“Damnit!” He screamed as the screen blinked out.

There wasn’t anything left to do, though. The server was dead and his hopes went with it. He was hoping that he would have gotten at least a couple more hours out of it, as a shield to the onslaught that was going to come down on his head in short order.

Management wouldn’t be happy about the failure, especially when it only lasted a couple of months. Then again, they were the ones that wouldn’t splurge for a proofed firewall. They can’t have expected it to last that long. He tapped on his bonecomm and called up his direct superior.

“Thomas here,” the man replied after a couple of rings. It sounded like he was in a tornado.

“It’s down,” he said. “Only lasted about three hours once the hive found out about the open jack. What do you want me to do?”

“Crap. Miles isn’t going to be happy with that. Hold for now, I’ll comm back in a bit.”

He started pulling the cables out of the rack, knowing that there was going to at least a replacement put in place, and if not that, a scrap order. There wasn’t anything to do with a server that had been hived out. Any time you connected it back on the ‘net it would be seeking out the hive and joining in whatever plan they had going on at the moment. His head buzzed.

“Okay, plug it back in, they say,” Thomas’s voice rang loud and clear.

“Huh? Are they crazy?”

“Well, apparently this was the plan from the start. They weren’t that happy that you actually tried to defend it in the first place. Put it back online.”

That sealed it: they were nuts.