by Melissa Good
And no air conditioning. Dar had given them both a smile, then simply taken off her denim overshirt, leaving her comfortable in a very light tank top as she sat down and kept them standing there, answering questions in their full uniforms until they’d both turned red as beets 84 Melissa Good and started sweating.
Dar chuckled to herself and glanced out the window, watching a training group go through an obstacle course, clawing their way up a tall wooden wall and flipping over with strained grunts she could hear all the way where she was sitting. It wasn’t too different from when she and the rest of the base brats used to sneak over after dinner and try the course themselves, ending up with splinters and cuts as they struggled along.
She remembered the first time she’d made it all the way through, at age fourteen. Almost without a scratch until she came to the last hurdle, the rope ladder she’d swarmed up, sweating and almost yelling with exultation as she grabbed the top and flung herself over.
Completely forgetting the ditch on the other side. Ow. Dar winced, even all these years later, and reached down to rub her ankle, which she’d twisted so badly she almost didn’t make it home. Fortunately, her daddy had spotted her limping down the sidewalk and pulled over in their sturdy pickup halfway there.
Andrew Robert’s rugged, crew-cut head poked out the window of the pickup. “What in the hell happened t’you, young lady?”
Dar grabbed the doorframe gratefully and hung on, catching her breath.
“Nothin’...I just fell offa something.”
Andrew leaned closer. “Were you over at that monkey pit?” he accused.
Dar chewed her lip. Lying to her father was never a good idea. She’d learned that the hard way. “Yeah.”
“After I told you not to go there?” The low growl made her flinch.
“Yeah.” She looked back up into his face. “Got through this time.” She wasn’t able to help grinning, just a little, but she stopped at the scowl on his face. “You are just a pile of trouble, ain’tcha, Paladar?” Andrew shook his head. “Git your ass into this here truck.”
So she did, limping around the front and getting in on the other side, glad of the chance to sit down and get off her aching ankle, as he pulled away from the curb and started down their street. It took her a moment to realize it when he passed the house and kept going, and she gave him a startled look.
“Where’re we going?”
“Git you some ice for that leg and some water to wash the mud off yer face,” her father told her. “’Cause I ain’t bringing you in the house looking like that, little girl. Your mother’d kill me.”
Dar scowled and looked down at her mud-stained hands, her momentary happiness fading. They’d only recently returned to Florida, and the adjustment back had been tough for her. Friends were very few and far between, and Andrew was facing another six-month tour in just a few weeks.
“’Sides...you can’t eat ice cream with all that dirt down there,” Andrew muttered.
Dar looked at him sideways.
Red Sky At Morning 85
“Figure anyone stubborn enough to get through that monkey pit deserves an ice cream cone, don’t you?” Andrew stopped at a stop sign and turned, reaching over and wiping a bit of mud off Dar’s cheek. “I know I went and got me one first time I got my butt through it.” He patted her face. “Good job, Dardar. That’s a tough thing you done.”
Dar smiled so hard it hurt, making her forget her ankle completely.
“Thanks, Daddy.”
Hmm. Dar licked her lips thoughtfully. Ice cream. Now there’s a thought. She decided to take a side trip during lunch, and resettled her attention on the report she held. The date was current—as of two weeks ago, as she’d thought—but the name of the base commander she knew now was wrong.
So what else was wrong, and why? Dar switched to the laptop and typed in a query. It came back, this time with the correct information.
Was the reporting that far behind, and she just got caught in the lag?
She checked another bit of data and frowned. Okay, that came up all right now, too. So maybe she did get caught between updates. “All right, let me just run these suckers all over again.” She typed in a request and watched a long bar start across her screen. “Note to self. Self, upgrade this damn base to 100 Base-T before you do anything else. Jesus. At ten I could walk to the blasted server and get this faster.”
Her cell phone buzzed and she flipped it open. “Yeah?”
“Morning, boss.” Mark’s voice came through. “You left me a voice mail to call ya, so here I am.”
