by Melissa Good
“Do you really want to?” Kerry laid an arm down on Dar’s chest and rested her chin on it. “You know what I’d like?” she added suddenly.
“What?”
“Someday, I’d like us to just...” Kerry nibbled her lower lip, “get a camper, or something, and travel all over the place, just seeing new things.” A half smile appeared. “Does that sound strange to you? There are so many places I haven’t seen, and I’d like to—together.”
Dar cocked her head slightly to one side. She took a breath to answer, then released it when her cell phone, dropped haphazardly on the bedside table, buzzed. “Hold that thought,” she told Kerry as she fumbled one-handedly with the instrument. “Because I really like it.”
Kerry grinned wholeheartedly and gave Dar a pat on the side. “I’ll get coffee started.” She lowered her voice as Dar answered the phone, then took the opportunity to suckle Dar’s navel gently, chuckling as she heard her lover’s voice break slightly. “Tell Mark I said hi.” She gave Dar a nip, then rolled out of bed and made her way out into the living room, where Chino was already waiting impatiently to be let out.
She opened the back door for the Lab, then clicked the coffee on before she trotted upstairs and into her own bedroom. “Two bathrooms, no waiting,” she told her reflection as she entered hers, splashing water on her face, more to wake her up than anything else, and scrubbing her teeth industriously.
One of the nicer things about the condo was the amount of space they both had, she reflected. She’d grown up in such a big house, with a lot of people around, and Dar had grown up just the opposite, but they both needed and appreciated the room to get away a little and be alone sometimes.
Red Sky At Morning 147
Which made her comment to Dar seem really odd, if she thought about it. But Dar had liked the idea of traveling around together, so maybe it wasn’t so weird after all.
Of course, showers, now... Kerry grinned at the rumpled, rakish-looking figure gazing back at her. Showers they liked to take together.
“Hey, scruffy, time for a haircut.” She pointed at her reflection, before she turned and went to her closet, bound on selecting her clothing for the day.
DAR SETTLED HER sunglasses more firmly as she headed from the parking lot into the staff building. She was dressed in her favorite pair of worn jeans and a Navy sweatshirt, in deference to the cooler weather that had rolled in overnight.
The Marine at the door gave her a friendly nod and opened the portal for her. “Good morning, ma’am.”
“Morning,” Dar replied politely. She took the stairs two at a time and ducked around the upper hall doors, glancing around for any sign of her glowering nemesis. “Eh...maybe I’ll get lucky for a change.”
She made it into the network hardware room and put her case down, then glanced around at the walls full of telecommunications punch downs. With a sigh, she pulled out her Palm Pilot and opened it, checking the circuit ID Mark had given her and comparing it to the rows of tags hanging from the blocks.
“Ah. There you are.” Dar pulled a tool from her briefcase and studied the network bridges, consulting her Pilot for the network node the base had assigned her to. Her brow creased, and she ran a finger lightly down the massive hub, curious about the design. For no reason she could readily identify, an entire segment was bridged off to a completely different hub.
One dark eyebrow lifted. “Hmm.” Dar followed the cables to the other hub and peeked in back of it. “Ethernet...Ethernet...Fast Ethernet...T3?” Dar looked closer. “Twelve network nodes sharing a T3?
What the hell is running on them?”
Really curious now, Dar pulled the network schematic she’d been given out of her briefcase and spread it out, running an experienced eye over the layout. After a few minutes, she folded up the paper and tucked it away, letting out a careful breath as she considered her options.
Then she walked over and copied down the circuit ID on the mysterious hub and pulled out her cell phone.
KERRY TOOK HER seat in the operations meeting, setting down her cup of tea and glancing around the table. No one met her eyes, and she let a wry grin touch her lips as she settled back in the leather 148 Melissa Good conference chair, extending her legs and crossing them while she rested her folded hands on the table surface.
Mark was the last to arrive, and he closed the door behind him before he took his own seat, the one directly across from hers. There was none of the usual bantering; everyone just sat quietly, eyes on their agendas, and waited.
