It has been three days since the fleet left the Imperial Zone.
Of course, since there is no concept of time in the void, these "three days" are calculated according to the imperial standard timeline. No matter how far away from the imperial zone, we will keep the time scale on the battleship consistent with the imperial zone.
For battleships in the void, rushing means constantly "jumping". Every time the void engine modifies its own information identification code, it is equivalent to moving the entire fleet once. This is a non-linear way of advancement, and each jump is very
Fast, without the "absolute path" as an obstacle, the only thing that affects the fleet's forward speed is the computing power of the void engine. And three days is enough for us to move a very, very far distance - but we seem to be still far away from the destination.
There is a longer way to go.
After all, the movement speed of the fleet cannot be compared with the void shuttle. Although Tavel installed modification plug-ins to increase the sailing speed of each spacecraft in the fleet as much as possible before departure, this improvement is limited. We probably need more than half
It takes months to reach the first suspected coordinate.
Now the fleet is far away from the border, but it is still within the range that the Garden of Death system can barely radiate. The empire has launched some sporadic outposts and automatic observation posts to this area, as well as some self-proliferating and self-evolving self-discipline bases.
It can be said to be the limit of the empire's power. Through the border outpost development station, some unclear civilian channels can still be received here. Although there are no civilian exploration ships here, these civilian channels are still using their own weak
The signal declares the presence of imperial hegemony here.
It is such a desolate and dead place. We have never developed here because there is really nothing to develop here - only three or two universes can be searched within the information offset of thousands of units, and there are still
All of them have no life response. The place is as empty as a large cemetery, and even the remnants of the world are rare items.
Occasionally, this kind of very empty area appears in the void. The distribution of the world in the void is uneven. There are dense places and sparse places. The extreme sparseness is this kind of desolate area. The desolate area is very important to those who accidentally appear in the local area.
This is a desperate situation for civilization, which means that even if they develop the technology to sail across the world, it will be difficult to find other universes alive, and they will die on the long road of their first voyage; but for some cross-world civilizations
.This kind of desolate area is a rare natural barrier: without the universe as a springboard, it means that it is difficult for the abyss and foreign enemies to penetrate. You don't need to set up a sovereign hub in every world to build a costly "Great Sentinel Wall".
This desolate area belongs to the latter. It has been an excellent barrier for the new empire for several years, and the facts have proved that it is indeed effective - since the establishment of the new empire, there has never been an early warning of the abyss penetrating from this desolate area.
But this time we have to trek through this barren land. This kind of journey is not difficult for the imperial fleet, but it is extremely boring and boring, and we can't see anything at all along the way. Even Qian Qian is always excited at all times
All the energetic girls quickly get bored.
Fortunately, the Imperial spaceships are quite large, even to the extent that there are towns inside. The hundreds of kilometers long Imperial Admiral has extra space for expansion inside, and the size of its towns has reached the level of a city. Although every spaceship has
They are all purely industrialized military towns, but walking on the streets of those cities can make people temporarily forget that they are on a starship sailing in the void. In addition, there is a huge ecological sphere in the spacecraft.
Qianqian has been busy for a long time - that girl will not suffer from depression.
The pioneering station is actually unmanned, but its main purpose is to provide safety for nearby explorers in various extreme environments. In addition, a survival capsule that can accommodate hundreds of people does not put much pressure on the space expansion device.
Large, so these sites have living areas.
The basic shape of an outpost development station is a short, blunt olive shape, with antenna towers protruding from the main body at both ends. The alloy carapace and nether energy barrier completely cover the other parts of the outpost development station. Their scale is one kilometer to ten kilometers.
In between, it depends on whether they need to "grow" so big. In such a desolate area, the outpost development station is an important communication device and also the "insurance" for the personnel working here. If you encounter danger in the void
, then escaping to the outpost development station is likely to be your last chance of survival - and you can also quickly return to the empire area through the teleportation device of the outpost development station. But to be honest, people who encounter danger in the void may not necessarily have time.
Escape to the nearest outpost. Most mortal artifacts are too fragile in the void anyway.
