Chapter 184. The Blackout Break

The command centre of The Vault was a tomb of humming silicon and captured arrogance. Friedrich Haas sat rigid in his ergonomic chair, his manicured hands bound, his face a marble mask of cold fury. The glow from the surviving monitors painted the room in a sickly, pulsating light. On the screens, the digital apocalypse they had engineered continued its silent, global spread.

Maya worked at the primary console, her brow furrowed in concentration. “The worm is a closed-loop daemon,” she reported, her voice tense. “It’s not taking external commands anymore. It’s on a pre-set timer, systematically corrupting backup arrays and overwriting recovery points. It’s a scorched-earth protocol. Even if we shut this hub down, the worm continues. It’s designed to make the blackout permanent.”

Haas allowed himself a thin, contemptuous smile. “You can have your little victory in this room. The victory is already written in the code. Rogers Industries is a ghost. A memory. You are holding a corpse.”

Anton ignored him, his eyes fixed on the screens showing the real-time collapse of his life’s work. The finality in Haas’s voice was a cold knife. A permanent blackout. Not just a temporary crash, but a digital burial.

Sabatine, however, wasn’t looking at the doom-scroll of data. He was studying the architecture of the attack itself, displayed on a secondary schematic Maya had pulled up. His gaze was not one of despair, but of intense, surgical focus. He leaned over Maya’s shoulder, his finger tracing a line of connection on the map.

“It’s a cascade, but it’s not a flood,” he murmured, more to himself than anyone. “Look at the node progression. London, then New York, then Singapore, then Frankfurt. It’s sequential. Prioritized by liquidity value and system dependency.”

“So?” Anton asked, stepping closer, hoping for a fragile flutter in his chest.

“So it’s not a simultaneous detonation. It’s a chain. And every chain has a weakest link. Not in the target, but in the propagation.” Sabatine pointed to a specific junction on the schematic, a secondary trading platform in Zurich—the very auxiliary hub they had just left. “The worm had to hit here to get the encryption keys to unlock Frankfurt. But the Zurich hub is isolated. It has a unique, legacy authentication protocol for its watchdog system—the one we just exploited. The worm had to mimic that protocol to pass through. It left a… a signature in the handshake. A digital accent.”

Maya’s eyes widened. “A non-replicable marker. Because the protocol is so old and idiosyncratic, the worm’s mimicry is imperfect. It’s a flaw in its camouflage.”

“Exactly,” Sabatine said, a hunter’s gleam in his eye. “The worm is perfect for modern systems. But it stumbles over antique code. That stumble is a backdoor. Not into our systems, but into its own command structure.”

Haas’s smirk vanished. A flicker of something—doubt, alarm—crossed his face.

“What are you saying?” Anton pressed, his mind racing to catch up with Sabatine’s.

“I’m saying the worm isn’t a monolithic entity. It’s a colony. And the colony communicates. It uses the same corrupted channels it creates to send ‘all clear’ and ‘propagate’ signals between nodes.” Sabatine turned to Maya. “Can you isolate the signal it used to authenticate with the Zurich legacy system? The raw packet?”

Maya’s fingers danced. “Yes… it’s here. A corrupted checksum in the header.”

“Good. Now, we have the core server.” Sabatine gestured to the humming machine at the room’s heart. “We can broadcast. What if we use this server, with Haas’s stolen credentials, to send a new command? Not to our systems, but to the worm itself. A command wrapped in the exact flawed signature of the Zurich handshake. A command from what it thinks is another part of its own colony.”

Anton understood instantly. “A kill command. You make it think the scorched-earth order has already been completed. To stand down.”

“Or better,” Sabatine said, a ruthless edge to his voice. “A recall command. Order it to retreat. To withdraw from all systems and return to its point of origin for ‘verification.’ It would have to undo its own corruption as it goes, to avoid leaving a trace. It would literally erase itself.”

It was breathtakingly audacious. To fight a digital plague not with an antibiotic, but with a forged suicide note written in the plague’s own unique dialect.

“It might work,” Maya breathed, awe in her voice. “But the signature has to be perfect. A single byte out of place, and the worm will treat it as noise, or worse, as a hostile attack and accelerate the corruption.”