“So.” Kerry broke the silence. “Heard any good rumors lately?” She waited for the embarrassed shuffling to quiet down. “That was pretty counterproductive, wasn’t it? I’m used to people having nothing better to do than speculate about my private life, but tying up the resources of the entire department for an entire morning was going a little overboard, don’t you think?”
Nobody knew what to say. They all just stared miserably at the table.“I’m not sure what’s more disappointing,” Kerry went on quietly.
“The fact that people who know me personally participated in it and thought so little of my integrity that they’d think I’d do something like that to Dar in front of the entire company...” She paused. “Or the fact that in a department full of intelligent people, only Dar’s admin had the sense to check the visitors log.”
Mark finally looked up, his jaw muscles visibly clenching as he met her gaze squarely. “I didn’t bother checking,” he stated. “I knew it was bullshit. The only thing I wanted to do was find out where it started and stop it,” he reflected. “I did. But the word flew out so fast, it went through my fingers.”
Kerry nodded. “I know. Thank you, Mark.” She saw some of the rigid tension in his shoulders relax a little. “Dar and I make a point of keeping our personal lives out of this building. I’d appreciate it if you all would do the same. Find something else to speculate about.”
Nods and murmurs of agreement went around the table.
“Okay.” Kerry was satisfied that she’d scared, embarrassed, and intimidated the entire room to the best of her capability. Dar, of course, would have done a much scarier job of it, but she felt she’d gotten her point across, and predicted her people would be having little meetings of their own in their areas as soon as the current session was over.
“Next item on the agenda. Enid, what’s the status on the new accounts in the Northwest?”
Never had there been so many people in one room so glad of a subject change. Enid eagerly sifted through her papers and started into her report.
THE SMALL OFFICE was very quiet. Only the faint sound of the laptop’s hard drive and the occasional soft click broke the silence. Dar had her head propped up on one fist as she reviewed the data flicking across the display.
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“What in the hell are they doing?” the CIO asked her computer, which morosely refused to answer. She scanned the data stream for the nth time, trying to figure out the pattern in the weird anomalies she’d been seeing for the last couple of hours.
The cell phone resting on the desk buzzed, and Dar answered it.
“Yeah?”
“Hey, Dar.” Mark’s voice sounded unusually quiet. “I tracked down that T3 ID for you. It’s a private subscriber circuit. Not BellSouth.”
“Huh.” Dar’s brow creased. “That’s even stranger. I could understand having a—” A thought occurred to her. “Hang on...I’ll call you back.” She hung up and retrieved a number from the cell phone memory, then dialed it.
It rang twice, then was answered. “Gerry?”
“Ah, Dar!” Gerald Easton’s voice sounded cheerful. “I was just thinking of you.”
“Someone send you a memo?” Dar hazarded a guess.
The military man chuckled. “Eh...heard from old Jeff, as a matter of fact. He’s thrilled to have you down there, Dar.”
Dar felt a half grin forming. “He’s the only one, Gerry. I’m not a popular person down here. Listen, is t
here anything black here?”
There was a momentary silence. “Eh,” Easton grunted. “Odd question.”
“Odd because it’s yes, or because it’s no?” Dar was conscious of the cellular connection, which could be monitored. “I don’t want details, Gerry, just if there is or isn’t.”
“Hold on a minute.” Easton’s voice had become crisp. It was replaced with hold music, which Dar suffered through, having an innate dislike for the song Sleigh Ride. It cut off thankfully on the third go-round, replaced by a rustle and a clearing of Gerry’s throat. “Ah, Dar?”
“Mm...still here.” Dar sketched a squirrel on her pad.
“I just checked, and no, we’ve got nothing dark there.” Gerry paused. “Nothing even remotely gray, as a matter of fact.”
Dar scowled, and put fangs on the squirrel. “Damn.” She exhaled.
“Okay, thanks, Gerry. I’ve got to hunt somewhere else for answers.”
“Problems?” The cautious question came back.
“Things that aren’t making sense,” Dar replied. “I hate that.”
A chuckle came through the line. “As well I remember. If you need any more information, Dar, get in touch, eh?”
