The Bizarre Adventure of Tartaros Fleet

"Only forty people went to participate in such a dangerous mission." He imagined the picture of those fighter jets flying out of the ejection channel, and said softly, "I don't know what's going on now."

Send a commando to destroy the warships of the Star Alliance on the belt occupied by the Flood (although there has never been a face-to-face confrontation, but from the data point of view, this is a very terrifying shapeless monster that can assimilate the enemy), no matter from which angle It seemed to be even more difficult, and it was basically a suicide mission, but the leader of Tartarus still led the team himself.This is by no means a wise thing-even if the battle is won, the boss will lose a lot if he dies.

This is not Thermopylae, 'Leonidas' does not need to go to the battlefield in person.

"It should be no problem."

The answer was a tall Spartan Phase II next to him, that was George.

"Do you know what?"

"When their soldiers were at the bayonet base, I saw the soldiers whose shields were pierced and disappeared in place." George still remembered the battle at the bayonet base, and the scene of the wounded soldiers disappearing in the light was still fresh in his memory." They were teleported back to the mothership, like a warship doing a jump. It shows their ability to keep the soldiers safe."

Send wounded soldiers directly back to the mothership?This is really amazing... Is it to activate the transmission device as soon as the armor is damaged?That kind of thing can be carried by a single soldier?If there is such a thing, then experienced and rigorously trained fighters will not be easily lost on the battlefield. The experience of soldiers who have survived one battle after another is a great wealth in itself.

And if such a soldier no longer fears death...

"That's great." Under the mask, Frederick showed a longing expression. "Maybe we can use this one day?"

"Maybe our war with the Covenant will be over before then."

"It won't be that simple." The tower-like man shook his head. He patted the combat knife fixed on his shoulder armor—that was his best partner—and said, "Do you remember? Years ago, before we fought the Covenant, who were we fighting?"

"It's rebels and separatists."

"Yes, war will always exist." His expression was hidden behind the helmet's visor "The war with the Star Alliance has downplayed the contradictions between various human forces. United, but not united enough, there are still separatists and rebels everywhere today. And when the Covenant fails, they will pop up again. By then the remnants of the Covenant, hundreds of The rebels in the near and far colonies...the battle is endless."

Frederick was right, and George could not deny it.Leaving aside the battle with the aliens, there is no such idea in human beings that everyone is human, so they should live in harmony... Only the Flood can do this. UEG can understand the demands of the colonies, and the colonies can understand the expectations of UEG, but mutual understanding cannot solve any problems.In wars from ancient times to the present, the warring parties generally understand what the other party wants, but understanding does not mean that it is acceptable.

You can accept it and you won't fight anymore, right? (far eye)

After contacting the Consolidation Department, from ONI intelligence personnel, to UEG social scientists, to veterans who participated in the early years of the war, they all thought about one thing from time to time, that is, how did the Consolidation Department manage so many races? Do they still live in harmony while living together?Just because of the threat of dark worms, can these alien races from all over the universe remain united?

Which one is the greater threat to a civilization, the dark worm or the rebel army?Several leaders in the intelligence department would secretly think about this problem in the middle of the night.Maybe UEG needs its own 'Dark Worm' too...

Just when Frederick wanted to chat with George, the voice of John-117 suddenly came out of the communicator——

[The battle report from the front line came back, the Star Alliance warship was confirmed to be destroyed, and the Prophet of Sorrow failed to escape.mission completed. 】

"It's really done..."

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Oregana came out of the bathhouse, said hello to the marines who were squatting in the lounge drinking ice milk and taking a nap on the massage chair, and immediately rushed to the bridge——they would have to wait in the Draw prizes in the prize pool, play table tennis and have a small celebration banquet with fast food. It's like having a party.

After the Holy Grail War, it is common sense to use fantasy carnivals to recuperate the body and mind. (violent theory)

But Oregana herself couldn't relax at this point, she entered the bridge with a dry hair cap on her head, and asked the dark rock who was in charge of the overall situation there:

"Have we trapped it?"

Dark Rock showed a bitter face, nodded and waved his hand again:

"The mission is half completed. The main purpose is to get it done. The Covenant warship was blown to pieces. Both the power furnace and the jump engine were blown up. But the ring belt did not disintegrate." He snapped his fingers, and the holographic projection immediately The real-time picture captured by the surveillance system was played, "At the last moment, the Gravemind sent the rear half of the hull to a place about [-] kilometers away from the surface of the ring. The subject remains intact."

