221: Chapter 221 Craig's Desperate Situation: Activating the "Self-Destruct Sequence"
The smoke from Operation Broken Blade had not yet fully dissipated from the Texas desert underground, yet the alarms in the Ark City command hall rang out once more across every corner with an even more shrill frequency.
On the main screen, the area that had originally dimmed following the explosion of the Hades platform suddenly lit up again with an extremely faint yet lethally threatening signal point. That light did not come from the platform's wreckage, but from—a conical escape pod that had been urgently ejected from the core area in the final moments before the platform's explosion!
"system reporting! Detected a small object breaking away at extremely high acceleration zero point three seconds before the Hades platform exploded! Trajectory analysis... complete! Target: Earth! Estimated crash site... directly below Ark City's synchronous orbit! Impact time: three hundred and seventeen seconds from now!"
"What?!" Elder Chen stood up abruptly, his aged face filled with shock. "There are survivors from Hades?! Who is it?!"
"Signal signature match... Old Era CIA Supreme Commander encrypted identification code..." The monitor's voice began to tremble. "It's... Craig! James Craig!"
The entire hall instantly fell into a deathly silence. That name, like a ghost crawling out of a grave, resurfaced before everyone once again, bringing with it endless madness and malice. Craig, the culprit who had vanished after the first failed rebellion of the Hades platform and whom everyone thought had long since perished in that space explosion, had actually been lurking inside a secret life-support pod on the platform all along, like a hibernating venomous snake, waiting for the final moment to strike back!
And at this moment, the "timing" he chose was precisely this instant when human civilization was being crushed to its most desperate and fragile point on the starry battlefield by the Scavengers!
In the synchronous orbit, inside the rapidly falling conical escape pod.
In the cramped space, there was only the pale light of the emergency lamps. Craig sat slumped in the only fixed seat, his body bloated, his skin showing a sickly pallor from long-term low gravity and malnutrition. His eyes, however, burned with a heart-palpitating, almost non-human feverish flame, staring fixedly at a crude control panel in front of him.
The panel displayed several key data points: the escape pod's remaining energy, the descent trajectory, and... a button highlighted in red and flashing constantly—'Core Self-Destruct Protocol: Final Phase'.
"Heh... hehehehe..." Craig let out a raspy laugh, like the sound of a broken bellows pumping, which echoed through the small metallic space, filled with the madness of one near death. "Everyone thought I was dead? Everyone thought I was finished? Lin Mo... Long Zhantian... and those stupid commoners you've deceived... You're playing out a grand drama of unity under the stars, yet you forgot that a true venomous snake waits for the most lethal bite..."
He reached out a trembling hand and caressed that red button, complex emotions welling up in his eyes—there was the recollection of the Old Era's glory, a bone-deep hatred for Lin Mo and the GDA, and also a twisted, all-destroying pleasure.
The failure of the Hades platform had been within his expectations long ago. It was merely a lure, a discarded pawn to attract everyone's attention. The true killing move was himself—this man forgotten by everyone, yet who held the most core and insane parameters of the pluto project!
The escape pod was not a simple escape tool. Its base was loaded with the 'Final Insurance' originally designed for the pluto project but never activated—an extremely unstable spatial collapse bomb modified from a core fragment of the Gravitational Tide Ripper! Its principle was to release the energy of the last bit of Ripper wreckage all at once in the crudest manner, creating a brief but all-consuming miniature spatial singularity in a localized area! The yield? Incalculable! The consequences? Craig didn't care!
His target was only one—Ark City! That core fortress suspended in synchronous orbit, symbolizing human unity and GDA authority! Let this bomb collide with it, let that damned spatial singularity swallow, tear apart, and reduce Lin Mo, Elder Chen, all the navigators, and the command center, along with those hypocritical 'civilization consensuses', to nothingness!
"Since I cannot have this world... then let everyone be buried with me!" Craig roared, his bloodshot eyeballs nearly bulging out of their sockets.
His finger slowly pressed toward the red button.
Ark City command hall.
