Read Online Mariposa by Greg Bear - Free Book Online Page A

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.
    Fouad lowered one eyebrow, truly uninformed.
    "Well, you handled him better than my guards. A magnificent job of defusing. I'm grateful."
    "Is the programmer well?" Fouad asked.
    He wondered why programmers as a group would be waiting to explode.
    Price lifted one shoulder and grimaced. "No longer your concern."
    He pointed to the rightmost monitor. A fast patrol ship in purple and green—Talos colors—was standing off from the cargo vessel.
    "Gulf of Aden. You'd think I wanted to be Pompey the Great, with all the pirates my boys discourage and all the ships I recover. Started that business five years ago. When foreign countries want military assistance, they don't go to the U.S. government anymore—they come to me. I sell protective systems to ship owners, but they're slow to spend what they cost—so I charge them for recovery, ten times more expensive. It's hard, dangerous work. Never underestimate what a little boredom and a lot of poverty can do to a bunch of fishermen.
    "A few years ago, when our snipers started blowing their brains out, the Somalis acquired a taste for blood as well as treasure." He grinned with a touch of boyish wickedness. "It's an old story—but they're getting tougher and meaner and more desperate every year, poor bastards. So we conduct our raids the same way they do. Surprise, speed, and ass-kicking violence."
    Fouad could see no guns on the patrol ship, but recognized a prickly array of LED blinders—bigger versions of the light used on Nick in Buckeye—as well as seizure-inducing strobes, acoustic blasters, and even conical microwave pain projectors, mounted on the bow.
    "My team commander has just given the pirates five minutes to abandon the vessel and leave the crew unharmed," Price said. "If they aren't away by then, he'll go in with a pulsed sound and light show—sends anyone topside into fits, and they don't even have to face the strobes. Backscatter does the trick most of the time. Anybody inside is going to have their sphincters open right up—the crew will be inconvenienced, but Hershey shorts are better than dying. Hell of a sensation. All my guys go through it,