Greg Bear: Mariposa

The crowd laughed again, as if the weird weeping had been planned-the world's cry of pain only appropriate, considering their coming triumph.

On the biggest screen, a net media news banner announced a breaking story-blackouts.

A wave of power outages sends much of the northwest and Canada back to the stone age-

Video pans of dark streets, black skylines silhouetted against the morning glow.

"Apocalypse now, by God!" the elderly congressman enthused in a booming voice.

The Saudi prince took this opportunity to push his way onto the riser, his own retinue glaring a challenge at Schmitz and the Haitians.

Schmitz did not intervene.

The prince's eyes fixed on Fouad. His face was stony but his hands quivered. He stepped close and leaned over. Fouad angled his head back, taking in this looming presence with doped nonchalance, then a twitch of his brows, a slight bow of his head, to a prince of the ancient blood.

Speechless with fury, the Saudi struck him hard across the face with the back of his hand, and was about to do so again.

Schmitz moved in this time to block the blow-

The air changed, turning suddenly crisp and terribly dry.

Schmitz cried out, grabbed his arm, and reeled back. His Haitians did the same, along with the prince's retinue-clutching the same spot on their right arms, as if branded by hot, invisible pokers.

The dance floor erupted in howls of pain.

The ballroom lights flared an intolerable white, then sizzled out in cascades of sparks.

Judah P. Benjamin International Airport (JPB)

Bruised and battered, blood streaming from his scalp down the back of his neck, William crept along the northern edge of the highway, sometimes crawling, sometimes marching in a low, awkward crouch, always aware of the traffic both on the ground and in the air.

Limos, Torq-Vees, a steady stream of light trucks…

Drones hugging the terrain along the highway, keeping low to avoid incoming flights.

He had come within a few dozen yards of the airport's northern boundary, protected by a high wire fence, when a Gulfstream sighed in for a landing to his left, catching the sunrise, its fuselage a gorgeous flow of gold and salmon pink.

Almost simultaneously, west of the airport, a big twinkle in the sky went nova. From the bright center, flares spread out to form a five-pointed star, each point expanding into a spherical front of purple plasma.

The plasma spheres warped, twisted, and merged, in turn provoking an atmospheric outrage unlike anything William had ever seen-a shower of spinning, darting puffs of intermittent light spreading out over the Texas landscape.

The air above the desert began to crackle.

Over Lion County

The sun rested on the horizon, cut in half, before its final heave toward day. The sky visible through the jet's opposite windows seemed to briefly flicker, like a passing torch flame. Fore and aft, Rebecca heard light mechanical clicking, like fingers randomly working keyboards.

Haze's face beaded with sweat.

"Bright number one," the first weapons officer announced. "Five-minute burn."

Something about the aircraft interior changed-something about Rebecca's own skull, as well. The air seemed dryer. Sharp pains wormed and twisted in her jaw, her mandible: the fillings in her teeth were getting hot.

Kunsler grimaced and covered her mouth.

Haze let out a whoop and bent over.

The weapons officer swore and produced mouth pieces from a bag. "Jeez, sorry! Most of my guys-here, use these-like a boxer," he said.

Rebecca inserted the guard between her teeth and sat back, feeling the pains subside.

"Range increasing." The weapons officer watched the lights on his remote trigger. He looked back at Rebecca and Kunsler, opened his mouth, and tapped his eyetooth with a fingernail. "Younger guys have ceramic caps, not amalgam. Double apologies-it'll pass. Keep those guards in."

"We're taking that first one well, ladies and gentlemen," the pilot announced. "Last plane into JPB has made it to the runway and is coasting. Engines puffing and throwing out sparks. That's quite a show down there."

"Second burn in three minutes," the weapons officer said, eyes bright. Totally into it. "Runway looks clear for a landing-if that's the plan."

Kunsler looked to Rebecca.

The HRT commander gave her a high-five-his team was ready.

JPB

William toppled from his crouch and lay on his back in the dirt, looking sideways. From this perspective, he saw a handful of metallic discs spark and dance on the pea gravel and sand.

Something was pumping the ubiquitous Talos surveillance chips full of energy. As if in rowdy applause, a number of nearby bushes snapped into smoky torches.

Under his legs, several of the chips burned his skin. William hastily kicked them away, then looked around for a place where there were no chips-nothing to absorb the pulse from the sky and catch his pants on fire.

A big drone came spinning down and augured into the dirt barely a hundred and fifty yards away. Its load of ammunition immediately began to cook off like a hideous popcorn machine, a continuous rolling snap-snap-wow followed by singing whines, much too close to his head.

Then its Hellfire missiles blew, knocking William several yards back into the scrub and poking small shrapnel holes in his legs.

He rolled and stayed low, waiting for his senses to return, then felt for injuries with filthy fingers, poking through torn pants legs and shirt. Eventually he realized that he wasn't much worse off than he had been before.

He had been tossed into a comparatively parched and empty patch of ground, no bushes, so he rolled over to watch the show.

Thousands of fist-size spheres of blue-green plasma bounced like elfin jewelry along the desert contours, following their own sense of magnetic destiny.

Without knowing precisely what was happening, William began to laugh like a maniac. This seemed to disturb a line of sizzling spook-gems. They backed off in sincere resentment, glimmering, studying his energy and static profile, and then accepted the new way of things. A few flowed around him. One touched his knee, and another an outcrop of boulder.

Both popped like tiny balloons.

Brush fires had broken out all over the desert. Smoke was already thick.

William realized he couldn't just stick around and play the stunned audience. He got up, brushed himself off, and walked toward the airport's wire fence, looking for a gate, a culvert, a water drainage pipe, some sort of entrance.

Somehow he guessed there wouldn't be much left in the way of a security presence. Axel Price had just provoked a federal response William did not even know was in their arsenal-

Non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse.

Another drifting star went nova and it started all over again.

The Smoky

The unrolled screens went black as one. Throughout the ballroom, more fixtures exploded and threw sparks down on the crowd-already dancing to another tune, not a waltz but a frantic thrashing accompanied by swinish squeals of pain.

Three hanging banners had caught fire. In the weird glow, Fouad saw Price grab his mouth and bend over double. His Haitians had thrown aside their weapons, which crackled and sparked on the polished oak floor. Despite their pain, as the guards twitched and groaned, they tried to move him from beneath the banners and out of the ballroom.

Price jerked straight and resisted.

Some of the guests had already left but dozens more were bowing, cursing, and screaming, bouncing into each other-cutting spastic orange figures against the darkness.