Chapter Three - Part One
Cohesive Efforts
In the words of VADM Megan Renee Austin
It appears that we, Tosh and I, work well as a team in terms of command of the bunker. He never hesitates to consult me as far as what the makeup of the bunker populace should be. I did notice that we had a shortfall in medical and maintenance and instead of taking offence, he is planning to do something about it. On top of that he thanked me for bringing it to his attention; that it would have been a very problematic oversight if it had not been brought to his attention. I can always tell that he's been that way ever since he took command of the United States Navy as Chief of Naval Operations. He puts his ego aside in order to achieve the objective.
I don't think Harm would have been able to do the same when it came down to it. He's the type that always has to be in control of every minutiae of every detail and he's the one that has to come up with it or he isn't happy. That's one of the reasons why I think that the President put Tosh in charge of the bunker and another reason why Tosh is a five-star and Harm is still only a captain. We have to do the necessary things to survive this potential doomsday and Tosh is willing to put his ego on the back-burner for us to be able to do whatever it takes to make sure that we are well-equipped in the bunker.
We'd had a meeting regarding what had been sent down the wire from the Pentagon in terms of what was happening in the locales where our fleets were, US Seventh Fleet was entangled with the Chinese and the Hermit Kingdom was sending out their little boats to harass our ships. Evidently North Korea and the Chinese had gotten closer in relations ever since the relationships between China and the United States had gone south.
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Tosh told me that it seemed as though things were on an inexorable slide to the brink of destruction; that from what he could tell; there was no escape. It was the strategist in him that told him that things were not going to go well in the Pacific...and the Russians were just waiting to jump in with both feet. They had always been our adversaries and it was only a matter of time before we and they came to blows.
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All of this was frightening...but we, as the de facto bunker command, could not show fear. It would trickle down to the masses and then we woul have a full-on revolt on our hands. It was hard to say how the human psyche would react to the news that their world was to be no more. It was such a horrific concept that not many people would be able to comprehend the true direness of the situation. One's mind just shut down and pretty much failed to parse the data putting one in serious jeopardy since there were things that one had to do in order to survive and if you were frozen in place, how would you have the gumption to be able to do what had to be done. Tosh was a doer - he didn't let the scary stuff make him freeze. He may have been terrified but not a whit showed on his face. And his drive was what kept the rest of the bunker going.
Being one of the few to have ever looked death in the face and given the Reaper the middle finger on a numbered hill in North Korea against overwhelming odds, there were very few things that would make him falter. And I wouldn't know a single one of them. There was a reason why he wore the star-shaped medal with Minerva repulsing Discord. On that no-name numbered hill back in 1994 he made a do or die stand armed with only an M-4 carbine and a sack of grenades daring the North Koreans to charge at him, inflicting more casualties on them than they were able to get wounds on him. Hill 175 would always be a name that rang through the annals of those who had received the Medal of Honor. It was because Tosh had said that whether he lived or died made no difference as long as his fellow men got home safe and sound and that he would do anything in his power to make sure that they had a fighting chance to get home safe to their families. When Harm and I had done the due-diligence investigation on his actions on Hill 175, I had truly found out just exactly what the words above and beyond the call of duty, at the very risk of his own life...meant. It truly reflected actions that gave credit to the United States Naval Service. And somehow...through miraculous circumstance, he'd managed to survive and make it home himself. Not many recipients made it home. Some gave the ultimate sacrifice.
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And for me, that was another reason why I was honored to serve with him and work with him hand-in-hand to make sure that we all survived what would be the most horrifying event that we would ever experience.
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On the whole, I didn't talk much with the rest of the bunker group but I knew that they were doing their things in order to make their own lives make sense in this impending cataclysm. Ms. Hart was working on the science station as was Kimber.
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Poor Harm was trying extremely hard to understand robotics. Considering that he, like Tosh, was a doer rather than a thinker, I'm sure his brain was doing mental calisthenics trying to figure out what a nanite was and trying to create trait-chips was probably one of the more brain-trying things he'd ever tried to do. Even flying an F-14 Tomcat tended to be a direct input task, you shoved your control stick one way and the F-14 reponded to the touch-input. Whereas the Robotics station tended to have its own mind. And every-so-often I could hear Harm cursing as he set off an alarm when a suggested input failed. Well, at least he didn't have the trait-chip or nanite explode on him.
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Admiral Gracen and Mrs. River McIrish-Chikamori gravitated towards the arcane and started learning alchemy. This was something completely outside my realm of knowledge. I dealt with ciphers, ledgers, figures and concrete details that pertained to things that were within the realm of every-day matters and the supernatural and arcane tended to raise hairs on the back of my neck. But if they could truly master that, then all the more power to them. Depending on what happened due to the radiation and whatever else twisted the natural, perhaps magic would be what saves the day. Until then bullets would be what solved the existential problems of things being mutated by rads.
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Jen and Mac gravitated towards the potion tables trying to find a way for us to be able to increase our skills and give us some leverage. A bit of science; a bit of magic went into the potion tables and again, it confused me since I was more attuned to logic rather than something metaphysical. As much as I was leery about Mac, I was glad that she found something interesting to bide her time rather than the two of us being at odds with each other. I hoped she understood that I no longer held any interest for Harm as he was far too junior an officer for me to ever even consider having a relationship with. Mac was one hundred percent welcome to Harm and that was perfectly fine with me.
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I was more interested in a certain former jet-jock.
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After all, we work well together.
River's husband on the other hand, was upstairs in the agricultural area fishing. He was busy trying to catch things other than crocodiles, which didn't bode too well when one stuffed them into one's pocket - considering that one could potentially get one's legs gnawed off no matter which gender you were, but especially if you were male, you could end up losing other things as well that one didn't want to lose.
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So overall, we were in good shape for whatever the apocalypse could throw at us.
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Some more than others.
