StarDestroyer.Net BBS

(This is an introspective psychological work based in the same universe as Where There Ain't No Ten Commandments, reflecting on social strategies for dealing with mental health and on the legacy of wartime suffering, as well as being a bit of an investigation into a radically different culture from any we presently know. Note that as usual the opinions expressed are period, and offence should not be taken.)

Aftermath
September 12th 1945,
Tokyo Bay.


“Kapitanleutnant, thank you for coming on such short notice with your ship about to sail.”

“Under the Old Lady herself,” Nurajhi Savurna answered after having saluted the old doctor.

“Samijha Fernandez, taking her home one last time,” the doctor agreed. The Portuguese-descended Fernandez family had been quite prominent for some time, and Admiral Samijha Fernandez had been Chief of Naval Operations throughout the war. The Seydlitz-class Battlecruiser Prithvirani was Nurajhi's assigned ship, and had been since January of '44 when she'd been sent straight out of the academy to be part of her reconstituted crew as she was preparing to leave drydock following the leveling of her superstructure by the Yamato in the famed Battle off Savo in March of '43. Like most of the excellent young officers in wartime, she'd been promoted fast.

Even for the young Nurajhi—Nura, in the mess—the war had been one hellish experience. She'd seen shots exchanged with the fleet's old enemies off Leyte at range, and survived countless kamikazi attacks, one of which had struck home with devastating effect off Okinawa. Several of the bombs strapped to the kamikazi had been gas, and without the ventilation in the ships that had been added by the efforts of the Chemical Warfare Institute, she would have had to have been scuttled. The mere memory of it made her nose twitch with remembrance of the smell of burnt flesh, the horrifying scent of Yperite in the air, and she reached up to adjust her glasses slightly. Nura was only twenty-one, but certainly the worst experiences of the war had come after April of that year when the Japanese had started using gas out of sheer desperation. As it was, they'd been at Guam repairing damage in a mobile drydock when the war ended; the repairs had almost been finished, and a bit more hasty work had sent them north to meet Admiral Fernandez.

The Old Lady of the fleet had understandably wanted to be on her former command—the ship she'd conned at the start of the last war when she'd put a shell into the forward turret of HMS Inflexible and killed a thousand men in a heartbeat—the ship she'd commanded in a dozen duels of the First World War with the Imperial Japanese Navy. Built in German yards that were now bombed out rubble in occupied territory, rebuilt multiple times; as sturdy as ever. She'd been a suitable insult to the Japanese to hoist the Admiral's flag for the arrival in Tokyo Bay, and they'd all been proud of the honour, though Nurajhi was envious that she'd been passed up for a spot taking home their first symbolic spoil of the war, the old Japanese armoured ship Ibuki.

Their mission on the way back, though, was one that occupied everyone's attention in a grim fashion. It was, apparently, why the doctor had summoned her here. They were repatriating POWs, all eighteen thousand of those who survived, a part of her mind added bitterly as the old doctor stepped through into a room with a grandmotherly and concerned look to her face. Nurajhi followed. What she saw froze her and sickened her immediately.

“Korvettenkapitan Sahira Sitari,” the Doctor introduced very gently. “She shouldn't be released by the standards of care for Prisoners of War, but I asked for special permission from Admiral Fernandez herself, Kapitanleutnant. It was granted. We just need to get her home to her family as fast as possible... If there's to be any hope for her at all.”

Nurajhi stared at the waif, long dark brown hair faded and dull, grown out for the lack of razors; an eye cruelly missing, patched over now and sliced out by a scar that went the length of her face. There was another which had cruelly disfigured her hairline; on her right hand, three of the fingers were missing at seemingly random joints. Her face was sunken to the point of a skull, where it could be seen, and the pathetic creature, skin roughened, the hair starting to turn a little gray, seemed much older than she surely must have been. She sat rather funny, as she looked into the wall, silently, and didn't move or acknowledge their presence.

