"Maybe not. But I know what it looks like when someone builds walls and calls them principles. I see it every morning in the mirror."
The air between us is charged space, dense with hours of proximity and the residue of an argument that cracked both of us open. His chest is rising and falling faster than normal. My pulse is elevated.
The workspace is dark except for the screens, and the screen light paints his face in blue and shadow, and his eyes behind his glasses are locked on mine with an intensity that has abandoned every defense his humor usually provides.
The alert hits both our screens simultaneously.
Red text scrolling fast. The Committee probe is hitting Echo Base's outer defenses with the sharp precision of a testing pulse, and the timing is either coincidental or catastrophic.
Tommy's hands hit the keyboard. My hands hit mine. The argument evaporates, the personal vaporizing into the operational with the instantaneous priority shift of two people who understand that their facility is under active probe.
"Three vectors." His voice is all business, the vulnerability from thirty seconds ago gone. What remains is the operator, the man whose hands on a keyboard are the difference between anintact perimeter and a breach. "Northern relay, tertiary junction, and the communication handshake you identified in the server room."
"They're testing our response patterns." My fingers fly, offensive countermeasures spinning up. "If we respond with standard countermeasures, they'll record the patterns and feed them to the adaptive weapon."
Before Tommy finishes the sentence, a tertiary probe that neither of us flagged breaches the signals infrastructure on a vector I didn't predict. The attack bypasses my containment entirely, threading through a maintenance port in Sarah's suite that I hadn't mapped because I was focused on the primary and secondary layers like an analyst who forgot that the enemy has read her playbook too.
Sarah's board goes red.
Not amber. Not the cautious yellow of a degraded system running backup protocols. Red. The flat, total red of systems that are no longer reporting because the systems no longer exist in a functional state. Her intelligence feeds — the European contact network that Victoria spent months cultivating, the real-time tracking data on Committee asset movement, the signal intercepts that were feeding the team's operational planning — all of it shredded in the four seconds between the probe's breach and my belated containment response.
"Tommy." Sarah's voice comes through the internal channel, and the sound of it makes my typing falter because Sarah Andrews does not sound like that. Sarah sounds like steady diagnostics and controlled precision and the professional composure of a woman who treats chaos as data. The voice on the channel sounds like a woman watching six weeks of source development burn.
"They got my signals suite. European feeds are gone. The real-time tracking on Committee asset movement is gone. Thosefeeds don't rebuild, Tommy. The contacts that sourced them don't rebuild. Those are people who trusted us with information, and the channels they used to deliver it just got exposed."
My gut drops. The intelligence feeds Sarah lost aren't data — they're relationships. Human sources who risked their safety to provide information through channels that were supposed to be secure, and the weapon just ripped those channels open like peeling insulation off a live wire.
"Can you reconstruct from cached data?" I ask.
"I can reconstruct a snapshot. Hours old. Static. If the Committee moves assets between now and whenever we need that intelligence, I'll be reading yesterday's newspaper."
Victoria's voice, flat and precise on the comm from the monitoring station: "They will move assets. That's the purpose of blinding us before the primary assault."
My hands are moving, rerouting defensive resources to seal the breach Sarah's suite left in the network topology, but the damage is structural and the seal is a patch, not a repair. The signals infrastructure was load-bearing. It supported the intelligence picture that every operational decision in this facility depended on, and now there's a hole where it was that I can't fill with code.
Tommy hasn't stopped typing. His offensive countermeasures are still running, still holding the primary and secondary perimeters, but I can see the shift in his rhythm—the bursts are shorter, the pauses longer. He heard Sarah. He knows, better than anyone, what it means.
We're fighting blind now. Whatever intelligence we had about the Committee's operational posture is frozen at the moment the feeds died, and every minute that passes makes the picture less reliable.
"So we don't respond with standard countermeasures."
"We respond with something they've never seen." My fingers are already moving, the plan assembling as I speak. "Route my output through your defensive matrix. I'll handle the offensive response. You manage containment."
Tommy doesn't hesitate. His fingers redirect system resources, opening a channel between my offensive tools and his defense grid, and the integration is seamless, two systems merging in real time with the fluidity of components designed to work together.
The probe intensifies. I counter. Tommy contains. My attacks flow through his defenses and strike at the probe's source nodes while his containment holds the perimeter.
The rhythm of our keystrokes synchronizes, his steady cadence and my bursting pattern aligning into a composite faster than either of us alone.
The probe retreats. Attack vectors collapse. Tommy's defensive matrix holds. My counterattack traces the probe's routing back through proxy layers before the signal disappears.
Then the lights go out.
Not a flicker. Not the brown-out stutter of a system under strain. A clean, total cut, every overhead in the workspace dying simultaneously, the screens holding on battery backup while the room plunges into a darkness that lasts three full seconds before the emergency strips along the floor activate in amber.
Three seconds of absolute dark in a room carved from rock with no windows.
My hands lock on the keyboard. Tommy's chair rolls sideways as his body reacts, one hand going to the desk for orientation while the other stays on his keyboard by pure muscle memory. In the amber emergency glow, his face is all shadow and sharp edges, and his eyes find mine with the intensity of a man who just felt his own nervous system stutter.