One Thousand Four Hundred and Eighteen When Poverty Leads to Change
Halsey couldn't believe his eyes. After thinking for a long time, he still couldn't figure out what these fluffs were. The think tank of the International Fleet had never encountered such a situation.
It was thought that Ganymede was just going through the motions, but the fluff in the hole gave Halsey a slap in the face, letting him know that Ganymede did not give up resistance, but that aliens took the initiative to put the battlefield underground!
Flattening the surface of Ganymede is not a problem, but even if Ganymede is turned into a glass ball, the aliens underground will still live no matter how they live. The purpose of eliminating aliens will not be achieved at all.
Halsey is not a rigid person. Since the original tunnel is impassable, wouldn't it be better to simply restart the stove and dig a new passage to the depths of the ground?
It just so happens that giant ants are also experts at digging holes.
An instruction was passed down, and the giant ants immediately exited the burrow and found a place far away from the burrow to dig.
Ganymede's density is not high and its gravity is extremely low. The giant ants dug much faster than expected. It only took a short while to dig underground and out of sight of the fleet.
After ten meters deep into the ground, the digging speed of the giant ants dropped slightly. When it was about twenty meters deep, the digging speed slowed down significantly. When it was thirty meters deep underground, digging became very difficult. It looked like ordinary soil. , after digging it out, it solidified like a rock.
If only a group of giant ants were abnormal, it could be explained that they encountered ice veins, but all ant colonies encountered this situation, which is very revealing.
In order to understand the situation, the operator controlled the drone to get close to the broken soil clod and carefully observed the cross section of the soil clod. Then, he found dense filaments on the cross section.
Halsey's whole body is not feeling well. It's not strange to have this thing in the hole, but why is it also in the soil? What did aliens do to Ganymede? Does it have to be bombarded with nuclear bombs before we can successfully enter the underground?
It's also that the giant ants' methods are too simple. If the soldiers landed, the situation would definitely be much better than now. If the marines landed, they might have invaded the ground and started fighting with the aliens.
Halsey immediately thought of the airports on the back of Ganymede and immediately ordered the fleet to go around them. However, he was soon disappointed. The information fed back to the flagship by the battleship was that all three airports were blocked.
Setbacks came one after another, but Halsey was not discouraged at all. He mobilized the entire fleet and everyone worked together to find a solution.
In fact, he already had an idea in his mind, which was to join the Marine Corps.
But as soon as this idea came up, he was rejected by himself.
The international fleet has no servants at all. It’s not that the North doesn’t give them, or that Washington doesn’t want them. It’s just that the output is too low. Before the fleet sets off, the more than 40,000 clones have somewhere to go.
There are some marines. According to the standards of international fleets, each capital ship is equipped with a platoon, the space carrier is equipped with a company, and there are also some sailors who can take part in battles if they pick up weapons.
There are currently more than 40 warships and more than 1,400 marines on Ganymede.
At first glance, Halsey's Marines appear to be quite numerous, but if they were sprinkled on Ganymede, they would be like pepper in a pot, with no spray at all.
Reluctant to leave the Marines, he could only find a solution on the giant ants. Halsey immediately thought of the ice sea on Callisto... Aliens can bury filaments in the soil, but they cannot bury them in the ice. Stuff, right?
He immediately issued a series of orders, and the fleet that received the order immediately took action. The originally gathered fleet dispersed in all directions, looking for a suitable ice sea.
The location selection of each ship is not that simple. First, the ice sea on Ganymede is very complicated. Some are pure water ice, some are air ice solidified at low temperature, and there are also mixed ice of water ice and air ice. And no matter what kind of ice it is, it is more or less mixed with some impurities. Let’s not mention the small amount of impurities. If you take a piece of ice from a place with many impurities, it will become a mess after melting.
The second reason is that the giant ants have limited activity time in a vacuum environment. They must return to the transport ship every few hours to breathe oxygen and eat a lot to replenish their lost physical strength... The servants also have the same defect, so this is not human. The technology is not up to par, but there is a problem with the gene source.
The transport ship that landed cannot be moved. If the ant colony leaves the transport ship, it will not get the necessary logistical supplements. After exhausting the reserves in the body, it will have no choice but to wait for death.
Therefore, the location of each ship must meet the two conditions of less impurities and being close to the ant colony. As a result, the available targets are very limited, and only four locations among all candidate targets meet the conditions.
After each ship arrived at the target, it immediately adjusted its posture, with the bow of the ship facing the ice sea, and then fired at the ice sea with its laser main gun, intending to use the laser to penetrate the ice layer and open an ice cave for the giant ants directly to the bottom of the sea.
It doesn't matter if there are those kind of filaments under the ice. No matter how strong this thing is, it can't survive the continuous irradiation of the laser without any damage.
While the fleet was taking action, all the giant ants were withdrawn to the transport ships and were on standby.
There is some distance between the transport ship and the ice sea. The ant colony should have set off early, but in order to save the ants' time outside, the ant colony could only be withdrawn to the battleship.
It was not until half an hour later that Halsey ordered the giant ants to set off, and there were not many of them.
The ant colony arrived at the ice sea an hour later. By this time, the marines escorting the nuclear warhead had been landing for a while. They seized the time to fix the nuclear warhead on the back of the giant ant.
At this time, a hole of unknown depth had been made in the ice sea. After the giant ant approached, the warship stopped shooting, and a drone drilled into the ice hole. The warship quickly got the data it wanted: the ice hole was 74 kilometers long and 53 kilometers vertically deep.
Halsey didn't know how thick the velvet layer was, but no matter how much of this stuff there was, it was impossible to go more than 50 kilometers deep into the stratum - aliens have this ability, but aliens definitely don't have so many resources!
The giant ant carrying the nuclear bomb set off immediately, quickly crawled into the straight ice hole, retracted its legs and lay on the ice, sliding all the way to the bottom of the hole like playing a slide.
The giant ant had no intelligence at all, and didn't know what was on its back, let alone that this thing was about to send it to hell.
The giant ant was just a living tool, and no one cared about their life or death. The warship gave an order, and the nuclear bomb exploded instantly. The ice hole first lit up, and then the surface of the ice sea trembled violently, first bulging and then sinking, the ice layer cracked over a large area, and a large amount of steam rushed into the sky from the cracks, but soon disappeared.
When the ice sea calmed down completely, the originally flat ice surface had turned into a small basin with a vertical depth of more than 300 meters.
The ice layer was blown up, but more than 300 meters was really too shallow and could not achieve the result Halsey wanted.