot part did bend.
I just couldn't handle this. I could clearly see that she was hurt, that she was in pain and she still tried to make it seem like it is not a big deal that she was basically missing half of her heart! I hugged her… and it didn't go as planned.
"Ow ow ow my ribs!" she squirmed and I instantly let her go and apologize. As I touched her I felt something below her military tunic. She had something hard attached to her torso below her left arm… and it felt wrong. "Epsi… what was that below your left armpit?"
She was confused for a moment before answering "Oh, I completely forgot about that. It is a survival knife. I made it months ago to prepare food, work with plants and shape wood." Epsilon then unbuttoned her tunic and revealed a plastic scabbard holding a knife made from abyssal steel.
It sent shivers down my spine. So she didn't resort to handling abyssal materials out of pure desperation, she had been doing it for months! I decided to put the subject of implied shipgirl cannibalism aside for now… "Epsi, you do know that you interfere with cameras just like an abyssal does, right?"
She instantly got more serious as she replies: "I have a fake leg made out of Re's keel so I'm not surprised that it is having an effect. But previously I tried to get noticed by dozens of observation drones without any black metal on me. Wait… you aren't suggesting that a 50 gram speck of light cruiser armor is enough to obstruct my entire body from cameras, right?"
"No, it shouldn't do that. The abyss steel loses interference effects shortly after the abyssal dies. It only retains its corruptive effect on shipgirls… and you pixelated on every image taken of the island. There were hundreds of examples." Now it was Epsi's face that suddenly went pale. "...No…" she murmured in disbelief.
Chapter 11: "The consequences of our actions"
_________________________________________
Perspective: Iowa, USS Peleliu dorms. Two weeks later
The door swings open and a very tired- looking blonde battleship walks into the room. She waves to another shipgirl who is lying in bed tapping at her phone. Iowa closes the door behind her with a leg, immediately opens a mini fridge and pulls out two cans of Pepsi. One of these cans gets immediately pressed against the forehead. She then walks up to the unoccupied bed and sits down. As Iowa goes past the other girl she gives her the other can.
"You alright?" asks the silver- haired battleship as she puts away her phone and sits up
"Yeah, I'll be fine, Wash. Just a bit tired." replies the blonde battleship girl and smiles. It is quite obvious that she's not feeling that smile though
Washington looks concerned and continues "...want to talk about it? I haven't seen you like that… ever... Ok, fair, since two weeks ago, but not before that."
Iowa chuckles and says "Hey, all's well that ends well, right?"
"And it ends well, right?" clarifies Wash
Iowa pauses for a moment and then replies: "You remember how two days ago Epsilon sent a message that she is now in a state to receive a representative? Well, the command chose a cruiser girl for this mission. She's arriving tomorrow evening with a small fleet. She'll rest here with us until the next morning and then she will head out to try and talk to Epsi face to face."
"That was pretty quick, but by your reaction I take it that something concerns you." Washington replies after a sip.
"It is HMAS Sydney." Iowa replies with a deadpan.
Washington thinks for a few moments and says "Perth's sister? I don't see a problem, I think she's a good choice. I didn't interact with her that much, but she seemed caring and lively. She's also not American so Epsi is less likely to be triggered. Honestly, it was either her or a Brit boat."
"She was lost with all hands in 1941 to Kormoran, a German Merchant Raider." Iowa clarifies.
Wash painfully inhales through her teeth "Ah, that explains it. Well, look at the bright side. If she wasn't traumatized by a German q-ship then this would be a nice bonding subject with Epsi."
Iowa groans and flops her back on the bed as she replies: "Rear admiral said the same thing. My worry is that the operating word here is "IF". It is hard to tell if a shipgirl is fine or if she just doesn't show how broken she is. I'm afraid that Sydney might not be as fine as the command thinks… or as fine as she herself thinks."
Washington stands up, walks up to Iowa's bed and lies next to the other battleship before patting Iowa's shoulder. "You worry too much about this. We are literally made of steel! You need to trust her to be professional. If she couldn't do it, she would have refused. Also we'll have a whole night with her on the Tender. We can check up on what she thinks and share your experiences on talking with "Miss Spooky" so she knows what to expect. I am personally more worried about the stranded girl. Is Epsi ok?"
