Tie In
It was interesting being in a different body in a completely different environment. Although the first clue I wasn't in my own body was the skin. I rarely wandered around without my armor, let alone in just a vest and shorts. And as one of my friends said 'do you humans only come in shades of orange?' I was currently the one natural exception to that. I was white, not Caucasian, white an albino. Which begged the question of why an albino was in the middle of the ocean, standing on the water with as close to no clothes on as was legal in most jurisdictions.
I hoped this wasn't a crazy dream, because interpreting it would be a real mind bender. Dreams are generally just the mind trying to catagorize the day's or week's events, and this week had been a dozy. So I watched my dreams to pick up seemingly unimportant things my subconscious thought I missed. It's saved my life and the lives of my colleagues many times. That doesn't keep it from being weird if indeed I was dreaming.
The other possibility, there's a joke among my group that we're 'weak to summoning spells'. Someone uses one and one of us gets drawn in. So that's the other possibility.
The silence from my three, usual partners disturbs me, as is not having the swords they reside in. I don't mind the occasional telepathic commentary, and nagging, considering the usefulness of their skills, and someone else watching my back, it's a small price to pay. Their silence is worrisome, although they might be even more shocked by the new environment and new digs than I am. The fact I'm effectively used to this weirdness says something olympian about human resilience, or something abysmal about my grasp on sanity before I began my adventures.
In the distance, I see two figures limping along, the smaller trying to support the one nearly half-again her height. They're skating. Now I pride myself on the breadth of my skills: magic, politics, sword-play, the operational art, boxing, smithing, and cooking like a master, but ice or roller skating, no interest, no skill and normally I can fly or run so why bother. I can only hope that running works because I can't fly for some reason, and trying to skate only demonstrates that I haven't magically gained the skill and water here is nearly solid, as my face can attest.
So run it is. They don't see me until I'm trying to slow down. I also figure out that water here is just as good a lubricant as it is back home. I slide right past them, shout my apology and try to stop without faceplanting.
Side note, learned from painful experience, a little comedy helps a lot when meeting new people. Especially if they know you or have heard of you. The guy making bad puns or slight pratfalls distracts from the fact he's some kind of combat-monster. You'll have plenty of time to scare the crap out of them when you kill a vampire lord with a thrown toothpick. They need to think you're mostly harmless to start with. If they need a demonstration, you can challenge them to a test of their favorite weapons, only for them to realize you stole it without them ever seeing you move.
I realize next that a lot of that requires magic, which doesn't seem to be working here. So I'm back to being good with my fists, wordplay, swords and guns. That's useful as the larger and more seriously wounded of the pair has a sword out and is trying to be threatening. She might think the eyepatch make her intimidating, but since eyepatches were often used to preserve nightvision when coming up on deck, not for lost eyes, it strikes me as an affectation, as does the sword.
I take the sword from her easily, hand it to the smaller girl and then pick up the hurt girl in a bridal carry, squat down and tell the other to climb onto my shoulders. The pair exchange glances and then like she's walking to her execution, she climbs onto my shoulders. The larger girl extends her hand to the small and apologizes.
"Don't worry, I'm sure the smell isn't your fault," I tell them as I start jogging and get up to a run across the ocean.
The little one laughs, which causes the big one to smile. Ice broken, I go for broke.
"Since you all seem to know what's going on, and that despite my looks I'm not going to eat you, you want to tell me why albinos are so terrifying around here? I'm not Elric, I assure you," I say.
"Abyssals," the little one says, and both shudder.
"You're going to have to get more basic than that. I know humanity, but I'm not sure if you humans are the humans of my homeworld, or if this is a parallel reality," I tell them.
I note that my magic has returned, at least partially. My legs should be tiring as I run, but I feel my magic keeping the fatigue poisons and other side effects of prolonged exertion from them. Weirdly, it feels like steam through pipes and spinning shafts rather than muscles but my legs don't hurt. It's not a lot, but I'll take it as a first step.
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Their explanation is both illuminating and terrifying. An alien invasion of unknown origin, the fact that only similar creatures, in this case ship-girls, could combat the Abyssals effectively. Since my magic cannot be externalized, I initially might have to resort to hand-to-hand combat. And considering they summon ships, that's a major point for me being weak to summoning spells.
Then they mentioned 'rigging' a manifestation of a ship's primary armament, that would require research but would allow ranged combat if I'm actually a ship-girl in this new body, although ship-boy or -man might be more accurate. The lack of data on the organization and structure of the units is reasonable, they don't know if I'm a spy or even allied, but the horrible idea that there isn't such an overall organization also explains it. If they are thrown in piecemeal without high-level formations and tactics being a possibility depending on how long the war has gone on. Another item that they don't mention. So they could be the remnants of other formations that have been bled out and were not supposed to be full up combat units and were on patrol.
Since they admit to being a cruiser and a destroyer, the idea of training units being ambushed and wounded has some validity. Or it could be I'm trying to piece a coherent narrative from completely disconnected bits and creating pieces which aren't there. That's something that's been used against me in the past, trying to see a pattern when there isn't one. Usually one of my partners breaks me out of the analysis paralysis, without their more experienced voices, now I'm worried. I may have been the arms and legs, but I was only the brain who drove the body, the four of us studied and developed the plans to deal with a problem. Three alien, coldly inductive or deductive insights and me providing the inferential brainstorm. I don't have that now.
Sighting the shore, I proceed to the surf and up the beach to the collection of buildings. The lack of standing guard worries me, but the pair seem to take it in stride. The symbology I recognize as Japanese. Then I realize what the chrysanthemum crests they both wear mean, and now I think I may be walking into an ambush. The Imperial Japanese military was of two minds about the rules of war, in World War 1 they were as scrupulous as an combatant, while in World War 2 they performed atrocities that horrified devout Stalinists and dedicated Nazis.
Okay quit thinking and concentrate on the simple plan, getting the wounded girl to medical treatment is the first priority. That should get me a bit of respite and time to negotiate. Good, problem solved. The little one calls out to a group of women in the distance, and as I watch their expressions change, every alarm in my head goes off at once. I think I actually hear the klaxon.
Relax, they could just be worried about their friend, and your appearance. If you surrender, even the WW2 Japanese would see to the wounded comrade first.
It's twelve to one, but I'm carrying someone and just dropping them would send the wrong message. There are now three coming up behind me as well.
Time to take the risk, I realize. "I surrender," I tell them, it's in English, but the pair seemed to understand it before. I don't move otherwise. My arms are occupied, I have no 'rigging' and I've got one of their allies in position to shoot me in the head if I move wrong, that should reduce my threat-level or chance of a surrender feint to near zero.
I twist enough that the blow is just disorienting, rather than decapitating. I also learn what rigging is as nearly all the girls approaching begin producing models of gun turrets and torpedo launchers attached to their bodies or hovering nearby. Rigging indeed.
Even if those are scale models, the bore sizes mean they'll hurt, I think and try to look harmless. Powerful hands drag the wounded woman out of my arms and the little one off my shoulders, heedless of the effect on them, as their yelps of pain and surprise indicates.
I've made mistakes about people before, but it's usually me thinking worse of them than they deserve. Not this time. I've gotten beatings before, it's better when wearing armor. This one isn't the worst, but it's the most vicious I've dealt with in quite a while. The little one is pleading with the others, but I've recognized the mob mentality, they won't stop until they've beaten the target into submission or paste. I put arms and legs in the way of vital areas, but unless I flail around I can't protect everything, and moving is like chumming the water for sharks. I heal fast and that magic hasn't been lost to me, so broken ribs, damaged arms, skull fractures mount up and are squared away. Although I'm not stupid, the appearance of damage remains.
Eventually, they are satisfied, or sated, and several of the larger ones drag me off. Far too much of me is screaming to counterattack, the injustice of the whole thing infuriates me, but I'm still outnumbered, they have rigging I don't, and if I'd started fighting immediately I might have had a chance, wounded as I am it's better to play possum. Only now do they deal with the horrified girl I'd brought in. This is very World War 2 Imperial Japan. I need to find a place to go to, and go there. If this is an island then there will be others. If it's mainland Japan, then China, Korea and Russia are escape routes. Heck, the Philippines and Australia might be goals to reach.
They drag me to a cell, a concrete box with a solid door in one wall, literally throw me in, and lock the door behind me. After a while, it's clear I'm not going to get a body cavity search. Maybe because they realize I could hide a 10,000 megaton bomb inside where they couldn't reach as well as an infantry regiment.
Then I allow the effect of the injuries and a healing trance to rob me of consciousness.
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It's good to see my old traveling companions again. One of them, who's been with me since almost the beginning is temporarily free to roam the insides of the ship I've become. Basically I freed him from his prison by binding him in iron, and since the biggest piece of iron I had at the time was my sword, an Eldritch Abomination Master of Healing was bound into a sword. He's weird enough to think the irony is hilarious.
But here he's back to the form I first saw him as, a vaguely elephantine biped composed of inky black, iridescent bubbles.
"Sorry about not responding earlier, I was so happy about being able to get up and move around," he tells me.
"No worries," I tell him, and notice several more like him, "You three are templates of the crew?"
"Yes, this is weird even for you," he tells me, "I'm medical and engineering, I take care of wounded and I take care of your damage."
"Seems about right, what's the butcher's bill this time?" I ask.
"Let's head up to the bridge, you aren't going to like it," he tells me as he leads me to a stairway, and on through the ship.
The bridge is staffed by my other long-term companion, a self-deposed demigod who threw herself on her god's mercy when she realized the cult who'd arranged her apotheosis meant her as her god's replacement not his handmaiden/enforcer. He can't really trust her, she can't really trust him, she couldn't trust her old allies, so he put her into a sword that replaced the healer's more mobile prison and gave her to me. We've come to trust each other, and have disarmed several of the feedback loops that would have turned her against her god eventually. Her dry, scaly, bipedal serpentine appearance is at odds with the healer's wet-look, but they too are friends after a fashion.
"We are going to need fuel and spare parts soon. They really did a number on you," she tells me, "And we've consumed a lot of supplies undoing that damage and still leaving it to look like the damage is still there."
I nod and catch sight of the third of my companions, she seems to be my Marines and a fair amount of the above deck work crews. "Have you scouted the area?" I ask.
Humanoid, she nods, taciturn as ever. "Many guards, much suspicious," she says, "Ineffective practices."
I nod at what might be all she says all day. She's communicative, she just doesn't like talking, so later she might take me to tour the places she thinks I need to know about. Unlike the other two, she was a weapon created to kill an Eldritch Demigod, but she fulfilled her function and was sort of at loose ends after her 'retirement', and she knew little past her mission so she's always been skittish. She enjoys being a sword, not having to do much but watch the enemies and draw my eye to where was the best place to hit them. Getting her even this much out of her shell and getting her to accept that the other two neither hate nor fear her has been an effort. A constant reminder that some things just take hard work.
"Tenryuu's here, wake and see her," she recommends.
The other two nod, the briefing can wait. I should have asked what a Tenryuu is before I left them, but my impulsiveness is another one of those things that will take hard work.
I open my eyes to the girl I'd rescued trying to drape a blanket over me through the bars of my cell, different cell I wonder when they moved me. Seems she has the right to visit, just not the right to enter. Under other circumstances it would be amusing to sexy, she's buxom enough that as she pushed forward she's poking her breasts through the bars, although Heaven help that poor button holding her shirt closed. If this was a nascent harem anime, that button would give up the ghost and depending on how ecchi the series, the shirt would pop open and show her bra or lack thereof, followed by a scream of 'hentai' and she'd megaton push me to Skentectitdy, or in a hentai series she'd push forward, get stuck and the author's main fetish would be involved in getting her loose.
My hands are chained behind my back to a bracket in the floor, not exactly the best situation to help her. I do catch it with my bare feet, also chained together, and shock her as I'm able to set it on myself. Frankly I don't want to know if I'm in a harem anime and if so how ecchi to hentai it might be. I could be cast as the cad rival to the loser, pure hearted everyman, no thank you. But it does put the beating in a different perspective.
"Thank you." I tell her.
"How long have you been awake?" she asks as she steps back from the bars and the guards come to action stations.
"About the time you arrived my crew awakened me," I tell her, "Are you healed?"
She checks where the belly wound was and grimaces at my apparently unrepaired damage. "I'm fine, I can't get authorization to get you time in the baths," she says, ashamed of the admission. One of the guards left, likely to inform the higher ups that the next phase could begin. She seems nervous about something, tugging at the edges of her clothes, biting her lip, making small, darting motions of her arms and legs.
"Don't try, it will only get you in trouble," I tell her. I just realized all the guards are female, if they are creatures like Tenryuu or humans or something else I don't know yet. I briefly imagine a species-wide matriarchy combined with the ethos of Imperial Japan. It would explain why they reacted so violently to a male of an unknown or enemy sect.
The bars and chains I'm bound with wouldn't be sufficient to hold me with my normal strength and magic, this new form, my chief engineer whispers to me, glad to have that back, could walk out of here at any time and even the walls couldn't stop me.
The woman who walks in with the returning guard couldn't look more sour if she were made of tamarinds and lemons. Barely as tall as Tenryuu, she looks like a garbage can with arms and legs. Very different from the cruiser. She glares at Tenryuu, who bows her head and retreats, then at the blanket Tenryuu had provided.
"Remove that at the earliest opportunity," she tells the guards who realize they've been ordered to enter the lion's cage and steal his teddybear. "You will answer my questions," she directs at me.
Patience, my captain counsels.
Before she can ask any I provide, "My name is Trevor Gambit, my social security number is 586-23-5428, I would like to speak to someone from the United States of America Embassy or Consulate."
My captain sighs something about half a loaf and falls silent.
The interrogator frowns at that, "What is your mission here?"
"My name is Trevor Gambit, my social security number is 586-23-5428, I would like to speak to someone from the United States of America Embassy or Consulate."
"If you do not answer my questions, you will be punished," she tells me.
"My name is Trevor Gambit, my social security number is 586-23-5428, I would like to speak to someone from the United States of America Embassy or Consulate."
"What is your mission here?" she demands.
"My name is Trevor Gambit, my social security number is 586-23-5428, I would like to speak to someone from the United States of America Embassy or Consulate."
"You will answer my questions!" she shouts.
Thin skin? I wonder, I don't grin at her my counselors remind me, keep the same neutral expression, "My name is Trevor Gambit, my social security number - "
"SILENCE!" she screams, a bit of foam at the corner of her mouth. It's an order I'm willing to follow.
"What is your mission here?" she demands.
I stare at her.
"What is your mission here?" she demands.
I stare at her some more.
"What is your mission here!?" she demands.
I stare at her. Then diagram a triangle on the floor. She is beside herself with barely controlled rage. "You may speak to answer my questions!"