“What did they do her..?”

“Sport with swords,” the doctor answered. “Some other things... She probably won't be able to have children from what they did to her vagina with a bamboo spear at some point. Beaten so many times, so many broken bones. She shouldn't be alive. Any three or four particular incidents should have killed her with the lack of medical care she got. But she survived. Some people do; they're just like, they survive anything. I've seen it before in my life, someone with half their brain blasted out by shrapnel and they keep on living. I was a doctor in the last war too, after all.

“But those were casualties in war. Even the gas was done.. In war. This was all done to her in captivity. She's listening, by the way; she isn't brain damaged like that at all. She's just withdrawn. We should keep her here, bring in psychologists. But I've never trusted them, and the methods of those western men. Treat her like family, Kapitanleutnant, and she may yet recover. Fair would the gods be if she again spoke.”

Trembling, Nurajhi responded as she only might, stepping closer to the savaged officer and looking over her again. She seemed to be scarcely eighty-five pounds on her five-foot frame, if that. “Has she been eating enough?”

“Yes. She has no problem doing things. Automatic, like a machine, like her mind is somewhere else. She won't be to much of a burden on your mess, I think...”

“No burden at all.” Nurajhi continued, a moment later, and in an undignified way, quite close to tears. “No, the highest honour for us is to care for her. That is a better one than all the battle honours of the war. By why? How long was she there?”

“She's been in their hands since April of 1942. She was the executive officer on the destroyer Ilajhi which was sunk off Timor during the response to the intervention there. About half the crew survived; she was the ranking officer. There's only five of them left now. She did her best to protect all those she could, the other prisoners said, even the Americans and Brits and so on at the camp. So they concentrated their brutality on her until things led up to this, oh, maybe two years ago. Because she had done so much before then, the others looked out for her after that. More than a few starved to death to give her the food to survive. And she knows it. It's probably part of why she doesn't speak anymore.”

Long years of triage had hardened the doctor's heart. “It would be a damn sight of a measure of kindness by the fates if that gift wasn't wasted.”

Nurajhi's response was the only one a young Kætjhastian girl socialized in the common schools and the Turkish baths of Kænahra could make. She slipped onto the bed with Sahira, and ignored the nervous inhalation of the doctor as she enfolded the woman into a gentle hug. The response was immediate; thrashing and making strange noises, half wails and moans of pain, her body bucked against Nurajhi's, and she kept it up for a whole minute, scratching and clawing and biting until it looked like the Kapitanleutnant had been ripped into by an angry tomcat she'd tried to pick up. But Sahira was far to weak to drive her away.

Nurajhi might have stepped back, normally would have, should have, but she had been shocked by the violent response and remained tightly there. As it faded away, Nurajhi remained close up against the warmth of the other woman. “Shhh... It's alright, Sahira. We're all friends here. I'll take you back to the mess, like in your younger days in the fleet, and we'll feed you well and never lack in affection.. Shh...”

The woman had calmed, and the doctor watched, more than a little relieved, as for the next ten minutes they simply remained together. It was exactly what she'd hoped, when she'd sent a letter directly to Admiral Fernandez for permission to send back Sahira with the ship's mess of the Prithvirani. Some things, their culture simply did better than the philosophical proclamations of the west. She had no truck with pseudoscience, regulations be damned; she was going to see this woman who should not have survived live.

Sahira did nothing to indicate that she understood, or cared, or reciprocated to the affection that was very much the norm in the tightly knit bonds of the officer corps of the Royal Kætjhasti Navy. She was dead to the world; but she soaked up the heat of the well-fed body against her, and no longer struggled at all.

“We've got a duffle with some clothes and other things in it for her, Kapitanleutnant.”

“Thank you, Your Honour,” Nurajhi answered. “Can you have someone carry it to the launch?”

“Of course. I assumed you had been needing to go soon.”

