Uncommon Valor

The debriefing went just as tensely as Lieutenant-Commander McKnight expected it would. Earlier, she had been hoping she could at least get away from today's watch without having her captain do anything more... unorthodox... than she already had. Right now, she almost wished for a little sexual harassment just to cut the tension of having Gillian Masterson staring at her unblinkingly with her one eye, porcelain face-mask completely still and silent, for once. Outside of the dark cabin illuminated only by the hazy daylight coming through a narrow porthole window, a deathly calm had settled over the ship.

"Jesus H. Fucking Christ." Captain Masterson said noncommittally. "Another day where the whole Coast Guard and Atlantic Fleet are so damn busy getting their rocks off and slacking that they can't see the incoming foot aimed right at their ass. I'm gonna be putting every officer who was on deck - except for you, I suppose - on notice that they have the rest of this voyage to demonstrate to me why I SHOULDN'T have all their asses court-martialled for dereliction of duty." As she spoke, she limped over to a typewriter and bent over to use it without sitting down.

Unable to draw her attention away from the obvious, Drew observed her commanding officer's backside poking out from under her black latex miniskirt. Unlike Drew and most of the girls she'd seen so far, it seemed Captain Masterson preferred to forego the option of wearing underwear. If it had been just a bit brighter, Drew was sure she, or anyone, could see the Captain's labial lips any time she bent over. While the captain's confident fingers clacked away at the stiff steel keys, Drew silently mused that Masterson's intimidating appearance and demeanor probably wouldn't dissuade the crew from targeting her for long.

"Umm," Drew said belatedly. "Ma'am...! What does the Captain mean, 'the rest of this voyage'? Aren't we turning back to port? There's an intruder on board, and we'll probably have survivors joining us from the lifeboats. ..."

Tearing free a sheet of paper, Gillian stiffly crammed it into a message tube and fired it off somewhere. "We've got no signals. Radio, radar, sonar - none of it will even come on. With one of the worst storms I've ever seen heading our way, on a coast that's absolutely lousy with navigation hazards. Even if we had orders to return to port, and we don't - every Stadti warship in the Atlantic could be bearing down on us right now and we wouldn't know it. If the Coast Guard has any damn sense, every last minelayer they have is going to be scrambling to shore up the defenses around Newport News in case this is a full-scale invasion. If the enemy manages to crack it open, the Navy dies a slow ****."

"Is that possible?" Drew murmured, eyes widening.

Gillian gave her ponytail a toss, gave a strangled harumph, and shook her head. "Like a lost little kitten. I gotta wonder if you can really handle this position, beginner's luck with depth charges aside. I'm going to have to. Hmph. Feel out," the good Captain went to the effort of making air quotes with her fingers, including her mechanical one, "if you're tough enough to endure being an officer at sea and make the hard decisions. Because grab your little dog, Dorothy. You're not in Kansas, anymore, and we're about to have to make some real fucking hard decisions. Like whether going after those lifeboats is just going to lure us into a spread of torpedoes." She turned to hear the dying whine of the pneumatic tubes become loud once again and pulled out a fresh message tube, tossing it to Drew.

Surprised, Commander McKnight fumbled it and dropped it to the floor with a clatter. The captain didn't react, just stood there glaring, eventually crossing her arms over her large chest. With a gulp, Drew sank to her knees and picked it up, pulling out the letter... but even as she did so she was unable to restrain a defiant, exasperated mutter: "For the record, I'm from Illinois, not Kansas..."

As she red aloud, it looked like Drew had suffered a sharp, painful blow. "It's... it's a casualty report, Captain, from our Medical Corpswoman in the infirmary. I'm afraid that Seaman Elliot Driver bled out before they could get him there and the enemy diver's other victims are in critical condition. Not only that, but Navigator Yang suffered serious injuries due to being in the water when one of the mines went off. Oh no... it says that he's suffering from ruptured eardrums and is slipping in and out of consciousness. Corpswoman Baxter says treating him for any internal injuries is her first priority."

"She couldn't save a man from a knife wound? A. Knife. You know. After the bridge of the Wilson got bullseyed by an Axis airship, the medics pulled over three ounces of shrapnel out of my head and neck? But this dame can't save a man from one little poke? And speaking of that." Captain Masterson said in her usual angry, electronic monotone. "If we didn't need all hands on deck right now I would order some close quarters drill for the crew too... One Axis cunt against half a dozen men, and they just stand around holding their dicks while she carves them up like a Christmas turkey."

Her eye swiveled over to Drew, then, making the younger woman gulp. "You could do with some of that practice, too. Good instincts on the depth charges, McKnight but I don't recall you mentioning you even tried to subdue that saboteur."

"Another message!" Drew said, juggling the tube back into place and re-sending it just in time for another one to rocket into her outstretched hand. "It's a damage report! Compartment G-9, below the waterline, taking on water. Engineering says the pumps have it under control and they're effecting repairs immediately."