" - is 586-23-5428, I would like to speak to someone from the United States of America Embassy or Consulate."
I think if she could reach me she'd physically assault me. I do take some time to carefully fold up the blanket, using my toes and slide it to where a guard can reach her fingers through and grab it. Despite their orders, none of them want to risk it. Do they not understand the restraints they've used are meaningless, they are no safer behind the bars than they would be in front of them.
I do note the chains and manacles are made of one of the materials needed to replenish my stocks, so they will be 'consumed'. I'll have to see if I still have my magical abilities within my hull. If I do, transmutation may be possible, another source of needed materials.
The questions and threats, and my monomaniacal answers to them continue until the interrogator storms out. Technically the no food, no blanket, and heavy interrogation technique with threats of withholding food, water, etc. are violations of any Rules of War that I'm familiar with, but local laws are probably different. That also may blur things, I may not have a counterpart here, or that counterpart may have been killed, all things to consider in the long run.
I return to inside the ship and consult with the crew, determine if magic can solve the resource problem, and consider what intelligence-gathering and escape-and-evasion options we have.
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Good news is the feed water and drinking water problem have been solved. So has the immediate food shortage for the crew, and if they didn't know me and trust me so well, it wouldn't be. That took until nighttime, although they didn't turn off the lights. The chains and the floor bracket provided much needed material to complete all repairs and have a small stock of backups. Removing them without being noticed took time and skill. Hooray for magic and skilled practioners.
I have a scout plane, but launching it would be too great a give away, so my deposed demigod's and god-slayer's lesser mirrors slip out under full stealth, down to invisibility to gravitational anomaly detection, to explore the immediate area and determine what areas farther afield will require attention.
It's a bit past midnight when another interrogator arrives. She's the one who tried to sucker punch me at the start of the fight. Under other circumstances I might think she was pretty, right now she's just an officer, a moving pool of pain and derision.
"We've checked with the Embassy," she tells me. She's doing the same flittering as Tenryuu, tugging at the fingerless gloves she's wearing, eyes glancing about nervously.
Am I really so fearsome, I wonder, then reply courteously, "Thank you for that." Whether I believe her or not is another matter.
"They have no record of you," she says.
Again, whether I believe her or not is another matter. They haven't listened to Tenryuu's story or made the leap of logic that I'm from a parallel world. That leaves me with a whole slew of responses they cannot be prepared for.
"I have questions, I will have answers," she tells me.
I don't shrug, I just prepare for a possibly violent physical confrontation. She hasn't noticed that the chains around my ankles are gone, or she doesn't care, but I am not going to sit there and take another beating. I was trying to be nice about it and get my charges some help. Now I'm just looking for an excuse. I suspect I know more about hand-to-hand combat than a Naval officer would. I made my way with a sword for many years before my magic grew strong enough, and my crew have briefed me on my rigging and the results that armor belts would have on hand-to-hand combat. She may be expert at the gunnery portion, but I'm a fast learner, and at this range I can have my hands around her throat after having gouged her eyes out before she can summon her's. She has no radar aerials, I have radar, so even in a blind fight I'd have the advantage.
"What is your mission here?" she asks.
"My name is Trevor Gambit, my social security number is 586-23-5428, I would like to speak to someone from the United States of America Embassy or Consulate."
"They don't acknowledge your existence, now, what is your mission here?" she asks.
"My name is Trevor Gambit, my social security number is 586-23-5428, I would like to speak to someone from the United States of America Embassy or Consulate." Police interrogation works because people think they can provide a few answers and they'll be back to normal. Military/Intelligence interrogation works because people think answering questions will end their current pain/disorientation. Neither are correct, they will outlast you, because they are being paid to get the info, they have people to give them breaks for food, water, rest, and you don't. So a mantra and patience is how you beat them. Name, ID, and a request for an advocate, over and over, nothing else. Even exhausted, shocked, in pain, the same mantra. Eventually they'll give up, or they'll kill you. Or they'll make a mistake.
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She didn't lose it like the other did, but she did grow a lot more agitated as my refusal to answer went on. She also did a lot more of the nervous tics: tugging at her clothes and hair, quick nervous motions, rocking on her heels, and so on. The regular guards don't show much to any of that behavior. It'll take time to figure out what's going on.
I went back to sleep, and this time I start dreaming. Oh I am not looking forward to my subconscious laughing at me too.
I know it's a dream because it's a half set, a floor with furniture but a wall is missing, so the camera can look into the scene. In this case there are no walls, the small windows outside the cell hang from wires, doors are there unsupported and the location of the walls are marked on the floor, basically by clean spots as the floors weren't exactly spotless in reality.
Tenryuu walks in, in her own half-set. The bikini she's wearing would be less embarrassing if it were her eyepatch replicated three times instead of what acts like a few sections of body paint. Cloth doesn't cling like that, and she's absolutely aware of it.
The two buckets she's carrying are almost an after thought, but are why she's here. She folds a bunk frame out of the wall that isn't there, it's that kind of dream, and sits me on it. One bucket is full of rags, which she dumps out beside me on the bunk frame. Why the rags don't fall between the slats I chalk up to dream logic, and frankly a lot of the rags are bigger than the top and bottom of the bikini she's wearing so why not improvise something? Again dream logic, I'm only noticing those things because I'm watching this from outside. I can't really influence it.
"The guards got called away," she tells me as sets the other bucket beside me, it's full of warm, soapy water. From it, she pulls one of those, I always call them bath tribbles, one of those things that are trendier to use than sponges and wash clothes. She begins rubbing my face. So this is a sponge bath. With her other hand she's playing with the side tie on her bikini. The three damn bows holding the thing together are so huge that if you replaced them each with a clip, you'd triple the available fabric for coverage, which would make Tenryuu a lot more appealing. A woman on the verge of tears/flight isn't as interesting as one who's more secure in her skin.
"You're a battleship, I'm only a light cruiser, I couldn't stop you if you tried something," she tells me as begins on my shoulders and chest. Her blush brightens as I, or my dream simulacrum, pulls off the vest I wear.
Lady, you already saw what I'd do when I had every advantage, I think.
"Even if I yelled, no one would come to help me," she say, pausing to look up at my face and see where I'm looking at what's on display, "Someone could do whatever they want."
"I'll protect you," I tell her. While she's vaguely pleased, she's also frustrated I don't seem to be getting the message.
Okay, now I get what all the fidgeting is about. Suddenly, instead of being an interesting nerd, I'm Chad of the Football Team, and she's not the Head Cheerleader.
I want to tell her that me 'doing whatever I want' still feels a bit like bait for a rape accusation, she's giving off every signal she's refusing to accept any responsibility for this. I'm not interested in taking by force what can be negotiated and agreed to. Her debauched reticence is just creepy.
I'm on the verge of telling her that an enthusiastic partner is the best aphrodisiac, at least for me, when six girls arrive, with their rigging deployed, and the first man I've seen yet is a surprise. End dream, back to reality, the walls are back and just as trivial as their lack was.
He's a janitor, confirming my suspicions about a de facto or de jeur misandrist matriarchy. They are my previous interrogator, a redhead with similar, four, double turret rigging. A dark-skinned blonde with three, triple turrets, and a stereotypical Japanese lady with similar guns. The one who decided repeatedly kicking me in the jewels during my surrender was her best option and a taller version wearing glasses, both with the four, double turrets. I stand up and move to the far corner of the cell, and all the girls are too shocked to fire.
"How did you break those chains?" the interrogator asks.
I indicate the bare floor, lacking even the staple that was supposed to restrain me. "What chains?"
The six take up firing positions, the poor janitor is frozen in place. "What say I stay here, you clean that half of the cell, then when you're ready, I'll move to the other far corner and let you get the rest?" I offer.
He nods and unlocks the door.
"Oh, you're nice to him," Ball Buster mocks.
"He's cute, you aren't," I reply.
If I'd kicked her where she'd repeatedly kicked me I wouldn't have gotten that reaction. The heel rocking and playing with clothes suddenly resolves itself and I confirm my subconscious' realization of what they were doing. The girls are generally my height or shorter, I thought the man fit in with my Bonobos assumption, where the males are smaller and weaker than the matriarchs, but evidently they caused the change, and aren't happy about it. They were flirting, and I was ignoring it. Yes, even my subconscious picked up on that before I did. To be fair, it wouldn't consider them assailants, like the higher functions would.
I nearly laugh aloud at the thought I'd be remotely interested in a pack of vicious harpies, no matter how they look or how much skin they show. Sorry, Tenryuu and her friend didn't try to beat me down after I surrendered, all six of you did, I'm not stupid enough to fall for any of your tricks.
I wait until the janitor is finished and has closed the door to the cell before I ask, "If you're so desperate for it, why'd you keep kicking me there?"
I swear I hear a steam whistle as Ball Buster turns bright red. Glasses drags Ball Buster out of the room, and I'm not sure if the group are horrified or are trying not to laugh. They withdraw as quickly as they can, and as soon as I'm alone with the two regular guards, who are also blushing furiously, I stretch out on the bunk and check in with my crew and the intelligence gathering team.
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The admiral looked up from the lab reports. Blood clots and a few samples had been collected by the sweep of the cell. None of the battleships who'd been sent in had seemed eager to discuss what happened despite Nagato's previous venting of frustrations about his reticence, or Tenryuu gushing about him carrying her back to base like a bride. The omission would normally be the focus of discussions, but the results of the sample swept that off the table.
The pieces were blood clots and an expert had suggested Type-O negative. There were anomalies but being partially a ship-girl and mixing them with other effects of his injuries explained those. But the blood clots were human blood. He was not an Abyssal despite every visual cue he was. And he was a he, not a she. Even the most remotely humanoid Abyssals had female characteristics. He was definitely male. He also was immune to the spirit chains he'd somehow dissipated, chains that supposedly should have held an Abyssal.
The admiral had a spate of questions, and he knew any attempt to get answers would be stonewalled. The U.S. had checked the man's story, while there were plenty of Trevor Gambits, some still alive, the Social Security number hadn't been issued.
Resigned, he called the Embassy and asked an intelligence officer be sent for a debriefing. He didn't like giving in, but sooner or later an angry battleship was simply going to walk out of his cell and short of naval combat across his base, he had no way of stopping him.
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The woman is short, like the first interrogator. I realize I would have to abandon any hope that things were scaled as I expected them to be. I could be nine feet tall for all I knew. I was always moderately tall, but towering over everyone but the ship-girls I'd put down to the Japanese being shorter, than might not be the case.
The woman wears a suit with a cloisonne, U.S. flag pinned on the lapel and carries a briefcase and professional attitude.
"Mister Gambit, I wish to assure you the Self-Defense Force did contact us, and we did verify you don't appear anywhere in our records," she tells me as preamble, "That said, we cannot offer you asylum. We have been able to prevail on the Japanese Government." She shows her government ID, which I don't recognize the details of.
A lot of empty promises, yep government bureaucrat through and through. 'We made a deal, you'll have to live with it', not as a battleship I don't.
"So, how did you come to be here?" she asks as one of the soldiers provides a chair for the bureaucrat.
I give her my life story until I was essentially kidnaped by aliens who taught me magic, and that I was at my home among those aliens when I appeared here.
"You seem to be taking all this in without trouble," she says.
"I've dealt with worse," I tell her, "So what was done to set off the Abyss and Abyssals? Are they simply invaders or do they carry a list of grievances that are too expensive or embarrassing to meet?"
"They intend to exterminate the entire human race," she tells me as if I should believe it, "They launched an attack on many coastal cities on the first week of their appearance."
"So no WSQ protocols here," I say and shake my head, "Unfortunate. I assume the reason they haven't been hunted down and exterminated is some form of stealth technology humans don't have the ability to break, the ship-girls can break it, and no one here has dusted off the plans to the pigeon-guided bombs."
" 'WSQ' ?" she asks.
"If you are stymied by a magic stealth field the physics and math involved are beyond current science and technology," I tell her, "Grossly over simplified, it's like Jonathan Livingston Seagull's Perfect Speed, but with thoughts and ideation."
She doesn't write it down, so I assume I'm being recorded. The real meaning is that magic basically is the will to tell the universe to shut up, bite the pillow, you're going in dry. Religion used to be strong enough to provide the certainty for that, in atheistic settings math does it, but in reality, you just have to be arrogant enough to believe in a small way, you're more important than what the universe thinks. I've never had a problem with that.
"You can help with that?" she asks.
"I've never encountered an Abyssal, but I can tell you the basis of the pigeon-guided bomb," I tell her.
She's not pleased by that, but I know we're negotiating. She want something for nothing, and I just want a chance to walk out of here without needing to fight my way out. My spies have given me the approximate layout, and I've got several possible escape routes. I just have to avoid actually promising anything, like staying here and giving them long-term service. I was attacked while performing a rescue, I don't intend to let that slide no matter how they try to brush it way.
"Unfortunately, you are under Japanese law and jurisdiction, since you are not a U.S. citizen, we have no legal grounds to stand on," she says.
Give away something valuable and we'll go ahead with the deal we've already brokered.
"That's good news, as a high-ranking, alien polity, I can go directly to The Hague for a War Crimes Tribunal," I say and smile, "I won't have to go through SCOTUS to get permission." I smile. She looks ill, being denied the leverage she was angling for and realizing I'm playing on a completely different field. "As a disastrous First Contact situation, they'll have an interesting trial, especially in the Court of Public Opinion. It'll set precedents that will be studied for years. Hopefully your next First Contact won't result in a rapsheet as long as your arm. Don't worry I understand it was just the viciousness of a few, psychotic soldiers, so I can keep a military response is off the table, but politically . . . " I shrug.
Now she's mentally scrambling to figure out how to avoid this, and I suspected a shot in the dark was the table, but that would allow me to respond in kind, now a shot in the dark will give the Abyss a cobelligerent. One who doesn't need the planet in one piece. As well, since they haven't fed me, poison is out, and a polonium umbrella tip is not likely to have much effect on my new biology.
"Well, sorry for wasting your time, coming out here to tell me I am on my own," I tell her, "I was rather hoping that the local forces were lying about it, as a form of enhanced interrogation." I shrug. "Also since you weren't taking notes when my stenographers type up the report do you want a copy?"
" 'Stenographers'?" she asks, reeling a bit by losing her leverage and discovering I can deliver administrative violence as well as high explosives. In as bureaucratic a system as this appears to be, the administrative violence will be far more effective.
"Yes, I have a crew, a crew have duties, sometimes unpleasant ones, and having everything needed for a Captain's Mast or even a full Court Martial is part of the capabilities," I tell her, "The weird thing is that all the law books aboard are for this planet and its polities rather than the ones I'm familiar with. The case will be very interesting, although transferring it to a civilian court will dilute things."