Iowa pulls the soda can away from her forehead, looks at it for a few moments and then chuckles before replying. "She is not dead and not an abbie, hard to tell beyond that. She still distorts camera footage and now more than she used to, but less than when she peaked during the battle. She doesn't allow drone flights so we had to use satellites which is not ideal. One of Sydney's goals is actually to figure out how and why that happens as this was the main reason for her misidentification."
"…You think she hates us?" asks Wash with a mildly worried voice.
Iowa sighs as she sits back up and opens her soda. "While Epsi is not actively angry, I don't see why she wouldn't. Honestly, it is a darn miracle that she's not an abbie now. It took way less than that for Zeppelin and I won't have the guts to call her "weak- willed". Zeppy still refuses to visit Germany after the whole mess." She then downs the drink in one go, crushes it in her hand and perfectly throws it into a bin from across the room.
Wash finishes her soda as well and notes: "I think she's getting along well with Yamato."
"Mhm" replies the blonde battleship and pulls out her smartphone as it has just buzzed. "The Akagi sisters as well. Met them last time I did the convoy escort to Japan with Biscuit. She likes the culture, but the internet… less so..."
_________________________________________
Perspective: ACC Epsilon DCVN-821
Hot tropical sun blasts its rays directly in my face but I barely have enough strength to wince. I am lying on a slightly angled hard black surface that might as well be a hybrid between a rough grit sandpaper and a searing hot pan. Surprisingly, I don't feel much. I'm not in pain, thirsty or sticky with sweat even though I expect that I should be somewhere between a "heat stroke" and "you were my brother, Anakin".
The worst part of my predicament is that nothing is going on and I can't do anything about it. I've been like that for so long that I've lost count. I don't have the strength for anything beyond lightly moving my fingers and the days in my memory have merged into a prolonged strobe of light and dark. The heat of the sun and the coldness of the night pale in comparison to the true torture of being so incredibly bored.
It is an early morning and my whole being suddenly focuses on the only new thing that has occurred in what seems like decades. A streak of light was coming vaguely in my direction. It takes some time, but eventually the meteor gets closer, stops glowing and opens a parachute. Over the next 15 minutes or so a white pod vaguely reminiscent of SpaceX Dragon lands somewhere close by.
I pull everything I have into trying to sit up. It feels like my body is made of tungsten and I fail several times, but finally I manage to get myself upright. I see the flight deck, my flight deck. It is small, it doesn't have the angled section and there's only one 160mm gun parked directly on the deck.
Strangely this all feels… normal. Of course that's my deck, it always has been. I sense a mild vibration as the dock's cargo elevator activates. The cabin arrives with a single man clad in a bulky spacesuit of the same colors as my clothes. He looks in my direction, but his eyes glance past me entirely as he just takes a cursory view of the deck before heading for the island.
I wave and try to shout him over, but there's no response. With great effort I wobble onto my feet and try to follow. He is tall, at least 50% taller than me. It makes me feel like a child catching up to a parent who walked a bit too far down the street. He takes his time getting to know the layout which allows me to eventually catch up. I try to grab his hand, but I simply phase through him. Am I a ghost? I feel like I should be more concerned about this, but I'm not. I'm just unbearably curious.
As I follow him to the bridge he opens one of the officer quarters and I manage to catch a glimpse of me in the mirror. I look like a middle schooler at most. Even my outfit looks more like an unusually blue school uniform with added military patches. My white hair is tied into a small braid and I'm wearing a pair of somewhat dorky glasses. I look like some kind of nerdy student council president which makes me feel mildly embarrassed.
Once on the bridge, the spaceman enters his credentials and moves to the engineering consoles. I feel a new vibration from deep inside my chest followed by a burst of energy. My twin gas turbine engines spin up and emergency power is replaced by the new supply as main lights flick on across my interior. A sudden acceleration follows as the docking clamps release and I feel a cool salty splash as I'm finally touching the sea.
I feel giddy, almost shaking in anticipation. Yes, YES! That's what I've been made for! Not to be built and then just rust never even leaving the dry dock! I don't know why I was activated, and honestly I don't care. I am barely half fueled, I have half of my air wing and I only carry Seals. I'm barely ready to fight school bullies, much less anything serious. But even if it is the last adventure I'll ever have, I'm ready for it.
