Homo Sapiens

November 5, ’20.

The tranquil Northwest Pacific.

A submarine sailed silently through these waters.

The submarine was only 137 kilometers from America’s Guam Base.

It was a medium-sized submarine with a displacement of roughly 2,000 tons, belonging to the Shark Team, a unit within the Luzon Navy. However, the unit did not officially exist on paper.

Even within the Luzon Navy itself, many officers were unaware of this submarine unit’s existence.

This was primarily to prevent security leaks. Although sailors who joined the Shark Team were not required to be converted into Soldiers, they all had to be implanted with biological chips and become New Humans.

New Humans were employees of the Homo Sapiens Company who had been implanted with biological chips. Not all of them were incorporated into the ranks of the Spider Web Managers.

Therefore, Li Qingye had given these people a universal designation: New Humans.

The New Humans category included regular employees with biological chip implants, Spider Web Managers, and Soldiers.

The number of New Humans within the Luzon Army was rapidly climbing, as was the case in Hongsawaddy.

Clearly, the Homo Sapiens Company had very limited trust in ordinary, natural humans.

Especially when it came to arming such a crucial force. As the Homo Sapiens Company deployed more and more secret weapons, the risk of leaks grew.

Natural humans had too many uncontrollable variables; they were certainly not suitable for such tasks.

For instance, the sailors on this submarine were all New Humans. With not a single natural human among them, the chance of a leak was minimized.

This was a Tuna-class submarine, an upgraded version of the Mackerel-class. This model continued the design philosophy of its predecessor: aside from its stealth capabilities, its other performance aspects were mediocre.

The submarine’s current mission was to come here and lay mines.

The submarine came to a halt on the seabed, at an average depth of about 240 meters. It opened a compartment in its belly and released a smaller submersible.

The submersible descended slowly until it touched the silty seabed, kicking up a small cloud of sediment. Startled by the sudden intruder, nearby marine life scattered.

A pheromone emitter on the submarine’s hull transmitted a command.

Soon, a large number of transgenic parasites emerged from the submersible’s surface. Resembling worms and earthworms, they used their oral cavities to ingest the surrounding sediment and expel it outwards.

In this way, the submersible gradually buried itself in the silt.

In about three days, the submersible would be completely buried.

This submersible was equipped with four heavy oxygen torpedoes and ten sea mines. Its integrated pheromone and sonar detection systems could effectively monitor a sea area with a 50 to 80-kilometer radius.

This was equivalent to establishing a secret undersea launch silo.

Its surveillance range happened to cover a portion of the American Navy’s shipping lanes.

Whenever necessary, the submersible could be activated, turning this stretch of ocean into a minefield.

Furthermore, these submersibles could communicate with each other via pheromones. While the bandwidth was limited, it was sufficient for transmitting commands.

Additionally, the Homo Sapiens Company’s undersea fiber-optic monitoring network was also expanding throughout the surrounding waters.

For example, near the Caroline Islands, another Shark Team vessel—the Tuna-class submarine 003—was currently executing a secret mission.

Anyone who has seen a bathymetric map of the Pacific Ocean knows that to the east of the Luzon Islands lie the famous Luzon Trench and Luzon Sea Basin.

The Luzon Trench in particular, at a depth of five to six thousand meters, posed a significant challenge for laying submarine cables.

Therefore, when laying submarine cables, trenches should be bypassed whenever possible. Although it is possible to lay cables in a trench, repairs are extremely difficult if a break occurs.

To circumvent the Luzon Trench, the Homo Sapiens Company opted to establish two main submarine cable routes: one running through the waters north of Luzon Island, and the other through the waters north of the Maluku Islands.

The submarine cable that Tuna-003 was currently laying was for the southern route, which detoured from the vicinity of the Maluku Islands.

Tuna-003 opened a hatch in its belly and released a submersible. This submersible was roughly the same size as the weaponized version; in fact, they were both developed from the same basic module.

The entire submersible weighed about 50 tons. To withstand the immense water pressure, it had a nearly solid internal structure, incorporating design principles from the anatomy of deep-sea fish.

This type of submersible could withstand a maximum depth of approximately 3,753 meters.

The old method of laying submarine cables had already been phased out by the Homo Sapiens Company.

The old method required surface ships, which had to remain in the area for extended periods. This was acceptable for construction in their own territorial waters and barely feasible on the high seas. However, it was neither appropriate nor secure when operating near other countries’ waters or in contested international zones.

Thus, the Homo Sapiens Company had developed a new technology.

This technology was called Subsea Directed Growth.

The process was quite simple. First, a suitable route for the submarine cable was surveyed on the seabed. Then, a node was established approximately every 100 kilometers.

The submersible was the core component deployed at each node.

Once the submersible buried itself deep within the sediment layer, its internal directed growth system would activate, and it would begin to grow a coral-based fiber-optic cable in a predetermined direction.

Ensuring the coral cable didn’t grow astray was also quite simple: pheromone guidance.

During the initial seabed survey, 150-kilogram ”growth anchors” were placed along the designated route.

A growth anchor was a miniaturized submersible, capable of burrowing 10 to 15 meters into the seabed sediment. It would then continuously release pheromones, guiding the coral cable’s growth in a fixed direction.

Typically, one of these growth anchors would be placed every 1,000 meters.

The coral cable would grow within the sediment layer, 10 to 15 meters below the seabed, at a rate of 300 to 500 meters per day.

This growth rate was thanks to the rapid burrowing ability of transgenic coral polyps. Especially in soft sediment, their chitinous mouthparts could rapidly consume the surrounding soil. They would extract the necessary raw materials to construct a honeycomb-like coral tube 10 to 12 centimeters in diameter.

Meanwhile, another type of transgenic coral polyp would begin to generate fiber-optic crystals within these tubes.

A submarine cable composed of this biological fiber not only had an extremely high data throughput capacity but also possessed self-repair capabilities.

Each growth anchor and growth node stored a substantial amount of nutrients, a key factor in promoting the rapid reproduction of the coral polyps and the construction of the fiber-optic crystals and their protective shells.

Under normal circumstances, the nutrient reserves in a growth node were sufficient to construct 400 kilometers of submarine cable.

For now, the submarine cables were merely point-to-point connections between two nodes, not yet a fully formed network. The remaining nutrients were therefore kept in reserve for future network expansion and repairs.

For the sake of secrecy, each growth node was equipped with a self-destruct system. In the event of any unforeseen incident, the node could be destroyed immediately.

In reality, the security of the seabed was currently quite good.

This was especially true for seabeds deeper than 2,000 meters. Aside from offshore oil rigs, submarines rarely dove below 1,000 meters. Similarly, ships rarely anchored in waters deeper than 500 meters.

Thus, as long as the cables avoided drilling platforms, they were unlikely to be discovered or damaged.

Conversely, submarine cables in shallow waters were far less secure.