"Kaga, don't waste any of your crossbow bolts, save them for the helis that those guys came in if they try 'n run away," Damon mutters, keeping his voice down. He and his destroyers, including newly acquired Shigure and Yuudachi, are still hiding inside the white office building with the partially destroyed front wall, and Murakumo and Amatsukaze are tracking the Mexican soldiers with their sensors.
"Acknowledged."
"Admiral, are you sure we ought to eliminate them?" Shigure asks worriedly. "They haven't done anything to us. They don't even know we are here."
"No, they should know," Damon counters, tapping his trigger finger against the trigger guard of his marksman rifle. "They definitely saw our Merlin sittin' out there on the runway, and it doesn't look all beat up 'n shit like the other derelict helis 'n jets out there. They'll be on their guard. They should, anyway."
"...what's a Merlin, poi?" Yuudachi asks.
"Our helicopter."
"What's a helicopter, poi?"
"You'll see when we get back...well, that is, if we get back. In the meantime, check your memory files if you wanna know what it looks like. In fact, Shigure, you too, both of you check your memory files that you downloaded in case you have questions about anythin'."
"Oooohhh, so thaaaat's what a helicopter looks like, poi..." Yuudachi pores over the image in her mind.
"That," Damon concludes with confidence, "and they're armed. In this world, rule number one: don't ever trust anyone with a gun. Doesn't matter if it's a guy, girl, adult, kid, whoever. If they're armed and you don't know them, you kill them. 'Cause chances are, they're out to kill you."
Shigure protests. "B-But...but surely...surely there must be some sort of understanding that can be made - !"
Then, suddenly, a shot rings out, causing Shigure to jump. The shot is extremely loud, and while there is no bullet crack to indicate that the shot was fired towards Damon and his group, the report echoes throughout the empty shantytown.
"...you were sayin', Shigure?" Damon mutters grimly. "By the way, that ain't no chump gun that just got fired. That's a fucking fifty cal like the DSR I lent to Sanford. Only fifty cals make that kinda sound..." He adjusts his mic quickly. "Mutsu, Kaga, Iku, are you all good? You heard that shot, didn't'cha?"
"Yeah, we heard that shot. They didn't shoot it towards us, though. And we can't see them anymore, by the way, just so you know," Mutsu reports.
Damon can now hear the men approaching steadily, their voices increasing in volume. He recognizes the language as Spanish, confirming that they are indeed Mexican.
"I don't understand that kind of tongue," Amatsukaze frowns. "Do you, Admiral?"
"I only know two languages, English 'n guns," Damon mutters back. "I like to think I understand the latter more. Now, question is, why'd they just fire? What the hell were they shootin' at? If I find out they shot at our chopper, I'm gonna rip their fuckin' balls off..."
"Uhhh...Admiral, they're all moving towards our position..." Murakumo warns worriedly. "Well...scratch that, not all of them, but a lot of them."
"Wait, here? Like, this office building specifically?"
Murakumo nods.
"...what the fuck? This can't be a coincidence. Do they fuckin' know about you ship girls?"
No one answers him. Grinding his teeth and running out of time to formulate a plan, Damon motions everyone away from the broken wall.
"C'mon, let's get away from here 'n hide further back somewhere. They'll find the little hole we made - in fact, we'll use Shigure's and Yuudachi's weapons crates as bait and take 'em all down. Quick!"
They retreat from the wall as silently as can be and hide behind various debris and obstacles big enough to hide them, like overturned desks, tables, and pieces of rubble from the ceiling. Damon, however, slips back inside the hole that he stomped his foot through in the floor.
"Uhhh, Admiral, is that...safe, poi?" Yuudachi asks, considering to jump in with him herself.
"No, but then again, none 'a us right now are really 'safe', right?"
The Mexican soldiers have drawn close enough to the building that the girls can clearly hear their voices entering through the various holes in the front wall.
"No one make a move," Damon whispers just barely audibly for his girls to hear through their comms. "Let me handle this. How many are there?"
The ship girls track the soldiers' movement: only two soldiers approaching the center of the office building, where the hole is.
"Only two, sir," Shigure responds, wishing to be of use to her new Admiral despite not being armed.
"The fuck? Murakumo said there'd be a lotta 'em..."