“Yes, we are.” Her arms still around Sahira, Nurajhi manoeuvred her away from the wall. The woman reflexively cut into her arms with her nails, and without the thickness of the gray woolen uniform, pattered on that of the old Kaiser's navy, would have surely drawn blood despite the stubs they'd been cut down to. She stood, and Sahira resisted for a moment.. But only a moment. Broken, passive; dead dull eye that might as well be as thoroughly destroyed as the patched one for all that it stared into nothing, she rested against the Kapitanleutnant, and Nurajhi considered that the first of her victories; the doctor offered a cane, and to her slight surprise, Sahira took it, unsteadily at first, and leaning on both it and Nura, started out, negotiating the threshold of the small cabin in the hospital ship without to much difficulty.

A young enlisted orderly followed them as the doctor signed Sahira out, hauling a duffle and looking with nervousness on her young face, trepidation at the living ghost. It was noticed by the doctor as she turned back and looked to Nurajhi, the orderly, and Sahira. Her last words were brisk, and from one of the healing profession, horrifyingly savage. “If the Kindly Ones spare me from ever seeing a Jap again in my life, I will still have looked into their soulless and inhuman eyes to often for the sake of my own heart. Monsters one and all, as long as a single one remains alive we'll have to fight them again.”

Getting down to the launch proved more of a hazard, but the ladderway down to the platform was negotiated well enough, and there were many willing arms of young girls, tough Maori and Chomoi who oft-quarreled amongst themselves for ethnic differences but were damn good on the launches and with small boats. And, with the waiflike figure of the wasted Sahira, inevitably as gentle as the skin of the softest Chinese girl in the high towers of Taifung back home. Nurajhi nimbly jumped aboard after, sniffing at the sweet smell of the oil burning in the boiler of the old steam launch, and the scabbard for her kris-sword slapping at her thigh.

“Straight back to the Prithvirani, girls—we sail in two hours, after all!”

Most of the grand allied Armada which had received the surrender of the Mikado remained in the harbour. Line after line of powerful American battleships, the three surviving South Dakotas, the four Iowas, the two North Carolinas being missing; the old battleships: Washington, West Virginia, Colorado, Tennessee, Arkansas, Utah, and others she couldn't identify. Butcher's row of eight Essex-class carriers and the lone lady's grace of the elderly Saratoga standing in their midst. More Baltimore class cruisers than she could count; lone Witchita swinging at anchor in the inner harbour, perhaps her guns ready to level a part of old Tokyo if revanchist elements should try to rise up.

And the Kætjhasti ships, the pride of their own fleet, after all. The Rani Sridanya III, completed just in time for her to demolish the Japanese battleship Tosa off Savo, where the South Dakota and the KRN Rivanapura had been lost breaking the back of the Japanese line, all sixty-six thousand tons at full load displacement, looking up proud, half-German and half-Italian and thoroughly native to their southern homelands, ten 41cm guns and studded with anti-aircraft artillery; beyond her, her younger sister, and the line of smaller battleships after her, their immediate predecessors of the 1930s; the surviving WW1 vintage ships. Beyond them, the carriers, four of them as modern and powerful as the American Essex's, one slightly smaller and older, and one, of some fifteen thousand tons, the oldest in the fleet. Five of the six fleet carriers which had survived the war in the hard-suffering Kætjhasti Navy; the light carriers were elsewhere, as was the immense Ke'ora. The 11,000 ton cruisers in their own lines. So grand and glorious and now.. Futile.

