Lao and Chitose waved goodbye to the escorts as we made the turn in the river. The few visible men waved back at the two Kanmusu, stopping only when Hakone and Diane joined in, which was a bit of a dick-move, but whatever.
We'd just passed the town of Krong Strung Treng, why they needed three names for the place I had no idea, but it sat right on the turnoff from the Mekong river going into the Tonle Sekong. A river that branched off and would bring us almost as far as the Eastern border with Southern Vietnam. Further, if we didn't have to worry about Jersey, apparently, it fed right into a reservoir almost smack-dab in the middle of the Pleiku province there.
I licked my cone of Vanilla soft-serve, it wasn't the best I'd ever had, just decent, especially in this heat. It was in one of those small flat-bottomed cones that always got your hands sticky, and in the humid jungle river, it was a bit of a race to see if you could eat it before it melted, or liberally sprinkled in stuck blackflies.
It was a race that the others were determined to win, by the looks of it. My ships gobbled down the icecream I'd given them within minutes, once they'd figured out how to eat it. Anne was still nursing a brain freeze from when she'd just shoved the whole thing into her face-hole and started to chew.
I dreaded to think of the scene she'd make the first time she ate a banana.
Chitose and Diane were far more sedate about it, though Diane had to be told that you had to lick it first, before she repeated Anne's mistake. Hakone, of course, got one that hadn't been smooshed into the cone properly, and I was subjected to the saddest pair of glowing blue eyes I'd ever seen when her icecream went in the muddy drink at her first lick.
"Aw don't be sad! I got more! Here!" Apparently my crew couldn't take the sad puppy dog eyes either, as a fresh cone was quickly given to me from...
Well, best not to think about that.
Hakone took the fresh cone, and was far more careful with it as she beamed at me, "Thanks Georgia! You're the best!"
"I can't believe you had actual icecream this entire time!" Chitose said, cruising along beside Lao, who was making the kind of noises eating her cone that would never make a PG rating.
"Ohhh my god, its good to finally get some of that!" The Frigate said, licking off her fingers as she ate the last of her cone, "I haven't had proper ice cream since I was awakened!"
"Really? you'd think you'd have been able to get some at least, I mean I get there's rationing but-" I started.
"Oh yeah! I could have when I was staying in Long Xuyen! But it wouldn't be US Navy icecream. And good luck finding an American ship big enough to have a machine here! Well, one that isn't trying to blow your damn head off anyway." Lao interrupted, "Like, I'm fairly sure, tonnage wise, I'm the biggest Kanmusu in Vietnam aside from Chitose!"
"What about me? I'm fatter than she is! ...Somehow." I said.
"Hey! First off, you are an Abyssal, not a Kanmusu, second, I'll have you know I've actually lost weight!" Chitose squawked, "I used to weigh almost three-thousand tonnes more back when I was a Light Carrier!"
"W̵h̶a̴t̵'̵s̷ ̴w̵r̵o̵n̵g̵ ̶w̶i̷t̷h̷ ̷b̷e̸i̵n̸g̸ ̷h̸e̴a̴v̷y̷?" The forty-thousand-plus tonne Anne asked.
"Absolutely nothing Anne." I said, giving Chitose the stink-eye, "it just means there's more of you to love."
Chitose stammered as she tried to make a come-back, but it was Hakone that spoke next.
"So what is fat anyway? Is it like some of the humans we saw in town with the really wide hulls? Does it mean they have more tonnage?" She asked curiously.
I put both of my hands together, palm up under my nose as I assumed a thinking pose, "Technically?" I brought my hands down, "Yes. though, come to think of it, I don't think I've ever seen a fat Kanmusu OR Abyssal, except for maybe those Wa-class transports we saw, and I'd honestly say they were are more 'curvy' than 'morbidly obese', what's up with that?"
All that (slightly rhetorical) question got was a round of shrugs and "I don't know"'s as we continued downriver.
Ta-01 watched the trio of human craft pass by, sheltered with the rest of her forces in the low-hanging foliage. It was a good thing, she reflected, that she'd chosen ships with legs for this, or they'd have been left behind a long time ago.
