NationStates Jolt Archive

"You'd imagine that we'd have charted out at least all of the continents by now, if not all of the islands perhaps. I mean come on, we've got all of those surveillance satellites in space and even more if you add in the rest of the Empire," griped Able Seaman John Medichkin as he splashed some paint onto the bulkhead.

To be fair, the entire crew of DLGN273 was bored. Even though they had cruised at a steady forty-two knots thanks to their nuclear reactor, the voyage had still taken them nearly two and a half weeks, and they were only just now approaching the coast. And what did they have to look forward to once they got there? Nothing but a few weeks of charting the coastline, perhaps a few landing parties, and then another two and a half weeks to go home. It may one day become a bustling colony, but that was for private enterprises to fund after the Navy got back.

"I don't know man," responded his fellow painter, Able Seaman Michael DeAndras. "Maybe it's one of those whatchamacallit, Schrödinger's cat things, yaknow?"

Seaman Medichkin just stared at his shipmate for a long moment before returning to painting and a response. "Just what in the world are you talking about?"

"Well, maybe these continents exist and don't exist until you decide to go check and see if they do, yaknow?"

Medichkin's pondering of what sort of derogatory remarks ought to be directed at DeAndras' intelligence were rather rudely interrupted by the sudden wail of the ship's klaxon and the thundering voice of the Officer of the Deck.

"GENERAL QUARTERS, GENERAL QUARTERS! ALL HANDS MAN YOUR BATTLESTATIONS! THIS IS NO DRILL, ALL HANDS MAN YOUR BATTLESTATIONS!"

Things weren't going to be so boring after all.

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"What's the situation?" asked Captain Jonathan Patterico as he came onto the bridge in what he hoped was a dignified manner, and not the mad dash it had been on the way up.

"Here's some video from the NestEye UAV we launched earlier sir," commented the ship's executive officer as he hit the play button. The small television at the captain's seat obediently began to play back the digitally recorded footage.

"As you can see, this fleet of ships approached this town and, discharging soldiers, began to ransack it," drolled the XO through the fast-forwarded tape. "We've seen a number of persons we believe civilians killed, and they've just started firing the town."

"Odd ships those. They look like monitors," was the passing remark made by the captain as he watched the video. "We're what, seven leagues from the coast?"

"Yes sir. This spot in particular is eight and a half leagues."

"Very well. Proceed at top speed to this location and ready a boarding party to secure the ground. Let us put an end to this nonsense."

Smoke belched out of the cannons of His Majesty's Battleship Nejickel as it fired upon a stronghold resisting her troops. The shells missed of course, landing over a hundred yards from the intended target. No matter, simply correct and fire again. Or at least that was the plan until the strange new ship appeared.

"Ship Master Rasdin, we are being approached by a large vessel of unknown origin. It does not respond to any of our semaphore signals, it merely blinks a light at us in an undecipherable pattern" reported what might best be called the captain's slave. Owned by the captain, his duty was essentially to be the ship's gopher.

Unfortunately for the Nejickel, Ship Master Rasdin was possessed of much more money than he was sense. "Order the gunnery crews to have the ship come about and surrender," was the impatient captain's only response.

That the Sovereignty of Blotniak was quite powerful relative to its known neighbors, the last of which it was currently attacking, and the Nejickel with its four 12-inch cannons the pride and joy of the Blotniak Royal Navy, did not excuse the stupidity of Rasdin. A competent commander would have sought to find out the size of the newcomer and whether an attack was quite the smartest thing to do. As the ship in question was three times their size and a hundred years more advanced, it was not.

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"Are they insane?" asked Captain Patterico as the larger of the two monitors opened fire with a full salvo. None of the shells came close to the now evading destroyer leader, but it was still a rather uncomfortable experience, especially as a lucky hit would do quite a good deal of damage.

"Looks like. Makes matters rather simple for us," remarked the XO.

"Quite. Send a report to ONI about this, and engage the enemy. Launch a torpedo at each of the monitors, and use the gun on the rest of the fleet."