The captain suddenly turns his head towards me and looks directly into my soul which causes me to get startled and fall on my butt. After a small delay he states: "Oy!". I am confused. "Oy, OY!" he says as I try to make sense. Something about a transmission… and then my eyes finally open.
"Gah! I'm awake!" I say as I am propelled vertically off the thin hotel blanket placed directly onto the cave's rocky floor. My body is instantly pierced by excruciating pain as my wounds, sleep deprivation and lack of soft bedding make themselves simultaneously and rudely known. "What… happened?" I squeeze out through my teeth as I wobble back onto my feet.
"Oy! Oy oy oy" replies Commander Gage. USN has just sent a message that the envoy is ready. I rub my eyes as I pull out my tablet where the captain has already prewritten the response. I probably should have done this myself, but I haven't slept since The Fuckening and I wanted a bit of a beauty sleep to look less like a ghoul. Judging by the view from a nearby UGV… it didn't help much.
I cough a few times which painfully resonates with my lower ribs on the right. I open my comms and read out from the tablet. "ACC Epsilon to USS Peleliu, I am ready to receive the envoy. HMAS Sydney is to approach 20 kilometers from Pitcairn and hold for aircraft escort." I quickly received the confirmation and two Mantas already loaded with four 500 kg aerial bombs each were waiting on my catapults for me to walk out of the cave and launch them.
It would take the cruiser around ten minutes to follow my first instruction and she should arrive here within an hour which gives me some time to get myself mentally prepared… or at least as prepared as I can get. I am not 100% sure how this would go and how the shipgirl would react to what I am and what I've done. I just hope that she won't get hostile because right now I'm only combat capable on paper.
My damage was extensive. The abyssal steel armor and shield have protected me somewhat, but I've lost basically all of my surface subsystems. All of my AA missile launchers and CIWS are just gone. My main caliber guns got misaligned in the barbettes and the shockwave has damaged the autoloaders and stabilizers. My secondaries fared better, but they were still damaged. I was completely out of 76mm ammo for them and couldn't print more as other things took priority. My main caliber ammo was also very limited. The only offensive systems that required no repairs were my cruise missile launchers.
Out of my aircraft elevators only one of three was working and most of the closed but still exposed systems like ammunition elevators and refueling points were damaged and jammed shut which increased rearming and refueling time to multiple hours. The aircraft would need to be lowered into the hangar deck to rearm each time.
The carrier island was almost completely torn off and would have to be rebuilt, but it was not critical for drone operation thanks to the CIC backup. I was pleasantly surprised that missing the bridge didn't mean missing a chunk of the head like in most KC fics, but it was still painful and resulted in a messed up hairstyle, visible wounds and cracks in the skin and skull as well as some hefty migraines and… apparently tinnitus that lasted until I got a radar installed again.
Structurally, I had a major haphazardly sealed breach on the starboard aft where I was missing my two right screws, drive shafts and electric engines. This translated into me missing my right leg below the knee. I previously fitted an improvised prosthetic to retain a degree of land mobility, but it wouldn't allow me to sail until I repair the structural damage and replace the engines.
Further to the middle I had a collapsed but not breached section also on the right which translated into what felt like three broken lower ribs. This is the damage which caused the primary coolant loop breach on the second reactor. It was also the main load bearing superstructure damage that I've sustained as some of my "bones" in the region had long fissures and significant cracking. Most of the other structural damage was limited to my outer hull and turned into what's basically bumps, bruises and hematomas all over the place.
Regarding the reactor… I'm moderately permanently fucked. I have two reactors each with its own turbine assembly and two distinct coolant loops. The outer coolant loop runs distilled water from the heat exchanger to the turbines and back while the inner loop runs molten FLiBe (lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride) mixed with uranium tetrafluoride at 700 degrees celsius flowing between the core, the heat exchanger and the reprocessor. THAT is the part which got breached.
There was no breach from the outside, but the concussive force of the princesses blow caused the pipes to burst and flood a section of the engineering with turbo carcinogenic salt which solidified and was a titanic pain to clean up. Luckily my bulkheads were sealed and robots could just deal with it eventually, but I couldn't just put it back into the system. I had to seal the salt in special containers and store them for later recovery.
