Greg Bear - Mariposa

Talos Campus

The wide window of the Talos command center looked out over forty acres of calf-high, swaying grass, dazzling green beneath high banks of football lights. The field had been planted at Price's orders to replicate the original Texas tallgrass prairie that had once covered twenty million acres.

Indiangrass and Little Bluestem flowed up to the window, lush and deceptive.

Axel Price was a tough man to see, even when he was doing the summoning. Fouad was increasingly certain his cover was blown. There were many sympathetic to Price even within the Bureau. He wondered which would come first: his meeting or security police dangling handcuffs.

With the slow, painful decline of oil prices in the second decade of the twenty-first century-and the living death of the local cattle industry after three major outbreaks of hoof and mouth disease-Talos Corporation was now the only thing that enabled anyone to make a living in this part of Texas. It supported almost a quarter of the state; it might even elevate Axel Price to governor-or emperor, Fouad mused, if the state legislature finished cutting itself away from the feds.

This time, there would be no Abraham Lincoln to stand in their way.

The receptionist-a slender brunette in a tight brown skirt and white blouse, mincing on shiny black high heels-opened the door to his left and tapped across the slate floor. Her glasses were shaped like cat's eyes, with small wings on their outer tips, as if they wanted to fly away.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Al-Husam," she said. "Mr. Price was here a few minutes ago, but a helicopter came and took him out to the Smoky. He told me you should hop a shuttle and meet him there."

"Thank you," Fouad said.

Even more privilege. The Smoky was Price's private ranch, four hundred acres on the northern edge of the Talos Campus. He did not raise cattle or horses but kept antique cars, helicopters, and armored vehicles in hangars and garages nearby-along with a sophisticated fighter jet, a two-seat Sukhoi Su-27 that he sometimes flew out of the Lion City airport, with the help of a professional pilot.

"I've called the van," she continued, "and it'll be here in five minutes. Terribly inconvenient, but he says it's important."

"I will wait out front," Fouad said.

"You do that! It'll be here in a jiff."

He left the reception area and stood on the porch beside the parking lot. Crickets sang in the dark heat. He wondered where they found their moisture. His own lips were dry. Of course, crickets did not have or need lips. Cartoons from television again came to mind: they spat black juice and played guitars.

Or perhaps those were grasshoppers or locusts.

The security team was nowhere in sight.

Other than the timing, there was no good reason to believe he had been discovered. He had been exceptionally careful and Jane Rowland had trained him well.

Still, Talos was a place of unexpected eyes and ears. Price's dictum was that since he trusted everyone, no one should mind being closely watched. "We're all family here-partners in a big effort. I'm watched, we're all watched. It's no big deal."

Price had nothing to hide. Of course, reports of his activities ultimately ended up on his own desk.

Fouad did not know what to make of what he had seen of the information that now passed through the tiny machines in his blood. Banks, corporations, international holding companies, names-nations.

He was grateful he was merely a vessel and not an analyst.

Even so, as he waited under the Texas night-the stars bleached from the sky by the banks of lights-he made a few surmises, put together a few educated guesses.

It did not look good.

The Bureau had been right to send him here.

A shuttle pulled up to the curb, a long, broad black van with twelve seats, all empty. The door swung open. The driver was a young, muscular black with short hair. He wore a gray jumpsuit with red stripes on the sleeves and pants legs, as did all support service workers on the campus. He smiled at Fouad as he climbed up the steps and took a front seat, facing the windshield.

"Dry, hot night," the driver said. "Straight to the Smoky, Mr. Al-Husam. Good time to see the ranch. They had choppers up doing practice runs last time I was out there, a couple hours ago. Might still be putting on a show. Real fine."

The shuttle drove through darkness along straight smooth roads, better maintained than the city streets or highways. The headlights painted in brilliant white the occasional jackrabbit, one possum, one artichoke-no, armadillo. Like little armored rats, armadillos were common around here, unsightly and unclean beasts-or so Fouad surmised. They were frequently seen ruptured and ugly, squashed by passing cars. It was said the treatment for leprosy had been found in the pads of armadillo feet. No Muslim could have made that discovery-nor even come close to touching such a prehistoric curiosity.

Yes, definitely unclean.

The driver delivered him to the gate house for the Smoky, and from there, another driver used an open cart to take Fouad half a mile to the main house, around to a side entrance, and dropped him off at the door.

At no point did this seem to be anything alarming or out of the ordinary.

Yet the network on the campus had gone out. Or so they said.

Price's private office was simple but elegant, the very best money could buy, but without much in the way of ostentation or even artwork, and comparatively small-barely twenty feet on a side.

A modest low bay window looked out over another plot of tall grass and beyond that, a set of gray hangars lined the horizon.

As Fouad watched, the lights surrounding these buildings dimmed, then shut off.

The side windows were open and a clean, grassy night breeze blew into the room, prickling the hairs on his neck.

A curved bank of monitors covered the eastern wall of the office, providing a panoramic view of a broad, distant gray ocean-sunrise or sunset, Fouad could not tell. In the middle monitor, jerky video of a large cargo ship marked "HKA" was apparently being shot from the vantage of a small boat crossing choppy water.

The view swooped to the left to show three other boats bouncing and skimming: trim, fast, purple inflatables known as Starfish.

The CEO of Talos rose from a stool in front of the monitors, took a sharp step forward, and offered his hand to Fouad.

Axel Price would have been difficult to describe to a sketch artist, yet once you saw him, you never forgot him. Beneath neatly trimmed brown hair, his clean, planed face was at once handsome and unmemorable. He had a narrow, knowing smile and observant but not penetrating blue eyes. Very small lines around the corners of his lips could just as easily have been traces of cruelty or humor. Just above his collar line, Fouad saw reddened scars, which he guessed would extend down his back-a case of acne rosacea, perhaps, in Price's impoverished adolescence.

Price stood two inches taller but did not outweigh him. Fouad had put on a little weight in the past year and Price was in top condition though slender, with just the beginning of a stoop.

"I've heard a lot about you," he said as he walked around Fouad to close the door. "You've done a great job for us."

"Always a pleasure serving Talos, sir."

Price returned to the stool and sat with one leg raised, brown Oxford wedged on a cross bar. "I was impressed by how you performed at Buckeye. Sorry you had to be exposed to that silliness. What do you suppose tipped the poor guy"

"I have no idea," Fouad said. "He is not known to me."

"Not really known to anyone, apparently. Big mistake, hiring those guys. All of them. Scattered all over the planet now, ticking time bombs, waiting to explode." Price waited for a reaction.