“Then it has to be perfect,” Sabatine said, his tone leaving no room for error. He looked at Anton. “You know the legacy Zurich protocols better than anyone. You designed the failsafes when you took over. You write the recall command. I’ll craft the signature wrapper.”

It was the moment their two skill sets fused into a single, precision tool. Anton’s intimate, architectural knowledge of the very systems under attack. Sabatine’s ruthless, analytical skill at deception and forensic mimicry.

Anton didn’t hesitate. He pulled a keyboard towards him, his mind accessing decades-old blueprints, lines of forgotten code he’d once scrutinized as a young CEO determined to know every bolt in his empire. He began to type, constructing a simple, elegant command sequence: //ROOT_OVERRIDE: CASCADE_ABORT. INITIATE_COLLAPSE_RETURN. VERIFICATION_REQUIRED AT SOURCE NODE ALPHA.

Meanwhile, Sabatine worked with Maya, dissecting the captured worm packet. He wasn’t just copying the flaw; he was understanding it—why the mimicry failed, the specific algorithmic gap the worm’s programmers had overlooked. He began building a new packet header, a digital forgery of sublime exactitude.

Haas watched them, his arrogance replaced by dawning horror. “You can’t… the self-corruption routines are not designed for reversal. You’ll cause a cascade failure within the worm itself! It could cause unpredictable damage!”

Sabatine didn’t even look up. “Good.”

Their teamwork was silent, intense, a duet of furious concentration. Anton finished his command string and passed it to Sabatine, who encapsulated it within the forged signature packet. On a secondary screen, Maya monitored the worm’s global status. The red zones of corruption were still spreading, but more slowly now, reaching the less critical, more isolated systems.

“Ready,” Sabatine said, his finger hovering over the enter key on the master console. He looked at Anton. “This will either save what’s left, or trigger a final, catastrophic data hemorrhage. Your call.”

Anton met his gaze. He saw no doubt there, only a crystal-clear assessment of the risk and the unwavering readiness to execute. He trusted that assessment more than he trusted his own. He trusted him.

“Do it,” Anton said.

Sabatine pressed the key.

For a moment, nothing happened. The screens continued their grim parade of failure.

Then, on the global map, a single, tiny green dot appeared. In Zurich. The auxiliary hub. The worm’s flawed handshake node.

The dot pulsed. Then, like a wave reversing, a ripple of green spread outwards from it, flowing back along the exact path of the red corruption. Frankfurt. The red blinking light stuttered, turned amber, then green. Singapore. New York. London. One by one, like lights being restored after a storm, the critical nodes flickered from red to green.

On the data logs, a new line of text scrolled, rapid and triumphant: //CASCADE_ABORT RECEIVED. COLLAPSE_RETURN INITIATED. CORRUPTION REVERSION IN PROGRESS.

The worm was eating itself. Un-making its own disaster.

A choked sound came from Haas. It was the sound of a man watching a masterpiece of malice being disassembled before his eyes, not with a sledgehammer, but with a scalpel wielded by the very people he’d tried to erase.

Maya let out a whoop of pure, professional joy. Leon allowed himself a grim, satisfied nod.

Anton stared at the screens, the reversal unfolding in real-time, a miracle wrought from lines of code and flawless teamwork. The immense, suffocating weight of the blackout began to lift. It wasn’t over—the financial damage would be immense, the recovery long—but the bleeding had stopped. The heart was beating again.

He turned to Sabatine. The commander was still focused, monitoring the reversal’s progress, ensuring no secondary failures erupted. The green light of the screens played over his sharp profile, the focused intensity of his eyes. He had done it. With cool precision and brilliant, unconventional thought, he had found the crack in an invincible weapon and shattered it.

The pride and love that flooded Anton was so immense it was vertigo. This was his partner. The man who didn’t just stand with him in the storm, but who could calm the storm itself.

Sabatine finally looked away from the screens, meeting Anton’s gaze. He saw the awe, the gratitude, the profound love there. And for the first time since they’d entered The Vault, the operative’s mask dissolved completely. A slow, real, exhausted smile spread across his face. It was a smile of shared victory, of a battle won not by money or muscle, but by mind and trust.

He didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to. The flawless teamwork was the only testament required. They had looked into the abyss of digital oblivion, and together, they had told it to close.

—-