Authors' Notes: I (Warp) have a Ko-Fi now at /2375DDLLGBXNI! If you like this story, would you kindly help defray the cost of the art?
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CHAPTER 34
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{Katana Zero Original Soundtrack - Rain on Brick}
Spotify track/2jRKOHOLv8b60sy6ypdUIk
The rain was noisily falling in great sheets that added a fuzzy quality to the dark of night as the inbound Skyranger made its approach to FLEACT Yokosuka. Within friendly airspace, its navigation lights were on without fear of untoward attention. This time of the year was supposed to be out of the typhoon season, but Oowatatsumi no Kami did not seem to have received the memo.
Minami watched from the, for want of a better word, terminal building of the base's heliport. FLEACT Yokosuka didn't have a full-length runway or other facilities for servicing fixed-wing aircraft the way, say, MCAS Iwakuni did. There was no prominent control tower, for one, not that this would have made any difference in a war; China had almost certainly acquired the target coordinates for the cruise missiles earmarked for it by now and wouldn't be needing any last-minute visual confirmation. That said, under the present circumstances, the Chinese missile with her name on it was far from mind.
Even with the high-powered lighting present, the rain still made seeing much difficult. The howling of the wind wasn't so powerful as to drown out all sound within the building, but it was still loud enough to make itself heard as a background buzz through the gaps. The thermostat had been turned up out of consideration for the change-of-season cold, but the nervous energy filling the room seemed to be doing enough to keep everyone within warm.
Kita was seated, listlessly staring at the floor in front of him. He was not much younger than her and not the kind of prodigy that could make captain-equivalent before 40 in peacetime, but the events of the past few hours seemed to have undone all the rejuvenative effects of the anagathics. She hadn't known him well before all this started, especially since she'd never come to invest overmuch in the more social aspects of being an officer. She did, however, remember he had talked about managing to avoid any loss due to either the backlash to Yamata's handiwork or the Terror, only for his luck to finally run out when his hometown had been one of those hit by the Great East Japan Earthquake. The losses then hadn't adequately prepared him for this.
Nothing had adequately prepared any of them for this.
Nothing had adequately prepared any of them for the death of what looked and sounded like an adolescent girl under one's command, whatever the rational knowledge otherwise.
Minami was, in an uncomfortably twisted way, glad that Takanami wasn't a Natural Born. No family to visit or write a letter to. She'd written too many already over the years, mourned enough peers that she'd known for years if not decades before abyssal shot and shell had reduced them to red slurries now irrevocably mixed into the earth and sea. If this incident was a reliable indicator of where things were going, there were going to be even more ahead.
Minami and Kita's staffs were chattering away in urgent whispers behind her, poring over laptops and tablets as they tried to figure out how to best present the bad news.
She hated how manipulative that sounded, even though she knew full well that the management of morale was one of the most important things in war. Officer training had taught that history was full of examples of theoretically superior forces that had failed from weakness of will. The last thing anyone needed was for some loose-lipped junior personnel to say something carelessly that might get misconstrued. Granted, she was the sort of person for whom threading the needle between clamming up entirely and tactless honesty remained something that, even after all these years as a senior officer, still demanded deliberate effort.
The combination of the weather and the ambience left her in a contemplative mood. It was in times like this that she felt most keenly the absence of Maya's rowdy energy. Not that it could be helped; the shipgirl was much more needed on the frontlines than driving a desk.
She was no stranger to death. Far from it. She'd known all too well ever since the earthquake that had apparently taken her birth parents from her and caused the head injury that had left a chasm in her memory as to what had come before. Officially, they had never been found, but by now more than enough years had passed for that to be a moot point.
She'd been old enough to be grateful, though, that one of those caught up in the disaster had not only risked his life to rescue her instead of saving his own skin first, but had gone more than the extra mile also to check up on her afterwards and adopt her too. Her gratitude had only grown after the thorough checkup she had received afterwards revealed lingering motor nerve damage from the earthquake-inflicted injuries that could have degenerated had it not been caught early. Learning more about the many hurdles that had to be overcome had only served to further instil the desire to repay all that had been done for her, and this sense of duty and selfless service had brought her to the door of Naval Academy Etajima even though the shadow of Yamata had been but years young then.
