On Broken Wings

by Francis Porretto

  Her agitation subsided, but she continued to avoid his gaze.

  "Would you like to talk about the contract, Chris? I wrote the important parts, so I'm sure I can explain anything you found unclear."

  She bit her lip. "Does Rolf have a contract like this?"

  Orloff had expected any question but that one. "No, why?"

  "You said he and I were a spectacular team. I'm not saying I'd be worthless without him, but a lot of what you've seen me do so far would have been a lot harder that way."

  She waited for him to respond, her face as open and guileless as a newborn's.

  ***

  Simulation's files were missing from both of Berglund's backup tapes. There was no trace of any of them. Svenson wanted to scream, to smash the terminal screen with his fist, to batter Berglund into a giant quivering bruise.

  "How could you have let this happen, Carey?" He gaped in agonized appeal at the man whose incompetence might just have ended Svenson's career.

  The elderly SysAdmin shook his head. "I've been doing things this way for a long time, Rolf. Nobody ever had a problem with it before."

  We never had a disk fault like this before.

  "You just copy the volume onto both tapes every Monday? With no validity check? You don't keep a grandfather backup?"

  Berglund shook his head again. "Nope. Never have. Like I said, nobody ever complained before."

  "Did you ever tell anyone how you were doing backup, you semiconscious moron?" Svenson rose from Berglund's desk chair and backed him up against his own cubicle wall, screaming into his face. "This isn't a backup procedure, it's a recipe for disaster!"

  The SysAdmin's face remained doughy and slack. He had not understood, and did not want to understand, and no words nor effort of Svenson's would reach him.

  Svenson reached behind him, grabbed the backrest of Berglund's desk chair, and yanked it forward. "Sit, Carey."

  Still uncomprehending, Berglund sat.

  Svenson turned to the SysAdmin's terminal. He powered it down, reached behind it, popped out the fuse, and pocketed it.

  "You're relieved of all your duties, effective immediately. I know they'll never fire you, you've been here longer than the building has, but at least I can stop you from doing any more harm. I'm going to talk to Morrison and Orloff, tell them what happened. They'll find you some work that's more compatible with your demonstrated abilities. Sifting the fly shit out of pepper, maybe."

  "Now, wait a minute, Rolf -- "

  "Shut up, Carey. I rank you by two grades." Svenson took a deep breath. "If I see you stroking a keyboard anywhere in this building, I swear to God I'll break all your fingers." He grabbed the useless backup tapes from the surface of Berglund's desk and stalked back down the corridor.

  ***

  "What are you saying to me, Christine?"

  She shrugged. "Well, just that, to make this a sure thing for the company," she said, waving the contract, "you'll have to give Rolf one too. Otherwise I could never guarantee that I could keep up the way I've been going."

  Doesn't she have any idea of what I'm talking about?

  "Chris, I don't think your performance is dependent on your team leader. Rolf doesn't either. From the way you hit the ground running and took off from there, I expect you could have worked all alone and produced the same results."

  The young woman shook her head. "I have to disagree with you, Dick. Rolf's guidance is more important to what you see in me than I could possibly explain to you. And if he's not guaranteed to be around, then I can't bring myself to take your offer."

  Orloff began to feel nervous. "Chris, you aren't examining other possibilities, are you?" God forbid. If I let her get away, the VP will have my head on a pole.

  She shook her head gently. "No, I'm not. I'll keep on going the way I've been. You don't need to lock me in with a contract. I'm happy here."

  He drew some relief from that, although the disappointment underneath was still keen. Getting this young prize to commit to OA for ten years would have been the coup of his career.

  "Well, I'm happy to hear that, at least. But let's leave it this way. This contract has been offered to you, by me as an officer of Onteora Aviation, and the offer will stay open until you accept it or I withdraw it. I guarantee you I won't withdraw it for at least thirty days. Meanwhile, keep it in mind that we value you that much, we want you that much, and we'd love that much to make you a long term member of the family. Okay?" He produced his best smile.

  She returned it with interest. "Okay."

  They rose, and he saw her to the door.

  "I thought I was a hard man to say no to, Chris."

  Her smile acquired an impish tinge. "You are," she said, and was gone.

  ***

  When Christine made it back to her cubicle, she found Rolf there, hunched over in her guest chair as if he were trying to fight off nausea. Boomer stood beside him, his head in Svenson's lap.

  Svenson straightened up as she entered. She had never seen a grown man look that frightened before.

  "What's up, Rolf? Is the clutter sim out of tolerance?"

  "It's all gone," he whispered.

  "What?"

  "All our development files. Everything we've done for six months and a lot from before that. All your work. All my work. There was a disk fault, and it wiped our asses."

  "Well, what about the backup tapes?"

  "Destroyed." He started to bend double again. She dropped to a squat, grabbed him by the shoulders, and pushed him back to an upright posture. Boomer whimpered and stepped back.

  "There's no backup at all?"

  "Nothing." His shoulders trembled. "That idiot Berglund copied the ruined disk image over the only backups at seven this morning. He didn't even do a validity check first."

  Holy shit!

  Stay calm, Christine.

  All right, Nag, I hear you. Any other pearls of advice?

