Storm Surge

by Melissa Good

  "You're on," Kerry agreed instantly. "The kids would love it down there. It's right on the beach, and there's a bunch of cool stuff to do all around there, like glass bottom boats and paddle boats and things."

  "Great." Angie got up. "Let me let you get to sleep. It's going to be a long day for you tomorrow," she said. "And hey, maybe I can even get Mom to come down and visit for a day. Show her you really don't live in the middle of some third world country."

  Eh. Kerry waved at her, as she left. "Actually--" Though she loved her adopted home, very often between the massively immigrant population and the overly graft ridden political scene it did sometimes seem like they lived on one of the nearby Caribbean islands.

  However, she figured her mother would actually be pleasantly surprised with a visit to the condo so she was content to let the chips fall where they might on that subject. She got up and put her diary into her briefcase, turned the lamp off and climbed under the covers.

  Somewhere, halfway across the planet, she knew Dar would be getting up soon, despite her late night and she wished suddenly that they would be sharing breakfast with each other. She wanted to talk to her partner about the interesting things she'd seen and felt the last few days, and she was already looking forward to her part in the new project and wanting to get started on it.

  When she got there, there would be the initial meeting with Dar to find out what Alastair and she had promised as part of the contract. Kerry trusted her partner not to sell her down the river, but there were times when Dar would okay a concession if she thought the contract was important enough and then sometimes they scrambled.

  This was an important contract. Not for the size of it, but for the visibility and the foothold it gave them in an area they hadn't really been that successful before now.

  It tickled her to no end that she'd been a part of that win, even though she knew that it had been more pure luck than any real skill on her or Dar's part that had achieved it. Take truffles where you found them, Dar had said.

  Yum. So she would. Kerry closed her eyes and relaxed her body, hearing the patter of leaves against the window and the soft creaks of the big house around her, until it lulled her into sleep.

  DAR WAS GLAD enough to sleep in, spending most of the morning working off some of the mail overload that had built up in her inbox over the past few days. She was sprawled in the desk chair in her sleep shirt, the remnants of her breakfast tray nearby and a pot of coffee still handy.

  It felt good to relax for a few hours. The trip had been very frenetic so far, and Dar appreciated the chance to sit back and get her act together before she had to meet with their new clients again. They had a meeting scheduled most of the afternoon, and then Alastair had arranged to host a dinner someplace in London for all of them.

  Thursday, they'd meet with the local folks, hopefully all day to keep her mind occupied and off the fact that she'd be suffering the nine or ten hours of Kerry in the air and unreachable while she flew from Michigan through Chicago and then onward to London.

  Of course, Dar realized she herself had been in the same state just the other day, but ever since Kerry's near miss in the storm, she'd found herself a nervous wreck whenever her partner flew. Kerry, on the other hand, had put the event in the past and didn't mind the travel and didn't seem to stress when Dar flew.

  When they flew together, naturally, it didn't bother her. Dar decided not to think too much about why that was, and went back to her inbox instead. She clicked on a note from Mark, and opened it.

  Hey boss!

  Practice went good today. I think we'll do okay, so long as we don't have to do stuff like hit or catch softballs. So far, we're really good at wearing funny looking pants, and tripping on cleats.

  We miss you guys. How's it going?

  Mark.

  Dar grimaced a little. She clicked on the little video embedded in the mail and waited for it to spool up, then watched as she got a Mark's eye view of two of her employees crashing full into each other and bouncing back at least four feet. "Nice."

  She shook her head. "At least Ker and I won't be the worst ones out there. " She clicked on reply.

  Hey Mark.

  I hope the team can at least not knock each other over by the time Ker and I get back because if that's what's gonna happen we'll be laughing so hard we might as well just forfeit and go get drunk.

  Meetings are going well--be ready to start this one up running because these people are skeptics. I hope that damn hub's going to come online soon because if there's one customer who's likely to push our SLA's to the limit it's this guy.

