>>6117885“Well, we all appeared literally out of thin air, right? Imagine if the monsters can do that too. One moment, nothing, it’s a quiet night, then *poof,* zombie battleship a mile off your port quarter, and you’re in a gun fight like it’s Guadalcanal. Better hope they’re loading AP.”
“… You know what would have been real nice? Waking up back in Bremerton.”
“The monsters can probably manifest in Puget Sound too.”
“It’s still better than monsters in the MIDDLE OF FUCKING NOWHERE! Actually, why *are* we here? Any ideas?”
“I believe the question rather is as to why *you* are here,” Nagato says dryly. “I was already in Bikini Atoll.”
“Well, we’re all dead boats. The three of us are nuke boats, and you’re a nuked boat, and we all showed up in a place where a bunch of boats got nuked dead.”
“And how much wood could a woodchuck chuck?” Bainbridge rolls her eyes. “That doesn’t explain anything.”
“It’s a connection,” you say. “I certainly can’t imagine it’s a coincidence. We’re getting off-track, though. We need to discuss contingencies - in case we can’t be airlifted, for example. There’s a lot of hostile ocean to cross.”
“What’d you have in mind?” Long Beach says.
“We have a pair of heavy gunboats who need an in-depth briefing on modern warfare, as well as whatever equipment we can give them. I don’t think it would be wise to try and jury-rig missile batteries to them underway even if we knew how to refit ourselves in the first place, but countermeasures and comms equipment we can manage.”
You had already gotten a head-start on that last point. Nagato’s attention for the last hour and a half had been completely absorbed by the iPad you’d handed her to give her access to your battle network and the detailed images of the monsters you’d accumulated. Her eyes had gone wide as the Moon as you described even just the tiniest fraction of what the piece of alien technology could do, from giving live-action views of a whole theatre to overlaying all manner of GIS data over high-res satellite imagery. Such a device is rather wondrous even by your standards, granted, but you had experienced the development of the digital age from its earliest days, and the proliferation of cheap personal electronics felt like a natural culmination of all those generations of ingenuity. You can’t wait to tell her about the internet.
“You think we should run gunnery exercises?” Long Beach asks.
“Seeing as you’re volunteering, by all means.”
“Walked right into that one, didn’t I. Well, I suppose I wouldn't mind having something to do. It’s been pretty quiet on our end.”
“Pardon,” Nagato says, “I believe you told me guns are no longer relevant in battles at sea.”
