Kali sat typing at a keyboard in the C2 truck parked alongside the Xingyun Liwu. Harper had been able to quickly acquire the passwords for the landing station’s internal systems. Only a half dozen of CloudCable employees shared them, and of those two were presently on shift in the building. She could remotely access the controls for its thirty-ton backup generator with a simple command, ensuring it stayed off when main power was cut to the building.

That was the easy part. The hard part was keeping it off.

Natasha sat beside her and watched. From what she had gleaned, the emergency generator would have to automatically sync itself to the main grid’s output before going online. In the United States that output was a standard sixty hertz. To produce that much power, a big steel rod in the generator’s prime mover had to rotate six hundred times a minute.

Under normal conditions, the backup generator would run at a very low output so it could sync up quickly if the electricity went down. But Kali was unsyncing it. Corrupting its logic. When the main power was cut, the generator would go offline instead of online. When it went offline, the pistons that turned the humongous steel rod would slow down rather than speed up to get in synch. Then when she put it back online, it would overwork in its rush to sync back up.

According to Kali the amount of internal stress that created would tear it apart.

“Like some dopey little kid who loses his mom in a crowd,” Natasha thought aloud.

Kali glanced over from the computer screen. “What?”

“When he realizes she’s a half block away, and tries to catch up, he falls and skins his knees,” Natasha said. “Except a generator that weighs more than a tank falls a whole freaking lot harder.”

Kali fixed her gaze on Natasha for a fraction of a second, then turned back to the screen without a word.

Typing.

Grigor’s upload was at seventy percent when the facility lost power. Four or five seconds later, he heard a loud, grinding clatter from elsewhere in the building.

The backup generator, he thought.

He looked around from his chair, his jaw tightening up. His eyes were much quicker to adapt to darkness than the average person’s. But he could see very little around him. The overhead LEDs were out. The desk lights. The computer monitor in front of him, along with all the rest of the display screens, and all the indicator lights and readouts on all the control panels in the room. He couldn’t hear the low sigh of the HVAC system. He couldn’t hear the low ambient hum of electricity passing through capacitors and transformers. There was only dead silence to match the enveloping darkness.