Donovan O'Niel spread his map across the workbench and stabbed a finger at the vault marker. He wanted to salvage the tech inside, but he couldn't do it blind. His plan was bigger than one raid. He meant to build a communications network linking Vault 141 to trade outposts and towns, then use those links to pull salvage from the vault. First he needed to walk in prepared. Three scouts had gone in before him. None came back with their gear. One came back without his partner. Brad Zaxxon leaned over the map beside him. He'd spent eight years in the Rangers, and Donovan trusted his read on a supply list more than anyone's. Brad tapped the vault entrance with a chewed pencil. "You're not carrying enough," Brad said. "Yeah, you mapped the dead zone, but a map won't dig you out if the floor drops. You want rope, spare batteries, cutting tools. And doubles of everything, because down there, no radio means no do-over." He got animated then, listing shielded canisters and clamps and backup power cells until his sentences ran together. Donovan wrote it all down. The list filled a page, then two. "I can't carry this on my back," he said. "And I can't keep it in a tent." "Then stop carrying it," Brad said. "Store it. Between you and me, a base with walls is worth ten trips to a trade post." Donovan looked past the fence outside, the rusted bars and torn chain-link that ringed the yard. Behind it stood an old pre-war garage, brick and timber, the roof still sound. He'd walked past it a dozen times. Now he saw a warehouse. Room for supplies. A roof for an antenna. The first real node in his network. He pitched it to Zelda Verada that evening. Zelda was the Red Hills Traders medic on the vault team, and she controlled the shared stores. She listened without softening her face. "You want to sink our supplies into a fixed building," she said. "Near a vault someone already broke into." "A fixed building is where the network starts," Donovan said. "Radio base on the roof. Supplies inside. I stop hauling and start reaching." Zelda studied the garage across the yard. "Funny what survives when no one keeps score." She nodded once. "Do it. But it's stocked and staffed, or it's a target." Donovan cleared the garage and raised an antenna on the grey tile roof. He wired a radio base station to the wall and stacked the shielded crates inside. Then he hired two hands to run it. Brad brought one himself, a black-and-white cat in a mechanic's jumpsuit who checked every crate seal without being asked. The second was a grey cat in tactical glasses who took the inventory ledger and started counting. By dusk the doors closed on a working warehouse. Donovan had his supply base and his first radio node. The vault was still dark. But now he had a place to reach from.

The garage doors had barely closed when Donovan hoped for one quiet night. He wanted to check his radio node in the morning, nothing more. Instead the base station crackled at dusk. Zelda Verada's voice came through, flat and clear. "You've got trouble," she said. Zelda was the Red Hills Traders medic on the vault team, the one who'd approved his supply base only if he kept it stocked. Now she was telling him the stock was the problem. "Raiders. Five, maybe more. They pried open the Vault-Tec entrance up the ridge. They're stripping it for scrap." Donovan pulled up the map on his battleboard, the tablet glowing inside its rugged case. He tapped the vault marker. The blast-scarred garage front sat right at the entrance he needed. "They don't know what's in there," he said. "Not yet," Zelda said. "But they'll dig. And if they find the labs before your team does, your G.E.C.K. walks off on someone else's back. So don't wait." He didn't. He clicked off and moved to the crates. Solo wasn't an option for this. He keyed his handset and raised the sharpest Ranger sergeant he trusted, a black-and-grey tuxedo cat who answered on the first call. Sergeant Greymire arrived in ten minutes with her own radio pack and glasses fogged from the cold, already asking numbers before she was through the door. "How many, and how loud do you want this?" Greymire said. She didn't sit. She checked the door seals the way a soldier counts exits. "Five confirmed at the vault mouth," Donovan said. "Loud enough to move them off it. Quiet enough not to bury the entrance." Greymire nodded once. That was all he needed from her. They worked fast. Donovan cracked a military ammo crate and counted magazines onto the bench. Greymire loaded two compact automatic rifles and set spare rounds in belt pouches. He measured out breaching charges, small ones, enough to clear a doorway without dropping a roof. "Charges go on the flanks," Greymire said. "Not the frame. We push them out, we don't seal ourselves in." "Agreed." He liked that she'd said it before he had to. He packed cutting tools, rope, and spare batteries into two ready bags. His shielded relay stayed on the shelf. Near the vault, radios died within ten meters. Tonight they'd work close and by hand. By full dark the gear stood ready by the doors. Two rifles, loaded. Charges wired and safed. Ammo counted twice. Donovan slung his battleboard across his chest and looked at Greymire. "We hold the entrance," he said. "Whatever's below waits for us, not them." Greymire slid the last magazine home. "Then let's go take our door back." The quiet night was gone. Donovan had traded it for a fight at the vault mouth, and a partner to fight it with. The gear was packed. The raiders didn't know he was coming yet.

