Read Directive 51 for Free Online Page A

been able to see what these assholes were up to, but I just didn’t, and look what it’s done to you, buddy. I sure as hell wish I could promise I’d avenge you, but I don’t think that’s in the cards.
    I guess I’ll be making my apology in person pretty soon, anyway.

ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. JUST WEST OF SANTA ROSA ISLAND, ABOUT FIFTY MILES FROM THE CALIFORNIA MAINLAND. A LITTLE BEFORE 6:00 A.M. PST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.
    Grady Barbour wasn’t used to being up this early, though he was sometimes up this late; and he wasn’t at all used to being sober when he was up this late. But here he was, three days without a drink because Daybreak mattered, and after a long, lingering morning twilight, the sun was finally looking like it might decide to come up. That would bring on the land breeze that would make the rest of the day’s sail down the California coast a lot easier; they’d had to use the engine to get out here early this morning, and somehow that seemed wrong, just as it seemed entirely appropriate that Mad Caprice was a wooden boat that he’d re-rigged with hemp.
    It was cold, but he had a nice big lidded mug filled with coffee, and the wind was light but steady. He kept a hand on the wheel, drank the coffee, and thought about Daybreak and what life together with Tracy would be like after this.
    Tracy was taking her turn at launching, working as clean as possible because their electronics needed to work for a couple more weeks.
    Normally, just watching Tracy could get him horny; to Grady, she pretty much defined “trophy wife.” But in the baggy jacket, rubber gloves, hairnet, and rubber boots, she didn’t look like much just now. Also, he was feeling uncharacteristically clearheaded because they’d agreed not to drink until Daybreak was actually delivered.
    Yet he didn’t feel grumpy, tired, or sad at all, as he usually would, cold sober and up too early. With just enough breeze to fill the sails, the day promised to be warm but not hot, and they were on their way to a new world.
    Tracy scooped out a cup of the little gelatin capsules and dumped them into a flaccid black balloon, as big as her own torso. Really, the longest and hardest part of the job had been building the glove box that let them load the gelatin capsules without spreading any of the various nanoswarm and tailored biotes around, but Grady had always been good with his hands. Tracy was always saying that he looked like a sculptor, with his craggy, weather- and gin-beaten features.
    Tracy poured a cup of seawater into the balloon, enough to get the biotes going once the sun warmed it. She squirted the sealant on the surface inside the mouth of the balloon, then fitted it over the special adapter built by a Daybreaker in Seattle, sort of a friendly hippie machinist who usually made stuff for drug labs. She cranked down the gasket, opened the valve to the cylinder of welding hydrogen, and filled the balloon to its full two-meter diameter, bigger across than she was tall, enough to lift the water and capsules plus itself. She tightened the tie around the neck and released the adapter, letting the balloon rise away from the bow, carried well downwind before it was at mast height. It climbed slowly but steadily.
    Grady visualized the rest of the story; in an hour or so, the seawater would dissolve a capsule containing a biote that would begin to grow and eat the balloon; while that continued, the other capsules would dissolve, leaving a gray, active breeding sludge of mixed nanoswarm and biotes, floating above the Big System inland, invisible to radar, and drifting on the breeze.
    Sometime between two and five hours later, depending on whether the sun was out and how well each particular strain of biotes did, the balloon would rupture. Probably it would happen at the bottom of the puddled seawater, where exposure had been greatest. Then the escaping hydrogen would spray the solution and nanospawn into the air as the balloon whipped madly