This place brings back Memories...
Ten
She was early. The guard let her in without comment this time, and Jade drove slowly through the base, allowing her memories to surface without interruption this time. She parked on the far end of the lot, and got out, locking the doors to the Volvo with a negligent flick, then turned around and leaned against the side of the car, just letting her gaze travel across the scene.
Damn. It looked different, but in some ways the same. The buildings had been altered, new construction changing the outlines subtly, and everything had fresh coats of paint on it. But as she stood there and looked, older images floated before her eyes, and without much conscious thought, she started walking towards the neatly trimmed pathway that wound its way around the base.
Of course, there was activity. Unlike most of the rest of the city, the day here started before dawn, and she listened to the familiar cadance as groups of men and women jogged by her, some sparing a curious glance as they moved past. Jade regarded their backs thoughtfully, and wondered for the hundredth time if she'd have ever had the internal fortitude to get through training if she'd chosen to join the Navy after all.
Physically, she knew she could have. She'd been all whipcord and iron back then, strong and tough and more than up to whatever demands the Navy would have chosen to dump on her shoulders. Even now, Jade glanced down and considered her form with a touch of conceit, even after all the years of desk-bound work and a plush lifestyle she'd never imagined back then, even now if she really pushed, she could probably force herself through the basic course.
On sheer stubbornness, if nothing else, she wryly conceded.
Mentally, though? Jade sighed, pausing and leaning against the fence to peer at the tiny houses just beyond it. She had self discipline, but she hadn't had the ability to accept taking orders from anyone just because they had a stripe on their arm, or a collar insignia. Not then, and, her lips pursed into a slight smile. Certainly not now.
Her eyes found that one small house, third one on the fourth block. She examined the neatly painted outside, then she circled the fence and walked down the sidewalk, stopping as she came even with the front door. It appeared vacant, and she walked up the small driveway into the carport, putting out a hand and touching the cement brick surface. It felt rough under her fingertips, and a familiar scent of dust and sun warmed tar filled her nose as the breeze puffed through the enclosure.
Home.
She walked through and out the back into the yard, over to a ficus tree still firmly entrenched near the side of the house. Her eyes lifted, and found the old, rotting bits of wood held by rusty nails that once, long ago, might have been the outlines of a tree house. She looked between the branches, into a blank window, seeing the faint outlines of a plain, small room inside that had once been hers.
It felt very strange. Jade leaned against the tree, and tried to remember what it was like being a small child looking out of that window. She found she couldn't. Too much time had passed, and she was too different a person now to feel a link here.
Hell. Her face tensed into a scowl. She hadn't even wanted to bring Tori here to see this. Not that her wife would have laughed, in fact, Tori would have been interested, as she was in everything Jade had to tell her about her childhood. She wasn't ashamed of the house, either. It was just that it was so unremarkable a place, and she could no longer feel any kind of connection to it.
With a sigh, Jade pushed back from the tree, then she glanced up, and moved her head, shifting a hand to part a thick branch full of leaves. Her eyes fell on her own initials, carved into the bark of the tree, and even after all these years, plainly visible.
Then her brow furrowed, and she leaned forward, blinking as her eyes tried to make sense of the freshly cut markings right next to her old ones.
Tori's initials. Jade's jaw dropped in open shock. When in the hell had she… Then Jade recalled the long stretch of time her wife had been gone, on one of their breaks from the endless data gathering. She'd returned, cheerfully claiming a walk to clear her head. Jade remembered the smell of warm skin as Tori had brushed against her, and now knew were it had come from. A silly smile appeared on her face as she gazed up at the letters.
Yesterday's date, with a plus sign joining the old and the new, all carved in slightly awkward, but competent letters into the gray bark. Without looking, she fished her phone from her pocket, took a picture and texted it to her before calling. She waited for a voice to answer, then she closed her eyes. "You are the most incredible person I've ever known." She heard the slight intake of breath. "I love you."
Then she closed the phone, and tucked it back into holder, and walked away from the house, headed back towards her waiting job, humming softly.
Tori glanced at the roomful of marketing executives, all intently focused on her, and put her phone away. "That was a…um… a Status report." She smiled weakly, knowing her face was as red as a boiled beet. "I'm sorry, what were you saying about fourth quarter projections?"