The fight at the vault mouth was won, but the anger stayed. Days later Donovan sat in the Rangers Command Office, jaw tight. A recruit in Brad's camp had sold their plans to the raiders. They'd caught the informant and locked him up. But the damage sat heavy in Donovan's chest. His network was supposed to keep his people safe. Instead a leak nearly cost them the whole mission. "You're gnawing on it," Sinclair said from the doorway. The Red Hills recon officer stepped in, radio pack on his back, yellow eyes calm. Sinclair had run comms and decryption for their team since the vault job began. He set a compact HF transceiver on the table. "Guilt's a lousy negotiating partner, friend. Better to spend the leak than mourn it." "Spend it how?" Donovan asked. Sinclair tapped the hand-drawn map between them. Two small raider outposts, one main camp, twenty miles north. "The raiders don't know their radio channel is still open to us. Their informant fed them for weeks. We know his frequencies. We know his codes." He chuckled, dark and short. "They think that line went quiet when we grabbed him. It didn't." Donovan understood. He pulled his survey board close and studied the glowing map. "We send fake orders. Test whether they still trust the channel." "Test it clean," Sinclair said. "Feed them something we can watch happen. If they move, the line's live and we own it." They worked through the afternoon. Sinclair matched the informant's code style, clipped and lazy. Donovan tuned the transceiver to the raider band and checked the signal twice. The plan was simple. They'd send word that a supply cart was passing the eastern trail near the second outpost, lightly guarded, easy pickings. Real Rangers waited nowhere near it. If raiders showed, the channel was theirs to poison. Donovan keyed the handset. Sinclair read the message flat and bored, exactly like a tired informant. Then they waited by the receiver. An hour crawled past. Static. Then chatter broke on the raider band. Two voices, arguing over who took point. A third confirmed a squad rolling toward the eastern trail. Donovan leaned in, heart quick. On his survey board he watched a scout's marker, a Ranger far off with binoculars, blink a signal back. Six raiders had left the second outpost, heading exactly where the fake message sent them. "They bit," Donovan said. Sinclair grinned. "Every one of them. The line's live, gal to fool, and they don't know we're the ones talking." Donovan sat back. The anger finally eased. He had a working channel straight into the raider network, feeding him their movements. His comms plan had turned a betrayal into a weapon. But six armed raiders now marched toward a trail with no supply cart. When they found nothing, they'd know something was wrong. He had one clean window to use the open line before it closed for good.

The open channel had one clean window. Donovan meant to spend it well. Six raiders had already marched to a supply cart that never existed. When they found nothing, they'd stop trusting the line. So Donovan and Sinclair built a bigger lie. They sent word of a stalled convoy near an icy stretch of trail, an armored truck abandoned with its crew dead, gear scattered, ripe for stripping. The bait was real. Days earlier Donovan had found the wreck himself while mapping the valley. An arctic-camo six-wheeler sat cold on its axles, white and grey against the frost. Three skeletons lay near it in rotted uniforms, an old exploration team gone decades ago. A rusted officer's pistol lay in the dirt beside a cracked field radio. Donovan photographed it all and marked it on his survey board. It looked exactly like fresh salvage to anyone who didn't know better. Brad crouched beside the thermal camera feed inside the garage warehouse. Brad had eight years in the Rangers and read terrain like a book. He watched the monitor without blinking. "Heh. That's a picture," Brad said. "Broken truck, bodies, loose gear. A scav sees that and stops thinking straight. Between you and me, greed makes better bait than any trap I've built." Sinclair keyed the handset. He read the message flat and tired, the way the dead informant used to talk. He named the wreck's position, the loot, the empty road. Then he set the mic down. "Now we wait, friend. If they roll out, the line's still ours. If they don't, we lost nothing but a story." Donovan stared at the camera monitor. His people waited hidden near the wreck. Brad's team held one ridge. Sinclair's Red Hills recon held another. The thermal picture showed the cold truck, the scattered bones, the frost. Nothing moved for an hour. Donovan's tail twitched against the crate. Then heat bloomed at the screen's edge. Engines. Two raider trucks crawled up the trail and stopped short of the wreck. Men climbed down. They circled the six-wheeler, kicked the skeletons, grabbed the fallen pistol and radio. They laughed. They filled sacks with worthless bones and old steel. Then they mounted up and drove back north, thinking they'd won. "They looted a graveyard," Brad said. He grinned. "And they don't even know it." Donovan let out his breath. The trap had worked clean. The raiders had acted on a second false order without a flicker of doubt. The channel wasn't just alive; it was trusted. He now owned a direct line into their movements, and he could steer them anywhere he chose. But steering them meant they'd keep chasing his lies until one lie ran dry. Sooner or later they'd reach a wreck and find Rangers waiting instead of bones. Donovan closed the survey board. He had a weapon now. He had to decide where to point it before the raiders came looking for the liar behind the voice.

