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.