Страница:
Union. Former KGB general turned religious fanatic. He was kind of like the
Minister of Defense for the government that the Orthos set up. So Gurov
opens the side door of the Airstream and lets us get a load of what's
inside."
"What was inside?"
"Well, mostly it was a bunch of equipment, you know, a portable
generator, electrical wiring, a control panel, and so forth. But in the
middle of the trailer, there's this big black cone sitting on the floor.
About the shape of an ice cream cone, except it's about five feet long and
it's smooth and black. And I asked what the hell is that thing. And Gurov
says, that thing is a ten-megaton hydrogen bomb we scavenged from a
ballistic missile. A city-buster. Any more questions?"
"So you capitulated."
"Couldn't do much else."
"Do you know how the Orthos came to be in possession of a hydrogen
bomb?"
Chuck Wrightson clearly knows. He sucks in his deepest breath of the
evening, lets it out, shakes his head, staring off over Hiro's shoulder. He
takes a couple of nice long swigs from his glass of beer.
"There was a Soviet nuclear-missile submarine. The commander was named
Ovchinnikov. He was religiously faithful, but he wasn't a fanatic like the
Orthos. I mean, if he had been a fanatic they wouldn't have given him
command of a nuclear-missile submarine, right?"
"Supposedly."
"You had to be psychologically stable. Whatever that means. Anyway,
after things fell apart in Russia, he found himself in possession of this
very dangerous weapon. He made up his mind that he was going to offload all
of the crew and then scuttle it in the Marianas Trench. Bury all those
weapons forever.
"But, somehow, he was persuaded to use this submarine to help a bunch
of the Orthos escape to Alaska. They, and a lot of other Refus, had started
flocking to the Bering coast. And the conditions in some of these Refu camps
were pretty desperate. It's not like a lot of food can be grown in that
area, you know. These people were dying by the thousands. They just stood on
the beaches, starving to death, waiting for a ship to come.
"So Ovchinnikov let himself be persuaded to use his submarine - which
is very large and very fast - to evacuate some of these poor Refus to TROKK.
"But, naturally, he was paranoid about the idea of letting a whole
bunch of unknown quantities onto his ship. These nuke-sub commanders are
real security freaks, for obvious reasons. So they set up a very strict
system. All the Refus who were going to get on the ship had to pass through
metal detectors, had to be inspected. Then they were under armed guard all
the way across to Alaska.
"Well, the Stern Orthos have this guy named Raven - "
"I'm familiar with him."
"Well, Raven got onto that nuclear submarine."
"Oh, my God."
"He got over to the Siberian coast somehow - probably surfed across in
his fucking kayak."
"Surfed?"
"That's how the Aleuts get between islands."
"Raven's an Aleut?"
"Yeah. An Aleut whale killer. You know what an Aleut is?"
"Yeah. My Dad knew one in Japan," Hiro says. A bunch of Dad's old
prison-camp tales are beginning to stir in Hiro's memory, working their way
up out of deep, deep storage.
"The Aleuts just paddle out in their kayaks and catch a wave. They can
outrun a steamship, you know."
"Didn't know that."
"Anyway, Raven went to one of these Refu camps and passed himself off
as a Siberian tribesman. You can't tell some of those Siberians apart from
our Indians. The Orthos apparently had some confederates in these camps who
bumped Raven up to the head of the line, so he got to be on the submarine."
"But you said there was a metal detector."
"Didn't help. He uses glass knives. Chips them out of plate glass. It's
the sharpest blade in the universe, you know."
"Didn't know that either."
"Yeah. The edge is only a single molecule wide. Doctors use them for
eye surgery - they can cut your cornea and not leave a scar. There's Indians
who make a living doing that, you know. Chipping out eye scalpels."
"Well, you learn something new every day. That kind of a knife would be
sharp enough to go through bulletproof fabric, I guess," Hiro says.
Chuck Wrightson shrugs. "I lost track of the number of people Raven
snuffed who were wearing bulletproof fabric."
Hiro says, "I thought he must be carrying some kind of high-tech laser
knife or something."
"Think again. Glass knife. He had one on board the submarine. Either
smuggled it on board with him, or else found a chunk of glass on the
submarine and chipped it out himself."
"And?"
Chuck gets his thousand-yard stare again, takes another slug of beer.
"On a sub, you know, there's no place for things to drain to. The survivors
claimed that the blood was knee-deep all through the submarine. Raven just
killed everyone. Everyone except the Orthos, a skeleton crew, and some other
Refus who were able to barricade themselves in little compartments around
the ship. The survivors say," Chuck says, taking another swig, "that it was
quite a night."
"And he forced them to steer the submarine into the hands of the
Orthos."
"To their anchorage off Kodiak," Chuck says. "The Orthos were all
ready. They had put together a crew of ex-Navy men, guys who had worked on
nuke subs in the past - X-rays, they call them - and they came and took the
sub over. As for us, we had no idea that any of this had happened. Until one
of the warheads showed up in our goddamn front yard."
Chuck glances up above Hiro's head, noticing someone. Hiro feels a
light tap on his shoulder. "Excuse me, sir?" a man is saying. "Pardon me for
just a second?"
Hiro turns around. It's a big porky white man with wavy, slicked-back
red hair and a beard. He's got a baseball cap perched on top of his head,
tilted way back to expose the following words, tattooed in block letters
across his forehead:
RACIALLY INSENSITIVE
Hiro is looking up at all of this over the curving horizon of the man's
flannel-clad belly.
"What is it?" Hiro says.
"Well, sir, I'm sorry to disturb you in the middle of your conversation
with this gentleman here. But me and my friends were just wondering. Are you
a lazy shiftless watermelon-eating black-ass nigger, or a sneaky little
v.d.-infected gook?"
The man reaches up, pulls the brim of his baseball cap downward. Now
Hiro can see the Confederate flag printed on the front, the embroidered
words "New South Africa Franchulate #153."
Hiro pushes himself up over the table, spins around, and slides
backward on his ass toward Chuck, trying to get the table between him and
the New South African. Chuck has conveniently vanished, so Hiro ends up
standing with his back comfortably to the wall, looking out over the bar.
At the same time, a dozen or so other men are standing up from their
tables, forming up behind the first one in a grinning, sunburned phalanx of
Confederate flags and sideburns.
"Let's see," Hiro says, "is that some kind of a trick question?"
There are a lot of Towne Halls in a lot of Snooze 'n' Cruise franchises
where you have to check your weapons at the entrance. This is not one of
them.
Hiro isn't sure if that is bad or good. Without weapons, the New South
Africans would just beat the crap out of him. With weapons, Hiro can fight
back, but the stakes are higher. Hiro is bulletproof up to his neck, but
that just means the New South Africans will all be going for a head shot.
And they pride themselves on marksmanship. It is a fetish with them.
"Isn't there an NSA franchise down the road?" Hiro says.
"Yeah," says the point man, who has a long, spreading body and short
stumpy legs. "It's heaven. It really is. Ain't no place on earth like a New
South Africa."
"Well, then if you don't mind my asking," Hiro says, "if it's so damn
nice, why don't y'all go back to your egg sac and hang out there?"
"There is one problem with New South Africa," the guy says. "Don't mean
to sound unpatriotic, but it's true."
"And what is that problem?" Hiro says.
"There's no niggers, gooks, or kikes there to beat the shit out of."
"Ah. That is a problem," Hiro says. "Thank you."
"For what?"
"For announcing your intentions - giving me the right to do this."
Then Hiro cuts his head off.
What else can he do? There are at least twelve of them. They have made
a point of blocking the only exit. They have just announced their
intentions. And presumably they are all carrying heat. Besides, this kind of
thing is going to happen to him about every ten seconds when he's on the
Raft.
The New South African has no idea what's coming, but he starts to react
as Hiro is swinging the katana at his neck, so he is flying backward when
the decapitation occurs. That is good, because about half his blood supply
comes lofting out the top of his neck. Twin jets, one from each carotid.
Hiro doesn't get a drop on himself.
In the Metaverse, the blade just passes right through, if you swing it
quickly enough. Here in Reality, Hiro's expecting a powerful shock when his
blade hits the New South African's neck, like when you hit a baseball the
wrong way, but he hardly feels a thing. It just goes right through and
almost swings around and buries itself in the wall. He must have gotten
lucky and hit a gap between vertebrae. Hiro's training comes back to him,
oddly. He forgot to squeeze it off, forgot to stop the blade himself, and
that's bad form.
Even though he's expecting it, he's startled for a minute. This sort of
thing doesn't happen with avatars. They just fall down. For an astonishingly
long time, he just stands there and looks at the guy's body. Meanwhile, the
airborne cloud of blood is seeking its level, dripping from the hung
ceiling, spattering down from shelves behind the bar. A wino sitting there
nursing a double shot of vodka shakes and shivers, staring into his glass at
the galactic swirl of a trillion red cells dying in the ethanol.
Hiro swaps a few long glances with the New South Africans, like
everyone in the bar is trying to come to a consensus as to what will happen
next. Should they laugh? Take a picture? Run away? Call an ambulance?
He makes his way around toward the exit by running across people's
tables. It is rude, but other patrons scoot back, some of them are quick
enough to snatch their beers out of his way, and no one gives him any
hassles. The sight of the bare katana inspires everyone to a practically
Nipponese level of politeness. There are a couple more New South Africans
blocking Hiro's way out, but not because they want to stop anyone. It's just
where they happen to be standing when they go into shock. Hiro decides,
reflexively, not to kill them.
