Wednesday, March 12th, 2014.
Saturday just can't come fast enough, can it?
Sure enough, like Big had foretold, I got today's detailed reports from HQ, compiled from the post-action mission report I'd sent to them yesterday. Battleship Symbiotic Hime, as they called the new Abyssal lifeform. So the English translation's pretty much spot-on with this one.
Satellite photos confirm that Able Four and Baker Two are basically leveled and utterly wrecked. If they really want to build those manufacturing bases, it's going to take them some time, that's for sure. And while we don't know how long it takes for an Abyssal ship girl like Battleship Symbiotic Hime (I'll be nicknaming her Symbiotic Hime from now on), it's a safe guess to assume that constructing another one of her's also going to take some time for the Abyssals.
Perfect time to rethink our strategy and recover from the temporary (but not really any less tragic) loss of Samidare.
By this point, my arms are feeling almost back up to par as before they got pulled out of their sockets by Kuubo-Hime (who's called Jenna now) and Suzuya. All I need to contend with are occasional pangs of pain and make sure I don't strain them too hard or make any really sudden movements, and they should get back to normal. This means that I can finally do all of my paperwork by myself without having Ooyodo handle the majority of it. Ooyodo, while happy that my arms were recovering, felt a bit sad that she couldn't help me directly in my office anymore.
I guess I should try to come up with something she can do for me. I don't know what, though. In times like this, I'm too self-reliant for anyone else's good. Ooyodo put it pretty well like this:
"If the Admiral is doing so much of the work to the point where his own secretary cannot do her job properly, then he seldom has a need for a secretary!"
So I suggested perhaps I ought to dismiss the position of secretary ship altogether as a joke to see what her reaction would be like, and Ooyodo nearly fainted just from the thought. I had her sit down on the couch as she recovered from the shock, and she had the thousand-yard stare going on. I guess I shouldn't make jokes about abolishing the secretary ship position anymore if I don't want to inadvertently deal automatic critical damage to Ooyodo.
The position of secretary ship is serious business.
Shortly after lunch, the usual MV-22B Osprey landed back at the Six-Pack, and Big and Sanford came out to pick up Samidare...or more accurately, what's left of her. Big said that it's going to suck big time for them after he saw how badly Samidare got ripped up, since constructing entire new limbs is a lot more painstaking than just fixing what's been damaged. I asked them why Wakaba and Suzuya hadn't been delivered today, and Big said that they were testing some augmentations with those two and that they still needed a few more days to gather enough data to streamline those augmentations and perfect them for combat readiness. But Big said that they will arrive here on Friday night, the day before the projected assassination date.
My assassination date, mind you.
After they departed back for the West Coast, I called the fleet together into Shinsengumi, since the izakaya's honestly a more comfortable place to have a fleet-wide meeting like this. As we sat around in the tables and the counters while Houshou broke out the Ramune bottles, I told the fleet that I considered the death of any ship girl to be a major mistake on behalf of the entire fleet, including me, the Commander, and that such an occurrence is a mistake that needs to be rectified immediately.
I began with myself: after re-evaluating my strategy for Operation Blackout, I admitted that having the fleet hit three places at once was probably the biggest mistake that I made. I had made the decision to have the fleet hit three places at once under the mentality that the faster we destroy the Abyssal manufacturing bases, the faster we eliminate their capacity and infrastructure to build dangerous and powerful Abyssal lifeforms like Kuubo-Hime and Symbiotic Hime. But obviously, as events had shown, the major flaw in that strategy was the fact that we had no idea how close Able Four, Baker Two, and Baker Three were to completing whatever they were building. The fleet got lucky at Able Four and Baker Two: they reached those places before those Abyssal lifeforms could finish construction. Not so with Baker Three, and the result was that Samidare got blown to pieces, literally. TL;DR: I rushed this attack. It would have been much better if I just took my time and picked off those bases one by one, maybe a max of two bases a night. It's not like there was any rush for us to destroy those bases, but merely the thought of the Abyssal fleet strengthening itself by constructing more and more of their wicked powerful ship girls was enough to send in the fleet all willy-nilly. I concluded that it's better to take our time getting rid of their bases, and if they happen to gain more ship girls of their own, let them do so, and we'll study their new ship girls in proper engagements to prevent something like what happened at Baker Three occurring again. I then asked for the fleet's opinions and evaluation of my strategy, both old and new.
Murakumo was the first to speak. She said that while the death of a ship girl was tragic, and that Samidare's loss was terrible, she said that casualties would be an inevitable part of any conflict, of any war. She said that I couldn't let myself be swayed or affected so deeply to the point where I'd feel like I'd have to change up the strats to make things work differently. Objectively speaking, Murakumo pointed out that the debut battle of Operation Blackout was a huge success. They'd prevented two Abyssal lifeforms, whatever they could've been, from completing, and they had essentially traded a single destroyer for an entire battleship, an extremely strong one at that, and everyone else only sustained up to moderate damage and returned to base. And she's right about that. Technically speaking, if these girls were an actual fleet of warships, that's a great trade, and we're the clear winners who came out of it.
"Didn't you say that you were a top Navy officer in the American Navy?" Murakumo pointed out. "You ought to know this."