“Not that it matters much, in the face of the American bomb,” Nurajhi muttered with a strange sort of horror, despair in her thoughts. What would America do in the height of her terrible power? Would she remain just, or turn against the whole world with her lust for democracy and her demands of equality? Kætjhasti had fought the war only with the utmost reluctance, when Hitler had betrayed them and the Japanese had surprise attacked, devastated their fleet, and the German forces in New Guinea Colony supported by Japanese had virtually occupied all of Sahul Minor before being repulsed, ironically enough, by the German-designed tanks of the Army. That had been in February of 1942; they had fought back against the Japanese for more than three and a half years, seen half their fleet sunk and replaced as fast as they could build new ships, and finally thrust home toward these high Japanese islands, the rivals and enemies of her nation for decades, until the Japanese, remembering its effectiveness from their fighting with Kætjhasti in the last war, had turned to gas. They had retaliated with the nerve agents their scientists had prepared and disseminated to the rest of the allies; and for many more months the war, on Luzon, on Iwo Jima, on Okinawa, and in Burma and China, had been swept by weapons even more cruel and caustic than those of the Great War.

And then the Americans had come with their hellburners, trumped gas by an order of magnitude, and ended the war in a single masterstroke. Lone penetrators flying in against their targets, carrying as in the old Vedic texts, projectiles charged with all the power of the universe, and they had wiped the cities of Hiroshima and Kokura from existence with the flames of Surya Himself. In a way, they had expropriated the power of the Empress who is the Sun, the Råhiranyah in Kænahra, and made it their own. “To think they could destroy every one of these hundreds of ships in the harbour...”

“Your Honour speaks of the American Hellburner?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe not that bad, aye, Your Honour?” The Chomo steerswoman answered cheerfully, lacking in the existential fears of Nura. “The Japanese had only homes of bamboo to protect them, we've got thick armour of iron. Even the hottest forge takes time to melt armour, Your Honour, and the forge of Surya is still a forge, when the Yanquise have presumed to take his power. They'd not get more than the ship they aimed it at, I dare, Your Honour.”

“Perhaps,” Nura frowned. “But for the moment, the Americans are the masters of the world. They have won us the war at a short cost, but... They have the hellburners and we do not.”

“Well, Rayati Råhiranyah!” The Chomo answered with the traditional military hail to the Empress. “She will put Her scientists to the task, and soon enough the power of Surya will be gifted to us, too.”

Will we try to get the bomb? Nura wondered aimlessly, and shivered in the cold of the sea breeze; Japan was actually quite temperate, not at all like her home in the capitol. As she shivered, she snuggled in against the silent, leaning body of Sahira, and turned her mind away from such useless speculation to things far more important, like the life of the Korvettenkapitan. It was still very strange to be in Tokyo Bay, though, seeing this massed armada which only ten days before had accepted the surrender of the Empire of Japan.

And ahead was their ship, anyway, as they came fast alongside with the barks of the steerswoman, who doubled as the launch's Petty Officer, encouraging the Maori girls to put their backs into it with insults about, well, pretty much everything about them. That, at least, was still very typical. They were tied up in a moment, all the shouting besides, and Nura helped her guest up, and toward the ladder on the side of the ship. It was a very painful journey.

This steel, born in the mountains of Germany, had outlived the yard it had been built in, the nation it had been built in, and many things besides; the Prithvirani was as legendary as a ship could be, and even with such a macabre burden as Sahira she couldn't help but feel awed, saluting as permission to come aboard was requested, and received, in formality. Turret Caesar was still frozen in place, guns locked aft, from the damage that took place in the kamikazi strike around Okinawa. The rest of the ship, 40mm Bofors stuck in every nook and cranny, 4.1in anti-aircraft looking skyward and still manned, smoke drifting lazily from the funnels as she got up steam to depart in the company of a destroyer flotilla, was all still very fighting fit, even with the crew reduced to the skeleton that could man the engines and anti-aircraft weapons, the rest on the Ibuki, and five hundred POWs aboard in makeshift accommodation. The prim fore tower of the ship, reminiscent more of Italian designs than German, had been an addition of the wartime repairs after the modernized superstructure had been blown off by salvo after salvo of 18.1in HE shells at point-blank range. The conning tower, a lesson of that engagement, was retained.