And Hiro is off into the lurid main avenue of the Towne Hall, a tunnel
of flickering and pulsating loglo through which black creatures sprint like
benighted sperm up the old fallopians, sharp angular things clenched in
their hands. They are The Enforcers. They make the average MetaCop look like
Ranger Rick.
Gargoyle time. Hiro switches everything on: infrared, millimeter-wave
radar, ambient-sound processing. The infrared doesn't do much in these
circumstances, but the radar picks out all the weapons, highlights them in
The Enforcers' hands, identifies them by make, model, and ammunition type.
They're all fully automatic.
But The Enforcers and the New South Africans don't need radar to see
Hiro's katana with blood and spinal fluid running down the blade.
The music of Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns is blasting through bad
speakers all around him. It is their first single to hit the Billboard
charts, entitled "My Heart Is a Smoking Hole in the Ground." The ambient
sound processing cuts it to a more reasonable level, evens out the nasty
distortion from the speakers so that he can hear his roommate singing more
clearly. Which makes it all particularly surreal. It just goes to show that
he's out of his element. Doesn't belong here. Lost in the biomass. If there
was any justice, he could jump into those speakers and trace up the wires
like a digital sylph, follow the grid back to L.A., where he belongs, there
on top of the world, where everything comes from, buy Vitaly a drink, crawl
into his futon.
He stumbles forward helplessly as something terrible happens to his
back. It feels like being massaged with a hundred ballpeen hammers. At the
same time, a yellow sputtering light overrides the loglo. A screaming red
display flashes up on the goggles informing him that the millimeter-wave
radar has noticed a stream of bullets headed in his direction and would you
like to know where they came from, sir?
Hiro has just been shot in the back with a burst of machine-gun fire.
All of the bullets have slapped into his vest and dropped to the floor, but
in doing so they have cracked about half of the ribs on that side of his
body and bruised a few internal organs. He turns around, which hurts.
The Enforcer has given up on bullets and whipped out another weapon. It
says so right on Hiro's goggles: PACIFIC ENFORCEMENT HARDWARE, INC. MODEL
SX-29 RESTRAINT PROJECTION DEVICE (LOOGIE GUN). Which is what he should have
used in the first place.
You can't just carry a sword around as an empty threat. You shouldn't
draw it, or keep it drawn, unless you intend to kill someone. Hiro runs
toward The Enforcer, raising the katana to strike. The Enforcer does the
proper thing, namely, gets the hell out of his way. The silver ribbon of the
katana shines up above the crowd. It attracts Enforcers and repels everyone
else, so as Hiro runs down the center of the Towne Hall, he has no one in
front of him and many shiny dark creatures behind him.
He turns off all of the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is
confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as
it's happening to him. Very post-modern. Time to get immersed in Reality,
like all the people around him.
Not even Enforcers will fire their big guns in a crowd, unless it's
point-blank range, or they're in a really bad mood. A few loogies shoot past
Hiro, already so spread out as to be nothing more than an annoyance, and
splat into bystanders, wrapping them in sticky gossamer veils.
Somewhere between the 3-D video-game arcade and the display window full
of terminally bored prostitutes, Hiro's eyes clear up and he sees a miracle:
the exit of the inflatable dome, where the doors exhale a breeze of
synthetic beer breath and atomized body fluids into the cool night air.
Bad things and good things are happening in quick succession. The next
bad thing happens when a steel grate falls down to block the doors.
What the hell, it's an inflatable building. Hiro turns on the radar
just for a moment and the walls seem to drop away and become invisible; he's
seeing through them now, into the forest of steel outside. It doesn't take
long to locate the parking lot where he left his bike, supposedly under the
protection of some armed attendants.
Hiro fakes toward the whorehouse, then cuts directly toward an exposed
section of wall. The fabric of the building is tough, but his katana slices
a six-foot rent through it with a single gliding motion, and then he's
outside, spat out of the hole on a jet of fetid air.
After that - after Hiro gets onto his motorcycle, and the New South
Africans get into their all-terrain pickups, and The Enforcers get into
their slick black Enforcer mobiles, and they all go screaming out onto the
highway - after that it's just a chase scene.
Y.T. has been to some unusual places in her career. She has the visas
of some three dozen countries laminated onto her chest. And on top of the
real countries she has picked up and/or delivered to such charming little
vacation spots as the Terminal Island Sacrifice Zone and the encampment in
Griffith Park. But the weirdest job of all is this new one: someone wants
her to deliver some stuff to the United States of America. Says so right
there on the job order.
It's not much of a delivery, just a legal-size envelope.
"You sure you don't just want to mail this?" she asks the guy when she
picks it up. It's one of these creepy office parks out in the Burbs. Like a
Burbclave for worthless businesses that have offices and phones and stuff
but don't actually seem to do anything.
It's a sarcastic question, of course. The mail doesn't work, except in
Fedland. All the mailboxes have been unbolted and used to decorate the
apartments of nostalgia freaks. But it's also kind of a joke, because the
destination is, in fact, a building in the middle of Fedland. So the joke
is: If you want to deal with the Feds, why not use their fucked-up mail
system? Aren't you afraid that by dealing with anything as incredibly cool
as a Kourier you will be tainted in their eyes?
"Well, uh, the mail doesn't come out here, does it?" the guy says.
No point in describing the office. No point in even allowing the office
to even register on her eyeballs and take up valuable memory space in her
brain. Fluorescent lights and partitions with carpet glued to them. I prefer
my carpet on the floor, thank you. A color scheme. Ergonomic shit. Chicks
with lipstick. Xerox smell. Everything's pretty new, she figures.
The legal envelope is resting on the guy's desk. Not much point in
describing him, either. Traces of a southern or Texan accent. The bottom
edge of the envelope is parallel to the edge of the desk, one-quarter inch
away from it, perfectly centered between the left and right sides. Like he
had a doctor come in here and put it on the desk with tweezers. It is
addressed to: ROOM 969A, MAIL STOP MS-1569835, BUILDING LA-6, UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA.
"You want a return address on this?" she says.
"That's not necessary."
"If I can't deliver it, there's no way I can get it back to you,
because these places all look the same to me."
"It's not important," he says. "When do you think you'll get it there?"
"Two hours max."
"Why so long?"
"Customs, man. The Feds haven't modernized their system like everyone
else." Which is why most Kouriers will do anything to avoid delivering to
Fedland. But it's a slow day today, Y.T. hasn't been called in to do any
secret missions for the Mafia yet, and maybe she can catch Mom on her lunch
break.
"And your name is?"
"We don't give out our names."
"I need to know who's delivering this."
"Why? You said it wasn't important."
The guy gets really flustered. "Okay," he says. "Forget it. Just
deliver it, please."
Okay, be that way, she mentally says. She mentally says a number of
other things, too. The man is an obvious pervert. It's so plain, so open:
"And your name is?" Give me a break, man.
Names are unimportant. Everyone knows Kouriers are interchangeable
parts. It's just that some happen to be a lot faster and better.
So she skates out of the office. It's all very anonymous. No corporate
logos anywhere. So as she's waiting for the elevator, she calls RadiKS,
tries to find out who initiated this call.
The answer comes back a few minutes later, as she's riding out of the
office park, pooned onto a nice Mercedes: Rife Advanced Research
Enterprises. RARE. One of these high-tech outfits. Probably trying to get a
government contract. Probably trying to sell sphygmomanometers to the Feds
or something like that.
Oh well, she just delivers 'em. She gets the impression that this
Mercedes is sandbagging - driving real slow so she'll poon something else -
so she poons something else, an outgoing delivery truck. Judging from the
way it's riding high on its springs, it must be empty, so it'll probably
move along pretty fast.
Ten seconds later, predictably, the Mercedes blasts by in the left
lane, so she poons that and rides it nice and hard for a couple of miles.
Getting into Fedland is a drag. Most Fedsters drive tiny,
plastic-and-aluminum cars that are hard to poon. But eventually she nails
one, a little jellybean with glued-on windows and a three-cylinder engine,
and that takes her up to the United States border.
The smaller this country gets, the more paranoid they become. Nowadays,
the customs people are just impossible. She has to sign a ten-page document
- and they actually make her read it. They say it should take at least half
an hour for her just to read the thing.
"But I read it two weeks ago."
"It might have changed," the guard says, "so you have to read it
again."
Basically, it just certifies that Y.T. is not a terrorist, Communist
(whatever that is), homosexual, national-symbol desecrator, pornography
merchant, welfare parasite, racially insensitive, carrier of any infectious
disease, or advocate of any ideology tending to impugn traditional family
values. Most of it is just definitions of all the words used on the first
page.
So Y.T. sits in the little room for half an hour, doing housekeeping
work - going over her stuff, changing batteries in all her little devices,
cleaning her nails, having her skateboard run its self-maintenance
procedures. Then she signs the fucking document and hands it over to the
guy. And then she's in Fedland.
It's not hard finding the place. Typical Fed building - a million
steps. Like it's built on top of a mountain of steps. Columns. A lot more
guys in this one than usual. Chunky guys with slippery hair. Must be some
kind of cop building. The guard at the front door is a cop all the way,
wants to give her a big hassle about carrying her skateboard into the place.
Like they've got a safe place out front to keep skateboards.
The cop guy is completely hard to deal with. But that's okay, so is
Y.T.
"Here's the envelope," she says. "You can take it up to the ninth floor
yourself on your coffee break. Too bad you have to take the stairs.