I'm rather proud that I came up with this strategy and my three counselors only helped polish the sharp edges. We've also begun monitoring all radio traffic, civilian and what military transmissions are in the clear, so I've got a limited view into the mental state of the local government and the international scene. There are always wedges to be driven into international relations, and a battleship is one massive bargaining chip. Except I'm not in their hands, I'm in mine.
"Well, thank you for your time," she says, "On a side note, if you weren't an Abyssal, why didn't you tell them that?"
"I did, and have ample evidence they did not believe me," I reply, indicating some of the abrasions that are now purely cosmetic.
She frowns and nods. Leaving, the guards collect the chair and then take up their positions. Since I know I'm being observed, I go through a series of katas several of my instructors taught me, or as one of them called it, a whole body workout inside a closet. It also confirms that I have not lost my par-caste capability. Basically channeling magic or telepathic skills to increase your hand-to-hand combat skills, a way to utilize your magic more passively. What takes martial artists years of training someone trained in par-caste can simulate easily. Hitting a bit harder or with greater accuracy, knowing where to hit to deliver a nerve strike, knowing how to turn to avoid one in return. Harden your skin to catch sword blades, strengthen your muscles to punch through stone walls, increase you senses and reaction times to dodge arrows. Attack and defense of pressure points, it's all the mystical mumbo-jumbo of Shoenen martial arts but too a much lesser extent and with an understanding of how to actually do it. If you want to shoot a fireball, you cast a spell, not harness you inner depression. But just looking at myself certain strikes will be useless, and if facing an opponent with a distributed armor scheme it'll require a maximum effort on the few vulnerable areas.
The odd thing is, half-way through a rotating kick, i.e. side kick, without putting your leg down rotate 45 degrees on the balls of your other foot feet, kick again, until you complete a circle, I note both guards are now blushing. Despite warnings from all three of my councillors, I say, "Should I take off my vest and keep going?" Which sends the pair into a furious blush. In deference to my trio, I left off saying, 'I think they'd object if I took off my shorts.'
I still maintain it would have been screamingly funny, I'll let my more sober-sided voices have their point. You never know how the enemy will react.
------------------------------
It's late afternoon, all the patrols are in, and warned me that a delegation was heading my way. The main reason they all recalled themselves. It's the same six who guarded the janitor before, except they haven't deployed their rigging this time.
I sense a trap, which is also an opportunity.
"The Admiral wishes to see you," the interrogator says.
I stand and soon we're walking through the complex, them in a hexagonal pattern around me just out of arm's reach. Whether they are guarding me from the base or vice versa is a question I know enough not to ask. The blushes and fidgets are there in force and so is the frustration that I'm ignoring them. If the human guards' reaction is an indicator, I'm good looking by local standards, but this Chad isn't even giving them the time of day. We enter a short, office building and up five flights of stairs to the Admiral's conference room.
"Prisoner reporting as ordered," I say and snap to attention before my guards can report.
The Admiral, a man, surprise surprise, looks sour but nods to a chair at the opposite end of a long table. He's at the head. All of those who took part in the beating are arrayed along with a few others as presumably witnesses, Master at Arms, and other official positions.
All the females are good looking, but I'm too old for that to distract me. I was ordered to sit, so I sit at attention, my gaze straight towards the Admiral, or actually a spot six inches over his head. This is a game I intend to play by my rules, not his. I also affect the thousand-yard-stare, not focusing on anything just directing my gaze in his direction. It's often a sign of PTSD, which would make sense to someone less inured to horror than I am.
The Admiral nervously orders me to 'At Ease', and I move my feet apart and put my hands behind my back, but don't relax or adjust anything else. I have five stenographers on rotation, ready for whatever comes. I also have several exits marked out, from the way I came in to out the window and down the drain pipe.
Ball Buster stands and begins speaking. I don't turn to face her. Whatever she says is meaningless compared to the battle. I've played the political game before, and apologies for automatic misbehavior/following standing orders have no more meaning than a politician's preelection promises. The beating I can put off as poor communication, to prioritize the beating over seeing to a wounded colleague when there were too many batterers for the target shows a lack of training, planning and command and control. Fine, beat the surrendering monster to death, but detail at least two of the fifteen to getting the wounded to safety and maybe five to setting up a perimeter or reserve, that would have left eight, about the most it was practical to have, doing the beating, and then swapping them out to let the reserve in on it and rest the batterers so they wouldn't make a fatal mistake. But they just tried to get their shots in and were less effective than they could have been.
I don't need to be reminded to not accuse them of fighting like girls, I'm now outnumbered eighteen to one, not counting the Admiral, it would be suicide and I and my friends suspect there will be some wiggle room coming soon. Ball Buster sits down and the short-haired, redhead begins speaking. I still fix on the spot over the Admiral's head, keep my expression neutral and let the stenographers record for review later. I know there will be a few jabs and accusations at me, so better to pay no attention and not react.
This continues for two-and-a-half hours. The Admiral is wilting under my placid, empty gaze, I've done nothing to indicate I have hostile intent, but I haven't looked at the girls, their sometimes histrionics, or moved beyond breathing and the occasional blink. It's clear he's not used to the silent treatment, nor are the girls, who universally are getting more anxious. But when the last one sits down, silence reigns. I swear I hear the clinking of cooling metal, and it isn't from the stenographers aboard.
The Admiral tries to rally and regain a sense of control of the situation, something he only lost in his head, he always had the overwhelming force option. "Do you have any questions?"
"Sir, I'm I still under arrest, sir?" I say, not loudly, but clearly, as a recruit would to a DI.
The Admiral blanches and shakes his head. When silence stretches on, he turns to Glasses, the tallest of Ball Buster's sisters. "Escort him to the Battleship Dorms."
Everyone freezes as I snap to my feet, turn 180, and march towards the door. Open, through, close door and I'm in the outer office. A small map on the wall holds my attention, although I already know the layout to a greater degree of detail than the map shows, being seen looking at it will excuse me being able to navigate without my escort.
As soon as she's out of the conference room, I'm out of the office and march smartly towards the stairway nearest the path to the dorms, leaving her flustered as she follows. As soon as she's close enough I fast march down the stairs and through the door at the bottom, pausing to wait outside the door off the stoop.
She's through the door and at a dead run about 20 feet before she stops and realizes I was waiting for her and am now jogging after her. I jog past her and she's forced to run to keep up.
"Can we just walk?" she asks as she runs to catch up, and races ahead a few steps as I suddenly stop. Then I fast walk to where she waits. It's walking heel-toe, but despite her long legs, she has to periodically run a few steps to keep up. Yes it's a passive-aggressive way to play, but it also tells her I'm in control, not her.
I'm also not looking at her as we walk, keeping my eyes fixed on the Battleship Dorms in the distance. But my observers note she seems a little miffed by that. I mentally chalk it up to a pretty girl being ignored by a handsome stud. I never considered myself good looking, intriguing was about the highest compliment I received, although I haven't been dating among humans as opposed to humanoids since I was seventeen, many of the entities I dated and some I did more than that with would make this one look like a marionette put together and operated by a bunch of kindergartners. She's obviously expecting me to go gaga, and I barely spare her a glance. I don't know precisely what she's thinking but it's obvious she's not happy about it.
"I'm Kirishima," she says.
"Yes, thank you," I tell her, then fall silent.
"Oh, you told people your name, didn't you," she says and adjusts her glasses, takes them off, and silently debates putting them back on. When I take a sudden turn she puts them back on instantly and looks around for what I dodged.
Yep, she's blind without'em.
I'm back on course for the dorms with no explanation. She can't abide the silence. "We really are sorry about what happened."
While my three councillors are ready to jump me to prevent me from making a snarky comment, they have no fear on that regard, silence is having all the effect I need as she creates the worst counter in her head, because if I didn't say anything, whatever I wanted to say would have had to be horrible. Almost in confirmation, she bows her head.
"Is there anything you'd particularly like?" she asks, then blushes furiously, "Food! I mean."
"My favorite dish cannot be made on this planet," I reply, the truth, it's best made in microgravity. Although the emotionless monotone is having the desired effect. She knows I can sound passionate, shouting my surrender, asking that Tenryuu get medical help, etc., but here I am all business.
"Maybe something else?" she offers. We've arrived at the Battleship Dorms, I open the door for her. "Thank you," she says.
Then I close the door after her and march for the perimeter fence. From here I have two exits, the closest leaves me in the waters claimed by the military, but another 50 yards and over a fence and there's a river that leads outside the military's exclusion zone. That's my target.
She catches up as I'm half-way to the fence. "The dorms are back that way."
"I know," I tell her, the fence is about 15 feet tall, two gantries with three strands of barbed wire each and a roll of concertina wire at the top between them. A formidable barrier if you aren't prepared. I suspect the fence, wire or both are hot, but I have defenses against that.
"I am supposed to escort you there," she says.
" 'to the Battleship Dorms', not into," I say, "You fulfilled your orders."
"You were supposed to go in," she says, she's acting like there's a surprise party in there and I'm not cooperating.
"That was never part of the orders," I tell her, "I know I have the transcripts." I pull on a pair of leather gloves and a pair of short boots, then jump onto the fence, so I'm not grounded when I touch it. I'm scrambling up as she touches the fence and gets a nasty shock that knocks her back. There are no isolators on the barbed wire or the concertina, so I scramble over that, and down the other side until I can jump clear.
She's still recovering, feeling around for her glasses.
"2 o'clock relative, 3 yards," I tell her and begin marching towards the river.
She just crashes through the fence. "Where are you going?" she demands.
My radio room alerts me to her sending out plenty of messages, but enciphered so I can't read them. "I'm no longer under arrest," I tell her and jump down onto the surface of the river. It's like jumping on a padded floor.
"But," she manages as I start jogging away, and am at a dead run as soon as I can speed up. The river is too small to be navigable to anything too large and so I don't have to worry about collisions.
------------------------------
Four hours at sea at 26 knots. If I remember the IJN correctly, that puts me as fast or faster than all but Yamato and the Kongo classes, and of course cruisers and destroyers. But I have a counter to that, I can't affect anything outside myself, but I can make my armor and superstructure radar-absorbent. So I go from having a radar signature like a battleship, to the signature of a sparrow.
It also blocked a lot of the radio chatter so I couldn't really use that to avoid the hunting groups, but if they got close enough to be heard, I knew to avoid them. Precisely at the four hour mark, I reduce the radar absorption in the direction of the Philippines. Earlier radio transmissions indicate the Abyss was making a move similar to the Luzon attack. So that's where I'm headed. The Filipinos aren't fans of the Japanese, they never had a battleship of their own, and I suspect they'll be amenable to a bit of piracy aimed at the Abyss.
So bisecting the angle between Radio Manila and my current course, and then two hours at 20 knots should take me out of easy discovery by the Imperial Japanese and hopefully into international waters where I can steam at 22-24 knots to the Philippines and begin seeing if I am more useful as a battleship or an infantry supersoldier.
------------------------------
My counselors have come to me with a problem. Odd enough that, but more so it's all three of them.
The crews which were basically down rated copies of them, are diverging, becoming independent personalities, and they don't know what to do. It's a reasonable question. The trio are all loners, they worked alone or with a few minions, the idea that somewhere you'd have to administer a group, especially a large group is something they are aware of, they watched me do it, but they haven't.
Bit of explanation, a rifle squad has a leader and someone to make sure everyone has bullets, beans and black coffee, but everybody also shoots their rifle. Same with a rifle platoon. But at the company-level, there starts to be people whose first job is to make sure everyone has bullets, beans and black coffee, they don't shoot their rifle unless things have gone wrong. At the brigade and division level, the number of people who shoot rifles may be outnumbered by the people who make sure everyone has bullets, beans and black coffee, as well as the forms to order the forms to order bullets, beans and black coffee. It's a fact of life.
Well Battleships are at the regiment to brigade level of staffing, except there have to be people doing certain things 24/7 on a routine basis You can't grab every ninth trooper and put them on guard duty, a complete group has to be on the off watch(es).
Now I've dealt with armies and fleets, several times both at once, and for several months, both and the air forces of a dozen allied nations. Not like Eisenhower, who had to negotiate, more like Pershing, they were under my direct command. So my trio of older, wiser, and vastly more powerful councillors came to me hat in hand to deal with issues of personnel and logistics.
I didn't laugh at them, despite it being screamingly funny. The critters are quickly screened for aptitude, they'd already worked that out themselves. I just made the de facto ranks permanent, worked out a cross training regimen so if a snipe wanted to try bridge watches they could, in the off hours. I worked out the battle stations and off shift battlestations, more like the Royal Navy than the U.S. Navy, and we ran drills. General Quarters, fire fighting, damage control, anti-aircraft, and UNREP. The templates were more seadogs than the originals, so there was a bit of friction there, but a few senior chiefs were detailed to get their senior officers up to speed and I had enough manuals aboard to keep even those three voracious readers busy.
Score one point for the noob. And it cemented the fact that I am the captain, which helped.
The weirdo who started agitating for a bowling alley needs to be watched though.
------------------------------
It's a convoy. Radio traffic is different than what I picked up while steaming away from Tokyo. It isn't encrypted, it's a nonhuman language. What I can make out is an escort forward, another to the rear, and at least five transports between. I've reactivated my stealth system, and timed my approach to happen an hour after nightfall. Visually I appear to be an Abyssal, might as well make use of that. I'm not stupid enough to think all the Abyssals are one big, happity family, so the escorts will fight. But they won't decide that until I'm a lot closer.
There's a rain squall in the area, but I can't wait to approach under that cover, and I know where the convoy will likely run to, so it balances out. My crew haven't found any torpedoes aboard, so the first firings of my main guns will be under combat conditions. I'm well aware of how stupid that is, as are my councillors, but the convoy showed up about the time I was going to start testing my capabilities and is moving at a speed that it would be in my area of operation for some time.
So sink the escorts with gunfire, dodge their return fire and torpedoes, and if they call for help, be ready to run away. The approach course will let me engage both escorts or concentrate on one. After some consultations, we decide to concentrate the main guns and unengaged secondaries on the rear escort, while secondaries' main effort goes against the forward escort.
The convoy goes nuts on suddenly having a powerful radar source closing in. The first salvo of the main guns isn't as abysmal as I'd expected, but the hope of a quick kill goes out the window. The secondaries are almost as bad, but they're correcting their aim faster as they fire faster. The second salvo gets a straddle while the secondaries are on their fifth and are getting hits on the lead escort. The rear escort sheers out of line and turns into the wind. Carrier. The secondaries engaging the rear begin getting a few hits, but not enough to prevent flight operations. The main guns speak again, this time I get one good hit, and since it's a high Capacity shell, the destruction is spectacular.
I don't know if I hit stacked ordinance or a burning plane set it off, but the fireball from the carrier lights up the sky. I almost wish it didn't. I get a close look at the transports and am revolted. While the ship-girls were cute to gorgeous, these things are not even ugly cute, they are grotesque and seem to tap into a human's base nature of seeing things as wrong.
