Chapter Text
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San Diego, California
Night
The stars were bright, these days. Nights.
The exodus of mankind from the coastline, along with the blackout orders, meant that light pollution was much reduced. She’d seen darker nights. Almost died on one. Did die on the next. But neither of those were in a major urban center.
She couldn’t remember if it was like that, back in the Old Days. She’d never visited San Diego, in that life. Which was…kinda ironic, but probably for the best. Her most annoying sister would’ve been unbearably smug.
Speaking of annoying sisters, whimpers started coming from one of the beds. Her least obnoxious (but highest-maintenance) sister was waking up.
She kept to her station by the window. Trying to intervene at this point would only lead to tears, maybe blood.
A full minute of increasingly concerning whimpers culminated in an anguished cry, and the sounds of a creaking mattress and a blanket half-tossed away. Not to mention the panting.
Several seconds crept by, as the woman gradually realized that whatever haunted her dreams (she could guess) wasn’t real, or was at least firmly in the past.
“Atlanta?”
“I’m here, Juneau.”
She finally moved away from the window, keeping her footsteps louder than was strictly necessary, while she very carefully kept her voice free of any hint of irritation. The last thing she needed was a crying little sister (and maybe she actually cared about her emotional wellbeing, and could also relate to being kept up by nightmares).
Juneau was almost unfairly cute (not that she planned on saying that out loud-even if she was the only one of her sisters that really needed the ego boost…maybe she’d rethink that), tall and slender, as the rest of their siblings, with a bob of platinum-blonde hair framing a nervous little face, her reddish-orange eyes peering through the formerly dark room.
Formerly dark.
“You turned your spotlights on.”
A small, honest-to-god “eep” escaped her lips, and Atlanta found herself blinking at being plunged once more into darkness, her night vision thoroughly ruined.
Her slow walk finally brought her to the bedside. She reached over, running her hand through silky blonde hair. Juneau flinched, but almost immediately leaned into her hand, all but nuzzling it.
She was trembling, of course. More than usual.
“Hey, Atlanta. Sorry but could you-“
“Move over.”
Her little sister shuffled herself closer to the wall, allowing her to climb in herself, grabbing the discarded blanket and pulling it up over the both of them.
Naturally, Juneau decided to snuggle right up to her big sis, despite the fact that the latter had made damn sure that the mattress was large enough to comfortably fit two. At a reasonable distance.
She fought back a flinch, as her crew instinctively braced for impact. Thousands of tons of metal come barreling towards her, colliding with the force of a needy hug. Where part of her hindbrain, the part that was all ship and no girl, anticipated hard metal, there was instead soft cloth and softer flesh.
A bit too soft, really. Her ego could do without the reminder of her sisters’ more substantial assets. Whoever thought that breasts equated to fuel tanks was an idiot.
Atlanta kept her brief moment of panic and discomfit to herself. Juneau needed a delicate touch even when she wasn’t trying to remind herself that she was alive.
So, she quietly wrapped her arm around the blonde. Her breathing had already calmed, only a few of her boilers kept lit, and then only barely.
Atlanta might be touched by her ability to dispel her sister’s nightmares, were it not for the fact that it tended to summon her own.
Specters crept up, drawn in by the darkness and Juneau’s presence and the half-imaginary ache of once-mortal wounds. Her mind shot them down as readily as her 5”/38s would especially slow torpedo bombers, yet more kept coming.
She might as well be a Japanese torpedo boat under attack by an Essex swarm, every intrusive thought downed replaced by a hundred more.
Juneau’s mere presence summoned up her own memories of that night-the frustration of knowing where the Japanese were, but being unable to engage, because SanFran’s admiral was a stubborn luddite-so concerned with friendly fire, and yet-
Atlanta and her sisters were sometimes called oversized destroyers. If most of the people who said it to her face weren’t assholes, then she might even agree. They were small for cruisers, and carried destroyer-grade guns, and…might as well have had destroyer-grade armor, for all the good it did for her.
