"Fast enough to worry me." My fingers find a pattern in the attack code that makes my gut clench. "He's not improvising. He anticipated we'd reroute to backup. The weapon has pre-built attack vectors for every contingency channel in the system."
Tommy swears. A single word, concise, without the usual creative elaboration he brings to profanity. The brevity tells me more about his stress level than any diagnostic could.
"He mapped my contingency protocols," Tommy says. "He didn't just study the primary systems. He studied the fallbacks."
"He studied you." I keep my voice clinical. The personal implications of this statement are significant, and we both know it, and neither of us can afford the processing cycles to feel it right now. "Every defensive move you make, he's already modeled. Your instincts are compromised because he predicted them."
"Then I need to stop being me."
I look at him. His face is lit by scrolling red alerts, his glasses reflecting threat data, his jaw set with the controlled fury of a man watching someone disassemble his life's work in real time.
"Be me instead," I say.
The idea lands. I watch it register. Tommy's eyes widen, and then his mouth does the thing it does when his brain catches a solution before his conscious mind has finished formulating the problem.
"He doesn't know your methodology," he says. "He mapped my defensive patterns, but you weren't part of this system when he built the weapon."
"I'm an unknown variable in his model. My offensive countermeasures don't match anything he's prepared for."
"If I run your playbook instead of mine and you handle the defense while I attack..."
"We invert his entire prediction framework." My fingers accelerate. "He's built to fight you. He's not built to fight us."
Tommy grins. In the middle of a crisis, with systems failing around him and his entire professional identity under assault, he grins at me.
Fierce. Unguarded. The exhilaration of finding someone who thinks fast enough to keep up, and the expression hits me in a place that has nothing to do with professionalism and everything to do with the fact that Tommy's real smile, the one without the performance, is the most dangerous weapon in this room.
"Swap," he says.
We swap.
The transition is instantaneous because the days of working side by side have built a shared operational vocabulary that doesn't require translation.
I take over Tommy's defensive consoles, deploying containment protocols modeled on his methodology but modified with my own innovations. Tommy shifts to my offensive station, launching countermeasures that carry my signature instead of his, attacks that the weapon isn't calibrated to predict.
The effect is immediate.
Marsh's automated response systems, designed to counter Tommy's specific defensive patterns, misfire against my modifications. Tommy's offensive strikes, carrying my methodology, bypass the weapon's anticipatory filters because they don't match any model Marsh built.
For twelve minutes, we fight as a single system.
Tommy launches a probe that uses my lateral attack methodology, and Marsh's containment protocol snaps to the wrong quadrant. I see the opening before Tommy does and shore up his exposed flank while he drives the strike deeper. His keyboard rhythm shifts, adapting my approach in real time, and for a disorienting beat his typing sounds like mine, the burst-and-pause cadence he's been listening to across two stations for days, replicated through his own hands.
Marsh adapts. He's fast. Faster than I expected. A new vector appears on the defensive console that doesn't match any GCHQ pattern I've cataloged, something he built himself, something creative and vicious and aimed at the seam between Tommy's original defensive code and my modifications. The seam that only exists because we swapped.
"He found the join," I say, already moving.
"I see it." Tommy's counterattack launches before I finish, a strike so precisely timed to my defensive adjustment that we overlap by microseconds, our code executing in a sequence that was never designed but functions as if it was.
Marsh's creative vector collapses. The join holds.
My defense catches three more attack patterns that Tommy's methodology would have missed because they target the psychological assumptions embedded in his code. The instinct to protect the team first. The redundancy bias. The tendency to build walls thicker instead of building doors faster. I defend without those biases, and the weapon's predictions shatter against defenses that don't behave the way Marsh's model expected.
The weapon's outer layer collapses. The biometric intrusion fails. The diversionary assault on the firewall degrades to noise.
For a breath, a full breath, the attack is contained.
Tommy's hands slow. My hands slow. In the sudden absence of combat rhythm, the workspace feels cavernous and too quiet, and I become aware of my own breathing, the ache in my wrists, the sweat cooling on the back of my neck. Across the workspace, Tommy pulls his glasses off, presses his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose, and puts them back on. Our eyes meet over the monitors, and the look that passes between uscarries the specific exhaustion of two people who just ran twelve minutes of intellectual combat at maximum capacity.
