Frigate [Kancolle] [Oneshot]

The sound is faint - barely audible. But it's there, and it's enough.

"Beat silent running," I whisper.

*rat-tat-tatatata-at-tat-tat!* ... *rat-tat-tatatata-at-tat-tat!*

By the time the last beat is struck, it is the loudest sound aboard. The crew have all frozen in place, some even holding their breath - pointless, of course (even for me, crew noise is not the dominant sound source when I'm under way) but an inevitable reaction to the order nonetheless.

I can't hear the signal any better - my own noise is not the limiting factor there, quiet as I am normally - but time has cleared it up enough. I have an angle, but not a side. "Thirty degrees a-larboard, gently now." The bearing ambiguity resolves. Ten degrees aft of my starbord beam. Up top, a lookout checks that direction and confirms no surface vessels. And there are no friendly submersibles running these waters. Contact, the first lieutenant writes in the log.

Some few minutes and one further course change later, I have a rough range, speed, and heading. I head in it's direction, keeping it about 15 degrees off the bow, and tacking occasionally (despite having the wind at my back) to switch which side of the bow its on. By the time I'm close enough for my final run, I have it's course figured quite precisely, and as I turn directly towards it my navigator clicks his stopwatch. "Set charges for eighty feet and prepare for action." A quiet murmur passes through me as the orders are spread.

I can feel tensions rise as the navigator's watch counts down to the calculated intercept point. The watch beeps. Now. "Roll charges! Beat to quarters."

On my deck, gunners pull the arming pins from depth charges as ratings roll them over the gunwales by the simple expedient of lifting the inboard ends of the long planks they are resting on. Beneath them, crew surge into action as the drums sound again, readying the guns. Before they can finish, the charges go off behind me, and I can feel my frames shake.

"Hard to starboard and bring the guns to bear." My rudder goes hard over, and I heel heavily in the turn for a minute before settling down with the churned water of the target area directly off my starboard beam. I wait nervously to see the results of my attack- There! A sleek, snarly, ugly shape emerges from the water as the Abyssal submarine is forced to the surface.

I give it no change to get its bearings. "Starboard battery, fire!" The roar of 21 cannon firing in a volley is deafening. 24- and 36-pound balls intended to breach heavy timbers have no difficulty penetrating a thin steel pressure hull. The gunners aimed for the waterline, and many hit near there; critically, some hit just below. The gun crews race through their reloading drill, but there is no need; before they are ready for the next volley, the submarine begins to list, putting more of the holes under the water, and, with a gurgling wail, the monster slips beneath the waves.

I am about to order my crew to stand down when I notice something splashing not far from the target. Another submarine? Yes, one of the humanoid ones, and it looks like it's struggling to surface. I make a snap decision, and turn directly towards it. Just as I'm about to sail directly over it, I think girl-shaped thoughts, pushing my true, thousand-ton self away for a moment, and reach down to grab her hand and haul her out of the water. The relief on her face turns to horror and rage as she sees just who has 'helped' her, but there's nothing she can do about it; we're too close for a torpedo to arm, and she can't man her deck guns when my swivels are covering her deck. I can't help but smile as I give an order that has been rarely heard for a century, but is baked into my bones. "Away all boarding parties."

It should be a slaughter, black powder guns and swords against machine pistols and SMGs. And it is. But I have a crew of over 300, many of them marines and all of them trained for boarding action, while she has a crew of little more than 50, and the tight confines of a submarine give them nowhere to set up a proper line of defence. Her crew die viciously and expensively, but they die all the same. Shortly, the boat is ours.

---

I set sail as, behind me, the powder charges go off and the Abyssal submarine begins to sink. (I cannot, alas, take home a prize which outweighs me by a thousand tons and which my crew have not the least idea how to operate.) On my deck, a working party sets up a block-and-tackle on the yard to haul fresh depth charges from the hold. Below, in what used to be the captain's cabin, another team of ratings is working to haul in the towed array, under the supervision of my navigator (who, his former occupation being obsoleted by a handheld GPS unit, had been the one to learn to operate said device, and to interpret and make use of the SONAR readings from the laptop it was attached to); meanwhile the bosun is monitoring the portable diesel generator which is recharging the batteries which powered the array while we were running silent.

Normally, I would continue south, but the admiralty wants me back home. My doctor, who has a gift for languages, is already reading the codebooks and documents we captured to them over the satphone, but they want the originals in their hands post-haste. So, as soon as the towed array is secured, I'll make sail for the coast and come ashore; from there I can return to London simply by heading to the nearest village and taking a cab.

I regret not being able to complete my patrol. Still, two Abyssal submarines is not a bad patrol record for a two-hundred-year-old, fifth-rate frigate.

Not bad at all.

Spoiler: AN

AN: This was inspired by a discussion I was in some months ago about what useful contributions to the war effort a sailing ship shipgirl could make, and ASW work came up. I was thinking more about how it might work earlier today, and I realized I'd accidentally come up with a coherent narrative, so I decided to write this out and post it.

• I based the unnamed frigate off HMS Endymion in terms of guns, crew, and displacement. However, it probably isn't actually Endymion; she was reclassified from 5th-rate frigate to 4th-rate ship-of-the-line in 1817, and would probably refer to herself as such if summoned.
• This ficlet assumes that doing a significant remodel of the shipgirl in question isn't possible, so all the modern equipment - depth charges, satphone, laptop, batteries, digital wristwatch, GPS unit, portable generator, and towed-array SONAR - is stuff that it would be possible to load aboard a sailing ship, install without major structural changes with only the help of the ship's carpenter and crew, and (with the exception of the SONAR) use without any special technical skill.
• Speaking of the towed array:
  • The cable is relatively short; there's no engine noise to get the hydrophones away from
  • The array is installed in what was formerly the captain's cabin in the rear of the ship. The inboard end of the cable (which is wired to the laptop and the batteries/generator) is mounted in a bracket; from there the cable goes through a couple pulleys and out a hole in the back wall. Deploying the array consists of feeding it out the hole manually then using the pulleys to control the rate at which it exits until the line is taught; there's no provision for deploying any distance other than the maximum. Retrieving the array requires multiple burly sailors with a winch and plenty of time.
  • People in the 1800s weren't any less intelligent than today, so I assume it's not impossible for one of the ship's officers to successfully be trained as a sonarman and TMA officer.
• Minor plot hole I am fully aware of: If the shipgirl can give her crew satphones and GPSs, she could give them megaphones and walkie-talkies, which would be better ways of passing orders than drums. I just liked the idea of her literally beating general quarters too much to leave it out.
  • In case the video link breaks: The 'Beat to quarters' scene from Master and Commander (specifically the one from near the start of the movie, when they first spot the Acheron in the mists)

 

I posted this to SV and SB a couple years ago; decided I might as well complete the trifecta.