I've had constant dealing with things so alien they barely understand humans and human thought, and they weren't that disturbing. These things are designed to hit every note of 'I am repulsive' that they can reach.
I leave the secondaries to keep engaging the burning carrier. AAA shoots down the few planes it did get up, and I redirect the mains to the forward escort who has been electronically screaming like a banshee since I first illuminated the convoy. The brief glimpse I got of it was another inhuman thing. I'm beginning to wonder how the Hell the ship-girls thought I was an Abyssal when these things are beyond hideous.
With a few salvos to work out the bugs, and the data from the secondaries' director, I straddle the escort with my first main gun salvo, and the secondaries have already gotten a few hits. The transports haven't scattered, they're sailing at the same course and speed as they were during my approach.
I see the torpedo tracks and hop over them, then the mains fire again. A secondary explosion from the carrier along with the gun flash of the mains illuminates the forward escort well enough I nearly lose my lunch. But the guns tear the escort apart and it disappears into the sea, the flames dotting its surface disappearing as well. The carrier is flaming debris so I can ignore that. Approaching the transports is a different kind of ordeal. They aren't armed except with their own repulsiveness, which is a considerable defense.
I've seen the effects of violence on people, be it battlefield, industrial accident or natural disaster. I've seen things the human mind literally cannot conceive of even while looking straight at it. But none were as disturbing as these things. They have the supplies, fuel and likely food I need. I never consider eating them, the thought of it sends my normally cast iron stomach reeling. I also have to be quick, those escorts were calling for someone as if that someone could do some good.
------------------------------
Now I have fuel, powder, some very questionable food, and shells I can't really use. Ripping open the transports was a thoroughly unpleasant experience. No one came to their defense, and they stupidly sailed in a straight line, couldn't communicate well enough to simply stand and deliver, and their crews fought the boarding parties I'd sent to take the supplies without physically tearing the ships, and their bodies, to pieces.
I'd been thinking how people with such poor decision making could do well in a war, then I encounter these transports and realize these people aren't thinking. They are playing out programming rather than being fully sapient. It's a jarring realization on what it says about even the possibility of negotiation or even personal growth. Their reaction was not 'abyssal-looking thing acting anomalously', it was 'Abyssal detected, ship-girls in proximity, activate hand-to-hand option.'
So with that in mind, full fuel bunkers and a goal to get the Hell out of here, I head towards the Philippines thinking not how to outsmart an opponent, but how to game their programming. I risk deactivating my stealth systems to listen in and locate broadcast sources and get an idea where they are and what's going on. The news from the Philippines is grim, local forces are fighting, and I'm thinking of the swarm of battleships in Tokyo and wonder why none of them are down here. Although after a bit of thinking I remember Plan Orange and realize this may be the US Navy's playground and they are on their way. And the US knows they and the UK broke the enemies' codes in both World Wars, so they are probably under radio silence to prevent detection. I wonder if they have celphones or other encrypted radios. I spotted a few computers on my walk through the office so we're at least in the 1990's level of tech with conventional forces, so a satphone is at least possible. It might only go to flagships, but I'd have no way of picking it up, which is the point of it.
Fortunately I have maps of the Philippines. They are circa 1941 so I'd be lost trying anything but the most basic navigation, but I've got them. And as I get closer I hear some radio chatter at what is likely the front lines. My plan is to land behind the front lines and play spy and saboteur. They have to have supply dumps of some kind. The fight consumed a bunch of resources that if their units are in combat will have to be replenished, they'll have more supplies than a common soldier would, but outside their hulls, those supplies will take up a huge amount of room.
Coming ashore in broad daylight seems foolish, unless you're trying to blend in. If you're trying to be sneaky, you'd pick times when you'd be less obvious. On the plus side I did use my magic to cast the strongest invisibility spell known: SEP, or Somebody Else's Problem. Probably a dozen Abyssals saw me, and all returned to what they were doing as I disappeared into the forest. Okay, some of them looked pretty good. I guess as you move up the tree in authority, you look more human. What I also see are a lot of thousand-yard-stares. The war may be going badly for the Filipinos, but it isn't all wine and roses for their attackers.
I soon see why. Land mines. Abyssals are heavy enough that they detonate anti-tank mines, and the lesser Abyssals are used to clear minefields by marching through them. Beaten paths with shattered monstrosities cast aside and squalling out for help or a merciful end litter them. Three minefields and the same thing.
Just from a morale standpoint that's bad planning. Even if you think of your troops as expendable, you don't leave markers saying that for all of them to see. At least put them down so you can lie about their brave sacrifice without their screams of agony ruining the propaganda. I have to put guards on my crew who came from the healer. I agree that we could fix them, or at least administer the coup de grace, but if the ethos is to leave them, and we want to blend in, we leave them.
I don't like it. If they're irredeemable monsters, at least put them down quickly. If they are comrades in arms, rescue them or put them down quickly. The level of sociopathy needed to ignore that is telling, but considering many Abyssals' reactions to the grisly reminders that they are just fuel for the warmachine probably lessens their risk taking, and thus success on the front lines.
Nightfall, and I long to just shelter under a tree during an absolutely monsoonal rain. I don't know if this is normal or some affect of the Abyssals, in any case it serves to put a damper on Abyssal activities. So scouting is the order of the day, night. The Abyssals who are sheltering under trees seem the higher-ranking, anyone out in the rain is beneath their notice.
I've moved out far enough that I'm near the ocean when I pick up an S.O.S., as I move it disappears, so directional radio. Good to know, I'll have to figure out how. I have a vector, I head that way. It wasn't ciphered so either civilian or desperate military.
I spot the girl in the tattered uniform looking desperately out of a blind that would render her invisible had I approached head on. How to approach?
Well, what kind of ship flew false colors? Pirates are too far back in history. So the blinker light comes out and I send 'Q-ship approaching' and give my magnetic bearing from her position. It takes two repeats to get the response 'Approach', at which point my radio direction finders lose the S.O.S..
The girl has two friends I didn't spot until I got in close. I hate not having my full suite of magic, and not being able to use what theoretically replaces it. The looks on their faces shows that my `disguise` is effective, but the yardarm is bearing the signal flags Q-S-H-I-P. So they don't point their weapons at me.
"Paint," I tell them as I approach within speaking distance, "Are you coast watchers or trapped?"
"Trapped," the girl says and glances at the others, they nod, she continues, "We're short on fuel, and we have wounded."
"Are they seaworthy and able to handle UNREP?" I say remembering the Navy jargon for underway replenishment.
They grin and nod happily. Hoses are paid out, my crew prepares to transfer a few crates of less dubious food, and soon I'm refueling and revictualling the trio. One breaks off to gather the other three, if I'm right about size/age, these three are destroyers, the returning group add two destroyers and a battered light cruiser. I also realize they are Royal Australian Navy, not RN.
I've got the new trio hooked up and transfer over enough to easily get them to Manila. If we can get them to sea. I can sneak, sprint and dodge, but they're going to be held to the best speed of their slowest ship, and since that's the cruiser, I doubt any of the five destroyers would abandon her.
"The line to the beach is patrolled," the cruiser says, the HMAS Perth on her cap gives a name.
"Yes, but if I fooled you, I'll fool them, that's kind of the point," I tell them. I also know I'm a battleship, anything lesser is easy meat at likely engagement ranges. They rapidly pack up their camp and the intelligence they've gathered, and we move stealthily to the beach.
We're almost there when I spot what the girls identify as a Ru-class. The Abyssal isn't walking a patrol route, but standing there. Petulant asshole on punishment detail, so doing a piss-poor job of guarding. I position my charges so they can shelter beside a rock and hide while I approach the Ru-class.
I walk up to the guard, bold as brass and punch her in the back of the head just where the skull meets the neck. And she goes down like a sack of potatoes, and stays there.
This isn't an act, I realize and signal the girls to move out. They take to the water and are out of sight surprisingly fast. I back off into the treeline and watch. If killing a battleship is that easy, this may be quicker than I thought. But she wakes up, clambers to her feet and looks around nervously. It's all I can do not to face palm when she sends out no radio report. If a guard I'd trained suddenly woke up, he or she would be screaming bloody murder for the sergeant of the guard, the officer of the day, or whatever, and the whole area would come to life, making an intruder's life interesting but short. Here, nothing. I wonder if she'll even report it.
Shaking my head I slip into the jungle and search for targets of opportunity.
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There's times you hit the jackpot, then realize you have no means to exploit it. I found their main fuel depot, HURRAY! I'd need a nuke to destroy it. It's not a set of tanks, it's hole scraped in the earth, lined with something, and the oil poured in it. It's a damn lake, how do the satellites not see it?
If I had my normal magic, destroying this much would be easy. A bit of trifluorochloride deep under the surface, it has to have been rained on, so there's a pool of water at the bottom. Heat that water under pressure by having the whole lake on fire, and when it flashes to steam BOOM. Flaming oil for everybody.
Except I can't do that here. Okay, options, and sailing into the middle of it, sinking myself and doing the conversion inside my hull isn't acceptable. I'm not sacrificing myself for a fight I have no stake in. I have enough `glory`, I'm not facing a hundred warships to get some more. My councillors are throwing out suggestions, but they all come down to a few options, and mad brainstorming is more my thing that their's.
One, set it on fire. Can starshells light Bunker C? I know you can put out a match with it, but can I put enough starshells into it to light it and keep it lit? I don't know and I won't get a second chance. They'll either kill me or deploy defenses.
Two, poison it. I don't know enough about Abyssals to know what poisons would work. If humans were the target I know a dozen materials that would make anyone taking a sip violently ill if it didn't kill them. But how do you poison a mobile boiler and turbine system?
Three, adulterate is somehow. This goes back to the sheer mass of the lake. Assuming I could turn all my drinking water and gray water aboard ship to HF, use magic to shield the tanks, lines, pumps and sprayers, what would even a few hundred tons of HF do to that quantity of Bunker fuel?
Four, antimatter. I can generate a small quantity internally and fire it into the lake, but enough to either disperse or ignite it and not so much I can't escape? Any magical shielding would cease the instant it left my body/hull and while a chunk of anti-carbon would likely travel some distance through the mostly oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere before hitting the lake, would it be enough? I'd guarantee only one salvo before every Abyssal would turn on me. Admittedly ounces of antimatter becomes megatons of TNT, but I generally have better control over the reaction.
Five, breach the berm. Leaving aside the ecological disaster, the fluid level only makes that possible when they fully fill it before a mass refueling, when the numbers quadruple and the time to do it is short. Also, it would only have a minor effect, the lake seems rather deep, so it would just make fueling more difficult, not impossible.
Six, get to Manila with the coordinates and get a squadron of heavy bombers to deal with it. My councillors are stunned that I put forth that. Unfortunately, this seems the option most likely to work. A nuclear depth bomb would be the best way. Building one from scratch is beyond my capabilities, but the US or the Russians must have some. I can make stuff that goes boom automatically, but stuff that goes boom exactly when you tell it requires my magic to work, which it doesn't outside my hull.
To say my councillors are stunned that I'm spearheading being reasonable for once is an understatement, and mildly insulting. All the 'crazy stunts' I've pulled in the past, I'm still here so I knew how to survive them. That's why the antimatter was out, I'm not sure I would survive it. That said, I do need to feed the need for KABOOM.
Okay, if they have a powder storage this size, that I could blow up. So get to searching and ignore the facepalms from my councillors. Why are you three surprised?
------------------------------
"Someone amid the Abyssals has a brain," my deposed demi-god says as we watch the target.
"The rank-and-file seem to have a sliding scale of intelligence to slothfulness," my medic/engineer chimes in, "The upper ranks are smart but incredibly lazy, the lower ranks can mess up counting to one. But the immense lake of fuel used the mass to protect it."
"The ammo dumps are small, concealed and highly isolated," I add, "We passed three of them before someone finally realized what we were looking at." I've already arranged for a reward for that bright-eyed individual. The observer from one of the scout planes actually, figures.
Now I'm looking at the fifth and it seems unguarded. The other four had small squadrons atop the dump itself, dug into the ground. It looked like a simple, sunbathing outpost or the squadron was having a picnic, so they were camouflaged by their protection force.
"This has no guards," my reticent councillor says as she debriefs the recon groups and reports back. Their report states, the force isn't off in the woods handling a biological necessity, it's abandoned.
That clear, I carefully close the distance and slip inside. I find shells that I can use, all the powder I can, I can rebag it, and then decide to strip the place to the walls and paint a taunting HA! HA! on the bare walls, and slip out. My councillors aren't happy about the last part of the plan, but I remind them we've already seen tensions among the various forces. Pilferage is just a military way of saying 'we're better at our job than you are at your's.'
I've got a full load of shells, enough spare powder I could blow something up if I needed to on my way out.
We have to head for Manila and report in, I realize as I brief my councillors, And with my appearance, I might be walking into an ambush like the Japanese base.
"I hate this," my reticent councillor says in a rare display of emotion. She isn't disagreeing, she just doesn't like the situation.
"Maybe if we understood things we could do something," my medic/engineer adds.
"While we've rarely encountered an 'Always Chaotic Evil' race, we have met collections of constructs that were, save with each other," my deposed demi-god gets to the heart of the matter.
"The Abyssals seem the ultimate Social Darwinists, if you're the stronger you're boss until someone else stronger puts you in your place," I say, agreeing with her premise, "Reminds me of why I avoided Twitter back on my Earth."
"There seems no room for making agreements and attempting to negotiate makes you seem weak." I add, "You break skulls and lord it over others until someone thinks they can take you."
"We really ought to introduce meetings and paperwork to the Abyss," my medic/engineer suggests, only half-joking, "The combat monsters would have no desire to be promoted out of the field if endless, ego-inflated meetings and stultifying paperwork would be their reward." It's a sign of how grumpy he is when he's making lame but true jokes.
I head back to the shore line and wait until just after twilight. And as a test, brazenly walk across the beach and into the ocean. The guards could care less, but they'd have to make an effort to do so. Heads would roll in a competent organization.
I head straight out, normal to the coast line for a couple hours, then swing north and begin tracking in on Radio Manila. Other teams are monitoring the other channels. After all, rescuing a convoy or embattled squadron would at least give me the benefit of the doubt.
Who am I kidding? It was exactly that thinking that got me nearly killed in Japan, I think. The collective sigh from the entire crew is just so heartening, the ingrates.
------------------------------
Listening to the laughter from my three companions is hardly new, they laugh at me half the time, and snicker or are incredulous the rest. But this one is almost funny to me as well. If the universe didn't want to complicate my life so much.