"Look," he says:, totally exasperated, "this is EBGOC. This is, like,
the headquarters. EBGOC central. You got that? Everything that happens
within a mile is being videotaped. People don't spit on the pavement within
sight of this building. They don't even say bad words. Nobody's going to
steal your skateboard."
"That's even worse. They'll steal it. Then they'll say they didn't
steal it, they confiscated it. I know you Feds, you're always confiscating
shit."
The guy sighs. Then his eyes go out of focus and he shuts up for a
minute. Y.T. can tell he's getting a message over the little earphone that's
plugged into his ear, the mark of the true Fed.
"Go on in," he says. "But you gotta sign."
"Naturally," Y.T. says.
The cop hands her the sign-in sheet, which is actually a notebook
computer with an electronic pen. She writes "Y.T." on the screen, it's
converted to a digital bitmap, automatically time stamped, and sent off to
the big computer at Fed Central. She knows she's not going to make it
through the metal detector without stripping naked, so she just vaults the
cop's table - what's he going to do, shoot her? - and heads on into the
building, skateboard under her arm.
"Hey!" he says, weakly.
"What, you got lots of EBGOC agents in here being mugged and raped by
female Kouriers?" she says, stomping the elevator button ferociously.
Elevator takes forever. She loses her patience and just climbs the
stairs like all the other Feds.
The guy is right, it's definitely Cop Central here on the ninth floor.
Every creepy guy in sunglasses and slippery hair you've ever seen, they're
all here, all with little fleshtone helices of wire trailing down from their
ears. There's even some female Feds. They look even scarier than the guys.
The things that a woman can do to her hair to make herself look professional
- Jeeezus! Why not just wear a motorcycle helmet? At least then you can take
it off.
Except none of the Feds, male or female, is wearing sunglasses. They
look naked without them. Might as well be walking around with no pants on.
Seeing these Feds without their mirror specs is like blundering into the
boys' locker room.
She finds Room 968A easily enough. Most of the floor is just a big pool
of desks. All the actual, numbered rooms are around the edges, with frosted
glass doors. Each of the creepy guys seems to have a desk of his own, some
of them loiter near their desks, the rest of them are doing a lot of hall -
jogging and impromptu conferencing at other creepy guys' desks. Their white
shirts are painfully clean. Not as many shoulder holsters as she would
expect; all the gun-carrying Feds are probably out in what used to be
Alabama or Chicago trying to confiscate back bits of United States territory
from what is now a Buy 'n' Fly or a toxic-waste dump.
She goes on into Room 968A. It's an office. Four Fed guys are in here,
the same as the others except most of them are a tad older, in their forties
and fifties.
"Got a delivery for this room," Y.T. says.
"You're Y.T.?" says the head Fed, who's sitting behind the desk.
"You're not supposed to know my name," Y.T. says. "How did you know my
name?"
"I recognized you," the head Fed says. "I know your mother."
Y.T. does not believe him. But these Feds have all kinds of ways of
finding out stuff.
"Do you have any relatives in Afghanistan?" she says.
The guys all look back and forth at each other, like, did you
understand the chick? But it's not a sentence that is intended to be
understood. Actually, Y.T. has all kinds of voice recognition ware in her
coverall and in her plank. When she says, "Do you have any relatives in
Afghanistan?" that's like a code phrase, it tells all of her spook gear to
get ready, shake itself down, check itself out, prick up its electronic
ears.
"You want this envelope or not?" she says.
"I'll take it," the head Fed says, standing up and holding out one
hand.
Y.T. walks into the middle of the room and hands him the envelope. But
instead of taking it, he lunges out at the last minute and grabs her
forearm.
She sees an open handcuff in his other hand. He brings it out and snaps
it down on her wrist so it tightens and locks shut over the cuff of her
coverall.
"I'm sorry to do this, Y.T., but I have to place you under arrest,"
he's saying.
"What the fuck are you doing?" Y.T. is saying. She's holding her free
arm back away from the desk so he can't cuff her wrists together, but one of
the other Feds grabs her by the free wrist, so now she's stretched out like
a tightrope between the two big Feds.
"You guys are dead," she says.
All the guys smile, like they enjoy a chick with some spunk.
"You guys are dead," she says a second time.
This is the key phrase that all of her ware is waiting to hear. When
she says it the second time, all the self-defense stuff comes on, which
means that among other things, a few thousand volts of radio-frequency
electrical power suddenly flood through the outsides of her cuffs.
The head Fed behind the desk blurts out a grunt from way down in his
stomach. He flies back away from her, his entire right side jerking
spastically, trips over his own chair, and sprawls back into the wall,
smacking his head on the marble windowsill. The jerk who's yanking on her
other arm stretches out like he's on an invisible rack, accidentally
slapping one of the other guys in the face, giving that guy a nice dose of
juice to the head. Both of them hit the floor like a sack of rabid cats.
There's only one of these guys left, and he's reaching under his jacket for
something. She takes one step toward him, swings her arm around, and the end
of the loose manacle strokes him in the neck. Just a caress, but it might as
well be a two-handed blow from Satan's electric ax handle. That funky juice
runs all up and down his spine, and suddenly, he's sprawled across a couple
of shitty old wooden chairs and his pistol is rotating on the floor like the
spinner in a children's game.
She flexes her wrist in a particular way, and the bundy stunner drops
down her sleeve and into her hand. The manacle swinging from the other hand
will have a similar effect on that side. She also pulls out the can of
Liquid Knuckles, pops the lid, sets the spray nozzle on wide angle.
One of the Fed creeps is nice enough to open the office door for her.
He comes into the room with his gun already drawn, backed up by half a dozen
other guys who've flocked here from the office pool, and she just lets them
have it with the Liquid Knuckles. Whoosh, it's like bug spray. The sound of
bodies hitting the floor is like a bass drum roll. She finds that her
skateboard has no problem rolling across their prone bodies, and then she's
out into the office pool. These guys are converging from all sides, there's
an incredible number of them, she just keeps holding that button down,
pointed straight ahead, digging at the floor with her foot, building up
speed. The Liquid Knuckles acts like a chemical flying wedge, she's skating
out of there on a carpet of bodies. Some of the Feds are agile enough to
dart in from behind and try to get her that way, but she's ready with the
bundy stunner, which turns their nervous systems into coils of hot barbed
wire for a few minutes but isn't supposed to have any other effects.
She's made it about three-quarters of the way across the office when
the Liquid Knuckles runs out. But it still works for a second or two because
people are afraid of it, keep diving out of the way even though there's
nothing coming out. Then a couple of them figure it out, make the mistake of
trying to grab her by the wrists. She gets one of them with the bundy
stunner and the other with the electric manacle. Then boom through the door
and she's out into the stairwell, leaving four dozen casualties in her wake.
Serves them right, they didn't even try to arrest her in a gentlemanly way.
To a man on foot, stairs are a hindrance. But to the smartwheels, they
just look like a forty-five-degree angle ramp. It's a little choppy,
especially when she's down to about the second floor and is going way too
fast, but it's definitely doable.
A lucky thing: One of the first-floor cops is just opening the
stairwell door, no doubt alerted by the symphony of alarm bells and buzzers
that has begun to merge into a solid wall of hysterical sound. She blows by
the guy; he puts one arm out in an attempt to stop her, sort of belts her
across the waist in the process, throws her balance off, but this is a very
forgiving skateboard, it's smart enough to slow down for her a little bit
when her center of mass gets into the wrong place. Pretty soon it's back
under her, she's banking radically through the elevator lobby, aiming dead
center for the arch of the metal detector, through which the bright outdoor
light of freedom is shining.
Her old buddy the cop is up on his feet, and he reacts fast enough to
spread-eagle himself across the metal detector. Y.T. acts like she's heading
right for him, then kicks the board sideways at the last minute, punches one
of the toe switches, coils her legs underneath her, and jumps into the air.
She flies right over his little table while the plank is rolling underneath
it, and a second later she lands on it, wobbles once, gets her balance back.
She's in the lobby, headed for the doors.
It's an old building. Most of the doors are metal. But there's a couple
of revolving doors, too, just big sheets of glass.
Early thrashers used to inadvertently skate into walls of glass from
time to time, which was a problem. It turned into a bigger problem when the
whole Kourier thing got started and thrashers started spending a lot more
time trying to go fast through office-type environments where glass walls
are considered quite the concept. Which is why on an expensive skateboard,
like this one definitely is, you can get, as an extra added safety feature,
the RadiKS Narrow Cone Tuned Shock Wave Projector. It works on real short
notice, which is good, but you can only use it once (it draws its power from
an explosive charge), and then you have to take your plank into the shop to
have it replaced.
It's an emergency thing. Strictly a panic button. But that's cool. Y.T.
makes sure she's aimed directly at the glass revolving doors, then hits the
appropriate toe switch.
It's - my God - like you stretched a tarp across a stadium to turn it
into a giant tom-tom and then crashed a 747 into it. She can feel her
internal organs move several inches. Her heart trades places with her liver.
The bottoms of her feet feel numb and tingly. And she's not even standing in
the path of the shock wave.
The safety glass in the revolving doors doesn't just crack and fall to
the floor, like she imagined it would. It is blown out of its moorings. It
gushes out of the building and down the front steps. She follows, an instant
later.
The ridiculous cascade of white marble steps on the front of the
building just gives her more ramp time. By the time she reaches the
sidewalk, she's easily got enough speed to coast all the way to Mexico.
As she's swinging out across the broad avenue, aiming her crosshairs at
the customs post a quarter mile away, which she is going to have to jump
over, something tells her to look up.