  Throws decent meals though. We had prime rib of some creature or other for dinner and unlimited bottles of grog.

  D

  She went on to the next mail, glancing down at her news ticker piddling along at the bottom of her screen. "Slow morning." She flipped over to the network monitoring screen that always, from habit, ran in the background and she viewed the gauges she seldom saw at this hour of the Miami morning.

  Nine o'clock in the morning here, four o'clock in the morning at home. She rested her chin on her fist, observing the traffic patterns. She could see the heavy usage fluttering across their internal networks both in Miami, and in the big data center in Houston. Backups, probably, unending streams of data being copied to their storage arrays, mirrored to make even that precaution redundant.

  Dar respected that. She knew her team took the need to cover her ass very seriously, and she knew her peers in the company depended on that to make sure if something inevitably did happen, they could recover from it with no harm done.

  A blinking blue light caught her attention, and she shifted her gaze to the Houston links, watching the big routers there chewing over a healthy size chunk of traffic, which she realized was the government financial data stream going through its nightly reconciliation.

  Between the offices, the parallel tie lines were quiet. They didn't share much data, since Miami was the commercial hub and Houston the governmental one, but traffic like payroll and mail, corporate shares and intranet servers were quietly replicated so that the IT operation to most people was pretty much invisible.

  Just how Dar liked it.

  Just then, her messenger software popped up. Dar blinked at in surprise, half expecting it to be Kerry. It wasn't.

  Ms. Roberts? Sorry to bother you.

  Dar recognized one of their night net operators. No problem. She typed back. What's up?

  We're having a little problem with the Niagara 3 node. We were going to call Mark but we saw you come online.

  Dar cocked her head, marveling in the fact that the ops crew felt they could approach her now in so casual a manner. Respectful, but casual. She accessed a secure shell session and navigated through the net to the node in question, one of the three that surrounded the New York area to handle the stupendous amount of traffic there. Yeah? What's the problem?

  We're seeing routes being injected and then squelched. We think it's a circuit issue but the local exchange up there swears no trouble found.

  LECs lie like fish. Dar informed him. Let me take a look.

  Node 3 was her newest, an interlink to Canada that had only been online a few weeks. She poked around in the router, pecking away happily at the device as she went through its configuration. She checked the logs, seeing nothing out of the ordinary, and then she went through all the interfaces one by one. Ah hah.

  Ma'am?

  Found it. Dar typed back. Give me a sec. She reviewed the flapping interface, a little surprised to find a timing mismatch coming in from one of their major service providers. She watched the errors for a minute, and then she experimentally changed a setting, watched, and then changed a second. The interface settled down and stopped its gyrations and after another minute the data commenced flowing normally.

  It looks great now ma'am!

  Dar smirked, and then cut and pasted the circuit information into her notepad and got out of the router. Anytime. She typed back. Now
I have to go find out why the damn vendor changed his clocking without telling us.

  So it wasn't the LEC?

  Not this time. Dar confirmed. Service provider.

  Well ma'am, sorry about that but you just won me a bet here, and now Chuck has to go out and get me Dunkin Donuts, so thanks!

  Dar laughed out loud. She pasted the information into a new message, and addressed it to the vendor with a couple of snitty pecks and sent it on its way.

  Have a Boston Crème for me. Later. Thanks again, Ms. Roberts. Have a great day.

  Well, she'd certainly do her best. Dar glanced up as an incoming mail binged softly. She was very surprised to see it was from the provider she'd just yelled at. She opened it.

  Ms. Roberts --

  We were about to contact you about this issue. We had a service interrupt out of the 140 West Street facility in Manhattan that resulted in a non scheduled recycle of the switch servicing your account.

  Dar translated that without difficulty. "So. Someone rebooted the thing accidentally. Sucks to be you."

  There was a configuration anomaly that was under review.

  "Uh huh, and someone forgot to write the memory before you rebooted it too."

