The static resolves. Three seconds that take three years.
Then his voice, thready and winded and carrying the unmistakable quality of a man who just moved very fast in a very small space.
"Clear. I'm clear. Core's holding."
My knees want to fold. I lock them.
Sit back down. Place my hands on the keyboard and run the diagnostic that will tell me whether the weapon is actually dead or just dormant.
The diagnostic returns clean. Marsh's weapon is offline. The control node is destroyed. The adaptive protocols are decompiled.
The kill switch fired and the primary core absorbed the surge and the backup system is intact and the framing evidence is being systematically dismantled by Sarah's forensic analysis on the adjacent console.
"Systems coming online," Sarah reports. Her voice has the careful neutrality of a professional delivering results, but her hands are shaking against the laptop keyboard, and that tells me more about the last three minutes than her tone does.
"Primary core is stable. Environmental controls restoring. Comm channels reinitializing."
The emergency lighting flickers. White light replaces red. The color shift is so sudden, so complete, that my eyes waterfrom the change, and for a moment the workspace looks unfamiliar in full illumination, as if the hours of red light rebuilt it into a different room.
Then the hum returns.
Low first. A vibration more felt than heard, rising through the stone floor into the soles of my boots, climbing through my bones.
The servers spooling up, one rack and then the next, each one adding its frequency to the chord.
The ventilation system engages and the first push of fresh air moves through the room like a breath the mountain has been holding. Cold, metallic, carrying the mineral taste of rock and filtration.
The communication relays reinitialize and the blue status lights on Sarah's console bloom left to right, each one a node in the network coming alive.
Then the overhead lighting stabilizes, the blue-white operational glow replacing the red, and the workspace transforms around me from a wound back into a room.
The hum builds. Fills the corridors. Fills the walls. Fills the spaces between heartbeats until it reaches the frequency I've been listening for since I arrived at Echo Base, the steady bass note that means Tommy's systems are running.
When it finally settles into that register, my throat closes and my eyes burn and my fingers begin tapping again.
Ragged. Irregular. The kinetic expression of something I cannot and will not process into language because the hum is back and the lights are on and Tommy's voice came through the comm saying he's clear and alive and the weapon is dead.
"Dar." Kane's voice on the restored comm system. Clear. Full bandwidth. "Status."
"Weapon neutralized." My voice holds. Barely. "Primary core absorbed the retaliatory surge. Backup system intact. Alloffensive components of the Committee's weapon have been decompiled. The threat to Echo Base is eliminated."
A pause. The kind of pause that, from Kane, carries more weight than most people's speeches.
"Good work," he says. "Both of you."
The comm clicks off. Sarah is already running system restoration protocols, her fingers moving with the mechanical precision of someone channeling residual adrenaline into productive function.
Dylan shifts in the doorway. Looks at me. Nods once.
I stand. My legs hold, which is more than I expected from them.
The corridor to the primary server room is lit white now, normal operational lighting restored, and the walls are just stone again. Familiar. Solid.
My body registers the absence of combat in stages: the ache in my wrists, the burn behind my eyes, the tremor in my forearms from hours of sustained typing.
Each step away from the console peels back another layer of operational focus, and what's underneath is raw and unsteady and moving toward the server room with a purpose that has nothing to do with systems.
The server room door is open. Inside, the primary core is running, status lights cycling through their normal green patterns. The hum is strongest here, resonant, filling the space with the bass frequency of systems doing what they were built to do.
