Earth had less than eighteen minutes before the orbital basin failed completely.
The countdown hovered across every major display inside the resonance chamber while the fractured containment rings above the Atlantic continued tearing themselves apart under the pressure of the merged collapse fragments.
The projection looked almost beautiful now.
That was the frightening part.
The storm of broken resonance had condensed into a glowing sphere wrapped in spiraling layers of fractured light. At its center, the faint lattice imprint pulsed weakly like the ghost of a dying heartbeat.
Not alive.
Not truly dead either.
Suspended somewhere between memory and dissolution.
Elira's fingers moved rapidly across the console as new calculations flooded in.
"The Gate can support temporary vault generation," she said breathlessly. "But only if we reroute seventy percent of the stabilizing field through Earth's node."
Kael looked at her like she had lost her mind.