And the junior officer's mess was forward, in the new superstructure, and Nura led her charge there herself. She had been hoping to catch her comrades sitting to eat, and she was lucky, she had. Green curry spread on rice; it was the basic staple of the fleet, cook up a massive pot of curry and then ladle it over rice for lunch and dinner, and if you were lucky, it was a different kind of curry each day. A sweet-soup was served for the break-fast with more rice; and that was a diet better than Sahira, certainly, might have dreamed off for more than three years. And then, indeed, with the smell of fine food in the air, she arrived with her pathetic charge in the comfortable rooms of the junior officer's mess, made large so they could socialize at the expense of their tiny rooms, where they bunked six per room, though none really minded it, the closeness more natural for the Kætjhasti than any western could imagine.

She looked around at the abrupt silence, all of them staring at Sahira, and began to explain. “This is Korvettenkapitan Sahira Sitari, executive officer of the destroyer Ilahji, lost in the Timor operations. She's been a prisoner for more than three years, and she's going back home to her family with us. Please, my kameraden; be kindly to her, the kiss of dharma has touched her cruelly, and we are the hand of the Gods in repaying the balance. She doesn't talk right now, and she wants to keep to herself, but she'll never get better if she does and so be close to her. She can take care of herself, though, so she shant be to much of a burden for us, alright?”

“Of course, Nura,” Feng Linfang answered from the long booth on the wall. “I mean, by the Kindly Ones she..” The shuddered seemed to run around the table.

“Cook! Get her something to eat!” One of the young lieutenants of Maori background shouted sharply. “Had they really been feeding her at all on that hospital ship?”

“She looked like those pictures of Auschwitz, the Doctor said, when she came in.”

“Those horrible Soviets,” Trilani Ukerma muttered. “Who can really believe that Germans would so such a thing to people under their control? The Germans returned such POWs as they took unharmed and well-fed when Rabaul was besieged.”

“Oh shut up,” Linfang half-snarled. “We know your well-born family's made you prattle on about conspiracies, but it seems Hitler really was that bad and, look, the Americans bled with us—if they say it was so, it was so.”

Trilani sighed, but she was also the one who reached out her hands for Sahira when Nura helped the woman to sit in the cluster of the Leutnants and Kapitanleutnants. She shivered, flinched, and turned away back to Nura. Which was, in its own way, progress.

“Shhh. We're all comrades, aren't we? I'll be here—I'll sit right next to you.” She ran her hand through the poor woman's hair and along her back a few times, until, like a cat petted until calmed, Sahira settled in and back against the plush leather of the padded bench along the wall, Trilani leaning in one side with eyes that betrayed a decency beyond her political thoughts, and Nura on the other; Lin nimbly perched herself on the back of the wall-bench and produced an elegant old hairbrush. “Someone's been trying to take care of her hair, at least...”

The scritch of the brush working its way through those long straight locks brought them all to silence until the orderly serving the mess brought out a plate, well laden of rice and covered generously in curry, and very hot. A good thing, too: Sahira stared it with the dull dead gaze of her good eye, before she took the elegant ceramic spoon provided for her, and began to eat. A sigh of relief ran all around, and gradually, trying not to stare, the rest of the mess off-duty at the moment went back to their conversations, while the little cluster around Sahira started on the Project that was to consume their every waking moment off-duty on the voyage back home, and more than a few of them sleeping: The salvation of a mind from the depths of Hell.

"I can well recall the first time I ever put to sea. It was on the old Sapora in eighteen ninety, and I was just thirteen. I was the youngest in the midshipwoman's mess and I caught my first taste of action a month later, as you well know, in the same battle where my mother was wounded serving our country in the Dutch War." The old woman paused and sighed as she paced the chartroom aft the flagbridge, half-ignoring the young kapitanleutnant to whom she spoke.

