They came in together, as he had expected. Rick swung a punch at Josh’s head, at the same time as Hag tried a kick. They didn’t think he’d be able to handle both at once, and they were right. Josh turned, so that Rick’s fist just brushed the side of his head; but Hag got in a solid boot high on his left thigh.
It hurt, but that wasn’t the worst part. Josh felt his leg muscle stiffen and his knee go wobbly. One more kick like that on either of his legs and he’d be as rigid as a tree. They would chop him down at their leisure.
As Hag kicked again, Josh hopped to one side and grabbed the leg as it swung wide of him. He twisted as hard as he could, but at the same moment Rick put an armlock on his neck. All three were off balance. No one let go and they staggered sideways together, to run into and knock over a tall blue cabinet standing along the wall a few feet away. Still locked together, they all fell squarely onto the overturned unit. There was a sound of breaking plastic and twisting metal.
They let go of each other, scrambled free, and stared at the flattened mess they had left behind.
“Schiitz! We’re in trouble now.” Rick turned to Josh. “It’s your fault, you brainless turd. You pulled us over onto it.”
“Me! Get screwed. If you hadn’t started on me in the first place we wouldn’t have been near it.”
“You’re as much a retard as your idiot bimbo cousin.”
“You leave Dawn out of this. At least she knows how to sing. Give us a tune, Alberich—if you can.”
“Our m-mother didn’t d-dump us.” Rick turned white, and he could hardly speak. “She didn’t abandon us with s-some whore of an aunt—”
“—who couldn’t stand you, either,” Hag added. “So she shipped your fat hide out here.”
They had been getting louder. Fists were clenched and they were all set to go at it again when Winnie Carlson walked in.
She took one look at the wreckage on the floor. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Nothing.” They all spoke in unison.
“Fine. Then you won’t mind if I go and get Brewster, to show him what happens when you do nothing.”
The three exchanged grimaces, suddenly in agreement. “No need for that,” Josh said, and Hag added, “We were just fooling around. We didn’t mean to smash anything. You don’t have to tell Brewster, do you?”
“We’ll see. I must say, I’d rather not bring him in if I don’t have to. He’ll blame me for getting here late. First things first. Is anyone hurt?”
“No.”
“No.”
“Oh, no.” The denials were prompt and vigorous. Rick stopped rubbing his shoulder, while Josh tried to stand naturally on his bruised leg. Hag muttered, “We can fix the damage.”
Winnie moved to examine the squashed case. “Don’t bet on it. This unit has had its day. The big question is, what have we lost from the system?”
She went across to the main console and began to call up system components, one after another. The others could only watch her facial expressions and hope that she knew what she was doing.
At first they were encouraged. Winnie said, “You may be lucky. That whole unit was only second-level backup. We haven’t lost anything.” But then she began to frown. “I don’t understand this. Whole segments of memory have been wiped clean, and half the system modules are sending failure messages. Were you fooling around at the console before you started to fight?”
Josh hadn’t been present, but Rick and Hag’s surprise and instant denial seemed genuine. “We didn’t touch anything over here,” Hag said.
“Cross our hearts,” added Rick.
“Well, someone certainly did.” Winnie called up a display. “See these? None of the units shown is working. And it’s not just processor failure. Here’s another list. These are databases—nothing to do with the ones you damaged, these are supposed to be in primary storage. We should be able to access data from any of them. But we can’t. Actually, I’m being told the data themselves don’t even exist.”
The list didn’t mean anything to Josh. It had uninteresting labels, like ROSTER OF SOLFERINO PERSONNEL, PERSONNEL MEDICAL RECORDS, PERSONNEL TRAVEL RECORDS, and SOLFERINO PERSONNEL ASSIGNMENT AND DUTIES. Even less relevant to anything were entries named Foodlines charter for the exploration and DEVELOPMENT OF SOLFERINO: TERMS AND CONDITIONS, and one Called LEGAL INTERFACES AND INTERCORPORATE AGREEMENTS CONCERNING CONGLOMERATE RIGHTS AND RESTRICTIONS IN THE GRISEL STELLAR SYSTEM. Attached to every item on the list was a notation: DATA FILE CORRESPONDING TO THIS LABEL DOES NOT EXIST.
Winnie Carlson did not seem to share Josh’s view as to what was important. She was making a note of places where data tables were missing.
“It’s worse than it looks,” she said. “I can’t reach the backup files, either. Those data are just plain vanished.”
“Did we do that?” Hag asked.
“No, you didn’t. Those were different files entirely. And it’s impossible to ruin a whole system by smashing a piece of peripheral storage hardware.” Winnie was puzzling again over the list that she had made. “But why are there no backup files? Normally, everything has a second copy in case the original is accidentally destroyed. Not this time. It’s unbelievably bad luck to lose processor capacity and data files, all at once. In fact, it’s such unbelievably bad luck that I don’t believe it.”
She stood, staring vacantly at the list, until Hag said, “Do you have to tell Brewster?”
“Soon. But not yet.” Winnie came out of her trance. She pointed to the ruined data unit. “You get that out of the way. Dump it where Brewster won’t see it. I’ll reconfigure the system to operate without it, make a backup copy of the data, and see what else is out of action. For the moment, you say nothing to Brewster. All right?”
It was more than all right. Josh felt the same relief as he saw on Rick and Hag’s faces, at the same time as a part of his brain asked a question of its own: Why was Winnie Carlson doing this? Was it just to protect them from Brewster’s anger?
That didn’t seem plausible; but he could think of no better answer as he and the Lasker twins packed the broken unit into a big trash bag. While they waited for Winnie to tell them they could take it away—she was still messing around at the computer console—he massaged his sore thigh.
Rick saw him doing it. “We got you good, eh?”
“No, it’s nothing. How’s your shoulder?”
“What shoulder?”
“That will do.” Winnie swung around in her seat. “Whatever it was, the three of you have had it out with each other. If you want me to forget this, you’d better do the same.”
“It’s forgot already,” Hag said. He lifted the bag with the broken storage unit inside it. “We can put this outside the fence, far enough away so nobody’s going to find it. But what if Brewster sees us going and asks what we got?”
“He won’t.” Winnie stood up. “I’ll make sure I have his attention while you get out of the way. Give me three minutes, then you can head out of here. Beyond the fence is fine, but make sure you stash it in a place where nobody will find it. I want you back in half an hour. There’s real work for you to do here. Smashing things doesn’t count.”
She left. “I had her wrong,” Rick said. “I was sure she’s so scared of Brewster, she’d run right off and tell him what we did.”
“She doesn’t seem as afraid of him as she was.” Hag hefted the bag. “Maybe she’s changed.”
That was Josh’s opinion, too. He even thought he knew the exact moment that the change took place. It was at the camp, when Amethyst said they had seen a Unimine ship—not near the far-off mining world of Cauldron, but in low orbit around Solferino.