Now go inside and go to sleep and stay asleep until we get home.”
“You’re not mad at me, are you, Lady Mona?” Liebchen was quivering, frightened.
“No, but you did make a mistake. Now do as you’re told.”
Patricia didn’t make the connection between her own problems and Liebchen’s, and followed the faun inside.
“Dirk, give this bunch a warning and let them go,” Mona said.
“Well, you heard the lady.” Dirk extended his dagger-claw in front 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…
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 death en route. Also, there is more work to be done in the western hemisphere alone than the LDUs assigned there can handle. The eastern seaboard of the U.S. is in far worse shape than we had anticipated. Therefore, Lord Copernick has delayed our entry into Asia for two months, when the food trees will be producing sufficiently to support us on the trip.”
“Well, if we got to, we got to.”
“We now cover the North American continent, except for Nova Scotia, and the first units have reached Columbia. We have suffered six hundred fifty-seven disabling casualities today, including seventy-two deaths…”
“Dirk, don’t treat your brothers like numbers,” Guibedo said, finishing up his work and turning to the LDU. “Someday when we have time, you can tell me each of their stories, so I can remember them.”
“Sorry, my lord. I didn’t mean to degrade their actions.”
“You didn’t, Dirk. It’s just that numbers are so cold. So how did the trip go? Everybody come back okay?”
“The original party came back in the same physical shape that they left in, my lord. We delivered nine tons of supplies to those who needed them and returned with forty-two sick and injured refugees. Winnie is loading up for another trip in the morning.”
“And the girls?”
“They’ll be along in an hour or so. I’ve been working for you now for three years, my lord. Besides being my boss, you’ve been my teacher and my mentor. And if I may be permitted the honor, you have also been my friend.”
“Well, I like you, too, Dirk. I think next to Heiny and the girls, you’re the only friend I’ve got. But what are you trying to say?”
“My lord—we have made another error.”
“So that’s troubling you? Look, Dirk. When you send out a lot of soldiers, you know that some things are going to go wrong. But the good your brothers have done is so much greater than the bad, that you have nothing to be ashamed of.”
“But it’s—”
“Look, Dirk. You got to understand that you’re really a bunch of kids. All of you. Your brothers, the telephone, the fauns, the TRACs. None of you are over four years old! Nobody expects perfection out of children. Making mistakes is part of growing up. If you’re still doing big things wrong when you’re twenty, you should worry about it then. But for now, be lenient with yourself a little bit, or you’re going to rot your guts out.”
“I don’t have any guts, my lord. Merely an absorption cavity. But the point is—”
“Dirk, your brothers are doing a fine job. Now I don’t want to hear any more about this.”
“It isn’t that, my lord. This concerns your own family, Patricia and Liebchen.”
“What!” Guibedo lumbered to his feet.
“They are unharmed, my lord. But a situation has occurred which requires your advice and consent to resolve. I felt that, as your friend, I should be the one to explain it to you. Perhaps, if you would sit down, I should tell it all from the beginning.”