Certainly, it wasn’t proof against American eight-inch shells at knife-fighting range.
She could still remember the agony-of shell after shell tearing into her. Most went in one way and out the other, leaving gaping holes right through herself. Those weren’t too bad-painful, difficult to think about, scarring-but they weren’t the worst. The ones that exploded, though? The burning, and the shaking, and the shock, followed by a raw emptiness where parts of her were supposed to be? One of her crewmen lost both his legs, and she could hardly tell the difference between his pain and hers, both steeped in a sudden, bloody lack .
The Japanese torpedo didn’t exactly help, either.
…
If she pulled Juneau in a bit closer, clung on almost as hard as her sister was in turn-well, it was just because she was such an awesome big sister. It wasn’t like her mind needed to be brought back to the present. It wasn’t like her yielding flesh helped remind her that friendly fire was much rarer, among shipgirls.
It wasn’t like she needed to convince herself that, this time, she wouldn’t be left behind to die.
West of Isla Coronado
Noon, several days later
She was a steel-hulled ship, her bow cutting through the waves and the fog, the graceful lines that once seduced her officers’ wives following after.
She was a girl surfing along the sea, skirt fluttering in the breeze, her shoulders framed by the faintly ridiculous number of turrets held up by her rigging, accompanied by smaller gun emplacements on her shoulder and behind her waist, a torpedo rack strapped fetchingly to her thigh, and the deceptively small pistol held at the ready.
She was the girl again, now free of her burdens, standing on her own deck.
All of these were true at once.
Her hair whipped behind her like a pink banner, somehow kept from her face by whatever weird magic bullshit gave her hair in the first place. And a face, for that matter.
Atlanta was, for a change, actually leading a destroyer division, instead of being strapped to a carrier’s side. She’d happened to finish repairs (and a minor refit-nothing special, mostly just slightly better electronics, and a couple extra 20mm that Alcor’d somehow found room for) at about the same time as the recently-summoned-and-refitted girls finished their own stint in drydock.
They’d needed a cruise to get used to their new systems and, well…Atlanta was currently available, had command experience, and had at least some proficiency with most of their new equipment.
So she found herself leading a squadron of destroyers, a bit out of sight of the coast. The two Clemsons and four Wickes -ships and shipgirls and girls-on-ships all at once, much the same as her-dutifully trailed behind her in line ahead, like ducklings following their mo- Big Sister .
It was cute. Not that she’d be caught dead saying that.
The little four-stackers had gone through an extensive refit-they’d lost half of their torpedoes and gun mounts, with their fore and aft mounts being replaced with dual late-war three-inch/50-caliber mk 22s, which might actually make them stronger against surface targets than with their old 4-inchers, on account of having a similar effective range, and firing about five times faster, as well as other advantages from being about three decades younger. And actually being able to bring all four guns to bear on a broadside.
All this freed up space and weight for improved radar, passive and active sonar, the inevitable Oerlikons and Bofors, depth charges for the Wickes sisters, not to mention extra auxiliary generators to power all their new gear…
Her chief navigator interrupted her technical thoughts with a “Hey, heyhey, hey hey.”
The light cruiser nodded. “Got it.”
There was a slight crackle, as her radio came to life. “Alright, girls, we’re almost at the target zone. Stay sharp.”
She’d already identified several of their targets, small gliders being trailed behind drones. The others were inexperienced with their air search radars, as were their crews (aside from a few observers from Atlanta’s) so it would take-
“Small bogey. two-zero-five, seven-zero, closing.” Schley announced, her arm wrenching up to point along the bearing.
…it would be the Pearl Harbor survivor, wouldn’t it?
She was even doing it by the book-though said manuals weren’t really written with shipgirls in mind. Well, being a bit overly-pedantic at least showed that she was trying to learn.
“Acknowledged. Commence firing when ready.”
