As Roger ran out through the door he saw Lexicon's tail lights disappearing into traffic. He then noticed the crumpled Hank Brooks lying on the asphalt. Running to him he soon realized that nothing could be done for his one time friend. Nancy came out and saw Roger standing over the body. "Spike wants to talk up in Lexicon's office. Are you all right? Can you make it?"

"Yeah, I'll make it."

As they entered the executive office, Roger explained to Spike, "Hank's dead. Looks like Lexicon ran him over in the front drive."

"I was hoping he wouldn't make it out there before Lexicon got away," said Spike. "Unfortunately we still have work to do. I have to stop the drones, but at least I know how to do it. I copied the CD while Lexicon was demo'ing it to you Nancy."

"Is that why it was reading constantly?"

"Yeah, I had to hope he wouldn't notice the hardware indicator lights. I've only looked at the control program for a couple minutes but I think taking the drones out should be pretty easy. The biggest problem is there are so many of them out there. Also, I've got to assume that Lexicon is going to advance the schedule and reload for a pay-off later. There's no time to spare in cutting them off. Nancy you need to call Tom Barnett and have him send the FBI down here. Make sure it's the FBI not the local police department. We need to explain this to someone who knows what's been going on with the net. Roger, you figure out a good story. One that explains this without me being part of it. Go over it together before they get here. Stick as close to the truth as possible. And Nancy, remind Tom to leave me out for now. We'll have to explain this to him later but we don't have time tonight for that."

"Okay Spike. We'll take care of that. You're going after the drones?" asked Nancy.

"Yeah, and to see if I can find Lexicon. You'll be spending most of the night with the Feds so we won't talk again until tomorrow. If everything goes all right and you don't both end up in jail, let's meet at Nancy's office around two tomorrow afternoon."

"Two it is. Now get going before the drones break loose," said Roger.

Spike ducked into home base at MicroLabs. There he set up his system to take out the drones. He issued the deactivate command to the first ten drones on the list. All ten shut down and deleted themselves immediately. Obedient little army John Lexicon had created. The next ten did the same. But in the third set, one of the drones activated when it received the deactivate command. Before Spike knew what was happening, the drone was firing a constant packet stream at the University of Texas' primary domain server in Austin. The drone was firing from a nearby research park location operating a Sequent SE60. The drone had activated everything the Sequent could give it from 12 SMP processors and jammed the total bandwidth of the two T3 circuits attaching it to the Internet.



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