Two 21" torpedoes jumped into the water from their trainable mounts aboard the destroyer leader and sped off towards the monitors, which were quite unaware that they had less than seven minutes to live. What they were aware of was that the 6" gun aboard the mystery ship was spitting out shells at an ungodly rate, and that the smaller unarmored vessels that were critical to the success of this operation would not survive for long. Raising steam, they headed out to meet the mystery combatant.

Brodny fired another round from his bolt action rifle at the brown clad troops who had launched this invasion. Cycling the bolt, he paused as a loud report echoed from the harbor. The scene was quite astonishing. The many invasion ships were aflame, and a huge column of water had arisen in the harbor, carrying with it the broken bits of one of the two large battleships that had been shelling them. Just a short second later, the water around the largest, which investigations would later show to be the Nejickel, flashed white, then surged up, breaking the ship into a thousand tiny pieces, which soared high into the air. There were no survivors.

Quite understandably, having had the pride of their fleet effortlessly destroyed, along with most of the fleet proper for that matter, the Blotniak soldiers began to run for the dubious security of the shore. Really, they had no choice. Without their seaborne artillery, taking the city would prove an exceedingly bloody affair, one that would cripple them. The fact that the enemy quite obviously had seaborne artillery of their own now made it abundantly clear that their best option was to flee. And so they did.

As they did, Brodny and his fellow soldiers followed them, taking what shots they could. And on the waters, small black dots that would prove to be rigid hull inflatable boats came speeding towards the shore.

As the RHIBs hit the beach, the sailors who formed DLGN273's boarding party jumped off, and opened fire at oncoming soldiers. Who to fire at was a rather simple question. There were two groups of people coming towards them. One was running for the water as fast as they could, with the occassional pot shot behind them, and the others were shooting at them as much as they could.

"Survey says: The bad guys are the closest ones," muttered Able Seaman Michael Horstman as he fired off another couple of rounds from his M-16. While admittedly obsolete, and due to be replaced in Rosdivan service, the M-16 was still quite capable of killing people, as the tumbling, and henceforth prone, bodies of their tan uniformed opponents demonstrated.

Though the Blotniaks were on the unfortunate end of a hundred years' technological difference, that did not mean that they were totally defenseless. A .40 caliber round traveling at 2000 feet per second will still do quite a bit of damage, and the emphasis for the Blotniak military was on precisely aimed fire at distances up to and including a thousand feet. Certainly the Rosdivan sailors were doing their best to make that a difficult task, but one's best was not always enough. Which is why Lieutenant Dan Simmons was forced to wipe Horstman's brains off of his face near the end of the battle.

"What's the situation?" asked Admiral Graham as he stepped into his office. Normally the Office of Oceanographic Survey was a rather boring office, the dim lighting within the building providing a suitable illustration of an officer's career path within that office. But over the past night there had been quite a bustle, and he'd been forced to come in rather earlier than he was used to.

"Approximately 0030 RST, Destroyer Leader DLGN273 approached the coastline of a new continent, located 20,000 miles west of Rosdivan," began a young lieutenant. "While conducting a preliminary survey with an unmanned aerial vehicle, they came across a seaborne force attacking and pillaging a town. They engaged this force on land and sea, wiping it out at a cost of 6 sailors killed and 17 wounded, some severely. They're requesting a medical evacuation for those sailors and a diplomatic team to establish more formal relations." Impressively, there was not a hint of emotion in the lieutenant's voice as he delivered the report.

"Damnit, they want medical evacuation?! They're one of our fastest ships and it took them two and a half weeks to make the journey, there's no way we can get anything out to evacuate them," exploded the admiral. He was quite correct. Even using seaplanes, which were being phased out of service, you still had to get their tenders set up along the route, which would take just as long. At this point however, a young ensign, who had been stuck doing paperwork ever since he had been assigned here, spoke up.

"Sir, if I may? Davidson Aerospace just had the maiden flight of their new Skymaster prototype aircraft, didn't they? It's nuclear powered, so it should be able to fly out there and back without any problem. Seaplane too, so we don't have to worry about a landing field."

Pausing to mull it over, the admiral nodded his head and strode off to the phone. The folks at Davidson were going to yell his ear off, but military needs took priority, and commandeering was perfectly legal.