CAUTION: This article was originally written in Chinese. It has been machine-translated into English, which means the original meaning may be distorted.

Chapter 1: The Tanggu Frontline

In selecting the form of battlefield electromagnetic interference, this manual advocates for targeted jamming against a specific frequency or channel, rather than barrage jamming that simultaneously interferes with a wider frequency band, as the latter can also affect one’s own electromagnetic communications and electronic support measures.

------Excerpt from the 1993 U.S. Army “Electronic Warfare Manual”

January 5th, The Tanggu Frontline

The sea was no longer visible; the frontline had retreated 15 kilometers overnight.

In the early morning light, the snowfield presented a cold, dark blue. In all directions in the distance, columns of black smoke rose from hit targets. There was almost no wind, and these smoke columns ascended straight into the sky, like slender black veils connecting heaven and earth. Looking up along these smoke columns, Lin Yun was startled: the morning sky was filled with a huge mass of tangled white, as if a deranged giant had frantically scribbled across it. It was the jumbled contrails of fighter jets, a remnant of the fierce night-long battle for air superiority between the Chinese Air Force and the NATO air forces.

Precise strikes from the air and sea had also lasted all night. To a layperson, the strikes might not have seemed dense, with explosions occurring only every few seconds or even minutes. But Lin Yun knew that each explosion meant an important target had been hit, with almost no misses. These explosions were like gleaming punctuation marks in the dark article of last night. As dawn arrived, Lin Yun didn’t know how much strength the defensive line had left, or even if it still existed.

Lin Yun’s electronic countermeasures platoon had been annihilated in the middle of the night when six laser-guided bombs fell on their position. Lin Yun had narrowly escaped. The Type 86 armored vehicle carrying the jammer was still burning. The platoon’s other electronic warfare vehicles were now just heaps of black metal scattered on the surrounding snow. The residual heat in the crater where Lin Yun lay was dissipating, and she felt the cold. She propped herself up with her hands. Her right hand touched something sticky, cold, and soft. It looked like a lump of mud covered in black explosive residue. She suddenly realized it was a piece of flesh. She didn’t know what part of the body it came from, let alone which person. In last night’s fatal strike, a first lieutenant, two second lieutenants, and eight soldiers had been killed. Lin Yun started to vomit, but only brought up sour bile. She frantically rubbed her hands in the snow, trying to wipe off the bloodstains, but the blackish-red stains quickly congealed on her hands in the cold, still starkly visible.

A suffocating silence had lasted for half an hour, which meant a new round of ground offensive was about to begin. Lin Yun turned up the volume on the walkie-talkie clipped to her left shoulder, but only static came through. Suddenly, a few muffled words came through, like a few birds flying hazily through a thick fog.

“…Observation Post 06 reports, on the front of Position 1437, thirty-seven M1A2s, average interval sixty meters; forty-one Bradley Fighting Vehicles, 500 meters behind the M1A2 attack vanguard; twenty-four M1A2s, eight Leclercs, are flanking Position 1633, have crossed the junction with 1437. 1437, 1633, 1752, prepare to engage!”

Lin Yun suppressed the tremors caused by cold and fear, stabilized the horizon in her binoculars, and saw hazy clouds of snow appearing on the horizon, giving it a fuzzy edge.

Then Lin Yun heard the roar of engines behind her. A line of Type 90 and Type 2000 tanks rushed past her position towards the enemy. Behind them, more Chinese tanks were crossing the highway embankment. Lin Yun heard another kind of roar. The enemy’s attack helicopter group appeared in the sky ahead, in neat formation, forming a black dot matrix in the pale dawn sky. The smoke dischargers on the tanks around Lin Yun were activated. With a series of low explosions, the position was shrouded in a white smoke screen. Through the gaps in the white smoke, Lin Yun saw Chinese helicopter groups swooping overhead. She could make out a few Z-10s and “Gazelles.”

The 125mm cannons on the tanks began to fire like a torrential storm. The white smoke turned into a frantically flashing pink light screen. Almost simultaneously, the first wave of enemy shells landed. The pink glow in the white smoke was replaced by the blinding blue-white flashes of explosions. Lin Yun lay at the bottom of the crater, feeling the earth beneath her vibrate like a drum skin under the dense booms. The dirt and small stones around her were thrown high into the air, raining down on her back. Amidst the explosions, the hiss of anti-tank missiles being launched could be faintly heard. Lin Yun felt the entire universe shatter into pieces in this heart-wrenching roar and fall into an infinite abyss… Just as her nerves were about to break, the tank battle ended. It had lasted only about thirty seconds.

When the white smoke and thick smoke dissipated, Lin Yun saw the snowfield in front of her littered with destroyed Chinese tanks, burning in raging fires wrapped in black smoke. She looked up and, without binoculars, could see a large number of destroyed NATO tanks in the distance. They looked like black dots emitting thick smoke on the snowfield. But more enemy tanks were rushing over the wreckage. They were wrapped in clouds of snow churned up by their tracks. The ferocious, wide front of the Abrams tanks would occasionally emerge from the snow clouds, like fierce turtles charging out of the waves. The flashes from their smoothbore cannons lit up intermittently, like the gleaming eyes of the turtles… In the low sky, the helicopter dogfight continued. Lin Yun saw an Apache explode in mid-air not far away. A Z-10, trailing leaking fuel, swayed and flew over her head before crashing a few dozen meters away, exploding into a ball of fire. The trails of short-range air-to-air missiles drew countless parallel white lines in the low sky…

Lin Yun heard a loud clang. She turned to see the rear hatch of a smoking, hit Type 90 tank open not far away. No one came out, but a hand hung down from below the hatch. Lin Yun jumped out of the crater, rushed to the back of the tank, grabbed the hand, and pulled. A muffled explosion inside the vehicle sent a wave of hot air that pushed Lin Yun back a few steps. In her hand was a sticky, soft, very hot mass—a piece of burnt skin pulled from the tanker’s hand. Lin Yun looked up and saw a jet of flame erupting from the hatch. Through the hatch, she saw the inside of the tank had become a small inferno. In the dark red, transparent flames, the tanker’s motionless figure was clearly visible, rippling as if in water.

Lin Yun heard two more whistles. It was a missile squad to her left front firing their last two anti-tank missiles. One, a wire-guided Hongying missile, successfully destroyed an Abrams. The other, a radio-guided missile, was jammed and veered upwards, losing its target. At that moment, the six members of the missile squad abandoned their cover and ran towards Lin Yun’s crater. A Comanche helicopter dived towards them, its angular fuselage looking like a ferocious crocodile. A long burst of machine-gun fire hit the snow, kicking up snow and dirt like a fence that suddenly stood up and then quickly fell down. The fence passed through the small group, felling four of them. Only a first lieutenant and a soldier reached the crater. It was only then that Lin Yun noticed the first lieutenant was wearing a tank helmet, possibly from a destroyed tank. Each of them held an anti-tank rocket launcher. After jumping into the crater, the lieutenant first fired at the nearest enemy tank, hitting the front of the M1A2 and triggering its reactive armor. The explosion of the rocket and the reactive armor blended together, sounding strange. The tank charged out of the smoke of the explosion, the fragments of its reactive armor hanging from its front like a tattered piece of clothing. The young soldier continued to aim at it, his rocket launcher shaking with the tank’s movements, unable to get a clear shot. When the tank, only forty or fifty meters away, entered a depression, the soldier had to stand on the edge of the crater to aim downwards. His rocket launcher and the Abrams’ 120mm cannon fired at the same time. The tank’s gunner, in his haste, had fired a non-explosive depleted uranium armor-piercing round. The shell, with a muzzle velocity of 1800 meters per second, hit the soldier, blowing his upper body into a shower of blood and flesh! Lin Yun felt fine pieces of flesh hit her helmet with a splattering sound. She opened her eyes to see, right at the edge of the crater in front of her, the soldier’s two legs, like two black tree stumps, silently roll to the bottom of the crater at her feet. The rest of his pulverized body had splattered a large, radial pattern of red spots on the snow. The rocket hit the Abrams, the shaped-charge jet of heat cutting through its armor. The vehicle began to emit thick smoke. But the steel monster, trailing smoke, continued to charge towards them, only stopping about 20 meters away after an internal explosion blew its turret roof high into the air.

Immediately after, the NATO tank line passed around them. The ground trembled slightly under the heavy impact of the tracks. But these tanks paid no attention to the crater where the two of them were. After the first wave of tanks had passed, the lieutenant grabbed Lin Yun’s hand and pulled her out of the crater to a jeep riddled with bullet holes. About two hundred meters away, the second armored attack wave was fast approaching.

“Lie down and play dead!” the lieutenant said. Lin Yun lay down by the jeep’s wheel and closed her eyes. “Keep your eyes open, it’s more convincing!” the lieutenant said again, and smeared some unknown person’s blood on her face. He also lay down, at a right angle to Lin Yun, his head right next to hers. His helmet had rolled to one side, and his coarse hair pricked Lin Yun’s temple. Lin Yun’s eyes were wide open, staring at the sky almost swallowed by thick smoke.

Two or three minutes later, a half-track Bradley Fighting Vehicle stopped a dozen meters away from them. Several American soldiers in blue and white snow camouflage uniforms jumped out. Most of them moved forward in a skirmish line with their guns raised. Only one came towards the jeep. Lin Yun saw two dusty combat boots step right next to her face. She could clearly see the 82nd Airborne Division insignia on the hilt of the dagger tucked into the boot. The American bent down to look at her. Their eyes met. Lin Yun tried her best to make her gaze vacant and lifeless, facing the astonished blue pupils.

“Oh, god!”

Lin Yun heard a gasp of astonishment, unsure if it was at the beauty of this girl with a major’s star on her shoulder, or at her blood-smeared,慘状 face. Perhaps both. He then reached for the buttons on her collar. Lin Yun’s skin crawled, and she moved her hand a few centimeters towards the pistol at her waist, but the American only ripped off her dog tags.

They waited longer than expected. Enemy tanks and armored vehicles rumbled past on both sides. Lin Yun felt her body was about to freeze to the snow. She suddenly remembered two lines from a Soviet army poem: “The soldier lies on the snow as if on velvet.” She had written these two lines in her diary on the day she received her doctorate. That too was a snowy night, and the snow that night was indeed like velvet. The next day, she had enlisted.

A column of Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force tanks drove up and stopped, spreading out in a large area around them. Several officers got out of their vehicles and gathered in an open space surrounded by the tanks. The one who had summoned them was an armor colonel, a typical example of the “new new-human” of Japan: tall and slender, with a fair and handsome face. His voice was very penetrating and could be heard clearly even over the noise of the engines.

“Why are you moving like snails? Why not take the highway?!” he questioned the surrounding armor officers.

