Nothing good comes out of Jade being bored.
Thirty Three
The house was very quiet as Jade slipped inside, too quiet, until Chino came sliding out of the bedroom, barking a greeting at her. "Hey girl." She set her briefcase down and knelt to greet the dog, ending up sitting on the floor with Chino climbing all over her. "Hey, hey hey.."
"Growf."
"Hang on." Jade managed to get to her feet and headed for the back door, followed by an ecstatically prancing Labrador. Chino stopped halfway, though, and looked back over her shoulder as though missing something.
"Yeah, I know. It's just me." Jade told her, opening the back door to the small garden. "Tori's not here." She watched the dog trot outside, whisking through the evening sun still splashing through the trees. Tori was at the ship, working on her project.
Jade had almost gone there too, but she stopped herself with a stern reminder that she'd turned the damned thing over to Tori, and she needed to butt out already. So instead, she'd just gone home.
And here she was. Jade leaned against the door jam and surveyed the quiet kitchen. Usually she and Tori came home together, but occasionally Tori left before she did, and whenever she did, Jade always came home to something nice like dinner, or a waiting hot tub or..
But she had no idea when Tori was coming back. A note sent earlier had gone unanswered, and so now Jade was at a bit of a loss. She removed her phone and scribbled a second note, sending it on it's way, before she turned and headed off towards the bedroom.
Inside, she paused a moment, tugging her shirt from her waistband and unbuttoning it before sitting down briefly to remove her boots. Then she removed the shirt and then her jeans, folding them both neatly and putting them on the dresser.
Chino bounded back in and came over to her, wriggling against her knees happily. Jade played with her for a few minutes, then she got up and retrieved a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, slipping into them before she went back out into the living room.
She could watch television. Jade studied the blank screen, then moved past it. She could go for a swim, or a walk with Chino, or go to the gym. Or cook your wife dinner…
Or sit in the hot tub.
She went to the kitchen and closed the back door. She could do some work, or play with her models. With a sigh, Jade went to the refrigerator and got some milk, leaning against the counter to sip it as she considered all of her various options.
None of them really appealed to her, so she went into the living room and sat down at the dining room table, sorting through the basket of mail placed there by the island staff.
No bills, because they handled all theirs electronically. A few bits of junk mail, mostly related to software upgrades or offers of new computer hardware. Jade tossed all these to one side and pulled over a diving magazine which spurred a bit more interest.
She checked her phone after a few minutes, finding it still silent, and then gave up on the mail. "Hell with it." Jade tossed the magazine from her and got up. "Okay, Chino.. wanna come to the gym with me? You can help me lift weights, okay?"
"Gruff."
"Okay." Jade went and put on her sneakers, then headed for the back door, pausing only to scribble a note on the small white board just to one side of the refrigerator. She'd spend an hour or so at the gym, then see if Tori was home and stop at the club for dinner for them on her way back.
Satisfied with her plan, Jade headed off down the path to the gym, with Chino trotting along after her. With the sun having set, the heat was dissipating and the breeze off the ocean was almost comfortable. She watched as Chino retrieved a tennis ball from somewhere and raced back to her with it. "Gimme that."
She threw the slimy ball across the beach, and kept walking as Chino chased it down. Several tosses later, they were at the entrance to the gym, and Jade cheerfully ignored the glares from two other residents as she held the door open for Chino to trot past.
They'd had a problem with that since they'd started bringing the Labrador to the gym with them. At first, Jade had been delivered with six or seven letters of objection from the house association over her practice, then she'd even been served with an official summons from the Island's legal office over it.
Unfortunately for all of them, she had Aunt May's original copy of the bylaws, and no where in any of them did it say you could not bring dogs into the gym. It hadn't made her popular with a few people, but Chino was well behaved, and she'd won over most of the residents after a while. "C'mon, Chi."
Unlike Jade herself, apparently. She gave the other two residents a charming smile, then went inside the inner door that lead to the dressing rooms. Inside, she went to her assigned locker and opened it, removing a towel and a pair of weighted gloves, which she slipped over her hands and fastened.
They weren't that heavy, only two pounds each, but she found they gave just that little extra bit of punch to her workouts and she'd noticed a bit more definition appearing in the muscles of her upper arms from using them.
Or, well, she hadn't exactly noticed that. Jade went over to the weight bench and settled herself on it. Tori had noticed, and commented on it in the shower the other day. Then, she'd just laughed, but now she had to sit here and acknowledge just how much she liked having Tori notice things like that.