Then, a cry of surprise from one of the soldiers is heard. Damon waits for one of the Mexican men to peek their head inside the hole to investigate the scene, and when he does so, Damon rips his karambit knife through the back of his neck all the way out to his Adam's apple. The other Mexican soldier, hearing the violent slash of a knife, also cries out in shock and pulls his buddy out from the hole, only to find him moments away from death from a stabbed neck. Just as he is about to pull out his radio to call his comrades and alert them, Damon jumps out of the hole and lunges at the second man in one jump, knocking him down and shoving the hooked blade of his karambit into his face, which the Mexican soldier barely stops in time by catching the blade with his own left palm. He shrieks with pain, blood dripping down onto his own face, but Damon, unrelenting, continues to push his weight down onto his karambit, eventually ripping his knife blade out of the guy's hand through the space in between his ring and middle fingers, and finally ends the ordeal by successfully plunging the knife sideways into the left side of the man's head. His hands drop lifeless, and Damon rips out his melee weapon and wipes the sides on the soldier's clothing.
"We could have just shot them, you know," Amatsukaze says once the coast is clear and the girls come out of their hiding. "You didn't need to do all the work yourself."
"Nah, I wanted to take 'em down silently," Damon says. "I dunno if they knew other people were here, but judgin' by their reactions, they don't seem to know that we are. 'Cause hear me out: I'm thinkin' that these guys know 'bout you ship girls, which ain't normal, since y'all're supposed to be this top secret project that involved America 'n Japan, not Mexico. So I'm thinkin' that maybe these guys're here to find ship girls like me, which they ain't supposed to be, since it ain't none 'a their business, at least not as much as mine. We're gonna follow the other group if we can find 'em, and if we can find 'em, they'll lead us straight to where they're headed. Then we'll know for sure if they've really come here for ya ship girls 'r not."
Damon, still kneeling next to the corpses of the men he has killed, leans down and inspects the men's weapons: the man he stabbed through the neck is carrying an IMI Tavor-21 and a simple, weather-worn Glock 17 pistol as his sidearm. The second man, too, wields the same sidearm in his holster, but he drops a Remington 870 with a side saddle and a pouch of Foster slug rounds instead of traditional double-aught buckshot. He tosses Shigure the Tavor-21 assault rifle and Yuudachi the R-870 pump-action shotgun, then the pistols to each of them. For himself, he takes the second man's radio and fits it in one of the last empty holsters in his vest.
"Get these load vests off these guys 'n put 'em on. Once you're done, we're gonna head out 'n see if we can find the other guys. Kaga, come in, ya got visuals over the other group 'a Mexicans?"
"We have not seen the intruders again ever since they headed towards your direction, Admiral."
"Shit, we'll jus' hafta yolo this then." Damon waits for Shigure and Yuudachi to adequately equip themselves with the help of the other destroyers. "We good? Let's go. Stay sharp 'n keep quiet, and make sure to look out for them in case we accidentally run into 'em out on the road. Don't want that ta happen now, do we..."
"Um, sir, what about our, uh, our ship weapons?" Shigure asks, a bit timidly, and Damon looks over at the two unopened crates that contain the new destroyers' ship armaments.
"Not now, we'll pick 'em up after we take care 'a the other Mexicans. We'll come back for 'em later..."
Murakumo, Shimakaze, and Amatsukaze emerge from the broken wall first, with Damon, Shigure, and Yuudachi following closely after them.
"Anyone gettin' a read on those other guys?" Damon requests, sweeping his DMR down the street.
"Not yet. They must be far away," Murakumo reports.
"Really? Because I'm getting a bit of a signal that way," Shimakaze points southeast, into the heart of the shantytown.
"Lead the way then, Shimakaze," Damon orders. "Kaga, keep overwatch on the three helis those guys came in and make sure no one touches our heli. Dunno where you are, but don't be seen. Mutsu, take Iku and Sanford and push into the settlement. We're gonna pincer these guys."
"Roger that, we're moving."
The six destroyers and Damon creep their way into the shantytown, down Avenue C. Everywhere they look, makeshift huts in lots and sometimes right in the middle of the streets and lanes. The trash levels have tripled, and at some parts of the street, Damon and the girls often have to wade ankle-deep in trash and random debris. Clotheslines run everywhere, and some even still have dry articles of clothing hanging from them. Luggage suitcases and large trash bags are lying overturned like scattered domino pieces, and old civilian cars and sedans sit, their tires either removed entirely or slashed and their radios and dashboards ripped out, glass windows punched out and the like. Vandalism is, needless to say, everywhere.
"...what on Earth could have happened to make a scene like this...?" Shigure wonders aloud in her usual morose tone.
"Lots'a things. Apocalypse, shitty people, oppression, starvation, no water..." Damon lists off the possible factors. "Power struggle, or, hear this, maybe those Mexican dudes know somethin' we don't."
"You think those guys are responsible for what happened here?" Murakumo says, a bit distrustful of Damon's accusation. "What makes you think that?"
