Two minutes. Three minutes.
The little light on the DHS port on the switch remained a stubbornly dead orange. Miller was shifting his weight, the skepticism returning to his face. Three minutes and fifty seconds. My own heart was beating a little faster. Come on, baby. Talk to me.
Then, at three minutes and fifty-eight seconds, it happened.
The orange light flickered once, twice, and then it turned a solid, brilliant, beautiful green. A second later, the other lights on the switch connected to the station's internal network began to flash frantically, like a string of Christmas lights having a seizure.
Data was flowing.
"And we have propagation," I said, a triumphant grin spreading across my face. "Three, two, one..."
The effect in the main room was immediate and dramatic. The overhead fluorescent lights, which had been off, flickered to life as the building's network-connected power management system came back online. The monitors on the desks all lit up in unison, displaying their familiar login prompts. A laser printer in the corner, silent for hours, whirred to life and began spitting out a huge backlog of queued print jobs, the paper cascading onto the floor.
Sergeant Davis, who had been staring at his blank screen with the expression of a man defeated by life, now just stared dumbfounded as the familiar logo of his operating system appeared. He slowly reached out and touched the screen as if to confirm it was real. He looked up, his eyes wide, and met my gaze through the server closet doorway.
Miller, standing behind me, let out a slow, astonished breath. "Did you... did you just fix the whole police department with your laptop?" he whispered in awe.
I leaned back in the cramped closet, closing my laptop with a satisfying click.
"I rerouted you through a billion-dollar federal backup network that's normally reserved for surviving a nuclear apocalypse," I said, savoring the moment. "So, yeah. Just try not to use it all streaming Netflix during your lunch break. I think DHS frowns on that."
With the station humming back to life, the atmosphere shifted from one of panicked despair to bewildered efficiency. Cops were logging into their computers, the dispatch radio was crackling with voices, and the printer was still chugging away like it was trying to single-handedly deforest Canada.
Sergeant Davis now looked at me with a completely new expression. The suspicion was gone, replaced by a healthy dose of fear and grudging respect. He was a man who understood blunt force, and I had just hit his problem with the digital equivalent of a tactical nuclear strike.