Because after all, the building she just escaped from is towering above
her, many stories full of Fed creeps, and all the alarms are going off. Most
of the windows can't be opened, all they can do is look out. But there are
people on the roof. Mostly the roof is a forest of antennas. If it's a
forest, these guys are the creepy little gnomes who live in the trees. They
are ready for action, they have their sunglasses on, they have weapons,
they're all looking at her.
But only one guy's taking aim. And the thing he's aiming at her is
huge. The barrel is the size of a baseball bat. She can see the muzzle flash
poke out of it, wreathed in a sudden doughnut of white smoke. It's not
pointed right at her; it's aimed in front of her.
The stun bunny lands on the street, dead ahead, bounces up in the air,
and detonates at an altitude of twenty feet.
The next quarter of a second: There's no bright flash to blind her, and
so she can actually see the shock wave spreading outward in a perfect
sphere, hard and palpable as a ball of ice. Where the sphere contacts the
street, it makes a circular wave front, making pebbles bounce, flipping old
McDonald's containers that have long been smashed flat, and coaxing fine,
flourlike dust out of all the tiny crevices in the pavement, so that it
sweeps across the road toward her like a microscopic blizzard. Above it, the
shock wave hangs in the air, rushing toward her at the speed of sound, a
lens of air that flattens and refracts everything on the other side. She's
passing through it.
As Hiro crests the pass on his motorcycle at five in the morning, the
town of Port Sherman, Oregon, is suddenly laid out before him: a flash of
yellow loglo wrapped into a vast U-shaped valley that was ground out of the
rock, a long time ago, by a big tongue of ice in an epochal period of
geological cunnilingus. There is just a light dusting of gold around the
edges where it fades into the rain forest, thickening and intensifying as it
approaches the harbor - a long narrow fjordlike notch cut into the straight
coastline of Oregon, a deep cold trench of black water heading straight out
to Japan.
Hiro's back on the Rim again. Feels good after that night ride through
the sticks. Too many rednecks, too many mounties.
Even from ten miles away and a mile above, it's not a pretty sight.
Farther away from the central harbor district, Hiro can make out a few
speckles of red, which is a little better than the yellow. He wishes he
could see something in green or blue or purple, but there don't seem to be
any neighborhoods done up in those gourmet colors.
But then this isn't exactly a gourmet job.
He rides half a mile off the road, sits down on a flat rock in an open
space - ambush-proof, more or less - and goggles into the Metaverse.
"Librarian?"
"Yes, sir?"
"Inanna."
"A figure from Sumerian mythology. Later cultures knew her as Ishtar,
or Esther."
"Good goddess or bad goddess?"
"Good. A beloved goddess."
"Did she have any dealings with Enki or Asherah?"
"Mostly with Enki. She and Enki were on good and bad terms at different
times. Inanna was known as the queen of all the great me."
"I thought the me belonged to Enki."
"They did. But Inanna went to the Abzu - the watery fortress in the
city of Eridu where Enki stored up the me - and got Enki to give her all the
me. This is how the me were released into civilization."
"Watery fortress, huh?"
"Yes, sir."
"How did Enki feel about this?"
"He gave them to her willingly, apparently because he was drunk, and
besotted with Inanna's physical charms. When he sobered up, he tried to
chase her down and get them back, but she outsmarted him."
"Let's get semiotic," Hiro mumbles. "The Raft is L. Bob Rife's watery
fortress. That's where he stores up all of his stuff. All of his me. Juanita
went to Astoria, which was as close as you could get to the Raft a couple of
days ago. I think she's trying to pull an Inanna."
"In another popular Sumerian myth," the Librarian says, "Inanna
descends into the nether world."
"Go on," Hiro says.
"She gathers together all of her me and enters the land of no return."
"Great."
"She passes through the nether world and reaches the temple that is
ruled over by Ereshkigal, goddess of Death. She is traveling under false
pretenses, which are easily penetrated by the all-seeing Ereshkigal. But
Ereshkigal allows her to enter the temple. As Inanna enters, her robes and
jewels and me are stripped from her and she is brought, stark naked, before
Ereshkigal and the seven judges of the underworld. The judges 'fastened
their eyes upon her, the eyes of death; at their word, the word which
tortures the spirit, Inanna was turned into a corpse, a piece of rotting
meat, and was hung from a hook on the wall.' Kramer."
"Wonderful. Why the hell would she do something like that?"
"As Diane Wolkstein puts it, "Inanna gave up ... all she had
accomplished in life until she was stripped naked, with nothing remaining
but her will to be reborn ... because of her journey to the underworld, she
took on the powers and mysteries of death and rebirth."
"Oh. So I guess there's more to the story?"
"Inanna's messenger waits for three days, and when she fails to return
from the netherworld, goes to the gods asking for their help. None of the
gods is willing to help except for Enki."
"So our buddy, Enki, the hacker god, has to bail her ass out of Hell."
"Enki creates two people and sends them into the netherworld to rescue
Inanna. Through their magic, Inanna is brought back to life. She returns
from the netherworld, followed by a host of the dead."
"Juanita went to the Raft three days ago," Hiro says. "It's time to get
hacking."
Earth is still where he left it, zoomed in to show a magnified view of
the Raft. In the light of last night's chat with Chuck Wrightson, it's not
hard to find the hunk of raft that was staked out by the Orthos when the
Enterprise swung by TROKK a few weeks back. There's a couple of big-assed
Soviet freighters tied together, a swarm of small boats around them. Most of
the Raft is dead brown and organic, but this section is all white
fiberglass: pleasure craft looted from the comfortable retirees of TROKK.
Thousands of them.
Now the Raft is off Port Sherman, so, Hiro figures, that's where the
high priests of Asherah are hanging out. In a few days, they'll be in
Eureka, then San Francisco, then L.A. - a floating land link, tying the
Orthos' operations on the Raft to the closest available point on the
mainland.
He turns away from the Raft, skims across the ocean to Port Sherman to
do a bit of reconnoitering there.
Down along the waterfront, there's a nice crescent of cheap motels with
yellow logos. Hiro rifles through them, looking for Russian names.
That's easy. There's a Spectrum 2000 right in the middle of the
waterfront. As the name implies, each one has a whole range of rooms, from
human coin lockers in the lobby all the way to luxury suites on the top. And
a whole range of rooms has been rented out by a bunch of people with names
ending in -off and -ovski and other dead Slavic giveaways. The foot soldiers
sleep in the lobby, laid out straight and narrow in coin lockers next to
their AK-47s, and the priests and generals live in nice rooms higher up.
Hiro pauses to wonder what a Pentecostal Russian Orthodox priest does with a
Magic Fingers.
The suite on the very top is being rented out by a gentleman by the
name of Gurov. Mr. KGB himself. Too much of a wimp to hang out on the actual
Raft, apparently.
How'd he get from the Raft to Port Sherman? If it involves crossing a
couple of hundred miles of North Pacific, it must be a decent-sized vessel.
There are half a dozen marinas in Port Sherman. At the moment, most of
them are clogged with small brown boats. It looks like a post-typhoon
situation, where a few hundred square miles of ocean have been swept clean
of sampans that have piled up against the nearest hard place. Except this is
slightly more organized than that.
The Refus are coining ashore already. If they're smart and aggressive,
they probably know that they can walk to California from here.
That explains why the piers are clogged with trashy little boats. But
one of them still looks like a private marina. It's got a dozen or so clean
white vessels, lined up neatly in their slips, no riffraff. And the
resolution of this image is good enough that Hiro can see the pier speckled
with little doughnuts: probably rings of sandbags. That'd be the only way to
keep your private moorage private when the Raft was hovering offshore.
The numbers, flags, and other identifying goodies are harder to make
out. The satellite has a hard time picking that stuff out.
Hiro checks to see whether CIC has a stringer in Port Sherman. They
have to, because the Raft is here, and CIC hopes to make a big business out
of selling Raft intelligence to all the anxious waterfronters between
Skagway and Tierra del Fuego.
Indeed. There are a few people hanging out in this town, uploading the
latest Port Sherman intel. And one of them is just a punter with a video
camera who goes around shooting pictures of everything.
Hiro reviews this stuff in fast-forward. A lot of it is shot from the
stringer's hotel window: hours and hours of coverage of the stream of shitty
little brown boats laboring their way up the harbor, tying up to the edge of
the mini-Raft that's forming in front of Port Sherman.
But it's semi-organized, in that some apparently self-appointed water
cops are buzzing around in a speedboat, aiming guns at people, shouting
through a megaphone. And that explains why, no matter how tangled the mess
in the harbor becomes, there's always a clear lane down the middle of the
fjord, headed out to sea. And the terminus of that clear lane is the nice
pier with the big boats.
There are two big vessels there. One is a large fishing boat flying a
flag bearing the emblem of the Orthos, which is just a cross and a flame. It
is obvious TROKK loot; the name on the stem is KODIAK QUEEN, and the Orthos
haven't bothered to change it yet. The other large boat is a small cruise
vessel, made to carry rich people comfortably to nice places. It has a green
flag and appears to be connected with Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong.
Hiro does a little more poking around in the streets of Port Sherman
and finds out that there is a pretty good-sized Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong
franchulate here. In typical Hong Kong style, it is more of a spray of small
buildings and rooms all over town. But it's a dense spray.
Dense enough that Hong Kong has several full-time employees here,
including a proconsul. Hiro pulls up the guy's picture so he'll recognize
him: a crusty-looking Chinese-American gent in his fifties. So it's not an
automated, unmanned franchulate like you normally see in the Lower 48.
