Finding the Bates Ball!

The New Year's Eve dinner had arrived long ago, and it was lavish: a huge pile of dumplings, all kinds of seafood, and meat dishes.

But everyone ate only intermittently. No one had their attention on the food; they were all intently occupied with the work at hand.

Once the translator had been confirmed to be error-free, Song He relaxed slightly.

Right now, the only thing they could do was prepare the translator in case communication became necessary. As for other discussions concerning Alien Civilization, Song He felt the odds of reaching a correct conclusion in such a short time were extremely low. He did not participate. Instead, he conserved his strength, reclined his lounge chair a little, and rested half-lying down with his eyes slightly open as he watched the salvage operation on-screen.

Numerous warships were weaving back and forth through the target waters, their tracks packed as densely as knitted wool.

There were also countless live camera feeds. The sea surface was livelier than the Yangtze Crossing Campaign, with tens of thousands of orange, white, and red flares continuously launched into the sky. Large numbers of floodlights were cast into the seawater as well. Flashes rose and fell from every direction, and the chaotic interweaving lights turned the sea into something almost dreamlike and multicolored. Even the clouds seemed about to catch fire!

Vessels of all sizes moved constantly across the sea. After observing for a while, Song He concluded that the sailors on the surface were mainly divided into two groups.

Group One was the clearing team. They dragged enormous fishing nets to continuously haul debris out of the sea. Under the relentless bombardment of fish-scaring explosives, nearly all the living fish had fled, but plenty of dead fish floated to the surface. Nets and boatloads of dead fish were hauled aboard and taken away.

The livestream was incredibly clear. In many windows, the sailors were visibly covered in layer after layer of oily reflections, fish blood, and scales. Even through the screen, one could practically smell the stench of fish aboard the ships. Some sailors were so exhausted that they leaned over the rails to vomit, spraying from their noses as they threw up. Then they slapped themselves twice to wake up and went back to work.

There was also a considerable amount of seagrass and plastic waste on the seafloor. Several tons of seagrass were pulled up every minute. To find the Bates Ball as quickly as possible, the troops were giving it everything they had. They wanted nothing more than to turn over every stone on the seabed in a grid search and flatten the ocean floor as soon as possible to expose the target.

The second group was the deep-diving team. Their numbers were small. The waters where the Bates Ball had fallen were too deep, and only specially made diving suits could reach them. Those specialized suits looked outrageously expensive, and normal combat units would never have many of them. This time, they had probably emptied out every last bit of inventory, yet they had only managed to gather a thousand suits.

The Frogmen were exhausted too, diving again and again to search the suspected Bates Ball objects detected by the scanners.

After several hours of high-intensity searching, they had found all kinds of suspicious objects, but not even a shadow of the Bates Ball. Most were parts of sunken ships covered in seagrass and shellfish, massive iron anchors, rusted engines, metal crates, and so on. The objects that looked most like it were spherical naval mines from World War II, resting silently on the seabed with metal spikes protruding from them.

The waters assigned to the Frogmen were relatively shallow. But in the deepest section—the core area of the Bates Ball's projected landing zone—there was a massive undersea cliff.

There were cliffs on the seafloor too. After all, underwater rock also underwent geological movement. This one had a drop of more than eight hundred meters. Even the specialized diving suits could not descend that far, so they could only rely on submarines and unmanned deep-sea salvage devices.

Song He saw something familiar: the specialized submarine that had salvaged Ao Xiaoguang before. It was larger than a nuclear submarine and might even have been nuclear-powered. Like a bomber, it was continuously releasing salvage devices.

So far, there were very few salvage devices at work—only two hundred and sixty in total. More than five hundred deep-sea salvage devices of various models were about to arrive from all over the country, but even all of them together would not be enough. It was like trying to capture a major city with the manpower of a single company.

Time passed quickly. Two in the morning, three in the morning, four in the Early Morning!

Just after four, the screen suddenly changed dramatically!

All the other livestream windows vanished, and one feed enlarged. A metal sphere one meter in diameter lay quietly in the seabed sand, so smooth that not a grain of sand or mud clung to it. It was unmistakably the Bates Ball!

Every room erupted. People sprang to their feet and streamed out toward the operations command room!

In less than a minute, personnel from every department had packed the command room. Hundreds of breathless faces were illuminated by the glow of the massive screen.

On the wall-sized display at the front was a live feed of a deep-sea salvage device slowly approaching. It was about fifty meters from the Bates Ball. Various data appeared along the side: water temperature, signals, radiation, sound... According to the readings, the area around the salvage device was completely silent, with no abnormalities for the time being.

General Wang stood at the very front, his imposing back turned toward them. His expression could not be seen; he merely stared upward.

"Forty meters away, everything normal!" a department reported, its voice suppressing its tension.

"Thirty meters away, everything normal!"

"Twenty meters away, everything normal!"

"Ten meters away, everything normal!"

"Slow down! Hover at one meter!" General Wang suddenly ordered.

"One meter away. The salvage device is hovering in position!"

The enormous metal sphere loomed close on the huge screen. The salvage device's camera captured every detail of its surface. From afar, the entire object appeared perfectly smooth, without the slightest protrusion, like a mirrored sphere. Only up close could they see that its surface was covered in intricate three-dimensional patterns!

The patterns looked nothing like the result of manual polishing or external impact. Countless folded curves packed together, their lines as thin as hairs and spaced so tightly that only ants could crawl between them. Looking at any one area, the twists of the lines seemed utterly irregular, yet taken as a whole, they possessed an indescribable consistency.

