Silent Ark

Chapter 54: Deep Blue Echoes

The headquarters of the Ninth Division is not located in any known building.

Yao Chong and Liu Pan arrived the next morning.

They left the apartment and went to the meeting point on the Fourth Ring Road.

We boarded an unmarked black van and set off from the West Fourth Ring Road in Beijing. After forty minutes, we turned into an abandoned military factory.

The rusty factory buildings and the overgrown playground look like any forgotten remnant of the Third Front construction.

The car stopped at the entrance of the third workshop.

The person leading the way didn't speak, but simply lifted a piece of iron plate on the ground that looked no different from the surrounding area, revealing a staircase extending downwards.

There is no sign.

There are no lights.

Only a faint, cold white light emanated from the end of the stairs.

We went down seven floors.

A corridor appeared.

Gray walls, cool white lights, one every three meters, with a constant brightness.

Each door is lined with lead, there are emergency lights at the corners of the corridor, and a yellow sign is posted on the wall every five meters.

"Unauthorized personnel are prohibited from entering. Physically anomalous area."

Shen Qingci waited for them at the end of the corridor.

Dark blue uniform.

The small badge on the left chest—shaped like an eye.

She leaned against the wall and didn't move when she saw Yao Chong; she simply nodded slightly.

"Come with me."

She turned and walked away.

Shen Qingci did not turn around.

But she quickened her pace a little.

The meeting room was not large.

A rectangular table that can seat twelve people.

A huge electronic screen hangs on the wall, but it's currently black.

Several people were already seated at the table.

Lin Fan sat in the main seat.

With a buzz cut and a deep red bar across his shoulder, he looked more like a mid-level manager at an internet company than the head of a secret agency handling unconventional physical events.

Next to him was Chu Chen.

Thin, wearing glasses, constantly twirling a pen in his fingers, his expression suggesting he was thinking about something more important than what was being said.

There was another person Yao Chong had never met before—a woman in her early thirties with short hair, wearing a white lab coat, and whose name tag read "Ninth Department, Technical Analysis Group, Song Zhiyi".

There were three devices in front of her, and she quickly swiped her finger across one of them.

Lin Fan nodded when he saw them come in.

"sit."

Yao Chong and Liu Pan sat down on one side of the table.

Shen Qingci sat next to Lin Fan.

"Everyone's here." Lin Fan pressed a button on the table.

The electronic screen on the wall lit up.

The Pacific Ocean.

There is a red marker on the map, located in the east-central part of the Pacific Ocean, approximately 15°N, 160°W.

A line of text was marked next to it:

"Field Task Force 1 - Coordinates of Missing Contact"

失联时间：2031年5月18日 03:47 UTC。」

"Three days ago," Lin Fan said calmly, "the field team of seven, aboard the research vessel 'Deep Blue 7,' went to that coordinate to carry out a routine physical constant monitoring mission."

He paused for a moment.

"Three days ago, in the early morning, Deep Blue 7 had its last communication with headquarters. The content of the communication is as follows."

He pressed another button.

A recording started playing in the conference room.

The sound is somewhat distorted, as if the signal has been interfered with.

"...Headquarters, this is Deep Blue Seven."

We have reached the target coordinates.

Physical constant monitoring equipment has been deployed.

Preliminary data shows—

The sound paused for a moment.

Then came a woman's voice, younger than the first, and speaking faster:

"Headquarters, there's an anomaly here."

A stable region of physical constants was detected at a depth of 4200 meters.

Fine structure constant, gravitational constant, speed of light—all values ​​locked in before the whale fall.

The error shall not exceed 10 to the power of -20.

10 to the power of negative 20.

Yao Chong's finger twitched.

This level of precision is three orders of magnitude higher than that of CERN's internal database.

Recording continues:

"The radius of this stability region is approximately—"

The sound was suddenly interrupted by a noise.

Then came the first voice, a man's, urgent:

Something is approaching.

It should not be...not...not a sovereign entity.

It's something else.

Headquarters, we need a team—

noise.

A louder noise.

Then the recording stopped.

Three seconds of silence.

A line of automatically generated text pops up on the screen:

[Deep Blue 7 - Communication Interruption - 03:47:23 UTC]

[最后已知坐标：N15°07'22「， W160°33'41「]

[Last transmitted data packet: Received, integrity 98.7%]

Lin Fan turned off the recording.

There was a three-second silence in the conference room.

"The last transmitted data packet has been decrypted," he said. "It contains all the physical constant monitoring data collected by Deep Blue 7 before it lost contact."

He looked at Song Zhiyi.

Song Zhiyi stood up and walked to the screen.