The thought of the cursed one and the stain he and his fellow conspirators had left on Japan's honour made her blood boil even now, though none of that showed externally. That he had engineered the breaking of some of the nation's most tightly adhered-to taboos had not helped, patent denials from China and India regarding the involvement of their officials and operatives in the plot notwithstanding.
Was there some connection between Yamata's actions and what the abyssal that claimed to be Northampton said that the abyssals' motives were, she wondered. Both shared the commonality of stemming from the same decades-old grudges, but if the former prompted the latter, why wait more than 20 years? Was there some mystic symbolism behind waiting for the 81st anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack? She was not ashamed to admit that she was no specialist in the sorcerous ways. Her position meant she had neither the time nor the wherewithal to worry about the minutiae of the mystical mechanics. That was why JEXRA went to all that trouble to deal with the specialists and their varied quirks.
Thinking about these possibilities reminded Minami of something else still fresh on her mind. With Riptide out of immediate danger, she had gone back to her office to do some urgent checks while waiting for them to return, only to end up dozing off at her desk as the exhaustion and stress of the operation had finally caught up to her. In her dreams, she had seen some sort of vision showing in chilling detail just what would have eventually happened if Riptide had never been sent into the lion's den. She'd awoken to find herself shivering with cold sweat, now possessed of a Truth that was at once slippery whenever she tried to write it down or share with others and yet also burnt indelibly into her mind for the rest of her days. She couldn't help wondering if Takanami had received a similarly apocalyptic vision that had steeled her to go out with a bang rather than a whimper.
That knowledge did little to wash away the guilt.
The Skyranger began its final descent, and Minami's XO came over to open the door for her, so that the party might await Riptide on the porch. It would be unseemly to remain in the comfort of the lobby, especially since safety regulations regarding downwash meant that the Skyranger had had to set down out in the open far from the buildings, and that in turn meant Riptide had to walk through the pouring rain to reach her.
The RAN MEDEVAC Skyranger had taken Riptide to Cairns for stabilisation and triage first. There, the assessment had been that the damage was not so critical as to need immediate treatment and that they were better off returning to homeport to seek the attention of a dedicated repair ship. Thus, after a short dip in the repair baths to handle the most critical damage, followed by changing of bandages, Aosagibi One had come to bring them back to Yokosuka, having received a transmission while still en route to the main force that with Northampton's extraction, there was no longer any point in picking up reinforcements.
Eventually, the Skyranger landed and its engines came to a stop. The passenger cabin ramp came down with unseemly efficiency and Riptide disembarked.
Minami could remember quite vividly, despite the fuzziness surrounding everything else of her life before the fateful earthquake, that as it had laid her low, she had seen some white-glowing winged humanoid, beautiful in an otherworldly manner. In hindsight, the angelic vision had probably been a hallucination caused by the head injuries.
Fast forward decades, and she had found herself downed once again, this time by abyssal bombs on the first day of their attacks. She had lain helpless, pinned by debris and furniture unfeelingly squeezing the breath from her lungs, vision gradually being overcome by darkness from a fallen tile to the head. All she had been able to do was deliriously apologise between shallow breaths from a parched throat and dusty lips to Akio for leaving him behind and Yōji and Chihoko for not being able to see them grow up.
Then, for the second time in her life, she had seen an angel. In the darkness of the base with its destroyed lighting, the angel had come wreathed in a blindingly bright, blazing aura, breathtaking, inspiring awe and dread in equal measure. With strength to surpass any strongman, it had picked up and thrown away that which had been crushing her like they were pebbles.
That had been no hallucination.
That had been her first encounter with a shipgirl.
Compared to that, Riptide now had more in common with the many refugees she'd seen in the course of her career than some angel, whether stereotypical or Bible-accurate. Swathed in bandages, some dark red with the blood of reopened wounds, supporting each other while limping down the ramp, they made for a terrible sight.
The sight of bedraggled people displaced by disaster, having lost everything short of the clothes on their backs, had been ubiquitous no matter which of the many relief operations Minami's sense of duty had driven her to volunteer for. The pain of injury and loss had been clear on faces for all to see, and whatever the stereotypes the rest of the world believed about Japan, there had been no attempt at putting up tatemae under those conditions. Perhaps because of her own familiarity with this sort of thing, she'd never grown numb to the suffering of others. She hadn't lost any limbs the day the attacks had started, but she'd seen peers and subordinates who had, and the stark sights had stuck with her even after said cripples had had the limbs regrown.
