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When she first woke up, she was still in her RadiKS coverall, mummified
in gaffer's tape, lying on the floor of a shitty old Ford van blasting
across the middle of nowhere. This did not put her into a very favorable
mood. The stun bunny left her with a persistent nosebleed and an eternal
throbbing headache, and every time the van hit a chuckhole, her head bounced
on the corrugated steel floor.
First she was just pissed. Then she started having brief moments of
fear - wanting to go home. After eight hours in the back of the van, there
was no doubt in her mind that she wanted to go home. The only thing that
kept her from giving up was curiosity. As far as she could tell from this
admittedly poor vantage point, this didn't look like a Fed operation.
The van pulled off the highway, onto a frontage road, and into a
parking lot. The rear doors of the van opened up, and a couple of women
climbed in. Through the open doors, Y.T. could see the Gothic arch logo of a
Reverend Wayne's Pearly Cates.
"Oh, you poor baby," one of the women said. The other woman just gasped
in horror at her condition. One of them just cradled her head and stroked
her hair, letting her sip sweet Kool-Aid from a Dixie cup, while the other
tenderly, slowly took the gaffer's tape off.
Her shoes had already been removed when she woke up in the back of the
van, and no one offered her another pair. And everything had been removed
from her coverall. All the good stuff was gone. But they hadn't gone
underneath the coverall. She still had the dog tags. And one other thing, a
thing between her legs called a dentata. There's no way they could have
found that.
She has always known that the dog tags were probably a fake thing
anyway. Uncle Enzo doesn't just go around giving his war souvenirs to
fifteen-year-old chicks. But they still might have an effect on someone.
The two women are named Marla and Bonnie. They are with her all the
time. Not only with her, but touching her. Lots of hugs, squeezes,
hand-holding, and tousled hair. The first time she goes to the bathroom,
Bonnie goes with her, opening the stall door and actually standing in there
with her. Y.T. thinks that Bonnie is worried that she's going to pass out on
the toilet or something. But the next time she has to pee, Marla goes with
her. She gets no privacy at all.
The only problem is she can't deny that she likes it, in a way. The
ride in the van hurt. It really hurt bad. She never felt so lonely in her
life. And now she's barefoot and defenseless in an unfamiliar place and
they're giving her what she needs.
After she had a few minutes to freshen up - whatever that means -inside
the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates, she and Marla and Bonnie climbed into a
big stretch van with no windows. The floor was carpeted but there were no
seats inside, everyone sat on the floor. The van was jammed when they opened
the rear doors. Twenty people were packed into it, all energetic, beaming
youths. It looked impossible; Y.T. shrank away from it, backing right into
Marla and Bonnie. But a cheerful roar came up from the van people, white
teeth flashing in the dimness, and people began to scrunch out a tiny space
for them.
She spent most of the next two days packed into the van between Bonnie
and Marla, holding hands with them constantly, so she couldn't even pick her
nose without permission. They sang happy songs until her brain turned to
tapioca. They played wacky games.
A couple of times every hour, someone in the van would start to babble,
just like the Falabalas. Just like the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates people.
The babbling would spread throughout the van like a contagious disease, and
soon everyone would be doing it.
Everyone except for Y.T. She couldn't seem to get the hang of it. It
just seemed embarrassingly stupid to her. So she just faked it.
Three times a day, they had a chance to eat and eliminate. It always
happened in Burbclaves. Y.T. could feel them pulling off the interstate,
finding their way down twisty development lanes, courts, ways, and circles,
A garage door would rise electrically, the van would pull in, the door would
shut behind them. They would go into a suburban house, except stripped of
furniture and other family touches, and sit on the floor in empty bedrooms -
one for boys, one for girls - and eat cake and cookies. This always happened
in a totally empty room in a house, but there was always different decor: in
one place, flowery countryish wallpaper and a lingering smell of rancid
Glade. In another, bluish wallpaper featuring hockey players, football
players, basketball players. In another, just plain white walls with old
crayon marks on them. Sitting in these empty rooms, Y.T. would study the old
furniture scrapes on the floors, the dents in the sheetrock, and muse over
them like an archaeologist, wondering about the long-departed families who
had once lived here. But toward the end of the ride, she wasn't paying
attention anymore.
In the van, she could hear nothing but singing and chanting, see
nothing but the jammed-together faces of her companions. When they stopped
for gas, they did it in giant truck stops out in the middle of nowhere,
pulling up to the most distant pump island so that no one was near them. And
they never stopped driving. They just got relayed from one driver to the
next.
Finally, they got to a coast. Y.T. could smell it. They spent a few
minutes waiting, engine idling, and then the van bumped over some kind of a
threshold, climbed a few ramps, stopped, set its parking brake. The driver
got out and left them all alone in the van for the first time. Y.T. felt
glad that the trip was over.