Minister of Defense for the government that the Orthos set up. So Gurov
opens the side door of the Airstream and lets us get a load of what's
inside."
"What was inside?"
"Well, mostly it was a bunch of equipment, you know, a portable
generator, electrical wiring, a control panel, and so forth. But in the
middle of the trailer, there's this big black cone sitting on the floor.
About the shape of an ice cream cone, except it's about five feet long and
it's smooth and black. And I asked what the hell is that thing. And Gurov
says, that thing is a ten-megaton hydrogen bomb we scavenged from a
ballistic missile. A city-buster. Any more questions?"
"So you capitulated."
"Couldn't do much else."
"Do you know how the Orthos came to be in possession of a hydrogen
bomb?"
Chuck Wrightson clearly knows. He sucks in his deepest breath of the
evening, lets it out, shakes his head, staring off over Hiro's shoulder. He
takes a couple of nice long swigs from his glass of beer.
"There was a Soviet nuclear-missile submarine. The commander was named
Ovchinnikov. He was religiously faithful, but he wasn't a fanatic like the
Orthos. I mean, if he had been a fanatic they wouldn't have given him
command of a nuclear-missile submarine, right?"
"Supposedly."
"You had to be psychologically stable. Whatever that means. Anyway,
after things fell apart in Russia, he found himself in possession of this
very dangerous weapon. He made up his mind that he was going to offload all
of the crew and then scuttle it in the Marianas Trench. Bury all those
weapons forever.
"But, somehow, he was persuaded to use this submarine to help a bunch
of the Orthos escape to Alaska. They, and a lot of other Refus, had started
flocking to the Bering coast. And the conditions in some of these Refu camps
were pretty desperate. It's not like a lot of food can be grown in that
area, you know. These people were dying by the thousands. They just stood on
the beaches, starving to death, waiting for a ship to come.
"So Ovchinnikov let himself be persuaded to use his submarine - which
is very large and very fast - to evacuate some of these poor Refus to TROKK.
"But, naturally, he was paranoid about the idea of letting a whole
bunch of unknown quantities onto his ship. These nuke-sub commanders are
real security freaks, for obvious reasons. So they set up a very strict
system. All the Refus who were going to get on the ship had to pass through
metal detectors, had to be inspected. Then they were under armed guard all
the way across to Alaska.
"Well, the Stern Orthos have this guy named Raven - "
"I'm familiar with him."
"Well, Raven got onto that nuclear submarine."
"Oh, my God."
"He got over to the Siberian coast somehow - probably surfed across in
his fucking kayak."
"Surfed?"
"That's how the Aleuts get between islands."
"Raven's an Aleut?"
"Yeah. An Aleut whale killer. You know what an Aleut is?"
"Yeah. My Dad knew one in Japan," Hiro says. A bunch of Dad's old
prison-camp tales are beginning to stir in Hiro's memory, working their way
up out of deep, deep storage.
"The Aleuts just paddle out in their kayaks and catch a wave. They can
outrun a steamship, you know."
"Didn't know that."
"Anyway, Raven went to one of these Refu camps and passed himself off
as a Siberian tribesman. You can't tell some of those Siberians apart from
our Indians. The Orthos apparently had some confederates in these camps who
bumped Raven up to the head of the line, so he got to be on the submarine."
"But you said there was a metal detector."
"Didn't help. He uses glass knives. Chips them out of plate glass. It's
the sharpest blade in the universe, you know."
"Didn't know that either."
"Yeah. The edge is only a single molecule wide. Doctors use them for
eye surgery - they can cut your cornea and not leave a scar. There's Indians
who make a living doing that, you know. Chipping out eye scalpels."
"Well, you learn something new every day. That kind of a knife would be
sharp enough to go through bulletproof fabric, I guess," Hiro says.
Chuck Wrightson shrugs. "I lost track of the number of people Raven
snuffed who were wearing bulletproof fabric."
Hiro says, "I thought he must be carrying some kind of high-tech laser
knife or something."
"Think again. Glass knife. He had one on board the submarine. Either
smuggled it on board with him, or else found a chunk of glass on the
submarine and chipped it out himself."
"And?"
Chuck gets his thousand-yard stare again, takes another slug of beer.
"On a sub, you know, there's no place for things to drain to. The survivors
claimed that the blood was knee-deep all through the submarine. Raven just
killed everyone. Everyone except the Orthos, a skeleton crew, and some other
Refus who were able to barricade themselves in little compartments around
the ship. The survivors say," Chuck says, taking another swig, "that it was
quite a night."
"And he forced them to steer the submarine into the hands of the
Orthos."
"To their anchorage off Kodiak," Chuck says. "The Orthos were all
ready. They had put together a crew of ex-Navy men, guys who had worked on
nuke subs in the past - X-rays, they call them - and they came and took the
sub over. As for us, we had no idea that any of this had happened. Until one
of the warheads showed up in our goddamn front yard."
Chuck glances up above Hiro's head, noticing someone. Hiro feels a
light tap on his shoulder. "Excuse me, sir?" a man is saying. "Pardon me for
just a second?"
Hiro turns around. It's a big porky white man with wavy, slicked-back
red hair and a beard. He's got a baseball cap perched on top of his head,
tilted way back to expose the following words, tattooed in block letters
across his forehead:
RACIALLY INSENSITIVE
Hiro is looking up at all of this over the curving horizon of the man's
flannel-clad belly.
"What is it?" Hiro says.
"Well, sir, I'm sorry to disturb you in the middle of your conversation
with this gentleman here. But me and my friends were just wondering. Are you
a lazy shiftless watermelon-eating black-ass nigger, or a sneaky little
v.d.-infected gook?"
The man reaches up, pulls the brim of his baseball cap downward. Now
Hiro can see the Confederate flag printed on the front, the embroidered
words "New South Africa Franchulate #153."
Hiro pushes himself up over the table, spins around, and slides
backward on his ass toward Chuck, trying to get the table between him and
the New South African. Chuck has conveniently vanished, so Hiro ends up
standing with his back comfortably to the wall, looking out over the bar.
At the same time, a dozen or so other men are standing up from their
tables, forming up behind the first one in a grinning, sunburned phalanx of
Confederate flags and sideburns.
"Let's see," Hiro says, "is that some kind of a trick question?"
There are a lot of Towne Halls in a lot of Snooze 'n' Cruise franchises
where you have to check your weapons at the entrance. This is not one of
them.
Hiro isn't sure if that is bad or good. Without weapons, the New South
Africans would just beat the crap out of him. With weapons, Hiro can fight
back, but the stakes are higher. Hiro is bulletproof up to his neck, but
that just means the New South Africans will all be going for a head shot.
And they pride themselves on marksmanship. It is a fetish with them.
"Isn't there an NSA franchise down the road?" Hiro says.
"Yeah," says the point man, who has a long, spreading body and short
stumpy legs. "It's heaven. It really is. Ain't no place on earth like a New
South Africa."
"Well, then if you don't mind my asking," Hiro says, "if it's so damn
nice, why don't y'all go back to your egg sac and hang out there?"
"There is one problem with New South Africa," the guy says. "Don't mean
to sound unpatriotic, but it's true."
"And what is that problem?" Hiro says.
"There's no niggers, gooks, or kikes there to beat the shit out of."
"Ah. That is a problem," Hiro says. "Thank you."
"For what?"
"For announcing your intentions - giving me the right to do this."
Then Hiro cuts his head off.
What else can he do? There are at least twelve of them. They have made
a point of blocking the only exit. They have just announced their
intentions. And presumably they are all carrying heat. Besides, this kind of
thing is going to happen to him about every ten seconds when he's on the
Raft.
The New South African has no idea what's coming, but he starts to react
as Hiro is swinging the katana at his neck, so he is flying backward when
the decapitation occurs. That is good, because about half his blood supply
comes lofting out the top of his neck. Twin jets, one from each carotid.
Hiro doesn't get a drop on himself.
In the Metaverse, the blade just passes right through, if you swing it
quickly enough. Here in Reality, Hiro's expecting a powerful shock when his
blade hits the New South African's neck, like when you hit a baseball the
wrong way, but he hardly feels a thing. It just goes right through and
almost swings around and buries itself in the wall. He must have gotten
lucky and hit a gap between vertebrae. Hiro's training comes back to him,
oddly. He forgot to squeeze it off, forgot to stop the blade himself, and
that's bad form.
Even though he's expecting it, he's startled for a minute. This sort of
thing doesn't happen with avatars. They just fall down. For an astonishingly
long time, he just stands there and looks at the guy's body. Meanwhile, the
airborne cloud of blood is seeking its level, dripping from the hung
ceiling, spattering down from shelves behind the bar. A wino sitting there
nursing a double shot of vodka shakes and shivers, staring into his glass at
the galactic swirl of a trillion red cells dying in the ethanol.
Hiro swaps a few long glances with the New South Africans, like
everyone in the bar is trying to come to a consensus as to what will happen
next. Should they laugh? Take a picture? Run away? Call an ambulance?
He makes his way around toward the exit by running across people's
tables. It is rude, but other patrons scoot back, some of them are quick
enough to snatch their beers out of his way, and no one gives him any
hassles. The sight of the bare katana inspires everyone to a practically
Nipponese level of politeness. There are a couple more New South Africans
blocking Hiro's way out, but not because they want to stop anyone. It's just
where they happen to be standing when they go into shock. Hiro decides,
reflexively, not to kill them.