Total ego. Jade did a quick couple of sets with a relatively light barbell just to warm up. Total ego, and on the fringes a haunting insecurity she tried very hard to pretend didn't exist. NOw especially with the impending weight gain… she looked around maybe she should go heavier while she can. She liked Tori paying attention to her, and probably that was why she felt so out of sorts, having two messages ignored so far today.
Stupid, really. Jade got up and moved to a leg press station, sliding a pin into place and waiting for her body to settle into position before she started the exercise. Chino stood up and licked her arm, sliding up and down as she tried to keep her balance. "Chi, down." Jade muffled a chuckle. "Lie down."
Reluctantly, the dog obeyed, seating herself on the rubberized floor at Jade's side.
Tori was probably busy doing what it was WesTrek paid her for, taking care of details, and putting her plan into effect with her typical detail oriented style. While it never matched her own, Jade appreciated her partner's very disciplined operating mode.
It matched her usual schedule in the gym. While Jade tended to wander from machine to machine, using whichever one struck her fancy at the moment, Tori always followed one or two or three routines, studiously using all the machines in it until she either finished or exhausted herself.
Jade kept the image of her partner in her mind as she got up off the leg press and switched to an abdominal machine, laying flat on her back and taking hold of the handles before she started her sit ups. She enjoyed the exercise, though this one was a little harder for her than it was for Tori due to her longer torso… Though right now it felt harder than ever. And she wondered if maybe she should avoid it all together. So she walked past and headed to the leg press instead.
For a while after they'd gotten together, Jade had strongly suspected that Tori was doing gym work more to fit in with her lifestyle than because she really enjoyed it and it had made her feel a touch guilty even though she'd called Tori on it more than once.
After all, Tori had been forced into doing things she didn't really want to do for so long, was it fair that she escape from her family life only to feel obligated to change again to meet what she felt were Jade's expectations?
Except they really weren't her expectations. Jade didn't honestly care if Tori worked out or not and she'd tried really hard to convince her of that until Tori finally just told her she really liked it. Or, actually, she didn't fanatically enjoy it, but she very much liked the results so she was willing to put the work in to get them.
Jade paused to add a little more weight to the machine's resistance and continued her sets. That had finally made sense to Jade, at least, since taking control over her looks had been a big part of Tori shrugging off her past.
Of course, now it meant that for the first time in a long time, she was concerned about what her body looked like, but it seemed a small enough price to pay for having found the most amazing love of her life.
Probably, though, Jade almost chuckled at herself, Tori would tell her she didn't care what Jade looked like just as insistently as Jade had told her. Both of them probably wondered if they both really meant it, and neither wanted to find out for sure.
So her life was now complicated. Jade exhaled, and let her eyes close, her thoughts wandering elsewhere as her body went through the motions. But it was a nice kind of complication and she had no desire to get rid of it so hell with it all anyway.
Instead, she imagined herself underwater, in the peaceful blue of a dive doing lazy somersaults as Tori floated nearby taking pictures of sea urchins. She loved watching Tori take pictures because she'd get herself into the nuttiest positions doing it, usually standing on her head to get closer and tight focus on the tiny creatures.
Her hair would float around her head in a halo and she'd cross her ankles, her fins fluttering lightly to keep herself in position. Jade would sometimes get herself horizontal in the water and rest her chin on her clasped wrists, just hanging there and watching the show.
She could almost hear the bubbles of her own breathing.
So a warm, solid weight settling over her lower body nearly scared the shorts off her until she managed to get her eyes open and her hands untangled from the machine and found Tori sitting on top of her dressed out for the gym and looking amused. "Bah!" She yelped in surprise, dropping flat on her back again.
"Hi there." brown eyes twinkled. "You didn't wait for me, you grunge!"
Jade blinked, trying to get her tongue to work properly after having bitten it. "Abu." She cleared her throat. "Wait for you when? I had no idea you were coming home this fast." She protested. "I thought you'd be later at the port." Jerked so quickly out of her peaceful day dream, her body now didn't know whether to jump or completely relax and she felt like hiccupping.
"I answered your last note." Tori replied. "I didn't realize when I was in the bowels of the ship my signal was cut off. I got topside and saw I had messages from you." She wiggled the fingers she had laying on Jade's stomach, giving her a friendly scratch. "So I answered them right there on the gangway, and annoyed the heckies out of some really big guys trying to move wood onboard."