Then everything started to rumble, like an engine noise but a lot
bigger. She didn't feel any movement until a few minutes later, when she
realized that everything was rocking gently. The van was parked on a ship,
and the ship was headed out to sea.
It's a real ocean-going ship. An old, shitty, rusty one that probably
cost about five bucks at the ship junkyard. But it carries cars, and it goes
through the water, and it doesn't sink.
The ship is just like the van, except bigger, with more people. But
they eat the same stuff, sing the same songs, and sleep just as rarely as
ever. By now, Y.T. finds it perversely comforting. She knows that she's with
a lot of other people like her, and that she's safe. She knows the routine.
She knows where she belongs.
And so finally they come to the Raft. No one has told Y.T. this is
where they're going, but by now it's obvious. She ought to be scared. But
they wouldn't be going to the Raft if it was as bad as everyone says.
When it starts coming into view, she half expects them to converge on
her with gaffer's tape again. But then she figures out it's not necessary.
She hasn't been causing trouble. She's been accepted here, they trust her.
It gives her a feeling of pride, in a way.
And she won't cause trouble on the Raft because all she can do is
escape from their part of it onto the Raft per se. As such. The real Raft.
The Raft of a hundred Hong Kong B-movies and blood-soaked Nipponese comic
books. It doesn't take much imagination to think of what happens to lone
fifteen-year-old blond American girls on the Raft, and these people know it.
Sometimes, she worries about her mother, then she hardens her heart and
thinks maybe the whole thing will be good for her. Shake her up a little.
Which is what she needs. After Dad left, she just folded up into herself
like an origami bird thrown into a fire.
There is kind of an outer cloud of small boats surrounding the Raft for
a distance of a few miles. Almost all of them are fishing boats. Some of
them carry men with guns, but they don't fuck around with this ferry. The
ferry swings through this outer zone, making a broad turn, finally zeroing
in on a white neighborhood on one flank of the Raft. Literally white. All
the boats here are clean and new. There's a couple of big rusty boats with
Russian lettering on the side, and the ferry pulls up alongside one of them,
ropes are thrown across, then augmented with nets, gang-planks, webs of old
discarded tires.
This Raft thing does not look like good skating territory at all.
She wonders if any of the other people on board this ferry are skaters.
Doesn't seem likely. Really, they are not her kind of people at all. She has
always been a dirty scum dog of the highways, not one of these happy
singalong types. Maybe the Raft is just the place for her.
They take her down into one of the Russian ships and give her the
grossest job of all time: cutting up fish. She does not want a job, has not
asked for one. But that's what she gets. Still, no one really talks to her,
no one bothers to explain anything, and that makes her reluctant to ask. She
has just run into a massive cultural shock wave, because most of the people
on this ship are old and fat and Russian and don't speak English.
For a couple of days, she spends a lot of time sleeping on the job,
being prodded awake by the hefty Russian dames who work in this place. She
also does some eating. Some of the fish that comes through this place looks
pretty rank, but there's a fair amount of salmon. The only way she knows
this is from having sushi at the mall - salmon is the orange-red stuff. So
she makes some sushi of her own, munches down on some fresh salmon meat, and
it's good. It clears her head a little.
Once she gets over the shock of it and settles into a routine, she
starts looking around her, watching the other fish-cutting dames, and
realizes that this is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the
people in the world. You're in this place. There's other people all around
you, but they don't understand you and you don't understand them, but people
do a lot of pointless babbling anyway. In order to stay alive, you have to
spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to
get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the
wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.
She's not especially good at cutting up fish. The big stout Russian
chicks - stomping, slab-faced babushkas - keep giving her a hassle. They
keep hovering, watching her cut with this look on their face like they can't
believe what a dork she is. Then they try to show her how to do it the right
way, but still she's not so good at it. It's hard, and her hands are cold
and stiff all the time.
After a couple of frustrating days, they give her a new job, farther
down the production line: they turn her into a cafeteria dame. Like one of
the slop-slingers in the high school lunchroom. She works in the galley of
one of the big Russian ships, hauling vats of cooked fish stew out to the
buffet line, ladling it out into bowls, shoving it across the counter at an
unending line consisting of religious fanatics, religious fanatics, and more
religious fanatics. Except this time around, there seem to be a lot more
Asians and hardly any Americans at all.
They have a new species here too: people with antennas coming out of
their heads. The antennas look like the ones on cop walkie-talkies: short,
blunt, black rubber whips. They rise up from behind the ear. The first time
she sees one of these people, she figures it must be some kind of new
Walkman, and she wants to ask the guy where he got it, what he's listening
to. But he's a strange guy, stranger than all of the others, with a
permanent thousand-yard stare and a bad case of the mumbles, and he ends up
giving her the creeps so bad that she just shoves an extra-large dose of
stew in his face and hurries him on down the line.