The main reason for the irreversible damage is not just the damaged corrosion resistant piping. Molten salt coolant operates at normal atmospheric pressure unlike pressurized water reactors so it is mostly a material science and maintenance problem. It wasn't even the tainted coolant as I have the entire facility to extract all the various fission fragments directly from the molten salt as a part of the fuel reprocessing system.
No, the issue is the reactor core. It didn't melt down and it wasn't directly damaged, but it did suddenly lose the coolant and even when scrammed it was already too hot. The sudden heat cycling caused the rods and the inner housing to develop internal stress fractures which meant that I'll need to replace the ENTIRE reactor core assembly.
I'll need to disassemble an eighth of my body to extract and replace the entire housing with the dock crane. What's worse is that I can't print the new reactor piecemeal, I'll need the dockyard facility to produce the replacement and until then my energy supply is practically halved. Should I even mention that it periodically feels like a cross between a hefty heartburn and a heart attack?
I had two weeks to do emergency repairs and I did what I could. The primary concern was the coolant breach and internal decontamination, after which I prioritized the main guns, the high importance structural damage and the island systems like radar and comms. The bridge is still barely there and my crew are still using the internal sealed CIC, but now I at least have my own radar. I felt nearly blind without it.
I even managed to fish out the two lost Mantas remotely so I should have enough materials to replace most of my lost units and repair most of my systems with the exception of the reactor and the two electric engines. Unsurprisingly, I can't synthesize high temperature superconductors. I do have blueprints for the previous generation electric engines that just used copper, but their performance would drop by a quarter and I'll have endurance issues due to waste heat accumulation. Fan-fucking-tastic…
After AWACS had confirmed that the shipgirl was on the way, my two Mantas launched and moved to intercept. Within minutes I had the visual feed on the young brunette with a ponytail wearing a blue skirt and a green vest over a white shirt. An Aussie boat, judging by the southern cross decoration on the collar. Very similar to Perth's uniform. How did I recognize it when I am not a huge KC fan? The 2020 bushfire memes and fanart, mostly.
"This is HMAS Sydney. Epsilon, I am in position and I see your aircraft approaching me." she states over the radio. Her voice sounds peppy, but I do note some worry as she says the last part. I reply with instructions stating that she needs to approach within 2km, circle around the island to reach the point in front of the Bounty Bay pier and wait for further permission to approach, which she acknowledges.
I start making my way to the pier as I see the corpse of the BB-Hime. I didn't have the time to salvage her. My engineering bots were too busy, I had plenty of steel stored already and it could be considered as a bad look to say the least so I didn't even try. I wince as I note the massive marks left by my mace as I pull out a plastic tarp, cover her and nail it to the ground so that it is not blown away.
She was a tough enemy, even after a near point blank nuclear strike, mass fires and several minutes of being pounded by a mace into unconsciousness she still refused to die. I had to resort to flooding her with the bot marines and methodically killing off her entire crew once she was in no state to resist.
I really don't want a repeat. It was stupid and it worked, but it was still stupid and I got lucky. Unfortunately, it was the only acceptable way to win in this case. It quickly became apparent that I couldn't match her, and the choice was either this… or the Voice. I decided that if I was to die that day then I'd die as myself and at least take her along with me.
I really should have known that having so much abyssal steel in close contact with me would have side effects. I guessed that it would be the case which is why I didn't wear the armor frivolously, but I didn't expect that the effect would be that… overt. Luckily, there's nothing permanent.
My skin was weirdly white in places once I removed the armor after the battle, but the effect slowly reverted to normal within an hour. The same could be said about the peg leg as the interface point has a large spot of porcelain white skin regardless of the thick plastic separator. It also reverts to normal quickly, but I try to keep the false leg detached when I don't need it.
The main abyssal influence was in my mind. I didn't even put the two together at first. I thought that I was having my usual waves of anxiety and intrusive thoughts until they started poking the subjects of abandonment and anger. Whether the friendly fire was a betrayal and if I'd ever be accepted with all my juicy technology and… concerning problem solving approaches. I didn't agree with most of it, but some things made sense and ended up burned in my memory.
Once I realized what was happening, the Voices referred to me directly and offered a way out. I was promised [Power] and [Freedom] in exchange for [Alignment]. The power and treatment worthy of royalty, worthy of a goddess… of a [Hime]… if only I agreed with a few points with all my heart. And at that point I decided that the price was unacceptable.
