Moriya, Ibaraki Prefecture
22:06
Haruna looked down her port side next to her #1 turret, noting the sediment piled up beneath her. Her prow had dug itself up to her normal water line in grassy mud.
She looked up and observed telecommunications and power cables just 30 meters from the riverbank in front of her.
... She could make it.
The battleship throttled up her main thrusters once more and began pushing herself forward. Compared to the intense wave drag from moving through water at over 80 knots, this wasn't so bad. All she had to do was obtain access to those cables, splice into one, then search as much information as she wanted. Simple.
No above ground communication lines spanned the Tone River for some reason, which was why she finally decided to try reaching for some away from the bank. Perhaps the river was just too prone to floods due to higher water levels?
400 years of extensive construction to control the once wild and untamed river had quite effectively been undone in just 30 years. With Japan's declining population, crippled infrastructure and diminishing resources, it simply didn't make sense for people to live close to the river in and around the Boso Peninsula anymore. Most of them had been forced out by government orders.
Haruna didn't know anything about all of that.
[So how are things going, Haruna? Do anything fun yet?]
[I have been listening to local radio channels. It has been a fulfilling experience.]
There had been more to listen to this far inland than there was miles away from shore. She surmised that these were low-power radios. Most of them sounded "amateur". That was, humans operating a service they did not have proper equipment for as recreation or personal fulfillment. This behavior intrigued her, as she had never experienced a world where individuals imitated a profession for fun.
Until she had actually traveled a few kilometers up the Tone, there hadn't been much reaction to her approach. However, it quickly became clear that to the humans in the area that the Fog battleship wasn't turning around. Within minutes, everyone with a ham radio was blasting the airwaves with frantic exchanges about her.
As she listened, Haruna picked up a variety of phrases pertaining to her that she had never heard before. They were rather confusing.
"The bumblebee is buzzing up the river!" one stated. Haruna wasn't sure what that meant at first. She pulled up an images of bumblebees and spent several minutes wondering why so many humans were talking about them.
"... Ah. I am yellow and black." Haruna said, finally making the connection. "They have assigned a descriptive moniker for me based on my colors. Fascinating."
"The spirit ships! They've finally come to finish us and collect the tax on our sins! You who have scorned the gods of the sea brought this upon us!"
Those seemed highly irrational things to assume. The Fog did not attack inland targets. There were 15 years of consistent behavior corroborating this fact. The also did not impose taxes. What would they even demand as tax?
[Have you seen any humans? Do they have anything cool?] Zuikaku asked, projecting a bundle of excitement and anticipation.
As her bow met and crushed the pavement of a road running parallel to the river, she scanned around for signs of humans with... "cool" things. She found her sensors didn't behave inland as she was accustomed to on the open ocean. She couldn't use sonar effectively here, and she had never before needed to deal with the way radar reflected off of ground and plants. It was extremely confusing. Haruna spent a good deal of time calibrating to make some sense of it.
She didn't know much of anything about places on land, but it didn't seem like Moriya was a large population center. Truly, there wasn't much of note to see here. On low-frequency radar she could make out the landscape all the way to Yokohama, but with rather poor resolution. She wouldn't be able to pick out individual humans with that. High-frequency radar gave her very good resolution, but the plants, terrain and clouds blinded her after a relatively short distance.
[I have heard them conversing about my presence over radio channels, but I have not encountered them yet.]
[Aww...]
Haruna soon slid to a stop with her bow next to the utility pole. The lines didn't quite come up to the level of her deck railing, so she lowered a cable that clamped onto one of them and spliced into it. After a few seconds she cracked the encryption and had Internet access.
Success.
"... The data transfer rate of this line is not as fast as I would like."
Sort of.
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"Did you not hear what I just said?!" Kita Ryoukan roared into his phone. "Are you truly this short-sighted?!"
Assemblyman Kita was a tall and strongly built man despite being in his seventies. With a full beard, eagle nose and sharp eyes, he struck an imposing visage that had been a useful asset since he began his career in politics. 15 years ago he had been the captain of a missile battleship in the last open conflict humans had tried to fight against the Fog. After retiring from the navy, he had gone into politics and made the unexpected move to become the primary backer of the Japanese Army. As the only thing standing in the way of the complete disbandment of the Army, he possessed immense clout and commanded a great deal of respect.
His office in the Diet Building had become a hectic place in the last half-hour. His attendants frantically moved about trying to keep track of all the information coming in and present it to him at his desk without piling up a bunch of redundant reports that only wasted his time. At the moment he was screaming at the general of the Army, trying to dissuade him from doing something immensely idiotic.
