Chapter 8 Chapter VII

Old Earth! It was his distant homeland, the mother of mankind, where his longing and imagination filled.Now, if the Aperture Station had to be evacuated, he could finally catch a glimpse of her beauty from Skynet, her dark mystery and sun-drenched beauty.Under the Kingdom of the Sun, he could finally feel her grand mind, explore the boundless plains that he could only see in photos before, and appreciate the magical forests and mountains, oceans and white clouds, and the beautiful blue sky. May the dream come true. He switched to the day shift so he could get Bruhn's flight report.As the Mars Kirvan drew closer, Brunn's image appeared on the screen.She was stocky and somewhat masculine.She was not young, with a resolute broad face and short white hair.

The messages she sent were very short, nothing more than talking about the flight coordinates and asking for the latest news from Jason Cowan. Even if there was no news from Jason, it was not obvious that she was worried at all.She was ordered by the giant and the Sun Empire to fly this time, and she didn't seem to care about the rest. While waiting like this, he tried hard to use her calm attitude to face his ignorant future.It is not easy to do this.In the eyes of Clay, Jomo, and Noel, the side of the sun is just a dark jungle composed of Kovan dragon wire and orbital metal, full of jackals and beasts that prey on the weak and the strong.He could not accept such a cruel picture.

He told himself that the sun people are human essence selected from thousands of people, born suitable for living in space, and all of them bear the shining sun mark.Both Jomo and Noel have that mark.His mother had it, and no doubt his father had it too.Among those with the Sun-mark, he will surely find that there are more good people than bad ones. He tried not to question the unattainable fate he longed for; he tried not to think too much about the painful pain that giving up Jannot would bring to Clay and Noel; He said that after all, he could not stop the evacuation of the aperture. When all kinds of distractions in his mind faded, he thought of Mindy Zinn.She might be living a life of her own, a stranger to him.But she loved herself before.Even if he traveled all over the world, he must try to see her again!

Now he was working long hours, waiting for Vera Brunn and for the message that Jason Cowan never sent.Often he saw old Captain Carbon come to the dome, waiting for another signal from his son.Quinn felt sorry for him.He suffered from insomnia all night, his face was sloppy, his body was getting thinner day by day, and he was always drunk, but he was unwilling to give up that crazy idea. "Just wait and see!" His voice had become hoarse. "Commander Kovan will be back soon, revealing that Bella was lying to him, and come back and tell us that my Leonard is not a traitor, but a loyal servant of the Empire of the Sun!" Wait, wait—one day at dawn, Quinn and Clay walked in together and found Carbon floating high above the floor.Perhaps because of his careless actions, he drifted in the weak gravitational force, staring straight at the deathly black sky outside, as if he saw something.He was sullen, disheveled, and frightened.

"Captain!" Clay yelled. "Captain Carbon!" He didn't seem to hear it, rose slowly without feeling, stayed lazily in the air, then fell slowly, bounced on the ground, rose again, and fell again, stiff as a puppet. "Captain!" Clay raised his voice. "We'll replace you from get off work!" Carbon took a deep breath, stood still on the floor, and turned around slowly, as if he didn't see anything.The light on the instrument shone faintly between his thinning white hair, casting a dark red halo on him.He opened his mouth as if he wanted to speak, but he didn't utter a word.

"Captain, are you sick?" He blinked before he spotted them. "I'm done." He murmured hoarsely to himself. "There will never be news from Commander Kirvan, and I'm still waiting. Liar! They ruined my Leonard; ruined his soul; ruined Commander Kirvan; and are planning to ruin us all." He grumbled and staggered into the tunnel.After a while, several of his deputies sent a message from Capala saying that Caparon was ill.The deputy is a member of the Ministry of Security. The reason for the aperture to endure the cold and suffering is to get promoted and make a fortune. He has never received any flight training, so he cannot take over from Carbon to do the laser communication work.Clay had to work another night shift.When Quinn went in at dawn, he found that there was a strong smell of star fog in the air, and Clay was next to the laser contact machine, blatantly blaming Carbon's deputy.

"A bunch of idiots!" He yelled angrily when he saw Quinn come in. "When we saw a new object in the mirror and went to call the captain, they told me that the captain was still unwell. Unwell?They mean comatose!I don't feel anything anymore. " "Is it Jason's boat?" Quinn asked. "came back?" "Not like." He shook his head, frowning at Capala. "The object was coming from the north and was within 60 degrees of Jason's last reported position." "Is it the alien he wants to find?" "It's not like that either. Not in the direction of their headquarters."

