"Hey, Dar. Check it out. Email from your mother." Kerry reached out and gave her partner's sleeve a tug.

Dar straightened. "My mother?" She turned and stared at Kerry. "You got my mother to touch a computer?" She leaned over and peered at Kerry's laptop in disbelief. "No way."

"Yes way." Kerry grinned. "It's not a computer, though. Bellsouth has these little email keypads...so I talked her into getting one." She opened the mail. "That way we wouldn't end up having to run down to the marina if she opened a spam virus."

"Mm...good thinking." Dar peered at the mail. "How come she didn't send me one?" She frowned.

"Possibly because you wouldn't know the recipe for jambalaya," Kerry pointed out. "I don't know, maybe she did. Have you checked?"

Dar went back to her own machine, minimizing her network session and opening up her mail instead. She scanned the lines quickly, her eyes lighting up slightly as she spotted the new address. "Heh...got one." She clicked on it, then blinked. "But not from mom."

Kerry grinned a little, watching her partner lean closer to the screen, her head cocking to one side as she read. "Hey, Dar?" she asked after a few seconds. "Did some woman in a gray suit come in here complaining about me?"

Dar slowly turned her head and looked at Kerry. "Huh?"

"Never mind." Kerry waved her back to her screen. "Tell dad I say hi."

Hans looked between one and the other, grunting as an apparent enlightenment came to him. He pecked out a few keys, then pushed the machine back. "All right, my friend, it is time. Are you ready to try this child of ours?"

There was a long moment's silence.

"Dar?" Kerry reached over and touched her partner's leg, startling her a little from her intense concentration. "I think he's ready to test...you okay?"

"Um...yeah, fine." Dar seemed a bit embarrassed. "Sorry." She turned to Hans and spoke to him in German. "Ready to go?"

"Yes. I am ready. I will warn you, we have not tested this fully. If we put this in now and it does not work, I cannot back it out, and they will be crashed. Do you understand this?"

Dar nodded. "Go for it."

Kerry's eyes flicked between them, not understanding the words, but seeing by the shifts in Dar's body posture that something was about to happen.

"Are you sure?" Hans asked. "Do you not want to tell these people what we are doing?"

"And give them a chance to say no?" Dar leaned on both elbows. "You're the big shot programmer who's always perfect. You have confidence in your stuff? I've got confidence in mine," she said. "So do it, or admit you blew it."

Hans frowned at her seriously. "That is not fair," he muttered. "But I will hold up my end. If it fails, I will point at you and shrug my shoulders." He attacked his keyboard with a furious rattle.

"Is he doing something?" Kerry asked.

"Putting the new program in," Dar told her, watching her screen intently.

"In the middle of a production day?" Kerry protested. "Dar!" She half stood, caught by surprise. "What if we take them down!"

Dar set her filters, and waited, her hands flexing lightly over the keyboard. "I'll risk it. I'm not missing out on a carriage ride and dinner with you for this bunch of nits." She looked at Hans. "Now?"

With a finishing clatter, Hans touched one last key and lifted his hands. "It is done."

Kerry settled slowly back in her seat, holding her breath and crossing everything she could that her trust in Dar's judgment wouldn't fail her...fail both of them, in this most public of circumstances.

Only a few moments would tell the tale.

DAR KNEW SHE was taking a huge risk. In fact, she knew having Hans replace the running program in the middle of the day was more than a risk, it was a shockingly disruptive action, which she'd just ordered him to do.

However, what she'd told Kerry was absolutely true. She had no intention of sitting around in this glass box until after hours just to dump the program when it was least inconvenient to Godson. He was inconveniencing her by having her be here, and she was doing him a favor. Besides, as her note from her father had reminded her--do it, and ask forgiveness later.

Dar opened her network session wide and watched both of her routers with a hawk-like intensity. She saw the data stream abruptly stop, the packets trickling to absolutely nothing but management traffic. "Program's restarting."

"Yah." Hans folded his arms across his chest. "All the sessions went to the bathroom," he said. "They will not be happy, that is for sure."

Kerry laid her hands on the table, drumming its surface softly with her thumbs. She could sense the building tension, and after a moment she pushed herself to her feet and went to stand behind Dar's chair. She laid her hand on her partner's back, giving the skin under the cotton shirt a little friendly scratch before she focused her attention on the screen in front of her.

