PTSD
darthcourt10
Well worn.
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Fallenworldful
So, a third snip. I've fallen way behind already haha. Our resident dapper kaiju writes far too fast for us mere mortals to keep up with.
+=====+
August 15th, 2013
US Fleet Activities Sasebo
The baths at Sasebo were as comfortable as Caroline remembered them. They had been built in a blend of traditional Japanese and Western styles, with the traditional high-vaulted roof, columns, and lintels but built with glass, steel, and concrete rather than wood and paper. A careful balance of humid and dry air left just the right amount of steam hanging in the room. There was a large central bath and row of shower stalls, but small enclaves housed more private facilities as well.
She had occupied one of these, filling the tub with piping hot water and drawing the curtains shut before letting the repair fluid get to work on fixing all the little issues that popped up during a deployment. That little bit of rust? Gone. Some cracked piping? Sealed. A bent railing? Straightened. No one knew how good having every ache and pain washed away in seconds could feel without experiencing it for themselves. Sounds of shipgirls relaxing in repair baths had become a meme for a reason, after all.
It was hard to enjoy it though, with the events of the previous day and night looming over her head. Admiral Richardson had only nodded at her words, no judgement or anger at the admission of weakness. He had Jamaica drop some of her fairies off to help repair the damage to the sidewalks as Hiei notified Sasebo's resident psychologist that they needed her, and they all boarded the shuttle to the base proper with nary a word. That had been an awkward 20 minutes as the other girls that had arrived with the convoy could clearly tell something was up, but held back from commenting. Caroline was faintly sure that Jamaica would've glared anyone who looked like they might ask into silence, anyway.
The debriefing was even briefer than usual, with not a single Abyssal force even coming within radar range of the convoy. Some scattered groups had been sighted from the air, but a few aircraft from Sangamon had sent them fleeing. Richardson gave the usual congratulations, before dismissing everyone else for their few days ashore before they'd begin their trek home again. Again Caroline felt the weight of the gazes and whispers as the others filed out, Jamaica lingering just a second longer before Richardson shooed her out as well.
Before she even realized it, she was before the psychologist's office, staring at the little brass name plate declaring the room occupied by Olivia Wilson. She rested her hand on the door knob but hesitated, a tiny part of her casting about for any way out of the meeting. Richardson quickly put a stop to that.
"Rochester, your new orders are to take as much time as you need to recover."
She froze at those words. "S-sir?"
Richardson met her eyes as she looked back at him. "You're not fighting this war alone, Rochester. Others can take up the slack. It's far more important that you heal so you don't burn out."
Caroline nodded, and turned back to the door. "Yes sir," she responded, and stepped in.
The evaluation went fine at first. Dr. Wilson was friendly, outgoing, and a bit loud. She had asked the standard questions about how she had been feeling, whether she was eating properly, and other little things. Caroline even allowed herself to start to feel comfortable when Dr. Wilson had begun to poke at her background, teasing out the barest outline of what happened in China before she clammed up again. That had been enough to set the psychologist's face into a scowl, and she had stormed out after reassuring Caroline that her ire wasn't directed at her. Everything had fallen apart after that. She'd been given a very clear diagnosis and a small mountain of paperwork to fill out, with phrases like "temporary disability" and "honorable discharge" floating about.
Now she was sitting in a repair bath, her path torn out from under her.
"What a mess," she whispered to herself. No shipgirl had ever been formally diagnosed with PTSD before, despite many having served continuously for eight years now. Even she was—had been—fine in combat, and Caroline had been involved in some of the fiercest fighting around Hawaii in the opening months of the Abyssal War. Maybe subsuming herself in her ship-memories wasn't particularly healthy, but she'd never had trouble summoning her rigging and sailing into danger when needed.
Many believed whatever compressed rules allowed shipgirls to function as they did also dampened the effects of stress and trauma. There was a fair bit of evidence backing up that view, too; plenty of summons and natural borns alike had been involved in days-long running battles often marked with gruesome injuries, only to bounce back fully healed and ready to continue fighting.
Yet past the surface, and outside of combat, she knew that wasn't quite true. She had heard rumors that some of the IJN girls harbored dark memories from their previous lives, and she knew a few USN girls who had similar issues. That wasn't even counting those like her, the younger natural borns who had seen the worst of Blood Week firsthand. The defenders of humanity, the most effective weapon against the Abyssal threat, bore their own mental wounds that their very nature made nearly impossible to mend.