"Intercept! Intercept at all costs!" Lin Mo's command was issued almost the instant the escape pod's movements were detected. His voice remained calm, but beneath that calmness was a sense of urgency like a mountain collapsing.
"Synchronous orbit defense platform activated! Three interceptor missiles launched!" The fire control officer executed the order immediately.
On the screen, three points of light shot out from the Earth's orbital defense platform, pouncing at high speed toward the conical escape pod that was falling frantically.
However, Craig seemed to have anticipated this long ago. He pressed another button on the control panel. The escape pod's external camouflage coating instantly peeled off, revealing the eerie, distorted body of the 'spatial collapse bomb' within, emitting a dim light! At the same time, the pod began to perform irregular, frantic tumbling and evasive maneuvers, its trajectory so complex it was nearly unpredictable!
"Interceptor missiles... lost target! Evasive maneuvers have exceeded the limits of the guidance algorithm!" the fire control officer shouted in despair.
"What about the ground defense systems? Can the Thunder Department land-based batteries deployed on the North American West Coast fire?" Elder Chen asked urgently.
"The angle is insufficient! The target is at the very top of the synchronous orbit, falling directly above Ark City! The land-based system is blocked by the Earth itself!" another staff officer said, his face pale.
Three hundred and seventeen seconds... two hundred and eighty seconds... two hundred and forty seconds... the countdown ticked down ruthlessly, each beat like the approaching footsteps of the God of Death.
Even more lethally, at this critical juncture, bad news arrived again from the lunar battlefield: that most terrifying Alpha unit seemed to have 'noticed' this sudden internal chaos behind the humans. Its dark purple cannon port, originally aimed at the Guanghan Palace ecological dome, now tilted slightly, as if 'observing' and 'waiting'. Meanwhile, the other two Beta and Gamma units accelerated their slaughter of the remaining human fleet in lunar orbit even more frantically, clearly intending to take advantage of the human internal division and command chaos to completely destroy the moon's defenses!
Attacked from both within and without—this was the ultimate desperation!
On the bridge of the soaring heavens, Long Zhantian stared at the escape pod falling frantically on the screen and the increasingly tragic images of the lunar battlefield, his eyes nearly splitting with rage. His soaring heavens was nearly crippled, the main engines stalled, and shields gone, but the 'judgement' class main cannon at the bow had barely recovered the ability for one last shot after the engineers' desperate repairs!
"Aim the last bit of the main cannon's energy at that escape pod!" Long Zhantian ordered through gritted teeth.
"General! The soaring heavens is currently relying on that bit of energy to maintain its attitude and minimum life support! Once we fire, we will lose all power and become a living coffin in space!" the adjutant said in shock.
"A living coffin is better than watching Ark City be destroyed!" A look of resolve burned in Long Zhantian's eyes. "Aim! Lock on! Prepare to fire!"
However, just as the soaring heavens' cannon port was turning with difficulty, preparing for this desperate strike, another unexpected turn of events occurred—coming from that Alpha unit!
A thin, dark purple ray was fired, not at the soaring heavens, nor at the Moon Base, but with inconceivable precision across hundreds of thousands of kilometers, it accurately struck the edge of Craig's frantically falling escape pod! It didn't hit the core bomb directly but grazed the pod, instantly vaporizing a part of the escape pod's propulsion system!
It wasn't helping the humans intercept; it was... testing! Testing this sudden variable, testing the humans' reaction on the brink of internal collapse, and even... testing that unstable spatial collapse bomb that had piqued even its 'interest'!
Craig's escape pod was sent into a violent tumble by this unexpected strike, the internal alarms wailing frantically. That red button slipped past his trembling fingertips without being pressed!
"No!!!" Craig let out a desperate roar, scrambling to stabilize the pod and reach for the button again.
But his hands had already been fractured and deformed by the previous impact, and he could no longer press it accurately!
