Adrenaline fueled her thinking, accelerating her thinking several times over. Jiang Ling made what would normally seem like a difficult decision in a split second. She began scrambling along the surface of the spacecraft, moving only one safety line attachment point with each step. While the operation was cumbersome, her thinking was crystal clear—her target was the culprit that had caused all the emergency.
The space mine was less than 20 meters away from her, but in her current state, this distance was not much different from running a marathon. It took Jiang Ling an hour to barely move half the distance, and at some moments, she felt like she was performing acrobatics on the back of a mad wild horse.
Perhaps it was the blessing of the ancestors, or perhaps it was the will of heaven, but the keel structure of the spacecraft persisted until Jiang Ling reached the position of the "Sky Thunder" without falling apart midway. However, she could already clearly feel the teeth-grinding sound of metal fatigue coming from inside the spacecraft.
Time was almost up, and she practically flew in front of the "mine" and started cutting it with the laser cutter that had been placed in her exoskeleton. Out of professional habit, she did not directly make a hole, but instead created an arm-long arc-shaped gap on the surface of the "mine" and opened it with pliers, a bit like a surgeon performing surgery on a patient - this can minimize the increase of space debris in orbit.
She had previously observed the technique of dismantling this type of bomb in virtual space, so she perfectly avoided the trigger of the bomb's self-destruct device during the cutting process.
Lighting up the helmet's illumination module, the interior of the bomb truly revealed itself to her for the first time. It was essentially a cylinder encased in a spherical mesh of silver wire. Wires extended from the trigger on the bomb's surface, passing through the spherical mesh and connecting to the yellow-brown material on the cylinder's surface. The mesh was said to be an electromagnetic pulse amplifier, primarily made of a silver-zinc alloy. If recovered in its entirety, it would be worth perhaps two or three points. The truly valuable element was its power core—a plutonium fuel cell. In other words, it was an atomic bomb.
Jiang Ling carefully used metal shears to create an opening in the sphere, minimizing the risk of creating dangerous metal debris. She then used the laser cutter again to peel away the cylinder's wrapping and remove the nuclear fuel tank, still emitting neutron radiation. She deftly removed the pressure-resistant storage tank from her waist and dropped the dangerous object into it, then temporarily placed it on the back clamp of the exoskeleton.
Due to the urgency of the situation, she didn't follow the instructions in the instructional video, but resorted to illegal brute force dismantling from the outset. In fact, if she hadn't used her psychic powers to control the trigger of the bomb's self-destruct mechanism, the bomb would have turned into a giant fireball the moment the scissors touched the mesh sphere.
With the removal of the energy core, the "mine" finally calmed down. The helmet display flashed, and the other systems of the exoskeleton gradually restarted. The Songbird-class intelligent flight control system triggered the automatic stabilization mechanism at the moment of recovery. The spin speed of the spacecraft slowed down rapidly, and the four straight safety ropes on Jiang Ling's body gradually loosened.
Soon, the communication from the "Home" was connected. While reporting the flight data of Jiang Ling that she observed, the artificial intelligence Lin Shuang remotely took over the No. 2 machine which was drifting farther and farther away.
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