>>6114341The near-infrared imaging seeker on the nose of the SLAM-ER is able to uplink everything it sees to the aircraft that launched it, or in this case Searchlight, as your strikers are long since below the radio horizon. Every uploaded feed starts to record as the missiles make their terminal approaches. Feeds cut out one by one as interceptors home in. Others wink out so close you can tell there was no stopping them before impact. The feeds of a few stragglers give you an impromptu damage assessment, showing pillars of black smoke and raging fires from every hull, including critically a large boxy one in the centre of the formation - their aircraft carrier. Soon enough Searchlight detects that the ships are slowing and meandering off-course. Your attack got through, to savage, ruinous effect.
That fleet, though… what you see sickens you. The ships are all black, part machine, part sea creature, hard straight lines here and smooth organic curves there. Every one is coated with the scales and slime and encrustations of the deep, like the carcasses of dead ships torn from their rest in the cold below and chained to the surface to fight once again. Demons? Zombies? Vengeful ghosts? Whatever they are, they need to die, and go back to the deep to rest or seethe away from the world of the living.
‘Scratch one flattop,’ you announce over the radio. But there’s little triumph in it for you, after seeing your enemy up close, only relief.
Fleet One is no more. Prinz Eugen is defended, both by air and by sea; in a few hours she will be under the umbrella of your cruisers’ Aegis suites. All that remains to be dealt with now is Fleet 2.
And to get in contact with 3rd Fleet command. You might be out of direct radio range, but now that you know your capabilities better and with active combat no longer occupying your full attention, you realise you could take advantage of the radios onboard one of your Vikings telepathically. With bags and tanking they had plenty of range. And maybe, finally, you could get some support. Perhaps even a ride.
>[1] Defensive posture. The enemy could be most of a thousand miles away, and hunting them down would be a serious challenge, especially if they’re stealthier than the other fleet was; trying to attack them from so far away will also be a great deal harder, especially with an intact air defence network. >[2] Hunt these bastards down even if you have to go to the ends of the earth to find them. 