Unfortunately for them, the Snowgoose still had two more hockey pucks in its cargo bay. The first one hit a substation north of the city, a fenced-off lot full of transformer towers like the spires of a futuristic cathedral. The submunition blanketed the substation with carbon fibers, and for a split second, lightning jumped in every direction as one after another of the transformers shorted out and went dark.
The third submunition exploded over a switching station farther inland. The station was already overloaded as it tried to take the strain off the damaged power grid, pulling in power from more directions than it ever had before. A massive current passed through the station, maybe enough to have melted electronic components on its own. The Snowgoose wasn’t taking any chances, though, and it flooded the station with its tiny fragments just as it had the power plant and the substation. The arcs of electric current the fibers elicited this time were strong enough that part of the station exploded, sending hot metal debris flying over a residential neighborhood and starting half a dozen house fires.
Within minutes every light in San Francisco went dark. Those buildings that had on-site backup generators — hospitals, police stations, military installations — were flooded with red emergency lighting, and administrators and officials worked hard to prevent local catastrophes, but they were hampered by the fact that all the cellular networks were down and communications were almost nonexistent.
Within an hour the blackouts had begun to spread. Unable to handle the necessary switching functions, substations across California shut themselves down automatically to protect their vital components. Others were shut down manually because nobody knew what was going on and the men and women who operated those stations were terrified of the power surges that had led to the blackout of 2003. By the time the sun came up, Los Angeles had power only in a few scattered areas. There was no part of California that didn’t feel the pinch. Train stations shut down, delaying millions of passengers. Server farms up and down the coast were taken off-line, and even where people had sufficient power, the Internet and telephone networks slowed to a crawl. Police flooded the streets of the cities to direct traffic and try to ameliorate some of the chaos.
Meanwhile, the Snowgoose found a flat spot on the long hilly ridges of the Las Trampas Regional Wilderness in Contra Costa County. It set down gently on its landing skids, then sat and waited patiently for its masters to collect it. Its work was done.
It was a long walk back to Top’s house, but when they arrived, Chapel and Julia found the place deserted. The front door was unlocked but no lights were on inside, and Chapel couldn’t find anyone in the living room or the kitchen.
Then he heard a rhythmic thumping sound coming from the basement, and he froze in place. Thud-thud-thud. One-two-three. Over and over again.
“Wait here,” he told Julia, wishing, and not for the first time, that he had a weapon. He went to the door that led to the basement stairs and eased it open. There were lights on down there, and the sound was much louder now, and accompanied by gasping breaths. It sounded like someone was being beaten down there.
Chapel sprang into action. If Angel was down there, if she was in trouble—
He rushed down the stairs, with no idea what he would find, knowing perfectly well he could be running into a trap. What he saw instead brought him up short.
The basement was as big as the first floor of the house but completely open. Bare concrete walls were hung with flags and banners showing the Marine Corps and Army logos. Most of the space was full of battered old exercise equipment — weight benches, Nautilus machines, and a huge punching bag hanging from a hook in the ceiling.
Suzie, the scarred vet he’d seen on the stairs earlier, was working the bag hard. One-two-three, one-two-three, dancing around it, slamming her fists against the canvas. Sweat slicked her face and neck, and her skin was bright red with exertion, making her scar stand out pale white against her skin. When she saw Chapel, she stared at him as if she’d caught him peeping through her bedroom window.
“Something you wanted?” she asked.
“I, uh, I’m just looking for—”
“Chapel,” Angel said, then, and he swiveled around to look for her. She was on the far side of the basement, sitting crouched over an antique desktop computer. The screen showed a television feed from CNN. He saw people running in a street somewhere warm. Then the view switched to a map of California, with a huge red stain expanding away from San Francisco. “You need to see this,” Angel said.
When Suzie was done hitting the bag, she moved to a stationary bike and started pedaling like mad. Her eyes stayed on Chapel the whole time.
“She’s okay,” Angel told him. “She just has trust issues.”
Chapel looked back up the stairs and told Julia to come down. “Where’s everybody else?” she asked.
“They all went out to their jobs. Suzie’s only here because she got fired from the last place she worked,” Angel explained.
“Asshole manager kept grabbing my butt,” Suzie told them. “Told me I should feel lucky any man wanted to touch me. What else was I supposed to do?”
“She broke his fingers,” Angel explained.
“That’s… harsh,” Chapel said.
“Sounds about right to me,” Julia said, with a smile.
“She gets it,” Suzie said, never letting up on her pace.
Chapel shook his head. “You said I needed to see something,” he told Angel.
“Yeah, here,” she told him. She clicked through some tabs on her browser and brought up the map he’d seen. It showed California as a series of power grids, with red areas denoting where the power was down and pink areas showing areas that had reduced electricity. Only about a third of the state was still green to indicate it had full power. “It’s worse than it looks. There are hospitals all over the state that are airlifting patients to Nevada and Arizona. There are no traffic lights in Los Angeles, none at all. They can’t even get accurate information out of San Francisco because everything there is dead, and meanwhile the outages and brownouts are spreading north, into Oregon. Every time they try to bring a switch back online it causes shorts in a dozen other places and the problem just gets worse.”
“That’s awful,” Julia said. “But what does it have to do with us? I mean, I feel for all those people. But we’re kind of in a bad situation ourselves, here.”
Chapel thought he might know what Angel was trying to show them. “Do you have any idea what happened?”
“That’s just it. This shouldn’t be possible.” Angel brought up another map. It showed a single red dot near San Francisco. “There was a fire at a power plant, here. The power system is built to handle that. There’s all kinds of redundancies and fail-safes built in. But then these two locations went down, just a few minutes later, and all hell broke loose.” She tapped a key, and two more red dots appeared on the map. “There’s not a lot of information coming out of the state — even the governor can’t seem to get a press conference together. What Internet is still working out there is buzzing about this, though.”
“I can imagine,” Chapel said.
“There’s a lot of debate. A lot of conspiracy theories, and dumb people who think they know something. I was able to find some people who actually work for the utilities commission, though, the people in charge of keeping the lights on — and they all agree. They never even bothered considering a grid failure like this. Those two locations, a switching station and a substation, had to fail at the same time as the power plant for a blackout like this, and nobody had ever thought they could have three bad failures like that at the same time. They’re calling it a freak accident. A billion-to-one chance.”