"Then you tell me why the hell they'd be here. I could be wrong, but here's what I think: I think that this place, up 'til a few days ago or whatever, used to be a large settlement for a lotta people, let's say, around...eh, I dunno, three thousand, four thousand? Maybe I'm overshootin' the statistic. But whatever the number, I think those Mexicans came in 'n kicked everyone out. We haven't seen any dried blood anywhere, so they probably just forced 'em off this place without shootin' anybody. And now, they're lookin' for ship girls. Just like me. And you know what I think 'bout other people lookin' for the same things I'm lookin' for."
"That's a pretty bold accusation for someone who said earlier that he doesn't really know what's going on in Mexico," Amatsukaze notes.
Damon snorts in response. "Yeah, well, maybe if we were livin' like twenty years ago, before the war happened, you could call it that. Now, though, any accusation's a bold one. So your argument's fuckin' invalid, 'cause I could accuse someone back in the CCPL post up in Chicago of stealin' a bit of my breakfast, 'n we'd fuckin' kill each other over it. So in that context, this shit ain't much different. And you can't say how this shit's turnin' out's really suspicious. Oh, golly, two Mexicans with rifles jus' waltzed into the same office buildin' as us where we found Shigure 'n Yuudachi, lookin' down the same hole that I made! Whoop de doo, wonder what they're up to, right? Yeaaaaahhh..."
"Ummm, Admiral?" Yuudachi asks, raising her Remington 870 shotgun. "I checked my memory files for information on how to use this gun, but there's nothin' on shotguns except for the AA-12, poi. How do I use this, poi?"
"For now, just point, aim, and shoot," Damon says, not wanting to have to teach Yuudachi the basics of proper shotgun usage out in the open as they are. "And do you have to say 'poi' at the end of every single sentence?"
"Why, what's so bad 'bout it, poi?" Yuudachi cocks her head in confusion.
"It's slightly annoying. What the hell does it even mean, anyway?"
"Awwwww...poi..." Yuudachi becomes downhearted at the mention that her Admiral doesn't like her mannerisms.
"Admiral, please don't make Yuudachi unhappy," Shigure objects indignantly. "You can't ask someone to simply stop doing something like that!"
"Christ, a'ight, a'ight, I'll back off, sheesh, if that's somethin' you're gonna get that worked up over...but what does it mean?"
"It's just a dialect, or an accent. It's kind of hard to put it in terms that Americans can understand," Amatsukaze explains. "I guess the most synonymous behavior that would match Yuudachi's would be the American stereotype of the 'valley girl' image, you know, a girl who keeps saying 'like, like, like' all the time."
Damon immediately pictures a girl in overalls with slightly redneck tendencies going "Like, hey y'all!"
"Okay, now I feel a lot better about Yuudachi just sticking to her little 'poi' thing," he sighs. "Maybe it's not so bad after all."
"Yaaay, does Admiral like me now, poi?" Yuudachi cheers up as quickly as she had become downhearted.
"...that's irrelevant."
"Awwww...poi..."
"Shhh, shhh!" Shimakaze hisses at them to get them to shut up. "I think I'm getting stronger readings! Yeah, I think I have their coordinates!"
"Then pass it to everyone and report. Where?"
Shimakaze points to a another big white builing, this time a three-story building with a rusted angled ceiling near Ocean Drive.
"I think they're in there."
Murakumo nods, also looking in the same direction. "They're in there for sure," she confirms. "They're probably on the second floor right now."
"Okay, let's move up. You girls over there, y'all get the coordinates?"
"Yup! We got 'em, we're a-comin'!" Iku's jolly voice pops in Damon's ears.
"A'ight, good, then converge on their position, we'll move in together. Get to a distance of 'bout a hundred meters from it, and tell us when you're in position, and we'll go."
The two groups move in, Damon's posse from the southwest and Sanford's group from the southeast. A large complex of what appear to be logistics labs and more ruined storage buildings separate them apart. As they draw within two hundred meters, however, a small boom erupts from within their target building, causing Damon's destroyers to jump.
"W-What was that?!" Shimakaze, alarmed and itching to pull the trigger of her AA-12 automatic shotgun, looks around frantically.
"Calm down, it came from inside that building, in case y'all couldn't tell," Damon says in a steady voice to keep everyone from freaking out unnecessarily. "That was a controlled explosion. Probably a small breach charge on a door 'r somethin'. And if that's the case, they sure as hell're tryin' to look for somethin', so fuck goin' stealthy, let's move!"
Damon breaks into a run, and his destroyers follow suit, Shimakaze eagerly running straight on ahead with her innate speed.
"Mutsu, Iku, we're goin' balls out 'n runnin' straight in! Get in there and watch'er fire!" Damon calls.
"Uh, o-okay! We're moving in!" Mutsu calls from the other side before breaking into a run herself towards the rusted building.