  However, the issue seemed to self-correct, so no further action was taken.

  Dar hit reply.

  The issue didn't self correct. I went into our router and matched your timing change. I don't mind leaving it that way, but get your goddamned procedures straightened out and tell your operations people to get their heads out of their asses and follow the rules next time.

  She reviewed the note and hit send with a satisfied little grunt. "Nitwads." She lifted her cooling cup of coffee and sipped from it, then set it back down. With a touch of curiousness, she clicked back to the network map and went into the graphical view of the node again, reviewing the traffic, then checking the other two nodes in the area.

  Tons of data, even at this hour. What was it they always said? New York never slept? Watching this she could believe it. With a shake of her head, she closed the monitoring tool and went back to her mail, realizing there was one there from Kerry she'd somehow managed to miss. "Hey!"

  She clicked on it.

  Dar --

  Ah, business. Dar knew a moment of disappointment, but immediately chastised herself and read on. Even using the corporate mail system, Kerry often sent short personal notes to her, and those were always addressed as something other than her name, so seeing one addressed with it made her aware it was probably either a problem or a solution to one.

  Reviewing the growth chart, I found a hole here, in the mid Atlantic interchange.

  Dar's eyes widened. "Oo!" she said out loud. "Checking up on me, Kerrison? You little scoundrel!"

  With the new backhaul contract for the cellular consortium I think we're going to run out of space within six to twelve if the curve maintains. What do you think?

  "What do I think?" Dar propped her chin on her fist and reviewed the graphs Kerry had inserted in her email. Her brow creased as she studied the bandwidth usage, then she quickly hunted something up on her hard drive and looked at it, switching between the document and Kerry's mail with rapid-fire flicks of her eyes.

  After a long moment of silence, she snorted again. "Well, I'll be damned," she said. "What in the hell are those people doing? They're overshooting their per connection bandwidth by fifty percent." She flipped through the original proposal, wondering if she'd made a wrong calculation somewhere.

  "Did they sign up a billion new users or something?" She puzzled over the numbers. "What the hell did I do wrong here?" She went to her browser and clicked on it, calling up one of the consortium web pages. After a moment's studying, her expression cleared. "Ah." She came close to slapping her own head. "Data. Pictures. No wonder."

  She clicked over to Kerry's note, and hit reply.

  Kerry --

  Nice catch. I'll add bandwidth. Looks like they put in new services right after they signed the contract--maybe they figured they could get away with it.

  Good work.

  D

  Then she added two small GIFS, one of a sheep, and one of a rock, and clicked send. Then she got up and stretched, leaving the laptop behind as she roamed over to the window and looked out.

  Today, it was reasonably sunny outside, and the streets were full of walkers. Dar suddenly had the urge to be outside as well, and she put that plan immediately into motion, closing down her laptop and heading for the shower.

  There was shopping to be had, and cute trinkets for Kerry to be bought, and she thought she saw a couple of street food vendors off in the distance.

  Just the thing to start the day off right.

  KERRY LAY FLAT on her back on her bed, her hands behind her head as the early morning sun poured into her window. After a moment's rest, she continued her crunches, counting under her breath as she worked through her last set, ending up grimacing on the last few but getting through them.

  "Ugh." She spread her arms out and stretched them, waiting for the burn to fade in her midsection. Then she rolled over and got up, twisting her torso and making shadowboxing motions to shake her muscles out as she went to the dresser.

  Her laptop was seated on it, whirring through its screen saver placidly until she touched the track pad and it presented her login screen. She rattled in her password and unlocked it, opening her mail program and watching the screen fill with dark lines.

  "Aha!" She pounced on the one from Dar immediately, clicking it as the rest of the mail downloaded. She leaned on the counter and scanned the words, a relieved and happy grin appearing a moment later. "Yes!" She pumped her fist in the air. "Score!"