But then Sazanami spoke out against Murakumo, saying that while the mission itself was a success, the fact that we'd lost Samidare was a completely unnecessary loss. And the way she got killed was completely stupid, too, what Sazanami called a product of the fleet's overconfidence that they'd built up from laying waste to Able Four and Baker Two before moving in to take down Baker Three. Sazanami said that yeah, there's always going to be casualties in any conflict, sure, but she said that Samidare's death wasn't a casualty so much as it was a plain and simple waste. If Samidare had gone down in a blaze or a fireball of glory, dying while fighting or something worthwhile, then Sazanami said she personally wouldn't feel as bad, because Samidare had died bravely. But the way she ended up getting killed wasn't a brave death, it was like watching a farm animal get slaughtered. And seeing that Sazanami herself, Murakumo, Fubuki, and Inazuma were all the first ones here from the very start, this so-called victory that they'd scored two nights ago never once felt like a victory after Samidare got wrecked.
Kirishima declared no single entity was at fault for the loss of Samidare. Many factors played into the situation that contributed to her death: the fleet's built-up overconfidence, a lack of complete understanding of the areas the fleet was targeting, a lack of firm control over the destroyers' movements at the time when Symbiotic Hime blasted Samidare to a bloody pulp, etc. She did mention, however, that because they'd launched a surprise nighttime assault on their position, the Abyssal fleet would be on guard against another possible night battle, so she said that in order to catch the Abyssals off guard once more, the next Operation Blackout mission should be set for the early morning, a time frame that the fleet's never used to attack the Abyssals before. And in order to better control the outcomes of the battles, Kirishima urged me to give very specific fleet movement orders and formations, something that, admittedly, I don't really do, since I want the fleet to fight in whatever way's most comfortable for them. By giving the fleet specific orders, I might be able to prevent something like Samidare's death from happening again.
Souryuu and Akagi also pointed out that their inability to participate fully in the battle may have had an impact, since they couldn't launch any planes to cover the advance of the destroyers at Baker Three, as it's unsafe for them to launch any planes other than recon planes at night. They argued that if they'd been able to launch their planes, most likely Samidare would still be alive. Maybe she would've taken a shell and ended up with heavy or critical damage, but Akashi would be there to stabilize her condition enough to get her back to base so she can be put in the medbay docks in the bathhouse. They lent their support to Kirishima's notion of an early morning raid, since they can launch their attack planes in any amount of daylight.
The other girls pitched in their own two cents as well, but for the most part these were the most important bits that I remember. So for today, there wasn't any sortie, just some more late afternoon training, but I've already drawn up the plans for the next Operation Blackout mission. And because I forgot to put Hiei as the flagship as I'd said I would but forgot like a dumbass, I'm assigning Hiei as flagship for this mission. Hope I don't regret this decision. In order to prep for this, I called Akagi, Souryuu, Shouhou, Kitakami, Ooi, Kiso, Akashi, Kiyoshimo, Fubuki, and Murakumo to my office and informed them that I wanted them to sortie earlier than usual tomorrow, at 1100 hours, on an advance recon mission to scout out Able, Baker, and Charlie Districts. It would be strictly recon, no open engagements with the Abyssals unless it's the only way to escape a bigger fight. Depending on what this advance recon mission yields, the next Operation Blackout mission will be altered.
At dinner, I saw that Inazuma was sitting with her fellow starter ship girls, and Sazanami was constantly hugging Inazuma's arm, and that Inazuma was holding the big teddy bear that we'd given her on her birth - er, launch day. Inazuma was getting a bit better, so I quickly made another small lemon drizzle cake to give to Inazuma, which cheered her up a bit more, but as soon as she took first first bite and started chewing, to everyone's surprise in the mess hall, Inazuma just started bawling really, really hard out of nowhere. She didn't take another bite of it again, because she ended up crying her eyes out for the rest of the evening, and I heard from Houshou that Sazanami had stayed with her all evening. No one knew why Inazuma just all of a sudden started crying like that, and understandably, there were a few girls like Akebono who thought that I was the one responsible for Inazuma's breakdown.
But I know.
I've seen men during my deployments who've behaved exactly the way Inazuma has tonight. They see close buddies, comrades, and friends get torn up and destroyed, sometimes right in front of their own faces, and I've felt it a bit myself too. After talking with some of them, I know a bit about how grief works. The first kind that hits you is the realization that something has happened: someone near you just got shot in the head, blown to pieces by a mortar, or got his eye stabbed out by a piece of fragmentation grenade shrapnel. It's gut-wrenching, vomit-inducing, and soul-freezing. That nervous drop of the heart, plunging into your stomach: that's the first feel.
The second kind, however, is so much worse. It's like an earthquake, which has the first major earthquake that does the damage but then has aftershocks that come after it to totally ruin anything the big earthquake started. The second wave of grief's the kind you feel when everything's said and done, after everything's over. The death and the tragedy then truly sets in, and you feel like you're lying on a cold floor, and you've got no way to warm yourself up, and you can't do anything but lie there, feeling like you're freezing to death.
Inazuma was acting in sort of the same way: the tears she shed yesterday in my office, when she woke up screaming from her nightmare, were tears of terror, of stress, of the trauma of seeing Samidare get shot to pieces. They weren't logical tears, just tears of pure fright, a pure reaction to her base instincts that she feels as a result of having a human body. But today, during dinner time, what I think happened was that whatever she tasted in that small cake I made for her, it probably reminded her of how things were before, that literally two days ago, Samidare was still hanging around, alive and well. Those tears she shed today weren't the same as the ones yesterday. She wasn't crying on reaction to her instincts, but instead now to her emotions.
I'd like to think that Inazuma cried because she wanted Samidare back with her so that they could enjoy the cake I'd made for her together, just like they had before.
But I could be wrong.