She pulled up a chart—a blue ocean with a small red area in the middle.

"The red area is the 'locked zone' they discovered. Depth 4200 meters, radius—"

She paused for a moment.

"About 3.7 kilometers."

Liu Pan frowned.

"3.7 kilometers? A region with a radius of 3.7 kilometers, where the physical constants are completely locked at the values ​​before the whale fall?"

"right."

What is the difference between locking and restoring?

Song Zhiyi glanced at him.

Recovery is the healing of wounds.

The lock was like it was secured with steel nails.

She paused for a moment, then explained again, as if afraid that others might not have understood.

"Recovery is dynamic—the constant fluctuates, but the trend is to revert to the values ​​before the whale fall."

Locking is static—the constant does not fluctuate. It remains completely still.

Like being nailed to the ground.

Yao Chong spoke up.

"If the locking mechanism can be copied—"

"The spaceship doesn't need to stay in the water," Song Zhiyi continued.

She glanced at Yao Chong.

"You said something similar at the class reunion yesterday."

Yao Chong's expression remained unchanged.

"The news spread very quickly."

"Your file is in the Ninth Department," Song Zhiyi said. "There were seven people at your class reunion."

Three of these individuals' phones were flagged as "high-value information sources" within the past twelve hours.

She didn't say which three.

But Yao Chong could probably guess—Zhao Yutong, Wang Xindong, and Zhou Yi.

It's not because they said anything sensitive.

It's because they came into contact with sensitive people.

he himself.

Others also had contact with me, but they weren't marked, which can only be attributed to the fact that the contact was insignificant and they were filtered out.

"Continue," Lin Fan said.

Song Zhiyi pulled up another chart.

One of the core challenges of the Silent Ark Project is that the physical constants of the space carrier will drift rapidly after it leaves the water-saturated area.

All equipment on board—engines, life support, navigation—will fail within a short period of time.

"But what if we could create a 'locking field' around the spaceship—"

She didn't finish speaking.

Because there's no need to finish speaking.

Chu Chen pushed up his glasses.

He stopped writing.

"So what the field team discovered may directly solve the biggest engineering bottleneck of the Silent Ark Project."

"It's not 'possible'," Song Zhiyi said, "if the locking mechanism can be copied."

We currently do not know how the locking is implemented.

On-site sampling is required.

"But the field team has lost contact," Lin Fan said.

He looked at Shen Qingci.

"Captain Shen."

Shen Qingci stood up.

"Field Team Three is ready."

A seven-person team with standard equipment.

Expected arrival at target coordinates within 22.5 hours.

"What's the status of Deep Blue 7?"

"Deep Blue 7 is a medium-sized research vessel with a displacement of 3200 tons. It belongs to—"

She paused for a moment.

I glanced at the document in my hand.

"It belongs to 'Xinlan Ocean Technology'".

Yao Chong's brow twitched slightly.

Xinlan.

鑫。

Wang Xindong.

"Xinlan Ocean Technology is Wang Xindong's company," he said.

Shen Qingci glanced at him.

"Yes."

"Is Deep Blue 7 a research vessel they invested in?"

"The field team was on board the Deep Blue 7 to carry out the mission because the Ninth Science Department is not a research institution and does not have its own oceanographic research vessel."

Xinlan provided the vessel and some deep-sea exploration equipment.

In exchange, Jiuke shared some physical constant monitoring data with Xinlan.

"When was this agreement signed?"

Four months ago.

Lin Fan tapped the table.

"Yao Chong, that's not the point."

The key point is that the field team has lost contact.

We need to rescue people, and we also need to collect samples.

Team Leader Shen's third field team was responsible for the execution.

You and Liu Pan will accompany us as scientific advisors.

"Where is Wang Xindong?" Yao Chong asked.

Lin Fan glanced at him.

"His ship, his men. Do you think he wouldn't get involved?"

Yao Chong remained silent.

Lin Fan stood up.

Mission codename: "Deep Blue Echo".

Departure time: Tomorrow morning.

Meeting point: Tianjin Port.

He glanced at the people at the table.

Meeting adjourned.

The others stood up one after another.

Yao Chong did not move.

He was looking at the screen.

The map of the Pacific Ocean is still there.

The red marker was quietly lit up in the center of the screen.

A whole string of information went through his mind.

N15°07'22「， W160°33'41「。

4200 meters deep.

Radius 3.7 kilometers.

The physical constants are locked at their values ​​before the whale fall.

The error shall not exceed 10 to the power of -20.

It's not a recovery.

It is locked.

It's not that the wound has healed.

Steel nails were inserted.

Who hit him?

What hit you?

That remains to be seen...