The choreography between us is muscle memory now, the same synchronized rhythm we built in Echo Base's server room, tested under the weapon's assault, refined through crisis.
She runs offense. I manage infrastructure. Two systems operating as one.
Working beside her in this cold room with its hostile equipment and its borrowed hum, I feel the same pull I felt in every late-night session at Echo Base. Her shoulder six inches from mine. Her fingers moving in the burst-and-pause rhythm that I could identify blindfolded from across a room. The focus that strips everything human from her expression and replaces it with the machine-precise concentration that first made me realize I was in trouble.
"Bridge established." My hardware connects Echo Base's remote relay to Webb's air-gapped network. Data begins flowing.
"I'm in." Dar's voice is flat and focused. "Financial records. Operational directives. Personnel files."
"Download speed?"
"Faster than it should be. They weren't expecting a physical breach."
She pauses. Something on the screen changes her expression.
"Tommy. Look at this."
I look. The file she's found is a registry. Committee personnel, listed with real names, photographs, operational histories, and compensation records. Every asset, every operative, every contact in every country where the Committee has ever placed a finger.
"Get it all," I say.
"Getting it all."
Gunfire upstairs. Closer than before. A staccato exchange followed by the heavy thud of a body hitting the floor.
My body flinches. My hands don't.
"Your heart rate just spiked," Dar says without looking up from her screen. "I can hear it from here."
"Your concern is touching."
"Not concern. Data. If you pass out, I need to know how much time I have to finish the download before I drag you to the extraction point."
"I weigh more than you."
"I'll manage. I'm highly motivated to preserve the only person whose encryption I respect."
Her fingers don't break rhythm. My chest loosens by a fraction, because Dar making contingency plans for my unconscious body is the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me in a server room full of stolen intelligence, and the fact that I find threat assessment arousing says something about me that I'll examine when I'm not in a combat zone.
"Upper floors secure." Stryker's voice. "We have Webb."
The words land in my chest with a force that has nothing to do with concussive waves.
We have Webb. After everything. We have him.
"Hold position," Kane says. "Victoria, you're up."
I hear Victoria's boots on the stairs through the comms. Measured. Deliberate. The cadence of a woman walking toward the conclusion of something that started long before I joined this team, long before Echo Base existed, long before any of us understood what the Committee would cost us.
The confrontation comes through the comms in fragments, but the fragments are enough. Victoria's voice carries the cold precision of a woman who spent years compiling the weapon she's using now, and the weapon isn't a gun.
It's documentation.
I hear her name the evidence. Reagan's investigative work, spanning years of source cultivation and legal coordination. Victoria's own intelligence network, rebuilt from the ashes of the decade she spent believing Roman was dead.
Sarah's signals analysis. The financial trails that Delaney traced through jurisdictions and shell companies. And now, the comprehensive digital haul that Dar and I are pulling from Webb's own servers while he sits upstairs watching the scope of it assemble on screens he can't turn off.
"Morrison started this," Victoria says through the comms, and the name lands in the server room with a weight that predates my time at Echo Base, predates everything except Kane's original oath in a cave carved from Montana rock.
