>>6100560Silence reigns, and you feel it best not to be the one that breaks it.
Though caught by an initial impulse to get your air wing in gear, you realise that you have been cut off from military satellite networks owing to codes and keys now fifteen years out of date, meaning your ability to organise complex operations is severely constrained, and something you have no actual experience doing yourself to begin with. And that was saying nothing of your lack of weather information.
But you can operate helicopters with a little more freedom. They lack the range or endurance of your Vikings, but they can stay low on the water, as far below the radar horizon of any watchful eyes as possible.
Looking at your charts again, you see that you are in the southeastern corner of the atoll, a few nautical miles from Enyu Island, which is labelled as having a disused airstrip. It was as good a destination as any. The runway itself was useless to you - it was no doubt useless to anyone but a bush pilot, given that it was so long left to the tropical weeds and weather, and you were an aircraft carrier anyhow - but it there was a good chance of there being abandoned buildings there that might serve to hide you in a pinch.
With a return destination set for your choppers, you get ready to let them go, only to be confronted with the fact that you are a person now, not a ship, at least outwardly, and had no idea how to do ship things other than floating. Yet, as you're thinking about it, several items suddenly appear on or about your person. On your shoulders you see the boxy forms of rolling airframe missile and Sea Sparrow launchers and the domes of Phalanx guns. Your feet are enclosed in odd metal boots painted red and grey, with little rudders and screws on the heel like a cowboy's spurs. Hovering by your right hip is a quiver full of grey-fletched arrows and an asphalt-coloured compound bow that you realise must be your catapults, while by your left side stretching as tall as you is a floating shield in a shape of your flight deck, even painted with deck markings.
After taking a moment to get over the surprise of having apparently just performed honest-to-god magic, following some deep instinct, you hold out your hand, and exactly as the rest of your equipment did there materialises a miniature Romeo, which lofts into the air like a hummingbird. Then another, and another, and another. As they leave they grow, soon reaching their true size, and head off across the water in every direction. As their directional-broadcast Common Data Link comes online you find yourself with an extra sense - the link isn't high-enough bandwidth to stream video, but it still reports the location of contacts anything on the network sees, and is both short-range and narrowly-focused enough to minimise detection risks, and can be turned off except to give quick periodic updates.
