98: Chapter 98 Alien Heart Transplantation Exposed, Fleet Civil War (First Update)

Mark Milley did not take up Callahan's point.

His gaze shifted from the lingering, unfinished tail-end of Alan Holt's words, looking straight at Alan Holt, and he waited a few seconds before speaking:

"Alan Holt, is there intelligence you haven't finished sharing?"

"What you just said is already a disaster-level situation assessment."

"If they have done more than just rough captures, if there are more heinous acts, I need to know right now."

This sentence pierced through the silence that everyone had deliberately prolonged.

Everyone on both sides of the curved long table turned their heads toward the Director of Intelligence.

Biden also looked over; this was the quietest moment he had experienced in this war room when turning his gaze toward Alan Holt.

Because he was the only one who knew that Alan Holt's briefing for today had not yet reached his desk.

Alan Holt did not dodge.

He gently pulled the unfiled classified fax from the bottom of the folder in front of him, placed it on the table, and smoothed it out.

Then he raised his head, looked at Mark Milley, and spoke in an extremely low and slow voice:

"That is correct."

"The Deep State has indeed done something more insane than beating up Aliens."

He pushed the fax half an inch forward.

"They have already begun transplanting the hearts of Aliens to obtain eternal life."

"Musk and Edward Warren found the fragmented records left behind in the emptied laboratory within the ruins of Warehouse 18 tonight."

"After piecing those fragments together, they assembled a clinical observation record of a heart transplant surgery."

"The donor was a heart removed in its entirety from a living Grey Alien."

"The recipient was an adult human male."

"During the surgery, after cold perfusion ended, the graft resumed beating on its own."

"Transplant test number: 11-γ."

"Note: 'Donor has...' the rest was torn off."

No one in the entire war room spoke.

The air itself seemed to have solidified into a thick block of glass; even the extremely faint hum of the overhead fluorescent light inverter was piercingly clear.

Everyone sitting in this room—the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Advisor, the Director of Intelligence, the Secretary of State... all of them were people who could deduce the entire chain of logic within seconds.

Someone had dug the heart out of a living Alien's chest and transplanted it into one of their own.

This wasn't about researching the propulsion systems of Alien spacecraft, not reverse-engineering their energy cores, not using Alien technology to build stealth bombers,

but rather directly connecting Alien biological organs to their own blood vessels!

This matter itself had nothing to do with words like "communication," "negotiation," or "civilizational contact."

In the moral framework of any advanced civilization capable of interstellar travel, this was an undisguised dissection of biological components.

Lawrence Graves was the first to break the silence, his voice dry:

"So, we are now facing two paths."

"Those 200,000 Space Fleet ships either belong to the Deep State, meaning they are fighting among themselves, a civil war."

"Or they belong to the Alien home planet."

"If it is the latter..."

He stopped.

Mark Milley picked up the second half of the sentence he hadn't finished, his tone lower and colder than Graves', yet set off by the silence so that the entire room could hear it:

"If it is the latter... then the fate awaiting all of humanity on Earth is nothing but destruction."

"You take someone else's heart and use it as a spare part; they are neither going to sit down and invite you to breakfast, nor will they accept any form of apology."

"The Grey Alien home planet traveled tens of thousands of light-years and brought a full 200,000-strong Space Fleet to our doorstep; this certainly isn't to deliver a diplomatic note."

"It's to fuck us up!"

After he finished this sentence, no one in the war room responded.

The Space Fleet on the screen was still exchanging fire, pulse light spears slamming into shields, the entire canopy of the sky repeatedly illuminated by waves of searing white fire.

Harris's right hand had already pinched the coaster next to the untouched cup of ice water on the table into tiny creases.

Callahan took off his glasses and wiped the lenses repeatedly with his cuff, but still hadn't put them back on after a long time.

Evelyn Strauss leaned back in her chair, arms crossed, lips pressed tight, her gaze fixed on the small gap between the fleets on the screen where artillery fire was still exploding.

Alan Holt pressed his last fax back to the bottom of the folder, his fingers resting on the paper without moving.

Monroe slowly placed his hand on the stack of unread diplomatic memos in front of him, took a look at the screen, and then glanced at the President.

Everyone at the long table, after the slight creaking of leather chairs had completely ceased, eventually looked simultaneously toward the center of the curved long table.

Joseph Biden sat there, hands crossed on the table, fingers interlaced, his gray-blue eyes unblinking in the reflection of the screen.

The old man, who just moments ago needed an assistant to wipe the drool from the corner of his mouth, now resembled a sharp dagger just drawn from a long-sealed old leather sheath, the blade covered in silent, cold light.

...

Outside the ruins of Warehouse 18, half a mile south of the old Colorado River channel.

In the canopy of the sky overhead, the 200,000 silver-gray Space Fleet vessels were still slaughtering each other with a fire density that humans could not comprehend.

The plasma fireballs from pulse beams exploding against shields illuminated the entire wasteland, flickering on and off.

Burning carrier wreckage dragged black smoke as it fell from the clouds, smashing into the heart of the desert and exploding into wave after wave of dark red fire.

On the ground,

a few minutes ago, both sides who were still slaughtering each other in the ruins using infrasound, Behemoth Factor, and liquid zero, had now made the same choice:

Run!

Diana Hopkins was supported by two Giant warriors who could still barely stand, one on each side, stumbling across rubble and craters as they retreated toward the exit of the old spillway on the south side.

Sterling Remington and Augustus Knox followed behind her, with fewer than thirty private armed men left who could still move.

On the other side,

Musk and Edward led the dead soldiers of the Warren Family, along with retired special forces led by Brick, and FBI agents and CIA tactical teams providing mutual cover, were also desperately retreating along another route in the same direction.

The two sides were no more than a few hundred yards apart, and they could both see the swaying silhouettes of the other party's groups under the flickering sky light.

No one fired again.

Because the total war between the Longevity Faction and the Tech Faction had already broken out in full force in the sky repeatedly torn apart by plasma light clusters,

and these underlings running errands for their respective factions, the only thing they could do, and the only thing they should do, was to save their own lives before the big shots on both sides decided the winner.

Then, everyone stopped in their tracks simultaneously.

It wasn't that they couldn't run anymore; it was that the sky overhead suddenly underwent a change that made everyone fleeing instinctively slam on the brakes.

Directly above the 200,000 silver-gray fleets that were slaughtering each other,

at the zenith, nearly several miles higher than the bows of the motherships,

space itself suddenly cracked open like a mirror smashed by a giant rock, forming a huge, irregular rift.

The edge of the rift was not a metal frame, nor was it the soft transition common when clouds churned,

but a space wound, torn open by violence, with dark purple ionizing ripples still spreading outward.

And then, flying saucers poured out of that rift.

One, two, three...

Ten, fifty, one hundred...

One thousand, two thousand!