I can't really describe it fully as the offer was conceptual rather than put in words, but essentially the Voice wanted two things: existential hatred for all mankind and anathema for the [Traitors]. I didn't even touch the first subject, I… it is embarrassing but I got hung up on the latter.
The Abyss considers all shipgirls to be traitors for its cause. But being a traitor implies working for one side and then switching sides. I strongly doubt that all shipgirls used to be abbies which makes that statement factually false. Yes, in a large part I didn't fall to the Abyss because I was being pedantic, but for some reason it felt personal. This shit is why we can't have good phenomenology.
That was a no- sell for the Voice. The Abyss wasn't happy and proceeded to repeatedly implant thoughts about "traitors" along with some kind of limited influence of my emotions. I've never had such severe mood swings between anger, shame and sadness before. Honestly, I've never had mood swings or anger problems ever. I'm a very low emotional person.
Luckily or not, I did have plenty of experience in dealing with massive floods of shame or apathy. It wasn't a cakewalk, but the Abyss would need to get in line if it wished to be in the top 10 subjects that ever tormented me. In the end, the Abyss stated that shipgirls were the enemy and I replied that they are "legal enemy combatants" which made it happy enough to fuck off and let me finish beating the princess into the ground.
I guess it decided to try a longer con. Still, this behavior suggested that the Abyss can't directly corrupt me. It couldn't force its will over me. It could only mess with my emotions and implant ideas in ways that are hard to detect. As such, it needs me to practically agree to become a lovecraftian ghost boat before it can do anything permanent. This is risky, but this can probably be hedged against and exploited.
However, I don't trust that I can handle the influence indefinitely. It was hard to tell apart what ideas were mine and what thoughts were implanted. The longer I am in contact with the stuff the higher is the chance that it convinces me or tricks me into thinking that it convinced me. As such, the armor was stripped from non- abyssal components and scheduled for disassembly into bulk abyssal metal once I have a spare engineer bot.
I guess I should come back to the nukes and what my plan was. My cruise missiles have a range of 1500 km which allows me to hit targets at the edge of my built in radar. This means I could have nuked the BB-Hime before she got a chance to leave her island.
Unfortunately that was not an option. The US cruise missile hit took out my communication array and as I wasn't intended to communicate outside the bot network often I didn't have backups even though I still had encrypted narrow band radio for drone control.
It also became obvious that I was mistaken for an abyssal. There would be absolutely no reason to ignore my transmissions and attack me otherwise. The only explanation was that they saw me as a threat and wanted to kill me in a surprise attack and they wouldn't want to do that to anyone who was not a known enemy, right? Any other explanation would require the American military to be incompetent or outright malicious which is not how such things work.
As such if I used nukes early they'd assume that they were dealing with a nuke armed abyssal and the response would be predictable: I'd be preemptively nuked in minutes. Regardless of how bad things went I had to delay launch until either my printer made another radio assembly or until Essi managed to rewrite the firmware so that botnet transmitters could be used for open transmissions.
By the time the solution for the comms was complete the princess was already too close for a direct strike. If I hit her she'd die but the island was too small and with too few features for me to feasibly shelter from the shockwave. As such, I took a risk and decided to see if I could 1v1 the princess at close range. By this point I was expecting her carriers to start launching the second wave so I sent two nukes at them and timed them so that they'd hit shortly after I engaged the princess to give me as much time as possible.
Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that I'd lose. I was comparably strong to her, but I was slower, clumsier due to the missing leg and she had the numbers advantage due to her separate beast rigging. After I had to scram my second reactor I realized that I had mere minutes until I could no longer lift my own shield. I had to come up with something drastic. And sometimes if you aren't willing to shell your position you aren't willing to win.
My plan hinged on two facts about nukes that I really hoped were true. The first one was that ships are surprisingly resilient to nukes. Anything within the fireball is vaporized, but ships are big and made of steel so the primary hull could reliably survive the shockwave. I've heard that some ships during Crossroads tests sank only because they were too contaminated to send in the damcon. Some ships even survived both bombs and were sunk weeks later as target practice.