Case in point, one, I evidently slipped away because the guards thought I was a straggler for a major force trying to engage Manila from the sea. Two, there was no carrier recon of the lake of fuel because the carriers were massing to repulse this strike. Three, I practically sailed into the back of them just as they slowed to engage the Allied gunline. Fourth and last, the carriers aren't discriminating me as nonAbyssal, so while I have been targeting and taking out cripples, I've had to dodge Allied airstrikes.
I've already put down four cruisers, two battleships, an aviation battleship and a dozen destroyers. Admittedly, they were kill-steals one and all, but they were unengaged at the time I sank them. I have no idea why no one is putting two and two together and guessing I'm the enemy.
Maybe you are to punish deserters, my serpentine councillor tells me, and the other two agree.
Makes as much sense as anything else. Problem is, if a large portion do break and run, then I become number one target, unless I run too.
Spotting a force of cruisers and destroyers coming out of a rain squall I spot two I recognize, Tenryuu and the destroyer who was with her that day. A destroyer I don't recognize points at me in terror, then Tenryuu just face palms while the known destroyer jumps up and down on the water excitedly. So at least they recognize me as well. The chance of friendly fire exists but Tenryuu seems to have the force well in hand. The handful of cruisers with her follow the destroyers in and launch a sea of Type 93's. The Abyssals have no idea that they are there until far too late as I've ceased fire and the ship-girl battleline has their full attention.
The destroyer practically collides with me in her eagerness to give me a hug. I recognize another cruiser arriving with a different set of destroyers. Perth looks ecstatic, then I realize why, Tenryuu's group was to launch torpedoes, and Perth's was to cover with smoke screens and gun fire. Now they have a battleship they both know and trust.
"Okay, who's squadron commander?" I ask as Tenryuu approaches.
"Me, sort of," Tenryuu asks, "Are you coming out with us?"
"I'll kill a few more cripples, and give them something else to shoot at," I say as one of the Australian destroyers sails in.
"We'd better get out of here," she says, her restored cap reads 'HMAS Vampire'.
"You lead, I'll follow," I tell them, "Besides, I know where their main fuel dump is."
There's happy chatter as we egress aggressively behind the smoke and back towards the rain squalls. Explosions beyond the cloud mark the torpedoes' effect. I launch a spotter plane to see which are the cripples and which are already dying. My radar picks out ships, but not priorities.
One immediate priority is the heavy cruiser squadron bursting through the smoke after the fleeing torpedo cruisers and destroyers. Their shock at seeing a battleship at the end of the line doesn't last. The Australians still had their torpedoes, but my guns are already hitting and taking out the cruisers. The lead cruiser loses a turret and slows considerably, she then eats several Aussie torpedoes. The second cruiser launched her torpedoes at me, dumb you're close enough I saw you launch, I maneuver to dodge them and give her a broadside just as she turns away. Fun fact, Crossing the T isn't just that you can bring your broadside to bear against just their forward or rear guns. Naval artillery are much more accurate in azimuth and less so in range, so I'm showing the thinnest range cross section, and she's showing the largest. Video games not withstanding.
Score fireball number two as she's now limping away with a huge cloud of white `smoke`, which is actually steam. Either the shock tripped the turbine bypasses, or the boilers/trunking is punctured. Either way, that steam isn't translating into turning the propellers. The Aussie torps manage kill steal number two as I hop over the swarm of torpedoes.
Cruiser number three has been battered as the recipient of choice for the entire rest of the squadrons, and has decided discretion is the better part of valor: duck into the smoke screen, and I've decided radar beats smoke screens. The thunder of my main batteries rings out and she took some evasive action, but my spotter is still up, after her battering she's not that maneuverable, and I'm not the only one shooting and she's the only one the other destroyers and cruisers have already been shooting at.
I don't know if I, Perth, Tenryuu, all of the above plus or her previous damage finally got her, but she goes down. The rest of us continue towards the rain squall.
Once in it, Tenryuu and Perth approach, each eying the other like two cats around one fish. "I assume you have intelligence that you picked up," Perth says, "That you weren't just sent in to rescue us."
I hand her a map. "That's their main fuel dump, a repurposed lake full of Bunker fuel. I saw it, heck I tasted some of it. Low sulphur, from light, sweet crude. Kilotons of it, and that's their only depot according to them."
Perth makes the map disappear up her sleeve. "Okay, come with us, and stay close, there's going to be a lot of nervous ship-girls."
I run up the 'Q-S-H-I-P' flags on yardarms on both sides and fall into formation. Now that I don't have to constantly look over my shoulder, I'm vaguely curious about what class of ship I am. The triples overfiring twins weren't unknown in the US Navy, the secondaries are high-angle guns suitable for AA work, but they aren't the USN 5"/38's or the RN' 4.7's or 5.25's. They look almost like the Kriegsmarine 5.9's but adjusted for dual purpose work. No torpedoes. Spotter planes amidships, so European rather than Pacific. The twenty-six knots we're running at isn't even close to flank speed, so Treaty-era or later, because I'm definitely no battlecruiser. The main guns are 420mm rather than the 406 of a 16 inch or 457 of an 18 inch, so again European. But I doubt that the Italians, French or Soviets even had a design like me on the drawing boards. The Netherlands and Sweden wouldn't have need for a ship like me, and the Royal Navy is right out.
So either the development of ships was different here or I'm a paper design.
For once I'm not the center of flirtatious attention. Tenryuu and Perth are running their squadrons, the torpedo cruisers are disinterested, and the destroyers are more interested in proving what good girls they are by diligently guarding us. Frankly, I find that a lot more attractive that the coy flirting. A declaration of protection and follow through over vague promises.
------------------------------
A quick chat with an intelligence type as I land turns into a full debriefing about what I saw, what weapons seemed to work, what didn't, morale of the enemy ranks, and scattered ammo dumps. I learn as much as I tell as a lot of the stuff comes hard wired with the ship-girls, but not me. After a couple hours I'm shuffled off to 'guest quarters' which is good because space is at a premium even on the outskirts of Manila, I have a few food coupons which will get me ship-girls' rations at the Australian canteen, they were immensely grateful for the rescue of their squadron, and the fire support of the Hail-Mary they and the torpedoes squadron made to break the Abyssal fleet. The admiral will want to talk to me sometime in the next few days so I'm not to leave base without an escort.
"Looking like I do," I tell them, "I wouldn't poke my nose out of my room without an escort."
The spooks get it both ways, as cries of 'Death by Snoo-Snoo!' erupt. All in all, not a bad day. What caps it is the escort by an even smaller ship-girl called Rose, she's RN not RAN and a tad feisty about it, but she takes my hand and leads me through the tangle of buildings that house the ship-girl contingent of the Allied Navies helping defend the Philippines.
On my doorstep is a problem I'm dreading a bit, until I see the expressions on both Perth's and Tenryuu's faces that I recognize: the fate of the big-talker who suddenly can't back down from their boasting. Perth has an overnight bag, Tenryuu doesn't, but the pair of them can't afford to back down first.
"Can you be discrete Rose?" I ask my escort.
"Of course," she says, frowning at me.
"Get a JMSDF destroyer or escort to put together an overnight bag for Tenryuu and bring it back here," I tell her, getting a raised eyebrow from Rose and from Perth, and a scarlet blush from Tenryuu.
"I'll take her," the destroyer I'd met the first day and still not been introduced to broke cover and says, shocking Perth and Tenryuu. Then I spot at least two other destroyers from JMSDF and RAN, watching from a distance.
I open the door and let the pair decide if they are going to follow or stand outside. Perth comes in first, followed by Tenryuu.
With the door closed I sniff both of them, then take Perth's bag, open it up on the bed while ignoring her shocked expression and extract a few hygiene products. "Both of you get washed up, yes, share, get to it," I tell them.
The pair of furiously blushing cruisers walk into the bathroom and the water runs. The bed is no way going to hold three people so the mattress, sheets and pillows come off and I set the bed frame on its side against the wall. I hang up Perth's stuff and put the rest in a dresser drawer with her bag atop. Meanwhile my ship's stores is finding the sleepware for both of them.
Rose and three destroyers arrive, each carrying a large bag. They spot Perth's stuff in the closet and quickly disperse Perth's remaining clothes and Tenryuu's stuff as I had sorted out Perth's. Vampire elbows me on the hip and waggles her hips as she leads/drags the others out. They left out some underwear and the most risque nightgown or teddy for each cruiser. I briefly wonder if the lingerie was owned by the cruisers or from the destroyers' hope chests. I add the underwear to the sweatshirt and sweat pants I have for each and hang up the lingerie.
The water shuts off and I knock on the door. "Fresh clothes," I tell them, and hand the package through the barely opened door. The pair step out in their sweats and towel-wrapped hair. They blush as they realize their `loyal` followers have essentially moved them both into my room.
"Look," I tell them as they look around like mice who've smelled the cat, "It's clear you two boasted, and then when you spotted the other you had no way to back down without losing face, so, I'm not interested in unwilling or uncertain partners. Besides being a legal headache, if I wanted no-fun, dead-starfish sex, I'd seduce one of the Kongos."
That breaks the logjam and both start laughing, laughing so hard they hold onto each other as they slide to the floor.
I sit in front of the giggling, snorting pair. "Right now, all I really want is some security," I tell them,"Ever since I got here I've have had to worry about the next thing to come through the door or out of the darkness. A night's sleep without that fear will be welcome. I'll also tell you a secret, women get their sexual value: youth and beauty which translates to fertility, front-loaded. Their beauty and desirability increases from age of consent to 24, after that it begins dropping off, but if they're smart they've been building loyalty value with their married partner and that keeps him with her. Everybody looks at the latest, hot thing, but the wise go home with their partner. It's a cruelty of biology, but that's the hardware humans run on. You know you're not the hottest ship-girls on this base, but Tenryuu knows what I got from the hottest girls on base, so no thank you. You can win by answering can I trust you or not?"
"Yes," Tenryuu says. Perth nods.
"Thank you for not - " Perth begins, before I put a finger to my lips in a 'ssh' gesture then point at the door. Both nod.
"So what do we say?" Tenryuu asks quietly, "There will be questions."
"Tell them you were opposing Perth, neither to go first, your boilers redlined, your turbines racing," I tell them, nodding at their blush, "Just like that." They blushed harder. "And then you take an expression like a contented destroyer and say, 'Then I was here.' Don't elaborate, don't embellish, their imagination will provide the most powerful imagery. Then you add that you woke up, cleaned, dressed in fresh clothes and you don't really remember the details."
The two snicker.
"What do you get out of it?" Perth asked.
"I'll get crazed battleships and battle cruisers rushing up to say, 'I want to be here!' I'll tell them, 'Fine, I'll be over there.' Or, 'You've accomplished that.' And an Abbot and Costello ~Who's on First~ routine will develop."
"What do we tell?" Tenryuu asks and glances to the door.
"Ask them if they ever worked real hard, got all cleaned up, then sat in their favorite, ah momboat's? Is that right? Sat in her lap with their favorite cuddlepile, while munching fresh cookies," I say, "They'll get it."
The pair calm down from the laughter and blushes, and look at the mattress and blankets. "So, spooning, facing?" Perth asks, "I'd rather face to face." She blushes.
"I'd rather spoon up behind," Tenryuu says, "So that's settled." She catches herself. "Unless you want something different."
"No, that's fine, heads on the mattress and pillows, we've got enough sheets and blankets to keep us off the rug," I say as we get up and rearrange things.
Seems all of us are tired, or unwinding the tension means we all relax into sleep. I enjoy the arrangement, and do wonder what the destroyers are doing outside. But they are soldiers, they'll make do.
All three of my councillors snicker at that. I feel that information is being kept from me, but I'm not in danger. Loyal allies will do what's best for the cause, even if you think they should do something else. Right now their cause is my safety, sanity, heck they are certain I'm already crazy.
------------------------------
She was asleep, but Tenryuu's crew wasn't, so when a serpent-human approached and requested a team of the command and engineering staff accompany her on a tour of Trevor, they roused the Captain and Chief Engineer among others. They met Perth's senior staff being escorted by a similar creature. The combined groups entered Trevor and received a comprehensive tour of the engines, main and secondary guns, and the bridge. The CIC, crypto and magazine spaces were forbidden, but no one raised a stink, they wouldn't have allowed access aboard themselves.
The purpose of the tour was primarily to identify what ship Trevor was, or failing that, where were the various pieces from. Unfortunately, the pieces were different from any standard designs of any of the combatant navies. The Germans had plans for 420mm guns, but the hoists and superheavy shells were American. The AA was based on German secondaries, but the support systems were British types, the boilers were Italian, the geared turbines British, the aircraft facilities a mix of French, German and British. The mess decks were a mix of many Navies from the US ice cream makers to some Japanese innovations. Optics were mostly Japanese. Radar US and British.
They left with as many questions as the crew had. And the question of who'd done the summoning, the Abyss or some other force hanging unanswered over all of them.
The Trevor's crew did let them take back about 10 gallons of ice cream to each cruiser, so there was that.
------------------------------
As I awaken, I realize we'd rearranged ourselves during the night. I wonder if my head pillowing on Tenryuu's chest was her doing or mine. The way her arms and legs were wrapped around me spoke to a ship lashed to another or a dock, so I was betting on her's. Perth had her face buried in my chest, her legs so tangled with mine neither of us could move.
Couldn't move without waking the other, I realize, Which changes this from cute to heartbreaking. Why are they so tied up, literary, with me not sailing off?
A number of my crew have walked over to the door, then the swine flip the door open and a tide of destroyers tumbles in. Nine of them had spent the night with their ears plastered against the door. Another six bulldoze their way in to get everyone inside and close the door behind them. Then they see the two furiously blushing, very tangled-up cruisers and fifteen smiles lit the room up like fifteen individual suns.
The question hangs in the air palpably, which makes things worse for Perth and Tenryuu. I expect to hear the explanation I told them. What I hear is embarrassed silence.
"He invited our command and engineering crews to tour his ship," Perth says in a tone I almost don't recognize. Suddenly the room explodes.
Some scramble to the far corners of the room with expressions of mixed terror and awe, some simply freeze only their occasional blinks signaling life goes on, some become so pensive they look like they had just gotten a letter they were the last survivor of their entire family, some do a couple of these things. Fortunately for my sanity, the bare majority look at the three of us like a bucket of kittens seeing something even more adorable than themselves.
"I said I trusted you," I offer, a trifle uncertain what the deal is. They're allies and they need to know at least my basic capabilities. I didn't tell them I was a wizard or anything.
The wave hits, and we're buried under hugging, crying and laughing destroyers.
Okay, first rule, ship-girls aren't humans despite their appearances. The sight of a young girl laughing happily and utterly sobbing and sniveling on my arm is a new experience. I've done First Contact before, I can do it again, but this is a completely different mindset.