"Perhaps we should take this opportunity to deploy more development stations." Watching the work ship and the autonomous machine drag the silver-white cube with a side length of 100 meters out of the order field and disappear behind the fleet, I suddenly had an idea, "We can
Let's connect the development stations into a network in the desolate area, and then use them as benchmarks to build a transmission channel to the home world. After all, the home world is too far away, and the power of the Garden of Death can't 'drag' it at all. We can't do it every time
It takes half a month to fly there every time, which is more difficult than dragging Xixi to visit our house."
"This is indeed a problem, but let's talk about it when we have the opportunity in the future," Shandora pondered for a moment and shook her head slightly, "It takes a lot of energy to set up the kind of continuous jump channel you mentioned, and this place is a desolate area, and there is no universe around it that can serve as a node.
.The jump channel itself requires a lot of self-maintenance components, and our fleet is not here for construction along the way."
I nodded and wrote this down in my mind. This problem will have to be solved sooner or later: the home world is far away from the current imperial area, and the Xiling apostle's habit of "dragging the new world over to use it as territory" always has a certain distance.
Extremely. It took the old empire countless years to organize more than a hundred sky zones, but now the "distance" between the new empire and the home world is farther than the first sky zone to the 135th sky zone.
!It is unrealistic to slowly open up the land and push through. We can only build a temporary channel to connect it first.
Now that I think of the Silk Road, can our history be saved?
The fleet left an outpost and continued to move forward. What followed was an even more boring and long journey.
Another week has passed, and the fleet has arrived at a strange void that no one has ever set foot in. If the previous intelligence and calculations are correct, this is already the front edge of the wave of destruction, and we will probably see it soon.
A lot of world fragments.
But the first thing we see is something surprising.
Sandora called me to the research facility of the Imperial Admiral early in the morning. A group of Tavel's mass projections were already busy here, and Abyss Xiling was also present. I saw the holographic projection in the center of the hall showing
A large piece of broken wreckage appeared at the front of the Order Field, and the fleet had stopped in front of this wreckage.
A large number of work boats were shuttled among the wreckage, dragging out bright lines. I looked familiar at the appearance of those wrecks, and couldn't help but ask Sandora next to me: "What is that?"
"It's the self-proliferating drone swarm we launched two years ago," Sandora frowned. "Some of them lost contact last year. I didn't expect that they have proliferated to this place. But it seems that they were attacked by something.
Ruined.”
Self-propagating drone swarm? I was stunned for a moment, and then quickly remembered it: this was an exploration plan two years ago. At that time, the New Empire and the Abyss were still in full swing, and we urgently needed to expand our territory and increase our territory.
Strength, so Sandora took the lead in launching a large number of self-proliferating drones. This kind of drone is not actually a single piece of equipment, but a "group", including a drone base, a conventional fleet, and exploratory experiments.
Rooms, development factories and a lot of other things. Just like ant colonies or bee colonies, they can generate huge collective power. Once this kind of drone swarm enters the void, it will multiply rapidly, search for the world, drop colonial stations, and send invitations to the empire area.
signals, while desperately expanding and spreading, only the orders set by the Xiling Apostle can stop them. This kind of fleet is used for "exploration and discovery", so they have no offensive except leaving marks everywhere. They belong to the "
"Safety product" (at least for Xiling Apostles, but many ordinary races seem to have doubts). In the old empire era, this kind of docile and loyal drone group has always been an important auxiliary tool.
The Xiling Apostles have been working diligently for hundreds of millions of years to open up new territories and split the soil, and their work has been very effective in the New Empire era. The expansion plan two years ago brought us at least one-third of the new territory.
But not all of these drone groups can work safely. Last year, a batch of drones disappeared together with a mother base.
This kind of sudden loss of contact is not uncommon, because the drone swarms are exploring some extremely dangerous unknown areas. Their forward speed is not as fast as that of the void shuttle, but their spread is much larger than that of any void exploration team, so there will always be
A group of drones has disappeared in the white area. These missing aircraft groups either encountered an abyss, or were unlucky enough to encounter the end of the world. When the situation is serious, it is too late to even send an alarm signal back.