“I will.” Dar hung up the cell phone and reviewed the data she had on her screen. “Okay.” She called up a new e-mail, clipped and pasted from the analyzer program into it, added notes, and sent it on its way.
“Let’s see what Mark can dig up about who bought that nice big hub that mysteriously connects to someone else’s network from inside a supposedly secure building.”
150 Melissa Good Then she set up her transfer program and tapped into the base’s network, parsing all of its traffic and sending a running dump to her ops center in Miami. The big boxes there would digest the information and run her custom-designed systems analysis programs on it. That code would tell her if her gut instinct was right and there was something weird going on, or if she was just seeing spiders in the shadows.
Dar leaned back in her wooden chair and folded her arms as the data transfer kicked in. She looked up as a light knock sounded at the door. “Yes?”
Chuckie stuck his head inside the room. “Hey there, old buddy.
Can I interest you in some lunch?”
Dar smiled easily. “Sure.” She set her passwords and locked the laptop down, then stood up and joined Chuckie at the door. “You want to go downstairs or off base?” she asked. “I kind of have an itch for conch fritters.”
“You’re on,” Chuckie agreed happily. “I’ve been buried up to my butt in status reports all day. I’ve got ten new recruits coming from this class, and boy howdy, I hope those little suckers don’t sink the boat before we clear international waters.” He put a hand on Dar’s back and guided her down the hall. “Dad says you plan on doing a checkout on the training process here, that right?”
“Right,” Dar answered. “That’s what Gerry was griping about from here mostly—results on the folks they kick out of here being substandard.” She dropped down the stairs with Chuckie at her side.
“He wants to know why, and frankly, so do I.”
“For real?” Chuckie held the door at the bottom of the hall open for her, then followed her out and into the cool, somewhat damp air.
“Yeah.” Dar pulled her keys out of her pocket and headed for the Lexus. “From a management perspective, bad performance usually only has one of a couple sources.” She opened the doors and they got in, then she continued her lecture, to which Chuckie listened with interest.
“Either your talent pool is empty, your processes are defective, or there’s a motivation structure in place that doesn’t match what your performance objectives are.”
Chuckie folded his arms over his chest and eyed her. “Can we talk about football or something? I didn’t get three words out of five in that last paragraph.”
Dar chuckled as she pulled out of the base parking lot and sent the Lexus in search of a scrungy crab shack. “Sorry.” She recomposed her thoughts. “Your recruits suck, the instructors don’t know what the hell they’re doing, or someone’s being paid to just churn out bodies regardless of whether they know what end of a broom to grab hold of.”
“Ah.” Chuckie considered this thoughtfully. “How are you going to figure out which one it is?”
How indeed? Dar pulled into an unpaved parking lot and stopped Red Sky At Morning 151
the Lexus. “I’m not sure yet,” she admitted. “I’ve got a program sucking everything down into one of our big processors, and it’s going to sort the data out for me. I’ll review it and make a plan based on what I find.”
“Okay.” Chuckie opened the door to the crab shack and they entered, going from the bright light outside into a somewhat dim, weathered wooden interior graced with trestle tables, benches, and several neon bar signs on the wall. “Howdy, Red.”
The burly, bearded man with more tattoos than seemed safe waved at him. “Hey, Chuck. Whoa, you moved up in the world, didn’cha?” His eyes flicked over Dar with genial approval. “C’mon in, sweet thing.”
Chuckie, to give him credit, winced.
Dar dropped her jacket onto the nearest trestle table and sauntered over to the man, leaning on the counter across from him and tipping her sunglasses down to give him a better look. After a moment, she sighed.
“You are still as butt ugly as you were in high school, you know that, August?”
The man’s eyes widened. “Whothefuckareyou?”
“Someone you ain’t seen in fifteen years,” Dar drawled back. “You want to put us up two baskets of fritters and burgers, so at least we’ll get something out of this conversation?”
The man scratched his jaw and tilted his head, then reached over and pulled Dar’s sunglasses all the way off. He leaned closer. “Oh shit.”
