Marvel Magic Case Files

Chapter 1672 SOS Signal

"...This is Captain Miller, the Lewis and Clark, contacting Houston for the 34th time. All crew members are awake and undergoing rehabilitation. We are expected to approach the Event Horizon (the edge of a black hole) in approximately 180 hours Earth time to begin our rescue mission. Ensign Justin, the engine engineer, reports that the engines are in good working order and can meet mission requirements, but he has no idea how the radioisotope generator works; he just knows to press buttons according to the manual. Lieutenant Smith, the pilot, and Lieutenant Cooper, the search and rescuer, are also undergoing rehabilitation training and continue to complain about the terrible taste of the nutritional paste..."

The blurry holographic image flickered for a moment, then returned to normal.

"...This is Captain Miller, the Lewis and Clark, making its 35th contact with Houston. We can now see the Event Horizon through the portholes, but all calls have gone unanswered by Captain Kilpark. Lieutenant Cooper, the search and rescue officer, believes the Event Horizon's crew may have entered hibernation pods awaiting rescue, even if that's overly optimistic—hibernation pods aren't designed to last seven years. Dr. Will claims that time inside a black hole is distorted by gravity and doesn't correspond to real time, but nobody knows what happened on that ship..."

"...This is Captain Miller, the Lewis and Clark, making its 36th contact with Houston. We can now clearly see the shape of Event Horizon through our observation equipment. This 43.5 billion-kilometer journey is about to reach its first stage of success. It has been a long journey. When I saw that spacecraft floating in space like a giant cross, I realized just how far we are from Earth. Voyager 1 took 42 years to barely leave the solar system, while we spend much of our lives in space, forgetting through slumber..."

"...This is Captain Miller, Captain Lewis and Clark, contacting Houston for the 37th time..."

After slumbering in the pressure chamber to overcome the gravity of the giant planet, proper training and medication were insufficient to fully restore the combat capabilities and tactical thinking of the mortal assault sergeant, Nicky. Even as a super-soldier who had taken appropriate amounts of gene-enhancing drugs and undergone minor surgical modifications, he was still just a mortal. The recording was soporific, and Captain Miller's voice gradually shifted from initial excitement to boredom. The inability to contact the command center on Earth was frustrating for everyone on the Lewis and Clark, even the experienced astronaut Captain Miller.

Fortunately, the dull environment in the tactical room didn't last long.

In the tactical discussion room, the Sorority Chief displayed the psionic readings detected by the forward-launched probe, then played another recording. Both the Commander of the Guard and the Sorority Chief had heard the distress signal that had been lingering in outer space. This recording instantly put everyone in the tactical discussion room on high alert; beads of sweat, like needles, broke out on their backs, as if they had momentarily lost control of their bodies, and a deep, bone-chilling pain pierced their ears.

It was a scream almost impossible to utter from a human throat. The sound was like a dense, subtle humming of countless insects' wings converging into a sonic wave, or the piercing screeching of rough metal rubbing against each other. Mortals could recognize their own mother tongue in the recording, but upon closer listening, it seemed like an illusion, a coincidence formed by the collision of countless audio tracks. Even with the audio off, everyone who heard the recording felt the sound lingering in their ears, as if the terrifying, desperate cry had pierced through space and seeped into steel. For security reasons, the accompanying Martian technicians completely isolated the storage medium containing the recording from the Sky Carrier's tactical analysis processor. Analysis revealed a barely audible sound from the screaming track: a repetitive, bloodied, torn Latin phrase meaning "Release me." Information on every crew member of the Lewis and Clark and Event Horizon was in the accompanying documents; the recording, after comparison, did not belong to any of the Event Horizon's crew.

Sergeant Nicholas of the Planetary Assault Forces, clad in Void Armor, swallowed hard. Pre-battle emotional preparation couldn't mask the primal fear emanating from his very soul. As one of the few mortals present, this officer, belonging to the First Class Regiment Assault Team, was a mercenary without borders. After being recruited, he underwent a specific genetic enhancement program and participated in the Battle of Mount Fimbulb, authorized to handle the most dangerous classified missions. From terrorist attacks to biological weapons leaks, from underwater to space, with robust logistical support and intelligence backing, this officer and his men could handle anything smoothly. It was precisely for this reason that Regent Victor von Doom authorized this First Class Regiment Assault Team to join this operation.