Dar didn't like to be hovered over, but Kerry felt some of the stiffness in her back relax at Kerry's touch and knew she understood the gesture of support. She watched Dar's fingers flicker over the keys, the gentle spatter of keystrokes almost rhythmic as the patterns were put in place waiting for the data stream to return. "Should it take that long to restore?" she muttered softly.

"I don't know," Dar replied. "Hans..." she added in German. "Do you have to restart the servers?"

"I should not have to."

"Want to check? I don't see sessions coming up."

With an aggrieved sigh, the German programmer bent over his laptop again, just as the door opened and Jason Meyer entered.

"What's going on? Did you take us down?" he snapped. "I've got everyone in the building calling me."

Dar barely glanced up. "You wanted it fixed ASAP," she said. "We try to give the customer what they want."

"Are you insane? How could you do that?" Meyer said. "It's the middle of the business day! Stop whatever you're doing right now!"

"Hans?" Dar ignored the red faced executive.

"Must you always be correct?" Hans replied in a disgusted tone. "They are coming up at this moment."

Meyer advanced on them, and Kerry reacted instinctively to intercept him, circling Dar's chair and putting herself between her partner and the approaching man. "Just give them a minute, Mr. Meyer. It's almost done."

"I am not going to give it a minute. This is totally irresponsible," Meyer responded. "I demand you bring us back up, right now, Roberts!" He tried to move past Kerry but found his way blocked, and realized the space behind the table wasn't big enough to go around her. "Get out of my way."

"Mr. Meyer, please calm down." Kerry stood her ground. "Just let them finish. I know it's a disruption, but..."

"Get out of my way," Meyer repeated, ignoring her words. "I'm not putting up with any more of this crap. Now move, or I'll..." His eyes slid past her, over her shoulder as he cut off his words.

Kerry knew Dar must have stood up behind her. She could almost feel the bristling danger at her shoulder blades, but she kept her gaze focused forward and her tone even. "Mr. Meyer, you've been having this problem since you put in this program. Most of your people can't work during the day anyway. It's so slow the rest of them are frustrated. Why not give us a chance to change all that? It's worth ten minutes downtime."

For a moment, she thought he was going to ignore her. But then he took a half step backwards, his face twitching. He addressed her again, though the shifting of his eyes indicated he was keeping something behind her in his peripheral vision.

"Ten minutes isn't the question," he said quietly. "The issue at hand here is the fact you did this without warning us. I don't find that acceptable, Ms. Stuart. Do you?"

Kerry heard the chair squeak softly behind her and relaxed a trifle even though the man's question was a valid one she had no good answer to. "Well, that's something we can discuss once it's fixed," she conceded. "So why don't we..."

"They're up," Dar's voice cut in. "I'm resetting the filters now. Let's see if we can make this warthog grow wings."

Letting out an imperceptible sigh of relief, Kerry turned, finding her partner once again hunched over her laptop. She took a step forward and let her hand rest on Dar's back again. "See? Less than ten minutes. More like five."

Dar felt her heartbeat start to slow as she forced herself to concentrate on the screen. The adrenaline pumping through her body was threatening to make her hands shake, and she laid them firmly on the palm rest as she silently willed her algorithms to work.

Stubbornly, the stream seemed to be resisting them, giving her no real improvement. Stifling a curse, Dar studied the output, suddenly aware of the tense silence around her, and the expectations weighing heavily on her shoulders.

The heaviest of all being the light, gentle touch on her back.

"I doubt very much that anything's fixed," Meyer stated. "In fact, I doubt very much you people even know what you're doing."

"Dar?" Kerry uttered softly.

"I know," her partner answered. "Give me a minute. I'm looking."

Her eyes spotted an error. With a twitch of her lips, she corrected it, then put the new configuration in place and watched the streams flicker back up, this time to a completely different rhythm. Dar let out a silent breath. The erratic spikes on her gauges dissipated, replaced by much lower, even flow, and the throughput level settled into a comforting green pulse.

"Well, unfortunately for you, but fortunately for your company Mr. Meyer, you're wrong," Kerry spoke up. "Could you please contact one of your remote offices, and let's see how it looks from there? It looks pretty good here."