"I know. We'll still talk after."
The call ends. The three node locations are on my phone by the time I reach the staging area.
Dawn breaks gray over Tidewater, and the exercise launches with the crisp efficiency of an operation that's been war-gamed and briefed and rehearsed down to the personnel rotations. SEAL and MARSOC teams deploy across the installation for the integrated readiness assessment. Holden's people take the waterfront sectors. Thatcher's MARSOC Raiders cover the interior training areas and the coastal perimeter. My EOD team is staged at the bay with the response truck loaded and the analog fallback procedures we drilled locked in. If comms go dark, we switch to hand signals, runners, and the prearranged rally points that Rowe has taped inside every locker in the shop.
Nox is in the comm building. I'm at the EOD bay. We're connected by a dedicated radio channel that Hartwell authorized for the operation, and her voice in my earpiece is professional, clipped, and stripped of everything personal. She feeds menetwork status updates between counterstrike calibrations, and I feed her sweep reports from the node locations she flagged.
The hardware devices are small, concealed inside junction housings along the infrastructure corridors, and my team locates the first two within the hour. They're relay modules, similar in design to the one we found during the initial sweep, wired into the network at junction points where the malware's activation signal passes through. I photograph them, document the wiring configurations, and wait for Nox's instructions on whether to pull or modify.
"Don't disconnect," she tells me through the earpiece. "If you sever the handshake before the counterstrike is calibrated to bypass it, the malware registers the missing signal and reroutes. I need you to modify the output so the device sends a clean handshake that my interception protocol can mirror."
"Walk me through it."
She does. Her voice is in my ear, steady and precise, telling me which wires to bridge and which contacts to modify, and my hands do the work while her words guide them. It's the same dynamic as the initial sweep, the one where I called herma'amfrom inside a junction panel and she told me to stop. It is the same and completely different, because the last time we did this, we were trading barbs across a radio channel and pretending the chemistry was friction. This time the channel is quiet between instructions, and the silence carries the full weight of everything we said yesterday and everything we didn't.
Both nodes are modified before the exercise has been running an hour. The third one is near the power distribution center, deeper in the infrastructure than the others, and I'm heading toward it with Rowe when the base goes sideways.
The comms stutter first, a burst of static across all channels, then a dropout that lasts two seconds, then a partial recovery that sounds like someone is feeding the signal through ashredder. The lights in the corridor flicker. The security panel beside the junction door flashes red, then amber, then goes dark.
"Nox." I key the radio. "Status."
Her voice comes through broken, cutting in and out through the degraded signal. "The malware is activating. The exercise pushed comms to operational load and the trigger fired. I'm deploying the counterstrike now, but it's cascading faster than the models predicted." Static swallows half of her next sentence. "...need the third node modified before the activation signal reaches it or the cascade completes through the gap."
The base alert system wails once, then cuts to silence. In the distance, toward the eastern perimeter, a concussive thump rolls through the concrete like someone dropped a bass note through the floor.
"That's a detonation," Rowe says behind me, his voice flat and calm and already running the next calculation.
"Diversionary." I'm already moving toward the power distribution center. "Garrick's pulling attention to the perimeter. Call Sullivan at the secondary truck, get his team to the blast site for render-safe. You and I are heading for the third node."
Rowe relays the order on the backup frequency we drilled, the analog fallback that exists because I spent a morning in the EOD bay teaching my team to operate in silence. Sullivan copies and redirects. The system works. That's why I built it this way.
The power distribution center sits behind a reinforced door at the base of the infrastructure corridor. The building houses the primary electrical feeds for the eastern half of Tidewater, including the backup generators that keep the comm building operational when the main grid fails. If the generators go down, Nox loses power, and if Nox loses power, the counterstrike dies mid-deployment and the malware completes its cascade unchallenged.
I see the device before I reach the door.
It's mounted on the exterior wall of the generator housing, bolted to the concrete at waist height where the main power conduit enters the building. It is larger than the B&B device, larger than the training cage device. This is a shaped charge, directional, aimed at the conduit junction where severing the feed would kill power to the backup generators and the primary distribution simultaneously. The detonator housing carries the same clean solder work and Eglin-curriculum wire routing I've seen on every device Garrick has built, but the construction is heavier, more deliberate. This one isn't a warning or a test. This one is designed to destroy.
A timer is visible through the housing's inspection port, red digits counting down.
"Rowe. Cordon at fifty meters. Nobody in or out."
"Copy."
I key the radio. The signal is garbage, cutting in and out, but I need her to hear me. "Nox. I'm at the power distribution center. There's a device on the generator housing. Shaped charge, timer-initiated. If it fires, you lose backup power and the primary feed."
Her voice comes through in fragments. "...how long on the timer?"
"Enough to work. Not enough to waste."
"The third node is inside the distribution center. Behind the generator panel. Modify the node first. The counterstrike is already deploying, and if it hits the third handshake before you've modified the relay, the whole interception sequence stalls."
Both targets sit in one location. Garrick put the hardware node and the demolition charge in the same building because he knew that anyone smart enough to find the node would also find the charge, and anyone who found the charge would evacuate the building before modifying the node. It's a tactical dilemmadesigned to make me choose: save the generators or complete the counterstrike. He built it expecting that no one would try to do both.
He doesn't know me.
"I'm going inside. Keep talking."
I pull the distribution center door and move past the device to the generator panel. The third relay module is behind the access cover, wired into the network the same way the other two were. My hands find the contacts while the red digits count on the other side of the wall, and Nox's voice comes through the degraded channel in fragments that I piece together the way I piece together partial circuits, by feel and by the pattern of what's missing.