Shipgirls naturally attracted attention. She had fallen over in broad daylight, with dozens of potential witnesses, all who could've captured the event on camera, and her absence from the return convoy would be noted as well. There would undoubtably be a media circus when news of her inevitable dismissal broke. Sure, the Abyssal War looked like it would be slowing down even further with the arrival of yet another group of friendly Abyssals, but shaking the public's confidence now was hardly a good thing.
And besides, it would cast doubt on the hundreds of other shipgirls faithfully serving every day.
Caroline shivered despite the heat. She briefly thought about flicking on the TV to try and distract herself, but reconsidered. Of all the things the endless therapy sessions had covered, it was that avoiding trauma was the surefire way to never heal. Her fairies piped up "Hey, hey hey!" "Hey hey." "Hey?" They started piling up on her shoulder, all clamoring to get their voices heard, before one overeager midshipman slipped a little more dramatically than any unintentional accident warranted and sent them all tumbling into the water.
She smiled at their antics. "Thank you, guys," she said, before scooping them out of the water and letting them climb back aboard. Caroline took a deep breath to steel her nerves, before letting her mind drift back into the past.
Had it really been eight years since that fateful week already? It seemed like just yesterday she had been stepping onto the beach for a day of celebration. And now… A bubble of panic started to worm its way up through her thoughts as she tried to bring herself to focus on that horrible month-
Caroline sprinted through the streets of Beijing, weaving through lines of abandoned cars and piles of rubble at top speed. Her engineers were yelling about her boilers redlining, but Caroline couldn't afford the time to stop. A single pause and the beast chasing her would find the range in instants. Even her own thundering steps couldn't mask the gallop of its pursuit. The buildings suddenly fell away, and her heart sank to her feet. She knew exactly where she was. The red brick wall of the Forbidden City stood to her left, and Tiananmen Square opened before her. If she kept going now, she'd run straight into the Embassy district. There was no way the evacuation had gotten much further. She was out of space to stall.
Caroline took a deep breath as she slowed, and spent just a moment considering what to do. There wasn't very much choice at all, and Rochester turned to face off against her pursuer once and for all.
The monster strode into the square at a slowing walk, mouth bent into that horrible sharp-toothed grin again. Each step powdered asphalt and dished in the road. Its eyes darted around, taking in their arena, and it stopped too. The Re's smile widened even further as it leered at Rochester. "Hehehehehe…" It started to chuckle, and Rochester tensed at the parody of amusement. "HAHAHAHA!" The chuckle morphed into deranged laughter, and-
-and try as she might Caroline couldn't stomp it out. She felt her turbines begin to over rev, and she forcibly turned to the events after those first few months, something she could actually bear to think about now.
China had survived the events of Blood Week, but for many, survival in this case was hardly an achievement. The best estimates pegged the death toll somewhere around 100 million in just the first month of the Abyssal war, with another 20 million following due to famine and disease caused by the collapse of mechanized agriculture in the absence of spare parts and shortages of pharmaceuticals. The Pearl River and Yangtze River Delta attacks gutted the country's economic heartland, with disastrous consequences around the globe.
The central government had held on, if barely. The CCP derived its legitimacy from prosperity, and the devastation wrought by the Abyssal attacks had ripped that away. However, the early Pyrrhic victories against the Abyssals had been enough to assure the people that the government wasn't going to fold, and bought enough time to kickstart a war emergency program. Industry was transferred inland as fast as possible, and central China once more became the center of resistance against a foreign invader.
Trade collapsed overnight. Even without the hundreds of ships lost to Abyssal attacks, there were simply no more goods to ship. Nations dependent on imports from overseas, which accounted for every nation on Earth suddenly found themselves cut off from their suppliers and scrambling to try and resolve the crisis. Vital electronics and machinery suddenly needed new sources, to say nothing of oil, steel, plastics, and even clothing. For a time, it seemed like all hope was lost and humanity would drown underneath the Abyssal tide. Yet, against all odds, they made it out of the fire.
