Chapter 488: Space Fleet, Human World, Separation of Powers!
After a moment's thought, Li Ang also concluded that they should quickly establish contact with the Natural Selection and persuade them to halt for the time being. Earth was nowhere near the point where it needed to make a hasty escape.
"Send the Hyperion to shadow them. Let them go some distance first, and then we'll move in to intercept."
Among The Megacorp's warships, the Hyperion ranked as one of the more elite mid-sized battleships, primarily valued for its agility and speed, often deployed for penetration-type combat missions.
However, compared with a vessel like the Natural Selection, the Hyperion's size could definitely be called colossal.
The reason Li Ang wanted a tail first was to prevent the rest of the human fleet from also rushing in to interfere and stirring the whole situation into chaos.
"Yes, sir!"
At once, David Martinez, then acting as Operations Group Director of the Exploration Division, gave his reply. Though The Megacorp's warships at this stage could no longer perform space jumps, the antimatter engines they used could still propel them at sub-light velocities.
Catching up with vessels that maxed out at only fifteen to twenty percent of light speed would be no problem at all.
Up to this point, human fleet warships were still relying on nuclear fusion engines—not even advanced heavy-fusion reactors—forcing them to burn hydrogen and helium collected from Jupiter as fuel.
The energy conversion efficiency was abysmally low.
Forget about powering something as demanding as an energy shield—for many ships, even making a round trip between Jupiter and Earth was a shaky, precarious business.
Without an auxiliary energy supply, they'd end up stalling halfway.
Thus, Li Ang needed only to dispatch a single Hyperion to handle both the Natural Selection and the four escort ships trailing it.
At Li Ang's command, David Martinez mobilized his most elite vanguard team to monitor the fleeing vessel and await further orders from headquarters.
In addition, David dispatched an investigative squad led by Paul Atreides to Earth in the Trisolaran universe, tasked with assessing the state of human morale and internal affairs, so that new mission deployments could be planned.
While The Megacorp's divisions sprang into motion, the dialogue between the Natural Selection and Jupiter Orbital Fleet Command continued.
At that very moment, the fleet commander was still trying in vain to persuade Zhang Beihai:
[Zhang Beihai, even if you believe humanity's fleet cannot defeat the Trisolarans advancing from afar, your attempt at flight will bring nothing but futility.]
[The Natural Selection departed with only one-fifth of its fusion fuel tanks filled. At best you'll reach one percent of light speed, and even that will consume far more fuel than you can afford.]
[Your ecological life-support systems demand constant energy to function. Whether decades or centuries, the span of your journey is uncertain. Even if we fail to catch you, the voyage itself will eventually doom you.]
The commander's tone remained steady, though laced with suppressed anger. Human civilization was a collective; individual heroism was meaningless.
He had to make Zhang Beihai realize that cowardice would only condemn the entire crew aboard his ship to perish in the Infinity void.
Humanity's sole path forward was one: to stand and defeat the Trisolaran civilization head-on!
[I know. I understand all too well the consequences. But this is the only way to preserve a seed of human civilization. Forgive my obstinacy. Neither of us can persuade the other.]
These words utterly infuriated the commander. He roared into the comms:
[Damn you! Do you truly want all those lives wasted on your pathetic, meaningless play at heroism? No—you are no hero. You are a coward, a disgrace!]
[Do you think we've never considered building a fleet to leave the Solar System, to spread humanity's final embers into the galaxy? We've already run the calculations.]
[Every carefully modeled draft told us the same brutal truth: the so-called "Civilization Seed Plan" is impossible.]
A civilization whose ships cannot even reach half the speed of light has no right to dream of interstellar colonization.
The survival of humankind lies only in victory over the Trisolarans in this doomsday war.
What Zhang Beihai was attempting was nothing more than an abandoned proposal, thrown away as trash long ago.
Unless humanity defeated the Trisolarans, unless it forced them to lift the sophon blockade on basic physics, there could be no new breakthroughs, no technology capable of carrying humanity beyond the Solar System.
