The server hum drops by an octave. Then drops again. The sound thins, frays, and the lower frequencies bleed away first, then the mid-range, then the high, until what remains is a whisper and then a vibration and then nothing.
Echo Base goes dark.
The silence is physical. It has texture and weight, the absence of sound in a place that has never been silent since Tommy first powered on the servers, and the mountain fills the void with its own presence. Cold stone. Dead air. The faint, geological groan of rock settling under its own weight, a sound the hum always covered and now has nothing to hide behind.
In the silence where the hum used to be, I hear Tommy breathing. Fast. Controlled. The breathing of a man who just watched his life's work go quiet.
My fingers reach across the dark space between our stations. Find his shoulder. Grip.
"We're not done," I say into the black.
His hand covers mine. Squeezes back.
"No," he agrees. "We're not."
19
TOMMY
Echo Base goes dark, and the silence where the server hum used to be is the loudest sound I have ever heard.
The hum has been the baseline frequency of my existence for years, a constant so deeply embedded in my auditory processing that I stopped hearing it the way you stop hearing your own heartbeat.
Sleeping. Working. Briefings, meals, late-night gym sessions. A low-frequency confirmation that the thing I built was alive and running and keeping the people I love safe.
Its absence is a void with teeth.
Emergency lighting kicks in four seconds after the primary systems fail. Red. Dim. The kind of light designed for evacuation, not operation, casting the workspace in a color that turns every surface into a wound.
My screens are dead. Dar's screens are dead. The diagnostic panels, the communication relays, the security feeds that let me watch every corridor and every entrance and every approach to the mountain that holds my life inside it.
All dark.
My hands are flat on a keyboard connected to nothing, and the uselessness of the position, the utter futility of a man sittingin front of dead screens in a dead room, hits me with a weight I haven't felt since the first time I watched a teammate die through a helmet feed and couldn't do anything except keep the comms channel open.
"Tommy." Dar's voice from beside me. Steady. Flat. The clinical register she defaults to under pressure, and right now I'm grateful for it because her steadiness is the only signal I can calibrate against. "Emergency backup server. South corridor. Independent power supply, isolated from primary grid."
I know the backup exists. I built it. A standalone system designed for exactly this scenario, air-gapped from the main network, running on an independent generator with enough fuel to keep it operational for days.
It's limited. No external communications. No security feeds. Basic processing capability. Enough to run diagnostics and not much else.
But it's something. And something is more than nothing, and nothing is what I'm looking at on every screen in this room.
"South corridor," I repeat. My voice sounds wrong. Thinner. Stripped of the resonance that comes from the confidence of sitting in the center of a functional system.
I try for a joke. The instinct is so automatic that the words are forming before the rest of me catches up. Something about backup plans and first dates. The joke reaches my mouth and dies there, unfunny and insufficient, and the failure of my own coping mechanism to engage is more frightening than the dark.
"Let's move."
We navigate the corridors by emergency lighting. Red-lit stone walls that I've walked a thousand times feel alien now, the familiar geometry distorted by color and silence and the absence of the environmental systems that usually regulate temperature and airflow.
The air is already getting stale. Without ventilation, the mountain's rock will start absorbing the available oxygen. The knowledge of it sits behind my ribs alongside everything else I'm carrying.
Dar walks beside me. Her hand brushes mine in the dark, a contact so brief it could be accidental if either of us believed in accidents.
Her fingers are cold. Her breathing is even. In the red emergency light, her face is all angles and shadow and focused determination, and I want to stop walking and hold her and tell her that whatever happens in the next few hours, the last few days have been the closest thing to being fully alive I've ever experienced. I don't stop. I don't tell her.
She's functioning at a level that I'm trying to match and falling short of, because her systems are internal and mine just went offline.