------------------------------
I'd never considered that machinery would be considered so intimate. The destroyers were barely coherent in their explanations, and the cruisers were too stunned to elaborate or correct. As far as Perth and Tenryuu were concerned, and their destroyer flotillas, I hadn't just offered my heart, I'd taken them on a guided tour. What had Tenryuu and Perth so nervous was I'd literally shown them the best ways to hurt me, the ways I could fight back, and how to overcome them, and without asking any reciprocity. I neither demanded nor asked to get the same from them. It's like doing a witch a favor, they have to pay it back, telling them you did it out of your common decency or duty to your god doesn't cut it.
So I approach the Admiral's office with two cruisers and eight destroyers as escorts. Worse for Tenryuu and Perth, I'd flat out told them to report all they'd seen. I'd had spies on my staff before, even when I'd won them over, I kept them spying, because what you tell a politician goes in one ear and out the other, but what their spies steal, gold pure and unadulterated. Even when it's the exact report you'd given them openly.
Hiei and Kirishima are exiting the office, they immediately lock on to me with a cruiser on each arm and a gaggle of happy destroyers. My counselors are silent on my plan, so I go ahead. "Hey Ballbuster and Ballbuster's sister, glad to see you in the war." I want to add, 'The Abyssals will kick you back', but don't. Just a jaunty wave and a happy, "Be careful out there."
Neither battlecruiser looks happy about events.
Perth and Tenryuu are able to hold it in, but the destroyers are giggling as we enter the outer office. There Perth and Tenryuu give me a kiss on the cheeks and depart with the destroyers. It's several minutes before another ship-girl, a battleship, comes out to tell me the Admiral will see me.
Inside, seated, is an RN admiral, and the IJN admiral in charge of my reeducation camp. "You didn't answer our radio hails," IJN says. I ignore him and speak to the senior.
"Trevor Gambit, I assume the summons is in regards the intelligence provided," I say.
"I expect an answer," IJN says.
"The civilized form of address from a Rear Admiral to an Admiral of All the Navies is: Sir, with all due respect, why didn't you answer our hails?" I tell Rear Admiral IJN, "That's how a two-star talks to a six-star."
The RN admiral, a three-star, has gotten out a folder of photos. He notes the mild tone and give IJN a look. I am confused that none of the officers I've seen had names on their clothing. Which I consider unusual. "This is the lake you described," RN says, "It's a lake." He lets me go through the pictures, and even the berm isn't visible. There are even a couple angled shots where it should be more visible.
I see the 'UNCLASSIFIED' watermark across the photos which means they aren't at full resolution, and spot another item on one. "This was taken three days ago, between 1330 and 1500 hours." I say as I hand it back.
He glances at the back, no that data isn't on the photo. "How do you know that?"
I point to the feature I'd spotted. "Because that's me. In the full resolution classified version you'll see gold vest and shorts, no tits and no shoes. I was on that hill trying to figure out if starshells could set it alight. And how I'd get off more that two or three volleys, before they swarmed me under. You'd need a nuclear depth bomb to take that lake out, or maybe you know a poison or adulterant to add to bunker fuel that would make it unusable."
"Pardon us, Admiral," RN says and I leave for the outer office.
Outside, the looks I'm getting from the office staff, all ship-girls, is interesting. Like a pack of alleycats in heat confronting a mountain lion. The interest is there, but so is the terror. A look from me, and they go back to work, but keep stealing glances.
The arrival of another of the Japanese Battleships, the companion of the interrogator, ramps up the reactions slightly. I recognize some of her subtle gestures as she sits across from me. Crossing her legs and if her hair were longer, she'd be playing with it. This sets off the coquettish behavior in the other ship-girls as well. While the newcomer is the prettiest, I remember that beauty is only skin deep while ugly goes clear to the bone. She wasn't like Hiei picking specific points to inflict maximum pain, she was just among the most enthusiastic.
I basically ignore them all, which makes them crazy. They're so used to attention because of their looks, when a clearly male person, and I've already proven I like females, ignores them, that completely undercuts a pillar of their identity. They ramp up the little displays to no avail.
Astonishingly, my medic/engineer slides as transcript of the `apology` to me, he normally isn't that mean. Then the interrogator's companion sits down next to me and reaches for my hand. I stand up and put a seat between us and manifest a secondary trained right between her eyes. "I remember last time you laid you hands on me," I tell her, "This time, I'll shoot first."
"Look I'm sorry," she says, and the whole office is fuming.
I hand her the transcript. "Why don't you read this again," I tell her, "That way you won't miss any lines."
"You recorded it?" she asks as she stares at the papers, as if afraid to touch them.
"My stenographers recorded all of it," I tell her, "It's evidence, as is this."
The IJN admiral coming out of the office gives her an out. She stands, as do I, courtesy after all, and the pair leave looking at me with horror. An RN destroyer approaches. "The Admiral will see you now, ah, sir," she says. I nod and follow her in to the rather shaken RN Admiral.
"So, since you want to be rid of me," I say, "What can I deliver to that lake which will most harm the Abyssals here in the Philippines?"
Why not start off on the right foot with a different power? The RN treated its ships well, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, not so much.
------------------------------
Tenryuu had never been so embarrassed and ashamed in her life. The questions about Trevor and his structure had been fairly clinical, but the occasional sniggering from the attending ship-girls didn't help. Even though Trevor had confided that he expected them to spy on him, giving such intimate details of someone who'd only been kind and helpful was the deepest betrayal. The only saving grace was that the RN and JMSDF were not handling the interrogations, USN experts and ship-girls were. So little would filter back to Perth or the destroyers.
She still felt they should stay with the western standard and give her 30 pieces of silver for her testimony. She saw Perth waiting outside a similar interrogation room. The other cruiser looked as miserable as she felt. Perth looked up at her, then down at her own clenched fists in her lap.
Tenryuu sat beside her. "You told them everything, just like he asked?" Tenryuu said.
Perth nodded, tears forming in the corners of her eyes.
"He told us it was all right, that we had to be loyal to our nations and our navies," Tenryuu said, and sat back to stare at the ceiling. "I doubt we could have kept anything from them even if we tried."
"We didn't try," Perth said, "That's the point. He knew we'd betray. Did he know we'd have to, or did he assume we'd choose to?"
Tenryuu looked down into her own lap and wondered. Unlike Perth, she'd seen the malicious glee from her fellow ships who thought they'd caught an Abyssal infiltrator. He'd taken her sword away and given it to Ushio, but he'd been cradling them so despite his skill, he couldn't fight back. She'd led him into the ambush thinking that the situation was obvious. Except it wasn't. Or it was, just not in the way she expected.
"We really are a mess," Perth finally said to break the silence.
"Here they are," Vampire called as she came around the corner, soon followed by Trevor and a few other destroyers.
"Well I've finished terrifying the Royal Navy, and I do have rights to the RAN canteen, so who's up for lunch?" Trevor asked.
"How can you look at us?" Perth asked.
"We told them everything," Tenryuu asked.
The destroyers glanced around, not fully understanding why their momboats were so dolorous when free food was on the menu.
"Good, and now you've told me," Trevor said, "Let's go eat and hope you were convincing."
"We betrayed you," Perth said, "You showed us your insides in confidence, and we just passed that along. Those battleships that beat you up now have that information."
Tenryuu felt her soul curdle a bit with that addition. Several of the destroyers tried to hold her hand or hug her.
"Ushio, Vampire, did I or did I not tell them to tell everything?" Trevor asked.
"You did," Vampire said, Ushio smiled and nodded.
"Then it's settled, let's go eat," Trevor said as the rest of the flotilla collected around them. Then he hauled them out of their chairs and seemed to be lowering them onto a eager collection of bearers.
"We can walk," Perth said and he set them on the ground.
"I'll tell you what I told the Admiral," Trevor said and tugged on his white hair, "This is the only part that wasn't new. I knew what would happen, and I'm fine with it." His kissed each cruiser on the forehead. "But I am glad you at least feel bad about the divided loyalty. Just talk to me if you get into the situation again."
Perth and she exchanged confused glances. "Then why were you so mad about what the battleships did?" Tenryuu asked.
"Unprofessionalism. If they'd knocked me down and rescued you and Ushio, okay, fair dinkum. If they'd deployed their rigging and tossed me in a cell, same thing. But if I was an Abyssal Infiltrator, and they did what they did, I could have touched off both magazines and killed or crippled 15 IJN battleships. Their sadistic little game was horrifically stupid and unbecoming an officer. The apologies cemented it, they practically admitted they were nonsapient, being controlled by overwhelming drives and instinct, no different than well-adapted insects. Even animals will adopt better hunting strategies. If it's true, it's terrifying; if they said it just to save face, they are beneath contempt or they are objects of pity as the drives are different than what they claimed but just as real."
------------------------------
The destroyers are bolder with their questions than the cruisers, both having less to potentially lose on the relationship front, and they were the scouts and sacrificial lambs.
"You seem to know a lot about women," Ushio says, mortifying both Tenryuu and Perth.
"I've been married before," I say and let the ship-girls react a bit, then add, "Several times in fact." That really gets them stirred up. "Several times at once in fact."
That stops them with vague expressions of horror on their faces. "You were two-timing your wife?!" an RAN destroyer exclaims.
"More like I was the stud for HER harem," I reply without breaking stride. I'm forced to stop when I realize none of them are following anymore. I look back at a sea of confused to horrified faces, including a few hanging out from their offices.
"They're a different species. If I just looked at you ship-girls, I would erroneously think that Abyssals would be your choice of mate," I tell them. The officer prairie dogs withdraw in disgust and the destroyers look sickened enough to turn down ice cream. "I know you prefer humans and as a second choice each other, but that's my point, different species, different ways of forming households."
I start walking and continue as they catch up, "For them it was similar to the ancient Greeks, someone of your sex for fun, the opposite sex for procreation. So there were often groups of women who spent most of their `energy` with other women."
"So you won't chose between Ms Perth or Tenryuu-chan?" one of the JMSDF destroyers asks. I do note the 'Ms.' versus '-chan'.
"If they had no problem, I wasn't going to rock the boat," I say and get the 'dad joke face' from the destroyers. There's a bit of relief on Tenryuu's and Perth's faces, clearly they weren't looking forward to that fight.
The mess hall gives another example of the difference between the curious stares, the seriously interested stares, and the hostile stares. The old trope that a man with a wife or a baby attracts a lot of female interest is true. The interest was directed at me, the hostility towards Tenryuu, Perth and a couple of the more mature looking destroyers.
Internally I'm thinking, What did they ever do to you?
But I know that's how it works, if someone else has done the vetting work, then you are somehow more appealing.
Frankly, I just watch the game, I'm only interested in the food. The near insanity of the ship-girl dynamics is just harder to fathom with the various nations and ship-classes added in. The destroyers of the JMSDF & IJN seem happy their momboat scored, ditto the RN, RAN and the few RCN destroyers. The cruisers of all nations are either fuming or sour grapes. I can live with that. The carriers are looking at a full-course banquet and I'm guessing, undressing me with their eyes. Some are cooler about it than others, some are only avoiding drooling by the amount of food they're shoveling down. The battleships are the most worrisome. IJN it's all forbidden fruit. They know the answers is 'no' unless they really make an effort. The presumably USN contingent are split between wondering at their chances and schadenfreude at the IJN's failure. The RN are openly sniffing at this, but I can practically see the plans being drawn.
That I'm acting more like a father guiding the kids/destroyers through the line is like throwing meat just out of reach of the starving lions. Yes, I'm that big an asshole. Most of the human officers, the largest number of males I've seen in a while, are mentally wanting to punch me out, or head for cover until the storm blows over. Either would be fine as far as I'm concerned.
The cooks take the tickets, shovel enough food to feed a platoon to each of us, and we continue through the line to a table large enough to seat the entire task force. As an added insult, after getting the cruisers and destroyers seated, I sit with my back to the rest of the mess. I don't let them see my face as the destroyers chatter and the cruisers give me all the warning I need to the mood of the room. The destroyers sense the changing weather and mentally begin preparing for a hurricane, they don't understand what is setting off their instincts, but they know in their bones that a storm is brewing. The cruisers know but I doubt they know I'm playing the room, as much to learn about ship-girls as to give an elegant middle finger to the IJN.
"The Admiral said you claimed to be a six-star," Vampire says, far enough away down the table she has to be loud enough the entire mess picks it up.
"We had over a dozen independent nations with armies and navies of their own, and essentially they only really trusted me or more accurately, various members of my general staff. In current terms I had Alexander, Armstead and Hancock, Sherman, Wellington for the army, and Nelson, Ching Lee, and Smaug for the navy."
" 'Smaug'?" Tenryuu asks.
"Yep, a dragon as an admiral, anyway, three navies, five army groups and other formations all to be directed from one headquarters coordinating across an entire continent with almost no high-speed communications," I tell them, and hear the quiet descending over the mess hall, "So they temporarily put me in charge. We won, and while the new nation immediately removed the rank from the new table of organization, I'd still held it long enough to create the national army and navy."
There are nervous exchanging glances at the various machinations now going on behind me. I have lookouts watching and reporting, but they don't know that so they're preparing for the explosion that will bring. After all, assaulting an enemy soldier is one thing, assaulting a general officer, especially one rescuing your troops, as I've proven is my modus operandi, is a very different one. And the Interrogator's companion has no doubt revealed to her friends, I recorded it all.
The 'suicide mission' I agreed to for the defense of Manila is looking like the safer and safer option all the time.
------------------------------
It was 0200 hours when I slipped into the sea with the five 55-gallon drums of material strapped to a pallet surrounding a pressure-regulated bomb. Clever gent that I am, I tried to analyze the material once it was inside and my magic functioned. After all, if one five-drum bomb in a lake was good, five or six more would be better. The briefing officer had even agreed, with the caveat they didn't have more than five drums of the stuff.
Except whatever that hellacious cocktail was, it was beyond my ability to synthesize. I could transform an equal amount of material to whatever was in the drums, but if the outside was anti-magical it would just revert to whatever the feedstock was. That's the old faerie gold problem, they change a set object into gold and magic makes up the mass difference. If you actually changed a mass of iron into a mass of gold, the volume would change because you were limited to a set number of protons and neutrons, although you can make a proton-electron pair from a neutron and vice versa, so it comes down to sum of protons & neutrons equals sum of protons & neutrons. And the resultant stuff is immune to anti-magic because it is that stuff. It breaks down with complex synthesis, like whatever this stuff is. Palmitate is well within my synthesis capabilities. I have no idea what this stuff is other than a metallo-organic compound containing iron, lead, tungsten and cesium along with a shit load of sulphur and nitrogen. Weird.