Blood Week and the hellish months right afterwards had stretched on for what seemed like forever, but they had ended all the same and by then desperation had given way to grim determination. The world settled into siege mode, full of recruitment drives, victory gardens, and rationing meant to direct everything to the war effort. The efforts paid off, far quicker than even the most optimistic predictions. Battles morphed from desperate rear-guard actions into proactive intercepts into outright offensives as more and more shipgirls appeared. Then, just in time for Christmas in 2006, a massive convoy sailed from the rebuilt facilities at Los Angeles headed to Nagasaki packed to the brim with food and supplies. The Abyssals sent three attacks against the convoy, and shattered against the awesome power of a whole carrier group and three dozen shipgirls. Caroline still remembered the crowds when that first convoy pulled into Nagasaki harbor.
More victories followed as shipgirls began to sanitize whole swaths of sea, and nukes fell on the greatest concentrations of Abyssals. The Navy even had grown confident enough to take her off duty and send her home for several months in early 2007, citing her age and the now stabilizing war as the reasons. She had stayed benched for a little over two months, bouncing between psychiatrists and counselors trying to treat someone who for all intents and purposes had been a child soldier, and scientists trying to understand how the hell shipgirls worked, before the campaign to clean up the mess on the Korean Peninsula hit a snag in the form of a Princess squatting on the ruins of Pyongyang. All hands were called on deck for that operation, and Caroline had left home after just two months to prowl the Korean coast once more.
After that, she had gone wherever she was needed, fighting battles across the globe. For all her experience, though, Blood Week was still different. Every campaign she had participated in after those terrible early days had been one where the civilians involved knew the risks, had chosen to stride into danger alongside the military to achieve goals like getting that one shipment of supplies through, or were being evacuated and defended by some of the largest fleets ever mustered. When the Abyssals first attacked, however, no one was safe. She had watched so many die despite everything she had done to stem the tide, and had walked out of battles as the only survivor simply due to a quirk of fate deciding she should bear the soul of a warship born anew.
August 24th, 2005
Tianjin, China
The storm was upon her. Rain and wind lashed at her rigging to complement the occasional lightning strikes, but Caroline stood firm. Hundreds of tiny dots lined the raging waters, each an Abyssal loaded with dozens of those zombie-like creatures. Beside her, three PLA soldiers kept a watch with binoculars, waiting for the signal to begin firing the mortar they had with them. A few other soldiers were prying open ammunition crates and setting up sandbags around them. Thousands of others were dispersed along the harbor's waterfront, preparing improvised barricades and pre-plotting kill zones. Once the Abyssals were close enough, they were to open fire with a devastating first strike. Hopefully, the show of force would be enough to lessen the monsters' momentum so a counterattack would be able to throw them into the sea.
Out of the haze, a massive sphere began to take shape. Caroline frowned and checked her radar. The weather was playing havoc with any accurate measures, and it didn't show anything out of the- wait. A flash of lightning backlit the enormous shapes, revealing that there were three of the things powering towards the shore. They appeared on radar just as suddenly, and Caroline shivered. Gleaming white carapace formed a sleek shell only marred by shallow fissures radiating an ethereal red light. Each had jaws the size of a small building, with teeth larger than cars, and bristled with gun turrets.
The soldiers held fire for a moment longer before the radio sitting on the floor of their little foxhole beeped three times. Not a second later, the first mortar rounds were away, and artillery began to rain down on the Abyssal landing force. Caroline stood up as well, bringing her own guns to bear. Her fairies took a few extra seconds to calculate the range to those floating fortresses, then opened fire. Nine 8" AP rounds, each weighing a hundred pounds, joined the wave of ammunition falling towards the sea.
A few small explosions blossomed on the surface of the floating fortresses, marking their white coat with small burns but doing nothing more. The fire directed towards the landing ships was much more effective, and the monstrous boats began to founder from hits. Then it was the Abyssals' turn to reply, and their guns began to flash. Soon they were hitting the harbor wall, where their landing ships used their own clawed limbs to climb up onto the roads. Mouths opened in a parody of landing ship ramps and literally vomited out hundreds of the abominations in a steady stream. Something that looked like a tank emerged, but crawled along dozens of hands instead of tracks. A rocket slammed into it shortly after, and the machine destroyed the landing craft it came from when it cooked off.
Several more of the tanks emerged elsewhere and began to push inland, taking fire and blowing up as easily as the first, but in such quantities that the rockets began to taper off. Then it was their turn to fire, and one of the PLA strongpoints was bracketed by explosions that abruptly cut off the machine guns that had been emplaced there. A wave of the zombies rushed the suppressed gun crews and began to pile into the fortified storefront.