Now the No. 05 ring is still slowly rotating, because the heat wave generated by the explosion has burned a large area of ​​vegetation. Even now, the strong wind caused by the shock wave still wreaks havoc on the surface of the ring with a terrible heat wave.An unsightly black spot appeared on the surface, the black spot was very large and still expanding, it looked like a sore in the middle - the 'skin' was torn, granulated, and the bottom of the surface was full of wriggling creatures organization, its source unknown.

Gravemind's reflexes seem to be much quicker and more dexterous than Guilty Spark's in the original.The evil spark in the original work saw that the Master Chief was going to detonate the belt, the first reaction was to hack into the Pillar of Autumn's system to shut down the self-detonation, and then locked all the command input systems to prevent Cortana from restarting the countdown to self-destruction, and then the Master Chief was carrying a grenade When it came time to artificially detonate, Guilty Spark still thought he was in control of the situation.But Gravemind, when it saw the grenade light up in its arms, it threw it out. Although it was still burnt black, its life was saved.

This is troublesome...

How to destroy the ring with low risk now?If the ship carrying the doomsday weapon ventures into the range, it will inevitably be counterattacked by the ring itself, and if the ATA is used to bomb... the ring is too thin. With the accuracy of the ATA, it is impossible to hit the ring with the planetary warhead. How many rounds to hit.

The dream of trying to get the ring at the cost of forty clones was shattered, and now if you want to kill the ring, you will lose a super flag anyway, or the ammo cost similar to the super flag.

Oregana felt her brain start to ache:

"Tsk... what about the Star Alliance's movements?"

If the ring was blown up in that wave just now, things would be much simpler. You only need to smash the planets here one by one. will happen.But now the ring can only be attacked from the outside. If you want to take down the giant structure made by the forerunners from the outside, you must formulate a mature plan to avoid excessive losses, and this will lead to an inevitable increase in time.

But if time drags on for too long, there will be a battle with the large forces of the Covenant in this galaxy, and the losses will also become exaggerated, and the super-flag battle cannot be avoided.And if one is not careful, and the floating ring of the boat is brought up, it will really be useless for all the hard work...

The one who answered him was Xiao Bao, the leader of the Gapari Chapter, who had just arrived. Her fleet had just jumped to the temporarily erected fixed inducement, and now it was starting to patrol and prepare for battle.

[I haven’t set off yet, so I might go here directly, or I might be waiting for a rendezvous at the surrounding anchorages. The command system is vague, and it might be that the top management of the city of fraternity is also quite at a loss. 】She called up the monitoring of the Star Alliance communications from the intelligence system—since Ansador sent the monitoring equipment and operators to the City of Fraternity one after another, this job has become extremely easy [Star Alliance Move slowly, ignore it for now.It would be better to solve the problem of the Flood Demon first. 】

"There's no way we'll ever get another chance. The Gravemind is ready, and it's pissed right now."

"But it can't do anything to us. It starts to clean up from the surrounding planets. Scan to determine the biomass first, so don't miss it."

【learn. 】

Across the galaxy, four planets have been infected by the Flood, and it is unclear at what point in history the initial infection occurred.The planetary bomber of the Blood Ravens Chapter arrived at Planet Two, and the heavy railgun on the bow of the ship aimed at the place where the life reaction was enriched and fired.This shot easily broke through the biological shell on the ground disguised as the ground, and blasted a small wound on the ground.

"Complete the blasting, investigate the scale, and measure the quality. Launch the probe, and adjust the detection intensity to level six."

"Incineration bomb ready."

"The probe has been deployed, and the internal structure of the flood creature is being investigated."

The same thing is happening simultaneously on four planets.Because the internal structure is very complicated, the investigation lasted nearly ten hours.During the period, in addition to the investigation ship, the sentry ships patrolling around also gained a lot.

In the eyes of the mad doctor of Blood Raven, the flood demons on these planets do not have the "integrity" of the dark worm, that is to say, it is not a huge egg buried in the ground, absorbing the energy of the planet and growing slowly, but like Ringworm grows diffusely below the ground—this may be to avoid the harsh environment in the universe. After all, there is no atmosphere here, the blazing light of stars, the huge temperature difference, and the asteroids that fall from time to time are harmful to the body of the Flood. Although it is not fatal, it is definitely uncomfortable...

After one night, half of the newly-spread creep was gone. This kind of thing is unbearable to anyone, so the flood chose to develop its own power under the ground on these planets.

They created holes in the ground, like a complex ant nest, with a clear division of labor in each area—the Flood is indeed a fighting creature, but the Flood here may not have put much thought into fighting from the layout of the base.There are very few things that look like defensive facilities, and there are only larger infected floods walking back and forth in the passage, which seem to be 'worker bees' used to maintain equipment.

And the equipment they maintain is a 'ranch'.