Shimakaze is the first to reach the doors, only to find it already breached open, presumably by the Mexican soldiers before them. "The doors're already blasted open!" she calls behind her at Damon, who is catching up.
"Get in there 'n clear the way for us, Shimakaze! Weapons free, check your fire around friendlies!" Damon orders, and Shimakaze dashes into the building, sweeping her shotgun across everything she sees. Upon entering a long corridor with faded white walls, she checks every door that she comes upon, leading into many rooms of identical layout, probably logistics labs and other such experimental rooms. Finding nothing on the first floor, she finds the flight of stairs leading up to the second floor and calls over her comms,
"First floor's clear! I'm going up to the second - "
Just as she starts running up the large flight of stairs to the second floor, a Mexican soldier rounds the corner, his Micro Tavor-21 already raised, and opens fire on Shimakaze. Yelping in surprise as the first few bullets rap off her chest and shoulders, Shimakaze raises her AA-12 with her right hand and blasts the man against the wall with one well-placed shell of double-aught buckshot.
"Shimakaze, we heard gunshots! Status?!" Damon yells as he and the rest of the destroyer girls run down the same corridor to catch up with Shimakaze at the stairs.
"I'm fine, I just got caught off-guard by this dude on the stairs!" Shimakaze reports.
"Then wait for us there so we can move in together! They know we're here!"
Just as they begin to climb the stairs where Shimakaze is waiting for them, the door on the other side of the building, incidentally near the main flight of stairs, gets kicked open the wrong way, knocking the door down onto the floor off its hinges, revealing Mutsu, Iku, and Sanford.
"Don't shoot, friendlies!" Mutsu yells as she raises her LSAT squad support machine gun at the same time as Murakumo, Shigure, and Damon raise their own weapons on reflex.
"Damn, shoulda told us you'd be comin' in from there," Damon snorts as the two groups congregate.
"There are six people right above us waiting for us to come up the stairs," Shigure reports hurriedly. "The other ten are rushing about the building...probably going up to the third floor."
Damon turns to Mutsu. "Do you know where the guys above us are, exactly?" he asks.
"Yeah. My sensors are pretty strong, so I have a good idea where the enemies are above us," she nods.
"Fuckin' awesome. What I want you ta do's ta spam the ceiling."
"What? Spam the ceiling? What does that mean?"
"Shoot the absolute fuck outta the ceiling where the guys are."
"Er, will that work?"
"Bullet penetration's a machine gun's best friend, ya know," Damon says with a smirk. "Everyone up the stairs. When I tell ya, Mutsu, kill the guys on the second floor where you are, and we'll move in."
"Okay...I think..."
Mutsu stays behind as the others move up the stairs in order to rush the second floor.
"A'ight, we're good to go. Fire away," Damon gives the go-ahead, and Mutsu aims her LSAT at the ceiling of the first floor and lets it rip. The powerful penetration strength of the caseless 5.56x45mm rounds passes through the thick ceiling of the first floor like a needle through a pincushion, shooting out the men stacked and watching the top of the stairs. Legs, sometimes arms, and to one unfortunate (or fortunate) soldier, ass get shot from below, and all six men watching the stairs scream out and swear profusely in Spanish as they double over from their wounds, none of which are actually fatal but enough to be debilitating. Shigure and Yuudachi are the first ones reach the second floor, and Yuudachi, eager to test her weapon, points the barrel of her shotgun at the face of a soldier lying on his back, clutching at his shot ankles, and despite his attempt to wave his hands in front of him to get Yuudachi not to fire, she does so anyway, and the head of the soldier gets a messy hole punched right through the middle, the innards spraying behind him. Shigure, taking a sharp breath and clenching her teeth to suppress her hesitation, shakily squeezes the trigger of her bullpup assault rifle, putting the three soldiers in front of her out of their misery. Damon steps behind her, reaches past her shoulder with his Glock 37, and headshots the last two who are trying to crawl away.
"Mutsu, regroup on us!" Damon calls. "Everyone, check the second floor! Murakumo, stay here and watch the stairs leading up to the third floor in case any of 'em decide to rush us from above!"
"Got it!" Murakumo nods and points her AK-47 at the next flight of stairs leading up to the third floor as the girls, Damon, and Sanford investigate the second floor, trying to figure out what the Mexican soldiers are doing in this particular building, if not this entire base.
"Nothin's here on the second floor, kiddo," Sanford says, a bit bewildered. "If it's a ship girl they're lookin' for, shouldn't our girls'a picked up on her signature already?"
"Yeah, it's fuckin' weird," Damon says, emerging with Sanford from an empty, cobweb-filled room. "There's nothin' here. Whatever they're here for's up on the third floor. Mutsu, same plan! Everyone, on me!"