Rochester ignored the sight of strongpoints collapsing before the assault to focus on getting as many rounds downrange as possible. Every shot she landed accurately would buy some critical seconds for a soldier somewhere in the mess down there. She had no time to hesitate with so much hinging on her. They fell like rain onto the docks, stitching a line on the landing forces and leaving a mess of monstrous corpses and shattered hulks behind.
A ragged cheer rang across the radio as a trio of jets streaked across the skies and poured a barrage of rockets into the two Floating Fortresses. The explosions cratered their armor badly, but they kept trucking forward heedless of the damage. The cheers faded away as the monsters drew closer to the shore and the complete lack of effect became apparent.
Even as the huge Floating Fortresses rammed into the shore and began to slowly drag their way inland, Rochester, kept firing at the lighter forces she knew she could help stop. Then her radar pinged, and Rochester took notice. Aircraft were streaming out of the Floating Fortresses. SPAAGs and MANPADs took shots at the wave of ball- and dagger-shaped Abyssal aircraft as they climbed, andPLAF airplanes swooped in and carved through the few that made it out of range. The flow didn't stop, however, and soon there were more aircraft flitting about than even modern antiaircraft tools could deal with.
The Abyssal aircraft began their diving attack runs, the pattern still familiar to Rochester. It didn't take long for a passel of bombers to spot their position and move to attack. She let loose with her own antiaircraft guns now, hoping to stop them from hitting the soldiers around her, while they fired off what few antiaircraft missiles they had.
Eight aircraft became seven when a 5" round struck one head on, then six after her Bofors found another target, then four after two fell to missiles. Then they were releasing their bombs just as they strayed into Oerlikon range, and another two disintegrated into fireballs.
It was too late. None of the bombs struck Rochester, but they landed close enough to throw sandbags everywhere and splash shrapnel off her hull plating. The blasts weren't even powerful enough to damage her rangefinders or drive her crew to cover. She emerged unscathed. The same couldn't be said of the men and women who had been fighting with her just moments ago. Rochester stared at the dark red stains painting the ground around her, as they began to swirl into voices begging her for help-
+=====+
Spoiler: A.N.
Not too satisfied with this. It's really unfocused and infodumpy, and I was intending to split it into multiple segments, but for now it'll do. I'll probably spend january revise all of the snippets I have completed by the end of the year, which should be another 2-3.
So, a third snip. I've fallen way behind already haha. Our resident dapper kaiju writes far too fast for us mere mortals to keep up with.
+=====+
August 15th, 2013
US Fleet Activities Sasebo
The baths at Sasebo were as comfortable as Caroline remembered them. They had been built in a blend of traditional Japanese and Western styles, with the traditional high-vaulted roof, columns, and lintels but built with glass, steel, and concrete rather than wood and paper. A careful balance of humid and dry air left just the right amount of steam hanging in the room. There was a large central bath and row of shower stalls, but small enclaves housed more private facilities as well.
She had occupied one of these, filling the tub with piping hot water and drawing the curtains shut before letting the repair fluid get to work on fixing all the little issues that popped up during a deployment. That little bit of rust? Gone. Some cracked piping? Sealed. A bent railing? Straightened. No one knew how good having every ache and pain washed away in seconds could feel without experiencing it for themselves. Sounds of shipgirls relaxing in repair baths had become a meme for a reason, after all.
It was hard to enjoy it though, with the events of the previous day and night looming over her head. Admiral Richardson had only nodded at her words, no judgement or anger at the admission of weakness. He had Jamaica drop some of her fairies off to help repair the damage to the sidewalks as Hiei notified Sasebo's resident psychologist that they needed her, and they all boarded the shuttle to the base proper with nary a word. That had been an awkward 20 minutes as the other girls that had arrived with the convoy could clearly tell something was up, but held back from commenting. Caroline was faintly sure that Jamaica would've glared anyone who looked like they might ask into silence, anyway.
The debriefing was even briefer than usual, with not a single Abyssal force even coming within radar range of the convoy. Some scattered groups had been sighted from the air, but a few aircraft from Sangamon had sent them fleeing. Richardson gave the usual congratulations, before dismissing everyone else for their few days ashore before they'd begin their trek home again. Again Caroline felt the weight of the gazes and whispers as the others filed out, Jamaica lingering just a second longer before Richardson shooed her out as well.
Before she even realized it, she was before the psychologist's office, staring at the little brass name plate declaring the room occupied by Olivia Wilson. She rested her hand on the door knob but hesitated, a tiny part of her casting about for any way out of the meeting. Richardson quickly put a stop to that.
