It was 2:17 AM, and the server room hummed like a dying beehive. Lena stared at the blue screen on Monitor 4. . The law firm’s entire case archive for the Whitmore trial—six months of work—sat on that mirrored RAID array. And the primary boot drive had just vomited its last byte.

She pulled the USB. The server would never boot from that drive again. But she had the ghost. She restored the image to a spare SSD, slid it in, and rebooted.

The command window flashed: Writing DOS boot sector... Copying Ghost 11.5... Done. USB is ready.