They repeat this process once more, but this time, the ten men on the final floor attempt to fire back down, spraying their assault rifles and submachine guns down at Mutsu below, so only a few of the ten soldiers get hit by Mutsu's wallbang spray. This time, Shimakaze and Amatsukaze spring out onto the third floor and hose down as many as they can, taking out two men apiece but catching a lot of bullets in the process. Murakumo and Iku also jump in to support, Iku rolling onto the floor and remaining prone as she bursts her FN FS-2000. Murakumo steps in front of Amatsukaze so that the former can take a few bullets for her comrade and returns fire simultaneously, knocking down another two men behind the two that Amatsukaze had killed. Yuudachi, chanting her little "Poi!" cheer, rolls past Iku, tries to fire another shell, but nothing happens because she does not know that she needs to pump the shotgun to load another round and consequently tumbles backwards onto the floor from getting hit right in the forehead by an M4-A1 carbine bullet. Damon and Sanford, using the girls as cover to avoid getting hit, help the girls finish off the rest of the men on the third floor, and the gunfire finally dies down.
"Owwwww, poi..." Yuudachi rubs her head painfully, a couple of tears welling up in her eyes at the uncomfortable pain that feels like a tennis ball was just hit at her face at full serve speed. "W-Why didn't my gun work, poi...?"
"You gotta pump it, Yuudachi," Sanford says, pointing at the pump mechanism on the underside of the barrel.
"Pump it, poi...?" Yuudachi looks confused. Damon leaps forward, snatches Yuudachi's shotgun out of her hands, kneels, pumps it, and blasts the last soldier who was hiding behind one of the rooms on the left and trying to pop out to catch them off guard dead in the chest. The man gets catapulted along the wall down the hallway, sliding across it and tumbling to a bloody stop.
"Like this," Damon says, pumping the shotgun once more. "Every time you shoot this thing, you pump it, puts another bullet in the chamber. This thing holds seven shots; shoot 'n pump seven times, and you feed more shells in. Got it? Good." He gently slaps the pistol grip of the R-870 shotgun back into Yuudachi's hands.
Suddenly, behind Damon and Sanford towards where Amatsukaze and Murakumo are facing, a door is smashed open and out comes a man dragging an unconscious teenage girl in front of him, pointing a Desert Eagle chambered in .357 Magnum at the side of her head. A large sniper rifle can be seen strapped on his back.
"I know you come for her!" he screams, by this point getting everyone's attention. The Spanish accent in his mediocre English is very thick, and at some parts, Damon has trouble understanding. "Let me go! I let this one live!"
Murakumo, Amatsukaze, and Mutsu have their sights on the man, who is backed up against the end of the hallway with his hostage. Damon, with his own sidearm raised, peers past Mutsu's shoulder and surveys the situation.
"Who's that girl?" he mutters. "Is that a ship girl? She certainly looks like it."
"I-I don't know," Mutsu stutters uncertainly. "We...well, at least, I'm not getting any matching signatures from her as we would from one another. That's how we recognize one another as ship girls, by analyzing the signals we emanate."
"Uh-uh," Sanford shakes his head. "I think she's in hibernation."
"I'm gonna say that she is," Damon concludes and steps forward with his Glock 37 aimed at the Mexican soldier's head.
"Stop! I will shoot!" the soldier yells, but Damon inhales, stabilizes, and puts a bullet through the man's right eye. He crumples backwards, dropping his Desert Eagle, and the girl he was holding hostage also slumps to the ground, and Damon and the others move up to secure her.
"Iku, Shimakaze, scan this floor and confirm we've killed everyone," Damon orders. "Mutsu, Murakumo, guard duty, watch our sixes and report any more hostiles. Okay, Sanford, explain this 'hibernation' shit."
Sanford kneels down next to the girl and props her up with his arms. "You've dealt with computers, kid. 'specially ones with Windows 'n shit like that, eh? You know how they got those options when ya wanna tell it to shut down? Y'know, the sleep, hibernate, shut off, log off options, shit like that? We put in the hibernate thing for the girls as an option, in case there was ever a time when they'd need to be just packed up 'n stored away forever to keep outta the wrong hands. It completely shuts down all vital signs that the ship girls got 'n erases any signature or signal they might give off. If the ship girls who're with us all didn't pick up any signal from this one, she's gotta be in hibernation."
"Okay, so...who the fuck put her in hibernation? All the ship girls I've found anyway weren't in this hibernation bullshit."
"Yer thinkin' good, kid, I like it. Someone needed audio-activation codes to put her in hibernation. Find her, activate her, then put 'er in activation."
Damon growls. "So these fucks were after ship girls," he cracks his knuckles menacingly. "Figures."