"Oh." Now that Tori was here, and more than paying attention to her, Jade felt a little abashed. "No problem. I figured you got tied up in details. Thought I'd come over here for a while then grab us some dinner." She looked around. "My phone's in the locker."
"Details." Tori eased herself up and off her living bench. "Oh, my god did I get details. I got introduced into the world of people who live on ships." She paused and adjusted one of her wristbands. "Please, please don't tell me the Navy is like this, because if it is, I can't believe your dad survived in it as long as he did."
"Eh." Jade watched as her partner went to the first machine, the bicep curl and sat down in it, carefully adjusting the weight stack before she fit her hands to the handles and began her exercise. "People. Politics. Can't have one with out the other. You know that."
"Hm." Tori grunted a little with the effort of bringing the weighted bar up. "More I see people, more I love Chino."
"Gruff." Chino trotted over and licked her knee.
Jade got up and decided she'd had enough of the leg press. She went over to the pulldown machine and sat under the bar, sticking the pin into a fairly significant amount of iron plates. Fitting her hands over the handles of the bar, she carefully pulled it downward, wedging her knees under the supports as she tested out how her shoulder was feeling about the weight.
So far so good. Jade flexed her arms slowly and brought the bar down, glad the twinging ache had finally faded from her injury. It had taken a long time, though Tori had probably been right in telling her it would have been shorter if she'd done the physical therapy she'd been told to.
"How's that feel?" Tori asked.
"Good." Jade straightened her arms and let the weight up. She pulled it down again, a little faster this time.
"You look great when you sweat."
Jade opened one eye and peered at the tricep machine. Tori winked at her, and stuck her tongue out. "Everything going alright at the pier?"
"Yeah, it's coming together." Tori straightened her arms out, forcing the machine lever down. "You find the hacker?"
Jade grunted, and released a little snort. "No, but if he comes back, he'll have a surprise waiting." She said. "But I spent some time in our gateways today and I gotta admit, Tor. I'm a little worried."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
Tori sighed. "Well, to be honest, I'm a little worried about how I'm going to pull off this project competitively, so we're even."
They were both silent for a few minutes, concentrating on their respective exercises. Finally, Jade let her bar up and sighed. "Know what I think?"
"What?"
"Ice cream." Jade got up from her bench and picked her towel up, extending a hand towards Tori. "We can finish this later."
Tori got up and took her hand without hesitation. "You're on. Let's go." She followed Jade out the door, not giving the room a single backward glance.
Ice cream actually turned into dinner out on the beach club's ocean facing deck. A nice breeze had come up, and it was very comfortable sitting outside with a lightly fluttering hurricane candle on the table and the prospect of dessert yet to come before them.
Tori let her head rest against one of the roof supports, her eyes lazily taking in the waving palm fronds down the beach. "I don't know, honey." She said. "Maybe it's a blessing in disguise. If you hadn't issued that challenge, you'd have never found the weaknesses you just told me about."
"Maybe we.. maybe I should have been looking for them before now." Jade was also leaning against the wall supports, one long leg slung over the chair arm.
"Jade, you're the chief information officer of the company. I think a lot of other people, like Sinjin, should have been looking for this stuff. Not you." Tori replied honestly. "It's ridiculous that you need to be sitting on the floor in some closet trapping hackers, you know?"
A slightly stronger breeze made itself felt, whipping their hair around a little. Some sea grape leaves blew across the tile floor, one of them ending up on Tori's foot. She reached down and picked it up, twirling it in her fingers. "Kinda windy."
Jade leaned to one side and looked out at the sea, spotting whitecaps. One eyebrow hiked up. "Don't tell me another damn storm snuck up on us." She checked her phone, but there were no ominous looking messages on it.
"Mm." A slightly dreamy smile crossed Tori's face. "Oh, man, I'd love it if it did."
That made Jade smile back, a frank grin of appreciation that lightened her entire face. "I'll take that as a compliment."
"It was." Tori impulsively reached across the table and fit her hand into Jade's. "Want to go down to the cabin this weekend?"
Without even thinking, Jade nodded agreement. "Yeah."
"I have a meeting on Friday afternoon. How about we do this…" Tori's mind raced over the details, thinking about their dual schedules. "How about we ride together Friday morning, and I get a ride over to the port – then you can pick me up and..vroom."
"Absolutely." Jade agreed instantly. "We can stop for dinner on the road somewhere and watch the sunset."