"Two hundred and ten seconds... one hundred and eighty seconds... one hundred and fifty seconds..." The countdown continued to tick ruthlessly, but the escape pod's descent trajectory had undergone a subtle shift due to the Alpha's 'grazing shot'! It was no longer falling straight toward Ark City, but would instead likely graze the edge of Ark City and fall into the Earth's atmosphere below!
Craig roared frantically, slamming his head against the control panel and waving his deformed hands wildly, trying to activate any program he could. His dead end had reached its most insane and desperate peak.
In the Ark City command hall, everyone stared fixedly at the shifting trajectory and the ticking countdown on the screen, their hearts nearly jumping out of their throats. Lin Mo's hands gripped the console tightly, his knuckles white from the strain, but his gaze was locked onto that still-struggling escape pod.
"system, recalculate the impact probability! If it falls into the atmosphere, will the spatial collapse bomb be triggered? How much damage will it cause?"
"Calculating... New trajectory: 87% probability of entering the atmosphere four hundred kilometers southeast of Ark City. After entering the dense atmosphere, due to intense friction and energy fluctuations, there is a 92% probability of triggering an unstable self-destruct, resulting in an explosion within the atmosphere. Estimated explosive yield: sufficient to destroy all targets within a fifty-kilometer radius, but will not affect Ark City."
Fifty kilometers... if that area was the ocean or an uninhabited zone...
But Lin Mo knew that below that crash site was the densely populated East Coast of the North American continent!
"Order all cities on the East Coast to immediately initiate the highest level of evacuation! All personnel into underground shelters! Fast!" he ordered hoarsely.
Countdown one hundred seconds... fifty seconds... thirty seconds...
Craig's escape pod was like a burning meteor, trailing an unstable, space-distorting wake as it plunged frantically toward the Earth's atmosphere. Inside the pod, Craig no longer had the strength to reach any buttons. He sat slumped in his seat, looking at the blue planet getting closer and closer outside the window. What welled up in his eyes was no longer madness, but a hollow, desperate blankness, finally realizing his complete failure.
"I... failed..." he murmured to himself, his voice drowned out by the violent roar of the pod's friction with the atmosphere.
In the next second, the escape pod, like a stone kicked by a giant, plunged into the dense atmosphere with unstoppable force!
The intense friction instantly ignited the surface of the pod, flames soaring! That unstable spatial collapse bomb, stimulated by the extreme temperature and pressure changes, was finally triggered!
There was no giant mushroom cloud, no soaring flames.
Only a flash of eerie spatial distortion, bright enough to instantly overload all observation equipment, suddenly erupted in the sky over a certain part of the North American East Coast near the ocean! That patch of space was like a crumpled piece of paper, violently twisting, contracting, and then snapping open!
The shockwave and energy storm completely tore apart and annihilated everything in that area—air, clouds, and a small stretch of uninhabited beach below! It left behind only a massive crater with edges as smooth as a mirror, and the subsequent sweeping of violent spatial turbulence!
James Craig, the last and most insane ghost of the Old Era, along with his final mad plan, perished in the fires of destruction he himself had ignited.
In Ark City, a violent tremor arrived—the impact of the spatial explosion's aftermath. After a brief silence, the alarms rang out again, but this time, they were reports concerning "damage assessment" and "shockwave passed."
Lin Mo stared fixedly at the image of the newly appeared, massive spatial distortion crater on the screen and the final confirmation that "Craig's signal has disappeared." There was not the slightest joy of victory on his face, only a deeper, more profound solemnity of having survived a disaster.
The most lethal and insane stab in the back had finally been barely neutralized in the most tragic manner.
But at what cost? An area on the North American East Coast had been reduced to nothingness, and countless people were displaced (though casualties were low due to the timely evacuation). More importantly, the lunar battlefield had not improved in the slightest due to Craig's demise. On the contrary, after "observing" the end of this "human implosion," that Alpha unit seemed to have reached some kind of "assessment conclusion." Its dark purple cannon port once again, without deviation, aimed steadily at the already crumbling ecological dome of the Moon Base.
And this time, there were no more distractions.
The God of Death in the starry sky had finally placed its scythe upon the alien home most cherished by human civilization.