“I need a T1.” Dar flipped through another set of reports as she talked. “Even a fractional would do if we can’t get a full. I’m gonna need the big boxes to run the specs on this place, and they don’t have a pipe big enough for me to hook into.”
“Hang on. I’m GPSing you,” Mark muttered. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, shut up. Stop with the error messages, willya...Ah, shit, Dar. You’re in bumfuck.”
“I am not,” Dar protested.
“You most certainly the heck are, boss. The nearest CO to you is freaking Marathon,” Mark replied. “I’d have to piggyback on the National Defense circuits. BellSouth’s not gonna go for it, that’s for sure. They don’t have crap anywhere in the area.” He paused. “What in the hell are you doing out there in the scrub, anyway?”
Dar felt stung; irrationally, she realized, but stung nonetheless.
“I’m on a project out at the Naval base here,” she answered slowly. “The one I grew up on.”
There was a very awkward silence on the phone. “Uh...sorry, Dar,”
Mark finally stuttered. “I didn’t mean to dis the place.”
Dar sighed. “It’s okay.” She glanced around. “It is bumfuck.”
“Well, it must be a pretty cool slice of bumfuck if you’re from there,” Mark rallied gamely. “But I gotta tell you, even if I cross my legs 86 Melissa Good and squeeze, I can’t really imagine you as a kid.”
No. Dar tossed the report onto the desk. “That’s probably a good thing,” she told her MIS chief. “When can I get my T1?”
A silence filled with clicking followed. “Best I can do is Thursday.”
Dar’s eyebrows lifted. “After all that griping? You’re a damn fraud, Mark.”
Mark chuckled softly. “Yeah, well, I was checking the commercial availability; I went back and checked the governmental. They’ve got a big POP not far from there. We can zap in a pipe there. I’ll ship you down a Cisco and a mini hub.”
“Good,” Dar responded. “When it gets a completion, I want to hook up and suck everything in their main systems out and over to the mainframes. I ran an analysis on my laptop, but there’s something not jibing, and I don’t have the CPU cycles to rip it apart.”
“Sounds good to me. Oh, hey.” Mark’s voice altered and warmed.
“I was just talking to the big kahuna.”
“The big kahuna who nearly got my ass nailed to the table in a marketing meeting? That big kahuna?” Kerry’s voice echoed through the circuit. “Gimme that phone.” There was a fumbling noise. “Paladar Katherine Roberts.”
“Uh-oh.” Dar started laughing. “You sound like my mother.”
“You are so busted.” Kerry joined her in laughter. “Oh my God, Dar...you knocked me for a such a loop in that meeting. How’s it going?”
“Eh.” Dar reviewed the report now running on the laptop’s screen.
“All right, I guess. There’s so much to do, I can’t decide where to start.”
She sent the report to print. “How’s it going there?”
“Well,” Kerry exhaled, an audible rushing sound, “I’ve got a session with Jose in about an hour. Wish me luck.” She perched on Mark’s desk and winked at him, “Other than that, it’s been fine, with the slight exception of me being rendered speechless earlier. What was that all about?”
“Someone’s initials,” Dar replied succinctly.
Kerry smiled. “Oh,” she murmured. “
Yeah. I don’t know what got into me. I got to use the Leatherman you got me, though.” She’d circled the small house and tried to imagine her lover and her family living in it, succeeding only when she pictured Dar out on their little island—in her scruffy cutoffs. “Well, I’ve got to get to my meeting. Here’s Mark back. See you later at home?”
“You bet.”
Kerry handed the phone back and stood, picking up the handful of requisitions she’d come to collect. She gave Mark a pat on the back and walked through the MIS command center with its semicircular desks and racks of seriously blinking lights. Just as she hit the door an alarm went off, and she paused, looking back over her shoulder to where two techs were scrambling toward a monitor. “What is it?”
Red Sky At Morning 87
“Shit.” One tech slapped buttons, then glanced up. “Sorry, ma’am.”
Kerry returned to the desk and peered over it. “What’s going on?”