Tori glanced at her watch and sighed mournfully. "It's only Tuesday."
Jade's cell went off before she could suggest something crazy like going after dinner. She took it out and checked the caller id. "Uh oh." She opened it. "Yeah, Sinjin. What's up?"
"You in the building, boss?"
Jade glanced around her. "Me? No. I'm home. Why?"
"Shit. Someone's messing around in here and I thought it was you.. looked like what was going on this afternoon." The MIS manager cursed. "Okay, thanks.. lemme get back to you. Hey.. you like.. locked that door, right?"
Jade's gaze went inward briefly, as she carefully traced her actions from the afternoon. "Yes." She said briefly. "I went up to a meeting on 14, then came back down and did a few more scans. I left the closet around four. Shouldn't have been any access after that."
"Gotcha. Bye." Sinjin hung up hastily, cutting off a yell in the background, and the sound of a buzzer going off.
Jade looked at her cell, looked at Tori, and then they both got up and headed for the house at a run.
Jade could hear the beeping of the alerts as she cleared the doorway into her office and put her hands on her desk, vaulting over it to land near her chair on the other side. "Son of a bitch!"
Tori forced herself to slow down enough to close the door behind them, making sure not to slam it on Chino's tail as the Labrador bounded in after her, tongue lolling out. She hesitated, then grabbed her briefcase from the dining room table where she'd left it, carrying it into Jade's study and taking possession of the couch inside.
As she hit the leather, it started raining, and for a brief second she had a flashback, startling and vivid, of the first time she'd been in the room. But it only lasted that one second, because then she was yanking her laptop out of it's case and opening it, waiting impatiently for the machine to boot up. "What's going on?"
"Fuck if I know." Jade's fingers were nothing but a blur on the keyboard. "Something's loose in the network…Jesus Christ I hope I didn't do something stupid and leave something open today."
"The door?' Tori was rapidly logging in.
"No.. no, that I know I shut. Something in the router.. I was doing those changes so damn fast.." Jade's brow was knit in a furrow. "When I was talking to you, when Sinjin was seeing the blocks."
"Oh." Tori called up her network monitor and keyed it, sitting there for a minute as it started registering and lines began blinking red across the screen. "Holy cow." She looked quickly at Jade, seeing the tension scrawled across her face.
Jade hesitated, her fingertips flexing above the keys, undecided on what to do. She hated not understanding what was happening – far as she could tell random data was flooding the network and she could not find the source of it.
She could shut everything down, and by definition that should stop the flood, but it also would take down everyone and everything using their network including the remote monitoring consoles.
Tori watched the emotions cross her partner's face, and decided she should do something more productive. She started up her analyzer and grabbed the main switch, opening up the data stream and focusing her attention on what it was showing her.
A lot of garbage. Tori flipped to her filters and cut off the standard network traffic, keying back to see what was left. "Jade."
"Uh?' Jade looked up from setting accounting parsers in place.
"It's not coming from outside."
"What?" Jade got up and sprawled on the couch arm to peer over Tori's shoulder.
"It's coming from inside the office." Tori traced a line with her finger. "Look. Here… I don't know what that is."
Jade blinked slowly, exhaling a little. "Neither do I." She admitted. "Worm? Better tell Sinjin."
Tori hit enter on the text message she'd already been composing. "Done… Jade, what would put out that kind of traffic? It's all tcp unicast."
Jade slid back into her seat and continued her scanning, slamming filters into place on interface after interface, attempting to staunch the flow of traffic. "Son of a son of a son of a…"
Tori got up and peered over her shoulder this time, her machine telling her nothing new other than the traffic was continuing to build. "That must be pretty damn close to the core, Jade… you want me to start shutting down the building floor by floor?"
"Might have to." Jade felt herself starting to sweat. She could imagine the calls beginning to come in to the ops center, and speculated on how long it would take before her phone, and Tori's, started ringing. "What if it's directly in the core?" She applied another access lists, reviewing the results. "God damn it, where is this thing!"
Tori slowly backed off, then went to her laptop, acting on a hunch. "What switch is the conference center in, Jade?"
"Conference center? Ten. Why?"
"Let's just say I smell rotten fish." Tori logged into the switch and checked the top traffic port. One switch, out of twenty seven in the building. What were the odds? "Jade."
Jade scrambled out of her chair and nearly crawled into the seat next to Tori, her eyes avidly searching the screen. "Bingo. Shut the damn thing off."
