Sapphire was un-impressed. She was almost done with it. She figured that between her maiden voyage, catching the rookie as she crashed and hitting her with a dose of both punishment and reward, it would be enough, right? Would finally get through the thick headed idiot. She enjoyed all the perks of her position, but if she had to start making an effort trying to grind another girl under her heel, it stopped being fun. She wasn’t a damn Court lady. If Bertha would just give up and accept her place in the chain of command, namely at the bottom, they could all start having fun.

But damn if the bitch wasn’t slow. Instead of finally accepting her place, the she was pissed. Actually might just try to ram her pissed. Seriously? It was a heady and infuriating mix, to grind down someone like that. Bertha had a head clear enough to realize what she was going through which made it all the sweeter. But her head was big enough to think she deserved better. She was stupid and slow enough not to get that she should actually just surrender, then start climbing the ranks.

Hells, she could have been above the Wa-Class by now, instead of still being at the bottom. She was certainly more useful than a regular freighter, but no, Bertha had to be stubborn. Whatever, forget it. Their strategic reserve was finally safe here from those American bitches, instead of coming through in bits and pieces. And losing half of it along the way. Sapphire had logistics for a war to plan and just the posting to get Fat Bertha out of her hair. Fuck her anyway. She didn’t even appreciate that some of her ships sank protecting her fat ass.

***

The following few weeks were the best of Taylor’s new life. Sure, every now and again a new horror would show up to scar her all over again. But the endless tide of abuse receded and she got to actually work at some of her goals in relative peace. Her work may have been enabling her captors to launch a fresh assault at Japan, but even that had a nugget of welcome surprise. This Earth’s Japan still had Kyushu Island. She kind of wanted to visit.

She was ordered well away. They didn’t need a freighter of her displacement so close to the fighting. No, she was ferrying supplies between Midway and the forward bases in the region. Which is how she met her first Anchorage Princess. After Midway? She’d been anxious about that. The Midway Princess was a cold hearted cannibal, more a grinding engine of war than anything human. Taylor’s fingers still hurt in phantom pain whenever she thought of her.

The Anchorage Demons and Himes? Well, they were people. Girls, like the rest of the Abyss. Each one was alien in some way and they all had their hot buttons and issues, but they were a breath of fresh air. Except the one near Iwo Jima. She was a pyromaniac and nearly set Taylor on fire. They all had expectations common to the abyss. Be obedient, be prompt and laugh at their jokes even if you are the butt of them. But the vitriol they spat felt less personal. They’d go off at Midway, shit talk other Princesses on the front. Pick on particularly famous and “uppity” ships.

It was being around them that Taylor started picking up more about how the Abyss was ran. The worst regular duty she had, was to carry insults from one Installation to the next. And she wasn’t the only one doing it. She saw multiple Wa-class doing the same and she learned from watching them.

“This pale reflection of your magnificence regrets the words so besmirching your radiance that dare utter from her lips, but this one is under orders to carry them truthfully and unchanged to your benevolence, by order of the Princess of So and So.”

There was an entire, almost ritualistic formula to it. One no one had thought to mention or teach to Taylor, so she still took a couple of beatings before she got it right. She still had to obey, to serve, to bow and scrape and pretend to smile for being allowed into their presence. But no one was picking on her, it was this whole… society being organized like it. There were rules, unwritten rules that no one had explained to her. And she’d been in violation of them from the start, clueless to it. Because without the bugs? Her poker face needed work.

It was a brutal, nasty kind of order, fitting for an apparent race of sea-monster ship people. And to that effect, where the hell were all the men? How were girls born? Where did they come from? Taylor was finding that she had big holes in her understanding of her new life, the kind of holes a five year old would love to poke at. “They crawl out of the depths after they die” felt like an inadequate explanation. It bothered her how little she knew about her new life.

At least there were plenty of new girls to listen in to. Some of which had not been part of the “Let’s humiliate Taylor to death” movie, extended edition.

Her role as resupply got her a bit of acknowledgment, her smuggling bought a bit of leverage. With her regular circuit to carry big hauls and the number of transports pulled up to re-supply the invading fleets?

The number of freighters making regular trips to Midway dropped like a stone and a lot of girls were looking for new smuggling contacts. Something which Taylor was going to exploit to the hilt. Even if the Princesses could simply order her to smuggle something on pain of death, most of the rest of them weren’t quite that certain they could sink her and survive the backlash.

So Taylor was doing brisk business, even if she had gotten a few extra beatings from battleships that now believed she had other masters she was too afraid to betray. Taylor was finding the entire battleship class to be extra dismissive of her. Or just annoyed with her displacement. At best they found her cute. At worse, they felt she was an affront for existing.

