"John Ringo - The Legacy of the Aldenata 1 - A Hymn Before Battle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)

Norcross, GA Sol III
1447 EDT March 16, 2001 ad


Michael O'Neal was a junior associate web consultant with an Atlanta web-page
design firm. What this meant in practice was that he worked eight to twelve hours a day
with HTML, Java and Perl. When the associate account executives or the account
executives needed somebody along who really understood what the system was doing,
when, for example, the client group included an engineer or computer geek, he would be
invited to the meeting to sit there and be quiet until they hit a snag. Then he opened his
mouth to spit out a bare minimum of technobabble. This indicated to the customer that
there was at least one guy working on their site who had more going for him than good
hair and a low golf score. Then the sales consultant would take the client to lunch while
Mike went back to his office.
While Mike had fine hair, he played neither golf nor tennis, was ugly as a troll and
short as an elf. Despite these handicaps he was working himself steadily up the corporate
ladder. He had recently gotten an unasked-for raise in lieu of promotion, which surprised
the hell out of him, and other rattling noises had been heard that indicated the possibility
of further upward mobility.
The office he moved into was not much; there was barely room to turn his swivel
chair, it was right next to the break room so several times a day it was overwhelmed by
the smell of popcorn, and he had to install a hanging book rack for his references. But it
was an office, and in a time of cube farms that meant everything. Someone in the
background was grooming him for something and he just hoped it was not a guillotine.
UnlikelyтАФhe was the kind of aggressive pain in the ass every company secretly needed.
He was currently in a mood to kill. The overblown applets on the newest client's site
were slowing their page to a crawl. Unfortunately, the client insisted on the "little" pieces
of code that were taking up so much of their bandwidth, so it was up to him to figure out
how to reduce it.
He sat with his feet propped on his overloaded desk, gripping and releasing a
torsional hand exerciser as he stared up at the "Tick" poster on his ceiling and thought
about his next vacation. Two more weeks and then it would be blue surf, cold beer and
coral reefs. I should have gone SEAL, he thought, his face fixed in a perpetual frown from
weight lifting, and become a surfing instructor. Sharon looks good in a bikini.
He had just taken a sip of stale, cold coffee, thinking blue thoughts of Java surgery,
when his phone rang.
"Michael O'Neal, Pre-Publish Design, how can I help you?" The phone snag and
stock answer were performed before his forebrain kicked in. Then he nearly spit out his
coffee when he recognized the voice.
"Hi, Mike, it's Jack."
His feet slammed to the floor with a crash and XML for Dummies followed it. "Good
morning, sir, how are you?" He had not talked to his former boss in nearly two years.
"Good enough. Mike, I need you down at McPherson on Monday morning."
Whaaa? "Sir, it's been eight years. I'm not in the Army market anymore." By nearly
Pavlovian response, he started to catalog everything he would need to take.
"I just got finished talking to your company's president. This is not, currently, an
official recall . . ."
I like that little hidden threat boss, Mike thought.
"But I pointed out that whether it was or not, you would be eligible to return under