Spike put himself into the stream of traffic inbound to the Sequent site. He squirmed through the security layer once he finally made it through the jammed channels. The UT node was taking a total beating. Pass through traffic was mostly moving around the node but nothing that had to get to UT was making it. Spike got to the administrative control layer of the OS's kernel and killed the drone process. The Sequent immediately quieted down to normal and UT began catching up its message load.

So Lexicon had included booby traps in the drone control program. Spike estimated that he had an hour from the time Lexicon fled the manufacturing facility before drones would start getting activation commands from Lexicon. It had taken ten minutes to get Roger and Nancy on their way and another five to get set-up back at MicroLabs. Now thirty drones had been taken out, but with the Texas delay, Spike had only thirty-five minutes to deactivate all the rest. He invested some more study in the control program and its data structures. Noticing an anomaly in the description for the booby-trapped site in Austin, he picked out another of the same from the list and sent it the activate command and password. As expected, the activate command produced the opposite effect and the drone deactivated.

Spike pulled all the entries with the same description anomaly and sent out a series of activate commands to each drone site on the list. One by one the entire set shut down. He then returned to the main list of drone sites and issued deactivate commands in blocks of twenty separated by two seconds in case any more surprises popped up. Fortunately none did and Spike had taken out all 2800 drones in a total elapsed time of forty-five minutes.

Learjet pilot powered up and was beginning to taxi toward take-off position. Lexicon had barked out his orders at the crew and the pilots. He told them there would be flight plan changes later but for now, he wanted to be on the way to Hawaii as soon as possible. He made himself a drink from the plane's liquor cabinet and sat back to relax a little and cool-off from all the running around.

He had to think. He had to punish them for trying to stop him. As the Lear left the ground, he decided to activate a few drones, ten or twenty and let them see the results of their foolish efforts. He powered up his portable and inserted the drone control program CD. As it came up he selected a few high profile targets and high powered drone processor sites. He linked in his laptop to the Internet with a cellular phone call and modem. Lexicon then hit the send button to launch his miniature attack. His feedback monitor sensed no drone activations. He started to get worried and began frantically trying to locate and activate any drone.



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