The raiders still trusted Donovan's false radio line, but the deception couldn't last. So Donovan turned his people to the ground itself. He ordered daily sweeps of the base perimeter, looking for the bandits who might trace the lies back to him. On the second morning, Sergeant Greymire came in with two finds tucked under her arm. Greymire ran fast tactical response for Donovan, and he trusted her read of a fight more than his own. She dropped a worn green flip-top notebook on the crate between them. Her tail flicked once. "Found this in a wrecked building north of the fence," she said. "Bandit rest stop. Empty now." She flipped it open to a hand-drawn map. "They mapped our fence. And look here. They wrote down automated defenses. They know the Command Office bites back." Donovan studied the rough handwriting. Grim little plans for stripping valuables. A crude sketch of the perimeter he thought was secret. His ears went flat. The raiders weren't just chasing his false salvage anymore. They were casing his real ground. That afternoon, clearing the garage lower level, Donovan found the second thing. A worn PC data disc, half buried under rusted shelving. He rubbed the grime off the label. Dr. Zahaas. Vault 141. Human medical experiments. F.E.V. injection tests. Failed trials, page after page, preserved in dense record. His breath caught. This was research from the vault the whole team had bled to open. He carried both finds to the rooftop base station and keyed his radio. He raised Zelda Verada, the Red Hills medic who'd approved his garage base and gambled every favor she had on the field hospital. He told her about the notebook first. The mapped fence. The note about automated defenses. "So they know the ground and the guns," Zelda said, flat over the static. "That's not scouting. That's a shopping list." "There's more." Donovan read the disc label to her. Zahaas. F.E.V. tests. Human trials. The line went quiet a moment. "Read me that label again," she said. He did. When he finished, her voice came back sharper, longer, the way it did when medical tech was on the table. "That matches the sample files we pulled. Same doctor, same program. That disc is the missing lab log. If it holds the injection protocols, I can finally tell which of my samples are safe to touch and which will kill whoever thaws them." A dry breath. "Funny what survives when no one knows what they're looking at." "It's yours," Donovan said. "I'll run it to the hospital myself." "Bring it," she said. "And Donovan, you took out the main Raider base but there are still bandit strays about. Those bandits know nothing about the Vault other than it’s a place with loot.” Donovan set the disc beside the notebook. As Donovan watched Brad organize daily patrols, he realized this camp is turning into a real base.

