Chapter 169 Deep Sea Minefield
20 years, November 5th.
The calm Pacific Northwest.
A submarine was sailing silently in this sea area.
The submarine is only 137 kilometers away from its base in Guam, America.
This is a medium-sized submarine with a displacement of about 2,000 tons. It belongs to the Shark Squadron of the Luzon Navy, but its sequence does not exist in the official documents.
Even within the Luzon Navy, many officers were unaware of the existence of this submarine force.
This is mainly to avoid leaks. Soldiers joining the Shark Brigade do not need to be transformed into soldiers, but they must be implanted with biochips to become new humans.
The new humans are the employees within the Sapiens company who have had biochips implanted. Not all of these people have been included in the sequence of spider web managers.
Therefore, Li Qingye gave these people a general name - new humans.
The new humans include ordinary employees, spider web managers and soldiers implanted with biochips.
The number of new humans within the Luzon army is now rapidly increasing, and the same is true in .
Obviously, the trust that Homo sapiens companies have in ordinary natural persons is very limited.
Especially within the military, as more and more secret weapons from Sapiens are put into service, the risk of leaks is increasing.
There are too many uncontrollable factors for natural persons, so it definitely cannot be used.
For example, all the sailors in this submarine are new humans, without a single natural person, so the possibility of leakage is reduced to a minimum.
This submarine is an upgraded version of the Bluefin tuna class submarine. This type of submarine continues the design concept of the Bluefin tuna class. Except for its stealth, its other performance is mediocre.
At this time, the mission of this submarine is to come here and lay mines.
The submarine was seen anchored at the bottom of the sea with an average water depth of about 240 meters. The bottom cabin was opened and a smaller submersible was dropped down.
The submersible slowly sank until it touched the surface of the mud on the seabed, stirring up a light cloud of mud. The surrounding marine animals were frightened by this sudden uninvited guest and fled from the vicinity of the submersible.
The pheromone transmitter on the surface of the submarine sends out a pheromone command.
Soon, a large number of genetically modified parasites emerged from the surface of the submersible. These genetically modified parasites were similar to worms and earthworms. They used their mouthparts to swallow the surrounding mud and sand, and then spit out the mud and sand to the surroundings .
In this way, the submersible sinks into the mud and sand little by little.
In just about three days, the submersible will be completely buried by mud and sand.
This submarine is equipped with four heavy oxygen torpedoes and 10 mines. The pheromone and sonar detection systems it carries can effectively monitor sea areas with a radius of 50 to 80 kilometers.
This is equivalent to building a secret underwater launch silo here.
Within its monitoring range, it just covers part of the American Navy's shipping lanes.
Whenever necessary, this submarine can be activated to turn this sea area into a minefield.
Moreover, these submersibles can communicate with each other through pheromones. Although the amount of information communicated is limited, it can still be used to convey instructions.
In addition, the underwater fiber optic monitoring network of the Zhiren Company is also spreading along the surrounding waters.
For example, near the Palau Islands at this time, another Tuna-class ship, No. 003, of the Shark Squadron was carrying out a secret mission in the waters.
Anyone who has seen the Pacific Ocean seabed topography map will find that to the east of the Luzon Islands is the famous Luzon Trench and Luzon Basin.
In particular, the Luzon Trench, with a depth of five or six thousand meters, has a huge impact on the laying of submarine optical cables.
Therefore, when laying submarine optical cables, if it is possible to bypass trenches, they should be avoided as much as possible. Although optical cables can also be laid in trenches, if they break, it will be very troublesome to repair them.
In order to bypass the Luzon Trench, Sapiens chose to set up two main submarine optical cables from the waters north of Luzon Island and the waters north of the Maluku Islands respectively.
At this time, Tuna 003 is laying out the submarine optical cable, which is the southern line that bypasses the Maluku Islands.
Tuna 003 opened the hatch from the bottom and dropped a submersible. This submersible was about the same size as the one equipped with torpedoes and mines, and was actually developed from the same basic module.
The entire submersible weighs about 50 tons. In order to avoid the oppression of water pressure, the interior adopts a nearly solid design, coupled with the body structure design of deep-sea fish.
The maximum water depth that this type of submersible can withstand is about 3753 meters.
The old-fashioned method of laying submarine optical cables has been eliminated by Sapiens.
The old-fashioned laying method requires the cooperation of ships, and the ships need to stay nearby for a period of time. It is okay to construct in one's own waters, and it can barely be used on the high seas, but once it approaches the waters of other countries or hot high seas areas, it becomes inappropriate and unsafe.
So Sapiens updated with new technology.
This technology is called seafloor directed growth technology.
The specific operation is very simple. First, explore a route on the seabed suitable for laying submarine optical cables, and then set up a node every 100 kilometers or so.
The submersible is the core component deployed at the node.
But after the submersible buries itself deep in the mud layer, the internal directional growth system will be activated and begin to grow the coral optical cable in a fixed direction.
As for how to ensure that the coral optical cable will not grow crooked, it is actually very simple, that is pheromone induction.
Because during the early stage of seabed topography exploration, a 150-kilogram growth anchor will be dropped along the determined route.
The growth anchor is a scaled-down version of a submersible that can penetrate into the seabed mud layer at a depth of 10 to 15 meters, and then continuously release pheromones to induce the coral optical cable to grow in a fixed direction.
Usually, this type of growth anchor is placed every 1,000 meters.
Coral optical cables grow in the mud layer at a depth of 10 to 15 meters at a speed of 300 to 500 meters per day.
This growth rate is actually due to the genetically modified coral polyps' ability to drill into the soil quickly, especially in soft mud and sand layers. Their chitinous mouthparts can quickly devour the surrounding soil, obtain some of the necessary raw materials, and construct honeycomb coral tubes with a diameter of 10 to 12 cm.
Another type of genetically modified coral polyp will begin to produce fiber optic crystals in these coral tubes.
This submarine optical cable composed of biological optical fibers can not only carry a very high information flux, but also has the ability to self-repair.
Each growth anchor and growth node stores a large amount of nutrients, which are also important factors in promoting the rapid reproduction of coral polyps and the construction of optical fiber crystals and protective shells.
Normally, the nutrient reserves of the growth nodes are sufficient to build a submarine optical cable with a length of 400 kilometers.
Currently, the submarine optical cable is only a connection between two nodes and has not yet been transformed from a linear structure to a mesh structure. Therefore, the remaining nutrients are a kind of reserve that can be used for subsequent line expansion and maintenance.
In order to maintain confidentiality, each growth node is equipped with an automatic destruction system. Once any accident occurs, the node can be completely destroyed immediately.
In fact, the safety of the seabed is quite good now.
Especially at seabed depths exceeding 2,000 meters, except for offshore drilling platforms for oil extraction, submarines rarely dive below 1,000 meters. Similarly, anchorages for ships rarely occur at seabed depths exceeding 500 meters.
In this way, one only needs to avoid the drilling platform and it will generally not be discovered or destroyed.
On the contrary, submarine optical cables in shallow water areas are much less secure.
