On Broken Wings (48 page)

She hesitated. "Mr. Orloff -- "

"You can call me Dick, Christine. Everyone does."

"Thank you, Dick. I really like working with Rolf. I'd like to keep doing it for a long time, if that's all right."

Either she doesn't know the scuttlebutt, or it hasn't affected her. Good.

"I'm glad to hear that, Chris, because the two of you have made a spectacular team. Everyone has been raving about the amount you've accomplished in the past six months. And I don't like to break up an obviously successful arrangement. You can stay in Simulation as long as Rolf is willing to have you there."

She broke into a radiant smile. It was as if the sun had risen right there in his office. A warmth grew in his chest that came from more than just the sense of having done his job properly.

***

Terry Arkham had been watching for Svenson to come sprinting past. When it happened, he couldn't resist slipping the man a passing dig.

"Yo, Sven, how're they hangin'?"

Svenson called back over his shoulder, "Later, Terry," and plunged on toward revelation and despair.

Arkham sat back in his chair, folded his hands on his belly, and allowed himself a foretaste of victory.

***

"Well, if you're happy about that, maybe you'll like this even better." Orloff pulled a stapled sheaf from his Out box and slid it across his desk toward Christine.

"Take a moment to read the first two pages. The rest is mostly boilerplate."

She did. He waited until she looked up again.

"This is a ten-year contract."

Orloff nodded. "That's right. With a generous schedule of raises and grade elevations built into it, and a no-terminations clause. And it's for you."

"No terminations?"

"Means you can't be laid off, and can only be fired for breaking a major company rule. Don't worry about those, we don't have that many."

"Mr. Orloff...Dick, I've only been here six months, and this is my first job. How can you be so sure you want to keep me around already?"

He chuckled. "How can I be sure the sun will rise in the east tomorrow? Christine, don't you know how good you are?"

The question seemed to fluster her. Her eyes darted about the office as if she hoped to find the answer written on the walls.

Is she really upset? An attack of impostor syndrome, maybe?

"Chris, Rolf says you're the best he's ever seen, 'way better than he is." He kept his voice low and friendly. "That's high praise, and you've backed it up with the most extraordinary performance I've ever seen. In six months, you've taken seven man-years worth of tasks off his back. And those numbers weren't sandbagged. I used to be an engineer myself, and I know when a schedule's been padded. That makes you fourteen times as valuable as the average OA software engineer, before we factor in your amazing quality of output. If I didn't try to get you to commit to us long term, I'd be derelict in my duty."

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 poker-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."