Donovan ran the disc to the field hospital and left it with Zelda. On the walk back, his legs ached and his radio hissed with nothing useful. The base ran on patrols now, perimeter sweeps, and endless reports. His people needed a breath. So did he. He turned toward the coffee hut near the trade post, where traders and off-duty Rangers gathered between fights. The hut sat warm and loud, its green roof dripping from an early rain. Inside, mugs clattered and voices overlapped. Logan Harrison leaned against the counter, hat pushed back, nursing black coffee. Logan ran tech salvage for the Atomic Cats and had opened the vault's inner doors himself. Donovan trusted his hands on a machine more than most. Logan nodded without wasting a word. "Donovan. You look like a dead battery." "Feel like one," Donovan said. He dropped onto a stool. Across the room, Mary Long worked her way through the crowd. She was Head Nurse at the vault now, calm in blue scrubs, round glasses catching the light. She usually carried her medical folder. Tonight she carried something else. Mary set a polished tablet on the counter and turned it so everyone could see. The screen glowed with team logos and bright game-day stats. "Found this in a crate of salvage," she said. "Still charged. Still pulling a broadcast feed." A trader whistled. Mary tapped it twice. "Somebody put a bigger screen in the back." Donovan's ears pricked. A live broadcast feed meant a working signal, out here, where he'd fought ten-meter dead zones for weeks. He followed the crowd to the back wall. A large retro monitor hung there, framed in chipped yellow casing. Logan was already behind it, tracing the wire with two fingers, the ones he still had. "Reads a relay somewhere close," Logan said. "Prewar node. Feeding the whole hut." The screen flared to life. Players ran a green field in sharp color. The hut erupted. Traders pounded the counter. Rangers who hadn't smiled in days laughed and shouted calls. Logan leaned back, dry. "World ends, and this still airs." Donovan stared past the game at the signal itself. Clean. Strong. Repeating. Kira Dallas stepped in from the rain, tactical glasses beaded with water. The Rangers' logistics officer verified everything and trusted almost nothing. She watched the cheering room, then the screen, then Donovan's face. "Hah. You're not watching the game," she said. "You're watching the pipe that carries it." "There's a live relay feeding this hut," Donovan said. "Prewar. Still broadcasting. If I can tap its node, I've got a network backbone I didn't build myself." Kira's cadence slowed. "Find the source, and every outpost on my supply line could share it." She pulled out a pad. "I'll log it. But I don't celebrate until you've got the node in your hands." The room cheered a touchdown. Donovan barely heard it. He had a new target now, and a reason to chase it before dawn.

The game ended. Traders drifted out into the wet dark, still arguing calls. Donovan stayed behind with Logan and Kira. The relay still fed the hut, clean and strong, and he meant to find where it came from before dawn. First he needed a direction. Donovan found the hut's owner stacking mugs behind the counter. He asked where the feed came from. The man wiped his hands and pulled a worn trader's map from under the counter. Red and green lines crossed it like veins. Timing notes crowded the margins, scrawled by many hands over many months. "Traders swap routes by when the game airs," the owner said. "Somebody tracked the tower that carries it." He tapped a far mark. A distant tower, ringed in ink, with a route sketched toward it. Donovan spread the map on the counter. The route was long. Too much guesswork between here and that tower. He needed verification, not rumor. Kira had that. She crossed the room and dropped a worn notebook beside the map. Pages bulged with careful columns. Channel names. Broadcast times. A list of shows that cycled through the signal. She'd been logging the feed for weeks without telling anyone it mattered. "Look," she said. "Sports talk at the same hour every day. Same gap between games. That tells me the tower runs on a fixed schedule, not a loop. A machine someone set and left." Her glasses caught the screen's last glow. "I don't call it confirmed until you're standing at the base of it. But the pattern holds." Donovan laid her notebook against the map. The owner's inked route and Kira's timing notes agreed. The same tower. The same distance. Two sources, one answer. His dead-zone weeks had taught him never to trust a single reading. Now he had two. Logan leaned over the map, tracing the route with his three good fingers. He read machines by what was missing from them, and he read this the same way. "Half that route's open ground," he said. "Ghouls on the trade roads lately. Walking it at night is how scouts stop reporting." He straightened. "Morning. We go in daylight, with the route marked and the gear packed. The tower's been broadcasting for two hundred years. It'll wait till sunrise." Donovan wanted to move now. His legs still ached from the hospital run. But Logan was right, and Kira's slow nod sealed it. "Agreed," Donovan said. "We leave at first light." He folded the trader's map around Kira's notebook and sealed both in his map case. Kira marked the tower on her own pad as the priority target. Logan named the gear he'd bring. For weeks Donovan had chased a backbone for his network and found only dead air. Now a real target sat in his case, with a route to reach it and a plan to survive the walk. The source had a location. At dawn, he'd go get it.

