The "Lightning" Escape Pod

The "Lightning" escape pod.

It was pitch-black all over, with a titanium-alloy frame and a heat-resistant ceramic coating, and could carry one person safely from low orbit to the surface. There should originally have been a fairing atop the truncated pyramid, but it had been jettisoned during the descent.

Although this test had not taken place at the outrageous altitude of a thousand kilometers, a hundred kilometers was probably still beyond the limits of human skydiving.

This escape pod had originally been installed on the Auspicious.

During its return flight, at an altitude of roughly a hundred kilometers over the western part of Hua Nation, the Auspicious had tested its escape system, separating the "Lightning" escape pod from the aircraft and dropping it toward the center of the Junggar Basin.

This was also the final test in the Auspicious's twenty-four-hour maiden flight.

In terms of technical sophistication, the thing was not actually anything particularly advanced. At most, it was a miniature version of a crewed spacecraft's return capsule. Besides room for one adult, it contained some basic survival tools, along with emergency food, fresh water, and medicine sufficient to sustain one person for ten days.

Apart from its rather distinctive shape, the thing really was not worth two hundred million dollars. At most, some of the data it collected was important, but even that was not worth so much money, especially since it was single-use...

That was why Lu Zhou had been so astonished to hear that someone on the black market had offered the astronomical sum of two hundred million dollars for it.

Holy shit, someone would actually pay a fortune for this junk.

Staring blankly at the hunk of metal, Wang Peng took quite a while to offer even the slightest response to Lu Zhou's remark.

"...Wear it?"