"Sir, it's isolated from the rest of them and trapped in a river kilometers from open water!" the general argued. "The army may never get a better chance than this! We who could do nothing to fight them all these years finally have a chance to strike back!"
"You didn't personally experience their power in that battle 15 years ago! You think just because it's alone that it won't annihilate everything you send against it?!" Kita said, watching 3 separate video feeds from news helicopters that were approaching the Fog vessel. "The only thing I want you to do is cordon off that area and keep civilians from throwing away their lives trying to see it! Get those media helicopters to turn around, block all the roadways!"
The general finally caved and assured the assemblyman that it would be taken care of, leaving Kita Ryoukan to fume over the insanity of the situation. The week had already been bad enough what with the the son of that traitor hijacking Japan's most valuable artifact for whatever infantile foolishness he had planned. As he watched the live news, one of his aides approached him.
"Kita-san, the Prime Minister says you have his utmost confidence and that he believes our armed forces will conduct themselves admirably in the face of this unprecedented event."
That seemingly well-meaning message got the assemblyman's blood up ever so slightly. Prime Minister Kaede Nobuyoshi could wield words quite dangerously for a man without vocal chords. His old second in command from the Great Naval Battle wasn't to be taken lightly, even if he relied on Kita's party for much of his support in office.
The aging veteran steepled his hands as his eyes closely examined the helicopter camera feed. One particular chopper had decided to move in closer than the other stations were willing. While he cursed the fools for their suicidal action, he didn't terribly mind the chance to see a Fog vessel in closer detail. It had yet to react to them. Still, he didn't expect the beast to remain quiet for much longer.
The helicopter panned their camera over the ship, rattling on about various details, spewing incompetent speculation and referencing tidbits about the historical ship this super advanced copy was patterned on. Typical brainless media sensationalism. Kita was just about to mute the useless commentary when the reporter suddenly shouted about someone being on board the ship and pointed at the foredeck.
Kita Ryoukan's eyes bore into the screen as the camera zoomed in on a solitary figure standing at the deck railing above the starboard bow anchor. It was hard to tell with the huge leather coat, but it seemed to be a young woman in her late teens with blonde hair in girlish pigtails. The girl appeared to be paying more attention to a cable she was dangling over the side of the deck than the helicopters overhead. It was hard to make out, but that cable looked to be connected to the utility lines below.
Kita's mind quickly sprang to a couple of speculative ideas as he watched the girl finally notice her observers and lazily turn her gaze to the camera.
First, that Chihaya Shouzou wasn't the only human turncoat with the Fog. This seemed the most sensible idea to Kita. If one man did it, that meant it was possible more had done the same thing. How had a young girl ended up with them, though? Perhaps she was just another one like Chihaya Gunzou; some naive and selfish child that somehow fell into the captain's chair of a Fog battleship and was doing whatever the hell she wanted with it.
Second, the girl was hacking into the fiber optic cables for something. This meant the Fog, or just the girl depending on her loyalty, wanted information from Japan. What about was anybody's guess.
Whatever she was after, she had to be stopped.
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[I am being observed by 3 rotary-wing aircraft. The humans aboard them are saying interesting things.]
Haruna's eyes glowed slightly as she zoomed in on the humans to read their mouth movements. She recorded each one and assigned them tags for later study.
There had been so many new things to experience this day.
[Oooo, helicopters! I wish I had one. I could fly to land!]
The battleship's mental model scrunched her left cheek slightly upward in an expression she'd learned was similar to a raised eyebrow, though with fewer context-based meanings.
[You are too large and heavy to be carried by a helicopter.]
[Huh? I'm half your size!]
No she wasn't. This was a plainly visible fact. How could the carrier be committing such errors?
[Your full combat load is in excess of 32,000 tonnes. We are of similar mass, and you are 35.5 meters longer overall.]
[... OH! Haruna, I'm talking about our mental models!]
Ah... of course. Zuikaku's mental model was half the height of Haruna's own. Now she understood what the carrier meant within this new context. Were she to have a helicopter... she could... Wait.
[Zuikaku, I am not certain I understand. You would fly... your mental model to land?]
[Yeah, that's exactly what I meant!]
So that meant... that meant...
"Oh", Haruna realized, looking down again at her bow that was digging into dirt, mud and pavement.
[My mental model is able to leave my hull?]
[Uh... yeah. I do it all the time! I swim all around when I'm bored! I even go spear fishing and wreck diving! Don't tell me you didn't know?!]
Truthfully, she hadn't.
Then Haruna lost her Internet connection.