"Rochester, your new orders are to take as much time as you need to recover."
She froze at those words. "S-sir?"
Richardson met her eyes as she looked back at him. "You're not fighting this war alone, Rochester. Others can take up the slack. It's far more important that you heal so you don't burn out."
Caroline nodded, and turned back to the door. "Yes sir," she responded, and stepped in.
The evaluation went fine at first. Dr. Wilson was friendly, outgoing, and a bit loud. She had asked the standard questions about how she had been feeling, whether she was eating properly, and other little things. Caroline even allowed herself to start to feel comfortable when Dr. Wilson had begun to poke at her background, teasing out the barest outline of what happened in China before she clammed up again. That had been enough to set the psychologist's face into a scowl, and she had stormed out after reassuring Caroline that her ire wasn't directed at her. Everything had fallen apart after that. She'd been given a very clear diagnosis and a small mountain of paperwork to fill out, with phrases like "temporary disability" and "honorable discharge" floating about.
Now she was sitting in a repair bath, her path torn out from under her.
"What a mess," she whispered to herself. No shipgirl had ever been formally diagnosed with PTSD before, despite many having served continuously for eight years now. Even she was—had been—fine in combat, and Caroline had been involved in some of the fiercest fighting around Hawaii in the opening months of the Abyssal War. Maybe subsuming herself in her ship-memories wasn't particularly healthy, but she'd never had trouble summoning her rigging and sailing into danger when needed.
Many believed whatever compressed rules allowed shipgirls to function as they did also dampened the effects of stress and trauma. There was a fair bit of evidence backing up that view, too; plenty of summons and natural borns alike had been involved in days-long running battles often marked with gruesome injuries, only to bounce back fully healed and ready to continue fighting.
Yet past the surface, and outside of combat, she knew that wasn't quite true. She had heard rumors that some of the IJN girls harbored dark memories from their previous lives, and she knew a few USN girls who had similar issues. That wasn't even counting those like her, the younger natural borns who had seen the worst of Blood Week firsthand. The defenders of humanity, the most effective weapon against the Abyssal threat, bore their own mental wounds that their very nature made nearly impossible to mend.
Shipgirls naturally attracted attention. She had fallen over in broad daylight, with dozens of potential witnesses, all who could've captured the event on camera, and her absence from the return convoy would be noted as well. There would undoubtably be a media circus when news of her inevitable dismissal broke. Sure, the Abyssal War looked like it would be slowing down even further with the arrival of yet another group of friendly Abyssals, but shaking the public's confidence now was hardly a good thing.
And besides, it would cast doubt on the hundreds of other shipgirls faithfully serving every day.
Caroline shivered despite the heat. She briefly thought about flicking on the TV to try and distract herself, but reconsidered. Of all the things the endless therapy sessions had covered, it was that avoiding trauma was the surefire way to never heal. Her fairies piped up "Hey, hey hey!" "Hey hey." "Hey?" They started piling up on her shoulder, all clamoring to get their voices heard, before one overeager midshipman slipped a little more dramatically than any unintentional accident warranted and sent them all tumbling into the water.
She smiled at their antics. "Thank you, guys," she said, before scooping them out of the water and letting them climb back aboard. Caroline took a deep breath to steel her nerves, before letting her mind drift back into the past.
Had it really been eight years since that fateful week already? It seemed like just yesterday she had been stepping onto the beach for a day of celebration. And now… A bubble of panic started to worm its way up through her thoughts as she tried to bring herself to focus on that horrible month-
Caroline sprinted through the streets of Beijing, weaving through lines of abandoned cars and piles of rubble at top speed. Her engineers were yelling about her boilers redlining, but Caroline couldn't afford the time to stop. A single pause and the beast chasing her would find the range in instants. Even her own thundering steps couldn't mask the gallop of its pursuit. The buildings suddenly fell away, and her heart sank to her feet. She knew exactly where she was. The red brick wall of the Forbidden City stood to her left, and Tiananmen Square opened before her. If she kept going now, she'd run straight into the Embassy district. There was no way the evacuation had gotten much further. She was out of space to stall.
Caroline took a deep breath as she slowed, and spent just a moment considering what to do. There wasn't very much choice at all, and Rochester turned to face off against her pursuer once and for all.