Elle cleared her throat. "We were talking about the South American emerging IT market."
"Right." Tori rubbed her face. "Sorry. Go on."
Jade leaned back in the hard, wooden chair and rubbed her eyes, closing them for a moment as she reloaded data for the hundredth time. She listened for the hard drive to stop spinning, then sighed, and rocked forward, scanning the results with a tiny scowl on her face.
"Damn it." She checked and rechecked the figures. "Something's just not adding up." Jade paged through the reports sprawled over the desk and shook her head. She'd taken the performance data of the base first, and dumped it into her analyzer, letting the custom built scripts she'd written sort through the columns of figures, matching dollars spent with viable product, in this case, qualified personnel who were assigned out to various Navy installations around the world.
Something just wasn't matching. Her scripts kept returning errors, finding discrepancies between the list of expenses and the lists of demands for payment, and so far she hadn't been able to put her finger on the reason why. It was almost as though parts of the data were misplaced, not missing, because the end result balanced, but in the wrong areas so that the orderly progression of bookkeeping went every which direction.
Hm. Jade scratched her jaw. Maybe that was why her data parser on the base hadn't brought back snips of relevant data, like who the new base commander was. Her eyebrows hiked, and she dove into her briefcase, retrieving the case study she'd done before starting the project. Impatiently she flipped through the already ruffle edged papers, her eyes darting back and forth until she found the spot she was looking for. "Ah."
She leaned back and rested the report on her knee, as a warm draft of air entered through the window and stirred the pages, bringing a scent of fresh cut grass and the sound of rugged chanting to her. Jade had requested, politely, a small office space for her use, and Commander Albert and Lieutenant Parkins had, equally politely, led her to this tiny room with its one single, scarred, wooden desk and unpadded chair.
And no air conditioning. Jade 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 and started sweating.
Jade 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. Jade 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."What in the hell happened to you, young lady?" James West's rugged, crewcutted head had poked out the window.
Jade had grabbed the doorframe gratefully and hung on, catching her breath. "Nothin'... I just fell offa something."
Jim had leaned closer. "Were you over at that monkey pit?" He'd accused.
Jade had chewed her lip. "Yeah." Lying to her father was never a good idea. She'd learned that the hard way.
"After I told you not to go there?" The low growl had made her flinch.
"Yeah." She'd looked back up into his face. "Got through this time." She hadn't been able to help grinning, just a little, but she'd stopped at the scowl on his face.
"You are just a pile of trouble, ain'tcha, Gigi?" James had shaken his head. "Git your ass into this here truck."So she had, 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'd pulled away from the curb and started down their street.
It had taken her a moment to realize it when he passed the house, and kept going, and she'd given 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 had told her. "Cause I an't bringing you in the house looking like that, little girl. Your mother'd kill me." Jade had scowled, and looked down at her mud stained hands, her momentary happiness fading.
They'd only recently returned to California, and the adjustment back had been tough for her. Friends were very few, and far between, and Jim was facing another six month tour in just a few weeks."'Sides… you can't eat ice cream with all that dirt down there." Jim had muttered. Jade had looked at him sideways."Figure anyone stubborn enough to get through that monkey pit deserves an ice cream cone, don't you?" Jim had stopped at a stop sign and turned, reaching over and wiping a bit of mud off Jade's cheek. "I know I went and got me one first time I got my butt through it." He'd patted her face. "Good job, Gigi That's a tough thing you done."
Jade remembered smiling so hard it hurt, making her forget her ankle completely. "Thanks, daddy."
Hm. Jade 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? Jade 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… 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 phone buzzed. "Yeah?" she answered.
"Morning boss." Sinjin's voice came through. "You left me a voicemail to call ya, so here I am."
"I need a T1." Jade 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 locating you." Sinjin muttered. " ..yeah.. shut up… stop with the error messages, will ya… ah. Shit, Jade. You're in bumfuck."
"I am not." Jade protested.
"You most certainly the heck are, boss… the nearest CO to you is freaking Bakersfield." Sinjin replied. "I'd have to piggyback on the National Defense circuits… verizon'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?"
Jade 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, Jade." Sinjin finally stuttered. "I didn't mean to dis the place."
Jade 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." Sinjin rallied faintly. "But I gotta tell you, even if I cross my legs and squeeze I can't really imagine you as a kid."