They weren’t used to looking a freighter in the eye. She made sure to slouch. She’d had more than enough gut punches to ensure she wasn’t imagining herself higher than them. Taylor was worried that she was getting used to the casual physical abuse. It seemed endemic to the species, which made her worried for her future.

The carriers were both better and worse. Better in that they weren’t quite as physical or direct with their barbs. Worse, because they actually considered her and more than one had seen past Bertha. For some, that made for business partners and customers. A few turned it to blackmail. For now, she had to suffer through it.

To that effect… sailing was boring. Mind-bogglingly, incomprehensibly boring. Being at sea felt like being in jail. Except instead of being stuck in a room, you were stuck on your route, with nothing but each other and your duty. After Sapphires concerted attempts to grind her down, she was finding her current, much lighter escort, significantly easier to deal with.

So she found ways to kill time. But when had she gotten this good at making clothes? Most days, if she wasn’t drilling or planning, when she wasn’t cooking while running, she was sewing. Some needles and thread had passed through her holds among the general flotsam of her cargo and Taylor had felt compelled to latch on to them. She did not want to spend the rest of her life in either her skin or her rigging.

So she taught herself to sew. She knew some stuff from her past life, she wasn’t incompetent, but she got good much faster than should have been possible. Especially with cranes and one hand. Trying to figure out how that happened managed to fill four whole hours of sailing, before she had it. But to backtrack a bit.

***

Bertha was a hoarder, Shun had come to realize. She hoarded pets, she hoarded plans, blueprints, manuals, maps, information and feelings. She packed them away and carried them with her. Which was another clue that whatever she was, she wasn’t a freighter. And that something was wrong with her class. Shun noticed things. You had to, when the difference between life and death was noticing the enemy first. It was impossible to describe to those who’d never experienced it, what knife fighting in the depths was like.

So she noticed things. And like a good sub, she kept them to herself. Every sub knew things they weren’t supposed to and each one knew not to talk about it. Like the fact Bertha was scouring the Black Market for Bauxite. In Midway. Holy Abyss that was extra special stupid. Any hint that maybe they should not try to work with anyone stupid enough to rob the Midway Princess in her own backyard bounced right of her. She needed it, no matter how much she tried to hide that and that said very interesting things about her class.

So the Yo-Class submarine smiled, nodded and said she’d do her best. Then did nothing that might draw the wrath of the closest thing this place had to God. Bauxite was a strategic resource. You couldn’t do re-summoning rituals without it. Every last rock was weighed, measured and sealed. She wanted nothing to do with it. Bertha was just lucky Shun hadn’t turned her in for a prize. She was still considering it. The girl could be surprisingly ignorant.

But that was the thing. She didn’t know things, things she should have known. Slowly, Shun had put together a theory. Bertha’s self-summoning was botched. It figured something could have gone wrong with such a late period ship. Didn’t she come in with a missing arm and her rigging in tatters? Well, that wasn’t all she was missing. She had the body and the instincts of an Abyssal, but the instinctual knowledge they were all raised with was missing.

Which was bad news for all her plans to use Bertha to escape. It was good news, in that it could be fixed, and apart from her craving for Bauxite the girl was level-headed, persistent and hard working. That last one in particular made her arrogant. Because no one that hard working was a Princess. And the girl behind Bertha? She felt she was just as good as any of them, Midway included. If that wasn’t a sign she was headed for the Court, nothing was. Assuming she didn’t die along the way. If Shun was the one to help her when she was down, at the start?

That was the kind of thing her new boss would remember. Because if Shun was certain of one thing, it was that her new boss was a hoarder. She hoarded debts as well. There was a massive pile, building up behind her eyes and Shun needed to make sure they left before it overflowed.

***

Shun had been a reliable partner so far. She’d been frank and fair in their dealings and was Taylor’s primary sneak for dealing with other girls in Midway. Taylor had gotten her hands on a rather sizable pile of plans, documents and general data over the weeks she worked. Nothing special, nothing Midway considered important, but a lot of stuff. Her biggest single find, had come from in the far north Anchorage where they were preparing to assault some isles in spitting distance from Hokkaido, the northern most Japanese island.

There she’d run into a fleet at rest. After delivering her supplies, she’d been approached by a centaur-like girl clad in a gleaming black dress that belonged at a ball, or maybe for the bedroom. It was risqué, much like most of the Abyssal clothing, shoulder less and her hands were oversized claws, pitch black and as if made of living metal. A condition shared by her cloak, a jagged, angry looking thing. Her look was completed by a floppy black ribbon tied in a huge bow on top of her hair. The bow was bigger than her head and kept her hair swept back. It reached about mid-back and was like black silk.