  Not at the moment, no.

  Then get out of the way and let me cope with the problem in front of me. I won't be able to do it with you whispering in my ear.

  The Nag vanished. Christine gave her stricken supervisor a gentle shake.

  "Don't fold up on me, Rolf. First, we have to start checking places we might expect to find secondary copies of the program files, even old ones that would have to be revised and debugged again. Second, we have to make a list of everything we haven't been able to replace. Third, we have to sit with Morrison and Arkham and draw up a contingency plan for how we're going to cope with the customer demo if we can't find our stuff. And we have to get started right now."

  His expression went from hopeless despair to desperate hope. "You think we might be able to resurrect it?"

  "Won't know until we try, Bubba. Now strap your spine back on and help me."

  She turned, slithered into her desk chair and powered up her computer. He nudged Boomer out of the way and dragged the guest chair over to sit beside her. She began to script an exhaustive search of the development servers and every private disk owned by any member of the Simulation Group. Her fingers flew over the keys as she muttered under her breath.

  "Thanks, Chris."

  "Huh?" She ceased to type and turned to Rolf. "What for?"

  The cords in his neck clenched. "For being you."

  She grinned. "You haven't gotten the bill yet."

  "Oh, okay, what do I owe you?"

  She turned back to the screen. "I'll think about it."

  ====

  Chapter 44

  There were no smiles in Roger Morrison's office that afternoon. Morrison's usual forced joviality was nowhere in evidence. He appeared genuinely worried for the first time since Svenson met him. Christine looked grim and more than a little angry. The set of her shoulders suggested that she was ready to leap at someone, given a good enough excuse. Svenson could imagine what his own face looked like.

  Terry Arkham looked strange: not happy, but there was no strain or worry evident in his expression. He looked pok
er-faced, as if he were trying to keep his emotions to himself.

  He's got to be worried. He's got more to lose than anyone else here.

  "So you managed to recover how much?" asked Morrison.

  "About thirty percent of the program, but don't go by that. They're old files from unreliable sources, mostly dated well before we moved our work to the central server and put it under control. It'll help, but we'll have to review and possibly revise all of it before we can really say we've reclaimed what it represents." Svenson thought a moment. "Best guess, I'd say we've got eighty percent of the job to do over."

  Morrison's eyes flicked to Christine. She said nothing.

  "Do you have a rough estimate of how many lines of code you'll have to recreate to rebuild the simulator?"

  Svenson nodded. "Between thirty-five and forty thousand."

  Morrison's lips thinned. "What are the odds?"

  Before Svenson could speak, Arkham cut in. "Are you crazy, Roger? Sven budgeted twenty-two man-months for that effort. He's got five people and two weeks. Not even Superman could do it."

  Thanks, Terry. As if I needed another reason to kill myself.

  "We can do it," said Christine.

  All three men turned toward her. Svenson's heart started to crawl up his windpipe.

  Chris, do you mean what you're saying? Or is this just a diversion, to take the pressure off me for a moment?

  "I mean it," she said. "We have thirteen days. I know that program inside and out. Nearly half the effort went into the user interface and the automatic controls, and we can exclude that. We can reproduce maybe eighty-five percent of the working parts if we leave out the chrome plating. One of us will have to run the simulator manually during the demo, and Terry might have to tailor his demo a little to avoid a few holes, but we can do it."

  Morrison stared at her. Svenson was afraid to speak.

  "So Superman couldn't do it, but Supergirl's going to swoop in and save the day." Arkham was shaking his head as if he hadn't expected even a Simulation engineer to make so foolish a statement.

  "Got a better idea, Terry?" Christine snarled. The three men sat up straight.

  "I've got a real good idea that you're grandstanding, toots, 'cause no one in his right mind could expect you to pull it off." Arkham's sneer carried decades of contempt. "No matter what comes out of this, even if I and my project go down in fucking flames, you'll be remembered for your heroic gesture in a lost cause."

  Christine's face lit with fury. Morrison headed off her riposte.

  "Can it, Terry, you're out of line. Chris, I hate to say it, but he's right. You don't have a chance, not if you were to put in a twenty-four hour shift from now till the demo."

  Christine stood, eyes blazing.

  "Enough of this. Rolf and I are going back to my cubicle right now, and we're going to get started. By the end of the day -- I mean, by midnight -- you'll have a list of the functionality we think we can restore by demo time. Then it will be your job to start cutting back the demo to miss the missing parts. If anyone comes up with a better plan, you know where we'll be." She turned to Svenson. "Come on, Rolf. We've got work."

  Svenson rose and followed Christine out of Morrison's office. Morrison appeared paralyzed. Terry Arkham's face was contorted in frustration and anger, as if the effort Christine had just promised were the result he'd wanted to avoid.

  When Morrison's door had closed behind him, Christine said, "Get all the system block diagrams and any data-flow diagrams we saved from the initial pitch to the customer. I'm going to start sketching out the approach."

  Svenson nodded. "Okay, Chris."

  She clasped his upper arm and squeezed. The strength of her grip surprised him. "We're going to do it, Rolf. I promise you we will."