Her own guns came about to track the nearest target, even if she wasn’t planning on firing, and if they were still well out of range. She may have been originally designed to bully enemy destroyers, but something about knocking planes out of the air made her blood sing.
Her side itched a little, where her wing turrets used to be. They were removed for top-heaviness, and to make up for the increased weight of her improved sensors. They’d used the space for two pairs of three-inch/50s, like the ones her destroyers had, and some more light-to-medium AA.
She kept all this-a forest of gun barrels, if a smaller one than they’d managed to slap on most full-sized cruisers-aimed and ready, and it took all her willpower to avoid lighting up the targets as they came into range, the drones letting go of their gliders as the latter group came forth.
Her destroyers (wait, since when were they her destroyers?), however, had no such computations, a combined total of 24 three-inch guns opening up almost in unison, followed up seconds later by a slightly more ragged salvo. She could feel her officers noting down the reload speeds of each gun crew, for her report..
The first shells fell short, as did the next couple salvos, but even an inexperienced crew could work wonders with radar-directed proximity-fuse-armned rapidfire cannons, so it wasn’t long before targets started dropping.
The girls let out whoops and cheers as the last one fell, and Atlanta allowed herself a small grin, for a moment.
The next few hours kept them occupied with some of the less glamorous aspects of their shakedown cruise: navigation, station-keeping, a couple mock torpedo runs, rapidly changing formations, ASW practice, the works.
The destroyers were noticeably less peppy by then, though she was sure that they all had experience with much longer cruises than this, if perhaps at a lower tempo (she didn’t actually know much about them, honestly, aside from Schley. Hell, she knew more about the guns that shared Dahlgren’s and Parrott’s namesakes than the girls themselves).
In any case, it was time for the final leg of their cruise, before heading back to port.
“Alright, girls. Time for your speed trials.”
That got them to perk back up. Few ships would say be at all upset at an opportunity to go at flank speed, and these girls were no different.
Some of Atlanta’s crew already had some modern speed-detector-things set up on her deck (the boffins and repair ships might not have found a way to integrate post-1950 tech into shipgirls yet, but they were perfectly capable of lugging it around in their holds. Being carried by a shipgirl didn’t magically make them work on abyssals (they’d checked, Atlanta had even been a Guinea Pig for one of the experiments), but they still had their uses-like right now.
The Wickes and Clemsons were still roughly equal in speed, if perhaps a knot or two slower than they used to be (their internal machinery wasn’t as improved as many of their other systems, which was probably why they could be refitted soo quickly in the first place), which actually put their top speed at about equal to hers.
Except for Kimberly . She was, randomly, a knot faster than her sisters and…half-sisters? Not too shocking, though, these things happen-Atlanta herself, and her sisters, had a top speed 1.1 knots higher than designed. Sometimes a class or particular ship is just faster or slower than expected, thanks to the vagaries of constructing things as complicated as a warship.
Granted, this was a difference that came after a refit, not after construction, which was-
She was going to call that rarer, but she honestly had no idea if that was the case.
They were just forming up to head back to base, when Woolsey, the oldest ship present (not that she looked any older than her siblings, all of them about a century old despite resembling older elementary school students), suddenly twisted her neck around.
Atlanta felt it before the destroyer could say it.
“Surface contact, two-one-five, two-zero-two-zero-zero.”
Six pairs of eyes turned to the cruiser. They knew, as well as she did, that there weren’t supposed to be any ships out in that direction, not right now at least.
“Line Ahead formation, fall in behind me.”
A quick transmission back to San Diego got them to scramble a few jets-not that they were of much use offensively, but even with many of their modern sensors unreliable, they could still help identify and track this interloper fleet.
Perhaps more comforting was the voice of the old pre-dreadnought Georgia (BB-15) (if Atlanta heard one more joke about being “inside of her” then she’d shove a torp up the offender’s skirt. Especially if it was Georgia herself).
“I’m rounding up all the girls we’ve got around here for a sortie. You just keep sitting pretty and we’ll be right on over.”