"It was kinda obvious after a bit, not gonna lie," Sanford agrees. "In any case, we dunno if they'll send more guys down here, so let's get 'er outta hibernation." He clears his throat. "Ah shit, I don't know this one's name...tell Shimakaze 'n Iku to see if they can find the crate she came from, maybe it's still here and they didn't jus' dump it somewhere..."
Damon relays the message to them, but this is not needed as Amatsukaze enters the room from which the Mexican soldier taking the alleged ship girl hostage and finds two corresponding containers.
"Shoukaku? Today's yer lucky day, you just found another standard carrier, kid," Sanford chuckles.
"Lucky 'r not, it don't make two shits 'a difference if she ain't doin' shit for me, so get to it," Damon orders.
"Yeah, yeah, hang on to yer panties, kid, I don't wanna rush this. Hmmm...let's see...Shoukaku, lift hibernation."
Shoukaku's lips move, and the same robotic monotone that Damon heard from Murakumo when he had initially activated her comes droning out of her lips.
"State user credentials. You have three attempts remaining."
"Jus' like a damn computer," Damon mutters, but Sanford waves him off quickly to shut him up.
"Sanford. Seal Helix Division. Verify integrity of Protocol 3733, Corollary 19."
"Protocol 3733, Corollary 19. Integrity of command confirmed."
"Execute protocol."
"Protocol execution denied. You have two attempts remaining."
Sanford's eyes narrow in disgust, not expecting this sort of response.
"The fuck...? Did someone tamper with this...? Shoukaku, display command prompt."
"Access to command prompt restricted. Access denied. You have one attempt remaining."
Sanford, now pissed off, rolls his eyes.
"Shoukaku, apply override code 81545 and execute Protocol Missouri. Do it, now!"
Shoukaku stops speaking in the robotic tone.
"The hell'd you do?" Damon asks as the other ship girls surround them, looking on either in interested anticipation or uncertain worry.
"It's the hard reset command for the ship girls," Sanford explains. "It's basically like pushin' the power button on a CPU 'til it shuts off 'r pullin' the plug on it. It gets rid 'a the whole hibernation thing. Problem is, she's gonna go back into her activation state, so you'll still hafta shove that knife 'a yers into her head like ya always do."
"Can you, like, not put it that way? It ain't like I made it out to be that way intentionally, asshat."
"Yeah, suuuuure..."
Damon begins the hacking process, piercing Shoukaku's central processing unit, her brain, with his nanoknife. They wait a few until she finally does emerge conscious.
Shoukaku, Shoukaku-Class Standard Carrier.
A thick white shirt with a small v-neck and a thick red skirt tied around her waist by a tight sash that exposes a part of both her hips. A black muneate, or chest protector, like the one Kaga wears, but sporting a different katakana figure than Kaga's. Black thigh-high boots, armored and metallic and knobbed, giving the impression that some sort of ship armament goes there, sporting small retractable propellers behind the shins. Dark yellow eyes and long, flowing pale white hair that sports a red headband over the top of the head, displaying a white circle in the very center, presumably the rising sun symbol of Imperial Japan. The hair sports a curious hue that reminds Damon of the color that you get from mixing milk with water. From an angle in the light coming in from the windows, you could even say Shoukaku's hair has a pale blue tint somehow, but less pronounced than it is on Murakumo's hair.
"You're awake, good," Damon nods as Shoukaku sits up in Sanford's arms, rubbing her head. "Sorry for the short notice, but we're gettin' the hell outta Dodge. Shimakaze, grab Shoukaku's weapons container over there and let's go back to the office building to get Shigure's and Yuudachi's shit too."
"Umm...ohhh, this information isn't organized..." Shoukaku groans, her processing unit a bit shaky from all the sudden transfers of command. "Admiral Polchow, I presume?"
"That's me. We can talk as we move." Damon picks up an M16-A4 assault rifle with a simple red dot sight and puts it in her hands. "This'll help against the baddies."
"H-Huh? What's...what is this, sir...?" Shoukaku is positively baffled by the sight of all these ship girls and Damon and Sanford, if not by the sight of the assault rifle being shoved into her hands by Damon. "I...I don't..."
"Ask questions later, for now, follow us," Damon commands as he spies the sniper rifle on the dead man's back and takes it off his dead body, a Desert Tactical H.T.I. 50 BMG sniper rifle that was responsible for the mysterious first shot they had heard out on the runway earlier. They exit the logistics labs, with Shimakaze towing the container. "Mutsu, prep your memory files for transfer. Shoukaku, open torrents and download the memory files to get caught up on stuff." Mutsu nods and gives Shoukaku her memory files for transfer, and Shoukaku uncertainly accepts the wireless download.
