"Honey." Dar stroked her cheek. "Please don't be an idiot."
"I'm not." Kerry frowned. "Give me those drugs. Let's see if they do anything useful."
"Ker."
"Don't Ker me. I've been through this whole thing with you. Don't ask me to sit out now." She took a cautious breath. "At least I can just go and be with you. I won't pick anything up."
"You're going to make it impossible for me to concentrate." Dar objected."C'mon, Kerry. This isn't anything to joke about. You could get really hurt."
"Don't give me that." Kerry reached up and took hold of Dar's jaw."Please don't even try that after what I've seen you go through in some of the crap we get into."
Dar sighed. "Now we're back into that if I'm an idiot realm again,huh?"
"Dar."
"Kerry, we're going to be crawling on the floor splicing cable. Is that something you really want to be a part of?" Dar asked, practically. "Tell you what."
"You're right." Kerry interrupted her. "I don't want to be on the floor splicing cable."
"Okay." Dar regrouped. "Well then--"
"I want to be with you." Kerry cut her off again. "Can I just go and watch?"
Dar sighed again.
"Besides, you never know. You may need someone to make a phone call, or type a message, or call a relative who happens to be in Congress." Kerry negotiated skillfully. "Besides, now that you woke me up, there's no damn way I can get back to sleep again."
Having known beforehand the argument was going to be moot, Dar was relatively satisfied with the compromise. "Okay." She kissed Kerry's shoulder. "Can't blame me for trying."
"I don't." Kerry responded with a smile. "Dar, I'm glad."
Dar rested her cheek against Kerry's arm. "Glad? That we're doing this?"
"That we're not just walking away. Even if it was for the very best of reasons." She patted Dar's cheek, and then kissed her on the nose. "Thanks for waking me up."
Dar gave in, nuzzling her and exhaling and enjoying a last moment of peace before the craziness started up again. "I'm glad too. Which makes us all nuts."
"Cashews."
"Gesundheit."
KERRY CLIMBED UP the steps to the bus, its engine idling in the quiet of early morning. She paused inside, spotting a familiar figure behind the wheel. "Hi Dad. You driving?"
"Yeap," Andrew said. "No sense getting that feller up out of his bunk. I know where that place is right well by now." He pushed a button, jerking a little as the windshield wipers turned on. "Whoops."
"Have you ever driven a bus before?" Kerry asked.
"Naw." Andrew pushed another button, resulting in the bus's hazard lights coming on with an orange blare. "Drove me a tank a few times though. Can't be that different."
Kerry studied him. Then she walked over and gave him a kiss on the cheek, straightening carefully and retreating to the midsection of the bus before he started experimenting with anything else. Kannan and Shaun were already there, the two of them dressed in dark jeans and navy blue goodies with equipment belts buckled over the top of them filled to the brim with nerdish jewelry.
"Hello, ma'am." Kannan looked up from stuffing cable ties in a pocket."How are you feeling?"
"Not too bad, really." Kerry went over to the far side of the bus and opened the door to the small office in the back. Her laptop was already inside and set up. She walked around behind it to find a handful of chocolate kisses on the keyboard, along with two bottles of green tea and her bottle of drugs resting nearby. "Aw."
"Something wrong, ma'am?" Shaun called in.
"Not a thing." Kerry sat down slowly in the chair, testing her rib's reaction to the motion. The chair had nice, padded arms just like herbed cushions had, and she rested her elbows on them in relative comfort. "This'll work."
The door opened again, and she heard Dar's voice trickle back into her little haven. With that as a reminder, she unwrapped one of the kisses and put it in her mouth, humming softly under her breath as she booted up the laptop and waited for her login screen.
On the desk she also had a radio, and her PDA, and she grabbed for both as the bus lurched unexpectedly into motion. "Whoa."
"Everyone hang on," Dar said. "Dad's driving."
"Is that a bad thing?" Mark's voice cut in.
"Let's put it this way," Dar said. "If my mother were here, she'd be calling in an air strike on the bus to stop us from getting hurt.
Kerry pinched the bridge of her nose and tried not to laugh. She made a note to relate the conversation to Ceci when she saw her, as she knew her mother-in-law would find it worth a chuckle knowing well her husband's method of driving.
Such as it was. "Glad you didn't inherit that part, Paladar." Kerry remarked in a voice loud enough for her to hear.
"So's my mother," Dar responded. "She threw a party when I got my driver's license."
"Wow," Mark said. "All righty then. Everyone got all their gear?Shaun, you concentrate on that Ethernet rat's nest and I'll help Kannan finish the fiber uplink."
"What about the stuff on this end?" Shaun asked. "Those guys weren't finished running the cable, were they?"
"First thing's first, since we're done on this end with the connectivity," Mark said. "That rat's nest'll take us longer than our end will."
"Not only that, the later it gets on that end the more people we have to contend with." Dar said. "I want to get in and get out and then we can deal with the rest of it."
"What if they just quit and left it there?" Shaun asked. "Under the ground in that tunnel?"
Kerry wondered the same thing herself. She had no idea if the workers had been told to stop what they were doing, or if, like their vendor, they'd just kept working in ignorance.
"We'll deal with that when it comes to it," Dar answered, her voice coming closer to Kerry's little den. "I don't want to split up at this point. It's dark and we don't know what we're going to run into." She appeared in the doorway, studying Kerry intently. "You okay?"
"I'm fine." Kerry held up a kiss. "Thank you Dr. Dar."
Dar grinned unexpectedly. Then she shrugged and turned back to the rest of the team, presenting Kerry with an attractive view of her bare shoulders emerging from her tank top as she lounged in the doorway, resting a hand on either side of it.
The bus lurched into motion again, rocking back and forth alarmingly as its tires apparently climbed up onto the sidewalk as Andrew got them underway. "Dar, do we have insurance on this bus?"
"Not my area." Dar glanced over her shoulder. "Should I rig seat-belts in there?"
Kerry settled back in her padded chair for the ride, the motion making her a little seasick when she looked down at her keyboard. She rested her elbows on the chair arms and looked past Dar, seeing the first hint of gray tingeing the windows of the bus.
No sense in looking at the laptop anyway. There was either too much or too little for her to do, especially at this hour of the morning, so she abandoned any pretense of work and simply relaxed as best as she was able for the ride.
A blaring horn and a sudden lurch of the bus made her close her eyes for good measure; glad she wasn't up in the front.
Chapter Sixteen
DAR SWUNG THE door open and flipped the lights on, not surprised to find no one else in the area as she stood aside to let her team in. "Where was that pile of cabling?"
"There." Kerry walked over and tapped the toe of her hiking boot against a square. "I won't forget that any time soon."
"Got it." Mark grabbed a tile puller and thumped to his knees on the floor. "Lemme get this up. You get ready to start clipping, Shaun."
"Watch out for the rats." Kerry said, just as Mark pulled the tile up.
He froze, and then he peered cautiously into the opening he'd just made."Thanks boss."
Kerry backed away from the space, taking up a perch on the desk. Dar had circled it, and was kneeling down next to Kannan, plugging the configuration cable from her laptop into the router resting on the floor.