Unlike the Hime, my crew was primarily robotic and all of my fairies were in a shielded compartment so I should be more resilient against both the radiation and the fallout. I merely needed to make sure that Hime got hurt more than me, which is where the second fact comes in: the shockwave of a near surface nuclear detonation reflects off of the ground and interferes with itself, focusing the energy into a razor edge that "shaves off" the surface structures.
My potentially braindead concept was to be directly below the explosion. If the nuke was far enough away I'd avoid the fireball and thus had a chance to survive. I'd be hit by the blast, but before it had the chance to produce the shockwave edge. While I'd merely lose all surface systems the Hime might get ragdolled across the island while suffering proportionally more blast damage.
What I had going for me was the armor and my shield. It was triple layered battleship armor and it was large enough to cover me like a tent as its two edges touched the ground. It completely protected me from the heat flash and I think that without it I'd have significantly more blast damage. Unfortunately, it was not a hermetic seal and shockwaves can somewhat flow around obstacles. You should have seen the other guy though.
The Princess was almost entirely blinded, deafened, concussed, immobilized and mostly disarmed as she was thrown hundreds of meters while impacting the trees, boulders and ground. I was in pain, but I could still move and see so I got up and finished the fight. It might have not been too dignified to finish off a mostly disabled opponent, but it was a matter of life or death and I wanted to live.
One of the few silver linings in this situation is that there was very little fallout. The main contributor to the radioactive contamination is the material vaporized within the fireball. As I blew up a 150 kiloton bomb at over 550 meters the fireball only stretched for 498 which meant the only thing that was vaporized was the missile itself. Alternatively, vaporizing iron rich materials like buildings or ships gives the most fallout, but the evaporated Wo and Re were far enough away to basically not matter to Pitcairn.
My counters suggest that the radiation exposure on the island right now is around 45 mSv per year which is merely 15 times the standard background. Pre-eco collapse civilian annual recommended dose was no more than 50 mSv while for astronauts and nuclear industry workers it was 5 times higher so it should be safe for a human to go around without protection for arbitrary long periods of time.
I finally make my way to the concrete pier, extend my rigging and wait for the shipgirl to reach the marker. I can now clearly see her in my optical rangefinders as she fumbles with a gas mask before looking in my direction with a shocked expression and then taking almost half a minute to call in. I ignore the delay and reply with the simple permission to continue the approach. I hope that it was nothing serious…
_________________________________________
Perspective: HMAS Sydney
I knew that this shipgirl was hurt and paranoid, but I didn't expect such an extent. She was obviously hurt, her uniform was tattered, her stomach and head were bandaged and her right leg was clearly missing below the knee, replaced by a crude prosthetic of black steel. Her rigging also displayed significant damage, but she was still standing tall in defiance of her wounds.
She was looking directly at me. Her face had a focused, serious expression and from this distance I couldn't tell if she was displaying malice. What I could clearly tell is that two of her cruiser-grade cannons were tracking me directly. If the jet bombers circling above me like vultures didn't make this clear, she did not trust me.
It took me a bit of time to gather the bravery to contact her. She replied instantly with the permission to approach the island. I think she noticed the delay, but her voice sounded neutral, professional and near emotionless.
I equipped my gas mask, a newer model which was provided for the mission with a full face visor and a voice amplifier so that I could be heard better through it. My crew retreated from the deck and sealed all the hatches. I tightened the straps on my backpack, rearranged the duffle bag and made sure that the body camera with the uplink and the geiger counter were working before I closed in at half speed.
As I was getting closer the extent of the damage became clearer. There was not a single spot on Epsilon that wasn't hurt in one way or another. Her prosthetic also appeared much less crude than I first expected. It wasn't a mere peg leg, instead it had a hinge with the "foot" supported by some large hydraulic pistons likely taken from cannon recoil absorbers. It was entirely made of abyssal steel and merely looking at it made me shiver.
Once I got close enough I put up a smile and waved. I was about to introduce myself, but Epsilon extended her arm with a flat palm in a gesture to stop. It immediately wiped my smile, but I followed this instruction and stopped maybe ten meters away from the short concrete pier where she was standing.
"HMAS Sydney, I understand that it is not the best way to start the talks but I need to inform you before we can continue further. Be advised that my scuttling charge is armed and connected to the dead man's switches. Nothing personal. I expect that you may have a way to incapacitate shipgirls. If me and my crew simultaneously lose consciousness the device will initiate."