So I'm heading for the coast and then to the lake. Tomorrow night is supposed to be moonless, until the full moon rises, so I get in, drop off, and get out with enough light to see without external light. Well thought out, very professional, and as suicide missions go, highly survivable. I hadn't told them about making my hull radar absorbent or invisible, so if they were trying to kill me, it wouldn't really work.
It's just before twilight as I come on shore. The guards are asleep on their feet, SEP is in full effect as they give me the once over if they notice me at all, and I look like an Abyssal. Sheesh, would the Great White Fleet be able to infiltrate these guys? Reaching the lake by noon is doable, but not wise. Right after sunset will be the best time, as the guards staying up late will be the least attentive. It does let me scout and the bunker is about midway up, so between refillings, so no mad dash to get the new stuff. The guard is pathetic, but it is something that everybody can just walk up and get, so who'd steal something you can just ask for?
Me and my big mouth, idiots, that's who. While I'm waiting, some jackass gets caught pissing in the oil. So now there are patrols. I also learn that Abyssals don't bleed as humans do, but they scream just as much when people tear them apart piece by piece. And joy of joys, we all get dragooned to watch. The execution goes on for several hours and it's something that reminds me why I'm siding with the people who beat the crap out of me on my arrival. They tear off the gun turrets and torpedo launchers first, no weapons, makes sense. Then they cut her slowly, not enough to kill her instantly, but enough to really hurt, strip away whatever dignity she might have and prevent her from fighting back when we're forced to form a reverse gauntlet. Everyone swept up in the crowd gets to hit the bloodied, oily?, screaming body once. The ones able to get her to scream loudest get applause and cries of approval.
All the temptation to give a blow that kills her or knocks her out rushes to my head, and sets my councilors to furious discussion. Predictably the medic/engineer is okay with a mercy shot, kill or stun, the god-killer wants a desultory blow and finish the mission, the usurper points out a mercy kill would make things easier but then we'd be the goat or the hero.
By the time it's my turn, the question is moot. She's dead and I'm just hitting a corpse. She was a cruiser from what I can see, a pretty one, I don't know whether it was boredom or arrogance that made her do it. The sick thing is that her fellows turned on her in an instant. I seriously doubt what she did contaminated the oil as much as the periodic rain squalls have, but they tore her apart in ways that the Unit 731/Harbin researchers would squirm about. Most telling is the sexual damage, the blows to what on humans would be the primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Yeah I'm being clinical, because I've seen this behavior before, I was subjected to it by the IJN and now I see the horrifying parallel. The Abyssal females were jealous of the attractive female and sought to destroy her beauty. I doubt Hiei thought I was a male, she thought she was attacking another girl. Jealousy at a pretty rival, partially, and that she wanted no one to have what she couldn't have.
I'm now more worried about Tenryuu and Perth than myself. If I'm male and I picked them, well war is dangerous, accidents happen and maybe Kirishima, Hiei or Mutsu will get to comfort the grieving widower. I hope that's buried deeper in the ship-girls than it is among the Abyssals, but them chasing after 'The Admiral' shows it isn't buried that deep. What's the line about a woman scorned?
Can I go back to dragons, demons and shoggoths just trying to eat me? Please?
------------------------------
The fall of night, Astronomical Twilight, means I can complete my mission. They have cruisers sailing the lake on patrol, but I enter and begin pinging with radar. To a novice this might make me more obvious, but to a seasoned soldier it looks like a heavy unit got dragooned into being an escort by something bigger. You don't volunteer for guard duty. This also means they all quit using their radar so I'm even more invisible and meaning they won't spot the bomb, which will be visible on radar when I deploy it. I sail the long chord of the lake making a detour at the widest point, the point I'm supposed to drop the bomb, before continuing on. Again, patterns lull them into disregarding me, and with a heavy in the area they are less aggressive in their patrolling. They also stay away from me, as a heavy unit who got tossed into guard duty might just take their frustrations out on a weaker slacker.
Once you understand the psychology, the best form of invisibility changes. A hard hat, good but worn boots, and a clipboard on a construction site and no one wants to see you.
I drop off the bomb in the middle of a torrential rain squall and continue towards the shore line. The growing thunder and lightning hiding the underwater explosion small as it is. The danger will come stepping onshore. Lightning wouldn't hit me on the lake because the oil was an insulator and the charge wouldn't ground itself. That'll change when I'm on the ground, most of the Abyssals having taken cover when the lightning started.
That will be perfect, I think, Killed by lightning after a successful mission.
I don't get hit, and neither the guards suddenly missing the radar picket, or the Abyssals hiding from the lightning raise a cry. So by 2330 I'm in the water headed back to Manila. I am curious what that stuff was supposed to do to such a huge quantity of oil, but I can ask when I get back. Now I am full EMCON, SEP at full and best speed zigzagging towards a bath, a meal and a debrief.
Then the shooting starts. Not at me, way in the distance. I risk dropping the EM absorption to listen to the radio frequencies.
"They're coming out of the forest are you blind!"
"The cruisers are changing! What's happening?"
"Chis we are leaving!"
"Alex Jones predicted this!"
"The ship-girls are parachuting . . . those aren't ship-girls! SHOOT THEM!"
"If it bleeds we can kill it."
"The mines! The mines are everywhere!"
"The seas are burning, there's no escape to the beach!"
"Candles, it's all candles!"
"Shoot the snake! Shoot the snake I don't want it to eat me!"
"They come at night, mostly."
"The Princess is gone lets get the Hell out of here!"
"Don't touch the box!"
"They're coming out of the sky! They're coming out of the Abyss-damned sky!"
"You're all guilty and I am the Law!"
"Do you think I'm pretty?"
It's a melange of Abyssal screams, orders, warnings, and incoherent ramblings. They are under attack, but not by ship-girls. Some of their fellows have turned into monsters, there are monsters and 'things' dropping out of the sky, the seas are on fire, the mines are hunting them, and thousands of other paranoid ravings. And Abyssals being Abyssals, the response to any threat is naval gunfire. The shooting goes on for hours, the screams go on for longer, more rational voices demanding to know what happened.
"Concentrate fire on that Ru!"
"Where are the carriers?"
"Free candy!"
"Fall back and regroup."
"What's going on!"
The most heartbreaking is one, "The snakes are coming, someone please shoot me," she sounds like a little girl, "Shoot me before the snakes eat me, again. NO! They're here please shoot me, ship-girls can you find me, just shoot me!" Her screams go on the longest, and her cries begin again after the screaming is over.
It seems dozens of Abyssals suddenly flipped out, violently towards their fellows, the environment, and themselves. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why, and I was part of it. Unless they figure it out, there's going to be more when they sup from that tainted fuel. I know poisoned traps are of dubious legality, but spiking the enemy's `food` with hallucinogens? I set my legal team to researching that. I go back to EM absorption and sail a roundabout course to Manila.
The debate among myself and my three councillors continues on into the night. I'm not annoyed about that, I doubt I'd be able to sleep after what I'd heard.
------------------------------
It's almost my trademark: when it matters my luck is great, when doesn't matter my luck is awful. I'll take it, but it's still frustrating. I'd assumed I could enter on the dock I left from, but who's waiting there but Hiei and another IJN battleship and they don't look happy. After last night, I really do not want to deal with them, even if they are there legitimately.
Two words: Fuck that. I keep the invisibility up, locate a different dock, the one I'd been escorted to when I first arrived with Perth and Tenryuu's battlegroups. The stevedores and crane operators tense up as I climb up on the jetty, but within a moment a few remember me and wave hesitantly. I wave back and pull out the Celphone, a burner, a gift from Perth. Her number as well as all the squadrons' are in the memory, and texts are harder to detect and do direction finding on. A quick text to all the squadrons' phones tells them I'm back, I succeeded and do I still have my old room?
A brief flurry of happy replies, but they're out at sea, so they have some suggestions and a few embarrassing anecdotes about whose what I can cuddle up with if I'm missing them. A text base screaming match occurs. I'm actually glad they aren't here, I wouldn't be fit company for the young and hopeful. I've done some pretty grim things, heck I've set enemies against each other and let their savagery unfold, but I never felt clean about it, and here there remains the question of legality. No ship-girl could have pulled this off, and I seriously doubt if any would.
I do text them all if they don't behave I won't spank them when they get back, or let them watch me spank Perth and Tenryuu. The airwaves go very silent. I can practically see the overlapping blush from here.
The intelligence building is the same place it was, and the office ship-girls are surprised I'm arriving alone.
"Perth, Tenryuu and the destroyers are out at sea," I tell the receptionist after she asks about my escort, "Who else would have been waiting for me?" I try to keep it light, I suspect there'd be a revolt if what just happened became public, or simply flooded the ship-girl community.
"There was a force at the dock you left from," she explains.
"Oh, that wasn't in the briefing, I thought L dock was for returning ships," I say. A blatant lie, but consistent. "Of course with my luck you'd have sent Hiei, Kirishima and Mutsu waiting in ambush for me." I laugh. The office girls look very nervous.
To say the Admiral is surprised is an understatement. "I figured you'd take more than a day and a half to deliver the bomb."
"The weather helped immeasurably," I say and close the door behind me. That raises his eyebrows.
With the door closed and no eavesdroppers I ask, "Did you know the bomb would do that?"
He sits back, I'm calm, so he realizes I'm either not angry or so angry just answering is the best policy. "The Boffins were sure," he replies, "It went further than even they anticipated."
I nod. "The legal eagles signed off on this?" I ask quietly.
He hands me a thin folder. I skim the contents. They're lumping it under weapons of mass destruction, technically it was a chemical weapon, and note most protections and provisions are for the protection of civilians. The military is always a legitimate target of such things.
"M.A.D. isn't codified in legal briefings," I reply as I hand it back, "And if they figure out how to turn it back on you . . ."
"Volunteers tested it," the Admiral assures me, "It has a very different effect. Addiction would be our worry."
I remind myself of the Opium War, how Britain fought China, and the Delano family got their money. It's a dangerous but barely legal way to wage war. International politics is always messy, especially during war.
He sends me off to a different berthing space and gives me a three-day liberty, and a recommendation that I spend it on a bender. "I appreciate the bed and the food, but I still need to figure out how to get home," I tell him, "Unless Merlin is working for the British War Effort I'll have to figure this out myself."
He laughs and mutters something about Mad Jack Churchill.
He has no idea, and frankly, I've done worse and ordered worse. This isn't a clean war, wars of survival rarely are.
------------------------------
The suite has more than a bed and shower, it has a structure large enough for a squadron cuddlepile and a bath. The effect is disturbing, in the middle of a war I have these kind of accommodations, although I may have ended the war here so perhaps this is a hero's reward. I still can pick up the occasional gunfire and mad message, but all in all the assault on Manila is over and some cautious celebrations are taking place. Not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. The Abyssals' 1942, for the Allies: Midway, Guadalcanal, and Stalingrad all rolled into one. Those in the know are more cautious, those really in the know are heartsick.
The Admiral invites me to a private dinner, I have a better uniform in stores, with the correct fruit salad and insignia. To say the Admiral is shocked that I wasn't kidding about my rank is saying something. He also doesn't recognize any of the ribbons, but the sheer number of them concerns him. Twenty years of constant wars and skirmishes does that. And there's no laws against wearing the decorations of foreign powers in the dress code of the military I was and am an official part of.
We talk, as adults do, in vague terms about the situation and the decision to basically use a WMD against an enemy troop concentration, because that's what it was, a chemical weapons attack. No different than WW1 with poison gas. One of the reasons the British went with the 'Queen Anne's Mansion' bridge structure was to protect against gas attacks.
I appreciate the effort that he doesn't come out and say he's bothered by it too, but we do talk around it. But the details of Blood Week are laid out, and the implacable, genocidal enemy is something that must be fought. One or two Princesses seem to have captured rather than exterminated the local populations, but they are few and far between, and none were involved with this. He admits that they were losing, and that the odd life cycle of ship-girls is the reason they are give so much latitude, and are not expended as ships would be. A lost ship was six-months to two-year's replacement. A lost ship-girl was potentially a new Abyssal Princess. And likewise, every destroyed Abyssals means the Allies have a chance to summon her away from the Abyss.
It's a logistical element I hadn't considered. A finite resource pool that means you not only lose, but you hand over losses to the enemy. More go than chess. So both sides are either posturing, or going for the kill when you aren't going to lose your own. Of all the `ship-girls` only I can be Nelsonian and be willing to fight and cripple, and perhaps die myself, because I'm a glitch. Maybe dying would send me home, or maybe I'd just die.
It's a lot to think about. And I'm thinking about it when I go to a ship-girl gym and practice some of my katas. I go very early so there won't be a crowd. I don't have the swords, but I do have the hand-to-hand, and if we're going to go in and clean this up, I might have to fight at very close range. Ship-girls don't punch others generally, their own structures can't handle it. Ramming cripples both ships. I need to know what I can add to my par-caste in this form and I need to practice both to clear my head and to keep my skills sharp.
It's what I'll need to do if we're fighting as infantry. I also need to do something mindless while I'm seeing if the body retains the muscle memory of what my councillors and trainers pounded into my head for my whole life. Vest hung on the wall as a touch target, I begin.
Good news is, I still can par-caste, manifest parts of my rigging and do all the katas at the same time, so hand to hand or strikes with turrets against an Abyssal are back on the table. Greater Outer Reaping.
"That works," my serpentine councillor comments on the leg move. High praise from her.
Second good news, I haven't lost any of my skills, as I go from one form to the next without stumbling. Greater Inward Crescent to Plow Guard.
"Aw he misses his swords," my medic/engineer notes.
Most of my teachers would facepalm, but they'd do that with me anyway. Mantis Kick, 3, 2, 1. Back down, pivot.
Third, I haven't been able to really think about what I've done, what I will be doing. Up on the ball of one foot, side kick, pivot, side kick, pivot, side kick, down.
I don't care that generations of know-it-all-know-nothings will decry what I did to the Abyssals. Right jab, pivot, left jab, pivot.
"When have you ever cared about them?" my serpentine councillor asks.
"You often don't care what we say about what you do," the god-slayer said and chuckles, me fighting, even in practice, draws her out of her shell.
I don't care that I may never be able to talk about it to anyone, other than to parrot the party line that the Abyssal Princesses turned on each other. Right Cross, Left Cross, Lesser Inner Reaping.
"If you stay here," my medic/engineer points out, "You aren't a ship-girl, species wise.
I don't care that I was tricked into doing it. Greater Outward Crescent, Lesser Outer Reaping.
"Because likely, you would have been talked into it anyway," my serpentine councillor says.
"That isn't why you're shadow boxing at 0200," the god-slayer tells me.
Scorpion Kick. What bothers me is the idea of losing Tenryuu or Perth, or their girls, and having to kill them again when they show up on the other side, I tell them. Mantis Kick into Ox Guard.
"You still hate betrayal," my serpentine councillor says.
