Free Eye Of The Storm - DK3 by Melissa Good

con-descension.
    “Sure.” Dar unfolded her length from the bucket shaped chair and stood, towering over the smaller woman. She was dressed in her jeans and short sleeved shirt, the rolled sleeves exposing her toned arms, and had pulled her dark hair back into a tail at the base of her neck. “Lead on.” Her eyes flicked to Kerry’s face, then followed Sue out, pulling the door shut behind her.
    “Funny,” Sam drawled. “I thought you people liked to present a much sharper image.”
    Kerry bit the inside of her lip to keep the retort from emerging, then cleared her throat. “Well, it’s Bunny’s day off. She’s doing us a favor.”
    The accountant shook his head. “I hope she knows what she’s doing.
    We can’t afford down time today.”
    “Oh,” Kerry scratched her nose, “don’t worry. She does.”

Chapter
Five
    DAR FOLLOWED HER officious guide down a long, gray carpeted hallway, passing offices on either side full of paper covered desks. Eyes looked up as they passed, then dropped, and Dar sensed a feeling of reti-cence that made her spine prickle.
    “Nice office,” she commented.
    Sue glanced at her. “Thank you.” She led the way into a larger room, full of cables and other telecommunication gear. “Roger?”
    A tall, lanky man in a painfully white shirt and blue pants ducked his head from under a rack. “Yes? Oh.” He straightened up and ran his fingers through bushy brown hair, blinking out from behind a pair of very thick glasses. “Can I help you?”
    “The new company sent a technician over to start getting us hooked up to them.” Sue waved Dar forward. “All yours.” She turned and walked out, leaving them regarding each other.
    “Hi,” Dar finally said. “So you’re Roger, huh?”
    He seemed to realize he was staring. “Ah…um…yeah. Hi. Roger Milken. Yeah. And um…there’re a couple of others around here. Bill, and Tom and Squeeziks.”
    One of Dar’s eyebrows lifted. “All right.”
    He scratched his neck under an ill-fitting collar. “Did you want to see something or…um…what’s your name, anyway?”
    Dar held out a hand, deciding on her middle name rather than the label Kerry had pinned on her. “Katherine.” She released him. “I’d like to see your setup. W…they’ve got certain things they like to see before they let you connect.”
    “Mmph. Okay.” Roger waved at her. “C’mon. I’ll give you the five cent tour. Watch your step. We’re redoing the patch panel.”
    Dar strolled along behind him, her eyes taking in the room’s equipment and evaluating it as he rambled on about the hardware. An NT
    server farm, a chugging AS400, and a bank of routers on one side of the room, with the rack of Ethernet hubs mounted next to them. “Nice.”
    “Uh. Thanks. Yeah, this is the main box.” He indicated the AS400.
    “We keep all the database stuff in there. And that’s our webserver and we just got these two new Cisco 7000’s…”
    “Mmm.” Dar stopped in front of the routers and leaned on the con-Eye of the Storm 39
    sole that programmed them. She idly signed into one and browsed its statistics. “Send a lot of traffic out?”
    “Uh, yeah. They do lots of searches. That kinda thing.” Roger now sounded just a touch evasive. “You know.”
    “Mmm.” Dar pointed. “What about those?”
    “Oh, that’s the SQL servers. I wrote ’em.” Roger walked over and signed into one. “See? It runs concurrent copies. Saves all the stuff to the RAID arrays. They go bonkers about downtime.”
    Dar signed out of the router and patted it. “Firewall?”
    “You bet.” Roger went to the next machine. “All our access in and out is logged. Make sure no one’s downloading nudie pics.” He laughed lamely. “So. What is it you want so we can get hooked up?”
    Dar sat down on a chair. “Got a pad?” She started listing off require-ments as he scrambled for a pen.
    KERRY CAUGHT UP with the fair haired, heavyset woman as they took a break, and wandered