At first light they rolled out in the patrol truck. Donovan had the trader's map open on his knee, the tower's route inked clear. Kira drove. Logan rode shotgun, watching the open ground with a salvager's eye. The relay still ran on its fixed schedule. Donovan meant to reach its source and turn a two-hundred-year-old tower into the backbone of his network. They never made the tower. Static broke over the dash radio, then a voice. A trader, shaking, reading off a battered emergency set. Raiders had hit a caravan bound for Ranger Camp. Wounded down. He called out the attack site in short, panic-cut words. Kira didn't ask. She wrenched the wheel toward the coordinates. "Look," she said, flat. "The tower's stood two centuries. It holds one more hour. Those traders don't." Donovan folded the map into his case and brought his rifle up. Mary Long braced in the back seat, her medical folder clamped to her chest. She was the field hospital's head nurse, riding along to study the tower route for future supply runs. Now she checked her bag by feel, counting stimpaks without looking. "Tell me how many down the second we're close," she said. No fear in it. Just the next task. The truck crested a rise. Below, three overturned carts smoked. Ghouls moved among them, not wild, not scattered. They worked in a line, cutting off the survivors who crouched behind a wheel. Military fatigues hung off their gray hides. These ghouls kept formation. "Same kind that hit my supply road," Kira said, braking hard. "They don't break. You have to put them down." Donovan fired from the truck bed. One ghoul dropped. The others turned as a unit and charged. Logan took the left flank, calm, spacing his shots. "Three left," he called. "They flank when you reload. So don't." Donovan didn't. He kept the trigger steady and dropped a second. Kira's pistol cracked twice beside him. The last ghoul reached the carts before Logan's shot folded it. Then quiet, but for the fire and a trader's groan. Mary was already out and moving. She knelt by the worst-hurt man, pressed a stimpak to his thigh, and worked without pause. Two more she stabilized in minutes. The survivors watched her like she'd dropped from the sky. While she worked, the lead trader talked. He'd run the roads near the tower for years. He drew Donovan a sketch in the dirt: tower used to on a major but after years of changing hands The Atomic Cats Traders have for 20 years or so, owned and control the tower and defended by putting a Atomic Cats base around it. Reaching it had just become possible because Ruby and Marcus the leaders of the Atomic are on very good terms with the Rangers. Team makes camp ready to move the Tower in the morning.

By midmorning the truck rolled up to the Atomic Cats Trade Emporium. The strip-mall ran long, red and grey brick under a camouflage-tiled roof. Signs marked each section: radio, trade, repair, sleeping quarters. Donovan climbed out and read the whole front like a schematic. Somewhere inside that building was the key to his network. Mary Long guided the three wounded traders toward the repair wing, where a medic waved them in. She counted her patients off to the staff, clipped and sure, then looked back once to confirm the team had cover. Inside, the bar hummed with traders and salvagers. A grey-and-orange cat in a tan safari shirt leaned on the counter, swiping a tablet with one paw. He looked up before Logan reached him. "You're the Rangers off the caravan hit," he said. "Word travels faster than you drove." This was Otto Morgan, who ran the Emporium's radio feed. He set the tablet down and pulled out a battered field notebook instead. "The tower," Donovan said. "We came for the tower." Otto flipped the notebook open. Pages crowded with handwriting, old ticket stubs, call signs. "Twenty years we've run a live sports feed off that tower. WADC, WKLM, WMLB." He tapped a line of notes. "It's not just metal on a hill. It's a working backbone. The Cats keep it humming." Donovan leaned in. "Can it carry more than ball games?" "It already does." Otto turned a page. "But here's the rule. We close tower access at night. Ghouls on the roads, same ones that hit your traders. We open it early, first light." He jotted a note to himself without looking down. "You don't reach it today. Nobody does after dark." Logan studied the ledger with a salvager's squint, reading what wasn't written down. "So we wait," he said. "Story of my week." Kira set her pack on the bar. "Look, waiting I can plan around." She pulled a folder and started logging the schedule Otto named. "Fixed open and close times. That tells me everything about how they run it." Her pen moved fast. Then the dash radio behind them crackled. Logan stepped to it. A voice came through, hurried but easy, a friend's voice. Brad. Donovan watched Logan's ears come forward. "Message is for me," Logan said after. "Brad says wait here today. Tomorrow morning, go to the tower. Ask for the Cats' area commander. Amy Gill." He almost smiled. "Brad knows her from Broken Hill. Says she's a good friend. She'll open the door for us." Donovan let out a breath. No forcing the gate. No cold pitch to strangers. A name, a friend, a scheduled morning. He folded the trader's map back into his case. "Then we camp here tonight," he said. "At first light we meet Amy Gill and make that tower ours." Kira closed her folder. "Hah. Now that's a deal I'll shake on."