“Crap...crap...crap...we just lost the Southeast.” The other tech was furiously rattling his keyboard, and now Mark approached, leaning over them. “Mark, something big just took a dump over Georgia.” He looked at Kerry. “You know what that means.”
Kerry grinned cheerfully. “Hot darn. It means I get to cancel my meeting.” She set her papers down and rolled her sleeves up.
“Okay...Mark, you start checking the access routers; I’ll call BellSouth.”
DAR MADE HER way through the labyrinth of corridors and pushed open Commander Albert’s door without ceremony or even a knock. She found him just getting off a call, and she paused, giving him a look. “You wanted a conference?”
Albert took in a breath visibly and released it. “Okay, look.” He held out both hands. “Can I raise a truce pennant here?”
’Bout goddamned time. Dar folded her arms, but relaxed her posture at the same time. “Depends on what your terms are,” she said. “This can be just as tough as you want it to be.”
“Okay.” The man sat down and motioned her to do the same.
“Look, Ms. Roberts, I really don’t mean to be such a bastard, but...” He paused.
“But I’m stomping all over your territory with spike heels,” Dar finished for him. “You think I don’t know that? Listen, Commander, if I were in your shoes, I’d be just as pissed off as you are, believe me.”
Albert relaxed a little. “Have you ever been? In my shoes?”
Dar considered the question. “Not really, no,” she admitted. “My company was taken over by ILS, but I was just a programmer then. I remember resenting the hell out of having to explain to clueless githeads what my code was, though.” She crossed an ankle over her knee. “So I do understand, but you need to understand that I’m not your enemy.”
He watched her closely. “You were hired to do this, I know that.”
Dar nodded. “That’s right. The brass is looking for two things. One, to make themselves look good by hiring the biggest, most well-known IS firm around to come in and evaluate them; and two, they’re wanting justification to spend billions in improving infrastructure. If it comes to a question, they point to our analysis, and it’s right there, in black and white.”
Albert grunted, his brows twitching in thought.
“So, do yourself a favor, Commander, just let me do what they’re paying me a fortune for, okay?” Dar said.
He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desk surface, clasping his hands together lightly. “All right, Ms. Roberts. I’m just going to get my butt chewed up one side and down the other if I don’t.”
88 Melissa Good He exhaled. “So, do you have everything you want? Lieutenant Perkins told me you were pulling down statistics most of the day.”
Dar got up and walked to the window, resting both hands against the sill and peering out the dusty panes. “That’s right.” She watched a squad of men carrying huge logs move past. “But I’ve got programs to analyze all that. I want to start looking at facilities, firsthand.” She turned, and faced him. “You can let me wander by myself, or give me someone who can answer questions.”
A faint grin crossed the commander’s face. “I think we can arrange for a guide, Ms. Roberts.” He hit a button on his desk. “I was anticipating the issue.” His voice got louder. “Send in Chief Daniel.”
After a moment the door opened, admitting a short, very stocky woman, her ginger hair peppered lightly with gray. She gave Dar a brief glance, then turned her attention to Albert. “Sir?”
“This is our Senior Operations Staff, CPO Daniel, Ms. Roberts.
She’s in charge of implementing and supervising all our overall processes.” He gave the newcomer a brief nod. “Chief, this is Ms.
Roberts. She’s here on orders from Washington to do an evaluation on us and recommend improvements,” the commander said pleasantly.
“Please take her where she wants to go and answer any questions.”
In her spare moments Dar often played a little mental game where she tried to match people up with what breed of dog they would be if they suddenly morphed before her eyes. She’d often amused herself in meetings by imagining Eleanor as an Afghan hound, discussing sales with Jose the sheepdog, for instance. She’d even drawn a sketch of it, which had sent Kerry into a fit of hysterics and made her leave the room.
The bulldog in a naval uniform gave Dar a once-over, then nodded briefly. “Yes, sir, I’ll be glad to do that. Would you like to start now, ma’am? It’s a big base.”
“Absolutely,” Dar responded, recognizing the aggressive stance with an internal sigh. “Let’s start where they come in. After you?” She gestured toward the door. “Thank you, Commander.”