In such a dilemma, both sides fell into silence.
The commander believed humanity must fight its way through death to survive. Zhang Beihai believed escape was the only chance—slow though it might be, it was better than marching to slaughter.
Zhang Beihai knew the commander was right. They had no resupply. Out here in the blackness of space, they were like weak travelers staggering through an Infinity desert.
The lack of basic supplies alone could finish them.
Not to mention the unknown dangers of encountering other star-faring civilizations along the way.
Sigh…
A heavy, helpless breath escaped Zhang Beihai, his eyes weary, tinged with sorrow. Even he wasn't sure if the path he had chosen was the right one.
But in this world, how many roads are marked "right" in advance? Someone had to risk walking the dark, hopeless trail, in the chance it might lead to new life.
The commander, sensing Zhang Beihai's wavering, pressed his appeal once more:
[Zhang Beihai, it's not too late to turn back now.]
[The road you've chosen is no better than our annihilation in battle. The outcome is not yet decided—who dares claim the Trisolarans will surely win?]
He had long held a deep impression of Zhang Beihai—an outstanding officer, top of his class, his convictions and discipline so firm he needed no ideological stamping to enforce loyalty.
Why, then, was he faltering now, with the bowstring drawn to its breaking point?
After a long pause, Zhang Beihai finally answered:
[I'm sorry, Commander.]
With that, he cut off the transmission unilaterally. He feared that if he hesitated any longer, his resolve would crumble.
Since he had already chosen this road of no return, he could only walk it to the end. Even if that road led straight to a grave, he would tread it for the sake of humanity's survival.
Even in death, their loyalty would blaze like fireflies against the dark void, testifying to later generations that they had made foolish, yet unshakable, attempts.
...
...
On the War Moon's battleship platform, the Hyperion was preparing for launch under Captain Pani Wells' command.
At that moment, Zhang Beihai's Natural Selection lay roughly seven million kilometers distant. To the naked eye it was no more than the faintest glimmer of starlight.
But with the Hyperion's superior capabilities—even limited to decades-old sub-light engines—overtaking a fuel-short ship forced to crawl at one percent of light speed would be utterly effortless.
On the other side, the Earth investigation team assembled by Paul Atreides was already prepared to board the morphing ship and head deep into the human world.
This morphing ship also carried the Advance's shielding system, allowing it to avoid detection by Earth's radar and conceal both its trace and position.
As the ace operative of the Operations Division, Paul Atreides might have already risen to a management role, but missions of such importance still had to be led by him personally.
Even though the Three-Body universe had no psionics or Force powers, his physical prowess still far surpassed that of ordinary humans in this cosmos.
Having undergone the subtle transformation of both psionics and the Force, Paul's body structure had long since diverged drastically from that of a normal human.
At this moment, while corporate agents were in full motion, researchers from the Science Nexus had also picked up mysterious objects at the edge of the Solar System.
That was none other than the probe launched by the Trisolaran civilization—the Droplet.
Because they had to conceal their position as much as possible and could not use spatial jumps, the morphing ship took thirty hours to finally reach Earth's orbit.
Although the humans of the Three-Body universe had had their technological progress locked down by sophon interference, they had still tried their utmost to develop to a certain level.
Magnificent orbital cities were scattered across Earth's skies, connected to the ground by space elevators that towered like celestial spires, moving in synchronous orbit with the planet.
Unlike the warship arrays stationed at the Jupiter Fleet Base, although there were numerous orbital cities above Earth, no military vessels were stationed here.
The only traffic shuttling between orbit and the planet were civilian ships. It was entirely an undefended world, without even a proper orbital cannon in sight.
Clearly, the humans of this universe had thrown all their military power and resources into Jupiter orbit to resist the Trisolaran fleet.
Either the armed forces at Jupiter defeated the Trisolarans and Earth would remain safe, or the Jovian defense collapsed, and Earth would go down with it.