The most probable heading for the enemy vessels had been Châu Đốc, at the Vietnamese/Cambodian border, but after scoping the town from a distance for the better part of a day, they'd found no presence of the enemy fleet.
They had, however, found several spots where the Battleship-Himes earlier bombardment and Kitty-Hawk's airstrikes had been off a tad, missing their targets and leaving several key structures unscathed, like the bridge that spanned the river that the border was drawn along. They sent off a message with the grid coordinate corrections promptly. By the time they'd begun to move again, they could hear distant explosions in the distance behind them.
Ru-08 would have started adding her own firepower to the carnage then and there, but Ta-01 had convinced (practically begged) her not to give away their position, the Standard had acquiesced easily enough, though not without her share of complaining.
After that, the small fleet of ships had crept along the Bassac for a time, keeping close to the embankment in case they needed to hide quickly, but for some reason, there weren't any patrol boats whatsoever. It was like the humans had forgotten the river even existed! One that shot straight into a major city, if the maps were any indication. That was when they hit their first roadblock, well, river block.
It was a mass grave. Ships, lined up and sunk in the river, stretched from one side clear to the other. Their corpses formed a barrier they had to cross, and they'd tried.
But something was watching them, and it did not want them there.
Ru-08 had tried to bull through, but had begun to feel weak when she grabbed onto one of the wrecks to move it, she quickly let go, and wouldn't go near it again, the normally boastful ship visibly shaken. The Re-class then suggested they blast their way through, but cannon fire would have alerted anyone within a hundred miles that they were there...
That and they all had the vague feeling all it would do was piss something off. It was a creeping, sinking feeling in your holds, like that moment right after you'd realized you'd blundered into a minefield on the river.
Or when you realized you had to bring Jersey-Hime bad news.
They ended up going around, it took a while, and they had to backtrack on the endless web of irrigation canals several times to avoid people, even had to chase down and kill a few that saw them, but eventually, they'd made it into the Boeng Cheung Loung, a lake that branched off into the Bassac again just South of Phnom Penh.
By the time they'd made it that far, the sun was setting, another day gone, they used the night to their advantage, darting across the river before moving North, into another lake, this one the Boeng Thum. They'd moored themselves in amongst the reeds for the night, catching what sleep they could, listening to the frogs chirp in the night lit up only by their bridge lights, before they too were turned off.
They caught a break on the fourth day of their chase, having used the previous night to cross onto the East side of the Mekong-proper, a flurry of human military activity had-had them worrying briefly that they'd been spotted, but some low-flying recon planes had revealed the true culprit upriver.
Abyssals, at least four, and Kanmusu as well, including a Vietnamese Frigate that matched the description of the one that had been at Can Tho when it had fallen as well as the Japanese Seaplane tender that had opposed them at Xuyen. Of the Abyssals, one was a pretty stock-standard Ri-class, while two of the other Abyssal ships were unrecognizable, one, simply because she'd never seen the class before, though whatever she was it was a submarine, a big one. Which honestly explained a fair amount of the battle for Xuyen in retrospect. The other? Looked like someone had blown-up and stitched together several ships... poorly.
More importantly, one of those four Abyssals was quite clearly and visibly Ta-04.
They couldn't move on them quite yet, not without the entire Cambodian army coming down on top of them, but now that they knew their location? They could afford to wait. They hunkered down within the treeline on the riverbanks opposite of the city as the enemy fleet moved in, flanked by human patrol craft. It was unnatural, seeing her sister casually cruising alongside human-piloted boats like that, as if she didn't have a care in the world. It made 01 wonder just how far back this betrayal went, and for how long it had been planned.
Why not tell her anything?
Regardless, they'd waited a day, planning their attack on the City if the enemy fleet didn't move on, only for daylight to come, and the vessels to leave almost immediately. Headed upriver with the same three human patrol boats from yesterday.
They let the fleet pull around the bend in the river, before starting to follow. Once the fleet was far enough from human support, they'd strike. Sink 04, take her bridge as proof, and save 01's own neck in the process. 01 was sure Ru-08 would be disappointed at that.
Maybe they'd get some answers while they were at it, too.