And Hiro is off into the lurid main avenue of the Towne Hall, a tunnel
of flickering and pulsating loglo through which black creatures sprint like
benighted sperm up the old fallopians, sharp angular things clenched in
their hands. They are The Enforcers. They make the average MetaCop look like
Ranger Rick.
Gargoyle time. Hiro switches everything on: infrared, millimeter-wave
radar, ambient-sound processing. The infrared doesn't do much in these
circumstances, but the radar picks out all the weapons, highlights them in
The Enforcers' hands, identifies them by make, model, and ammunition type.
They're all fully automatic.
But The Enforcers and the New South Africans don't need radar to see
Hiro's katana with blood and spinal fluid running down the blade.
The music of Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns is blasting through bad
speakers all around him. It is their first single to hit the Billboard
charts, entitled "My Heart Is a Smoking Hole in the Ground." The ambient
sound processing cuts it to a more reasonable level, evens out the nasty
distortion from the speakers so that he can hear his roommate singing more
clearly. Which makes it all particularly surreal. It just goes to show that
he's out of his element. Doesn't belong here. Lost in the biomass. If there
was any justice, he could jump into those speakers and trace up the wires
like a digital sylph, follow the grid back to L.A., where he belongs, there
on top of the world, where everything comes from, buy Vitaly a drink, crawl
into his futon.
He stumbles forward helplessly as something terrible happens to his
back. It feels like being massaged with a hundred ballpeen hammers. At the
same time, a yellow sputtering light overrides the loglo. A screaming red
display flashes up on the goggles informing him that the millimeter-wave
radar has noticed a stream of bullets headed in his direction and would you
like to know where they came from, sir?
Hiro has just been shot in the back with a burst of machine-gun fire.
All of the bullets have slapped into his vest and dropped to the floor, but
in doing so they have cracked about half of the ribs on that side of his
body and bruised a few internal organs. He turns around, which hurts.
The Enforcer has given up on bullets and whipped out another weapon. It
says so right on Hiro's goggles: PACIFIC ENFORCEMENT HARDWARE, INC. MODEL
SX-29 RESTRAINT PROJECTION DEVICE (LOOGIE GUN). Which is what he should have
used in the first place.
You can't just carry a sword around as an empty threat. You shouldn't
draw it, or keep it drawn, unless you intend to kill someone. Hiro runs
toward The Enforcer, raising the katana to strike. The Enforcer does the
proper thing, namely, gets the hell out of his way. The silver ribbon of the
katana shines up above the crowd. It attracts Enforcers and repels everyone
else, so as Hiro runs down the center of the Towne Hall, he has no one in
front of him and many shiny dark creatures behind him.
He turns off all of the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is
confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as
it's happening to him. Very post-modern. Time to get immersed in Reality,
like all the people around him.
Not even Enforcers will fire their big guns in a crowd, unless it's
point-blank range, or they're in a really bad mood. A few loogies shoot past
Hiro, already so spread out as to be nothing more than an annoyance, and
splat into bystanders, wrapping them in sticky gossamer veils.
Somewhere between the 3-D video-game arcade and the display window full
of terminally bored prostitutes, Hiro's eyes clear up and he sees a miracle:
the exit of the inflatable dome, where the doors exhale a breeze of
synthetic beer breath and atomized body fluids into the cool night air.
Bad things and good things are happening in quick succession. The next
bad thing happens when a steel grate falls down to block the doors.
What the hell, it's an inflatable building. Hiro turns on the radar
just for a moment and the walls seem to drop away and become invisible; he's
seeing through them now, into the forest of steel outside. It doesn't take
long to locate the parking lot where he left his bike, supposedly under the
protection of some armed attendants.
Hiro fakes toward the whorehouse, then cuts directly toward an exposed
section of wall. The fabric of the building is tough, but his katana slices
a six-foot rent through it with a single gliding motion, and then he's
outside, spat out of the hole on a jet of fetid air.
After that - after Hiro gets onto his motorcycle, and the New South
Africans get into their all-terrain pickups, and The Enforcers get into
their slick black Enforcer mobiles, and they all go screaming out onto the
highway - after that it's just a chase scene.
Y.T. has been to some unusual places in her career. She has the visas
of some three dozen countries laminated onto her chest. And on top of the
real countries she has picked up and/or delivered to such charming little
vacation spots as the Terminal Island Sacrifice Zone and the encampment in
Griffith Park. But the weirdest job of all is this new one: someone wants
her to deliver some stuff to the United States of America. Says so right
there on the job order.
It's not much of a delivery, just a legal-size envelope.
"You sure you don't just want to mail this?" she asks the guy when she
picks it up. It's one of these creepy office parks out in the Burbs. Like a
Burbclave for worthless businesses that have offices and phones and stuff
but don't actually seem to do anything.
It's a sarcastic question, of course. The mail doesn't work, except in
Fedland. All the mailboxes have been unbolted and used to decorate the
apartments of nostalgia freaks. But it's also kind of a joke, because the
destination is, in fact, a building in the middle of Fedland. So the joke
is: If you want to deal with the Feds, why not use their fucked-up mail
system? Aren't you afraid that by dealing with anything as incredibly cool
as a Kourier you will be tainted in their eyes?
"Well, uh, the mail doesn't come out here, does it?" the guy says.
No point in describing the office. No point in even allowing the office
to even register on her eyeballs and take up valuable memory space in her
brain. Fluorescent lights and partitions with carpet glued to them. I prefer
my carpet on the floor, thank you. A color scheme. Ergonomic shit. Chicks
with lipstick. Xerox smell. Everything's pretty new, she figures.
The legal envelope is resting on the guy's desk. Not much point in
describing him, either. Traces of a southern or Texan accent. The bottom
edge of the envelope is parallel to the edge of the desk, one-quarter inch
away from it, perfectly centered between the left and right sides. Like he
had a doctor come in here and put it on the desk with tweezers. It is
addressed to: ROOM 969A, MAIL STOP MS-1569835, BUILDING LA-6, UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA.
"You want a return address on this?" she says.
"That's not necessary."
"If I can't deliver it, there's no way I can get it back to you,
because these places all look the same to me."
"It's not important," he says. "When do you think you'll get it there?"
"Two hours max."
"Why so long?"
"Customs, man. The Feds haven't modernized their system like everyone
else." Which is why most Kouriers will do anything to avoid delivering to
Fedland. But it's a slow day today, Y.T. hasn't been called in to do any
secret missions for the Mafia yet, and maybe she can catch Mom on her lunch
break.
"And your name is?"
"We don't give out our names."
"I need to know who's delivering this."
"Why? You said it wasn't important."
The guy gets really flustered. "Okay," he says. "Forget it. Just
deliver it, please."
Okay, be that way, she mentally says. She mentally says a number of
other things, too. The man is an obvious pervert. It's so plain, so open:
"And your name is?" Give me a break, man.
Names are unimportant. Everyone knows Kouriers are interchangeable
parts. It's just that some happen to be a lot faster and better.
So she skates out of the office. It's all very anonymous. No corporate
logos anywhere. So as she's waiting for the elevator, she calls RadiKS,
tries to find out who initiated this call.
The answer comes back a few minutes later, as she's riding out of the
office park, pooned onto a nice Mercedes: Rife Advanced Research
Enterprises. RARE. One of these high-tech outfits. Probably trying to get a
government contract. Probably trying to sell sphygmomanometers to the Feds
or something like that.
Oh well, she just delivers 'em. She gets the impression that this
Mercedes is sandbagging - driving real slow so she'll poon something else -
so she poons something else, an outgoing delivery truck. Judging from the
way it's riding high on its springs, it must be empty, so it'll probably
move along pretty fast.
Ten seconds later, predictably, the Mercedes blasts by in the left
lane, so she poons that and rides it nice and hard for a couple of miles.
Getting into Fedland is a drag. Most Fedsters drive tiny,
plastic-and-aluminum cars that are hard to poon. But eventually she nails
one, a little jellybean with glued-on windows and a three-cylinder engine,
and that takes her up to the United States border.
The smaller this country gets, the more paranoid they become. Nowadays,
the customs people are just impossible. She has to sign a ten-page document
- and they actually make her read it. They say it should take at least half
an hour for her just to read the thing.
"But I read it two weeks ago."
"It might have changed," the guard says, "so you have to read it
again."
Basically, it just certifies that Y.T. is not a terrorist, Communist
(whatever that is), homosexual, national-symbol desecrator, pornography
merchant, welfare parasite, racially insensitive, carrier of any infectious
disease, or advocate of any ideology tending to impugn traditional family
values. Most of it is just definitions of all the words used on the first
page.
So Y.T. sits in the little room for half an hour, doing housekeeping
work - going over her stuff, changing batteries in all her little devices,
cleaning her nails, having her skateboard run its self-maintenance
procedures. Then she signs the fucking document and hands it over to the
guy. And then she's in Fedland.
It's not hard finding the place. Typical Fed building - a million
steps. Like it's built on top of a mountain of steps. Columns. A lot more
guys in this one than usual. Chunky guys with slippery hair. Must be some
kind of cop building. The guard at the front door is a cop all the way,
wants to give her a big hassle about carrying her skateboard into the place.
Like they've got a safe place out front to keep skateboards.
The cop guy is completely hard to deal with. But that's okay, so is
Y.T.
"Here's the envelope," she says. "You can take it up to the ninth floor
yourself on your coffee break. Too bad you have to take the stairs.
