>>6103657“Shore bombardment?” Nagato asks.
“Oh. Right.” It was all too easy to take the battle network for granted. “Actually, why don’t you take a look? A battleship might be the expert here.” You try asking your intel officers for a print still from the feed, and a minute later you’ve got one in hand and are holding it out to Nagato.
“What is the scale on these craters?”
“15 to 30 feet. 4 to 10 metres.”
“Then it was not a battleship’s main guns. A heavy cruiser, perhaps. These are larger than the marks of 15-centimetre guns.”
“Yeah, uh, nobody’s put a gun larger than that on a cruiser since the 1940s,” Bainbridge says. She looks back at you. “You sure that’s not a carpet bombing?”
“Not unless China or some else managed to build carriers capable of getting through the USN in open water in the last fifteen years.”
“Then, we’re lookin’ for some kind of new gunboat?”
“Or an old one,” Long Beach says quietly.
“Old? Like, a ghost ship? Are you serious?”
“Another ghost ship, you mean. Besides us.”
No one speaks a long moment after that.
Be it a carrier or cruiser, old ship or new, the seas are no longer free.
>[1] Your scouts have enough fuel to take a look at Majuro, and pass over a few smaller atolls in the process. Have a look there too to see what you can see before doing anything. >[2] Recall your current planes early and have the next wave armed for bear. AND
>[A] Maintain current emissions - fighter noses cold, E2 and sonar in passive. > All arrays hot, active radar and sonar - leave nothing to chance. Put out a call for survivors or help on all frequencies. (Incidentally, sorry about the delay, and also the wall of text - I had to rewrite this three times to and I'm still not really happy, but here it is.)