In the huge hollow in the center of the entire lair is a well-organized factory - the inside is filled with capsules, and inside the capsule is a constantly developing 'meat', which is a bit like the one seen on the halo in terms of structure. It is a large herbivorous animal similar to a cow, but it seems that a series of adjustments have been made with the idea of ​​'easy placement' according to the structure of the capsule and the size of the hall.

Water, nutrients and energy are continuously sent into the capsule to allow the 'meat' to grow, and the biomass produced is used to support the Flood group and breed new Flood individuals.It has become a self-sufficient colony.As for how the materials come from, this question is about to be clarified. The raw materials used to cultivate organisms are directly launched from the ring belt to the colony star, and the water resources are transported by the Flood aggregate floating in the asteroid belt. The icy asteroid is towed, and after the orbit is calculated, it is thrown into orbit, and then the individuals on the planet are recovered.

Why so sure?

Because the fleet of Blood Ravens found the 'scheduled flights' going to the asteroid belt and the 'colonies'.The large Flood body protected by a sealed shell moved slowly in a dormant state, with almost no energy response, and the response on the radar was very similar to that of an asteroid.Unable to move faster than the speed of light, they flexibly borrow the gravitational force between the planets to move forward, and it takes months to years to reach the target, just like the explorers who went to Mars in the early development of human beings.

This expresses only one thing, that is, after the Flood took control of the belt, it did not intend to be imprisoned here forever. It actively expanded outwards, used the materials on the belt to feed itself, and built a A fairly large-scale biological structure in the planetary system.The largest colony among them has already begun to build a biosphere with the characteristics of the Flood. There are no biomass production factories there, and it is not yet known how they perform material conversion.But it can also be inferred from this that although it is not known how long it has been developed, this is only an 'initial stage' of the Flood's colonization of the planet.

But because there is no way to exceed the speed of light, it is difficult for the Gravemind to further expand its power.Its empire has stagnated, which is not much different from ordinary civilizations that have been trapped around their parent star because they cannot point out the speed of light. The big filter is firmly set on the head of this civilization. If you continue to point out , there is only one result waiting for them - the load on the mother star reaches the limit, and then a wave of civilization is reopened. If you are unlucky, the remains of the previous civilization will turn into dirt on the filter, and the future of civilization in the next season will be ruined. blocked.

This finding was unexpected, but also reasonable.The goal of the Flood Demon in this life is to destroy any other living beings, so it will naturally find ways to achieve this goal... Even if it does not have the technology of the jump engine, the Gravemind is not willing to just sit and wait for the sky to fall. stuff, which is constantly getting ready for the universe.

To be honest, this is much scarier than squatting still and playing yo-yo every day...

Oregana smacked her lips, feeling a little pain in her head.

There are more troublesome things, God knows how many space shuttles this ghost thing has launched, and it is this kind of dormant entity that looks like a meteorite... In other words, it can only be found slowly?But if the Gravemind controls these individuals at any time, it will be able to follow the cat through the previous psionic transmission link... No, follow the vine...

This method seems to be feasible. It happens that the subspace here is calm and the disturbance is very small. As she thought about it, she browsed the scanned images sent from various places to see if there were any large-scale low-speed emission channels between stars like BETA. ——After all, this guy has plenty of time, and he might really do something like 'It takes 5000 years to fly to the galaxy next door, so let's fly one, huh huh~'.

Ma Dan... This kind of guy with longevity and heaven can really play a lot of tricks that ordinary people can't imagine.

Suddenly, Dark Rock patted Oregana on the shoulder, and said in surprise:

"32, look here is a 'split body' of the Gravemind." He pointed to the biological individual under the core of the building, and compared it with the scale next to it, it can be easily concluded that the size of each split body is more than 200 meters. They are like seeds buried in the ground, connected to each other with a large number of roots and nearby building structures, and the thought waves are much more frequent than those around them. "I guess it may be a command node similar to the king worm."

"Oh? That means that the Flood Demon will also block the population? How much population is one infection spore?" (abruptly)

Dark Rock froze for two seconds, and complained fiercely:

"No, no, no! Take care of your thinking thread! Are you secretly dialing your thinking thread to do something else! Tell me! Are you making a mutation!"

"No...no..." Oregana waved her hands again and again, "No this time! We were just thinking about other things."

"What do you think?"

"I want to find the aircraft that Gravemind shot out. Didn't BETA do the same thing at the beginning, and didn't have the ability to jump and launch carrier ships out continuously?" She explained, "We found all the carrier ships of BETA in the galaxy, because they It has only been flying for decades, and the solar system has not flown out. But the time of Gravemind is calculated in tens of thousands of years, and there are rings for him to observe habitable planets and calculate orbits, so we are thinking about how to catch these 'drifting bottle'."