"Stood for midshipman in eighteen ninety-five... And twenty-one years later I was a freshly minted Kapitan zur See standing on the very bridge right below us--well, before they ripped out and rebuilt the superstructure, anyhow--and making twenty-six knots with the Red Swastika aflutter from every yardarm and gaff, the great battle-ensign hoisted on the mainmast with the Japs in sight at twenty thousand meters and closing in those beautiful waters north by northwest of Rabaul.

"Finally finished it, didn't we, kapitanleutnant? Or at any rate, the Japs won't be a threat for a hundred years. But the Navy will grow weak if we don't watch ourselves--I like you, Kapitanleutnant Nurajhi Savurna. You got in the navy with some reluctance for wartime, but rose fast. A consummate professional in the making--if you'll stay. Which is largely why I called you here. One might say I have better things to do than spend my time talking to junior officers, but really, our victory celebrations in Kænahra will also be my retirement party--might as well end your career at the top--and then I can spend my time at home with my daughters and my grand-daughters, so I really have one last thing to do as Chief of Naval Operations. Keep as many of you in as possible."

"Your Honour?" Nura fidgeted a bit. "I didn't even know I could be retained on the active list."

"I an certainly arrange it. Peacetime; you're not likely to get shot at again for the next eight years, I'd wager, at least. But we need technical minded professionals now--fewer places for romantics like me." A wan smile drifted across her face. "The next war will be fought with rockets and atom bombs and radars, and precious little room for grand battle-lines manoeuvring in formation with a dozen ensigns apiece and fourty torpedo boats swirling like cavalry on their flanks. You have the technical training and the mindset. I want you in the navy, and as many like you as I can arrange to be retained. We've got a massive amount of rebuilding and modernization to do on a budget shortly to become nonexistent, and you'll have your work cut out of you, but it'll be rewarding--you'll be in a position to determine the future of the fleet for the rest of the century.

"There sits now only three naval powers in the world, the United States, Britain, and us. And the limeys are a mess; they don't have any good carriers like we do, their economy's shot, their battleships are worn out and their cruiser force in shambles. We'll contend with them next, and we've got some substantial advantages--ones that we need a technical sort of mindset to take advantage of. Stay with us, kapitanleutnant?"

Nurajhi bit her lip, half torn between the comrades she'd known and loved, the friends and lovers lost in their ranks, too, and the horrors of the stench of gas and charred flesh. That, and her daily acquaintance with the mute wastrel that was Korvettenkapitan Sahira Sitari. She had calmed, and mostly slept and ate. The Mess considered that a huge improvement in its own right; rest was the best medicine for the soul. But to face that horror again? And yet--the very thing that they were doing--the intensely personal way in which all of their society but especially the Navy took responsibility for their own wounded--made her think she could scarcely abandon such compatriots, such a feeling of camaraderie.

"Give me some time, Your Honour, I beg of you?" She looked up, dark eyes a tad querrelous, to the legend of the fleet herself. "I must at least speak to my mother and my sisters in person over this."

"Please return to my office in Kænahra two weeks after our arrival--you'll all have a fortnight's leave anyway--and give me your answer. I'll be pulling through a fair number of wartime service officers, not just yourself my girl, to get their answers in that period for voluntary continuation on regular active duty. So don't think yourself unique, but not alone, either."

"Certainly, Your Honour. A fortnight after our arrival." Nurajhi relaxed; she could, in the end, leave the decision up to her family, a fact which was very relieving. She didn't trust herself to make the right decision for their collective future.

"One thing before you go, then. How is the Korvettenkapitan faring?"

"Sahira Sitari, Your Honour?" Nurajhi looked surprised until she remembered the Admiral had authorized her transfer directly.

"Yes." Samijha Fernandez turned away toward the windows of the chartroom, out toward the sea below, that beautiful pacific ocean that had been her home for most of her life, lost in a seeming reverie as she waited for the answer.

"She eats, she sleeps, she mostly grooms herself, Your Honour. We brush her hair. She never speaks." Nurajhi squirmed a bit, at that. Can we be doing better?