Captain Masterson's only response was to close her arms over her chest - which, for her, unavoidably necessitated resting her forearms atop the swell of a huge bosom that was... well, appealing, but just a bit too unnaturally rigid - much like the rest of her.

"You changed the subject, lieutenant commander." the captain droned threateningly. "Did you try to stop Miss Axis-Sally-in-water-booties from murdering an enlisted man? He was putting his life on the line for you. Did you do the same? Or did you scamper away like a pampered Dame who seen a rat in the cupboard?"

Drew's eyes bugged out, and she gave the best pout that her thin lips could muster. "C-captain...! She had a knife! A big... big knife! P-practically a sword. And besides, with all due respect, ma'am, I had believed it wasn't the responsibility of a commissioned officer to repel boarders!"

Captain Masterson gave her another withering glare. "Send out a message to engineering and all major duty stations. The Captain is gonna be temporarily moving her command to fire control. Since we're down a navigator anyways, and we got a confirmed intruder, we can double up on sentries more efficiently. And if the Axis is about to come at us with more than-"

Before McKnight could type more than a line, yet another high-priority message whirred its way in. Reaching down to snatch it up and pop it open, Drew was relieved to see that it shut Captain Masterson up, and she hurriedly stammered out the content: "Report from the aft deck! One of the lifeboats is missing!"

Even saying the words made Drew feel weak in the knees. Her mind had been doing a bang-up job of finding other concerns to focus on so as to leave no time to dwell on the her close brush with a particularly visceral and intimate way to pay the ultimate price. The image of that towering, curvaceous terror made her breath catch in her throat, and she coughed and swallowed conspicuously a couple of times before she managed to continue. The Captain began tapping her foot. "Is that all?"

"Ma'am!" The lieutenant-commander clicked her high-heels together. She caught herself before she sounded any notes of hopefulness or gratitude that the Stadti diver might've made good her escape. "Regrettable as it, um, is that we were not able to surround and destroy the enemy, she surely won't get very far! After an attack like that, every warship and Coastie Cutter south of the Statue of Liberty is going to be converging on this area... especially with Newport News closed up, like you said. Surely the minisubs have all been destroyed!" Even as she spoke, McKnight hoped her commander wouldn't ask her how she supposed she knew that.

"Minisubs? MINIsubs?" Captain Masterson swung her mechanical arm into the nearby bulkhead with a reverberating clang that made Drew jump - and, thanks to those infernal heels, stumble and almost fall on her butt. "I'm worried about the MACROsubs, Pollyanna! The big gun-metal dicks that the Axis can whip out and fuck any convoy they choose with. I know you wouldn't 'cause it's disloyalty, but if you listened to the Axis English-language propaganda stations you'd hear them brag about the 'Free-use torpedo range' here all the time. The ones that pop up get sunk more than half the time, but their target survives less than a TENTH of the time."

"But, but... they already got the battleship!" Drew's protest came out sounding a lot more whiny, even to her own ears, than she'd hoped. She expected another barb, if not a physical blow... But none came.

"True." The Captain muttered in her usual harsh monotone. "They'll be watching to see how much of an effect their attack had... opportunistically move in if they can, slink back to their lairs if it looks too risky. So the last thing we can do is let them see us sweat, by running off or making for port." She clenched and unclenched her steel hand a couple of times. "Alright, I've made my decision. Since the bridge isn't even operational yet, send it to engineering directly. I'll fine-tune the bearings when and if I can... and you, get your pretty little ass back on deck so you can signal that cruiser behind us. We're going to be heading out, further east... let those sea wolves know we're looking for them. We probably don't have any air support coming, but they don't know that. I'll be waiting for you in Fire Control once you get done."

"Ma'am!" Drew said with a note of concern in her voice. "That will take us further away from the sailors off that sinking battleship!"

"It's not gonna do them any good if some U-boat captain is feeling forward enough to surface and start throwing the kitchen sink at us. We're less than 20 miles offshore, help will be coming for them... if they're lucky." She paused a moment. "And, until we have very good reason to believe otherwise, we're going to have to assume that saboteur is still on-board and waiting for an opportunity to kill us all."

As Drew dutifully typed up the message, the Captain nodded to herself. "Yes. We will need to do a few drills and demonstrations on how to resist interrogation, especially the officer ranks and above..." Drew (who was facing the other way) made a face, having a suspicion what that line of thinking was going to entail... when she made for the upper decks, it was with a bit of relief.

All of the sudden terror had momentarily put the kibosh on the sailors of the Sidney Story taking the opportunity to get their hands on their new female shipmates. Normally it would be festive atmosphere (for some, at least)... Even though the PRA theoretically gave anybody the right to have anybody, schedules were often so tight that in practice, Joe Average was going to be spending his time with whatever girls happened to live and work around him... so a new workplace became a carnal feast. But not now, not when the enemy had gotten up upper hand on them and was poised to deliver the second strike any moment.

But below the decks of a massive vessel lurking just below the surface, a scant few kilometers away from the panicked American warships, the atmosphere was downright bacchanalian. Not because of the circumstances of their successful mission - because they were seldom any other way...