That's the truth, and it's really important stuff.But Dark Rock still looked suspicious:

"Forget it, that's not the point." He pointed to the inside of the body scan of 'Little Gravity Brain Beast', and said, "Look at this structure."

Oregana squinted her eyes and watched for a long time. A group of large nerve clusters occupied about one-fifth of the lower body of the 'Little Gravity Brain Beast'. Considering its size, it was considered extremely large.

"It looks familiar. Looks like a warp synapse?"

Dark Rock nodded affirmatively and said:

"To be exact, it's a subspace synapse that is more than [-]% similar to the dark worm." He enlarged the image, took out an anatomical diagram of the dark worm's organs and placed it next to it. The two pictures are roughly the same in structure. Almost exactly the same as "a newborn conventional large dark worm individual, functionally possessing the ability to detect subspace, and can rely on this sense to detect whether there are intelligent creatures in several galaxies around it. Like the dark worm, it is a passive detection. This organ They were prepared for hunting in the vastness of the universe... except that they have not been of any use in the old days, the warp is too quiet here, but it responds to us."

Hearing this, Oregana felt her stomach start to hurt.Troublesome things plus troublesome things are not the effect of one plus one equals two. As long as the Flood Demon and the Dark Worm are mixed together, as long as it is confirmed, the huge pressure will immediately turn into a platinum star, Pulling everyone's hair down Ola Ola Ola.

Liu Lizi asked from the side:

"Is it convergent evolution?"

"I don't think so. From the structural point of view, it can be seen that the core design is the same. Flood Demon's is a specialized version adjusted specifically for the space environment of this universe. The traces of artificial design are very clear." Dark Rock replied, "This It shows that the two must have been in contact in some form at a certain period in history."

"I can't imagine the scene where the Flood Demon and the Dark Worm sit down and discuss technical exchanges. But if it is said that they fought each other..."

Indeed, the Flood and the Dark Worm are two types that cannot sit down and have a good conversation. The two Great Devourers took a look at each other and suddenly felt sorry for each other, "Dude, you have a good mouth" and "Brother, you are not bad" and then began to communicate. The possibility of how to find people quickly and how to eat efficiently is very small.But if they do fight, the effect is not like this...

The fact that Hong Mo can get the dark worm's organs means that the dark worm is defeated. According to the biological characteristics of Hong Mo, how can there be only one subspace synapse on Hong Mo now?You must be handy, right? Bring the bio-transition engine and the gravitational detection synapse of the dark worm. If you really want these things, you still need to wait here for the super-light-speed starship that will fly over at some time?Even if I waited once in a thousand years, I have waited a hundred times. It took so long for Fahai to evolve from a great mighty dragon to a great mighty Tibetan king.

This abrupt subspace synapse is so carelessly stuck here, swaying like the hair of a 35-year-old programmer, which makes people fall into deep doubts.

"It is possible that a deep dark worm came to this world at that time, and was defeated in the battle with the Flood Demon, so the Flood Demon got the psychic synapse, or there may be a mutual victory and defeat, and the Flood Demon got a certain The dark worm with certain characteristics left later—maybe it has been destroyed in a long battle, or maybe it is still wandering somewhere in the universe until now..."

"This is too weird..."

"It's also possible that this kind of psionic synapse was already implanted in the Flood's design."

"You mean... the pot of the pioneers?" Oregana had no idea about it. "What happened in the past of this world..."

[However, since Hong Mo has this thing on him, there are many things that can be explained clearly. ] The voice of the war scythe came from the communication [Now we can know why no psyker was born. 】

"The psychic power is almost completely blocked and the psychic powers of all staff are insensitive. Thanks to this, the subspace here is as quiet as a mourning hall in the middle of the night." Oregana smiled wryly, "The pioneers have considered a lot... Even if Hong The demon epidemic has resurfaced, and they have even gained the ability to navigate in the universe again. As long as they can avoid the detection of this synapse, the Flood will find people in the universe like looking for a needle in a haystack. If there is not enough food, the Flood will start to sleep..."

"One mystery has been solved, but other mysteries have increased instead. Where did this dark worm's organ come from!"

Pressing the leopard scratching its head, Oregana sighed and said:

"Let's put more effort into archaeology in the future. There is nothing we can do except archaeology. Let's go to the subspace to check... Then bring more people there, and then drag Haste, those library inquiry systems will arrive There are problems now, and it is necessary to rely on crowd tactics to check the mission records so long ago."

"It's not finished yet?"

"The mean time to failure is more than the use time, about four times more."

"This……"

"Forget about that for now, and focus on cleaning up the Flood in this galaxy."

"Yes!"

But at this moment, a soldier in a dark green shirt rushed in from outside the bridge: