Chapter 375: Nanorobots!

Jason was overjoyed, and through the communicator, he could hear the crew clapping and cheering with delight.

Still, he dared not let his guard down. He quickly offered the ocean a few warm words of praise over the external speakers. Instantly, the glowing green sphere began spinning with joy, completely forgetting its earlier annoyance.

"Alright, pilot the drone closer to the hatch... Slow and steady."

An operator nervously controlled the unmanned submersible via remote interface, guiding it toward the target structure.

A few minutes later, the drone crossed the threshold cleanly and slowly glided into the interior. Because the facility had spent decades submerged under seawater, the telemetry screens revealed that the interior corridors were choked with calcified coral, with several passages narrowing considerably.

The moment the drone penetrated the structure, chills ran down the spines of everyone watching. Every operator was focused to the absolute limit.

Heavy weapon systems were locked in active standby, everyone terrified that some horrific alien monstrosity might suddenly charge out of the depths.

Hope and dread coiled together into an unbearable knot of tension.

Even Jason broke into a cold sweat. An intact alien installation like this could still be actively broadcasting distress signals into deep space. This was completely unlike the derelict scout craft on Mars that had decayed for millions of years.

An advanced civilization carrying a technological tier far above humanity always posed an existential threat. Even their discarded scrap represented an immense theoretical gap, an unknown variable. And the unknown was always terrifying.

However, taking in the corroded ruins on screen, the room gradually breathed a collective sigh of relief.

"I understand now! It was the greenhouse effect!"

"...This site was originally an isolated, elevated island. When the natives’ industrial pollution triggered runaway global warming, the sea levels rose and completely swallowed it. Even the brilliant alien scientists from thirty thousand years ago couldn’t have accounted for native stupidity."

Arthur Lambert had a flash of clarity and laid out the environmental factors. "Look closely at the entrance. Those decayed organic remains outside were likely terrestrial trees that once grew on the island."

Everyone felt a wave of relief. The deduction was sound. The rapid greenhouse warming had only unfolded over the past few decades, drowning coastal landmasses and low-lying islands worldwide.

An analyst ventured an optimistic guess: "Could the internal systems have shorted out from the saltwater?"

The optimism was brutally short-lived.

Pushing deeper into the main corridor, the drone encountered a massive blast door sealing off the facility.

Mounted directly beside the gate was a glowing crimson signal beacon.

Unlike the ruined entry tunnel, this chamber was completely barren of marine life. There wasn’t a single scrap of coral; the surfaces were impeccably clean, as if they had just been polished. A sudden suffocating tension settled over the room as every eye locked onto the drone’s feed.

The moment the submersible glided toward the threshold, the video monitor representing the craft snapped to black.

In less than 0.5 seconds, the feed went dead without warning!

"What happened?!"

Several high-strung soldiers flinched, their fingers hovering over the trigger locks of their heavy rifles. Jason reacted instantly, his voice sounding over the comms:

"Hold your fire! Keep calm! Nothing has breached the door. Deploy five more drones in a staggered formation, spaced five meters apart. Find out what killed that craft!"

The technicians rapidly entered commands into the tactical suite. Five more automated submersibles detached and descended into the passage, maintaining strict operational distance.

The lead drone crept forward toward the sealed gate.

In an instant, its display screen cut to static.

To the optical sensors of the trailing submersibles, the lead drone didn’t explode, it simply vanished into thin air.

Vanished?

Yes, completely wiped from existence.

"Push the next one in! High-speed capture mode!"

Another drone advanced toward the kill-zone. This time, running at ten thousand frames per second, the trailing cameras finally caught the reality of the horror.

The moment the hull crossed an invisible boundary near the door, the entire titanium submersible disintegrated into a cloud of microscopic dust within a fraction of a second, dissolving completely into the surrounding water.

The entire process took less than 0.5 seconds!

Without ultra-high-speed playback, the event was completely imperceptible to human retinas.

The room fell dead silent. Every face had turned paper-white.

Defensive protocols were expected from an extraterrestrial scientific outpost, especially on a world teeming with primitive lifeforms and unpredictable native fauna.

"I just didn’t expect the defense to look like this," Marcus whispered through his teeth.

Without needing orders from Jason, the Senior Scientists sprang into action, running forensic frame-by-frame analysis on the footage to identify what had reduced a military drone to fine silt.

Unfortunately, optical magnification yielded nothing. The hull simply fell apart at the molecular level.

"Could it be a high-intensity ultraviolet laser grid? Or some targeted chemical breakdown? It looks like a physical molecular tear..."

The room threw out theories in rapid succession until Jason cut through the noise. "Deploy three more drones to run chemical spectrography on the water column around that perimeter. Pinpoint any variations in the seawater composition."

"If we can’t crack the mechanism, we blow the doors with tactical nuclear charges! Move! We are on a ticking clock!"

The operations room kicked into maximum overdrive. Still, detonating a nuclear weapon inside the facility was a desperate last resort. If a blast vaporized the database inside, their only actionable lead on the alien fleet’s origin would be destroyed.

Jason walked out onto the pontoon and leaned over the kayak, trying to coax Elara again. The glowing green sphere bobbed happily in the water, oblivious to the dread hanging over the expedition.

Over the next half hour, the team sacrificed several more drones. Every single unit was dismantled into microscopic particles within a fraction of a second.

"Commander, we have spectral anomalies! The water within that zone is heavily depleted of specific elements—most notably refined iron, titanium, and magnesium."

"We’ve established the lethal perimeter. It forms a clean hemisphere roughly two meters out from the blast door. Stepping past that invisible line is instant death."

"There is an active agent suspended in the water, but it’s completely invisible to standard optical sensors."

After exhausting dozens of probes with zero progress, mental fatigue set in among the researchers. Sweat soaked the palms of their gloves. The strain was entirely psychological, the sheer terror of facing an invisible shredder.

The Federation Special Forces operators maintained a perimeter with weapons fully powered. The dropship’s primary railguns and point-defense systems were warm, primed to vaporize the structure if an aggressive swarm attempted to breach the surface.

Minutes later, Arthur Lambert approached Jason with a grim realization.

"A self-replicating nanorobotic swarm, tethered to a defensive radius of two meters from the portal... That is the consensus, correct?" Jason asked, staring at Arthur. "If they are hostile nanites, how do we neutralize them?"

Arthur frowned, shaking his head with deep unease. "To be entirely frank, Commander, the Federation has never engineered defensive nanites of this lethality. Bypassing them normally requires an authenticated biometric key or a specific encrypted handshake."

"I suspect the red beacon next to the portal or a transmission node directly behind the blast door, serves as the master control hub. Brute-forcing that encryption could take months, and we don’t have our heavy quantum computing arrays down on the surface!"

"We don’t have the planetary industrial base here to crack alien cryptography on the fly."

"What if we snipe the red beacon with an armor-piercing kinetic round? Or blast the portal from outside the two-meter kill-zone?" Jason proposed.

"Out of the question! It is far too dangerous, Commander!" Arthur protested immediately. "These autonomous nanites represent technology bordering on the Precursor! If you destroy the control node, you might not disable them, you might shatter their operational constraints!"

"If they lose their containment parameters, they won’t shut down. They will enter an unconstrained self-replication cycle!"

"Do you realize what that means? In an open ocean, they will multiply exponentially, feeding on dissolved minerals and marine life until they consume every trace of iron and magnesium on this entire planet! It would trigger an extinction-level gray goo scenario that we would have zero ability to contain."

Arthur’s voice dropped to a tense whisper: "Shooting that beacon could be firing the starting gun for our own execution."

Hearing this, Jason felt a cold spike of dread drive into his chest.

The Federation’s theoretical labs had run simulations on self-replicating nanoweapons before.

A nanorobot, measuring mere nanometers across, mimics the replication mechanics of biological cells. But because they are synthetic and infinitely smaller than organic cells, given sufficient ambient energy and raw matter, their growth curve is purely exponential.

One nanite replicates ten times to create 1,024 units. Twenty cycles yields over a million. If left unchecked, an aggressive swarm dismantles every living organism in its path, stripping cellular structures to harvest trace metals for replication stock.

Without those essential trace elements, organic cells instantly liquefy. The victim appears to simply evaporate into fine powder.

A weaponized gray goo swarm was a planet-killer, ten thousand times more horrific than an orbital nuclear strike.

Cold sweat ran down Jason’s spine. Deploying a catastrophic nanite barrier at the front door of a basic outpost... Were these aliens completely out of their minds?!

"Could we bypass the portal entirely?" Jason asked, forcing his pulse to slow. "Could we breach the facility through the bedrock or adjacent walls?"

Arthur shook his head again. "Negative. Structural scans show the exterior bulkheads are forged from an ultra-dense hyperalloy. We don’t know the hull thickness, but cutting through it with portable industrial lasers would take two to three days. And detonating shaped high-explosives against an unknown alloy right next to a volatile nanite nest is a suicidal gamble."

"Could Elara break through the exterior bulkheads?"

Jason looked out at the ocean, but immediately discarded the idea. Expecting Elara to dismantle refined hyperalloy was asking for the impossible.

Even the most adaptable biological hive mind had hard physical limits. The entity could effortlessly dissolve calcified coral or erode soft shale, but facing high-density interstellar armor, she couldn’t simply wipe it away. At best, she could slowly leach trace elements through biological corrosion over centuries.

Biological mining was an agonizingly slow process.

And right now, time was the one resource the Federation did not have.