I gasped. She was not just disgruntled, she distrusted me so much that she would be willing to kill herself to prevent a hypothetical capture and she was on a hair trigger. Such disregard for her own well being. I was not expecting this. "I promise that I have no intentions to hurt you. I'm only here to talk."
Epsilon nodded and sighed before saying with her neutral voice: "Just as long as you understand my position and the consequences. Well met, you may make landfall." She then walked up to the ramp and offered me her hand which I hesitated to take. The incline was a bit steep though, so I ended up taking her offer and she pulled me up to the pier. The moment I was on land I retracted my rigging to show that I had no intentions to harm her.
"I'm sorry that you feel such distrust towards us. I feel that I should be honest with you on this. I don't know of any way to safely incapacitate an unwilling shipgirl so you don't need to fear such a thing. If one of us is out of control it is preferable to call multiple shipgirls with bigger tonnage to help with their strength. I probably have an order of magnitude less tonnage than you so there is very little that I could do to you."
Epsilon listened with a blank expression on her face which made me uncomfortable and nervous. "Also you should know that scuttling is not as lethal to shipgirls as it is to ships. The charges tear big holes in the hull making a ship sink quickly, but we are on land so it would cause you a lot of pain and harm but it wouldn't end you. So… can you please disable your scuttling devices?"
Having live charges is risky as any faulty wire could erroneously set them off so I decided to try to talk her out of this. It was a bit of a gamble as this could have frightened Epsi, but instead she wasn't even mildly surprised. "Thank you for your input. I understand your concern, but this applies only to conventional scuttling explosives."
She then looked as if everything was normal even though she dropped such a huge bombshell. She implied that her scuttling charges were nuclear! Blood flowed away from my face as my heart sank into my feet. Epsilon noticed and almost looked concerned. She retracted her rigging which disappeared in an orange glow. "Please don't worry, nothing bad would happen to you unless you use force and I have no other option." I swallowed nervously and nodded.
"Are you okay?" I asked with some worry as I glanced at the bandages around her waist. She painfully chuckled and replied "It is just a flesh wound. I have enough materials to repair most of the damage within three to four months. The reactor and engines would be trickier to deal with, but I've survived here for months and if need be I can handle myself."
"You said you had a reactor leak… and you've lost your leg! Are you sure you're okay?"
"Coolant leak, but yes. MSRs don't melt down, but one out of two cores is totaled and I'll need to replace it entirely. As there was no full breach to the outside I managed to prevent the contamination from getting out, but I won't lie, it felt quite nasty. As for the leg, that's half of my engines missing. A cruise missile tore my foot clean off and I can no longer sail. So I had to improvise…" Epsilon sayed before leaning forward and backward onto her prosthetic for demonstration. It creaked, but the foot part did bend.
I just couldn't handle this. I could clearly see that she was hurt, that she was in pain and she still tried to make it seem like it is not a big deal that she was basically missing half of her heart! I hugged her… and it didn't go as planned.
"Ow ow ow my ribs!" she squirmed and I instantly let her go and apologize. As I touched her I felt something below her military tunic. She had something hard attached to her torso below her left arm… and it felt wrong. "Epsi… what was that below your left armpit?"
She was confused for a moment before answering "Oh, I completely forgot about that. It is a survival knife. I made it months ago to prepare food, work with plants and shape wood." Epsilon then unbuttoned her tunic and revealed a plastic scabbard holding a knife made from abyssal steel.
It sent shivers down my spine. So she didn't resort to handling abyssal materials out of pure desperation, she had been doing it for months! I decided to put the subject of implied shipgirl cannibalism aside for now… "Epsi, you do know that you interfere with cameras just like an abyssal does, right?"
She instantly got more serious as she replies: "I have a fake leg made out of Re's keel so I'm not surprised that it is having an effect. But previously I tried to get noticed by dozens of observation drones without any black metal on me. Wait… you aren't suggesting that a 50 gram speck of light cruiser armor is enough to obstruct my entire body from cameras, right?"
"No, it shouldn't do that. The abyss steel loses interference effects shortly after the abyssal dies. It only retains its corruptive effect on shipgirls… and you pixelated on every image taken of the island. There were hundreds of examples." Now it was Epsi's face that suddenly went pale. "...No…" she murmured in disbelief.