  "I believe you." The strange thing was that he did, but he was more afraid than ever.

  ***

  "Are you going to take that from her?" Arkham demanded.

  Morrison turned toward the team leader.

  "Take what, Terry? An all-stops-out effort when we need it most?"

  Arkham sputtered.

  "Can it, Terry. She might not be able to do it. Myself, I don't think she can. But she's going to try. And you've got a problem with that? When it's your project and your future on the line? What am I missing here?"

  The team leader collected himself and fell silent. Morrison looked at his watch. Resolve built inside him. "It's three-fifteen. You've got work to do, too. Go review your demo plan, find ways to drop pieces if you can, reduce the functionality you'll need from the simulator, but without making it an arm-waving exercise. Bring me a draft by seven." Morrison pulled out his wallet and riffled through his credit cards. "We'll have dinner in here."

  "You're ordering dinner in for us?"

  Morrison nodded. "From the best restaurant I can find that will deliver. They're putting it all on the line for us, Terry. Don't you think a little appreciation is in order?" He picked up the phone and started to dial. "I wonder what Boomer likes to eat?"

  ***

  Morrison summoned them back to his office at seven PM precisely. The engineers arrived to find his conference table covered by a white tablecloth, with four place settings upon it. Fresh green salads and generous portions of coq au vin with side dishes of rice pilaf and roasted zucchini awaited them. A large loaf of fresh French bread and a salver of butter stood at the center. Cans of soda stood incongruously next to the four gourmet meals.

  Morrison shrugged and grinned. "Federal contractor. No alcohol allowed, remember?"

  For the first time that day, Rolf Svenson laughed. "You did okay, Boss. Take it from me. Where'd you get all this?"

  "Grucci's Gardens."

  "Oh, boy," breathed Christine.

  They finished their meals before anyone spoke.

  "How does it look?" Morrison asked.

  Svenson looked toward Christine, and she nodded at him. "It's possible, Roger. It'll be thirteen days of hell, but we can do it, given that there are no further acts of God to cope with." He sipped at his cola. "I had private copies of all the early data-flow diagrams, they're still applicable, and Chris has convinced me that we can code from them. Can you shield us while we do it?"

  The project director looked uneasy. "What do you mean?"

  "We can't afford any distractions. This is going to require perfect concentration for every second of the next thirteen days."

  "Oh." Morrison relaxed. "That's a given. You really think you can do it? I shouldn't start backing and filling with the customer, just in case?"

  "We can do it," said Christine. She wiped her mouth and pushed away her plate. "That was delicious, Roger. Thank you."

  "De nada, cutie." The endearment plainly startled Christine. She and Morrison grinned at one another. Svenson's hopes rose inside him.

  If we survive this, it could wind up being the best thing that's ever happened to this department.

  "What about your end, Terry?"

  "Well, I can't cut a lot out of the demo." The Tactical team leader gestured his helplessness. "The customer asked for most of it, and I have two hours to fill. Realistically, there are only about three minor features I can afford to pass over. If I try that with any of the major stuff, the customer will simply ask to see it, and we'll be worse off than before."

  Svenson's neck hair prickled at Arkham's unconcern. Apparently, Morrison was similarly affected.

  "Are you fully on board with us, Terry? This is for your benefit, you know."

  Arkham recognized the warning shot. "Of course, Roger, but you can't expect me to eviscerate -- "

  "I do expect you to do whatever you can short of perjury to make this work out. And I expect you to go over your demo plan a second time, tonight, and squeeze more out of it than two or three minor features. There are a lot of ways to fill two hours. If you need help, say so."

  Morrison's tone was soft, but the words and his countenance were not. The Tactical software team leader turned pale.

  Te
rry didn't expect that. Roger's been in his corner for so long, he's forgotten what it's like not to get automatic approval for all his whims.

  "Shit, Roger, you know I'll give it my best." It was little short of a whine.

  The project director let that monitory gaze rest on Arkham a moment longer, then pushed his chair back from the table, stood and rubbed his midsection.

  "Your meals are on me until this is over, gang. Lunch at one, dinner at seven. Be here on time, because it's all going to be hot and tasty." He began to clear the table.

  "I have to go out and get something for Boomer," Christine said.

  Morrison grinned. "No, you don't." He reached under the table and picked up a foil bag that had lain there unseen.

  "What's in there?"

  Morrison mooed.

  Svenson erupted in laughter.

  ***

  "So how do we do this, Chris? You're the one with all the confidence."

  She shrugged. "We just do it, that's all. You've got the requirements and the high-level design right there. There's enough of the detailed design in the data-flow diagrams that I can interpolate the rest as I go." She glanced down at Boomer. The Newfoundland was licking his chops, the very portrait of canine contentment. "I'd better bring in a bag of his regular dog food. I don't want him to get used to Grucci's finest."

  Svenson grinned. "Sounds right to me. Okay, where and when do we start? Do you want to take the rest of the night off?"

  "Hell, no. We go till we drop. Pull the executive synopsis out of that pile and give it here."

  He did. She studied the diagram and the few paragraphs of accompanying prose for a few seconds, then turned toward her monitor and laid the document next to her keyboard.