Leo Frankowski

of the boys’ noses.
“If I had my way, I’d rough you up a bit more, or maybe chop off your hands to mark you as troublemakers.” Dirk’s
claws sliced through the ropes as though
they were spaghetti. “This time
the Lady Mona was here to save you, but next time you won’t be so lucky. If I
don’t get you, I have a million brothers
who will. Now get out of here and take your buddy in the plaster with you.”
    The boys required no
further encouragement.
    Well, that’s that problem, Mona thought. But there’s going to be hell to pay tomorrow.

Chapter Eleven
    AUGUST 30, 2003
     
    I AM in the process of
growing five additional Regional Coordination Units. Each will have message-handling
and data-storage capabilities equal to my present self. Each regional unit
will have authority over approximately five million humans and their
attendant bioforms. Message-routing procedures to these subordinate regional units will be
as follows…
    —Central Coordination Unit to all
local ganglia
     
    From the point where
Hastings was ejected from his plane to the outskirts of Life Valley was four
hundred miles
as the jet flies. It was more than twice that for a man who has to walk
and live off the land.
    Hastings was forced
to consider fifteen miles a day to be good speed, and often he didn’t achieve
it. But Hastings’ character and temperament were as solid as concrete. And like
concrete, the more he was stressed, the more rigid he became. His small lean frame
became thinner and harder from the continuous walking. His mind became narrower and
harder as well.
    Guibedo and Copernick
had become for him the personification of all that was evil. They had murdered
his family. They had destroyed his country. They had taken from him all that
could possibly be good in the world.
    Hastings had become
something less than a human being. He had become a machine. A machine with only one function.
    Vengeance.
    Yet his intelligence
never failed him.
    He burned his
uniform and dressed himself in rugged camping clothes that he found in Paradise,
Nevada. He let his hair and beard grow long to blend into the crowds of refugees.
    In an abandoned
electronics repair store, he cobbled together a white-noise generator from a
pocket radio. He took apart a choke coil and wove the fine copper wire into a
tight-fitting skull cap. He spent hours fitting the cap so that his long hair went through it
and the cap wasn’t noticeable at a
distance. He put the radio in his shirt
pocket and ran a wire under his arm to the skull cap at the back of his neck. Such a contrivance would
have stopped a human telepath; it
might work on the gene-engineered monsters, as well.
    He found a strip of
titanium in an abandoned workshop at Nellis Air Force Base, and painstakingly ground it into a gutting
knife. He ripped the element from an electrical heater and fashioned the nichrome
wire into a garrotte. In the explosives shed behind an abandoned air police office
he found three bricks of C-4 explosive. Plastique. But the electrical detonators
with them had had iron magnetos, and were useless.
    Three weeks later at
a construction site in Good Springs,
he found some blasting caps with chemical fuses.
    His confidence was
starting to match his determination. The only way to stop a good man is to
kill him.
    And good men are
damned hard to kill!
     
    Dirk trotted into
Guibedo’s workshop at Oakwood. Intent on his work, Guibedo was hunched over his incredibly ornate
microscalpel.
    “My lord.”
    “Hi, Dirk.” Guibedo didn’t turn
from his work. “I’ll be with you in
five minutes. Such a beauty this one’s going to be, Dirk. It’s an eighty-foot
Viking long boat with a square sail,
oars, shields, and everything. Heiny’s gonna
make an animal to work the oars and be the dragon’s head. It’s only got a ten-inch draft, so we can take it up the rivers and canals, but we can still
take it on the ocean. Some fun,
huh?”
    “I’m sure it
will provide considerable amusement, my lord,” Dirk said dryly. The
frivolity of these humans!
    “So, how did
everything go?”
    “In general,
things are proceeding according to the plan, my lord, except that, for logistical
reasons, the contingent heading for the eastern hemisphere has had to turn back.”
    “So? What
happened?”
    “There are
simply not a sufficient number of tree houses in Alaska and Kamchatka to support a
meaningful number of LDUs in transit to Siberia. If we sent more than a thousand they
would starve to