The monster strode into the square at a slowing walk, mouth bent into that horrible sharp-toothed grin again. Each step powdered asphalt and dished in the road. Its eyes darted around, taking in their arena, and it stopped too. The Re's smile widened even further as it leered at Rochester. "Hehehehehe…" It started to chuckle, and Rochester tensed at the parody of amusement. "HAHAHAHA!" The chuckle morphed into deranged laughter, and-
-and try as she might Caroline couldn't stomp it out. She felt her turbines begin to over rev, and she forcibly turned to the events after those first few months, something she could actually bear to think about now.
China had survived the events of Blood Week, but for many, survival in this case was hardly an achievement. The best estimates pegged the death toll somewhere around 100 million in just the first month of the Abyssal war, with another 20 million following due to famine and disease caused by the collapse of mechanized agriculture in the absence of spare parts and shortages of pharmaceuticals. The Pearl River and Yangtze River Delta attacks gutted the country's economic heartland, with disastrous consequences around the globe.
The central government had held on, if barely. The CCP derived its legitimacy from prosperity, and the devastation wrought by the Abyssal attacks had ripped that away. However, the early Pyrrhic victories against the Abyssals had been enough to assure the people that the government wasn't going to fold, and bought enough time to kickstart a war emergency program. Industry was transferred inland as fast as possible, and central China once more became the center of resistance against a foreign invader.
Trade collapsed overnight. Even without the hundreds of ships lost to Abyssal attacks, there were simply no more goods to ship. Nations dependent on imports from overseas, which accounted for every nation on Earth suddenly found themselves cut off from their suppliers and scrambling to try and resolve the crisis. Vital electronics and machinery suddenly needed new sources, to say nothing of oil, steel, plastics, and even clothing. For a time, it seemed like all hope was lost and humanity would drown underneath the Abyssal tide. Yet, against all odds, they made it out of the fire.
Blood Week and the hellish months right afterwards had stretched on for what seemed like forever, but they had ended all the same and by then desperation had given way to grim determination. The world settled into siege mode, full of recruitment drives, victory gardens, and rationing meant to direct everything to the war effort. The efforts paid off, far quicker than even the most optimistic predictions. Battles morphed from desperate rear-guard actions into proactive intercepts into outright offensives as more and more shipgirls appeared. Then, just in time for Christmas in 2006, a massive convoy sailed from the rebuilt facilities at Los Angeles headed to Nagasaki packed to the brim with food and supplies. The Abyssals sent three attacks against the convoy, and shattered against the awesome power of a whole carrier group and three dozen shipgirls. Caroline still remembered the crowds when that first convoy pulled into Nagasaki harbor.
More victories followed as shipgirls began to sanitize whole swaths of sea, and nukes fell on the greatest concentrations of Abyssals. The Navy even had grown confident enough to take her off duty and send her home for several months in early 2007, citing her age and the now stabilizing war as the reasons. She had stayed benched for a little over two months, bouncing between psychiatrists and counselors trying to treat someone who for all intents and purposes had been a child soldier, and scientists trying to understand how the hell shipgirls worked, before the campaign to clean up the mess on the Korean Peninsula hit a snag in the form of a Princess squatting on the ruins of Pyongyang. All hands were called on deck for that operation, and Caroline had left home after just two months to prowl the Korean coast once more.
After that, she had gone wherever she was needed, fighting battles across the globe. For all her experience, though, Blood Week was still different. Every campaign she had participated in after those terrible early days had been one where the civilians involved knew the risks, had chosen to stride into danger alongside the military to achieve goals like getting that one shipment of supplies through, or were being evacuated and defended by some of the largest fleets ever mustered. When the Abyssals first attacked, however, no one was safe. She had watched so many die despite everything she had done to stem the tide, and had walked out of battles as the only survivor simply due to a quirk of fate deciding she should bear the soul of a warship born anew.
August 24th, 2005
Tianjin, China
The storm was upon her. Rain and wind lashed at her rigging to complement the occasional lightning strikes, but Caroline stood firm. Hundreds of tiny dots lined the raging waters, each an Abyssal loaded with dozens of those zombie-like creatures. Beside her, three PLA soldiers kept a watch with binoculars, waiting for the signal to begin firing the mortar they had with them. A few other soldiers were prying open ammunition crates and setting up sandbags around them. Thousands of others were dispersed along the harbor's waterfront, preparing improvised barricades and pre-plotting kill zones. Once the Abyssals were close enough, they were to open fire with a devastating first strike. Hopefully, the show of force would be enough to lessen the monsters' momentum so a counterattack would be able to throw them into the sea.
