Chapter 44: You don’t know me
Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations
Editor: Karai
Lin Xu transmits the coordinates to LK809, Cassandra compares the signs of the black hole she found in the desert and looks grave, “This is not the same black hole.”
The black hole the scout had found was just a hundred kilometers away, and if it was a real black hole, even if it was only small in size, the powerful and terrifying gravitational field would be enough to tear the planet to pieces along with them.
Heinrich looked into the infinite desert, a silence in the rolling heat wave, except for the Zerg that came from nowhere, there were no signs of life on this planet, space-time was calm and peaceful, no signs of being massively distorted, “Human-made things…”
Human Imperial’s leapfrog technology depended on the black hole theory, where the leapfrog channel would not harm the starship’s interior as long as it was properly controlled and opened up to the starship’s force field. The Zerg did not have this technology.
There was even a debate within the Empire as to whether the Zerg were a civilization, or, for that matter, intelligent beings.
They seem to have relied on the brute force and rapid evolution of the Zerg to roam the universe, and in 3,000 years, no human has ever detected Zerg technology or a possible abstract communication vehicle.
On the communication channel, Lin Xu’s voice rang again, “Marshal, I’m receiving a communication request from the direction of the black hole, do you answer?”
No human activity was detected on the planet when the LK809 and Blizzard landed, and the Zerg were not sensitive to human electromagnetic signals, so neither mecha expended energy to turn on the signal cloaking function. Now, an intelligence other than theirs appeared on the same planet with an artificial black hole, and sent a communication request. The level of technology on the other side was by no means low.
When a lone human discovers the presence of another intelligence in a barren, uninhabited land, the first emotion that rises was not joy, but suspicion, alarm and fear. Heinrich stated, “Pick up the communication.”
Whether or not to make contact with the other side depended on boldness and courage. Lin Xu chose to share the communication channel with LK809, and then pressed answer.
“Marshal! Marshal, is that you? Whoo-hoo…”
This is…
“Ryan?” Lin Xu asked in a loud voice.
“It’s me! Professor Lin, it’s great that you’re alive!” Ryan was on the verge of tears of joy.
“Ryan Kalt, what are you doing here?” Heinrich interrupted seriously before Lin Xu could make another sound.
“Marshal, I’m the one who brought him here.” Ika’s voice also rang out over the comm channel, “I followed the location signal to find Dr. Lin.”
“Ika Igor… Is that a reason for you to go AWOL?”
Cassandra stood next to Heinrich, looking at the frosty-faced Marshal, silenced and hunched her shoulders to the side, but Ika sounded calm, “Yes. I gave all the authority to Ruth, and she will take care of everything.”
Heinrich’s facial lines were cold, hard and imposing, exuding an aura of “Do not enter if you are born,” “Ika Igor, Ryan Kalt, approach Blizzard mecha and be on alert, this planet is the origin of the Zerg that attacked the Silver Fortress.”
“Our shuttle is damaged and inoperable.” Ika replied.
Heinrich sounded like he could shake ice slag out of his voice, “Blizzard and LK809, approaching the intended coordinates.”
He stepped out of LK809 under Cassandra’s trembling gaze and quickly entered Blizzard’s cockpit and activated the mecha. Lin Xu, dressed in a white combat suit, looked calm and unaffected by Heinrich’s cold face.
Blizzard’s power module buzzed to life, the fuselage shuddered slightly, and the front windows fell open one by one, exposing the light to the two men’s faces.
Lin Xu buckled his X-belt on takeoff and, once the flight was stable, asked, “Why did Ika come here to see me?”
Heinrich stared straight ahead, his brow would have been deeply furrowed, the corners of his mouth pressed down, and after hearing Lin Xu’s question, he tried to relax his lips a bit to answer Lin Xu’s question, “I don’t know.”
Despite Heinrich’s attempts, his tone still carried the authority that belonged to Abyss Fleet’s commander-in-chief. After a moment of silence, he added, “Ika put a locator in your old suit.”
Lin Xu turned his head to look at Heinrich, and met his gaze at the same time. Heinrich’s brow bone was very high, the peak of the eyebrow was visually depressed, the pressure would become stronger when frowning, but it was also the pair of golden eyes that had a little more depth of feeling.
“Marshal…”
“Not on my orders.” Heinrich argued.
“I didn’t think so.” Lin Xu shook his head gently. Heinrich had even given him A-Class privileges, so how could he be so full of suspicion as to put a locator on him? Even if they hadn’t even met before they boarded the Victoria. Heinrich, “Did you know Ika before?”
According to Ika’s personality, who was immersed in his own world, he couldn’t have bet so much attention on a stranger he had just met. His friendship with Ryan had already taken Heinrich and Zhou Pingbo by surprise.
“No, I’ve never been to Haven and didn’t know much about the Abyss Fleet before that. Ika was in school until he came to the Victoria?”
“Hmm.” Heinrich turned his head to the airway, looking down at the high altitude where the yellow sand ended in a circular shape, the outline of the planet’s surface, “He was about my age, and had been at Haven University before that, and then met Katrina, the designer of the Victoria. Katrina invited him to write a new intelligent program for the starship, and he came to the Abyss Fleet. You were in..”
Heinrich paused, “You were in the Dionysus Sector’s borderlands before you went to Capital Star, correct?” Lin Xu’s ostensible file was indeed so written, but Heinrich knew that Lin Xu had many more unrecorded stories before he was in the borderlands.
