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Captain Tse Daiyu climbed from the backseat of the black Xpeng G9 SUV, while her driver idled the vehicle. Its electric motor was as darkly silent as her mood. The sun had yet to rise over the Gulf of Thailand, which bordered the Réam Naval Base. The morning was still warm and humid after a sweltering night.
She took off her glasses and used a handkerchief to wipe the fog that had immediately steamed her lenses after she had exited the air-conditioned interior. She dabbed the same dampness from her brow. She hated the heat. She had grown up in the city of Mohe, in the northern province of Heilongjiang, where the aurora borealis would often shine and the weather was cold and dry year-round.
Not like this infernal sweatbox.
She headed across the parking lot. Men and women—a mix of enlisted and officers—bustled throughout the fortified corner of the Cambodian base. They all wore blue fatigues in oceanic camouflage, which showed only a few insignias, in an attempt to keep their ranks hidden. It was a cynical ploy to mask the depth of PLA involvement on Cambodian soil. Not that anyone was fooled. The role-playing was more for the benefit of the Cambodian government than any real worry from Beijing.
As the commanding officer of the base, Daiyu refused to participatein this game. She wore crisp gray pants and a white, open-necked coat with hard epaulets and bar insignia of her rank. She carried her hat under one arm. Her hair was neatly trimmed to her collar. Her only concession to vanity was the dye that masked the few strands of gray.
At forty-eight, she was only the second female in the PLA Navy to reach the level of captain, and she did not intend to stop here. She aspired for an admiralcy.
As the only child of factory workers, she carried the burden of her family’s honor. Her parents had wanted a son but had to settle for a daughter, trapped by the “one-child policy” of the time. Still, afterward, her parents had doted on her and loved her, instilling self-confidence, along with pride of country, family, and self—if not necessarily in that order.
When her mother died twelve years ago, it had been the impetus for her to join the PLA. Her ambitions could not be fulfilled in the civilian sector. By then, she had already made her parents proud. She had graduated from Sun Yat-sen University with a PhD in geosciences, then worked at the Guangdong Southern Marine Science and Engineering Laboratory. There, she worked on deep-sea research projects for the navy. So, her transition into the military had been an easy one. After a post as a navigator aboard an aircraft carrier, she returned to the same lab.
Since then, for the past decade, she had overseen the advancement of China’s bathyscaphe project. Her crowning achievement, though, had been the completion and testing of an AI-driven ship, theZhu Hai Yun. The marine research vessel needed no crew. It served as the mothership for a collection of unmanned drones and submersibles, allowing it to operate independently, with minimal human involvement.
Her goal was to usher the PLA Navy into a new era of oceanic dominance. If she was successful, the rank of admiral would be within her reach. Still, much resided on her new role here in Cambodia. She intended it to be the next jewel in her crown of achievements. She had orchestrated the installation’s construction, both the base shown to the world above and the layers of engineering labs buried and insulated deep underground.
She crossed toward a steel-roofed warehouse, rising four stories, and looming over the neighboring water. The only sign on it was the number ?? above the entrance, but it was the most important structure on the base. Two armed guards flanked the door, but neither saluted her, though it clearly strained them not to do so. They were all under orders to adhere to the role-playing while in the open.
She swiped a keycard and entered the humid warehouse. Immediately, the dank smell of seawater and diesel fuel struck her. The structure contained two floors of offices and open workspaces, all centered around a deep-water bay in the middle. It opened out onto the Gulf of Thailand, but its huge doors were currently closed. A research ship was tethered at the dock, along with a prototype submersible that floated next to it.
Daiyu’s office was on the second level. Though she had a long day ahead of her—and an important one—she aimed instead for an elevator near the warehouse entrance. She wanted to see if any progress had been made while she had been gone the past two days.
Another swipe of her card opened the elevator doors. She entered and tapped the bottommost button, glowing with the number ?, marking the fifth subbasement of the installation.
The doors slid closed, and the cage dropped thirty meters into the subterranean concrete bunker. It lay mostly under the neighboring parking lot. The cage bumped to a stop and the doors whisked open with a slight hiss of pressurized air. She entered a long gray hallway, with sealed airlocks opening into various labs.
She crossed along it, glancing into the first room. Past the windows of its airlock, she spotted the three naked bodies on steel gurneys. Their corpses were blackened as if charred by a fire, each contorted in shapes of agony. She had once visited the ruins of Pompeii and had seen the chalk-plaster casts of ash-covered victims from Mount Vesuvius’s eruption. The trio inside the morgue looked much the same.
Only these are not plaster casts.
The three crewmen had been recovered from an escape chamber jettisoned out of the missing Chinese submarine, theChangzheng 24. It had taken the PLA Navy three days to hunt down the small pod bobbing in the South Pacific. A fierce storm had challenged their efforts, driving the chamber far from where it had been dispatched. The beacon, damaged during its ascent, had also fluttered on and off, further confounding the recovery. When the pod was finally discovered, it was found to be half-submerged, flooded by a pressure crack through one side, bodies floating inside.
With a shudder, Daiyu continued past the door and entered the next airlock. She savored the cool blast of recycled air, then entered the biolab. It had been hastily outfitted ten days before, after the discovery of the strange state of the bodies. To study them, she had brought in microscopes and centrifuges, along with an ultra-low temperature freezer and a CO2incubator. She had also commissioned a next-gen sequencer and a PCR system for genetic assays. Additionally, at the request of the lead researcher, an electron microscope and an X-ray diffraction system had been installed in an upstairs lab.
After all the expense and effort, she wanted answers.
She headed to the man who was expected to have them.
Dr. Luo Heng bowed at her arrival. He was a brilliant bioengineer and physician from the University of Shanghai. At only thirty-two, he had garnered a slew of accolades for his research and was the current director of CSCB, the Chinese Society of Cell Biology.
When Heng faced her, she noted the obstinate hardness to his eyes. He had not wanted to come here. At first, he had foolishly believed he had a choice.
The man had grown up in Hong Kong. He was a child when the region was handed back over to China. Yet, he carried himself—all six feet of him—as if he remained caught between two worlds: between East and West, between civilian life and military authority. A stubborn and belligerent streak persisted in him, one she had already butted against since his arrival.
Around the lab, four others worked at various stations, looking as if they were trying to avoid her gaze. Two had been handpicked by Heng. Daiyu had selected the other pair, a lieutenant and sublieutenant, to assist the doctor and watch over his efforts.
But, ultimately, the responsibility for any progress lay with Heng.
She crossed to the bioengineer. “How is our patient?”
“Come see for yourself, Captain Tse.” Heng led her to a window that looked out into the next room. “I don’t think he’ll last the day.”
Daiyu stared at the figure propped up in a hospital bed in the sealed room beyond. A lone nurse decked in a white biohazard suit checked a morphine drip that ran into his arm, the only limb still unafflicted. Tubes passed through his lips and nose, connected to a respirator that rhythmically rose and fell.
The submariner was a petty officer second class with theChangzheng 24. He was the only survivor found in the escape pod when it had been recovered ten days before. But he had not escaped unscathed. His legs were afflicted—hardened, blackened as the corpses. It was as if his lower half had been dipped in oil. Pain and delirium had kept him from answering any questions or explaining his condition.
