Cixin Liu - The Dark Forest

Luo Ji and Shi Qiang entered the cabin. Three men in black suits welcomed them and took them past the forward cabin, which was totally empty but resembled a passenger plane with four rows of seats. In the middle cabin, Luo Ji saw a fairly spacious office, and another suite through whose half-open door he glimpsed a bedroom. The furnishings were unremarkable but neat and orderly, and apart from the green safety belts on the sofa and chairs you wouldn’t have known you were on a plane. Luo Ji knew that there were very few charter planes of this kind in the country.

Two of the three men who led them in vanished through a door to the rear cabin, leaving behind the youngest one, who said, “You can sit anywhere you like, but you need to buckle up, not just on takeoff and landing but throughout the entire flight. If you sleep, then buckle the sleep-belt too. Nothing that’s not fixed in place can be left out in the open. Stay in your seat or bunk at all times, and if you must move about, please inform the captain first. This is an intercom button. There’s one at every seat and every bunk. Hold it down to talk. If there’s anything you need, please use it to call us at any time.”

Luo Ji looked in confusion at Shi Qiang, who said, “The plane may execute some special maneuvers.”

The man nodded. “Correct. Please let me know if you have any problems. Call me Xiao Zhang. I’ll bring you dinner when we’re in the air.”

After Xiao Zhang left, Luo Ji and Shi Qiang sat on the sofa and fastened their seatbelts. Luo Ji looked about him. Apart from the round windows and the slightly curved walls they were set into, the room seemed so conventional and familiar that it felt a little strange to be wearing seatbelts in an ordinary office. But soon the noise and vibration of the engine reminded him he was aboard a plane taxiing down the runway, and a few minutes later the engine noise changed and the two of them were pressed back into the sofa. Then the ground vibrations disappeared and the office floor took on a slant. As the plane climbed, the sun, which had already dipped below the ground, returned through the window, just as the same sun had sent the day’s final rays of sunlight into the hospital room of Zhang Beihai’s father just ten minutes before.

By the time Luo Ji’s plane reached the coast, Wu Yue and Zhang Beihai were once again looking over the unfinished Tang , ten thousand meters below. This was the closest he would ever get to the two soldiers.

As on their previous visit, Tang ’s enormous frame was shrouded in the dim light of dusk. The showers of sparks on the hull didn’t seem quite as plentiful, and the lamps illuminating the ship had dimmed substantially. And this time, Wu Yue and Zhang Beihai no longer belonged to the navy.

“I heard the General Armaments Department has decided to terminate the Tang project,” Zhang Beihai said.

“What’s that got to do with us?” Wu Yue said coldly, his eyes sweeping from Tang to the last bits of sunset in the west.

“You’ve been in a bad mood since joining the space force.”

“You should know the reason. You can always read my thoughts, sometimes more clearly than I can, and then you remind me what it is I’m really thinking about.”

Zhang Beihai turned to Wu Yue. “You’re depressed about joining what’s inevitably a losing war. You’re jealous of that final generation that will be young enough to fight in the space force at the end and be buried in the cosmos together with their fleet. Devoting a lifetime of effort to a hopeless endeavor is hard for you to accept.”

“Do you have any advice?”

“No. Technofetishism and technological triumphalism are deeply rooted in your mind, and I learned long ago that I can’t change you. I can only try to minimize the harm that sort of thinking can cause. Besides, I don’t think it’s impossible for humanity to win this war.”

Wu Yue dropped his cold mask and met Zhang Beihai’s gaze. “Beihai, you used to be a practical person. You opposed building Tang, and on multiple occasions, on the record, voiced doubts about building a blue-water navy, arguing that it was incompatible with our national strength. You believe that our naval forces ought to remain in coastal waters under the support and protection of shore-based firepower, an idea ridiculed as a turtle-shell strategy by the young hotheads, but you’ve persisted in it…. So where do you get your confidence in a space victory from now? Do you really believe that wooden boats can sink an aircraft carrier?”

“After independence, the newly founded navy used wooden boats to sink Nationalist destroyers. And even earlier, there were times when our army used cavalry to defeat tanks.”

“You can’t seriously think those miracles count as ordinary military theory.”

“On this battlefield, terrestrial civilization won’t need to follow commonplace, ordinary military theory.” Zhang Beihai held up a finger. “One exception is sufficient.”

Wu Yue shot him a mocking smile. “I’d like to hear how you’ll achieve this exception.”

“I don’t know anything about space warfare, of course, but if you want to compare it to a wooden boat versus a carrier, then I think it’s just a matter of having the courage to act and the confidence in a victory. A wooden boat could carry a small squad of divers who’ll wait in the carrier’s path. When the enemy draws near, they’ll dive in and the boat will leave. Then when the carrier comes close, they’ll attach a bomb to the bottom of the hull and sink the carrier…. Of course this would be exceedingly difficult, but it’s not impossible.”

Wu Yue nodded. “Not bad. People have tried it before. In the Second World War, the British did that as part of the effort to sink the Tirpitz, only they used a minisub. In the 1980s, during the Malvinas War, a few Argentine special forces soldiers took Italian limpet mines into Spain and attempted to blow up a British warship docked in the harbor at Gibraltar. You know what happened to them.”

“But what we have is not just a small wooden boat. A one- or two-thousand-ton nuclear bomb can be made small enough for one or two divers to take underwater, and when it’s attached to the underside of a carrier, it won’t just sink it, it’ll blow the whole carrier to smithereens.”

“Sometimes you’ve got a fantastic imagination,” Wu Yue said with a smile.

“I’ve got confidence in our victory.” Zhang Beihai looked out at Tang, the distant shower of welding sparks reflected in his pupils like two small flames.

Wu Yue too looked out at Tang, and a new vision took hold of him: The ship was no longer a ruined ancient fortress but a prehistoric cliff with a multitude of deep caves carved into it, and the scattered sparks were flickering firelight in those caves.

After takeoff and all through dinner, Luo Ji refrained from asking Shi Qiang anything about where they were headed, or what exactly had happened, reasoning that if Shi Qiang was going to tell him anything, he would already have come out with it. Once, he unbuckled his seat belt and got up to look out the cabin window, even though he knew he would see nothing through the darkness, but Shi Qiang followed him and pulled down the window shade, saying that there was nothing to see out there.

“Why don’t we chat for a while longer, and then go to sleep. What do you say?” asked Shi Qiang as he drew out a cigarette, then quickly put it back, remembering he was on a plane.

“Sleep? So this is a long flight?”

“Who cares? It’s a plane with beds. I say we take advantage of them.”

“You’re only responsible for taking me to my destination, right?”