“Yes,” Lin Xu replied simply, not continuing to delve into his own story in the Borderlands, “far enough away from Haven to not have had the opportunity to know Ika.”
For Blizzard, the distance across a hundred kilometers only took a moment. Before the two could get an answer to their questions, an unpainted space shuttle had appeared on the sand at the bottom of the eye, and Ryan waved his arm beside it to greet Blizzard.
The mecha’s stance shifted from horizontal to vertical, turning on the braking mode and landing a little further away so as not to pummel the two men with the rolling smoke from the engine’s exhaust flames. Ryan turned and ran back into the shuttle to talk to Blizzard on his communicator, “Marshal!”
Heinrich replied, “Get on Blizzard.”
Ryan breathed a huge sigh of relief and pulled Ika, who was in a depressed state, out of the shuttle and climbed down the ramp into Blizzard. Before Ryan could get to Lin Xu, the vetiver pheromone in the cockpit along with the territorial oppression of the S-Class alpha came crashing down like a giant wave on the young and unsuspecting Ryan.
“Help, help…” Ryan took half a step out before his legs gave out and he fell to his knees. The alpha instinct made Heinrich look coldly at the young alpha intruding on his territory, “Go to LK809.”
Ryan crawled away as if he had been pardoned, and Cassandra took pity on him and very kindly picked up Ryan with her mecha arm and escorted him into the cockpit of LK809.
Ika had his omega glands removed, and his olfactory cells fed him airborne scents but didn’t provoke a response; he looked ashen and woozy, and Heinrich didn’t kick him out with the other. The AI found a metal armchair for Ika to sit in.
“Not feeling well?” Lin Xu asked. Ika shook his head, stunned for a moment and nodded again, “The shuttle is not accelerating smoothly, and I got seasick.”
He was on the verge of throwing up all the acid in his stomach when he landed. Heinrich looked at the oddly shaped, unpainted metal fabrication in the sand, “This is not a fleet shuttle.”
“It’s my personal experimental work, not all perfected yet.”
Ika’s independent lab was approved by Heinrich, who didn’t care what Ika was working on in there, but this time… The journey from the Silver Fortress to the planet was filled with Zerg hordes that a rudimentary space shuttle could not have easily traversed.
“Have the Zerg been cleared out along the way?”
“Not when I arrived.” Ika replied.
“Can this shuttle cross the Zerg defense line?”
Ika nodded, “With the ultra-high energy particle beams, it can.”
Heinrich stopped asking and glanced at Lin Xu, shifting the initiative in a tacit exchange of glances. Lin Xu inclined his head and asked, “Ika, are you here to see me?”
Ika blinked and nodded, like a furtive owl. “Why did you come in person? You’re not combat-ready, it’s dangerous.”
Ika stared into the side of Lin Xu’s face through the daylight, his dark hair growing longer in the last few days as it was nourished by the crystal cores and draped softly over his shoulders.
He looked more like the Crown’s portrait Ika had seen.
“I wanted to come, so here I am.”
Lin Xu, who did not like to deal with people and spoke briefly with conscious control of his speech, could be understood by a normal person; but Ika would not think that way, he would only feel that he had made himself clear.
Lin Xu, “… Have we met before?”
The question seemed to catch Ika, and Heinrich turned his head to look at him, and found Ika’s gaze falling entirely on Lin Xu’s face, “No, no, you don’t know me, and I’ve only heard of you.”
Lin Xu’s name was not new to anyone who had been following the study of ancient Earth for a while. The silver-eyed necklace swayed and reflected the daylight, and Ika spoke with such sincerity that Heinrich could not see any flaw in it.
“All right.” Lin Xu gave Heinrich a look and sat upright again, signaling the end of this fruitless questioning; for now it was enough to know that Ika meant no harm.
Heinrich looked at Ika for a while longer and sent him the images and various reconnaissance data collected by the reconnaissance plane, “Can you now model the description of the black hole situation? Including the cause of the black hole, the time of existence, and the number of Zerg around it.”
Ika quickly resumed his professional state, pulled out the electronic board he carried with him, connected to Blizzard’s built-in mainframe computer, and began to deduce, no longer betting his whole body and soul on Lin Xu. Heinrich’s face eased up a bit.
During this period, Heinrich once again dispatched reconnaissance planes to the direction of the black hole to check the situation, occasionally activating the mecha to avoid the Zerg tide and the battle, saving mecha energy.
“Marshal, black hole situation confirmed.” Ika quickly gave the result, his face was still tired but his eyes were radiant, “It’s a Haven coded Iota type black hole, held by limited strong gravitational field, will not expand, passable inside.”
“Strong gravitational field genesis?”
“The probability of unnatural formation is more than 95%, and can be destroyed by a strike implemented by near-planetary star energy.”
Lin Xu said, “Blizzard’s remaining energy is not enough for a near-planet-star energy strike, nor is the LK809.”
“Oh…” Hearing Lin Xu’s denial, Ika looked a little lost, he looked reluctantly at the small space shuttle in tatters on the sand, “This shuttle has enough energy for a near-planet-star strike, if needed, throw it as a missile into a black hole and blow it up.”
“I don’t recall the Abyss Fleet munitions department calling in this amount of energy?” Heinrich questioned in a hushed voice.
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