Every hair on Song He's body stood on end. The patterns on the Bates Ball's surface inexplicably reminded him of the Golgi apparatus. They were so bizarre that they gave him an intense sense of nausea. His first instinct was that the metal sphere was some kind of living organism, that the patterns were traces of layer upon layer of growth. But on further thought, that seemed impossible. How could it be alive?

The team in the front row got to work in stunned confusion, visibly flustered. They were the materials analysis team, but they had clearly never seen this kind of metal before, nor could they understand what process could have created such sinister, complex patterns.

The salvage device had a built-in materials analyzer, whose display occupied the lower-right corner of the screen. It was scanning the surface of the sphere.

"Report: material cannot be identified!" A strained voice spoke after a moment. "The results from the various detectors conflict with one another!"

"A malfunction?" General Wang tilted his head slightly.

"There was no malfunction when it entered the water. The nearest salvage device can arrive in five minutes!"

"Wait," General Wang said. "Have this salvage device rotate and scan it, then pull back! Keep a distance of ten meters!"

The perspective on the big screen shifted. The salvage device carefully rotated around the Bates Ball, recording every inch of it, then slowly backed away as though afraid of waking it.

Five minutes passed in an instant. The screen switched, and a second salvage device slowly approached, hovering one meter away to scan it.

"Report! The material still cannot be identified. The scan results are identical to before!"

"Touch it lightly once! Maintain contact for one second!" General Wang ordered.

The entire operations command room fell into extreme silence. The salvage device extended a Mechanical Hand like a water snake and touched the sphere with the utmost gentleness, as if handling a bomb, then immediately pulled back.

The Bates Ball showed no response. A string of reports rang out in the command room.

"No nuclear radiation detected!"

"No signals detected!"

"No abnormal voltage detected!"

"No internal vibrations detected!"

"No abnormal temperature detected. The sphere's surface temperature is consistent with the seawater!"

More than a dozen reports followed. The Bates Ball seemed to have become a completely lifeless stone, lying quietly like any other piece of marine debris. It was difficult to imagine that this thing could easily reach speeds of dozens of Mach when moving.

At least that confirmed it was a tangible object, not some illusory projection, Song He thought. But then he reconsidered. That was hard to say too. If it truly was the projection of a higher dimension into a lower one, as they had previously speculated, who knew whether such a projection would take physical form?

"Report: the nearest translator has entered the water. It can arrive in five minutes. Should we attempt communication?" Qi Feng asked through the microphone.

"Attempt communication!" General Wang said.

Song He was so nervous that his throat felt dry. He unconsciously clenched his fists.

The perspective on the large screen changed again. Carrying a massive black translator the size of a refrigerator, the salvage device descended and slowly approached the Bates Ball lying motionless in the seabed sand.

Everyone in the room held their breath as they watched the black translator descend onto the sand, then get pushed bit by bit toward the Bates Ball.

Qi Feng was sweating from nerves as he clicked the mouse again and again, transmitting different types of communication signals.

"No response," Qi Feng said. "Should we attempt communication through tapping contact?"

"Try it!" General Wang said decisively.

The translator extended its Mechanical Hand as well and tapped the Bates Ball!

One tap first, then two quick taps, followed immediately by three!

The dull thudding sound was surprisingly somewhat like wood, nothing like the metallic sound they had expected.

After the tapping ended, the Bates Ball still showed no reaction. The team in the front spoke again.

"Report: the material still cannot be identified!"

The translator's Mechanical Hand varied its force as it tapped repeatedly from different angles. The Bates Ball did not move in the slightest.

At last, faint whispers arose from the corner of the command room. People were beginning to think the thing was completely broken. Even if it were a corpse, after being poked and prodded for so long, it should have shown some response. Only a totally scrapped machine would remain so utterly still.

"Report: tapping contact communication is ineffective. Should we attempt electrical-current communication?" Qi Feng asked again.

"Try it!" General Wang said.

The translator's Mechanical Hand gently grasped the Bates Ball and sent electricity through it!

The sudden burst of light startled everyone. The lifeless Bates Ball abruptly lit up!

It was not the entire surface that illuminated. Instead, a large number of small white circles lit up, each only the size of a soybean. They were densely and evenly arranged across the top of the sphere, somewhat like the burn marks on a monk's head, except their brightness was immense. The seawater within ten meters was lit so clearly that drifting particles could be seen floating through it.

"The light's energy is coming from inside it. The translator supplied very little electricity!" Qi Feng hurriedly said. "It has activated!"

Song He swept his eyes across it and opened the microphone. "A total of 111 light rings have illuminated!"

"It worked. Continue communicating through electricity!" General Wang was visibly shaken.

Qi Feng nervously operated the translator, beginning the electrical-current communication procedure.

But after repeated attempts for a long while, the Bates Ball showed no reaction. It simply remained lit with 111 light rings.

"Report: it's not working!" Qi Feng said. "The lights haven't changed!"

"Have all communication methods been tried?" General Wang asked.

"All of them! It neither receives nor emits any signals, at least none that we can detect!" Qi Feng said helplessly. "Could it be that this thing has no communication capability? Maybe powering it just turned on one of its lights?"

General Wang remained silent, quietly staring at the various data around the large screen, as though considering something.

Tension filled the command room. If the thing had been completely broken, everyone could have relaxed a little. But now it had lit up. Even if it simply remained lit without any other changes, it kept everyone on edge.

Suddenly, Song He's expression changed. He opened the microphone and shouted, "One light ring went out! The last one in the lower right corner! There are only 110 light rings left!"