Li Yao's hands turned into glamorous rainbows on the light beam. Deep in thought, he asked, "So to speak, your father's prestige on Firefly is quite high, isn't it? Let me ask you. If the incident today hadn't happened, which one is stronger, your father's strength or Speaker Cui Lingfeng's? "
Tang Xiaoxing thought for a moment and replied solemnly, "My father's prestige is indeed very high. After all, all the technical problems that happened during the long journey to space had to be resolved by the technicians and the bottom-level sailors. The mouths of the bureaucrats in parliament alone are not enough to block the leaking shells or repair the overloaded power units.
"Therefore, on Firefly, those who support my father must be much more than those who support Speaker Cui Lingfeng. In fact, most people hate our overly bloated parliament. It is also the reason why my father was bold enough to call for a vote to join the Federation.
"However, despite my father's prestige, he never intended to raise a force that was blindly loyal to him. Most of the people support him only because he is the captain of Firefly. What I'm worried about right now is whether or not Cui Lingfeng and his gang will intentionally frame my father with certain crimes. Even I have been accused of 'treason'. My father's crimes must be even more serious! "
"Got it."
Li Yao concluded. "Your father's prestige on Firefly is very high. It is impossible for your Speaker Cui Lingfeng to execute your father in secret directly. In order to completely crush your father's supporters, the only way is to fabricate crimes so that your father's reputation will be ruined and all the people will believe that the captain is guilty!
"Only in such a way will the Speaker's supporters be able to control Firefly tightly again, right?"
Biting her lips softly, Tang Xiaoxing nodded. "Yes."
Li Yao rolled his eyes again and again. "Then, can you basically guess what kind of crime your father is going to be accused of? After all, he is the captain of a starship and the No. 2 person who is on par with the Speaker. Petty crimes cannot bring him down. Instead, they will only infuriate the bottom-level people and make them even more disgusted with parliament. In the end, it will be counterproductive.
"Therefore, the crimes that your father will be accused of must be very serious, and they must have fabricated irrefutable evidence. What will it be? Treason? Reaching out to the Xing Yao Federation in secret and trying to join the Federation is treason, isn't it? "
Tang Xiaoxing shook her head hard. "Reaching out to the Federation is certainly not treason. We and the Xing Yao Federation are both civilizations of Cultivators. We share the same ideology and similar systems. Also, after a thousand years of arduous journey, everybody is clear about the current situation on Firefly. Other than the parliament at the top, who still cling to the't's's's, the bottom-level people are in fact,'s,'s. The Federation's's, the Federation, the bottom-level people have long been fed fed the Federation.
There is absolutely no hope for them! "We have escaped to the edge of the civilization of mankind in the Star Ocean Imperium ten thousand years ago. If we continue to flee from here, we will truly end up in an unknown, dark universe that has never been explored by human beings. We will truly become a rootless, wandering civilization!
"Enough. A thousand years of fleeing is enough. Nobody wants to flee anymore. Now that marching back to our old home has become an unreachable dream, we want to find a new home at the edge of the cosmos, too!
"Therefore, many people on Firefly, especially the bottom-level sailors and their families who live in the harsh environment, do not object to, and are even eager to join the Federation!
"We are told that Iron Plateau, Forest Ocean, and Boneyard, which is sandwiched between the Heaven's Origin Sector and the Blood Demon Sector, are all stable planets that are vast but sparsely populated. We only have a population of slightly more than a hundred million. It is totally possible for us to rebuild our home there and build a new Federation together!
"This is the voice of countless people. My father is merely a representative of such voices. The issue of joining the Federation has been discussed and promoted openly from the beginning to the end. Even the 'Election Observation Delegation' was sent out with the authorization of parliament. Everything is legal. How can it be treason?"
Li Yao pondered for a moment and said, "Therefore, the enemy must've grasped certain evidence of critical importance that could've nailed your father to death without raising a large-scale backlash from the bottom-level people. That is why the secret arrest was carried out so quickly today … My next question is, what about you? What's so special about you?"
Tang Xiaoxing was slightly dazed. "… Me?"
Li Yao finally moved his eyes away from the light beam and glanced at her. "Although you are the daughter of the captain of Firefly, based on your description just now, I don't think that the identity of the 'captain's daughter' alone is enough for the enemy to attach so much importance to you and send such an elite squad of secret police to arrest you in secret. After all, you are just a refiner. By common sense, the odds of you escaping are not high.
"The problem could've been solved by a few people, but they had to mobilize so many people. Therefore, I believe that your value must be more than just the title of 'captain's daughter', right?"
Tang Xiaoxing was hesitating.
Li Yao continued looking at the light beam and said casually, "I'm asking this not because I'm interested in your secrets but because I'm evaluating your value in the enemy's heart, including whether or not they are determined to keep you alive and whether or not they will hesitate in the crossfire. The issue is very important for our operation later. Just like I said, if you don't trust me, you can get off at any time. For example, at the intersection of a street up ahead."