The stark contrast between the grand warship formations and the vulnerable homeland behind them was as glaring as France's heavily fortified Maginot Line during World War II.
But this was also the only choice left to them.
After all, Earth's resources and humanity's technological level were woefully limited. Before the dawn of an interstellar colonization era, those two thousand escort-class warships were already the furthest humanity could go.
If the Earthlings of the Three-Body universe had managed to establish more footholds on other planets, their situation would surely have been far better than now.
But for the time being, they simply couldn't.
"All their fighting force sent to Jupiter… doesn't that make Earth nothing but a lamb for the slaughter?"
Morgan Blackhand shook his head as he looked at the live feed transmitted back by the morphing ship. With resource allocation like this, it was clear the humans of this universe were truly on the brink.
If they didn't place all their hopes on those two thousand warships, what else could they possibly rely on?
Yet Li Ang saw something else in this distribution of forces—a system of checks and balances.
This was plainly the Western world's most cherished political structure: separation of powers.
The space fleet stationed at the Jupiter Base did not belong to any single nation or government. Instead, it was the "Fleet International," composed of three major fleets: Asia, Europe, and North America.
It possessed its own territory, economy, and legal system, and was even recognized as a member of the United Nations. Each fleet was commanded by its own headquarters, a structure resembling a military government.
But unlike traditional military dictatorships, the main mission of the Fleet International was resisting the Trisolaran fleet, not interfering in Earth's domestic politics.
As a result, no nation was allowed to maintain its own interstellar warships, and Earth had to depend entirely on the Fleet International at Jupiter for protection.
Under this seemingly peculiar yet balanced arrangement, internal wars and conflicts on Earth were completely ended. A rare glimpse of global unity among humankind appeared in this time of storm and peril.
But everyone knew that humanity's contradictions hadn't truly vanished—they had merely been redirected outward, onto the Trisolaran fleet.
With a great enemy at the gates, humanity had temporarily set aside its disputes.
Yet once the Trisolarans chose surrender or a temporary truce, humans would quickly forget their pain once healed, returning to infighting and indulging in self-destructive folly.
Sometimes Li Ang couldn't help but suspect that the humans of the Three-Body universe were in fact the real fools and villains.
Especially in the political realm, they remained stuck in a childish state.
For instance, the very concept of the Wallfacer Project was an expression of Western savior-complex thinking. They were simply lucky that Luo Ji emerged and grasped a basic principle of advanced civilizations.
Otherwise, the Wallfacer plan would have been utterly useless.
Later, during the Swordholder election, they even chose Cheng Xin, who held no deterrent power against the Trisolarans at all—a pure victory of populism.
The humans of the Three-Body universe were always making mistakes, yet never learning from them, like a cosmic infant spoiled by its heroes.
They never managed to learn how to survive independently, always waiting for saviors like Luo Ji, Wade, or Zhang Beihai, yet never thinking of ways to save themselves.
But in reality, there has never been such a thing as a savior, nor any deity or emperor who could rescue humanity. Humanity's only reliance could be on itself.
Back in Earth's orbit, after confirming there were no facilities nearby that could pose a threat to the morphing ship, Paul gave the order to begin landing.
At his command, the morphing ship swiftly disguised itself as an ordinary drop pod, reentered the atmosphere, and slowly descended into the Three-Body human world.
Its landing site was in a desert, though judging from its coordinates, this place should once have been a primeval forest.
Paul was shocked to see that Earth's environment in this universe had degraded so severely: sand and rocks whipped by Infinity winds, a blazing sun scorching overhead. He even wondered if they had come to the wrong place.
This hardly looked like habitable Earth—it was more like Tatooine from Star Wars.
"No wonder the humans here have built so many orbital cities. With Earth like this, how could anyone live down here?"
Paul shook his head, then used his comms to check in with the other landing members. Their answers were similar: all of them had touched down in barren, desolate regions.
Clearly, constructing those two thousand warships had drained humanity of everything—even its natural environment for habitation.
If this war were lost, human civilization would truly collapse completely.
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