Last year's disappearance of the drone group was considered a serious one, because they also had a newly built mother base, making it a relatively large group. Sivis organized several search operations specifically for this purpose, but
Because the missing drone fleet was too deep into the White Zone, and the Abyss Zone was too restless at the time for the empire to pay attention to, this drone swarm gradually faded out of everyone’s sight.
We didn't expect that we would see the remains of the fleet here. They were obviously not the ones that disappeared at the beginning. They should be the new fleet that was proliferated later. I have to say that the expansion speed of these things is simply terrifying. Without the coordination of the headquarters,
The situation has spread all the way to this point in the White Zone - fortunately, the core instructions of each drone have two restrictions of "not interfering with the local civilization process and not destroying the stability of the local world" (after all, they are used to mark
For new territories, the empire does not want to get a piece of scorched earth and a group of enemies when it takes over the territory from the drone swarm), otherwise this thing will definitely become another group of terrifying war plagues.
Even the extraordinary materials created by the empire will quickly disintegrate and assimilate if they fall into the void without energy supply. Therefore, the wreckage the fleet encountered should have been destroyed not long ago. Most of them showed serious signs of "evaporation"
, the edges of some wreckage have blurred like phantoms. Even I can see this obvious blurry scene on the surveillance screen, but many of the wreckage are still intact. Salvaging them should be able to confirm what happened in this area recently.
thing.
The work boat found a spherical device from the wreckage that seemed to be in pretty good condition. It was a silver-gray metal ball with a radius of more than one meter. There was still a dim blue light floating slowly on the surface. It should have been installed
It was on a base somewhere, but now all that was left of those connections were broken metal stubbles. I watched as a work ship used a tractor beam to pull the spherical device into its cargo bay and then headed towards the Imperial Admiral.
Flying in, Tavel explained beside him: "That is the thinking device of the drone swarm. Every thousand drones have one such 'brain', and every hundred 'brains' can form a mother base."
, of course, there is also the phenomenon of expansion or reduction of the organization, which is decided by the drone group itself. These 'brains' have a very strong protective function. Even if the carrier ship they are on is blown up, these thinking cores can sail independently.
, and can survive in the void for a long time. Probably these brains have recorded the recent encounters of the drone swarm."
This thinking core was quickly sent to the research facility of the Imperial Admiral. Tavel led a group of experts to quickly dismantle it and found a database inside it - fortunately, it was not broken.
According to database records, this thing was destroyed several months ago.
A report was compiled and sent to Sandora and I. Abyss Xiling also received a copy. She looked at the analysis conclusion and shook her head slightly: "It seems to be related to the wave of destruction. The log said that the drone group lost contact with the Empire area.
Then they chose to rebuild the communication link while continuing to expand into the depths of the void. They proliferated normally for several months. Finally, a large group of drones finally found a stable new universe, and the consciousness of the drones decided to merge themselves with this new universe.
They seemed to be planning to build an industrial world, and then build a giant mothership to send a copy of the database back to the Empire, but before that... the entire universe was 'broken' without warning."
"Just like what those exploration teams reported, the world is dying in pieces, and the causes of death are all kinds of strange." Tavel looked at the dismantled thinking core of the drone and sighed, "It seems that we still know about the void.
Too little, and the exploration will never end... The world barrier will suddenly 'break', which is obviously only the void itself can do. This is the theory."
"Don't study these ultimate secrets yet," Sandora put down the data terminal in her hand and looked up at the large holographic projection not far away. The projection showed a panoramic view of the imperial fleet. The work fleet had cleaned up the order field.
The front-end drone swarm was wrecked, and some autonomous work ships were released to search for other drones nearby (we still hope to recover some things if possible, so we can live a good life), while the fleet itself is preparing to set sail again,
"We should be close to the 'wave of destruction' now, and we may encounter unprecedented situations at any time. Let the fleet be prepared, the sensor power is fully turned on, and the order field is transferred to the alert cruise mode - the speed can be slowed down a bit
, it’s better than missing something.”
The next second I realized that Sandora's sixth sense might be similar to Lin Xue's, because as soon as her voice fell, the shipboard broadcast rang: "Attention, the information tide has been detected, and we are about to contact the order field! All members
Be prepared for impact!"
(I’ve been thinking about what to write in a new book... and finally decided to go with the unrestrained and imaginative style.)