Tang Xiaoxing stared at Li Yao thoughtfully and gnashed her teeth. "Senior Lin, your eyes are truly keen. Your guess is correct. My father is a tough man who would never betray the interests of all his compatriots for the safety of his daughter. I'm afraid that they are capturing me not because they want to threaten my father with me but because of the 'jump key' in my hands."
"Jump key?"
Li Yao blinked. "What's that?"
"It's the activation pattern of the space jump matrix on Firefly," Tang Xiaoxing explained.
Tang Xiaoxing explained, "Firefly boasts the most advanced space jump unit array in the entire universe. Its greatest feature is that it can significantly shorten the distance between two starships when they perform a space jump at the same time. It can even be reduced to an astonishing range of hundreds of meters without any interference. Can you understand what I mean, Senior Lin?"
Li Yao nodded.
The so-called space jump was the process of 'jumping' from the three-dimensional world to the four-dimensional world and then 'restoring' from the four-dimensional world to the three-dimensional world.
During the process, the objects that were jumping or teleporting were bound to raise ripples of space-time debris at both the jump point and the destination point. It was exactly what it meant to 'break the void'!
Such space waves would undoubtedly cause intense interference to the objects nearby.
Assuming that two starships performed a space jump at the same time when they were very close to each other, say, within one to two kilometers, which was a negligible distance on the cosmic level, and they jumped to the same destination, it was very likely that they would collide or even meld. There would be dire consequences if one of them were mixed in the other!
Therefore, in the boundless sea of stars, not many space zones were suitable for the construction of 'space gates' and the implementation of large-scale space jumps. Also, even if a suitable space zone was found, the warships often had to be a hundred kilometers away from each other in order to ensure that they would not interfere with each other before they performed a space jump.
The larger a warship was, the longer the distance it had to cover, and the more destructive ripples it raised during the 'breaking the void' would be, and the greater the space around it would have to be left.
In many cases, if an enormous space fleet was to be mobilized for an expedition to another Sector billions of lightyears away, it was impossible to teleport all the main-force warships of an enormous scale over at the same time. Doing so would only result in the fleet becoming a pile of iron lumps that were overlapping and exploding nonstop at the destination.
Therefore, it often took three to five days or even a week to complete the space jump and deployment of the entire fleet.
When the expedition army performed a space jump, it was also the moment when it was most vulnerable. The starships that had already jumped to the destination were often far away from each other, without the concept of battle lines and formations. The following starships were still stuck at the departure point billions of lightyears away. It was impossible for them to be teleported to the destination instantly. Even if they were, the crew members who were suffering from the sequelae of the 'breaking the void' and the starships that were bound by space ripples would not be able to carry out one tenth of their combat ability.
They were as vulnerable as an army that was crossing a rushing river in ancient times. It was not a joke to attack when they were halfway through the river.
But Tang Xiaoxing claimed that the space jump matrix on Firefly could shorten the distance between the starships to only several hundred meters?
As a result, the demand on the stability of the space zone at the destination of the space jump on Firefly would be greatly reduced. Also, the flexibility, invisibility, and mobility of the starships would be greatly improved. Should anything go wrong, the hundreds of starships that were connected to each other would be able to escape instantly!
The value of such technology in a space war was immeasurable!
Li Yao blinked quickly. "Don't the Imperium and the Holy League have the same technology?"
"I don't think so," Tang Xiaoxing replied. "The antecedent of Firefly was an experimental starship that was still under construction. It was said that a lot of magical equipment from the Star Ocean Imperium and even the relic technologies from the primeval age were installed on it. Many of them were unique. After we seized the experimental starship, it was exactly with the marvelous space jump matrix that we managed to hide here and there for a thousand years under the siege of the army of the Imperium of True Human Beings. If they had the same space jump technology, I'm afraid that we would've been caught a long time ago!
"However, after a thousand years of escape, our space jump matrix was already overwhelmed and in need of comprehensive maintenance and major repairs. I happen to be one of the refiners responsible for the maintenance of the space jump matrix."
Today, I was chatting with a book friend and came up with an interesting question.
He said that many young people in the book, such as Tang Xiaoxing, who looked so young, were actually very awesome refiners, managers of important projects, or university professors. Was it not too unreal? Was her qualification, experience, and expertise enough? Did he write that on purpose for the thrill?
After all, it did not seem very appropriate to arrange a white-haired granny to go on an adventure with Monster Li.
As it happened, Old Cow read the news today. According to the news, the average age of the entire research team of Long March V, which had just been successfully launched, was thirty-three years old, and three of them were born in the nineties.
I think it should be enough to explain the problem, right?
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