"So, what is—" "Who knows!" Clay shrugged uneasily, and moved towards the tunnel. "All I could see was a moving dot with a faint infrared glow. It was slowing down now, but still going so fast I couldn't believe it. Carbon didn't care, we had to report to Captain Brunn. I have recorded the data, and when the window opens, you can just send it out. " Jannot twirled.The sun rises over the snow and ice.Mars Kirvan leaps into the window.He passed on Clay's tape. "Data received." On the screen, Vera Brunn's face with thick black eyebrows showed no expression. "You should continue to try to identify the approaching object. We are firing a monitor to intercept it. In the meantime, you should continue to record all data."

That night, and the next night, Carbon remained "unwell."Clay had to work the long night shift alone.He reported that there was no news about the alien base, nor about Jason Cowan, except for a small dot that was indistinctly flashing red light, that is, the unknown object slowly sneaking between the planets. "It's turned! Now it's turning to us!" Quinn saw Carbon sucking the star mist, his tired eyes were dazed. "Oh, no, it flew towards the wreckage of Spica." "Could it be the sky fish?" he muttered. "Want to go back and have another look at Spica?"

"Look at it." Clay walked towards the tunnel. "It's too far away, and there can't be much information on the display. But you must record what you see. Brunn's monitor should be able to get more information." Quinn was left alone in the dim red light of the dome. He turned on the monitor and stared at the stars slowly sliding in the dark night.It was past midnight, no news from Jason Cowan, and no news from the aliens.The object slowed down abruptly and approached quietly towards the location of the Spika wreckage.The two dots melted together to form a dazzling highlight.

He couldn't see anything—suddenly there was a sound of a gong, and he hurried to the image transmission workstation.The image screen shows something up.He saw the empty skeleton of the Spica.Meanwhile, Brunn's ship was receiving the monitor's signal beam. Near the camera, the wreckage of Spica slowly rotates in the starry night sky.He found that the object from the north they had been tracking was lighting up the Spica unusually brightly.When he saw the object, he suddenly held his breath. What a behemoth!It's hard to see all at once.Its pale body was ten times as long as the wreck, perhaps twenty times as long!Vaguely shaped like a vat, the injectors emitted bluish-purple flames, illuminating the wreckage.Where it struck, the rafters, metal blocks and beams of the wrecked ship first flashed red, then turned yellow, and finally white! What the white light shines—it turned out to be an animal! Not an alien bird, not a sky fish.It slowly showed its original shape.Two armored towers protrude from its head, shining a dim red light. Judging from its position, it should be its eyes; its terrifying jaws are wide open, as if yawning; the huge vat is its torso, tail bent, as if to stab the wreck with its fiery jets. It must have had wings, though its wings could not be seen clearly in the shadow of its bulk.Under the bright light, its limbs can be clearly seen. There are four legs in total, soft and boneless like a snake, but extremely powerful. It spread its huge black claws to grab the wreckage of the ship. It ate that ship. In the blue flames of the injectors, the ship's rafters, chunks of metal, and splinters melted into glowing white specks.The animal spread its black wings and approached, as if it wanted to catch the exploding gas in space, and at the same time opened its mouth wide.A thin tongue jerked out, licking molten metal. He watched intently as it ate the last speck.It ceased to shine, and faded away into the darkness, until at last only the red eyes shone among the stars.Its eyes appeared to be swollen and set far apart.Its shadow covered the stars in the sky, and its mouth was getting closer and closer.Like a boa constrictor pounced, its tongue seemed to pierce his face. The screen suddenly went black. He shrank back in fright, raised his hands, and after a while stared at the screen with lingering fear.It all happened so quickly, like a nightmare, and yet so unbelievably, so absolutely real, it was unimaginable. He tremblingly wanted to report to Carbon.A drowsy guard told him that the captain is not in good health and should not be disturbed, and no one is in charge now.He kept begging, but the waiter angrily ignored him, and finally cursed him to jump into space and fall to his death. He went back to the display mirror.That moving black dot has disappeared.The red light in its huge eyes—is that a searchlight?Looking for food?Now it's black, is it because it's full?With his heart still in suspense, he kept turning on the detection equipment.There is nothing left, no Jason Cowan, no alien base, no wreckage.Finally, as the distant sun came across the ice, Mars Kirvan came into view.It was preparing to decelerate for a landing with only a few hours to go. "Our monitors are gone," Vera Brunn told him. "What data do you have about that object?" Now it takes nearly a second for the laser light to reach her, and almost a second for the light to travel back. While waiting for her answer, or her waiting for his, he saw a long scar beneath the sun mark on her stiff cheek, and a sporadic black beard around her upper lip. "I saw what happened to the wreckage. Though I dare not—" He couldn't help shaking his head. "Can't believe it - can't believe there's such an animal alive." "Alive?" There was no expression on her stiff face. "What is alive?" He tremblingly described what he saw to her.She just narrowed her eyes slightly.He didn't know what she was thinking, but he sincerely admired her calmness. "Captain," he asked when he had finished speaking. "Didn't you see it?" "I'm not on duty." She stopped and gave him a hard look. "Our technician reported that the unknown object seemed to attack the wreckage and our monitors, so the transmission of information was stopped." "Didn't he see the shape of that guy?" "He reported our equipment was down, didn't see any details." "I think—I actually saw it alive." He tried to look as calm as she did. "A space animal. Kind of like an insect, with glowing red eyes and blinding jets. Big! Bigger than any spaceship. It eats metal—it melts the wreckage and licks the hot metal It ate. It moved faster than anything and just hit the monitor like that." He paused again to watch her reaction, but she remained unmoved. "Captain—" he was a little anxious. "Don't you believe—" "It doesn't matter whether I believe it or not." She shrugged and frowned at the screen. "I bet it must have been extraordinary. The technician seemed to have seen something so dazed that he couldn't even speak. We're trying to calm him now." "Captain!" He always wanted to be as calm and composed as she was. "There were real animals there. It's true--and it's terrifying!It must be flying in the dark now, without turning on the detection lights it used to find the Spica's position.It may attack Jannot, or it may attack your spaceship. " This time her expressionless brows were furrowed even tighter. "Mr. Durn, none of us are safe." She seemed to scold him. "One day, space will no longer be alien to human beings, if we can survive, if we can adapt. But that is also in the future. Right now, we are facing a situation that is completely alien to us. If we want to To survive, you have to accept these status quo." "Captain," he retorted. "If you ever saw that guy—" "I never want to see it." She almost smiled a little when she said it, and she looked likeable. "You should know that the flight department has a rule, or the Chen family has a rule." She changed her serious face again. “If you report what you saw to the inspectors, they’re going to get you in trouble. Better forget about it,” she added. "For yourself, and perhaps for me." "Why?" he muttered. "This is the politics of the Sun Kingdom. An old and annoying problem. Kowan insists that aliens exist, and the Chen family insists that they don't. They accuse Kowan of fabricating evidence of alien existence, and they are supporting The Revelator, because the Revelator declares that there are demons in space." "The sky fish is not a fabrication, it was my mother who brought it back to the sun." "Your mother?" There was some surprise on her serious face. "Dr. Naya Dern?" He nodded and listened to her. "I know her. I suggested to her to throw away Tianyu, lest the Chen family take her job." "Do they have that much power?" "That's right, it's the same in the building, and it's also the same in the Ministry of Security, although the current tycoon's surname is Ke Wan. So I advise you to forget everything you've seen. The Chen family won't let you tell it." He stared at the screen suspiciously. "If they see the guy—" Her face looked even more severe. "I suspect that someone from the Chen family saw it. Our detection engineer is named Nicholas Chen." Suddenly she started walking around the screen. "Dern, please inform Captain Carbon of our arrival time. Let him inform all personnel on the station to act and prepare to evacuate immediately!" In order to find the weapon of the Newlin, Greenweeney left Swift and came to the Liaison Office.The Liaison Office is home to a group of specialists who have come to learn the art and science of Elder. There he found a compatriot named Sparkle, a historian of the Aperture. They belong to the species of asexual reproduction, the ancestors were predators on the planet, and after the planet became a nova, they were forced to leave their homeland.Asexual reproduction allowed them to quickly adapt to the new environment, but it also stopped them from evolving.Despite living in space for nearly a billion years, their space suits and the muscles beneath their gleaming scales are still powerful, showing the features of their ancestors. Despite their high status in Elder, they have always been regarded as outliers; although their abilities are respected, they always seem to be different from other children because of their shared genes and inherited unique sexual characteristics of infertility. Racial incompatibility.They live long and reproduce slowly, so their numbers have been small.They never had territories of their own, just a group of learned men scattered across the aperture. Although Greenweeney had never met Sparks, as fellow clansmen, they knew each other instantly.She slipped out of her space suit and slipped into his, leaning close to greet him.After a round of warm hugs, he began to talk about the Seeker Queen and how he escaped from the Vermeern Observatory after a narrow escape. "We've got the news." She wrapped herself tightly around him, her small voice flowing like electricity through his body. "But we're fine." "There will be problems," he said. "There will be problems all over Elder. But with timely action, we will be able to solve this problem." "Then let's act, my little friend." While teasing him, she stuck out her black teeth and bit his ear. "Don't waste a minute." "I mean deal with the seekers." He dodged her temptation. "The people of Newlyn used to have a weapon. Kim Jini keeps saying it's still there. If you can find it—" "Let's talk about it later, friend." Her tail was tightly wrapped around him, making him burn with desire.He couldn't help reacting, and they didn't talk about Newlyn's weapons until she was content to go back to her coat. "I've come here to study the history of the Newlyn people," she told him. "Ever since I heard the news of the Seekers' attack, I've been looking for every clue of that weapon. The surviving Newlynians arrived here using only one ship, and most of their records were lost along the way. " "Jin Jini said they still have the weapon." "The ship they escaped in is still here, and a memorial has been built. I talked to the curator, dug everything out, and I didn't see any weapons. In fact, it might not be possible to have such a weapon. " "Kimkini seems pretty sure—" "The curator is not sure. The curator is a half-old woman named Beth Cribe. She keeps the sad history of all Newlyn people, but there are not many materials. Newlyn people have short lives and grow older. Confused. There's no sense in what White Scrivby is babbling about. She vaguely said that weapon was ruined." "You must have other sources of information?" "I was ordered to go through the archives and read the reports of the Newlyn's initial contact with the Seekers, and descriptions of the Seekers and their core physiology." "How could such a savage guy evolve?" "The people of Newlyn who have taken refuge here believe that the distant ancestors of the Seekers must have been self-replicating weapons." "Then they are machines?" "Half mechanical, half biological." She answered briefly.He felt her heat coming up again. "Is it important?" "For Elder, this is really important." He restrained himself from reacting too quickly. "It's the machine that can make it stop." "But here we think stopping the seekers is killing. Back in the day, the people of Newlyn could find a home here if they obeyed the spirit of Elder. "What is our spirit, little friend?" She was pinching his ears again. "If we evolved from violence, it must be a sweet kind of violence. Come to me." "Wait a minute." He stepped aside. "Please tell me first what you know about that weapon." "Little friend!" She squeezed his ear again. "I have nothing to say." "The curator—" "If you want to hear that old fool, she'll tell you that down-and-out Newlyn folks found the bodies of two seekers: a female, still young, and a male, both of whom had been through a Freezing to death on the aperture snow after a deadly copulation fight, biologists in Newlyn risked their lives to obtain tissue samples from which they created a virus that they hoped would kill the seekers .” "No success?" "Never really tried it." She wagged his impatient tail teasingly. "That's what Beth Kribe said, maybe she imagined it. She said that shooting the virus at adult seekers had no effect. But the invention experts believe that the virus can kill the eggs of seekers or young seekers. or, but they never performed that experiment." He curls up and asks why not. "Little friend, the Seekers themselves are the reason. The mother Seekers and their babies live in the asteroid castle, far away from the enemy. To attack them, you have to fight a bloody path through the Seekers, through Pass through heavily guarded tunnels to reach the delivery room. "This provided refuge for the rest of Newlyn who were about to make that last blow. They accepted Elder's terms not to use force, and took advantage of the time they had been made to make that attack. The ship escaped the seekers." "What happened to the weapon?" "White Screebie knows, she should have forgotten. But she did let me look through the ship, but I didn't find any virus. There is no clear statement about this virus. Me and I've spoken to dozens of Newlynians, and many of them seem inclined to agree with me that the existence of the virus is mostly a myth, a small compensation for their national failure and a show of their national pride. " "That's just your opinion, let's go back to the Newlyn ship—" He saw that her smooth and shiny body surface was deforming. "Now I'm a man, little one. Women, you may remember, we're Elder's ourselves, so even if someone puts a weapon in our hands, it's not for us to fight the Seekers." Unable to bear her fiery enthusiasm any longer, Greenweeney's whole body softened. A statutory organization of the Kovan Building of the Solar Empire, which rules Earth through the Solar Empire.The Empire of the Sun conquered many planets, extending its sphere of influence to the Aperture.Historians loyal to the Empire of the Sun praised it, saying that it ended wars between nations and opened up a peaceful and prosperous age of peace and progress; historians who opposed the Empire of the Sun cursed it, calling it a dictatorship Downfall is due to God's will, executed by "the devil of God".