"Look," he says:, totally exasperated, "this is EBGOC. This is, like,
the headquarters. EBGOC central. You got that? Everything that happens
within a mile is being videotaped. People don't spit on the pavement within
sight of this building. They don't even say bad words. Nobody's going to
steal your skateboard."
"That's even worse. They'll steal it. Then they'll say they didn't
steal it, they confiscated it. I know you Feds, you're always confiscating
shit."
The guy sighs. Then his eyes go out of focus and he shuts up for a
minute. Y.T. can tell he's getting a message over the little earphone that's
plugged into his ear, the mark of the true Fed.
"Go on in," he says. "But you gotta sign."
"Naturally," Y.T. says.
The cop hands her the sign-in sheet, which is actually a notebook
computer with an electronic pen. She writes "Y.T." on the screen, it's
converted to a digital bitmap, automatically time stamped, and sent off to
the big computer at Fed Central. She knows she's not going to make it
through the metal detector without stripping naked, so she just vaults the
cop's table - what's he going to do, shoot her? - and heads on into the
building, skateboard under her arm.
"Hey!" he says, weakly.
"What, you got lots of EBGOC agents in here being mugged and raped by
female Kouriers?" she says, stomping the elevator button ferociously.
Elevator takes forever. She loses her patience and just climbs the
stairs like all the other Feds.
The guy is right, it's definitely Cop Central here on the ninth floor.
Every creepy guy in sunglasses and slippery hair you've ever seen, they're
all here, all with little fleshtone helices of wire trailing down from their
ears. There's even some female Feds. They look even scarier than the guys.
The things that a woman can do to her hair to make herself look professional
- Jeeezus! Why not just wear a motorcycle helmet? At least then you can take
it off.
Except none of the Feds, male or female, is wearing sunglasses. They
look naked without them. Might as well be walking around with no pants on.
Seeing these Feds without their mirror specs is like blundering into the
boys' locker room.
She finds Room 968A easily enough. Most of the floor is just a big pool
of desks. All the actual, numbered rooms are around the edges, with frosted
glass doors. Each of the creepy guys seems to have a desk of his own, some
of them loiter near their desks, the rest of them are doing a lot of hall -
jogging and impromptu conferencing at other creepy guys' desks. Their white
shirts are painfully clean. Not as many shoulder holsters as she would
expect; all the gun-carrying Feds are probably out in what used to be
Alabama or Chicago trying to confiscate back bits of United States territory
from what is now a Buy 'n' Fly or a toxic-waste dump.
She goes on into Room 968A. It's an office. Four Fed guys are in here,
the same as the others except most of them are a tad older, in their forties
and fifties.
"Got a delivery for this room," Y.T. says.
"You're Y.T.?" says the head Fed, who's sitting behind the desk.
"You're not supposed to know my name," Y.T. says. "How did you know my
name?"
"I recognized you," the head Fed says. "I know your mother."
Y.T. does not believe him. But these Feds have all kinds of ways of
finding out stuff.
"Do you have any relatives in Afghanistan?" she says.
The guys all look back and forth at each other, like, did you
understand the chick? But it's not a sentence that is intended to be
understood. Actually, Y.T. has all kinds of voice recognition ware in her
coverall and in her plank. When she says, "Do you have any relatives in
Afghanistan?" that's like a code phrase, it tells all of her spook gear to
get ready, shake itself down, check itself out, prick up its electronic
ears.
"You want this envelope or not?" she says.
"I'll take it," the head Fed says, standing up and holding out one
hand.
Y.T. walks into the middle of the room and hands him the envelope. But
instead of taking it, he lunges out at the last minute and grabs her
forearm.
She sees an open handcuff in his other hand. He brings it out and snaps
it down on her wrist so it tightens and locks shut over the cuff of her
coverall.
"I'm sorry to do this, Y.T., but I have to place you under arrest,"
he's saying.
"What the fuck are you doing?" Y.T. is saying. She's holding her free
arm back away from the desk so he can't cuff her wrists together, but one of
the other Feds grabs her by the free wrist, so now she's stretched out like
a tightrope between the two big Feds.
"You guys are dead," she says.
All the guys smile, like they enjoy a chick with some spunk.
"You guys are dead," she says a second time.
This is the key phrase that all of her ware is waiting to hear. When
she says it the second time, all the self-defense stuff comes on, which
means that among other things, a few thousand volts of radio-frequency
electrical power suddenly flood through the outsides of her cuffs.
The head Fed behind the desk blurts out a grunt from way down in his
stomach. He flies back away from her, his entire right side jerking
spastically, trips over his own chair, and sprawls back into the wall,
smacking his head on the marble windowsill. The jerk who's yanking on her
other arm stretches out like he's on an invisible rack, accidentally
slapping one of the other guys in the face, giving that guy a nice dose of
juice to the head. Both of them hit the floor like a sack of rabid cats.
There's only one of these guys left, and he's reaching under his jacket for
something. She takes one step toward him, swings her arm around, and the end
of the loose manacle strokes him in the neck. Just a caress, but it might as
well be a two-handed blow from Satan's electric ax handle. That funky juice
runs all up and down his spine, and suddenly, he's sprawled across a couple
of shitty old wooden chairs and his pistol is rotating on the floor like the
spinner in a children's game.
She flexes her wrist in a particular way, and the bundy stunner drops
down her sleeve and into her hand. The manacle swinging from the other hand
will have a similar effect on that side. She also pulls out the can of
Liquid Knuckles, pops the lid, sets the spray nozzle on wide angle.
One of the Fed creeps is nice enough to open the office door for her.
He comes into the room with his gun already drawn, backed up by half a dozen
other guys who've flocked here from the office pool, and she just lets them
have it with the Liquid Knuckles. Whoosh, it's like bug spray. The sound of
bodies hitting the floor is like a bass drum roll. She finds that her
skateboard has no problem rolling across their prone bodies, and then she's
out into the office pool. These guys are converging from all sides, there's
an incredible number of them, she just keeps holding that button down,
pointed straight ahead, digging at the floor with her foot, building up
speed. The Liquid Knuckles acts like a chemical flying wedge, she's skating
out of there on a carpet of bodies. Some of the Feds are agile enough to
dart in from behind and try to get her that way, but she's ready with the
bundy stunner, which turns their nervous systems into coils of hot barbed
wire for a few minutes but isn't supposed to have any other effects.
She's made it about three-quarters of the way across the office when
the Liquid Knuckles runs out. But it still works for a second or two because
people are afraid of it, keep diving out of the way even though there's
nothing coming out. Then a couple of them figure it out, make the mistake of
trying to grab her by the wrists. She gets one of them with the bundy
stunner and the other with the electric manacle. Then boom through the door
and she's out into the stairwell, leaving four dozen casualties in her wake.
Serves them right, they didn't even try to arrest her in a gentlemanly way.
To a man on foot, stairs are a hindrance. But to the smartwheels, they
just look like a forty-five-degree angle ramp. It's a little choppy,
especially when she's down to about the second floor and is going way too
fast, but it's definitely doable.
A lucky thing: One of the first-floor cops is just opening the
stairwell door, no doubt alerted by the symphony of alarm bells and buzzers
that has begun to merge into a solid wall of hysterical sound. She blows by
the guy; he puts one arm out in an attempt to stop her, sort of belts her
across the waist in the process, throws her balance off, but this is a very
forgiving skateboard, it's smart enough to slow down for her a little bit
when her center of mass gets into the wrong place. Pretty soon it's back
under her, she's banking radically through the elevator lobby, aiming dead
center for the arch of the metal detector, through which the bright outdoor
light of freedom is shining.
Her old buddy the cop is up on his feet, and he reacts fast enough to
spread-eagle himself across the metal detector. Y.T. acts like she's heading
right for him, then kicks the board sideways at the last minute, punches one
of the toe switches, coils her legs underneath her, and jumps into the air.
She flies right over his little table while the plank is rolling underneath
it, and a second later she lands on it, wobbles once, gets her balance back.
She's in the lobby, headed for the doors.
It's an old building. Most of the doors are metal. But there's a couple
of revolving doors, too, just big sheets of glass.
Early thrashers used to inadvertently skate into walls of glass from
time to time, which was a problem. It turned into a bigger problem when the
whole Kourier thing got started and thrashers started spending a lot more
time trying to go fast through office-type environments where glass walls
are considered quite the concept. Which is why on an expensive skateboard,
like this one definitely is, you can get, as an extra added safety feature,
the RadiKS Narrow Cone Tuned Shock Wave Projector. It works on real short
notice, which is good, but you can only use it once (it draws its power from
an explosive charge), and then you have to take your plank into the shop to
have it replaced.
It's an emergency thing. Strictly a panic button. But that's cool. Y.T.
makes sure she's aimed directly at the glass revolving doors, then hits the
appropriate toe switch.
It's - my God - like you stretched a tarp across a stadium to turn it
into a giant tom-tom and then crashed a 747 into it. She can feel her
internal organs move several inches. Her heart trades places with her liver.
The bottoms of her feet feel numb and tingly. And she's not even standing in
the path of the shock wave.
The safety glass in the revolving doors doesn't just crack and fall to
the floor, like she imagined it would. It is blown out of its moorings. It
gushes out of the building and down the front steps. She follows, an instant
later.
The ridiculous cascade of white marble steps on the front of the
building just gives her more ramp time. By the time she reaches the
sidewalk, she's easily got enough speed to coast all the way to Mexico.
As she's swinging out across the broad avenue, aiming her crosshairs at
the customs post a quarter mile away, which she is going to have to jump
over, something tells her to look up.