Tori rapidly disabled the port, as Jade jumped up onto her desk and swung the monitor towards her, watching the read-outs in tense silence. The signals jumped for a moment more, then slowly settled down to a more even keel.
Jade slapped the desk, and turned her head towards Tori. "Talk to me."
"Okay." Tori felt her heart rate slow down, though her fingers were still shaking a little. "Inside the office."
"Yeah."
"Security audit just completely two weeks ago, and it was clean. No new hires since then."
"Right."
Tori got up and went over to sit in Jade's chair, folding her hands together on the desk. "I think this is my fault." She paused, then looked right up into Jade's eyes. "Because I'm the jerk who had four competitors sitting in our conference center with laptops and gear, and didn't ask for a security scan afterward."
Jade's face remained absolutely still for a very long instant. Then she slowly released her breath, her shoulders relaxing as she leaned on one elbow. "Quest's meeting."
Tori nodded.
"There was a lot going on then, Tori."
"Don't make excuses for me." The Brunette replied. "There is no excuse for that, Jade, and we both know it." She watched her partner's expression carefully, a little surprised to see the strong planes relax, and a faint, almost sheepish smile cross her lips. "Don't we?"
Jade traced a random pattern on her desk surface with her finger. "I'd like to agree with you." She finally said, in a quiet voice. "Except that I'm finding it hard to forget what you were being distracted by the most."
Mm. Tori nibbled the inside of her lip. "Well."
Jade's cell phone rang. She picked it up and opened it. "Yeah?"
"Did you do that? You stopped it? What was it? Where is it? What 'd you do?" Sinjin's words spilled out so fast and so loud Jade almost dropped her phone. "C'mon, Boss! Don't tell me it just stopped, please?"
Without answering, Jade just handed the phone over to Tori. "Have him find whatever it is, and secure it. We'll do an analysis tomorrow."
Tori took the phone as she watched Jade get up and wander out of the study into the living room. "Hi, Sinjin." She finally sighed. "I.. um.. found the problem. It's in the number ten switch, blade six, port thirty."
Rattling keys. "It's disabled!"
"Well, yes."
"That's the big conference room. I'll get some techs down there. What ya think –the projector system go nuts again?" Sinjin's voice sounded utterly relieved. "Son of a hoota… that scared the crap out of me. I thought we were getting slammed."
"We were." Tori hardly knew how to feel inside. "I think we might have gotten something planted on us during that meeting we had here in the blackout. Remember?"
Silence. "Oh, man!" Sinjin nearly howled. "I had that on my schedule… I had a damn sticky note here to check… oh, crap. Crap. I'll go check it myself. Crap. Sorry, Tori."
"S'allright."
"Call you right back." Sinjin hung up the line, still obviously very upset.
Tori folded the phone shut and sat there for a moment. She heard a sound and looked up to see Jade standing in the doorway, leaning against one edge of it in almost the same pose she'd seen her in the very first time they'd met. "Did you ever think we'd come to a point where we both needed to quit?" She asked.
Jade pushed off the door jam and came over, flopping down in the couch and patting the seat next to her. Tori got up and settled onto the cool leather, hitching one leg up over Jade's left knee. "You thought it was your fault, I thought it was my fault, Sinjin thinks it's his fault… the hell with it, Jade. Let's just all go open a taco stand down on castro."
"Yum!" Tori leaned against her partner
"Don't beat yourself up, Tor."
Tori sighed.
"Did I ever tell you about how I found out about the outage the night you ended up coming over and helping me fix it?"
More banter. Tori gave in and snuggled up. "The night we kissed?"
"Uh huh."
"Mm.. only thing I remember about that whole thing is opening the door, seeing you in your pajamas, and forgetting what my name was."
Jade chuckled softly. "Well, the ops center called me, and told me the whole damn network was down. You know what I said to them?"
"What?"
"No problem, guys. Just go on home."
"Oh, you did not." Tori started laughing, despite herself. "C'mon, Jade. I know you're trying to make me feel better, but really."
"Really." Jade went nose to nose with her. "I told them to go home, no sense in them sticking around if everything was down, right? Made sense to me at the time."
"Really?"Tori tried to imagine that, and just started laughing again. "Oh my god."
Jade gave her a hug. "Let's wait to see what Sinjin finds, and instead of beating ourselves up, figure out how we're gonna get even."
Would they? Tori wondered seriously if they should. Oh well. Tomorrow'd be yet another day.