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up for the challenge, forcing herself to pretend to be everything people said that she was: unstoppable, a ballbuster, a steamroller. She gave herself the usual speech, ordering herself to ignore the butterflies inside, to put on her big-girl panties and want to accomplish this job. She wanted to fix the problems here, she wanted to show these guys who was boss, she wanted to leave a legacy for herself.
    Right now, unfortunately, all she wanted was Nicolai Vladik. And to get the hell out of these scalding-hot big-girl panties. For her whole life, no matter how hard she tried, they just never seemed to fit her quite right.

Chapter Four
    T he square, impersonal workroom was silent. Lianne rubbed her eyes and wished she could rub away the throbbing behind them. The silence almost made the pain worse. It would have been nice to have some music or a radio or something, but no. There was nothing more than the sound of the tech she’d drafted to work with her tonight as he tapped endless streams of data into the computer and the constant tick-tick-tick of the battery-operated clock that hung on their beige wall.
    Lianne frowned at both of them. Midnight. No wonder the poor tech had been yawning incessantly. Okay, so he had a right to be tired. They’d been going over the same data for nearly six hours now. No matter how she had him run the reports, the results were the same: incomplete.
    Plain and simple, huge chunks of important data were missing. How no one had seen this before, she had no idea. All she knew was they had two weeks to figure out the problem and fill in the gaps or she’d be answering to her father.
    Even worse, she’d be answering to herself. She’d never let failure be an option and she wasn’t about to start allowing it now. She could sleep when she got back to the States. Hell, she’d be getting plenty of sleep once she got home. For the next two weeks here she could easily afford to go without.
    The tech, however, did not appear able to do that. He’d been drifting on her for a while now, and she could see he had nothing left to give. She’d better let him go get some rest or he’d be useless to her tomorrow. There was a fine line between getting hard work out of the team members and draining them dry.
    “All right, Davis, you can log out. I think we’ve exhausted all our options here tonight,” she said and could see him practically rejoice at her words. “Head to your bunk and we’ll hit it again in the morning.”
    “I don’t know what other data you can pull from this,” he said, pushing his chair back and stretching. “We’ve run it every way I can think of and still we’re missing parts.”
    “I know. We’ve got to figure out why.”
    “Faulty equipment is my guess,” he said, letting the machine power down as one by one the little blinking lights on printers, memory banks, and related equipment faded out. “Sandstrom Industries guarantees performance even in harsh environments, but I don’t know. They’ve had a lot of trouble on the westward side of that mountain.”
    She puzzled over that. “The westward side? Isn’t that the glaciated side?”
    “Our permits let us get right up next to the glacier in that area,” the tech explained. “We can’t get out and check them very often, though, since we’re only allowed limited access. I don’t know, but I heard some of the guys talking that maybe there’s a tolerance issue and we’re taking readings too close together or something. You’d have to get one of the engineers to explain it.”
    “Thank you, I will. Now go turn in and get some rest.”
    She didn’t have to tell him twice. He left and she stifled her own yawn but scanned the latest printout anyway. How could their numbers be so far off, the readings so inconsistent? Equipment failure could explain some of this, but not all of it. There was no pattern, no indication that any one network was acting up, one sensor group sending flawed data, or anything like