Snow Eagle heading south
March 13, 2026, is the last day before the Antarctic Circle enters eternal night.
The Chinese scientific research ship Snow Eagle split through the leaden sea of ice and sailed toward the depths of the Amundsen Sea.
Doctoral student Yu Jiaxuan has been staring at the sonar screen for six hours. The low-frequency whine coming from the deep sea is heard in his earphones - it is the song of whales, the sound of ice shelves collapsing, and some kind of regular pulse like a heartbeat that he does not want to admit.
Then it came.
A distress signal that had been frozen for fifty years emerged from 4,300 meters below the sea level.
The shipboard AI "mermaid" system took three seconds to complete the deciphering, and another 0.5 Seconds to fall into a logical infinite loop.
Signal source identification code: K-192.
Ship model: Soviet Navy Type 667A "Navar" class nuclear submarine.
Last contact: July 15, 1976.
File annotation status: Lost contact while performing a top-secret mission in the Amundsen Sea, and all officers and soldiers were listed as dead.
The content of the signal was only one sentence, repeated seventeen times in Russian——
"There is no time here. There is no death here. Requesting evacuation."
Captain Han Bingxian's hand was shaking as he put out the cigarette.
Forty-seven years ago, when he was a midshipman, he had received the same signal frequency in the North Atlantic. At that time, the old captain only said one sentence and locked the recording in the safe forever:
"That's not the Soviets. That thing just learned the voice of the Soviets." At this moment, below the Snow Eagle, in the abyss of 4,300 meters, a certain steel behemoth that had been sleeping for half a century was waking up.