“Iwata-kun, the road is blocked!” one of the majors said helplessly, pointing to the highway. As the front line had moved forward, the firepower here had thinned. Large groups of refugees had emerged from their hiding places and flocked onto the highway, which was soon clogged with civilian vehicles and people. A few dozen Japanese soldiers were firing into the air, trying to clear a path, but to no avail. Lin Yun heard Colonel Iwata’s voice again:

“The predecessor of this unit was the Itagaki Division, which performed many meritorious deeds on this land during World War II. If those predecessors were alive today, they would be so angry at your current state that they would go back to their graves!”

He pressed the throat microphone at his collar with one hand and waved with the other. “All units in the column, follow vehicle 103!” he shouted, then jumped onto the tank. The tank’s engine roared, and the black smoke from the exhaust blew through Lin Yun’s hair. The Japanese-made Type 90 tank leaped up and charged onto the roadbed. At that moment, a group of about thirty or forty kindergarten children stood on the road, having just gotten off a disabled bus. A young female teacher stood between the oncoming tank and the children, waving her arms, but the tank didn’t hesitate for a moment. It knocked down the teacher and charged into the group of terrified children. In her peripheral vision, Lin Yun saw the small bodies of the children burst into blossoms of blood between the snow and the tank tracks, like tomatoes being crushed on a white tablecloth…

After the column of Japanese tanks had passed, the area around Lin Yun and the lieutenant became deserted. They jumped into the jeep. The lieutenant drove, following a route they had already scouted, and sped away. The sound of submachine gun fire rang out behind them. Bullets flew over their heads, one of them shattering a rearview mirror. The jeep made a sharp turn into a burning residential area, and the enemy did not pursue.

“Major, you’re a doctor, right?” the lieutenant asked as he drove.

“Where did you know me from?”

“I’ve seen you with the son of Chief No. 10.”

After a moment of silence, the lieutenant said again, “Now, his son is the person furthest from the war in the world.”

“What do you mean by that? You should know…”

“Nothing, just talking,” the lieutenant said faintly. Neither of them was focused on the topic. They were both thinking about the sliver of hope they still held.

Hopefully, this was the only place the entire front line had been breached.

Chapter 2: “Eternal Yan Emperor”

January 5th, Near-Sun Orbit, “Eternal Yan Emperor”

Zhuang Yu felt the loneliness of living alone in a city.

The “Eternal Yan Emperor” space complex was indeed the size of a small city. Its volume was equivalent to two giant aircraft carriers, and it could support 5,000 people living in space simultaneously. When the complex was in a rotating gravity state, it even had a swimming pool and a small river, which was an unparalleled luxury in today’s space work environment. But the truth was, the “Eternal Yan Emperor” was the result of the Chinese aerospace industry’s consistent frugal thinking. Its design philosophy was to combine all the functions of inner solar system space exploration into a single structure. Although the one-time investment was huge, it was very economical in the long run. The “Eternal Yan Emperor” was nicknamed the “Swiss Army Knife of Space” by the West. It could operate as a space station in various Earth orbits, and could be easily moved to orbit the moon or for interplanetary exploration. The “Eternal Yan Emperor” had already conducted flights to Venus and Mars, and had explored the asteroid belt. With its enormous size, it was equivalent to moving an entire research institute into space. In terms of space science research, it had a greater advantage over the numerous but small and exquisite spacecraft of the West.

Just as the “Eternal Yan Emperor” was preparing to begin its three-year journey to Jupiter, war broke out. At that time, its more than one hundred crew members had all returned to Earth. Most of them were air force officers, leaving only Zhuang Yu behind. It was then that the “Eternal Yan Emperor” revealed a flaw: it was too large a military target and had no defensive capabilities. The designers’ failure to foresee the subsequent militarization of space was a mistake. After the war broke out, the “Eternal Yan Emperor” could only perform evasive maneuvers. Going into outer space was not an option. Within Jupiter’s orbit, there were a large number of NATO unmanned spacecraft. They were all small, armed or unarmed, and each was a fatal threat to the “Eternal Yan Emperor”. Therefore, it could only sail into near-sun space. The “Eternal Yan Emperor’s” proud active cooling thermal shielding system allowed it to get closer to the sun than any other human spacecraft at the time. Now the “Eternal Yan Emperor” had reached Mercury’s orbit, fifty million kilometers from the sun and one hundred million kilometers from Earth.

Although most of the cabins on the “Eternal Yan Emperor” were closed, the space left for Zhuang Yu was still astonishingly large. Through the vast transparent dome, the sun, which appeared three times larger than on Earth, was shining. The sunspots on its surface and the magnificent prominences in the purple corona were clearly visible. Sometimes, even the granulation on the surface of the photosphere, caused by convection, could be seen. The tranquility here was deceptive. Outside, the storms and waves of solar particle streams and radio waves were roaring. The “Eternal Yan Emperor” was a tiny seed floating in this turbulent ocean.

A thin thread of a radio wave connected Zhuang Yu to Earth, and also brought him the anxieties of that distant world. He had just learned that the control center in the suburbs of Beijing had been destroyed by a cruise missile, and control of the “Eternal Yan Emperor” had been transferred to the second control center in the northwest. He received a war news update from Earth every 5 hours. At these times, he would think of his father.

January 5th, General Staff Department of the People’s Liberation Army of China

Chief No. 10 felt like he was facing a wall. What was actually in front of him was a holographic map of the Beijing-Tianjin war zone laid flat. But in the past, when he faced the large paper maps hanging on the wall, he could see a vast and profound space. In any case, he still preferred traditional maps. He couldn’t remember how many times he and his staff had to lie on the floor to look at a location at the very bottom of a map. The thought of it now brought a faint smile to his face. He also remembered how, before many exercises, he would piece together the newly issued operational maps with transparent tape in a field tent. He was never good at it, but his son, who was watching an exercise with him for the first time, did a much better job than him on his first try… Realizing he was thinking about his son again, he vigilantly stopped his thoughts.

Only he and the commander of the North China Cluster were in the operations room. The latter was chain-smoking. They stared intently at the changing clouds of smoke above the holographic map, as if they were the grim war situation.

The commander of the North China Cluster said, “NATO’s landing force has reached thirty-seven divisions, with an attack front of one hundred kilometers. The main attack direction is along the highway axis, and they have broken through in several places.”

“And the northern front?” No. 10 asked.

“Russia has assembled forty-five divisions, but the attack on Zhangjiakou is still tentative.”

A nearby explosion sent a slight tremor through the ground. The operations room was filled with shadows that swayed gently with the hanging lights on the ceiling.

“On the southern front, we can only retreat to the Langfang defensive line,” the commander of the North China Cluster said.

“This is the only tactical move possible for the next step, but it is not our goal. This defensive line is only the distance of a large-caliber artillery shot from Beijing and has little meaning. We must push the enemy back to the coast by thirty to forty kilometers.”

“But now, some people are talking about retreating to defend Beijing and fighting in the streets using the city’s peripheral buildings and fortifications.”

“Nonsense! Once Zhangjiakou falls, or the enemy on the southern front outflanks us from both sides, it is possible to cut off the water sources of Miyun and Guanting. The besieged city will fall into chaos without a fight. The operational policy for the next step is, first, counterattack; second, counterattack; and third, still counterattack.”

The commander of the North China Cluster sighed and looked at the map without a word.

No. 10 continued, “I know the southern front is not strong enough. I am preparing to transfer an army group from the northern front to reinforce the southern front.”

“What? It’s already very difficult to defend Zhangjiakou now.”

No. 10 smiled. “The mistake of a considerable number of commanders now is that they only consider the problem from a military perspective. The grim situation has us trapped. From the current situation, do you think the Russian army does not have the strength to take Zhangjiakou?”

“I don’t think so. Elite units like the 1st Guards Army, 2nd Guards Army, and the Taman Motor Rifle Division, with such a dense concentration of armor and low-altitude attack forces, have advanced less than fifteen kilometers in a day without suffering major losses. They are obviously deliberately slowing down.”

“That’s right. The Russians are waiting and seeing! They are waiting to see the situation on the southern front! If we regain the initiative on the southern front, they will continue to wait and see, and may even unilaterally cease fire on the northern front.”

The commander of the North China Cluster held a newly taken out cigarette in his hand, forgetting to light it.

“Russia’s sudden attack from the north was indeed a stab in our back, but some comrades have psychologically used this as an excuse, making our operational policy tend to be passive. This mentality must be changed! Of course, it must be admitted that to fundamentally reverse the war situation, the strength of the Beijing-Tianjin war zone is not enough. Our ultimate hope lies in the reinforcements of the Northwest Cluster.”

“It will take at least a week for the Northwest Cluster to complete its assembly and move into its attack position. Considering the factor of air superiority, the time may be even longer.”

January 5th, Beijing

It was past three in the afternoon when Lin Yun and the lieutenant’s jeep drove into the city. The air raid siren had just sounded, and the streets were empty.

The lieutenant sighed and said, “Major, I really miss my 2000! When I graduated from the armored academy four years ago, it was also when I had my heart broken. But when I got to the army and saw that 2000, my mood immediately turned from cloudy to sunny. I touched its armor, smooth and warm, like touching a girl’s hand. Hey, what was that girl? This is a man’s true companion! But this morning, it took a Mistral. Alas, the fire probably isn’t even out yet…”

At that moment, explosions were heard from the northwest of the city. It was the direction of the Zhongguancun Science and Technology Park, which was also the most heavily bombed area, and it was a barbaric area bombing, which is rare in modern air raids.

The lieutenant was still immersed in the morning’s battle. “Alas, in less than thirty seconds, an entire tank battalion was wiped out.”

“The enemy’s casualties were also heavy,” Lin Yun said. “I paid close attention to the results. The number of armored targets destroyed on both sides was not much different.”

“The tank destruction ratio between the two sides is about 1 to 1.3, and the helicopters are a little worse, but it won’t exceed 1 to 1.5.”

“If that’s the case, the battlefield initiative should be on our side. We have a great numerical advantage. How did the battle end up like this?”

The lieutenant glanced at Lin Yun. “You’re in electronic warfare, don’t you understand why? Your stuff, in exercises, you play it so well. What’s this fifth-generation C3I, what’s this three-dimensional battlefield display, and dynamic situation simulation, attack plan optimization, and so on, it’s all so convincing. But in actual combat, the most displayed things on my LCD screen are two sentences: COMMUNICATION ERROR and COULD NOT LOGIN. Just this morning, my front and flanks were completely unclear. I only received one order: engage the enemy. Alas… If another half of the reinforcements had been committed, the enemy would not have broken through at our position. The situation on the entire front is probably like this.”

Lin Yun knew that in the battle that had just passed, the total number of tanks deployed by both sides on the entire front line might have exceeded 5,000, with a number of armed helicopters equivalent to half the number of tanks.

“My steel lover didn’t lose out,” the lieutenant was still unable to extricate himself from the morning’s battle. “I’m sure I hit a Leclerc, but what I really wanted to hit was an Abrams, you know? An Abrams…”

Chapter 3: Star

January 5th, General Staff Department of the People’s Liberation Army of China

For the first time in a week, Chief No. 10 walked out of the underground operations room. He strolled through the thick white snow, looking for the sun, which had already half set behind the pine forest covered in snow. In his imagination, a small black dot was slowly moving across the orange-red surface of the setting sun. It was the “Eternal Yan Emperor,” with his son on it, the son furthest from his father on this planet.

This incident caused many rumors in the country, and internationally, the enemy fully exploited it. The New York Times published a headline in frighteningly large bold letters: “The Farthest Deserter in the History of War!” Below was a photo of Zhuang Yu, with the caption: “While the Communist government incites 1.3 billion Chinese to drown the invaders in blood, the son of the supreme military commander flees to a place one hundred million kilometers away from the battlefield on the country’s only giant spaceship. He is now the safest person in the country.”

But No. 10’s heart was calm. In memory of his deceased wife, he had his son take his mother’s surname. From middle school to postdoctoral studies, almost no one around Zhuang Yu knew who his father was. The aerospace control center made this decision simply because Zhuang Yu’s research specialty was the mathematical modeling of stars. This close approach to the sun by the “Eternal Yan Emperor” was a rare opportunity for his research, and the complex could not be fully remotely controlled, so there had to be at least one person on board. The commander-in-chief only learned of Zhuang Yu’s identity later from Western news reports.

On the other hand, whether No. 10 admitted it or not, deep down, he did hope his son would stay away from the war. This was not just out of paternal love. No. 10 always felt that his son did not belong to war. Yes, he was the person in the world who least belonged to war. But he also knew there was a problem with this idea: who does belong to war?

Besides, did Zhuang Yu belong to the stars? He loved the stars and devoted his entire life to their study, but he himself was the opposite of a star. He was more like Pluto, that silent, cold planet, orbiting alone in a distant space untouched by the light of the world. Zhuang Yu’s personality, coupled with his fair and delicate appearance, made it easy for people to think he was like a girl. But No. 10 knew in his heart that his son was not like a girl at all in essence. Girls are afraid of loneliness, but Zhuang Yu liked loneliness. Loneliness was his nourishment, his air. As early as elementary school, Zhuang Yu would spend the entire evening alone in his small room, quietly. At first, No. 10 thought he was reading, but once he accidentally discovered that his son was standing motionless at the window, looking at the stars.

“Dad, I like the stars. I want to look at the stars for the rest of my life,” he said to his father.

On his eleventh birthday, Zhuang Yu made his only request to his father so far: he wanted a telescope. Before that, he had been using No. 10’s military binoculars to observe the stars. Later, that telescope became Zhuang Yu’s only companion. He would watch the stars from the balcony until the eastern sky turned white. On a few rare occasions, he and his father would watch the stars together on the balcony. No. 10 would always aim the telescope at the brightest star in the night sky, but his son would shake his head in disapproval. “That one’s not interesting, Dad. That’s Venus. Venus is a planet. I only like stars.”

But Zhuang Yu had no interest in the things that other boys liked. The little fatty next door, Chief of Staff Zhao’s son, secretly took his father’s pistol to play with and ended up shooting himself in the thigh. For the boys in the General Staff family compound, being taken by their fathers to the army’s shooting range for a round of shooting was the highest reward. But the innate attachment of boys to weapons was completely absent in Zhuang Yu. In this respect, he was indeed not like a boy. No. 10 was very uneasy about this. He could hardly tolerate a general’s son being indifferent to weapons, so much so that he later did something that still embarrasses him to think about: once, he quietly placed his own Type 77 pistol on his son’s desk. After returning from school, Zhuang Yu came out of his small room with the gun. He held the gun like a woman, carefully holding the barrel. He gently placed the gun in front of his father and said faintly, “Dad, don’t leave this thing lying around in the future.”

In dealing with Zhuang Yu’s future, No. 10 was an open-minded person. He was not like the generals around him who were determined to have their sons, and even daughters, continue their military careers. But Zhuang Yu was indeed too far from his father’s career.

No. 10 was not a hot-tempered person, but as a high-ranking general, he had reprimanded a general in front of tens of thousands of officers and soldiers more than once. But he had never lost his temper with Zhuang Yu. This was partly because Zhuang Yu had always grown up quietly along his own track, rarely causing his father to worry. More importantly, Zhuang Yu seemed to be born with an extraordinary and transcendent temperament. This temperament sometimes even made No. 10 feel a little awed. It was as if he had casually planted a seed in a flower box, but a rare and precious plant grew out of it. He watched this plant grow day by day with awe, carefully nurturing it, waiting for it to bloom. His expectations were not in vain. His son had now become one of the most outstanding astrophysicists in the world.

At this point, the sun had completely set behind the pine forest, and the snow on the ground turned from white to light blue. No. 10 collected his thoughts and returned to the underground operations room. Everyone for the combat meeting had arrived. They included the main commanders of the North China Cluster and the Northwest Cluster. There were also more electronic warfare commanders, ranging from major general to captain, most of whom had just returned from the front. A fierce debate was taking place in the operations room between the officers of the North China Cluster’s ground forces and electronic warfare forces.

“We correctly identified the change in the enemy’s main attack direction,” said a colonel, a division commander of the C Army Group. “Our armored forces and army aviation’s low-altitude attack forces are not bad in terms of mobility, but the communication system was interfered with to the point of chaos. The C3I command system simply didn’t work! The electronic warfare units in the army group have been upgraded from battalion to regiment, and from regiment to division. The investment in this area in the past two years has been more than the investment in conventional equipment. And this is the result?!”

The major general in charge of commanding the war zone’s electronic warfare glanced at Lin Yun beside him. Like the other officers who had just returned from the front, her camouflage uniform was covered in dirt and scorch marks, and there were still traces of blood on her face. The major general said, “Major Lin is very accomplished in electronic warfare research and is also an electronic warfare observer sent to the front by the General Staff. Her views may be more convincing.” Young doctoral officers like Lin Yun were mostly outspoken and uninhibited, and were often used as pawns, and this time was no exception.

Chapter 4: Sharing the Dark Battlefield

Lin Yun stood up and said, “Sir, you can’t say that! It’s not a matter of how much money has been invested. When the West had been studying C3I in depth for more than a decade, we had only just begun to have some concepts about it.”

“Then what about electronic countermeasures?” the division commander asked. “The enemy can jam us, so you can’t jam them?! Our C3I is paralyzed, but NATO’s is running very smoothly, as if it’s been lubricated. The rapid change in the attack direction of the 1st Marine Division opposite me this morning is proof of that!”

Lin Yun gave a wry smile. “Speaking of jamming the enemy, Colonel, don’t forget that it was on your division’s position that your men pointed a gun at the operator’s head and forced the army group’s electronic countermeasures unit’s jammer to stop!”

“What happened?” No. 10 asked. It was only then that people noticed he had entered, and they all stood up and saluted.

“Sir, this is what happened,” the division commander explained to No. 10. “For our communication and command system, their jamming was even more severe than NATO’s! In NATO’s jamming, we could still maintain a certain level of wireless communication, but as soon as their jammers were turned on, they completely drowned us out!”

Lin Yun said, “But at the same time, the enemy was also completely drowned out! This is the only strategy that our army can choose to implement electronic countermeasures at present. NATO currently widely uses technologies such as frequency hopping, direct sequence spread spectrum, null-steerable adaptive antennas, burst transmission, single-frequency transponders, and frequency agility in battlefield communications [Note 1]. It is useless for us to use frequency-targeting methods for jamming, so we can only use full-band barrage jamming.”

A colonel from B Army Group questioned, “Major, NATO uses all frequency-targeting jamming, and the frequency band is quite narrow. Our C3I system has also widely adopted the communication technologies you mentioned. Why is their jamming against us so effective?”

“The reason is simple. What kind of hardware and software platforms are our C3I systems built on? UNIX, LINUX, and even WINDOWS 2010. The CPUs are from INTER and AMD! This is like using someone else’s dog to guard your own door! In this situation, the enemy can quickly obtain electronic warfare intelligence such as frequency hopping patterns, and at the same time use more and more effective pure software attacks to enhance their jamming effects. The General Staff and the General Armaments Department once vigorously promoted domestic operating systems, but they encountered great resistance at the lower levels. Your B Army Group is one of the most stubborn fortresses…”

“Alright, the problems and contradictions you’ve mentioned are exactly what today’s meeting is meant to solve. Let’s start the meeting!” No. 10 interrupted the debate.

After everyone was seated in front of the electronic sandbox, No. 10 called over a major. The slender young man’s eyes were half-closed, as if he was not used to the light in the operations room. “Let me introduce you. This is Major Yang. His most prominent feature is his severe myopia. His glasses are different from others’. Other people’s lenses are inside the frame, but his lenses are outside the frame. Ha, they’re as thick as the bottom of a teacup! We can’t see them now. Major Yang’s were smashed this morning when his jeep was hit by an air raid. It seems his contact lenses were also lost?”

“Sir, those were lost three days ago on the beachhead. My eyes became like this within six months. If this change had happened earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to join the army,” the major said, standing at attention.

Although no one knew why No. 10 was introducing this major, a few low chuckles rippled through the crowd.

“The facts since the outbreak of the war have shown that although we suffered a defeat in the Bohai Gulf naval battle, in terms of conventional weapons in the air and on land, we are not much worse than the enemy. But in electronic warfare, the gap is unexpectedly large. There are profound historical reasons for this situation, which we are not going to discuss today. What we need to be clear about is the following point: at present, electronic warfare is the key for our army to regain the initiative in the war! We must first admit the enemy’s advantage, even overwhelming advantage, in electronic warfare. Then we must, based on our army’s existing electronic warfare hardware and software conditions, formulate a set of effective strategies and tactics. The purpose of this set of strategies and tactics is to achieve a certain balance of power between our army and NATO in electronic warfare in a short period of time. Perhaps everyone thinks this is impossible: our army’s war theory since the late last century has been mainly based on limited local wars, and we have indeed not studied enough about the current comprehensive offensive by such a powerful military enemy. In such a grim situation, we must think in a completely new way. The new electronic warfare strategy of the high command that I am about to introduce can be seen as the result of this kind of thinking.”

The lights went out, the computer screens and electronic sandbox were turned off, the heavy radiation-proof doors were tightly closed, and the operations room was plunged into pitch-black darkness.

“I had the lights turned off,” came No. 10’s voice from the darkness.

Time passed slowly in the darkness and silence. About a minute passed like this.

“What do you all feel now?” No. 10 asked.

No one answered. The heavy darkness made the officers feel as if they were submerged at the bottom of a sea of night. They felt it was a little difficult to breathe.

“Army Commander Zheng, what do you think?”

“The feeling I’ve had on the battlefield these past few days,” said the commander of C Army Group. A low chuckle rippled through the darkness again.

“What about the others? You probably all feel the same way,” said No. 10.

“Of course, sir. Think about it. There’s nothing but static in the headphones, the screen is blank, and you’re completely ignorant of operational orders and the surrounding battlefield situation. Isn’t that what it feels like? This darkness is suffocating!”

“But not everyone feels this way. Major Yang, what about you?” No. 10 asked.

Major Yang’s voice came from a corner of the operations room. “Sir, my feeling is not as bad as theirs. When the lights were on, my surroundings were also blurry.”

“You even have a sense of superiority, don’t you?” No. 10 asked.

“Yes, sir. You may have heard that during the great New York blackout, it was the blind who led people out of the skyscrapers.”

“But Army Commander Zheng’s feeling is also understandable. He has the eyes of an eagle and is a sharpshooter. At every holiday banquet, he performs the trick of opening a wine bottle with a pistol from a dozen meters away. It’s an interesting thing to imagine him and Major Yang having a pistol duel at this moment.”

The operations room in the dark fell into silence again. The commanders were all thinking.

The lights came on, and everyone squinted, not so much because they couldn’t adapt to the sudden light, but because they were shocked by the idea that No. 10 had just hinted at.

No. 10 stood up and said, “I think I have just clearly expressed our army’s next new electronic warfare strategy: full-spectrum, high-power barrage jamming. In electromagnetic communications, we will create a ‘shared’ completely dark battlefield for both sides!”

“This will completely paralyze our army’s battlefield command system!” someone said in alarm.

“NATO too! If we’re blind, everyone’s blind. If we’re deaf, everyone’s deaf. Under such conditions, we will achieve a balance of power in electronic warfare with the enemy. This is the core idea of the new strategy.”

“But that doesn’t mean we have to use messengers on motorcycles to issue operational orders, does it?!”

“If the road is bad, they’ll have to ride horses,” said No. 10. “We have made a rough estimate that this kind of full-spectrum barrage jamming can cover at least 70% of NATO’s battlefield communication systems, which means their C3I systems will be completely paralyzed. At the same time, it can also disable 50% to 60% of the enemy’s long-range strike weapons. The most obvious example of this is the Tomahawk cruise missile: the guidance system of this missile has changed a lot since the last century. At that time, the Tomahawk mainly used terrain matching and a small altimeter radar for navigation. Now this navigation method is only used for terminal guidance, and most of its range relies on the satellite global positioning system. General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas believe that this improvement is a major step forward. The Americans trust the navigation radio waves from space too much, but once the GPS system’s radio wave transmission is jammed, the Tomahawk becomes blind. This reliance on GPS exists in most of NATO’s long-range strike weapons. When the battlefield electromagnetic conditions we envision appear, it will force the enemy to fight a conventional war with us. We can stick to them and fight, and give full play to our advantages.”

“I still don’t have a bottom in my heart,” said the commander of A Army Group, who was being transferred from the northern front to the southern front, with a worried look. “Under such battlefield communication conditions, I even doubt whether my army group can be smoothly transferred from the northern front to the southern front.”

“You definitely can!” said No. 10. “This distance was not long for Liu Bei and Cao Cao. I don’t believe that today’s Chinese army can’t get through without radio! It should be the Americans, not us, who have been spoiled by modern equipment. I know that when the entire battlefield is in electromagnetic darkness, you will definitely feel fear in your hearts. At that time, remember that the enemy is ten times more afraid than you!”

Chapter 5: Codename “Flood”

As he watched Lin Yun’s figure disappear among the group of officers in camouflage uniforms at the exit of the operations room, No. 10’s heart skipped a beat. She was returning to the front line, and her electronic warfare unit would be the place where the enemy’s firepower was most concentrated. Yesterday, in a conversation with his son, who was a hundred million kilometers away, with a round-trip delay of 5 minutes, No. 10 had told him that Lin Yun was fine. But in this morning’s battle, she had almost not made it back.

Zhuang Yu and Lin Yun met during an exercise. That day, No. 10 had dinner with his son. As usual, they ate in silence. Zhuang Yu’s deceased mother watched them silently from a picture frame in the distance. Zhuang Yu suddenly said, “Dad, I just remembered that tomorrow is your fifty-first birthday. I should get you a birthday present. I only remembered when I saw that telescope. That was a really good present.”

“Give me a few days of your time.”

His son looked up at his father quietly.

“You have your own career, and I’m very happy about that. But as a father, I want my son to understand my career. That’s not too much to ask, is it? Why don’t you come with me to watch a military exercise tomorrow?”

Zhuang Yu smiled and nodded. He rarely smiled.

This was the largest exercise of the year in the country. On the night before the exercise began, Zhuang Yu had no interest in the rolling steel torrent on the highway. As soon as he got off the helicopter, he went into the field tent and helped his father tape together the newly issued operational maps with transparent tape. During the entire exercise the next day, Zhuang Yu showed no interest at all. This was already expected by No. 10, but one thing gave him great comfort.

The morning’s exercise was an armored division attacking a high ground. Zhuang Yu sat on the north side of the observation platform with a group of local officials. Although the observation platform was at a safe distance this time, it was much closer than before at the request of those curious local officials. A squadron of H-12 bombers flew over the high ground, and heavy bombs rained down, turning the hilltop into an erupting volcano. It was then that the group of local officials understood the difference between a real battlefield and a movie. In the earth-shaking roar, they all covered their heads with their arms and lay on the table. A few ladies even screamed and crawled under the table. But No. 10 saw that Zhuang Yu was the only one still sitting upright, with the same indifferent expression, quietly and impassively watching the terrifying volcano, letting the flashes of the explosions flash wildly in his sunglasses. At that moment, a warm current rushed through No. 10’s heart. Son, you have the blood of a soldier flowing in you after all!

That evening, the father and son walked on the site of the day’s exercise. In the distance, the headlights of various armored vehicles were like stars scattered across the valley and plain. The air still had a faint smell of gunpowder.

“How much does this exercise cost?” Zhuang Yu asked.

“The direct cost is about three hundred million.”

Zhuang Yu sighed. “Our research group wanted to develop a third-generation stellar evolution model and applied for 350,000 in funding, but it wasn’t approved.”

No. 10 said what he had long wanted to say to his son: “Our two worlds are too far apart. Your stars, the closest one is 4 light-years away, right? It has nothing to do with the army and war on Earth. I don’t know much about your career, but I am very proud of it. As soldiers, we are also the ones who most want our sons to understand our careers. Which father does not consider telling his son about his military career as the greatest happiness? But you always have a cold attitude towards my career. In fact, my career is the foundation and guarantee of your career. If a country does not have a sufficient number and quality of armed forces to guarantee its peace, it is simply impossible to conduct the kind of pure basic research that you are engaged in.”

“Dad, you’ve got things backwards. If people were like us, exploring the universe with their entire lives, they would be able to appreciate the beauty of the universe, the beauty behind its vastness and profundity. And a person with a deep sense of the inner beauty of the universe and nature would not go to war.”

“Your idea is so naive. If war is caused by people’s lack of a sense of beauty, then peace would be too easy!”

“Do you think it’s that easy to make humanity feel this kind of beauty?” Zhuang Yu pointed to the brilliant sea of stars in the night sky. “You see these stars. People all know they are beautiful, but how many people can truly experience the deepest level of this beauty? These countless celestial bodies, their evolution from nebulae to black holes is so magnificent, the energy they erupt is so huge and violent, but do you know? A few elegant equations can accurately describe all of this. The mathematical models built with these equations can predict all the behaviors of stars with extreme accuracy. Even our mathematical models of our own planet’s atmosphere are several orders of magnitude less accurate than it.”

No. 10 nodded. “That’s possible. It’s said that humanity knows more about the moon than about the bottom of the Earth’s oceans. But the feeling of the deep beauty of the universe and nature you mentioned still can’t stop war. No one could feel this beauty more than Einstein, but wasn’t the atomic bomb still built on his suggestion?”

“Einstein made little progress in his later research, largely because he became too involved in politics. I will not follow his path. But, Dad, when the time comes, I will also do my duty.”

Zhuang Yu stayed in the exercise area for five days. No. 10 didn’t know when his son met Lin Yun. The first time he saw them together, they were already talking very congenially. They were talking about stars, and Lin Yun knew a lot about them. Looking at Lin Yun, who was still a naive and romantic girl, but who had already shouldered a major’s star because of her doctorate, he felt a little awkward in his heart. But other than that, his impression of Lin Yun was very good. The second time he saw Zhuang Yu and Lin Yun together, No. 10 saw that they had some intimacy. The content of their conversation surprised him: they were talking about electronic warfare. At that time, they were by a tank not far from No. 10’s jeep. Because of the content of their conversation, they didn’t mean to avoid others.

No. 10 heard Zhuang Yu say, “You are now only focused on some purely software high-level things, such as C3I, virus attacks, digital battlefields, etc. But have you thought about it? You may be holding a wooden sword.” Seeing Lin Yun’s surprised look, Zhuang Yu continued, “Have you thought about the foundation of these things, that is, the physical layer at the bottom of the seven-layer network protocol? For civilian networks, you can use things like optical fiber and directional lasers as communication media. But for a C3I system used on the battlefield, its various terminals are fast-moving and their positions are uncertain, so it can only mainly rely on electromagnetic waves for information connection. And electromagnetic waves, you know, are as fragile as thin ice under interference…”

No. 10 was really surprised. He had never communicated with his son about these things, and it was even more impossible for Zhuang Yu to have secretly read his confidential documents, but he had expressed his years of thought on electronic warfare concisely and accurately! Zhuang Yu’s words had an even greater impact on Lin Yun, even causing her to deviate from her own research direction and develop an electromagnetic interference device codenamed “Flood”. The size of “Flood” could be installed in an armored vehicle. It could simultaneously emit strong electromagnetic interference waves from 3KHZ to 30GHZ, covering all electromagnetic communication bands except for millimeter waves. This weapon caused a lot of trouble for the military in its first test at a certain base in the northwest: “Flood” completely interrupted the electromagnetic wave communication of the nearby large northwestern city. Cell phones didn’t work, pagers didn’t ring, and televisions and radios couldn’t receive signals. The impact on banks and the stock market was even more catastrophic. The local authorities described the losses as astronomical. The inspiration for “Flood” came from an electromagnetic bomb, a weapon that generates a strong electromagnetic pulse in a disposable coil through high explosives. Therefore, “Flood” worked like a rocket engine, and the sound it produced shattered the nearby window glass. This determined that it could only be operated remotely, and the operators two or three kilometers away had to wear microwave radiation-proof protective clothing. “Flood” caused a great debate in the electronic warfare command agencies of the General Armaments Department and the General Staff. Many people thought it had no practical value. Using it on a limited battlefield was like using a nuclear weapon in street fighting, and its lethality to both the enemy and oneself was equally great. But at No. 10’s insistence, more than two hundred “Floods” were still mass-produced. Now, in the new electronic warfare strategy of the high command, it will play a major role. His son had fallen in love with a girl in the army, which was a great surprise to No. 10. His conclusion was that Zhuang Yu’s feelings for Lin Yun had nothing to do with her profession. Later, Zhuang Yu brought Lin Yun home several times. The first time, Lin Yun was wearing a bright dress. When she left, No. 10 heard Zhuang Yu say to Lin Yun, “Wear a uniform next time.” This incident made No. 10 negate his previous conclusion. He now knew that Zhuang Yu’s falling in love with Lin Yun was not unrelated to her being a major. He felt the same feeling as on the first morning of the exercise again. He now felt that the major’s star on Lin Yun’s shoulder was incomparably beautiful.

Chapter 6: The Jing-Jin War Zone

January 6th, Jing-Jin War Zone

Strong electromagnetic waves quickly gathered over the war zone, eventually forming a huge electromagnetic typhoon. After the war, people recalled that even in remote mountain villages far from the front lines, animals and birds were restless. In cities under blackout, people could see tiny sparks induced on television antennas…

An armored regiment of A Army Group, transferred from the northern front to the southern front, was marching rapidly. The regimental commander stood by a jeep parked on the side of the road, watching his troops advance rapidly in the snow and dust with satisfaction. The enemy’s air raids were far less intense than expected, so the troops could travel during the day. At that moment, three Tomahawk missiles flew low over their heads, the low hum of their ramjet engines clearly audible. A moment later, three explosions were heard in the distance. The communications officer next to the regimental commander, holding a static-filled headset with nothing to do, turned to look in the direction of the explosions and then cried out, telling him to look. He told the communications officer not to make a fuss, but a major, a battalion commander next to him, also told him to look, so he did, and then shook his head in confusion. Not every Tomahawk hit its target, but it was rare to see three of them land in an empty field thousands of meters apart.

Two J-10s flew alone at an altitude of 5,000 meters over the war zone. They had originally belonged to a J-10 squadron, but the squadron had just had an encounter with a NATO F-22 squadron at sea. In the aerial dogfight, they had been separated from the squadron. In the past, regrouping would have been a piece of cake, but now, with radio communications down, the airspace that was once very small for high-speed fighter jets now felt as vast as the universe. Trying to regroup was like looking for a needle in a haystack. The lead and wingman could only fly very close to each other, so close that it looked like they were flying aerobatics. Only then could they hear each other’s radio calls.

“Suspicious target spotted upper left, bearing 220, elevation 30!” the wingman reported. The lead pilot looked in that direction. The winter sky was clear and blue after the snow, with excellent visibility. The two planes approached the target diagonally upwards. The target was flying in the same direction as them, but much slower, so they quickly caught up to it.

When they got a clear look at the target’s shape, they thought they were seeing a ghost in broad daylight. It was a NATO E-4A AWACS aircraft, the last enemy aircraft a fighter pilot would expect to encounter, like a person seeing the back of their own head. The radar on the E-4A AWACS could monitor an area of up to 1 million square kilometers, and a full scan took only 5 seconds. It could detect targets 2,000 kilometers away from the defense zone, providing more than 40 minutes of warning time. It could detect 800-1000 electromagnetic signals within a range of 1000-2000 kilometers, and each scan could query and identify 2000 sea, land, and air targets of various types. The AWACS never needed an escort; its powerful thousand-mile eyes could keep it far away from the threat of fighter jets. So the lead pilot naturally assumed this might be a trap. He and his wingman carefully searched the surrounding airspace. The clear, cold sky was empty. The lead pilot decided to take a risk.

“Thunderball, Thunderball, I am initiating an attack. You maintain vigilance in the 317 direction, but be careful not to exceed visual range!”

After watching his wingman fly towards the direction he thought was most likely to be an ambush, he turned on the afterburner, pulled back hard on the control stick, and the J-10, trailing black smoke from its acceleration, pounced on the AWACS diagonally upwards like a rearing cobra. At this moment, the E-4A also spotted the approaching threat. It hastily made an evasive maneuver to the southeast, and magnesium flares to jam heat-seeking missiles were constantly being ejected from its tail. The string of small fireballs was like its soul scared out of its shell. An AWACS in front of a fighter jet is like a bicycle in front of a motorcycle; it cannot escape. It was only then that the lead pilot realized how selfish his order to his wingman had been. He followed the E-4A from a distance behind and above it, admiring his prey. The blue and white radome on the E-4A’s back had beautiful lines, like a lovely Christmas toy. Its thick white fuselage was like a plump roast duck on a plate, making his mouth water, yet he couldn’t bear to use his knife and fork. But his intuition told him not to delay. He first fired a burst with his 20mm cannon, shattering the radome. He saw the fragments of the Westinghouse AN/PY-3 radar antenna scatter in the air like silver confetti at Christmas. He then used his cannon to sever one of the E-4A’s wings. Finally, the whip of death from the twin-barreled cannon, with a rate of fire of 6,000 rounds per minute, cut through the already tumbling E-4A at the waist, breaking it in two. The J-10 followed the two falling pieces of wreckage in a descending spiral. The pilot saw people and equipment constantly falling out of the fuselage, like candy falling out of a box. A few parachutes blossomed in the air. He remembered the scene of a comrade being shot down in the recent air battle: an F-22 had flown over the comrade’s parachute three times, collapsing it. He had watched as his comrade, like a stone, gradually disappeared into the white background of the earth. He resisted the urge to do the same. After rejoining his wingman, the two-plane formation left the airspace at top speed.

They still felt it might be a trap.

Those two were not the only planes that had gone astray. Over the Langfang front, a “Comanche” belonging to the US Army’s 1st Cavalry Division was flying aimlessly. The pilot, Lieutenant Walker, was very excited. He had just transferred from the “Apache” to the “Comanche” and was not used to this armed attack helicopter that had been mass-produced for the army since the late last century. He was not used to the “Comanche’s” control system, which had no foot pedals, and felt that its binocular helmet-mounted sight was not as comfortable as the “Apache’s” monocular sight. But what he was most not used to was the attack commander sitting in front of him, Captain Haney. When they first met, Haney had said, “Lieutenant, you need to know your place. I am the brain of this helicopter, and you are just a part of its electronic and mechanical components. You need to fulfill your duty as a component!” And Walker hated being a component. He remembered a nearly hundred-year-old former navy pilot who had participated in World War II visiting their base. He looked at the “Comanche’s” cockpit and shook his head. “Alas, boys, the instruments in my Mustang back then were no more than on a microwave oven today. My best instrument was this!” He patted Walker on the butt. “The difference between our two generations of pilots is the difference between an aerial knight and a computer operator.” Walker wanted to be an aerial knight, and now his chance had come. Under the Chinese’s almost perverted, insane jamming, all the “integrated combat mission equipment” system, the “target detection system,” the “auxiliary target detection and classification system,” the “real visual scene generator,” and the “data burst system” on this helicopter had all gone into shock! Only the two 1200-horsepower T800 engines were still faithfully turning. Haney usually lived by those electronic gadgets, and now his chattering, stinking mouth had fallen silent along with them. At this moment, he heard Haney’s voice from the internal communication system:

“Attention, target spotted. It seems to be to our left front, it seems to be next to that small hill. There’s an armored unit, it seems to be the enemy’s. You… do as you see fit.”

Walker almost laughed out loud. Ha, this kid. Listen to how he used to command: “Target spotted, bearing 133, 17 Type 90 tanks, 21 Type 89 armored personnel carriers, moving in the 391 direction at an average speed of 43.5 kilometers per hour, with an average interval of 31.4 meters. According to the AJ041 optimized attack plan, enter from the 179 direction at a 37-degree angle…” And now? “It seems” there’s an armored unit, “it seems” to be “on the other side of the hill.” Who the hell needs you to say that? I saw it a long time ago! And he tells me to do as I see fit. You’re useless, Haney. Now it’s my world. I’m going to use my butt as an instrument and be a knight! This “Comanche” in my hands will not be unworthy of the name of its brave Indian tribe.

The “Comanche” charged towards the obvious target, firing all 62 of its 27.5-inch honeycomb rockets. Walker watched with intoxication as his swarm of little bees with fiery tails flew happily towards the target, engulfing the enemy convoy in a sea of fire. But when he flew a circuit to observe the results, he found that something was wrong. The enemy soldiers on the ground were not taking cover, but were all standing on the snow, pointing at him and looking as if they were cursing him. Walker flew closer and clearly saw the insignia on a destroyed armored vehicle. It was a three-ring concentric circle, with blue in the middle, then a white circle and a red circle. Walker’s vision went black, and he felt the world had turned into hell. He also started cursing:

“You son of a bitch, you’re blind?!”

But he was smart enough to fly far away to prevent the enraged Frenchmen from retaliating. “You son of a bitch, you’re probably thinking about how to shift the blame to me in military court. You can’t. You’re responsible for target identification, you have to understand that!”

“Maybe… we still have a chance to make up for it,” Haney said timidly. “I’ve spotted another unit, right across from us…”

“Go to hell!” Walker said angrily.

“This time it’s for real, they’re exchanging fire with the French!”

Walker perked up again. He flew his aircraft towards the new target and saw that the enemy was mainly infantry with few armored forces, which confirmed Haney’s judgment. Walker fired the remaining four “Hellfire” missiles, then set the Gatling twin-barreled machine gun’s rate of fire to 1,500 rounds per minute and began firing. He comfortably felt the slight vibration of the machine gun transmitted through the fuselage and saw the enemy’s skirmish line on the ground being sprinkled with a layer of white “pepper.” But the instinct of an experienced armed helicopter pilot told him there was danger. He turned his head and saw a shoulder-fired missile had just been launched from the shoulder of a soldier standing on a jeep to his lower left. Walker fumbled to launch decoy magnesium flares and then made an evasive maneuver backwards, but it was too late. The missile, trailing a spiderweb-like white smoke, hit the “Comanche’s” nose. When Walker woke up from the brief dizziness caused by the explosion, he found that the helicopter had crashed onto the snow. Walker scrambled out of the smoke-filled cockpit, hugged a tree that had just been cut in half by the propeller, and looked back to see the mangled body of Captain Haney in the front cockpit. He then saw a group of soldiers with submachine guns running towards him, their Asian faces clearly visible. Walker trembled as he took out his pistol, placed it on the snow in front of him, and then took out a phrasebook and read from it:

“I am unarmed, I am a prisoner of war, Geneva…”

He was hit on the back of the head with a rifle butt and kicked in the stomach. When he fell over on the snow, he laughed out loud. He might be beaten half to death, but he wouldn’t be all dead. He had seen the Japanese Self-Defense Forces insignia on the collars of the Asian soldiers.

Chapter 7: The “Kitty Hawk” Carrier

January 7th, Bohai Bay, “Kitty Hawk” carrier battle group, NATO Expeditionary Force operational command center

“Get that damned corpsman in here!” Admiral Tony Parker shouted irritably. When the slender colonel-medic ran to him, he said angrily, “What’s going on? You’ve fiddled with it twice, and my dentures are still buzzing!”

“General, this is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. Maybe there’s something wrong with your nervous system. Should I give you a shot of local anesthetic?”

At that moment, a major came over and said, “General, please give me the dentures. I have a way.” Parker then took off his dentures and placed them on the tissue the major offered.

Regarding the general’s two missing front teeth, the media’s general consensus was that they were knocked out when his tank was hit in the Persian Gulf War. Only the general himself knew that wasn’t true. That time, his jaw was broken, but his teeth had been knocked out earlier. It was at Clark Air Base. At that time, the world seemed to be nothing but volcanic ash: the sky was gray, the ground was gray, the air was gray, and even the “Hercules” he and the last group of personnel from the base were about to board had a thick white layer of ash on its roof. The dark red glow of the volcanic lava was intermittently visible in the depths of this grayness. That Filipino female employee still came to find him. She said the base was gone, she was unemployed, and her house was buried under volcanic ash. How could she and the child in her belly survive? She grabbed him and begged him to take her to the United States. He told her it was impossible, so she took off her high heels and hit him in the face, knocking out his two front teeth. Looking at the gray seawater, Parker thought to himself: My child, where are you now? Are you living with your mother in the slums of Manila? Your father has returned to the East. He is now fighting for you to some extent. After the war, Subic and Clark will once again become American naval and air bases in the Pacific. It will be more prosperous there than in the last century. You will find a job there! If you are a girl, you might even meet an American officer like your mother (what was her name again? Oh, Alena)… Most importantly, this war will also bring your country a wonderful gift, something you have long wanted: those beautiful islands in the South China Sea. I have seen them from the air, white coral reefs surrounding brown sand, like eyes on the blue sea. Child, those are your father’s eyes…

The major who was fixing his teeth returned, interrupting the general’s reverie. The general took the dentures on the tissue, put them on, and after a few seconds of feeling them, looked at the major in surprise. “Huh? How did you do that?”

“General, your dentures were buzzing because they were resonating with the electromagnetic waves.”

The general stared at the major, clearly not believing him.

“General, it’s true! Perhaps you have been exposed to strong electromagnetic waves before, for example, within the range of a radar, but the frequency of those electromagnetic waves did not match the natural frequency of your dentures. But now, the electromagnetic waves in all frequency bands in the air are very strong, so this situation occurred. I have made some modifications to your dentures to greatly increase their resonant frequency. They are still resonating now, but you can’t feel it.”

After the major left, General Parker’s gaze fell on a clock next to the electronic battle map. The base of the clock was a statue of Hannibal riding an elephant, with the three characters “Victory is Certain” engraved on it. It used to be in the Blue Room of the White House. At that time, the president noticed that his gaze always fell on that thing, so he personally picked up the clock that had been there for over a hundred years and gave it to him.

“God bless America, General. You are God now!”

Parker thought for a long time and said slowly, “Order a full-scale halt to the offensive. Use all air power to search for and destroy the Chinese jammers.”

January 8th, General Staff Department of the People’s Liberation Army of China

“The enemy has stopped their offensive, but you don’t seem to be happy about it,” No. 10 said to the commander of A Army Group, who had just returned from the front.

“I can’t be happy. All of NATO’s air power is now concentrated on attacking our jamming units, and this kind of attack is indeed very effective.”

“This is within our expectations,” No. 10 said calmly. “Our strategy is like fighting a martial arts master with no set routine. At first, it will throw him off, but he will always come up with a way to deal with it. Jammers used for barrage jamming are easily detected and destroyed due to their strong full-channel emissions. Fortunately, we have gained a considerable amount of time. Now all our hopes are pinned on the rapid assembly of the Northwest Cluster.”

“The situation may be more severe than expected,” said the commander of A Army Group. “We may not have left enough time for the Northwest Cluster to move into its attack position before we lose our electronic warfare advantage.”

After the commander of A Army Group left, No. 10 looked at the terrain of the front line on the electronic sandbox and thought of Lin Yun, who was under intense enemy fire. This in turn made him think of Zhuang Yu. That day, Zhuang Yu had come home with a bruised and swollen face. He had already heard rumors that his son was the only anti-war activist at that famous university and had been beaten by the students.

“I just said not to talk lightly of war,” Zhuang Yu explained to his father.

No. 10 said to his son with a severity he had never used before, “You know your place. You can keep quiet, but you are absolutely not allowed to engage in similar words or deeds in the future.”

Zhuang Yu nodded.

As soon as he entered the house in the evening, No. 10 told Zhuang Yu, “The far-right government of Russian Tupolev has come to power.”

Zhuang Yu glanced at his father and said faintly, “Let’s eat.”

A few days later, No. 10 said again before dinner, “Russia has joined NATO.” His son looked at his father again with that calm gaze, and then the two ate in silence.

Later, the Korean Peninsula war broke out, and there were conflicts in the South China Sea and on the Sino-Indian border. No. 10 no longer needed to tell Zhuang Yu. The father and son ate in silence every night as usual, until one day, Zhuang Yu received a notice from the space base, packed his bags, and left. Two days later, he took a space shuttle to the “Eternal Yan Emperor,” which was orbiting in near-Earth orbit.

A week later, the war broke out in full force. It was a full-scale war launched by an unprecedentedly powerful enemy from an unexpected direction, aimed at the complete destruction of the Republic.

January 9th, Near-Sun Orbit, “Eternal Yan Emperor” Skims Past Mercury

Due to the “Eternal Yan Emperor’s” high speed, it could not become a satellite of Mercury and could only skim past the planet’s sun-facing side at high speed. This was the first time humans had directly observed the surface of Mercury at close range. Zhuang Yu saw cliffs up to two kilometers high on the surface of Mercury, winding for hundreds of kilometers, crossing plains dotted with huge craters. He also saw the famous “Caloris Basin,” a landform that planetary geologists call “incredible terrain,” with a diameter of 1,300 kilometers. Its incredible feature is that on the other side of Mercury, there is a basin of similar size directly opposite it. It is speculated that a huge comet hit Mercury, and the strong shock waves passed through the entire planet, forming two extremely similar basins in both hemispheres at the same time. Zhuang Yu also discovered many new and exciting things. He found that there were many bright spots on the surface of Mercury. When he enlarged those spots on the screen, he held his breath with excitement.

Those were mercury lakes on Mercury, each with an average area of thousands of square kilometers.

Zhuang Yu imagined standing on the shore of a mercury lake during Mercury’s long day, under the scorching heat of 1800°C. Even in a strong wind, the mercury lake would be calm, and Mercury has no atmosphere, no wind, so the surface of the lake would be like a vast plain of mirrors, with the sun and the Milky Way reflected on it without distortion.

After skimming past Mercury, the “Eternal Yan Emperor” will continue to approach the sun, sailing to the limit of what its insulation layer, supported by a nuclear fusion cooling device, can withstand. The high temperature of the sun will be its best cover. No NATO spacecraft can fly into this scorching hell.

Looking at this vast universe, and then thinking about the war on the mother planet one hundred million kilometers away, Zhuang Yu once again lamented the narrowness of human vision.

Chapter 8: The Beautiful Flower of Life

January 10th, Langfang Frontline

Watching the enemy’s skirmish line gradually approach, Lin Yun understood why, after the surrounding jamming points were destroyed one after another, only her position had survived: the enemy wanted to capture a complete “Flood.”

The helicopter group, consisting of three “Comanches” and four “Black Hawks,” easily located the “Flood.” Due to the “Flood’s” huge electromagnetic emissions, it could only be remotely controlled through optical fiber cables. This, in turn, allowed the enemy to follow the path of the optical fiber cables and discover the remote control station where Lin Yun was located, 3,000 meters away from the “Flood.” It was an abandoned, isolated small warehouse.

The four “Black Hawks” carrying more than forty enemy infantrymen landed less than two hundred meters from the warehouse. At that time, besides Lin Yun, there was a captain and a master sergeant in the remote control station. The master sergeant had just opened the warehouse door when he heard the sound of engines, and a bullet fired by a sniper on a helicopter blew off his skull. The enemy’s subsequent fire was very cautious and restrained, obviously afraid of damaging the equipment they wanted inside the warehouse. This allowed Lin Yun and the captain to hold out for a while longer.

Now, to Lin Yun’s left front, the captain’s submachine gun fell silent. The sound of the gun had been her only comfort. She saw the captain’s body motionless behind the tree stump that served as cover. A circle of crimson blood was spreading on the snow around him. Lin Yun was now behind a simple barricade made of a few sandbags in front of the warehouse. Eight submachine gun magazines were scattered at her feet. The scorching gun barrel hissed in the snow on top of the sandbags. Whenever Lin Yun fired, the enemy in front of her would lie down, and bullets would kick up clouds of snow in front of them, while the enemy on the other side of the semicircular encirclement would jump up and advance a short distance. Now, Lin Yun had only three magazines left. She started firing single shots. This inexperienced move told the enemy that she was running out of ammunition, and they advanced faster and more boldly. As Lin Yun changed magazines again, she heard a squeak from the thick snow on top of the sandbag. Something quickly drilled through it. She felt a sharp push in her right side. There was no pain, only a spreading numbness. She felt warm blood flowing down her right side. She held on, firing almost aimlessly through the magazine. As she reached for the last magazine on top of the sandbag, a bullet broke her forearm. The magazine fell to the snow, her arm hanging by a single strip of skin. Lin Yun stood up and walked back towards the warehouse door, leaving a thin trail of blood on the snow behind her. As she pulled the door open, another bullet pierced her left shoulder.

This small detachment of the U.S. Marine Corps “SEALs,” led by Captain Rhett Donaldson, cautiously approached the warehouse. When Donaldson and two Marines stepped over the body of the Chinese sergeant and kicked open the door to rush into the tent, they found only a young female officer inside. She was sitting next to their target—the “Flood” remote control—with one broken arm hanging limply on the control panel. Looking at her reflection on the screen, she used her other hand to tidy her hair. Blood dripped continuously, forming a small puddle at her feet. She smiled at the Americans who had rushed in and the row of gun muzzles, as if to say hello. Donaldson let out a long breath, but he never breathed in again: he saw her hand, which had been tidying her hair, pick up a dark green, oblong object from the control panel and hold it in mid-air. Donaldson immediately recognized it as a gas bomb, small in size because it was designed for armed helicopters. It was detonated by a laser proximity fuze, exploding twice half a meter above the ground—the first time to disperse the gaseous explosive, the second to detonate the explosive mist. He knew he couldn’t escape its blast radius, even if he were an arrow.

He held out a hand towards her, pressing it down. “Calm down, Major. Calm down, don’t get excited,” he gestured to those around him, and the Marines’ gun muzzles drooped. “Listen to me, things aren’t as bad as you think. You’ll get the best medical care. You’ll be sent to the best hospital in Okinawa. Then, you’ll be one of the first prisoners of war to be exchanged…” The major smiled at him again, which encouraged him somewhat. “You have no reason to resort to such a barbaric method. This is a civilized war. It would have gone smoothly. I felt this a few days ago when we landed. At that time, most of the firepower on the shore had been destroyed. Only a few scattered machine-gun shots punctuated our glorious and romantic expedition. You see, everything will go smoothly. There’s no need…”

“I know of another, more wonderful landing,” the major said in perfect English, her gentle voice like something from heaven, capable of softening steel. “A beautiful beach with palm trees, with welcoming banners hanging from the trees; pretty girls everywhere, with waist-long hair and rustling silk trousers, moving among the young soldiers, decorating them with red and pink flower garlands, and shyly smiling at the dumbfounded soldiers… Captain, do you know of this landing?”

Donaldson shook his head in confusion.

“That was on the morning of March 8, 1965, in Da Nang, when the first U.S. Marines landed on Vietnamese soil, which was also the beginning of the Vietnam War.”

Donaldson felt as if he had suddenly fallen into an ice cave. The composure he had just had instantly vanished. His breathing became rapid, and his voice began to tremble. “No, don’t do this, Major. It’s unfair of you to treat us this way! We haven’t killed many people. The ones who did the killing are them,” he pointed to the helicopters hovering in the air outside the window. “It’s those pilots, and those gentlemen on the aircraft carriers far away who operate the computers to guide the cruise missiles. But they are all decent gentlemen. The targets they face are all beautiful colored markers on a screen. They press a button or move a mouse, wait patiently for a while, and those markers disappear. They are all civilized gentlemen. They have no malice, really no malice… Are you listening to me?”

The major smiled and nodded. Who said Death was ugly and terrifying? Death was truly beautiful.

“I have a girlfriend. She’s studying at the University of Maryland. She’s as beautiful as you are, really. She even participates in anti-war protests…” I should have listened to her, Donaldson thought. “Are you listening to me? Please say something, I beg you, say something…”

The beautiful major smiled at the enemy one last time. “Captain, I am doing my duty.”

The reinforcements from the Third Division of C Army Group were half a kilometer away from the “Flood” remote control station. They first heard a muffled explosion and saw the small, isolated warehouse in the wide field disappear into a cloud of white mist. Then came a much louder explosion, shaking the earth. A huge fireball appeared where the warehouse had been. The flames, wrapped in thick black smoke, rose high into the air, forming a towering mushroom cloud, like a beautiful flower of life blooming between heaven and earth.

Chapter 9: The War Song of a Bygone Era

January 11th, General Staff Department of the People’s Liberation Army of China

“This is your attack plan?!” No. 10 pointed at the operational concept map on the big screen and said angrily to the commander of the Northwest Cluster. It was the biggest display of anger people had seen from him since the war began. “Attacking north from the Baoding line is just reinforcing the defense of Beijing. It’s not a fatal blow to the enemy on the southern front. You’ve come all this way, spent so much time assembling, just to wipe someone’s ass and scratch an itch?!”

“We also wanted to attack along the Anxin-Baxian line, cross Tianjin, and strike the enemy’s landing area in the rear. But this plan can no longer achieve the element of surprise in the campaign. Now even Western news reports are talking about this optimal attack direction. The US 82nd Airborne Division, a British armored brigade, and a Japanese Self-Defense Force regiment surrounding Tianjin have already moved towards Baxian to block us.”

“With that small a force, they can at most form a ten-kilometer blocking front. You can bypass it. Even if you attack head-on, you have an absolute advantage.”

“I’m worried about time. The enemy’s defensive line in Cangzhou is supported by long-range fire from the sea. If we can’t break through in a short time, the already difficult Langfang defensive line will collapse, and NATO forces may outflank Beijing from both sides to meet up with the Russian forces on the northern front. In that case, our North China and Northwest Clusters will not be able to form a pincer attack on the enemy on the southern front.”

“I know what you want. Don’t waste your breath, just ask for it!” No. 10 said with a wave of his hand.

“I want the battlefield electromagnetic conditions of the past two days to last for another 4 days.”

“You know, seventy percent of our battlefield jamming forces have been destroyed. I can’t even give you 4 hours now!”

The High Command finally decided to attack according to the second plan.

On his way out of the underground operations room, the commander of the Northwest Cluster silently prayed: Langfang, hold on!

January 12th, Langfang Defensive Line

The commander of the 2nd Division of A Army Group knew that their position could at most withstand one more attack.

The enemy’s air strikes and long-range strikes from the sea were gradually intensifying, while our army’s air cover was becoming scarcer. The division’s armored forces and armed helicopters were almost all gone. This last stand was almost entirely dependent on flesh and blood.

The division commander, dragging a leg severed by a shrapnel, walked out of the shelter leaning on a rifle. He saw that the trenches were not dug deep, which was not surprising, as most of the people on the position were now wounded. But he was surprised to find that a neat breastwork about half a meter high had been built in front of the trenches. The division commander was very curious about what materials were used to build this breastwork so quickly. He saw a few tree branch-like things sticking out of the snow-covered breastwork. When he got closer, he saw that they were pale, stiff arms… He was furious and grabbed a colonel’s collar.

“You bastard! Who told you to use the bodies of soldiers to build a shelter?!”

“I ordered it,” the political commissar’s calm voice came from behind the division commander. “We entered the new position too quickly last night, and this is a farmland. There really were no other materials.”

They looked at each other in silence. The blood flowing from the political commissar’s bandaged forehead had frozen in streaks on his face. After a while, the two of them walked slowly along the trench, along the breastwork built of youth and life. The division commander’s left hand was on the rifle he was using as a crutch, and his right hand straightened his helmet, saluting the breastwork. They were inspecting their troops for the last time… They passed a young soldier whose legs had been blown off. The blood flowing from his severed legs had mixed the snow and dirt below into a reddish-black mud, the surface of which was now frozen again. He was lying down, putting an anti-tank grenade to his chest. He looked up at the division commander with a pale face and smiled. “I’m going to stuff this thing into the tracks of an Abrams.”

The cold wind whipped up gusts of snow, making a mournful whistling sound, as if playing a war song from a bygone era.

“Commissar, if I am killed in action before you, please build me into this wall as well. It is indeed a good final resting place,” the division commander said.

“We won’t be far apart in time,” the political commissar said with his characteristic calmness.

Chapter 10: The Beautiful Solar Prominence

January 12th, General Staff Department of the People’s Liberation Army of China

A staff officer came to tell No. 10 that the Minister of the Aerospace Industry was eager to see him. The matter was very urgent and concerned Zhuang Yu and electronic warfare.

Hearing his son’s name, No. 10’s heart skipped a beat. He already knew about Lin Yun’s death in battle, and at the same time, he couldn’t imagine what a son a hundred million kilometers away had to do with electronic warfare. He couldn’t even imagine what relationship Zhuang Yu had with the Earth now.

The minister and his entourage walked in. He didn’t say much, but handed a 3-inch optical disc to No. 10. “General, this is the message we received an hour ago from Zhuang Yu on the ‘Eternal Yan Emperor’. He later added that this is not a private message and hopes you can play it in front of all relevant personnel.”

Everyone in the operations room listened to the voice from a hundred million kilometers away: “Dad, I learned from the war news I received that if the electromagnetic interference cannot last for another three to four days, we may lose this war. If this is true, I can give you that time.”

“In the past, you always thought that the stars I studied were too far removed from reality. I thought so too. Now it seems we were both wrong. I remember mentioning to you that although the energy produced by a star is huge, it is itself a relatively simple and straightforward system. For example, our sun is composed of only the two simplest elements: hydrogen and helium. Its operation is also composed of only two mechanisms: nuclear fusion and gravitational equilibrium. In this way, compared to our Earth, its operating state is relatively easy to grasp in a mathematical model. Now, a very accurate mathematical model of the sun has been established through the study of the sun, and I have also done some work in this. Through this mathematical model, we can make very accurate predictions about the sun’s behavior. This allows us to use a tiny disturbance to locally break a certain balance of the sun’s operation in a short period of time. The method is very simple: use the ‘Eternal Yan Emperor’ to accurately impact a certain point on the sun’s surface.”

“Dad, maybe you think this is just throwing a small stone into the ocean, but that’s not the case. This is a grain of sand falling into an eye!”

“From the mathematical model, we know that the sun is an extremely delicate and sensitive energy balance system. If calculated properly, a tiny disturbance can cause a chain reaction on the sun’s surface and at a considerable depth. This reaction spreads out, breaking its local balance. There have been precedents in history: the most recent record was in early August 1972, when a violent eruption occurred in a very small area on the sun’s surface. This eruption caused an electromagnetic storm that had a huge impact on the Earth. The compass needles on planes and ships jumped wildly, long-distance radio communications were interrupted, the night sky in the Arctic region flashed with dazzling red light, and in the countryside, the lights flickered on and off as if in the center of a thunderstorm. This effect lasted for more than a week at that time. A more credible explanation now is that a celestial body smaller than the ‘Eternal Yan Emperor’ hit the sun’s surface at that time. Such disturbances to the sun’s surface must have occurred many times in history, but most of them occurred before humans invented radio receiving devices, so they were not detected. These impacts on the sun’s surface are all random and accidental, so the balance disturbances they can produce are limited in intensity and scope.”

“But the impact point of the ‘Eternal Yan Emperor’ on the sun has been precisely calculated. The disturbance it will produce will be several orders of magnitude greater than the natural disturbances mentioned above. This disturbance will cause the sun to spew out strong electromagnetic radiation into space. This radiation includes electromagnetic waves of all frequency bands from extremely low frequency to very high frequency. At the same time, the strong X-rays emitted by the sun will violently impact the ionosphere, which is very important for shortwave communication, thereby changing the properties of the ionosphere and interrupting communication. When the disturbance occurs, most of the radio communication on the Earth’s surface, except for millimeter waves, will be interrupted. This effect may be relatively weak at night, but during the day it will even exceed the electromagnetic interference you conducted two days ago. It is calculated that this disturbance will last for about a week.”

“Dad, in the past, the two of us have always lived in two distant worlds, and we communicated with each other very little. But now, our two worlds are integrated, and we are fighting for a common goal. I am proud of this. Dad, like every one of your soldiers, I am waiting for your order.”

The Minister of Aerospace said, “What Dr. Zhuang said is all true. Last year, we launched a probe to the sun. It conducted a small-scale impact test on the sun’s surface based on the calculations of the mathematical model, confirming the disturbance predicted by the model. Dr. Zhuang and his research team also proposed an idea: in the future, it may be possible to use this method to appropriately change the Earth’s climate.”

No. 10 walked into a small cubicle and picked up a red phone with a direct line to the country’s top leader. After a short while, he walked out of the cubicle. History records this moment differently. Some say he said the words immediately, while others say he was silent for a full minute. But the words are certain.

“Tell Zhuang Yu to do as he says.”

January 12th, Near-Sun Orbit, “Eternal Yan Emperor” hurtles towards the sun

All ten nuclear fusion engines of the “Eternal Yan Emperor” were ignited, each engine’s nozzle spewing out a plasma jet hundreds of kilometers long. It was making its final orbital and attitude corrections.

Directly in front of the “Eternal Yan Emperor” was a huge, beautiful solar prominence, a stream of scorching hydrogen gas spiraling up from the sun’s surface. It was like a long, light veil floating above the sun’s fiery ocean, changing its shape and posture dreamily. Both of its ends were connected to the photosphere, forming a huge arch. The “Eternal Yan Emperor” passed slowly and solemnly through the middle of this triumphal arch, which was four hundred thousand kilometers high. A few more prominences appeared ahead. They were connected to the sun on one end, and the other end stretched into the depths of space. The “Eternal Yan Emperor,” with its blue-glowing engines, was like a small firefly flying among several large fire trees. Later, the blue light gradually faded, the engines stopped, and the “Eternal Yan Emperor’s” orbit was precisely set. The rest would be done by the law of universal gravitation.

When the spacecraft entered the sun’s upper atmosphere, the corona, the black background of the space above turned purplish-red. This purplish-red glow filled all the space here. Below, the scene in the sun’s chromosphere could be clearly seen. There, tens of thousands of spicules were shining. Those things had been observed by astronomers in the 19th century. They were jets of luminous gas shooting into the sky from the sun’s surface. These jets made the sun’s atmosphere look like a vast burning prairie, with each blade of grass thousands of kilometers long. Below this burning prairie was the sun’s photosphere, an endless ocean of fire.

In the final images sent back from the “Eternal Yan Emperor,” people saw Zhuang Yu rise from the huge monitor screen, press a button to open the protective cover outside the transparent dome, and the magnificent ocean of fire was displayed before him. He wanted to see the world of his childhood dreams with his own eyes. The sea of fire was trembling and deforming. It was the half-meter-thick heat-insulating glass melting. Soon, the hundred-meter-high glass wall turned into a transparent liquid and rolled down. Like a person seeing the ocean for the first time, intoxicatedly facing the sea breeze, Zhuang Yu opened his arms to welcome the 6000-degree hurricane roaring towards him. In the last few seconds of images sent back before the camera and transmission equipment were melted, Zhuang Yu’s body could be seen burning, and finally his entire body turned into a dancing torch, merging with the sun’s sea of fire…

The subsequent scenes can only be guessed at: the “Eternal Yan Emperor’s” solar panels and protruding structures will first melt. These molten parts will form small silver spheres on the surface of the spacecraft due to their surface tension. When the “Eternal Yan Emperor” crosses the boundary between the chromosphere and the corona, its main body will begin to melt. When it penetrates 2000 kilometers into the chromosphere, the entire chromosphere will have completely melted. The separate molten metal droplets will merge into a huge silver liquid sphere, which will fly at high speed towards the target set by the computer, which has already turned into liquid. The effect of the solar atmosphere will begin to show. A circle of light blue flames will appear around the liquid sphere. This flame will trail for hundreds of kilometers, and its color will gradually change from light blue to yellow, and then to a beautiful orange-red at the tail. Finally, this beautiful fire phoenix will disappear into the vast sea of fire.

January 13th, Earth

Humanity has returned to the world before Marconi.

At night, even in the equatorial regions, the night sky was filled with surging auroras.

Facing a television screen of static snow, most people could only guess and imagine the situation on that war-torn continent.

January 13th, Tanggu Frontline

General Parker pushed away the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division and several front-line commanders who were trying to pull him onto a helicopter. He raised his binoculars and continued to look into the distance, where the Chinese line was rolling towards them.

“Set range 4000 meters, load shell number 9, delayed fuze, fire!”

From the sound of firing from the rear, Parker knew that there were less than thirty 105mm howitzers that could fire. This was his only heavy weapon for defense at the moment.

An hour ago, the only armored force on this position, a tank battalion of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, launched a counterattack with admirable courage and achieved excellent results: they destroyed one and a half times their number of Chinese tanks eight kilometers away. But due to their absolute numerical inferiority, they disappeared like dewdrops under the midday sun in the face of the Chinese steel torrent. Only one Japanese tank, trailing black smoke and fire, returned to the front of the position. A young lieutenant colonel climbed out of the tank. He took off his tank helmet, knelt down facing east, pulled open his burnt clothes to expose his abdomen, then drew a paratrooper’s knife and wiped it with a white handkerchief, while looking at the position. The Americans on the position watched him with cold but interested eyes. He held the paratrooper’s knife upside down with both hands and shouted, but at the last 0.1 second, he lost his courage, and the knife plunged into the snow. He took out a pistol and shot himself in the mouth, then lay on the snow struggling, drawing a strange pattern on the white snow with his brain and blood. Finally, he put his hand into the snow and died, clutching the soil of China.

“Set range 3500 meters, fire!”

After the whistling sound of the shells flying, a high wall of mud and fire was thrown up in front of the Chinese tank line. But just like a landslide in front of a flood, the fallen mud temporarily blocked the flood, but the flood eventually overflowed. After the mud thrown up by the explosion fell, the Chinese armored vanguard appeared again in the thick smoke. Parker saw that their formation was very dense, as if they were being reviewed. If they had attacked in this formation a few days ago, it would have been suicide. But now, when NATO’s air and long-range strike firepower was almost completely paralyzed, this was a formation that could be adopted. It could concentrate armored attack power to the maximum extent to ensure a breakthrough at one point on the front line.

The misconfiguration of the beachhead’s circular defensive line was within General Parker’s expectations, because under such battlefield electromagnetic conditions, it was almost impossible to accurately and quickly determine the enemy’s main attack direction. He was at a complete loss as to how to defend next. With the C3I system completely paralyzed, it was very difficult to quickly adjust the defensive layout.

“Set range 3000 meters, fire!”

“General, were you looking for me?” French commander, Lieutenant General Josserand, walked over. He was only accompanied by a French lieutenant colonel and a helicopter pilot. He was not wearing camouflage, and the medal ribbons on his chest and the stars on his shoulders were brightly polished, but he was wearing a helmet and carrying a rifle, which looked out of place.

“I hear that on our left flank, the Fawn Division is withdrawing from its position.”

“Yes, General.”

“General Josserand, behind us, 700,000 NATO troops are embarking. This beachhead withdrawal is three times the size of Dunkirk, and its success depends on our solid defense!”

“It depends on your solid defense.”

“Can I get a clearer explanation?”

“You understand everything! You concealed the true war situation from us. You knew long ago that Russia would unilaterally cease fire on the northern front.”

“As the supreme commander of the NATO expeditionary force, I have the right to do so. General, I think you also understand that you and your troops have the responsibility to accept command.”

…

“Set range 2500 meters, fire!”

…

“I only obey the orders of the President of the French Republic.”

“I don’t believe you can receive such an order now.”

“I received it a few months ago. At the National Day reception at the Élysée Palace, the President personally explained to me the code of conduct for the French army in this situation.”

“You de Gaulle bastards, you haven’t changed in all these decades! [Note 2]” Parker finally lost control.

“Don’t be so harsh, General. If you don’t go, I’ll stay alone, and we’ll die gloriously together on this eastern land,” Josserand said, waving the FAMS French standard-issue rifle at Parker.

…

“Set range 2000 meters, fire!”

…

Parker slowly turned around and faced the group of front-line commanders in front of him. “Please convey my following words to the American troops holding the line: We are not born an army that can only fight with computers. Like the enemy opposite us, we also come from an army of farmers. Decades ago, on Guadalcanal, we fought the Japanese for every hole in the ground in the tropical jungle. In Chipyong-ni, Korea, we used shovels to block the Chinese hand grenades. And even further back, on that cold winter night, the great Washington led those shoeless soldiers across the frozen Trenton River and made history…”

“Set range 1500 meters, fire!”

“I order the destruction of documents and non-combat supplies…”

“Set range 1200 meters, fire!”

General Parker put on his helmet, put on his body armor, and tucked his 9mm pistol under his left armpit. At this moment, the sound of the howitzers fell silent. The gunners were stuffing grenades into the barrels, followed by a series of chaotic explosions.

“All soldiers,” General Parker said, looking at the Chinese tank group that had spread out before them like a wall of death, “Fix bayonets!”

Behind the smoke of the battlefield, the sun appeared and disappeared, casting changing light and shadows on the bloody snowfield.

Appendix

Note 1: A brief introduction to these electronic warfare terms: Frequency hopping: The transmitter and receiver change frequencies in the same sequence; Direct sequence spread spectrum: The signal energy is spread over a very wide frequency band to make it difficult to intercept and jam; Null-steerable adaptive antenna: An antenna with a kidney-shaped coverage pattern, with the null pointing to the enemy jammer to which the antenna is unresponsive, in order to communicate with one’s own antennas in other directions; Burst transmission: Sending information in a short time using a wide frequency band or in a long time using a very narrow frequency band; Frequency agility: Automatically changing frequency when jammed.

Note 2: In 1966, General de Gaulle withdrew France from the NATO integrated military command, which was a serious blow to NATO in the Cold War at that time.

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(Simplified Chinese Version)