It was a half-hour of frantically stripping the guns off of every floating wreck around me and reorganizing the scattered friendly destroyers to send them off to regroup with the actual convoy before I decided to head back to the ship.
I stepped back up onto our home, wincing as I was helped up by a worried Hakone, before together we lifted all the crap I'd scavenged on-board from the battle in the brief time I'd had. Chitose was plucking her float-planes out of the water around us. The tactic she'd come up with, launching the additional planes stored in our home once she'd gotten her internal wings off, had been incredibly effective. I honestly wouldn't have expected better from an actual escort carrier with how many birds she'd flown at the enemy raiders. But there was a downside. She had to individually collect each and every plane via crane. Her old planes anyway, the Kai's were durable enough and round enough you could just pick them up like a ball. Damn mouthy baseballs.
"Are you OK Georgia? Your side is dented!" Hakone noted. Chitose looked up from her work at that, eyes widening as she hurriedly scooped up the rest of her craft and came over.
"Please don't tell me its anything we need a dry-dock for, we just got out of one!" She said.
"Nah Nah, don't worry about it. I just need to chow down on some bars of Abyss-steel and I should be fine." I said, it didn't stop both of the worrywarts from hauling my tiny arse down to the hold to do it. After I'd been seated and the minor repairs were fully underway I turned to Chitose.
"Hey, can you set a course following those retreating raiders? Try to keep a recon plane up above too so we aren't right on top of them when they reach their base." She nodded.
"I'm already tracking them with a pair, they should have enough fuel for another five hours before I have to replace them. Are you SURE you're OK? You hit that Ta class pretty hard..." I just nodded, mouth currently full of ingot, before swallowing.
"Oh come on, I didn't worry over you nearly this much when you were a stump! Yeah, she just got an elbow into me, stung and winded me for a bit, but it didn't get past my outer hull! It hardly even caused a leak Chitose! stop worrying about me so much!" Chitose looked a bit indignant, before walking off to the wheelhouse to start up the ship. But not before grumbling a parting shot.
"If me and Hakone don't worry over you, who will?" OK, that was fair.
I finished off the Kanmusu equivalent of a cancer-ridden mars-bar as Hakone sat down next to me, it seemed like she wanted to say something but didn't quite know-how. "Well?" I said bluntly. She looked over at me. "You look like you have something to say, spill." She started to fidget with the hem of her shirt as the Ri class spoke.
"I didn't feel very useful in that battle. I'm sorry that all I did was stand around and watch Chitose-Sama, she helped a lot with her float-planes, and you killed a battleship!" Sama, huh? Must be some leftover quirks from the Japanese to English language hotfix we'd put in. Wait, what was she going on about?
"Are you serious?" I said incredulously. Hakone looked up at that, barely meeting my eyes as I continued. "The only reason Chitose was as awesome as she was is because she didn't have to watch out for herself!" I went to wrap an arm around the girl's shoulder, but one: She was too damn tall for it to work, and B: I was still repairing my hull on that side. "I've been told that that being an escort for a carrier is a big responsibility! What if a sub had snuck past me and attacked her? What if they had more aircraft or another pack of destroyers and looped around and tried to blow up the house eh?" I patted the long bench we both sat on to emphasize. Hakone seemed to realize the point I was trying to make, letting out a small smile as she sorta... leaned over and flopped her arms on me. Luckily her massive arm-rigging was leaned against the stairs up to the wheelhouse. "What are you doing?" I said in a deadpan.
"Hugging you!" She said cheerfully.
I didn't want to tell her she was doing it wrong, so I didn't.
"So that's the base huh?" It was four hours later, and the enemy remnant had come to a stop. We had kept back as far as we could while still keeping contact with the recon planes trailing along behind the fleet. And we had come to anchor in a grotto two islands over. From the human-made GPS attached to the ship, the area they were sitting in was just a ball of static. Chitose explained that human equipment, anything beyond a certain tech level anyway, just didn't 'Work' around abyssal's, blaming it on some kind of radiation that came off us naturally that interfered with non-fairy electrical systems. Personally I blamed Spooky Deep-Sea Magical Bullcrap, or SDSMB for short. "I have my Tomahawks, but we'll need a proper visual to get anything close to accurate hits. Chitose, you 'see' anything with your third-eye plane mojo?" Chitose looked a bit puzzled for some reason, but gave a reply:
"I'm seeing the Abyssal base. It looks like they have multiple large coastal guns overlooking and covering a small harbor. The fleet we defeated is there, as well as a few other ships, There's a couple of Ne-class Heavy cruisers, a Na-class... wait, there's something over by the main jetty, It's pretty big, might be a capital ship." Honestly, I feel like I'm at a psychic's seance! She's holding her hands up to her brow and everything! "Ah! They have a fleet Carrier!" Chitose blinked, before coming out of her little trance and looking at us. "They have a Wo-class standard Carrier moored at the main jetty, I have to pull my recon planes back before she notices them and gets a CAP up and running." My Captain Interrupted Chitose in my mind, stating that we could get me a line of sight without having to risk her planes or having to deal with guesstimating artillery coordinates.
"How? I thought at her." The little woman in my head called two of my crew into her office, introducing the two uniformed women as the ships (therefore my) UAV operators. "Whats a UAV?" I said aloud, Hakone and Chitose giving me funny looks as I talked to myself. About twenty minutes of rough explanation and hurried preparation later, we all sat looking at the ...thing. It looked like a tiny engine with four helicopter rotors on each corner. It was dwarfed by the operators, who themselves, were only three inches tall.
"I can't believe the Americans make unmanned aircraft so...small," Chitose said, all of us looking down at the teeny tiny little drone sat on our gally's table, none of us dared touch it, it looked fragile. My two drone operators fiddled with it, before standing up and going to the comically oversized computer they'd dragged out of me in cases, it had joysticks and everything! The little drone, itself only 2 inches across, rose up after a minute, before darting up the stairway like a dragonfly.
"..."
"Hakone, go open a window for the drone to get out." Hakone left as one of the drone operators facepalmed in embarrassment.
The drones that Georgia has in this arent the new "Blackwings" under development, though that would be pretty freakin sweet, but small Pelican UAV's used by a specific portion of her crew.