Nicky couldn't understand why these incredibly beautiful girls were so calm in the face of such terrifying noise. It was said that the emperor especially favored these hot-tempered pretty girls and equipped them with explosive guns with recoil powerful enough to shatter the shoulders of ordinary people.

"Alien creatures, or something worse?"

Tita looked at Constantine.

The Commander of the Royal Guard remained silent, yet his presence was unmistakable in the bridge space. Only after receiving the Commander's nod of permission was Tita allowed to reveal some information to the mortal soldiers. "I won't disclose the source of this information, but it's certain that the Event Horizon's contamination level is far more severe than that of the Attilan base on the moon. We must determine the extent of the Event Horizon's contamination as soon as possible and recover its hyperspace engines. We may be facing extradimensional symbiotic aliens. I need the soldiers to prepare and continue their psychological adjustment; we must resolve this before it spirals out of control."

At that moment, the Retribution-class air carrier had just passed Saturn using a precisely calculated series of gravity slingshot maneuvers when its receiver, en route to Neptune, intercepted a communication sent to Earth by Captain Miller of the Lewis and Clark spaceship. Through Captain Miller's description, the Commander of the Guard and the Sorority Chief on the Retribution were able to learn about the information from the rescue ship.

Because all information about the Event Horizon spacecraft was classified, and the equipment used by the Lewis and Clark spacecraft could not be reproduced, all the crew members of the latter had to leave their families on Earth without saying goodbye and embark on a year-long space voyage, placing a considerable burden on the psychological and physical well-being of all the astronauts. Captain Miller told Houston in regular communications that the crew members had experienced nightmares after the hibernation voyage; however, Lieutenant Peters, the ship's doctor, believed this was a common symptom of using hibernation pods. This was considered possible in spaceborne hibernation experiments, so Captain Miller did not pay much attention to it.

There was a special passenger on the Lewis and Clark spacecraft.

Dr. Will was in charge of designing the Event Horizon spaceship.

This person was deeply involved in Project Pegasus and, together with Dr. Raul, the head of Project Pegasus, designed the Event Horizon spacecraft in order to explore the boundaries of the solar system. After receiving a distress signal, he made a request to NASA and the Pentagon and organized the Lewis and Clark rescue mission.

The reason this rescue operation could be organized so quickly (referring to the launch of the space shuttle within two years) was partly due to the unrepeatable nature of the hyperspace engine, and the Chitauri invasion of New York in 2012 further heightened the US government's anxiety. This was the main reason why the Lewis and Clark spacecraft was able to be completed and secretly launched after 2013. However, even Dr. Will was unaware of the hyperspace engine's origin—he only knew it was a product of Project Pegasus, although he had never seen the hyperspace engine project approved, nor had he heard of any scientists involved in it.

In order to recover the hyperspace engine as quickly as possible, he also took it upon himself to use another component of Project Pegasus, the sublight-speed engine created by Dr. Raul, which was unreplicable and unreverse engineerable. The cost of this rescue operation was extremely high. If the Pentagon had not been unable to reproduce the sublight-speed engine, and if the theoretical mathematics and applied physics of this world had not been unable to crack this technological black box, Dr. Will would not have been able to use such a valuable asset.

"Calculations show that Retribution will arrive 12.2 Earth hours later than Lewis and Clark." On the solar system map, Lewis and Clark and Event Horizon are moving at a visible speed. A Retribution technician and hyperspace engine researcher from Mars warns in a synthesized electronic voice, "Retribution uses Saturn and its moons for multiple gravity slingshot accelerations, but even so, we cannot arrive and intercept Lewis and Clark before them. Unfortunately, if Event Horizon's contamination level is alpha, then Dr. Weill, the designer of Event Horizon, has less than a one percent chance of survival. We will lose Dr. Weill."

"Dr. Will's priority is lower than the hyperspace engine. I formally reject your proposal and veto the motion to contact the Lewis and Clark."

The commander of the Imperial Guards moved as if a god had come to life.

