"Because you're operating inside this mountain with a wound that's informing every decision you make, and I prefer my assets to understand the full picture before I rely on their judgment."
Asset. The word should sting. Coming from Victoria, it's oddly respectful. She doesn't call people assets unless she considers them valuable enough to protect.
"The full picture," I repeat.
Victoria leans back in her chair. The movement is small but deliberate, a shift from briefing mode into something more conversational, still controlled but at a different angle.
The temperature shifts with it.
"You submitted your vulnerability reports through proper channels, twice, with supporting documentation that made the risk unambiguous. Your supervisors acknowledged receipt and took no corrective action."
She recites this without notes and without hesitation, as if my professional destruction is a case study she reviewed so thoroughly the details became permanent.
"The joint operation with MI6 relied on exactly the communication framework you flagged. The hostile actors exploited the vulnerability. Your partner's extraction team received degraded intelligence through the compromised channel. Outdated data when the situation required real-time coordination. He died because the system you warned them about failed in the way you predicted it would fail."
I'm not breathing.
I know this. I lived this.
I wrote those reports in technical language designed to be impossible to misinterpret, and I watched them disappear into an institutional pipeline that valued hierarchy over accuracy and career protection over operational integrity.
I know every detail Victoria is reciting because those details are carved into the walls of the room in my head where I keep the things that broke me.
But I've never heard someone else say them.
The disciplinary board redacted my contributions. The senior analysts signed off on the blame. My colleagues developed a sudden fascination with the floor whenever I walked past.
And the entire apparatus of British intelligence closed ranks around the lie that one junior analyst's incompetence, rather than systemic institutional failure, killed a good man on a routine extraction.
Victoria delivers it flat, clinical, stripped of the gentle cushioning that would make it easy to dismiss as comfort rather than fact.
"The institutional response was to classify your reports, seal your personnel file, and attribute the operational failure to human error on the part of field personnel. Your name was removed from the operation's documentation. The vulnerability was quietly patched after your departure, withoutacknowledgment that the fix corresponded to recommendations you made before anyone died."
My jaw aches. I've been clenching it. I make myself stop. The coffee on the stone ledge beside me has gone from hot to warm to approaching cold, and I haven't touched it since I sat down because my hands have been occupied with the full-time job of staying still.
"Why does this matter now?"
My voice comes out flat and even, which is the only acceptable output because the alternative involves either tears or profanity, and I refuse to produce either in front of a woman whose composure I refuse to fracture with my own.
"Because the Committee's weapon is built on the same class of vulnerability you identified at GCHQ." Victoria's eyes are steady on mine. "The communication handoff weakness between air-gapped systems and external signal traffic. The human element in automated processes. Your former agency's failure to address systemic weakness cost your partner's life. And it created the template that the Committee is using to target this facility."
The connection snaps into place with the clean, devastating logic of a circuit closing.
GCHQ ignored my warnings. My partner died. The vulnerability persisted.
And now the Committee is weaponizing that exact class of exploit against Echo Base, against Tommy's systems, against the people inside this mountain. My belly tightens at Tommy's name in that sentence, a response that's sharper than professional concern and specific in a way I'm choosing not to examine while Victoria is watching me.
The enemy at their gates is using a blueprint drawn from the institutional failure that destroyed my career.
Fuck.
"The system that buried you," Victoria says, "is the same system that armed them."
I stare at her. She stares back.
Two women in a room carved from rock, and the silence between us holds the weight of every institution that has ever valued its own reputation over the people it was supposed to protect.
"You didn't bring me here to make me feel better," I say finally.
