I have been fighting that since Kane handed me a laptop in a room full of bare rock and said he needed someone to build something that didn't exist yet.
Every firewall, every intrusion detection layer, every tripwire in Echo Base exists because I spent years imagining the worst things the worst people could throw at us and engineering countermeasures before the threats materialized.
But this wasn't an attack. This was a conversation. Someone found a channel that shouldn't exist, used it to deliver a message I can't ignore, and disappeared cleanly enough that the only proof they were here is a single word on my screen.
By dawn, the full system sweep returns clean. Every relay nominal. Every layer performing exactly as designed.
Reassuring and infuriating in equal measure, because it means the sender didn't compromise anything. They just proved they could.
I shower, change, eat a protein bar that tastes like compressed sawdust and good intentions, and arrive at the briefing room early with dark chocolate in my pocket and a presentation on my laptop that I built in the hours before sunrise while the rest of the base slept through the most sophisticated intrusion attempt Echo Base has ever experienced.
The room fills in the usual order. Sarah first, because Sarah is always first, her ponytail sharp and her gaze already scanning for data points before she reaches her chair.
Kane arrives with the measured stillness he carries into every room, settling at the head of the table with the patience of a man who has received bad news in spaces like this more often than anyone should count.
Victoria enters with Roman and they take seats with the synchronized awareness of people who have been operating in proximity long enough that coordination looks like instinct.
Dylan. Stryker. Mercer. The room fills.
I wait until everyone is settled, because timing matters in briefings the same way it matters in comedy, and what I'm about to deliver deserves the right setup.
"Someone got through."
Postures shift around the table. Kane's focus locks onto me with an intensity that reminds me why this man commands ateam of people who could individually dismantle most security details on the planet.
I walk them through it. The anomaly. The channel. The cipher. The word. The intrusion path and its implications.
I keep it clinical, because the alternative is standing in front of the people whose lives depend on my systems and saying, "Someone got through my defenses, and the way they did it was so clean it made me want to take notes instead of sounding the alarm, and I'm aware that's not the reaction you're looking for from your head of technical security."
"The cipher rotation follows a methodology I associate specifically with GCHQ's Cyber Operations Division." Victoria's voice carries the unhurried authority of someone accustomed to delivering assessments that reshape the operational picture, each word placed with the deliberation of a woman who learned long ago that precision is more persuasive than urgency. She's already three steps ahead of the presentation, which is why she's Victoria Cross and the rest of us are just trying to keep up. “Institutional in its foundations but modified with a confidence that suggests the author understood the framework well enough to recognize where it was deficient. That particular combination — disciplined training married to independent judgment — narrows the field rather more than continental origin alone."
Something loosens in my chest. I had it narrowed to European, probably British. Victoria just collapsed a continent into one building.
"I had the region. You just gave me the institution."
"Show me the routing."
I show her. Victoria studies the proxy chain with focused stillness, her eyes tracking each relay point with the patience of someone who reads intelligence the way I read code.
Roman watches her work and his expression is the one he wears when he's choosing not to interfere.
"I know this approach," Victoria says after a silence that stretches longer than the seconds warrant. Her focus hasn't left the screen, and the quality of her attention has shifted from assessment to recognition, the distinction between studying something unfamiliar and encountering something you've seen before in a different context. "The proxy selection logic. The manner in which the anonymization layers are nested, each one constructed to appear random while maintaining a structural coherence that serves the builder's operational philosophy rather than any institutional template. I've encountered variations in signals intelligence intercepts from the British freelance community. Former GCHQ operators who absorbed everything the program taught them and then departed with the confidence of people who understood that the institution's methods were sound even when the institution itself was not."
"How many people could pull this off?" Kane asks.
Victoria's gaze stays on the screen. "Fewer than ten. Who would target us specifically? Fewer than three."
"Can you narrow it?"
"Give me the cipher and forty-eight hours."
Kane looks at me. "Threat assessment."
I take a breath. The kind that buys time while the part of my brain still running the trace catches up with the part standing in a briefing room trying to sound like a professional.
"The message itself reads as a warning. If it's accurate, someone is telling us we have a vulnerability. If it's a test, someone wanted to see how fast I'd react and whether I could trace them. Either way, the capability demonstration is the real message. Someone can reach us through channels I thought were sealed, and they wanted us to know it."
"Recommendation?"
