Chapter 873: Humanity’s Greatest Hacker

The comm channel stayed quiet for three full seconds after Lila finished talking.

"Explain," Brooks said finally. "All of it. Right now."

"Sirius Prime." Lila’s voice came through steady despite everything. "You all remember the account Team Seven gave. Commander Cassandra wanted to bomb the planet to kill Kruel outright, before Noah ever stepped in and handled it himself. That’s not a new idea. That’s precedent."

"That’s one four-horn," Angel said. "This is a five."

"I know what it is." Lila kept going before anyone could cut in further. "Think about the actual record. Humanity’s faced two four-horns total. Both times we won, the Supreme General was physically present. Every other time we’ve beaten a four-horn since, Noah was the one standing there doing it. Kruel, a few months back, that took Noah pulling off something nobody else in this faction could replicate. That’s the actual math. Two certified variables, and neither one of them is anywhere near this planet right now."

"So what," Diana said. "We just accept we can’t win."

"We accept we can’t win the way we usually win," Lila said. "Humanity’s grown a lot. I’m not saying we haven’t. But growth doesn’t close a gap that size. Not against something that outranks every single fight we’ve ever actually survived." She paused, and when she spoke again her voice had gone quieter, harder. "We don’t have the General. We don’t have Noah. We have maybe ten minutes before this station leaves orbit with a five-horn sitting in its hold."

"So your answer is sacrifice the planet," Brooks said flatly.

"My answer is nobody else gets to inherit what we inherited from Red Hollow," Lila said. "No more three-year mysteries. No more finding out too late."

"How," Sophie said. "Walk me through how, Lila, because ’kill the planet’ isn’t a plan, it’s a sentence."

"We didn’t pack for planetary extinction," Angel added, sharp. "Nobody briefed us on that contingency because nobody thought we’d need one."

A pause stretched out, and then Lila’s voice came back, slower now, like she was circling toward something she didn’t actually want to say out loud.

"Kelvin."

He didn’t answer right away.

"Kelvin, your suit," Lila said. "KROME. It’s powered by actual dragon energy, isn’t it. The thing you and Noah built together. Heat from Nyx, cold from Storm, run against each other like a miniature sun."

Silence on his end, longer than the silence before.

"Kelvin."

"I’m here," he said finally, voice flat in a way nobody had heard from him in a long time.

"Is that output enough," Lila said. "To do what we need."

"Absolutely not," Diana said before he could answer, her voice cutting in hard across the channel. "No. We are not doing this."

"Diana—"

"No." She said it again, louder. "My husband is not the sacrifice plan, Lila. There has to be another option. There is always another option."

"There isn’t time to find one," Lila said.

"Then we make time."

"We don’t have time to make," Brooks said, quiet, and that quiet landed harder than if she’d shouted it. "The launch window’s closing. We’ve got minutes, not hours."

Diana’s breathing came hard through the comm now, ragged, furious. "So everyone’s just. What. Fine with this? Nobody else is going to say something?"

Nobody said anything.

"Are you kidding me," Diana said. "Are you actually fucking kidding me right now. You’re all just going to stand there and let this happen because the math works out convenient?"

"Diana." Kelvin’s voice, careful now.

"Don’t," she snapped. "Don’t you dare use that voice on me right now."

"I haven’t said anything yet."

"You don’t need to say it, I can hear you already deciding." Her voice cracked, something raw breaking through the fury. "We just got married, Kelvin. We have been married for exactly a handful of days, and now everyone standing on this channel is nodding along like it’s obvious that you’re the one who stays behind."

"Diana, listen—"

"No. No, you listen." She was openly crying now, the sound breaking through even over the static. "We’re pulling back. Right now. All of us. Earth doesn’t mean anything to me if you’re not in it, do you understand that? I’ve said it. I’m saying it out loud, I don’t care how it sounds."

"Babe," Kelvin said, soft.

"No. No, no, no." Diana’s voice climbed, desperate now. "Don’t you dare ’babe’ me, don’t you dare try to be sweet about this while you’re quietly planning to kill yourself for a planet full of people who don’t even know your name."

A beat passed, and then, despite everything, a short, disbelieving laugh cracked through Diana’s crying.

"Are you insane?" she said. "Is that what this is? You’ve actually lost your mind?"

"A little," Kelvin admitted. "Probably always a little."

"This isn’t funny."

"I know."

"Then stop sounding so calm about it!"

"I’m not calm," Kelvin said, and something in his voice finally cracked too, the first real break in it since he’d gone quiet. "I’m terrified, Diana. I’ve been terrified since the second the numbers finished running in my head. But I need you to actually hear me for one second before you keep yelling, because I promise you I’ve already thought about every single thing you’re about to say."

Diana didn’t answer, just breathing hard, waiting.

"I didn’t marry you so I could watch something happen to this world and know I could’ve stopped it," Kelvin said. "I married you because I want a future. An actual one. Kids, someday, if we’re lucky, growing up somewhere that isn’t constantly on fire. And I can’t build that future for us if I let a five-horn walk free because I was too scared to be the guy who does the math nobody else can do."

"That’s not fair."

"It’s not supposed to be fair. It’s supposed to be true." His voice steadied, found something solid under the fear. "I’m not doing this because I don’t want to come home to you. I’m doing this so there’s a home worth coming back to, for whatever’s left of us after today, for whoever we bring into this world eventually. I’m not choosing the planet over you, Diana. I’m choosing our future over my own fear of dying for it."

She was quiet a long moment, breath still shaking.

"I hate you," she said finally, wet and furious and completely without heat.

"I know."

"If you die, I will personally find a way to bring you back just so I can kill you myself."