No. Jade 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."
Jade's eyebrows lifted. "After all that griping? You're a damn fraud, Sinjin."
Sinjin 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." Jade responded. "I want to hook up when it gets a completion 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 m… oh, hey." Sinjin'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?" Tori's voice echoed through the circuit. "Gimme that phone." There was a fumbling noise. "Jade Giana West."
"Uh oh." Jade started laughing. "You sound like my mother."
"You are so busted." Tori joined her in laughter. "Oh my god, Jade…you knocked me for such a loop in that meeting… how's it going?"
"Eh." Jade 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." Tori exhaled, an audible rushing sound. "I've got a session with Jose in about an hour. Wish me luck." She perched on Sinjin'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." Jade replied succinctly.
Tori 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 wife and her family living in it. "Well, I've got to get to my meeting - here's Sinjin back. See you later at home?"
"You bet."
Tori handed the phone back, and stood, picking up the handful of requisitions she'd come to collect. She gave Sinjin a pat on the back and walked through the MIS command center, with it's semi circular 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 towards a monitor. "What is it?"
"Shit." One tech slapped buttons, then glanced up. "Sorry, ma'am."
Tori 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 Sinjin approached, leaning over them. "Sinjin, something big just took a dump over Georgia." He looked at Tori. "You know what that means."
Tori smiled. "It means I get to cancel my meeting." She set her papers down and rolled her sleeves up. "Okay… Sinjin, you start checking the access routers.. I'll call Bellsouth."
Jade made her way through the labyrinth of corridors and pushed open Commander Albert's door without ceremony or even a knock. She found the data center manager 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 damn time. Jade thought as she 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. West, I really don't mean to be such a bastard, but.." He paused.
"But I'm stomping all over your territory with spike heels?" Jade 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?"
Jade 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."
Jade nodded. "That's right. The brass is looking for two things. One, to make themselves look good, by hiring in the biggest, most well known IS and Media 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? " Jade said.
He leaned forward, and rested his elbows on the desk surface, clasping his hands together lightly. "All right, Ms. West. I'm just going to have my butt chewed up one side and down the other if I don't." He exhaled. "So. Do you have everything you want? Lieutenant Perkins told me you were pulling down statistics most of the day."
Jade got up and walked to the window, leaning 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, first hand. " 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. West." 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 with ginger hair peppered lightly with gray. She gave Jade a brief glance, then turned her attention to Albert. "Sir?"
"This is our senior operations staff, CPO Daniel, Ms. West. She's in charge of implementing and supervising all our overall processes." He gave the newcomer a brief nod. Ah… I see your game Commander. Good thing I couldn't care less about stepping on anyone's toes. "Chief, this is Ms. West. She's here on orders from Washington to do an evaluation on us, and recommend improvements." The base commander said pleasantly. "Please take her where she wants to go and answer any questions."
In her spare moments Jade often played a little mental game where she tried to match people up with what breed of dog they would be if they'd suddenly morphed before her eyes. She'd often amused herself in meetings by imagining Elle as an Afghan Hound, discussing sales with Jose the Sheepdog, for instance. She'd even drawn a sketch of it, which had sent Tori into a fit of hysterics and made her leave the room.
The bulldog in a naval uniform gave Jade 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." Jade responded, recognizing the aggressive stance with an internal sigh. "Let's start where they come in. After you?" She gestured towards 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."
Jade 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 the data center manager disliked more.
She eyed the shorter woman plowing along beside her.
"Would m'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." Jade 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 Tori do? Jade sorted through her options. "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 Jade's own. "I don't know what your real purpose is here, m'am, but I'm not one of those data center fluff heads 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." Jade 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, coming in here as an outsider 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 getting that attitude from people who couldn't last a day through basic training, who think we're a bunch of mindless idiots?" Daniel stabbed a finger at Jade. "Don't talk to me about attitude, lady."
Jade cocked her head. "You like the Navy, chief?"
That threw the petty officer right off her tracks. "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, Jade smiled. "You just gave me an answer to a question I've been asking myself since I was eighteen. Thanks." A flock of what if's took off and left her shoulders lighter. "You're right, Chief. I am an outsider." Now she met the shorter woman's eyes. "You need to pick if you want me to be a hostile, or a friendly one."
They stared at each other in silence.