"Good. I don't believe in any of the modern sorts of things, psychology and so on. Until we get her home, we are her family--treat her like that. I take a personal interest in the officers captured by the Japanese under my command. I have precious little to do with my family's wealth save to see that they are exquisitely cared for, and until that moment, it's our collective duty to see to it." A deep breath was taken. "No other power on Earth could after all fully conceive of what they have been through." She laughed, darkly.

"They still don't really see us as human, a great number of them truly don't. The racists might see my family as human--I remember some conversations with Portuguese nobility during my tour of the country in my young days--but only grudgingly. Our nation, our people? Remember that, they don't see us as human. That's the ultimate reason why we must make ourselves second among the nations of the Earth. Powerful enough to resist the strongest, and dominate all others. Any other position lets overwhelming strength be brought against us, whereas the idea of Kætjhasti Weltmacht is sadly impossible for many centuries--until recently, the trends in birth rates were decisively against us. But remember that, Kapitanleutnant. We would be exterminated under the dominion of a foreign race. And the moment we fall into their hands as prisoners, in disrespect to all the laws of war, the Japanese proved that amply. I have no doubt it applies to other nations as well.

"Take care of her, Kapitanleutnant. It shows our fundamental humanity more than anything else. I remembered her name as that of a rising star before the war--she graduated second from the Academy, you may not have known--and I actually think she'll come back to us, if we show her the comfort she needs. No human can be broken forever. That would require their web of friendships to also be broken--their society to be dead--or else for it to have never truly existed in the first place." She laughed a little merry laugh, and turned back. "Ah, foreigners think we are not human, but I am inclined to think they are all sociopaths. None know, or desire, what we take for granted--how can anything but guns and steel defend the warm embrace of our society from that cutthroat reality?"

"Hellburners, Your Honour," Nurajhi dared. "Hellburners, too."

Samijha laughed again and nodded. "They haven't told me, and probably won't, since I'm retiring in a few months. But yes, Kapitanleutnant, Hellburners. We'll have our own, given time. But that won't be a project for either of us to know about--though if you stay in, I have little doubt you will be involved in studying their applications to naval warfare. Now; forgive the ramblings of an old woman on the verge of her dottage, and please attend to Korvettenkapitan Sitari. We will be arriving in Manila tomorrow, and I do not want her to be disturbed by that city, as she was likely brought through it by the Japs on her way north to their.... Refined sadism. On the other hand.."

"What better therapy than to stand amongst friends on the deck of an Imperial ship of war in Manila Harbour, our guns commanding the city which, regardless, flies the Stars and Stripes and not the Rising Sun, Your Honour?"

"Precisely so. You're dismissed, Kapitanleutnant."

With a crisp click of the heels and an exchange of salutes, Nurajhi left the Admiral's presence, feeling strangely that Samijha Fernandez was, in the moment of her greatest triumph, consumed in the melancholy of it being over. Of not having anymore wars to fight, of not having the Japanese to again challenge, of never again seeing the cruising of a battleship squadron fitted for war, the red Swastika aflutter with every ensign they could raise aloft. Nurajhi herself had seen it more recently than the Admiral, who had not been to sea like that since she'd conned the Prithvirani in 1917 in the last great battles of the First World War; to her, it was indeed a less romantic thing, when the huge splashes of the shells from a line of Yamato class battleships had nearly flickered out to touch the tiny hull of the Prithvirani, so inadequate against her foes in that duel off Samar, the Rani Sridarnya III and her class-sister ahead as the true stars of the show, ten sixteen inch rifles each returning a measured fire under the guidance of the best optics in the world. A delightfully indecisive engagement that had left the Japanese turning back only to lose one of the monsters to American air power in a welcome change from the way the Raihiranya's War Fleet had been butchered in the first eighteen months of the war while holding the line.