That lifted a weight from her shoulders-true, her track record of surface actions, especially one commanded from an older and larger ship was “had one, then died,” but even the scratch force that they could muster up stood a better chance than one CLAA (posthumous as that designation was) and a bunch of four-stackers.
Naval Base San Diego might be between major fleets at the moment, but they still had their local defense fleet (Georgia, a couple gunboats, PT boats, subchasers, and a very angry minesweeper), plus a few destroyers and destroyer escorts in between convoys.
Only Georgia and the larger gunboat had guns over six inches, if in old casemates and single mounts, respectively. But that was still a lot of smaller-caliber guns and torpedos to throw at the problem.
Meanwhile, she led her destroyers away, changing course from time to time, to make sure that they were still capable of intercepting the fleet before it got too close to the shore. The girls were mostly silent, their mouths occupied with the grisly task of annihilating their stocks of shipgirl-grade energy bars, trying to refill their torpedo launchers with something deadlier than the training torps they’d expended earlier.
And then she got a report from the jets.
“Two heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, and twenty destroyers?”
That was…bad.
Atlanta might be able to take on one of the CLs, if they were old and small. If they were something like a Cleveland or a Brooklyn , though? Then she was already dead.
Even a very old CA was probably beyond her, unless if they waited politely for her to close to torpedo range. And if they were something more modern, than even Georgia might be overwhelmed by the two of them, firing far more advanced shells than hers, at her old armor, far more quickly and accurately than even her modernized self could match.
The destroyers were almost reasonable in comparison-Atlanta herself could probably account for at least three of them, assuming that she wasn’t targeted by a bunch of them at once, or any of the cruisers.
The minutes ticked on, and on, and on-radar contact, this time from the east. The defense fleet was coming.
The Abyssal War had seen no shortage of odd hodgepodge forces-without even touching the unusual combinations that the Abyssals themselves fielded on a regular basis. She could, for example, recall the defense of Tampa Bay, where a pair of Abyssal heavy cruisers raided the city. They were repelled by: a museum cargo ship ( SS American Victory ); a couple coast guard cutters (both named USS Tampa ); and a modern steel-hulled nuclear submarine, later joined by one very confused battleship.
Then there was that time that HMS Victory and a German U-boat ambushed a pair of overly-ambitious Abyssal destroyers.
In short, it wasn’t without precedent for auxiliaries of various types to get in on the action, to varying degrees of effectiveness. Usually, however, it was because the enemy came to them.
So she was a bit surprised to see that the subchasers had actually tagged along-they were barely any tougher than the PT boats (they could probably be seriously damaged by machine guns ), larger, and slower. They didn’t even have torps, just a single three-incher each. Even a tiny destroyer could blow them apart, probably with a single salvo.
The minesweeper, Bittern , was slightly better armed-with a grand total of two three-inch/50s. Like all the other smaller craft, her guns were older and less effective than the ones on Atlanta and her destroyers. She’d probably get them replaced by a more modern version eventually, but for now…
Even the PT boats would be of limited effectiveness against an apparently well-escorted force in broad daylight, but she wasn’t going to say no to 20 extra torpedoes.
In any case, she led her destroyers into a parallel course with the defense fleet, in between them and the approaching enemy. When she finally came abreast with Georgia, her signals officer started waving signal flags which, due to the usual Sparkly Shipgirl Magic Bullshit, allowed them to speak as if she were standing on her deck.
“So what’s the plan?”
“I was about to ask you the same, Captain.”
“Eh?”
“You’re the most senior officer here.” She said, tapping her own lieutenant-commander's insignia.
…
She supposed that that technically made sense, as she had actual experience leading small formations in both this life and her previous one, and the powers that be had given her an appropriate rank, once they started getting their shit together and integrating shipgirls into thier command structure and-
She was leading a surface action.
She was leading a surface action.
She didn’t break down into hysterical laughter, but it was a near-run thing.
Atlantics 1 Next>>