He started laughing. “It’s Dar.” He let the glasses drop to the counter.
“I’ll be a son of a bitch.”
Dar scooped up her shades. “You’re damn lucky I’m not nearly as much of a hardass as I used to be, Augie. That crack would have gotten you a broken nose once upon a time.” She relaxed into a smile as Chuckie decided it was safe to approach and came up next to her.
“Yeah, you’re so mellow now,” Chuckie commented. “Remind me of that again when I bitch about how sore I am from that little stunt we pulled the other night.”
“Irene!” August hollered behind him. “Two burgers, two fritters, okay?” He faced forward again. “Dar, man, it’s such a trip to see you. It has been forever and gone, ain’t it?” He pointed to the table. “Siddown.
I was just gonna have some lunch myself. We were busier than all get-out before, but it slowed down some.”
Dar took a seat on the worn wooden bench as her two friends did the same. She rested her elbows on the surface and exhaled, allowing a bittersweet sense of familiarity to wash over her. August’s father had owned the shack during her younger years, and she’d spent many hours hunched over the uneven tables, talking crap and swallowing enough fried fish and greasy burgers to have easily killed off anyone with a more sensitive digestive system.
Her nose twitched as she detected the scent of the spicy fritter batter cooking, and she smiled, glad—for the moment—to know that not everything had changed.
152 Melissa Good
“Still workin’ with that computer shit, huh, Dar?” Augie asked.
Oh yeah. “Yep,” Dar admitted. “Same shit.”
“MS. KERRY?” MAYTE’S voice crackled through the intercom.
“Señor Mark is here.”
Kerry finished typing her last sentence and flexed her hands, making the joints crack slightly. “Great. Send him this way, Mayte.” She sat back and waited as her door opened and Mark entered. “Hi.”
“Hi.” Mark closed the door and crossed the carpeted floor, taking a seat in one of Kerry’s visitor’s chairs. “Listen, I...um—”
“Mark, it’s okay,” Kerry interrupted him gently. “I’m over it.”
The MIS chief blinked. “Oh.” He sat back and let his hands rest on his thighs. “You know the whole staff’s been walking around in a blue funk since the meeting, right?”
“I heard.” Kerry ran her fingers through her hair and riffled it, stifling a yawn as she did so. “Jesus, it’s not like I was that wacko, was I? I’ve heard Dar go off. I know I’m not in her league.”
“Nah,” Mark agreed. “It’s worse with you, though, because you’re always so nice. When you get postal, it makes everyone’s hair stand on end.” He gave Kerry an apologetic look. “No offense.”
“None taken.” Kerry smiled. “I talked to Mariana.” She shifted the topic neatly. “She’s agreed to let me handle whatever we decide to do with Brent.”
“Urm.” Mark rubbed his jaw, darkened with stubble now that the day was almost ended. “I talked to him a little. He’s way out there, Kerry.” He shook his head. “I can’t figure out if it’s just that he had a...uh, I mean, if...”
Kerry leaned forward. “I didn’t think he was serious until after I met you both in the ops center that time and Dar told me that he’d just finished asking her if I was seeing anyone.” She propped her head up on one fist. “I thought that was pretty darn oblivious of him, you know?”
Mark waggled his hand. “He’s pretty focused.”
“So is his problem that I’m not interested, or is his problem why I’m not interested?”
“Why,” Mark said bluntly. “His dad’s a Southern Baptist minister who was tossed out of the local group for advocating the castration of gay guys and the incarceration of anyone who didn’t think we should swap the Bill of Rights for the Bible.”
Kerry sighed.
“It sucks, you know? He’s a good tech, and not a half-bad guy if you don’t mind the freaking nerdiness.” Mark shook his head. “I talked to him just before I came in here, and he just can’t see why everyone doesn’t feel the same way he does.”
“Okay.” Kerry scrubbed her face. “I’d like to talk to him,” she said.
“Can you set up a time tomorrow morning? Make it early, preferably Red Sky At Morning 153
before I have to sit in on the marketing projection session.”