The assault sergeant's eyes were filled with awe; he had witnessed the capabilities of the Imperial Guard on the battlefield.

As a notorious PMC (Private Military Company) on the battlefield, while not as corrupt as Blackwater, their mercenaries were never considered one of their own, and they weren't even alerted to enemy bombing raids. However, because they didn't fall into the same problems as Blackwater—drug use, alcoholism, brawling, prisoner abuse, civilian shootings, and arms smuggling—these mercenaries were captured rather than killed by the Royal Guard. He would always remember that day on the Iraqi battlefield, when that golden-armored demigod single-handedly and effortlessly breached their two-kilometer-long defensive line, destroyed several armored vehicles, and even shot down a rescue helicopter with a godlike presence. However, he didn't know if that golden-armored demigod was the Royal Guard commander named Constantine before him. His authority didn't allow him to understand the Royal Guard; like the rest of the world, he still knew very little about these powerful genetically modified warriors.

"The fog has shrouded all information, and the Royal Guard Prophecy Order is unable to ascertain any details."

The Praetorian Guard, mentioned by Constantine, was actually a newly established organization, subordinate to the Praetorian Guard and under the complete jurisdiction of the Praetorian Guard. Its main members were female sorcerers within Kamar-Taj skilled in divination, while the one who provided divination services specifically to the Praetorian Guard Commander and the Emperor, holding a position similar to a court sorceress, was the eccentric Lady of Calamity (the price of divination was enduring her humming those off-key, absurd holiday songs and offering appropriate commentary—the so-called price of omniscience). Surprisingly, the Praetorian Guard Commander discovered that beneath the Lady of Calamity's veil was a lovely face; after removing the veil, she was less eccentric, but she also lost her almost omniscient prophetic abilities, retaining only a small amount of knowledge gleaned from peeking into cosmic truths through the veil—making her a clumsy yet extremely safe witch.

Most recently, the erratic woman claimed that a terrifying enemy awaited outside the solar eclipse (the area of ​​radiation from the sun's plasma wind), then pointed out that the horrific entity's final destination was Earth. Considering the location of the Event Horizon, it's easy to see that the Lewis and Clark rescue mission is unlikely to be smooth sailing. All the crew members on the Lewis and Clark will face threats from another dimension, and without the Punishment ship's departure, the contaminated spaceship would have spread its corrupted energy across Earth.

"We can't save them," the Commander of the Royal Guard said. "The Event Horizon has suffered severe extradimensional energy contamination. If there are survivors, everything must be done according to protocol. The Royal Guard will decontaminate any contaminated individuals."

The head of the medical department on the Punishment ship nodded. As a subordinate department of the Sora Redwood Druid Order and the Gene Lab, many members of this department had studied in the Immortal City. These people had witnessed many contaminated human samples and knew that the horror of this contamination lay not only in simple physical mutations—the Gene Lab claimed that extradimensional energy shattered and recombined the DNA of carbon-based life forms, causing them to mutate rapidly—but also in the contamination of thought. Memories were no longer reliable, everything the brain perceived would be distorted, and the memes developed by human civilization and personal experiences would be contaminated, causing contamination and spreading throughout the material universe.

Constantine's grammar was strange; he didn't specify the contaminated object. It could be the crew of the Lewis and Clark and Event Horizon, or the crew of the Retribution, or even the Retribution's technician and hyperspace engine researcher whose gaze pierced through his ruby ​​eyepiece. It was a warning; that stern gaze, penetrating the electronic detection equipment and displays, caused the mechanical appendage connected to the laser cutter on the technician's back to twitch slightly. This technician wasn't a soldier, nor was he directly under the Guardian Order's command structure. If anyone on this ship was most likely to break the rules, it was the Martian technicians.

"No one is allowed to touch the source of contamination without permission. I'm referring to the Event Horizon's hyperspace engine. That engine is severely contaminated and unsafe to use," the Commander of the Guard stated curtly. "Control your curiosity. After completing our mission, we will scuttle the Event Horizon, completely dismantle it into pieces, and sink it to Neptune."

Tita looked out at the empty space outside the armored porthole of the bridge.

(End of this chapter)