At the time, the Prithvirani had been gamely testing the range with her heavily modified turrets at maximum elevation, and finding it somewhat wanting, though her super-heavy shells certainly made a couple hits against the Kongo class battlecruiser she'd faced--a very old enemy that she'd like enough put some shell holes into in the First World War as well--and the whole thing had been frightful and glorious at once. Nurajhi imagined, fancied, that if she had been born to as fearless of a line as the Fernandez family, she'd have found it as romantic as the Admiral; as it was, her respectful fear kept her workmanlike, and now she had the state of Sahira Sitari to concern herself with.

"Trilani?" Nurajhi glanced into the Mess, surprised to see only two figures present--the blue-blooded of highest daughters of the fine ladies of the realm in Trilani Ukerma, and Sahira Sitari herself.

"Everyone else is on duty with the crew this overworked, Nurajhi," she answered primly, shifting her arm around the silent, scarred woman and holding her a bit closer. "Come on and join us?"

Nurajhi decided it would be inappropriate to bring up the Admiral's recruiting effort; she just nodded and moved to slide in next to Sahira, on the opposite side from Trilani. The woman's head was folded downwards, though she rested at a slight angle up against Trliani--acknowledging her existence. That was a very positive sign. Nurajhi's hands deftly wrapped around her too, leaning on her, and this elicited a snapped movement which shocked them all, as Sahira looked up, startled, her face harsh, and then relaxing.

"It's just me, Nurajhi.."

Trilani had her hands in Sahira's hair, stroking and murmuring softly from the moment she'd calmed even fractionally, until they all were rather in a relaxed pile again. Even the decisively unliked young noblewoman knew her exact social role with a fellow officer who had suffered so much, and the odd pile of gray, German-patterned and sweaty uniforms, the light Sari that Sahira wore, and the sundry flesh of the three women, settled delightfully once more.

Sahira closed her eyes. And both of the others noticed that.

"I think it's the first time she's closed her eyes around us.." Trilani whispered very softly.

"She trusts us," Nurajhi answered. "As we should trust her to heal in her own way, and her own time, as the gods will it--we are just here to do as any family ought." And she leaned in, and dared a kiss to Sahira's ear--getting no response--and whispered directly to her: "And we are your family, victorious and returning you to your blood. Trust that we sailed into fire for you, and that we will always love you as our own. All who have worn the gray are my sisters, are your sisters, and nothing that has come to pass has taken this from you. I promise." She kissed Sahira's ear once more--it was expected to begin and end an intimate sort of whispered exchange, and the mere regularity of it might prove comforting--and settled back while she leaned in closer with the shattered woman.

"You have a true kshatriya's heart," Trilani offered softly.

Nurajhi took it as a compliment, smiled, and just settled in to spend, as she had for the past days, the bulk of her time off watch, until she went to sleep, snuggled into a ball with her fellow Kapitanleutnant and the mute Sahira Sitari, half hoping, half praying, that her voice would come one of those mornings, while the proud old ship and her proud old Admiral sailed under the War Ensign toward the storied Corregidor and Manila.

Duchess, what happened in this world? Are America and Germany allied? Is there some sort of Indian Empire that controlled all of Asia, hence the Hindu feel? Just some background would be nice. Nice story, by the way. Feels like TBO was to the Eastern Front of reality's time line. Cool writing, is there more to this AU?

Redleader34 wrote:Duchess, what happened in this world? Are America and Germany allied? Is there some sort of Indian Empire that controlled all of Asia, hence the Hindu feel? Just some background would be nice. Nice story, by the way. Feels like TBO was to the Eastern Front of reality's time line. Cool writing, is there more to this AU?

It's not an alternate universe but more of a parallel universe, where the Earth is significantly different. This story is an introspective counterpoint to Where There Ain't No Ten Commandments. Which has been on hiatus for a bit but will continue soon, as shall the updates to the alternate EB1911.