Kita's shoulders slumped even further, and his XO looked at him concernedly.
For all the not-quite-human behaviours, all the whispers that never amounted to anything when investigated, all the rational knowledge that there were younger grandmothers, outwardly these did not appear to be adults, and to see them hurt this badly was heartwrenching in a way that no number of grown men or women in agony - and Minami had seen far too many of those - could elicit. There was no missing the absence of Takanami or mistaking the gap Riptide left in its ranks, like a crudely improvised facsimile of a missing man formation.
Naganami was in front, robotically taking shambling steps forward, eyes never lifting from the ground. There was none of her usual verve to be seen in her mechanical motions, eyes obscured by the shadow her hair cast over her face.
Or should it be Mika Nagamine?
Minami hadn't suspected anything at first. When Naganami had first shown up, the shipgirl had given Minami no reason to suspect that she was anything other than a returnee fresh from beyond. In those chaotic days immediately after the Blood Week when mankind had finally had a chance to take a breather, but before the standing up of the Fleet Kanmusu Force or Task Force VALKYRIE or indeed any systematic attempt at organising shipgirls into a coherent force at all, running background checks on the newly-returned self-appointed protectors of mankind had not been a high priority. There were a few Natural Borns whose Reawakening had been prompted by these first attacks, but they had all openly asserted their birth identities, daring any to question their humanity, and either had identification on hand or could be easily looked up. The thought of a Natural Born not doing so was still as unthinkable now as it had been then.
What had actually happened to induce her Reawakening? Minami might not be some specialist, but she'd read enough reports to know that for Natural Borns, the Avatar usually receded after the Reawakening and let the original personality retake control. What carnage and horror had she witnessed courtesy of the abyssal attacks that had broken her, such that Naganami the small-S ship had had to take over while trying to kintsugi together Mika Nagamine's psyche? Minami still didn't know.
If any tells had resurfaced later, after Minami had grown accustomed to Naganami's behaviour, they must have been subtle. Subtle enough that, like the proverbial frog in the slowly-boiling pot, she had not consciously registered their appearance. Between handling Kita and the other commanding officers of KanFlot One's subunits, dealing with what her staff gave, and coordinating not just with Ishikawa and the other KanFlots in the FKF, but also with the other tenants of Yokosuka and Kaishō Kamiki's staff, she'd been pulled in enough directions that she had lacked the spare capacity to go over the lives of her subordinates with as fine-toothed a comb as might have been necessary. Neither had any of the frontline personnel whose job it was to pay attention to this sort of thing - MPs, medical and psychological aides, various other support staff - reported concerns.
Even if something had been noticed, Minami wondered whether it would really have been appropriate to confront the shipgirl with her suspicions. Or would pulling the rug out from under the feet of that house of cards only have done more harm than good?
{Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Original Soundtrack feat. LiSA - Homura}
YouTube watch?v=4DxL6IKmXx4
{Mi-mission failed,} Naganami-no, Mika Nagamine said without pausing in her zombielike shamble at a volume not loud enough to be called a shout, yet one audible even over the rain. Still weary and weak with pain and blood loss despite the stabilising repair dip, her stuttering slipped and slid between her true accent and that which she had been subconsciously putting on for so long. {We'll-we'll get them ne-ne-nex-}
Mika started to wobble, and Minami dashed out into the rain without hesitation. She paid no heed to the shouted alarm of her subordinates, her cover falling off her head in her haste, or the rainwater that rapidly soaked her hair and clothes, the cold forgotten as she ran to the younger girl and caught her before she could collapse.
Mika weakly pawed at Minami's blouse and began weeping loudly into her chest, words dissolving into incoherent groanings. Without the slightest sign of self-consciousness or concern for the blood now soiling her white uniform, Minami embraced her tightly, clenching teeth as she held back guilty and sorrowful tears of her own.
{I let Takanami die!} Mika wailed. {It's my fault! It's all my fault! I got her killed!}
{No,} Minami murmured as she soothingly rubbed the back of the girl's head. "Killed", the analytical part of her mind she couldn't turn off even now noted. Not "sunk". {It's mine.}
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Authors' Notes: Shizuka Minami remains the property of Salbazier from SpaceBattles. Our thanks for the assistance with this short but difficult chapter.