"U-Um...!" Shoukaku stammers, getting Damon's attention. "I-I want to at least introduce myself. I'm Shoukaku, the namesake of the Shoukaku-class aircraft carriers. I will do my best to follow your command with my ship sister and my seniors of the rest of the carrier divisions!" She bows to Damon, who suddenly feels slightly uncomfortable at the sight of seeing a beautiful girl bowing to him. "But I only see Kaga with us. Where is Zuikaku and the others? Are they elsewhere?"
"Errr...well, ya see, we don't know, actually," Damon says. "All the ship girls you see here...that's all I got so far."
Shoukaku stops dead in her tracks. "...Zuikaku..." she whispers. "Wh-What...what happened to Zuikaku?!"
"Before ya start freakin' out, lemme jus' say we don't know where she is. Download those memory files 'n you'll see why," Damon urges, cutting off Shoukaku before she can enter a state of fully-fledged panic. "You jus' gotta hope that she's doin' okay somewhere, hopefully no one's gotten to her yet, I guess."
Shoukaku purses her lips tightly, her mind becoming occupied with thoughts of concern and worry over the safety and whereabouts of her ship sister, Zuikaku. They reach the office building again, where Shimakaze places Shoukaku's weapon container onto the ground next to Shigure's and Yuudachi's where they were left behind. Damon orders his new ship girls to get equipped with their gear, leaving Amatsukaze and Shimakaze behind with them to help them get equipped, and Damon and Sanford and the other ship girls backtrack to the hidden weapons cache that Sanford's group had stumbled upon and begin moving the weapons and ammo into the Merlin helicopter out on the runway.
"Fuckin' a, man," Damon marvels at the shiny new McMillan TAC-50 bolt action fifty-caliber sniper rifle. "Never guessed I'd end up with three fiddy cal snipers."
"Yeah, so stop yer bitchin' that you ain't well armed enough," Sanford laughs. "I mean, dude! Everyone's fuckin' armed with military-grade guns. No one's runnin' around with a damn .22 peashooter like the average redneck out in the North Carolinian backwoods. Off to a strong motherfuckin' start, yo."
Damon, Sanford, Mutsu, Iku, and Murakumo take a few trips relaying back and forth from the weapons cache to the Merlin, loading the helicopter with their new guns and ammunition and packing them neatly in the cargo hold as Kaga comes out from her post overlooking the runway and joins to help them. As Damon securely stacks the case of H&K-417 Designated Marksman Rifles to finish the loading process, the new ship girls, following Amatsukaze and Shimakaze, regroup with them at the Merlin helicopter. At Damon's request, Shigure, Yuudachi, and Shoukaku display their full ship loadouts.
Shigure sports two 12.7cm cannon barrels pointing straight forward over her shoulders from the gearbox on her back that is also secured around her waist by means of a metal band, providing a ninety-degree angle of fire in front of her but unable to rotate freely by themselves. On the back of the lower half of her right arm, Shigure wields a single-barreled 12.7cm cannon that is physically bolted into her arm and able to be used at any time.
Yuudachi is similarly armed, but her 12.7cm cannon barrels are mounted on circular platforms behind her elbows on the sides of her gearbox, which also sports a mast. Like her fellow ship sister Shigure, Yuudachi also is armed with a similarly placed third 12.7cm barrel on her right arm. Yuudachi's gearbox-mounted cannons also provide ninety degree angles of fire with forty-five degrees of verticality, but like Shigure's, they cannot point backwards and relies on Yuudachi's own movement for accurate fire.
Shoukaku is virtually almost identically armed like Kaga, the same specialized crossbow and a similar flight deck that is slightly smaller than Kaga's flight deck, but she only has 40 crossbow bolts. Like Kaga, her gearbox is also very large, loaded with all the radar towers for her planes.
"Very nice," Damon nods, unable to really get over the sight of his ship girls being decked out in their ship armaments. "Okay, put them away and stay here at this heli 'n watch over it. Sanford, let's go." Damon heads over to the trio of helicopters that the Mexican soldiers had flown into the base in with Sanford. "You can fly one 'a these, right?" he asks as they reach the first such Bell M-412 choppers.
"Yeah, 'course. With like, maybe twenty percent chance 'a success?"
"Can you like, not troll me right now?"
"Bad joke, sheesh, stop bein' such a tight-ass."
Damon flashes him a middle finger as he investigates the helicopters for anything useful. Sanford in the meantime inspects the choppers to see which one of them is in the best condition for flying, and picking one, enters the cockpit and checks the controls. Damon is about to shut hop out of the passenger hold of the third Bell M-412 helicopter, but something catches his eye in the dark corner in the back of the heli. Intrigued, he pulls it out and hops out into the slightly hazy sunlight to take a better look at it.