Left Jab, Right Jab, Left Jab. I'm no child I've been betrayed, it's a consequence of politics, but I've always been astute enough to spot the spies, toss out the saboteurs, and distance myself from the false friends. Greater Outer Reaping.
"It's not the same and you know it," my medic/engineer says, "That's politics, not betrayal."
But have someone flip that way like a vampire movie? I silently ask them, No, that one I am having trouble wrapping my head around. Lesser Inward Crescent. Greater Outward Crescent.
"Loyalty and oath-keeping are a big part of who you are," the god-slayers says, "That's why we're here."
Jump Kick. Left Jab, Left Jab, Left Jab. If I freely give my word, I keep it. Side kick, Right Jab, Side Kick, Left Jab to High Guard. If I deal with a duplicitous type, I take that into account and they get the chance to burn me, once. After that, I won't do business with them.
"That's not what their life-cycle implies," the serpent says, "Are you afraid you might still love them as Abyssals?"
"Or that they were Abyssals and naturally inclined that way, and are on a tangent as ship-girls?" my medic/engineer asks.
"Would you kill an Abyssal you cared for, rather than bring them over to the other side some other way?" the god-slayer asks.
High Guard to Plough Guard. Ouch, that hurts, I admit, Having to kill someone just because they rise as an Abyssal? And then have to face them again as a restored ship-girl?
I raise my hands, then lower them. That's got me twisted up inside, I realize, Is it a betrayal that I let them get killed, is it a betrayal that they'd actually prefer to be an Abyssal? Both, neither, or something else? I begin jabbing at a point in space, alternating arms, but as fast as I can.
It's also a cursed existence that death means an automatic Jekyll/Hyde flip, what happens after the war? Are ship-girls and Abyssals immortal, will they persist forever, if not, they die of old age do they finally get to rest?
"Who says they die at all?" my medic/engineer asks.
"They may not die," the serpent says, "Just fade away like forgotten gods."
" 'Look upon my works ye mighty, and despair'," the god-slayer quotes.
Greater Inner Reaping, Greater Outer Reaping, Lesser Outer Reaping, Lesser Inner Reaping. Or is it a more wheel of karma where you graduate up from destroyer to cruiser to, etc. and only leave the cycle, when?
Installations are bigger than battleships or carriers, but those are all Abyssals. If you become an Allied installation are you allowed to sleep away the rest of your existence? Greater Inward Crescent, Lesser Outward Crescent, Greater Outward Crescent, Lesser Inward Crescent.
"In the end, the answer is perhaps no one knows," my medic/engineer says.
And that may be the real problem, does even the Abyss know?
The other answer is that while I've been letting my body work through the katas while my mind was elsewhere, every ship-girl who has come early to the gym is staring at me the way a starving dog looks at a steak. The mix of faint scars, toned muscles and fighting spirit like sauce for that steak. The sun won't be up for two hours and I've drawn a very troubling crowd. Including several of the IJN battleships. I don't particularly want to fight my way out of the pack of baying hounds.
One of the pack approaches as I retrieve my vest, earning the ire of everyone else who just wanted to watch. "Hey, when you're done dancing, ya wanna spar?" asks the blonde with the short hair, breasts too big for her shirt and attitude too big for her britches. She reminds me of a fifteen-year-old boy just starting to smell himself and thinking he can take on an expert. And they accuse Tenryuu of being chunni.
"Thank you for the offer, but no," I say, and then brace for the attitude.
"You think you're too good for me?" she asks as she throws back her shoulders. She's furious that I don't even look at her display. "I'm talking to you."
"I was under the impression that Navy regulations said that 'no' means 'no', and I said no thank you," I tell her and head towards the exit. This time I do dodge under the grab and keep walking. I have no patience for other battleships getting in my face for denying them my time and attention. I also don't want to put a battleship in the repair dock, because I can also see someone who'll keep uselessly challenging until they luck out and win, or you beat them so badly to keep them down that you get accused of being the villain. And considering the last time I got labeled the villain, I really don't want to put a dozen battleships in the repair dock.
Who follows me out is an IJN battleship who in dress, size and attitude matches the challenger I just walked away from. "She was just trying to be friendly," she yells at me.
I turn. "The last time I tried to be friendly, I was beaten by a crowd, you included," I tell her, "I see no reason to invite a repeat."
In the background, I hear all the usual taunts thrown at me, about my sexuality, my physical inadequacy and how I couldn't get a date if I wanted. And the rumbles of agreement as sour grapes from the others. If I can't have it, it must not be that valuable. The IJN ship is struggling with her response.
"Just call me a racist misogynist and run back to your fan club if you can't think of anything else," I tell her and she retreats in stunned silence back into the gym.
I know I went too far, but sometimes you knock down the biggest screw up so everyone leaves you alone. This isn't soldiers' discipline, it's closer to prisoners' discipline, and the first rule there is you never kneel.
------------------------------
The girls return in time for the big push to drive the Abyssals from the Philippines. Officially, the Princesses who were leading the push had a civil war and now is the time to drive them off. Also, I've been assigned to keep girls away from the lake. Officially, the Abyssals may have poisoned it to keep it out of Allied hands, but running it through a refinery should repurify it enough that civilians can use the resulting gas and diesel.
There's also clearing the minefields. The maps of them are very accurate, but the Abyssals dug up and moved some of them. Some ship-girls are provided with ground-penetrating sonar, so the advance is slowed but not halted. The mines aren't the only things that have to be cleared from the minefields. Some of the Abyssals are still alive enough to shoot, and the spooks want the pieces for study.
It's a weird combination of survival horror and infantry war. Mucking out stables with jump scares and people occasionally shooting at you. Or as one of the destroyers said 'Predator with the Marines of the Sulaco'. The effect is every bit as grim as it sounds. The number of dead Abyssals is worrying, especially as it gives credence to the official account. The damage done to them also is troubling. Many were not cleanly killed, but agonizingly. Their killers wanted to draw it out, savor it like a fine meal, or enjoy revenge on a rival or upstart they couldn't touch before.
How many `teacher's pets` met their fate here, slain by the jealous and the vengeful, I wonder, If they had this many, why didn't they push forward and overwhelm the defenders?
I'd spent part of the three days before the girls' return going over everything I could on Abyssals: ship-classes, weaponry, tactics, known weaknesses, etc. and then trying to figure out how to put it in practice.
I don't get as much practice as I might have. Verifying and tagging bodies, occasionally shooting the ones with some fight left in them. The Abyssals never ask for or accept quarter. Even though most think I am an Abyssal when I approach. That's bad, they are hardcore kill'em-all types despite having major pieces blown from them. After a while, if you spot one, you just shoot them. Except me, because I look the way I do, I can still offer, it's never expected and the invective I get, in one case the effort killed the Abyssal cursing me out, but I have to offer. I never believed in the wholly chaotic-evil race, but there are counterexamples, I'd even previously met some, but they were programmed that way. I'm beginning to wonder if ship-girls and Abyssals are Turing-compliant programs, unable to progress beyond certain blocks in regards to each other. Or are they free-willed and the mutual hate is so strong they become NPCs when confronting each other.
Disturbing doesn't cover what we find around the lake. I'd met people that considered brutality a competitive sport, how do we horrify our enemies more? They'd be at most Bronze Medalists compared with what I found around the lake, I wouldn't let the cruisers and destroyers anywhere near the area until I'd photographed it, and cleared up some of the more gruesome aspects. The Japanese have a word 'guro', and there are always people interested in violence, injury and pain, this would have been a treasure trove or a purgative. The politest term would have been inventive and effective. There might be researchers who decry my burning or otherwise destroying a lot of those bodies, but if they can look at the pictures and demand more, I don't count them as human.
The cuddlepile that night was poignant, the cruisers and destroyers didn't want to know why I kept crying, they just wanted me to know I was safe and they still loved me. I was glad of them, even a hardened, old bastard like me has limits and alcohol is not the answer for me.
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We're soaking our feet in Leyte Gulf, an irony not lost on me. We moved down the beach to a secluded spot to avoid some of the other groups and the inevitable 'notice me sempai' tactics. Perth and Tenryuu are playing volleyball alongside the destroyers. Perth's and Tenryuu's sisterships Tatsuta and Amphyon are keeping an eye out for party crashers, and enjoying each other's company.
I'm okay with them adding in as they didn't do the 'can you put on my suntan lotion', or other behaviors that we've encountered in the past couple of days. I'm just enjoying people I care about having fun. It's much more therapeutic than people I don't care about playing tease and laughing to each other at scoring points over Tenryuu and Perth. Yes, I helped put sunscreen on the two cruisers to show the destroyers how to cover each other and let them pair up and cover the easily burned areas, especially with as shiny as the sand is. Yes, on sand you can get sunburned under your nose and chin. How does a metal ship get sun burned anyway?
It's also time to think, about the Abyssals, the ship-girls, and their reactions. I've begun to wonder about their sapency, or rather their ability to think outside of their programming. Abyssals don't seem to be sophonts until they reach the cruiser stage. Destroyers and transport ships aren't even clever animals, subs and light cruisers near human-like idiot savants, at the battleship-level they are more intelligent, but less free will. I haven't met any princesses but by description they are free-willed only as long as their hatred or obsession doesn't consume them. Basically high-functioning savants. So perhaps free will and the whole range of expression isn't available to Abyssals. Perhaps this is by design.
Which makes ship-girls even more disturbing, they are all intelligent, maturity seems to grow as you rise up the classes, but it plateaus with the heavy cruisers to battleships. While cruisers are more free to be who they wish, battleships are more tied to who they were as ships and are less able to be free willed. So the battleships are more mature, but have a greater proscriptions on their actions due to their ship identity. I'm reminded of Keith Laumer's Bolos, who were only at their full mental abilities when they were at battle reflex, preparing for or being in combat. Several of the battleships act this way, flanderizations of their personality until they entered combat and then they became alive and capable of acting outside their, hopefully self-imposed, proscriptions.
Could it be that both were crippled in some way, able to fight but lacking the important mental tools to create a separate civilization? It's taboo to think this, but were they created as a slave race, both Abyssals and ship-girls, as if they were programmed to behave a certain way and never able to break out of those limits? It is beyond human limits to create other sentients, beyond the obvious ways, but that's what they have here, and someone or something did it. Most of the locals think of ship-girls as superheroes, but are they actually Mamalukes? They can no more refuse to fight than they could exist without air or fuel. The happy figures jumping after a ball and making such joyful noises, shyly glancing at me to see if I'm watching, could they truly be independent and on their own? Is that why, like the Admirals, I'm the prize? Because I could chart a course beyond war and fighting. That despite their apparent nature they cannot be as inventive and flexible as a human could be? Or worse, could not be as inventive and flexible without human direction? Humans would have to provide the innovative spark. Do the ship-girls know this, either consciously or instinctively?
I'm passing out ice cream to the winners when the alert goes up. Something big coming in low and fast. We stop being an extended family on a well-deserved beach holiday, and return to being a battlegroup. AA defense formation with the destroyers on the perimeter and the cruisers centered on me. It still goes against the grain to let nice girls take point against something that I normally would be at the vanguard against. But they are ships, fleet formation trumps logic.
We don't have more than a radar return when my mystical senses pick up a familiar IFF. I quickly broadcast a stand down order on both radio and by flags. While the girls are glancing around in confusion, they do lower their weapons and I launch a single star shell.
Dragons have some fairly consistent, though extremely rare mutations. A very small number replace the forelimbs with a set of wings, which for unwinged dragon-types turns them into a winged dragon, although technically they're a wyvern. Winged dragons get two sets which have all the drag vs. lift/maneuverability issues of biplane versus monoplane. An even smaller number have multiple heads and necks.
Poor Meltroxoline has both. She was teased about 'really being two dragons' because of having four wings and two heads/necks. You'd be amazed how not doing that and teaching her how to better use four wings over two would obtain her undying loyalty. Though she is a dragon, so respecting a 'squashy' has never been in the cards. She'd charge into Hell and drag me out of there, and insult me to my face the whole way. So when she hove into view, then landed, I was surprised she was speechless as she looked at the ship-girls surrounding her, positioned between her and me.
"Let me guess, you rescued the two, older ones and the kids all came with," Mel says one head to another, and shakes both heads, "Only you Trevor, only you."
That breaks the ice with the destroyers who surround the dragon and begin tossing questions, which Mel fields, as her personality regards me is similar to a sarcastic destroyer. Perth and Tenryuu are both nervous about this, while Tatsuta and her `friend` are leading a single battleship towards us, likely after turning back the horde. Fortunately, it is not one of the IJN ones, but one I've never seen and don't recognize.
I'm walking towards Perth and Tenryuu, and from their expressions they guess this is my ride home.
"You can come back?" Tenryuu asks, digging a toe in the sand.
"Yes, I'll have to figure a few things out to travel between, but yes, I'll come back. Next time I'll bring a proper battlegroup," I tell them and get shy smiles from both of them.
"Shoulda boffed you at least once," Perth says, and blushes more.
"Kinda hard when we were packed in like three sausages smothered in giggling gravy," I say and nod towards the laughing cloud of destroyers, "I enjoyed what we did." After all we saw and resented the rapacious looks from the battleships, the destroyers weren't letting me go anywhere without an escort including one of the pair of cruisers.
Tenryuu and Perth each look like she wants to melt into the sand.
Mel's two heads are still fielding questions as the destroyers shoot them out. She often seems a ditz because she makes leaps of logic that only make sense with analysis, so she's got about two-thirds of the destroyers pondering while the others ask questions. The battleship doesn't look hostile, more concerned and confused.
"What is your business here?" the battleship asks, not authoritarian, but not diplomatically either.
Both heads respond in unison, "Rescuing a kidnaped ally before the starfleet arrives and extracts him and retribution by force majeure," Mel tells her and goes back to happily chattering with the destroyers.
The battleship is stunned by the equally cheerful but nondiplomatic answer which is essentially 'I'm here to prevent my friends from blasting you back to the stone-age for stealing our friend.' It also has a heaping helping of, 'if we do this officially, you all die.' Officious bureaucrats tend to become more flexible when the step after correctly filling out the paperwork is to shoot them in the head.
The battleship wanders up the beach with Tatsuta and Amphyon. I suspect she's using a signal lamp to talk privately. I intend to be gone before she gets an answer. Of course I get lots of hugs from the destroyers, usually three to five at a time, but I'm resting on Mel's back and airborne before the battleship gets new direction.
"We don't have a starfleet," I ask Mel as I sense the portal she entered through, "Do we?"
"Scariest thing I could think of," Mel admits, "Explaining the Knights of Yig and your eye surgeon would have taken too long."
I nod. People capable of disintegrating the entire prison except who they were coming to rescue is always a persuader, but too often a demonstration is required. Then we're into the portal and on the way home.