"Noted."

"I mean it, Kelvin. Don’t you dare die. Don’t you dare."

"I’m not planning on it," he said. "I happen to be a genius. Geniuses have contingency plans for their contingency plans."

"That’s not reassuring."

"It’s a little reassuring."

"Fall back," Brooks said, cutting through gently. "Everyone, now. Transports are holding position two klicks out, Kelvin’s going to need the clearance."

The evacuation moved fast after that. Angel’s team broke first, falling back through the collapsing corridors toward the surface, soldiers moving in tight, practiced formation even with exhaustion dragging at every step. Diana went last among the main group, pulled bodily by Sophie when she wouldn’t move on her own, looking back toward the lower levels the entire way until the smoke swallowed the view behind her.

Lila lingered at the edge of the extraction point longer than anyone, watching the facility’s lights flicker in the distance, before finally turning and boarding the last transport.

"Confirm all personnel clear," Brooks said into the open channel.

One by one, confirmations came back. Angel. Sophie. Diana, her voice still thick. Lila.

"Kelvin," Brooks said. "You’re the last one in the building. Confirm status."

"Still here," he said. "Obviously."

"We’ll hold position as long as we safely can."

"Don’t," Kelvin said. "Get clear. All the way clear. I don’t know what the actual blast radius on this is going to look like, and I’d rather be wrong in the direction of too cautious."

A pause. "Copy that," Brooks said, and her voice carried more respect in those two words than it had in weeks. "Good luck, Kelvin."

The channel went quiet after that, just open static, everyone still listening even with nothing left to say.

Kelvin stood alone in the facility’s lower reactor chamber, auxiliary arms extended from his spine, eyes flared full green now, both prosthetics raised toward the console in front of him, data scrolling faster than any human eye should have been able to track.

He thought about just doing it remotely at first, routing the overload command through a relay, staying clear himself. He ran the numbers on that for maybe four seconds before discarding it entirely. The containment field holding KROME’s dual-core engine stable required live, continuous calibration, a human hand actually present to adjust the output ratio in real time as the heat and cold cores fought each other past every safety threshold they were ever designed to respect. A remote signal had latency. Latency, at the scale he needed to push this, meant the difference between a controlled release and the whole reactor going critical somewhere between here and the surface, taking the extraction teams with it on the way out.

His auxiliary arms couldn’t carry the calibration either, not alone. They were precise, fast, capable of a hundred things his own hands weren’t, but the feedback loop he needed ran through his own nervous system directly, his technopathy reading the reactor’s fluctuations the way another person might read their own heartbeat, correcting drift before it became failure. No proxy. No remote unit. Just him, standing here, hands on the console, doing this the only way it could actually be done.

Above him, through the cracked ceiling, he could feel the facility’s own systems groaning under launch preparation, the space station’s massive frame straining to lift off a planet it had called home for three years.

He pulled up the view through every camera he could still reach, stitching the feeds together into a single composite image rendered directly into his own vision. The entire structure, visible now from high orbit through a satellite he’d hijacked without asking anyone’s permission, glowing a soft, eerie green across every readable energy line, his own technopathic signature bleeding into systems that were never built to host it.

"Okay," he said out loud, to nobody, voice steadying as he worked. "Core temperature differential currently sitting at two thousand three hundred degrees positive, one hundred ninety-six negative. Standard operational ceiling." He adjusted a dial, watched the numbers climb. "We are about to very significantly exceed that ceiling."

He ran the actual math the way he always did under pressure, out loud, because talking it through kept the fear in a smaller box than silence did.

"If I force the differential past containment threshold, thermal runaway initiates in roughly ninety seconds. Energy release scales exponentially with differential width, not linearly, which means every additional degree I push costs more than the last one bought me." He exhaled, hands steady on the console despite everything. "Estimated yield, conservative end, somewhere in the range that makes ’planet buster’ a factual description instead of a joke I usually make at parties."

He laughed, short and a little unhinged, the sound bouncing off the chamber’s cracked walls.

"Funny thing. This is actually the second time I’ve put my life on the line like this. First time, I built a reaction to fight beside my friends. This time, I’m building one to make sure they have a planet left to come home to." He kept adjusting dials as he spoke, voice picking up its usual rhythm despite the stakes, something almost giddy bleeding through the fear. "If I somehow survive this, and I want to be clear, I am factoring survival into these numbers, I’m petitioning for statues. Plural. Every colonized world Earth’s got a flag planted on. Full body, heroic pose, maybe holding a tiny KROME helmet under one arm." He grinned despite everything, despite the sweat running down his temple, despite his hands shaking just slightly on the controls. "Inscription reads, and I want this exact wording, no edits: Humanity’s Greatest Hacker."

He pushed the differential further. The reactor’s hum climbed into something closer to a scream.

"Diana’s going to kill me for that inscription," he muttered. "Worth it."

The ground shook harder now, the station’s engines fully spooling, the whole structure straining against gravity it was seconds from escaping entirely. Kelvin watched the readout tick past the last safe threshold, past the next one, past every warning his own systems were screaming at him in red text he didn’t bother reading anymore because he already knew exactly what it said.

He thought about Diana’s voice cracking over the comm. He thought about a future that didn’t exist yet, kids that didn’t exist yet, a version of Earth that got to keep being boring and safe and worth fighting for instead of one more casualty in a war that never seemed to end.

He planted both hands flat against the console, auxiliary arms locking into final position behind him, green light flooding every inch of his vision as the facility’s entire structure lit up around him, visible now from orbit as a single, massive, impossible glow.

"Okay, Pithon," he said, quiet, steady, almost fond. "Let’s go crazy."