A large plastic bag, full of cubes. Damon pulls a cube out, suddenly realizing what these are that he's holding.
"Sanford!" Damon yells. "Git'cher ass out here, now!"
Sanford immediately hops out of the helicopter. "I can tell when people're bein' knappy-headed fucks 'n when they're bein' fuckin' serious, kid," Sanford says, smirking. "This better be good."
Damon tosses him the cube in his hand. "Tell me what the hell that shit is."
Sanford only needs one glance at it to know what it is as well. "Tell me that was a rhetorical question jus' now," he smirks even harder.
"Of fuckin' course it was. That's a fuckin' navitasium cube. This entire fuckin' bag's fulla this shit, dude!"
Baffled, Sanford peers inside to confirm. "Uhhh...well, now this shit's goin' weird. How the fuck did the Mexis get their hands on this?"
"You're askin' me, dude? Really? Fuckin' really?"
"'a course, you asshole, I don't know the goddamn answer, 'a course I'ma ask someone else hopin' they got a clue!"
"Well I don't, so fuck you. I'm keepin' this...how many are there..." Damon quickly counts the number of cubes inside. "There's like, seven. Are these things even charged? They still got juice in 'em?"
"Give 'em to the girls 'n see if they can use 'em," Sanford suggests, and they return to the Merlin together.
"Yo, we found more of this navitasium shit in one 'a the other helis," Damon calls out to his small fleet of ship girls and starts tossing the cubes to the girls nearest to him. "All of you, load these 'n see if you can use 'em. Dunno if they still got juice 'r not, I wanna find out."
Murakumo, Amatsukaze, Shigure, Yuudachi, Shimakaze, Mutsu, and Iku load the cubes into their stomachs.
"Mine's at around 82% battery," Murakumo reports. "It feels like they've been used already."
The other ship girls agree, reporting similar results.
"Okay...this really bugs the fuck outta me," Damon mulls. "Not only did those Mexicans know 'bout you ship girls, but they also have access to these cube things that've already been used. What the hell does that say, huh?"
"Er...that there may be more ship girls?" Shigure asks, a bit timidly.
"Bingo, bing bing bing bing, we got ourselves a winner!" Damon claps his hands a couple times. "That's fuckin' right! You ship girls ain't no secret anymore. I'm willin' to bet that TAC-50 in the back there that people like me're out there, runnin' 'round tryin'a get you ship girls. Well, to fuckin' hell with 'em, I ain't lettin' 'em get what they want. Everyone in the heli, we're goin' to the next base! Murakumo," he stops his first destroyer as the others begin to climb into the passenger hold of the Merlin. "I need you to go with Sanford in his heli."
"Huh? What other heli?" Murakumo looks confused.
"We're gonna take one 'a the helis that the Mexican dudes came in. We might as well, y'know."
"Oh, okay. But why don't you guys have your own radios?" she asks, lowering her AK-47.
"Dunno. Speakin' a radios..." Damon pulls the radio that he took from the soldiers in the wrecked office building. "Some fat help you were, fuckin' piece 'a shit." He tosses it on the ground after glaring at it. Murakumo follows Sanford to one of the Bell M-412 helicopters as Damon starts up the main engine of the Merlin.
"Shoukaku!" Damon yells towards the back as the girls get comfortable in their seats. "Grab that TAC-50 and put the M16 in the case! Kaga, you too, grab that HTI! Those're yours!"
Unsure of what to do with them exactly, Shoukaku and Kaga retrieve their respective weapons and sit in their seats awkwardly with their oversized fifty-caliber rifles standing in between their legs. Kaga, glancing at Shoukaku, notices that the latter is trembling slightly.
"Shoukaku," Kaga says, "what is wrong?"
Shoukaku shakes her head. "I-It...it's nothing, Kaga-senpai. It's just...I heard that...Zuikaku has not been found yet. So...so I can't help but worry a little..."
Kaga reaches out a hand and pats Shoukaku on her left shoulder as the Merlin lifts off the ground.
"You and I the same, Shoukaku. Akagi-san is also missing."
Shoukaku sharply turns to Kaga, appearing amazed at the fact that Akagi has not been found either. "What is going on with this world...? Where are all our sisters and comrades...?" she whispers.
"The memory files should serve to give you answers; if they are insufficient, you can always speak with the Admiral. But it is in everyone's interest to find everyone as quickly as possible," Kaga says reassuringly. "Do not worry, we will recover our family with due time.
Shoukaku nods slowly.
"I pray that we do, Kaga-senpai..."
The Merlin, now joined by Sanford's Bell M-412 helicopter, fly towards their next destination.