  Finding Dar in a mistake was so rare that when it did happen, she spent hours and hours going over the data to make sure she was looking at it from the right point of view until she felt secure enough to mention it.

  Dar never seemed to get pissed off about it. Kerry suspected if she approached her in public with the issue, her beloved partner wouldn't appreciate it but she never did, and Dar's reaction either was an explanation of why whatever it was happened to be that way, or else, like this time, a cheerful admission of guilt and an action plan to fix it.

  Awesome. Kerry stepped away from the desk and went to the window, peering out through the teak wood slats at what was going to be a gorgeous day. Though just seven, it was already light outside and she could see a beautiful, almost cloudless sky through the tree branches.

  Great day to go out on the lake. She sighed. "Oh well, next time." She turned and went back to the dresser, picking up her laptop and carrying it back to the bed with her. She sat down cross-legged, and studied her mail.

  Relatively uneventful. She clicked over and opened her morning report from operations, scanning it lightly until she came across an entry for the northeast sector and saw the outage notation. One eyebrow lifted. "And I didn't get a page, why?" She clicked the report. "Oh, that's why."

  Opportunistic of her night administrators. Kerry couldn't really argue with the logic of contacting her apparently available boss, but really, there was a process for that sort of thing. She blinked as a small box popped up next to her cursor.

  Hey. Ah. Speaking of the devil. Hey cowboy. What's up? Cowboy? Kerry smiled. I saw the outage report from this morning.

  Ah. Dar seemed to reflect on that. I sent a nasty gram to the vendor. I copied you. Looks like someone tripped over a power cable at their New York Corporate Office or something.

  Where are you? Kerry asked.

  Just about to leave the hotel for the client site. I just got back from walking around outside. It's gorgeous here today.

  Kerry smiled again. Here too. I wish I could go out sailing instead of to mom's brunch. Oh well. Are you doing anything tonight?

  The sun winked in the window and striped across the bed, warming Kerry's bare legs. She wiggled her toes in it, and wished very briefly and pointlessly that she was having this conversation in person.

&n
bsp; Waiting for you.

  So apparently the feeling was mutual. I'm not leaving until tomorrow morning, sweetie. I have to get through the day at moms then I talked Angie into going down to the shops near the lake so I can get goofy trinkets for everyone. She paused. Wish I were at the airport taking off right now though.

 

  Kerry cocked her head at the screen. What's so funny?

  Tell you when I see you. I have to head out. Tell your crazy family I say hi and try to have a good time, okay?

  Okay. Kerry typed. Have a good meeting. Love you.

  Love you too, later. DD

  Kerry chuckled and closed the window, and then she ran her eye over her mail. Not finding anything really urgent, she closed the program and got up to put the laptop back on the dresser.

  "Hey, you up?" Angie stuck her head in the door, blinking in surprise to find her older sister in a pair of shorts and a sports bra apparently wide awake. "Boy, you have become an early bird haven't you?"

  Kerry chuckled. "I have," she admitted. "I was doing my traveling exercise routine and then chatting with Dar for a bit. C'mon in."

  Angie entered, still in her nightgown. "What's a traveling exercise routine?" she asked. "Is that what you do every morning?"

  "No." Kerry turned and leaned against the dresser. "At home, Dar and I usually either go for a run in the morning, or if it's too hot and sticky which is often, we go to the island gym or to the pool," she replied. "I just have a few things I do when I am out of town like some sit-ups and push-ups and stuff."

  "You're nuts," Angie informed her.

  "I am," her sister cheerfully agreed. "But it makes me feel good to do it, so who cares?" She spread her arms out. "Hey, I even joined a softball team. Our company's doing a league."

  "Oh my god." Angie rolled her eyes. "You always wanted to do that. You used to bitch about it all the time I remember."

  Kerry grinned. "Yeah, I know. But this was something that just came up. It should be fun though." She folded her arms over her chest. "Hey, want to go roust Mike up?"