At first light the truck climbed to the tower. The structure rose off its concrete feet, a steel frame wrapped in cables of red and green. A painted panel near the base read New Reno Feed Tower. Donovan read the whole thing like a blueprint before he even stepped down. Logan swung out beside him, hat low. Kira followed with her pack, logging the approach without a word. A light orange cat in red camo stood at the ladder, waiting as if she'd known the exact minute they'd arrive. "Amy Gill," she said. "Brad's people. He vouched for you, so sit down and let's talk terms." She didn't waste a handshake. She set a metal board on a crate, marked with the Atomic Cats insignia and dense rows of type. "Our tower, our rules. Read before you nod." Donovan leaned over the contract. The terms were strict but fair. A connected network could run five nodes, no more. Hard technical limit, the board warned twice. He thought of the garage, the vault, the coffee hut relay. Five would reach them all, with room to spare. "This carries real traffic?" he asked. "It carries ball games to half the Wasteland," Amy said. "It'll carry your supply chatter fine. Five nodes. Push for six and the link drops." She tapped the board. "That's not me being stingy. That's the hardware." Donovan looked at Kira. She'd already pulled her folder. "Look," she said, "five nodes I can plan a supply map around. Fixed cap tells me everything about how to route it." She signed her name under the terms, clean and fast. Donovan signed below her. The deal was done. Amy produced a second thing then, a worn guidebook thick with notes. RobCo Feed Tower Operations Manual, the cover read. "This goes to your tech," she said, and handed it to Logan. "Channel map, the network limits, and the Wi-Fi link spec. The F95 V2. You'll need that part to tie your relays in." Logan flipped it open, scanned a wiring diagram, and gave a short nod. "Missing nothing," he said. "That's rare." Kira closed her folder and faced Amy. "One more thing. Medical supplies are already moving your way. A full crate off the field hospital, stimpaks and antirad, as goodwill from the Rangers." She said it plain, no pitch. "They'll reach Broken Hill inside the week." Amy's ears came forward. "Hah. Brad said you were the careful one." She almost smiled. "That buys you more than a signed board. Keep sending those and we stay friends." Donovan stood under the tower and felt the plan click into place. Access granted. Five nodes, a manual, a friendly command behind him. The backbone was his. But five was a wall, and he already counted four live sites in his head. His next node would cost him a choice about which link to cut.

The truck rolled back toward Vault 141 by midday. Logan rode in back with the rugged link laptop open on his knees, its weathered green casing marked with the Atomic Cats insignia. The tower deal was signed, but a signature meant nothing until the nodes talked to each other. Donovan watched the road and ran the math again. Four live sites. One cap of five. He still had a choice to dodge. His field radio crackled before they reached the gate. A short message plaque dropped into the cradle of his pack set. Brad's voice, upbeat, caught in text on the little screen. "Donovan, don't be disappointed with only five nodes," it read. "Yesterday we had none. Just link our four main bases together and save one node for the future. Your team, great job." Donovan read it twice. His worry had been backward. The limit wasn't a wall. It was room to grow. At the field hospital, Mary Long met them at the door. She was the head nurse now, running the scaled-down hospital built into the vault. She waved a gray and brown tabby forward, neat in medical scrubs with a red pouch at her hip. "This is Tammy Lammens," Mary said. "Area head nurse. She covers the floor while I'm below." Tammy gave a short nod and a steady look, already counting their wounds before they spoke. "No bleeders today," Donovan said. Tammy's mouth twitched. "Good. I'll hold you to that." Then Mary turned and went back down toward Vault 141, her job waiting underground. Logan set the link laptop on a crate and pulled the F95 adapter from his jacket. "Wi-Fi link," he said. "Fancy word for a short radio bridge. Ties my relay to their tower." He wired the adapter into the garage base station first, then opened the tower network on the screen. A green light blinked. "That's the tower," he said. "Alive. We're on their backbone." He worked without hurry. Kira leaned over his shoulder, logging each step in her folder. "Which two first?" she asked. "The two that can't afford silence," Donovan said. "The vault and headquarters." Logan typed. He added Vault 141 as the first node, then Ranger HQ as the second. The screen listed them under the tower line, two rows where there had been none. "Ping them," Donovan said. Logan sent a test packet. The vault node answered in a second. HQ answered right after. Two green rows held steady. "They see each other," Logan said. "Through the tower. Real traffic, both ways." Donovan let out a breath he'd carried since Broken Hill. His base and his command could talk now, live, across the Wasteland. Two nodes down. Two main bases still open, one spare node banked for later, exactly as Brad wanted. He looked at the two glowing rows. The backbone wasn't a plan anymore. It was running.