After so long spent sailing, Taylor was starting to see the appeal of easy access to sea spray of the more open clothes. At least they could feel the waves in seas calmer then a squall. Taylor barely got wet unless it was raining and she’d come to realize her crew needed regular watering or they slowly declined. She dealt with it by diving and keeping her double bottom filled with sea water. The crew liked having their own diving pool, even if she lost some carry capacity.

Access to said pool was regulated by her security team, which finally gave her an effective punishment. If you didn’t behave, she’d remove your pool privileges. More than one nightmare had ended up on their knees, begging for relief before the pool doors on one of her longer trips. It hadn’t rained once, so they got a bit desperate. It made her point. She hadn’t had a crash in port for weeks.

But, sewing and tenders. The thing about rigging is that in many ways, it looked like cloth. Well, cloth mixed with nightmarish sea monsters. For example, the very tender? She looked human up top, but her legs were replaced with thick, monstrous grey/brown hands covered in tough leather, the kind a ramped up Lung might have. And let’s not talk about the mouth. That thing was maliciously and deliberately designed to give men nightmares. Taylor felt uncomfortable just being near it and that was with the dress hiding it. She could still see hints through the slit that went all the way up to her belly button and she tried not to stare. She was tired of beatings.

Yet when she met her eyes for the first time in the Abyss she saw pure, genuine kindness.

“My, my, young one, you’ve been through a lot, haven’t you. Let aunty Ena have a look at you.”

The girl tutted around her, checking her skits, adjusting her glove, letting in and tightening her corset. Taylor was blushing up a storm, as for over an hour the other woman went over every inch of her. Every inch. Her shoes, her stockings, every petticoat, in careful detail was examined and pressed. Including her underwear. Now at some point, maybe she should have protested. But there was an odd air about her, a sea before the storm. Like you could let her take care of you, or she’d take care of you. So Taylor stayed meek and compliant. To her relief, the woman kept it professional.

“There you go dear. [Well Maintained].”

And she did feel better. She realized there was an entire battery of minor aches and wrinkles that had sneaked up on her, lesser discomforts that she’d gotten used to. Taylor was only now noticing them because how conspicuous they were, when they all disappeared at once. She kept her eyes down, unsure how to approach her but the girl was having none of it. A finger gently raised up her chin, even if Taylor knew better then to meet her eyes.

“Now, now. I can’t fix what’s missing there” she said, gently running her other hand over her stump, “but we can do something about all this.” and Taylor realized that while the girl was checking her over like a well bread horse, she’d squirreled away things in her holds during that treatment. Packages, messages and a bundle of papers. A full set of instructions on how to be a ship. A bit outdated for her systems, but exactly the kind of thing her first mate needed to really sink his teeth into the crew and start bringing them up to standards. It was the treatises on field maintenance and repair that had helped her get better at sewing. She'd been drawing on them without noticing.

The fact a girl she’d never meet knew to give her those left an odd mix of cold dread and cautious hope roll down her spine. There was a difference between being manipulated and being handled. Managed. This bit, this bit right there? It felt like a bit of both. Taylor would not be anyone’s toy. But partners, friends, rivals? Those she could accept. Even a temporary position under another, if she needed to learn and could find a teacher worthy of the name.

Her search for Bauxite remained fruitless, but by the time Taylor completed her second circuit she was feeling pretty good. Her crew were getting better, she wasn’t universally despised and she’d learned enough not to stand out so much anymore. Proven she could contribute, that she was valuable and she was starting to see ways she could get out without having half the Abyss howling for her blood or chasing her for debts in blood or coin.

So when she was done docking and unloading she went looking for her co-conspirator. She couldn’t find her. It took her a while to find someone who would give her a straight answer, since no one was talking about. Not on Midway, where she might hear. Finally, one of the escorts whispered to her that the invasion had failed. They’d pushed the Japanese off Iwo Jima and the nearby islands, again. But the northern invasion corridor had failed and fallen back with moderate casualties.

Their subs had managed to catch and drive out The Ghost before she could threaten Midway, but they’d lost twelve submarines to the fight. When Taylor saw the official casualty count the next day, it included the line:

- Yo-Class submarine: Shun: Killed in action by The Ghost of Kyushu 32 miles N-NW off the coast of Midway.

Taylor was going to kill her when she came back. If she came back. Shun was coming back. She was. Then she was going to find who The Ghost of Kyushu was. Depending on the answer, she was going to have some words for them.