Because after all, the building she just escaped from is towering above
her, many stories full of Fed creeps, and all the alarms are going off. Most
of the windows can't be opened, all they can do is look out. But there are
people on the roof. Mostly the roof is a forest of antennas. If it's a
forest, these guys are the creepy little gnomes who live in the trees. They
are ready for action, they have their sunglasses on, they have weapons,
they're all looking at her.
But only one guy's taking aim. And the thing he's aiming at her is
huge. The barrel is the size of a baseball bat. She can see the muzzle flash
poke out of it, wreathed in a sudden doughnut of white smoke. It's not
pointed right at her; it's aimed in front of her.
The stun bunny lands on the street, dead ahead, bounces up in the air,
and detonates at an altitude of twenty feet.
The next quarter of a second: There's no bright flash to blind her, and
so she can actually see the shock wave spreading outward in a perfect
sphere, hard and palpable as a ball of ice. Where the sphere contacts the
street, it makes a circular wave front, making pebbles bounce, flipping old
McDonald's containers that have long been smashed flat, and coaxing fine,
flourlike dust out of all the tiny crevices in the pavement, so that it
sweeps across the road toward her like a microscopic blizzard. Above it, the
shock wave hangs in the air, rushing toward her at the speed of sound, a
lens of air that flattens and refracts everything on the other side. She's
passing through it.
As Hiro crests the pass on his motorcycle at five in the morning, the
town of Port Sherman, Oregon, is suddenly laid out before him: a flash of
yellow loglo wrapped into a vast U-shaped valley that was ground out of the
rock, a long time ago, by a big tongue of ice in an epochal period of
geological cunnilingus. There is just a light dusting of gold around the
edges where it fades into the rain forest, thickening and intensifying as it
approaches the harbor - a long narrow fjordlike notch cut into the straight
coastline of Oregon, a deep cold trench of black water heading straight out
to Japan.
Hiro's back on the Rim again. Feels good after that night ride through
the sticks. Too many rednecks, too many mounties.
Even from ten miles away and a mile above, it's not a pretty sight.
Farther away from the central harbor district, Hiro can make out a few
speckles of red, which is a little better than the yellow. He wishes he
could see something in green or blue or purple, but there don't seem to be
any neighborhoods done up in those gourmet colors.
But then this isn't exactly a gourmet job.
He rides half a mile off the road, sits down on a flat rock in an open
space - ambush-proof, more or less - and goggles into the Metaverse.
"Librarian?"
"Yes, sir?"
"Inanna."
"A figure from Sumerian mythology. Later cultures knew her as Ishtar,
or Esther."
"Good goddess or bad goddess?"
"Good. A beloved goddess."
"Did she have any dealings with Enki or Asherah?"
"Mostly with Enki. She and Enki were on good and bad terms at different
times. Inanna was known as the queen of all the great me."
"I thought the me belonged to Enki."
"They did. But Inanna went to the Abzu - the watery fortress in the
city of Eridu where Enki stored up the me - and got Enki to give her all the
me. This is how the me were released into civilization."
"Watery fortress, huh?"
"Yes, sir."
"How did Enki feel about this?"
"He gave them to her willingly, apparently because he was drunk, and
besotted with Inanna's physical charms. When he sobered up, he tried to
chase her down and get them back, but she outsmarted him."
"Let's get semiotic," Hiro mumbles. "The Raft is L. Bob Rife's watery
fortress. That's where he stores up all of his stuff. All of his me. Juanita
went to Astoria, which was as close as you could get to the Raft a couple of
days ago. I think she's trying to pull an Inanna."
"In another popular Sumerian myth," the Librarian says, "Inanna
descends into the nether world."
"Go on," Hiro says.
"She gathers together all of her me and enters the land of no return."
"Great."
"She passes through the nether world and reaches the temple that is
ruled over by Ereshkigal, goddess of Death. She is traveling under false
pretenses, which are easily penetrated by the all-seeing Ereshkigal. But
Ereshkigal allows her to enter the temple. As Inanna enters, her robes and
jewels and me are stripped from her and she is brought, stark naked, before
Ereshkigal and the seven judges of the underworld. The judges 'fastened
their eyes upon her, the eyes of death; at their word, the word which
tortures the spirit, Inanna was turned into a corpse, a piece of rotting
meat, and was hung from a hook on the wall.' Kramer."
"Wonderful. Why the hell would she do something like that?"
"As Diane Wolkstein puts it, "Inanna gave up ... all she had
accomplished in life until she was stripped naked, with nothing remaining
but her will to be reborn ... because of her journey to the underworld, she
took on the powers and mysteries of death and rebirth."
"Oh. So I guess there's more to the story?"
"Inanna's messenger waits for three days, and when she fails to return
from the netherworld, goes to the gods asking for their help. None of the
gods is willing to help except for Enki."
"So our buddy, Enki, the hacker god, has to bail her ass out of Hell."
"Enki creates two people and sends them into the netherworld to rescue
Inanna. Through their magic, Inanna is brought back to life. She returns
from the netherworld, followed by a host of the dead."
"Juanita went to the Raft three days ago," Hiro says. "It's time to get
hacking."
Earth is still where he left it, zoomed in to show a magnified view of
the Raft. In the light of last night's chat with Chuck Wrightson, it's not
hard to find the hunk of raft that was staked out by the Orthos when the
Enterprise swung by TROKK a few weeks back. There's a couple of big-assed
Soviet freighters tied together, a swarm of small boats around them. Most of
the Raft is dead brown and organic, but this section is all white
fiberglass: pleasure craft looted from the comfortable retirees of TROKK.
Thousands of them.
Now the Raft is off Port Sherman, so, Hiro figures, that's where the
high priests of Asherah are hanging out. In a few days, they'll be in
Eureka, then San Francisco, then L.A. - a floating land link, tying the
Orthos' operations on the Raft to the closest available point on the
mainland.
He turns away from the Raft, skims across the ocean to Port Sherman to
do a bit of reconnoitering there.
Down along the waterfront, there's a nice crescent of cheap motels with
yellow logos. Hiro rifles through them, looking for Russian names.
That's easy. There's a Spectrum 2000 right in the middle of the
waterfront. As the name implies, each one has a whole range of rooms, from
human coin lockers in the lobby all the way to luxury suites on the top. And
a whole range of rooms has been rented out by a bunch of people with names
ending in -off and -ovski and other dead Slavic giveaways. The foot soldiers
sleep in the lobby, laid out straight and narrow in coin lockers next to
their AK-47s, and the priests and generals live in nice rooms higher up.
Hiro pauses to wonder what a Pentecostal Russian Orthodox priest does with a
Magic Fingers.
The suite on the very top is being rented out by a gentleman by the
name of Gurov. Mr. KGB himself. Too much of a wimp to hang out on the actual
Raft, apparently.
How'd he get from the Raft to Port Sherman? If it involves crossing a
couple of hundred miles of North Pacific, it must be a decent-sized vessel.
There are half a dozen marinas in Port Sherman. At the moment, most of
them are clogged with small brown boats. It looks like a post-typhoon
situation, where a few hundred square miles of ocean have been swept clean
of sampans that have piled up against the nearest hard place. Except this is
slightly more organized than that.
The Refus are coining ashore already. If they're smart and aggressive,
they probably know that they can walk to California from here.
That explains why the piers are clogged with trashy little boats. But
one of them still looks like a private marina. It's got a dozen or so clean
white vessels, lined up neatly in their slips, no riffraff. And the
resolution of this image is good enough that Hiro can see the pier speckled
with little doughnuts: probably rings of sandbags. That'd be the only way to
keep your private moorage private when the Raft was hovering offshore.
The numbers, flags, and other identifying goodies are harder to make
out. The satellite has a hard time picking that stuff out.
Hiro checks to see whether CIC has a stringer in Port Sherman. They
have to, because the Raft is here, and CIC hopes to make a big business out
of selling Raft intelligence to all the anxious waterfronters between
Skagway and Tierra del Fuego.
Indeed. There are a few people hanging out in this town, uploading the
latest Port Sherman intel. And one of them is just a punter with a video
camera who goes around shooting pictures of everything.
Hiro reviews this stuff in fast-forward. A lot of it is shot from the
stringer's hotel window: hours and hours of coverage of the stream of shitty
little brown boats laboring their way up the harbor, tying up to the edge of
the mini-Raft that's forming in front of Port Sherman.
But it's semi-organized, in that some apparently self-appointed water
cops are buzzing around in a speedboat, aiming guns at people, shouting
through a megaphone. And that explains why, no matter how tangled the mess
in the harbor becomes, there's always a clear lane down the middle of the
fjord, headed out to sea. And the terminus of that clear lane is the nice
pier with the big boats.
There are two big vessels there. One is a large fishing boat flying a
flag bearing the emblem of the Orthos, which is just a cross and a flame. It
is obvious TROKK loot; the name on the stem is KODIAK QUEEN, and the Orthos
haven't bothered to change it yet. The other large boat is a small cruise
vessel, made to carry rich people comfortably to nice places. It has a green
flag and appears to be connected with Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong.
Hiro does a little more poking around in the streets of Port Sherman
and finds out that there is a pretty good-sized Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong
franchulate here. In typical Hong Kong style, it is more of a spray of small
buildings and rooms all over town. But it's a dense spray.
Dense enough that Hong Kong has several full-time employees here,
including a proconsul. Hiro pulls up the guy's picture so he'll recognize
him: a crusty-looking Chinese-American gent in his fifties. So it's not an
automated, unmanned franchulate like you normally see in the Lower 48.