“My pleasure.” Albert gave her a pleasant, albeit vicious smile.
“Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”
Dar followed the woman out of the office and organized her resources for this new challenge. Given how Albert had phrased her assignment, calculated to offend the petty officer as much as possible without actually coming out and accusing her of not doing her job, she had to wonder which one of them he disliked more.
She eyed the woman plowing along beside her.
“Would ma’am like to stop at Supply and pick up a pad and pencil?” Daniel asked suddenly. “I’m sure you’ll have notes to take.”
“No, thanks,” Dar replied mildly. “I usually work at a macro level.
I leave the micro details to the people who actually implement the designs.” Hmm. What would Kerry do? Dar sorted through her options.
Red Sky At Morning 89
“Look, Chief, I’ve got no intention of spending days wading through your attitude. Let’s go get a cup of coffee and get the fistfight out of the way, then maybe we can get something done.”
The petty officer stopped and turned and studied her with a ferocious intentness. She had a strong presence and an air of fierce competence that almost matched Dar’s own. “I don’t know what your real purpose is here, ma’am, but I’m not one of those data center fluffheads who wander around with printouts tucked up their butts all day. I have a job to do, and I do a damn good one. So, if you want to tell me what your agenda is, maybe I can save us both time and sweat.”
“Problem is, I don’t have one,” Dar replied. “So if you’re doing a good job, you’ve got nothing to worry about, right?”
“What makes you think you can walk in here and judge us?” Daniel moved a step closer. “You think I have an attitude? What did you expect, an outsider coming in here like this, walking into a world you can’t possibly understand?”
“Chief—”
“You think we don’t know what you people out there think of the military? You think it’s easy always getting that attitude from people who couldn’t last through a day of basic training, who think we’re a bunch of mindless idiots?” Daniel stabbed a finger at Dar. “Don’t talk to me about attitude, lady.”
Dar cocked her head. “You like the Navy, Chief?”
That threw the petty officer right off her
track. “What?”
“Do you like the Navy? You’re a career in, right?”
Warily, Daniel backed off a pace. “It’s a job,” she answered slowly.
“You take a lot of shit, but it’s like a family. I’ve gotten used to it.
Why?”
Unaccountably, Dar smiled. “You just gave me an answer to a question I’ve been asking myself since I was eighteen. Thanks.” A flock of “what ifs” took off and left her shoulders lighter. “You’re right, Chief. I am an outsider.” Now she met Chief Daniel’s eyes. “You need to choose whether you want me to be a hostile or a friendly one.”
They stared at each other in silence.
THE OCEAN ROLLED in nearby, a rhythmic shush and roar followed by a faint tinkle of shells. Dar and Kerry were sitting braced against a tree with their legs extended out on sand still holding the day’s warmth. Or, to be more precise, Dar was leaning against the tree and Kerry was leaning against Dar, seated between her lover’s legs in a blissfully comfortable sprawl.
“This was a good idea.” Kerry exhaled. “Glad you decided to meet me down here. I was so in the mood for that spicy lobster.”
“Even with the sand?” Dar picked up her bottle of root beer and took a swig of it. “Sure was better than what I’d have gotten at the base 90 Melissa Good if I’d stayed for dinner.”
“I bet.” Kerry picked up her own bottle and sipped from it. “It didn’t look like there’d be much gourmet food there, though that lunch was pretty good.”
“Mess on a whole wasn’t bad,” Dar agreed. “I think that’s why I never bothered learning to cook. It was easier just to go there and grab something, and then when I went to college, they had the cafeteria, so…” She shrugged. “Never got in the habit.”
“Mm.” Kerry studied the silver moonlight. “So, where did you get a taste for stone crabs, then?” She turned and regarded her partner curiously. “I’m pretty sure they didn’t serve them there, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one diving.”
“Ah.” Dar chuckled briefly. “Yeah.”
Kerry waited for her to continue, but the silence lengthened so she peeked back over her shoulder to see Dar looking quietly out at the sea.
