Chapter 13 - Signal at the Relay Station
By first light, the search parties had shifted their perimeter three miles south toward the valley floor, leaving the upper ridge relatively quiet. Vance led us along an overgrown deer trail that wound upward toward an abandoned microwave relay station perched on the highest point of the range. The station consisted of a rusted chain-link fence, a small cinder-block utility building, and a towering metal lattice mast topped with broadcast dishes.
"My brother installed these repeaters back in the nineties," Vance said, leaning against the chain-link gate while catching his breath. "The local network is isolated from corporate servers, but it has a dedicated fiber line straight to the federal press pool in the state capital. If Daniel has the ledgers on that micro-SD card, this is where we upload them to the wire."
Daniel pulled the tiny piece of plastic from his pocket, his thumb running over the gold contacts. His face was pale, drawn tight from exhaustion and the reopened wound in his side, but his eyes were sharp. He pushed open the unlocked utility door, revealing a cramped room filled with humming analog relay racks, tangled cables, and a dust-covered maintenance terminal.
"If I plug this directly into the master routing bus, it'll bypass every corporate firewall and broadcast the entire financial audit across every independent news terminal in the country simultaneously," Daniel said, his fingers flying over the archaic keyboard as the green monitor flickered to life. "Within sixty seconds, they won't be able to scrub it."
"Do it," I said, settling the sleeping twins onto a folded wool blanket in the corner of the room, keeping watch through the cracked window that looked down the winding access road.
A sudden series of sharp warning tones pinged from the terminal. On the screen, a red progress bar appeared alongside a flashing corporate override alert. "They're attempting a remote lockout," Daniel gritted out, his jaw clenched as he hammered additional keystrokes into the terminal. "They traced the local IP address the second I initiated the handshake."
"How much time do you need?" Vance demanded, drawing his revolver and stepping toward the doorway.
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"Forty seconds!" Daniel yelled back, sweat beading on his forehead as the transfer rate slowed to a crawl under a heavy digital barrage.
Outside, the familiar low rumble of heavy diesel engines echoed up the access road. Two unmarked black SUVs crested the final ridge, their tires crunching against the gravel as they surged toward the relay station gates.