Out of the haze, a massive sphere began to take shape. Caroline frowned and checked her radar. The weather was playing havoc with any accurate measures, and it didn't show anything out of the- wait. A flash of lightning backlit the enormous shapes, revealing that there were three of the things powering towards the shore. They appeared on radar just as suddenly, and Caroline shivered. Gleaming white carapace formed a sleek shell only marred by shallow fissures radiating an ethereal red light. Each had jaws the size of a small building, with teeth larger than cars, and bristled with gun turrets.
The soldiers held fire for a moment longer before the radio sitting on the floor of their little foxhole beeped three times. Not a second later, the first mortar rounds were away, and artillery began to rain down on the Abyssal landing force. Caroline stood up as well, bringing her own guns to bear. Her fairies took a few extra seconds to calculate the range to those floating fortresses, then opened fire. Nine 8" AP rounds, each weighing a hundred pounds, joined the wave of ammunition falling towards the sea.
A few small explosions blossomed on the surface of the floating fortresses, marking their white coat with small burns but doing nothing more. The fire directed towards the landing ships was much more effective, and the monstrous boats began to founder from hits. Then it was the Abyssals' turn to reply, and their guns began to flash. Soon they were hitting the harbor wall, where their landing ships used their own clawed limbs to climb up onto the roads. Mouths opened in a parody of landing ship ramps and literally vomited out hundreds of the abominations in a steady stream. Something that looked like a tank emerged, but crawled along dozens of hands instead of tracks. A rocket slammed into it shortly after, and the machine destroyed the landing craft it came from when it cooked off.
Several more of the tanks emerged elsewhere and began to push inland, taking fire and blowing up as easily as the first, but in such quantities that the rockets began to taper off. Then it was their turn to fire, and one of the PLA strongpoints was bracketed by explosions that abruptly cut off the machine guns that had been emplaced there. A wave of the zombies rushed the suppressed gun crews and began to pile into the fortified storefront.
Rochester ignored the sight of strongpoints collapsing before the assault to focus on getting as many rounds downrange as possible. Every shot she landed accurately would buy some critical seconds for a soldier somewhere in the mess down there. She had no time to hesitate with so much hinging on her. They fell like rain onto the docks, stitching a line on the landing forces and leaving a mess of monstrous corpses and shattered hulks behind.
A ragged cheer rang across the radio as a trio of jets streaked across the skies and poured a barrage of rockets into the two Floating Fortresses. The explosions cratered their armor badly, but they kept trucking forward heedless of the damage. The cheers faded away as the monsters drew closer to the shore and the complete lack of effect became apparent.
Even as the huge Floating Fortresses rammed into the shore and began to slowly drag their way inland, Rochester, kept firing at the lighter forces she knew she could help stop. Then her radar pinged, and Rochester took notice. Aircraft were streaming out of the Floating Fortresses. SPAAGs and MANPADs took shots at the wave of ball- and dagger-shaped Abyssal aircraft as they climbed, andPLAF airplanes swooped in and carved through the few that made it out of range. The flow didn't stop, however, and soon there were more aircraft flitting about than even modern antiaircraft tools could deal with.
The Abyssal aircraft began their diving attack runs, the pattern still familiar to Rochester. It didn't take long for a passel of bombers to spot their position and move to attack. She let loose with her own antiaircraft guns now, hoping to stop them from hitting the soldiers around her, while they fired off what few antiaircraft missiles they had.
Eight aircraft became seven when a 5" round struck one head on, then six after her Bofors found another target, then four after two fell to missiles. Then they were releasing their bombs just as they strayed into Oerlikon range, and another two disintegrated into fireballs.
It was too late. None of the bombs struck Rochester, but they landed close enough to throw sandbags everywhere and splash shrapnel off her hull plating. The blasts weren't even powerful enough to damage her rangefinders or drive her crew to cover. She emerged unscathed. The same couldn't be said of the men and women who had been fighting with her just moments ago. Rochester stared at the dark red stains painting the ground around her, as they began to swirl into voices begging her for help-
+=====+
Spoiler: A.N.
Not too satisfied with this. It's really unfocused and infodumpy, and I was intending to split it into multiple segments, but for now it'll do. I'll probably spend january revise all of the snippets I have completed by the end of the year, which should be another 2-3.