From time to time, she actually recognizes one of the people who were
in her van. But they don't seem to recognize her; they just look right
through her. Glassy-eyed. Like they've been brainwashed.
Like Y.T. was brainwashed.
She can't believe it has taken her this long to figure out what they
were doing to her. And that just makes her more pissed.
In Reality, Port Sherman is a surprisingly tiny little burg, really
just a few square blocks. Until the Raft came along, it had a full-time
population of a couple of thousand people. Now the population must be
pushing fifty thousand. Hiro has to slow down a little bit here because the
Refus are all sleeping on the street for the time being, an impediment to
traffic.
That's okay, it saves his life. Because shortly after he gets into Port
Sherman, the wheels on his motorcycle lock up - the spokes become rigid -
and the ride gets very bumpy. A couple of seconds after that, the entire
bike goes dead, becomes an inert chunk of metal. Not even the engine works.
He looks down into the flat screen on top of the fuel tank, wanting to get a
status report, but it's just showing snow. The bios has crashed. Asherah's
possessed his bike.
So he abandons it in the middle of the street, starts walking toward
the waterfront. Behind him, he can hear the Refus waking up, struggling out
of their blankets and sleeping bags, converging over the fallen bike, trying
to be the first to claim it.
He can hear a deep thumping in his chest, and for a minute he remembers
Raven's motorcycle in L.A., how he felt it first and heard it later. But
there are no motorcycles around here. The sound is coming from above. It's a
chopper. The kind that flies.
Hiro can smell the seaweed rotting on the beach, he's so close. He
comes around a corner and finds himself on the waterfront street, looking
straight into the facade of the Spectrum 2000. On the other side is water.
The chopper's coming up the fjord, following it inland from the open
sea, headed straight for the Spectrum 2000. It's a small one, an agile
number with a lot of glass. Hiro can see the crosses painted all over it
where the red stars used to be. It is brilliant and dazzling in the cool
blue light of early morning because it's shedding a trail of stars,
blue-white magnesium flares tumbling out of it every few seconds, landing in
the water below, where they continue to burn, leaving an astral pathway
marked out down the length of the harbor. They aren't there to look cool.
They are there to confuse heat-seeking missiles.
From where he's standing, he can't see the roof of the hotel, because
he's looking straight up at it. But he has the feeling that Gurov must be
waiting there, on top of the tallest building in Port Sherman, waiting for a
dawn evacuation to carry him away into the porcelain sky, carry him away to
the Raft.
Question: Why is he being evacuated? And why are they worried about
heat-seeking missiles? Hiro realizes, belatedly, that some heavy shit is
going on.
If he still had the bike, he could ride it right up the fire stairs and
find out what's happening. But he doesn't have the bike.
A deep thump sounds from the roof of a building on his right. It's an
old building, one of the original pioneer structures from a hundred years
ago. Hiro's knees buckle, his mouth comes open, shoulders hunch
involuntarily, he looks toward the sound. And something catches his eye,
something small and dark, darting away from the building and up into the air
like a sparrow. But when it's a hundred yards out over the water, the
sparrow catches fire, coughs out a great cloud of sticky yellow smoke, turns
into a white fireball, and springs forward. It keeps getting faster and
faster, tearing down the center of the harbor, until it passes all the way
through the little chopper, in through the windshield and out the back. The
chopper turns into a cloud of flame shedding dark bits of scrap metal, like
a phoenix breaking out of its shell.
Apparently, Hiro's not the only guy in town who hates Gurov. Now Gurov
has to come downstairs and get on a boat.
The lobby of the Spectrum 2000 is an armed camp, full of beards with
guns. They're still putting their defense together; more soldiers are
dragging themselves out of their coin lockers, pulling on their jackets,
grabbing their guns. A swarthy guy, probably a Tatar sergeant left over from
the Red Army, is running around the lobby in a modified Soviet Marines
uniform, screaming at people, shoving them this way and that.
Gurov may be a holy man, but he can't walk on water. He'll have to come
out to the waterfront street, make his way two blocks down to the gate that
admits him to the secured pier, and get on board the Kodiak Queen, which is
waiting for him, black smoke starting to cough out of its stacks, lights
starting to come on. just down the pier from the Kodiak Queen is the
Kowloon, which is the big Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong boat.
Hiro turns his back on the Spectrum 2000 and starts running up and down
the waterfront streets, scanning the logos until he sees the one he wants:
Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong.
They don't want to let him in. He flashes his passport; the doors open.
The guard is Chinese but speaks a bit of English. This is a measure of how
weird things are in Port Sherman: they have a guard on the door. Usually,
Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong is an open country, always looking for new
citizens, even if they are the poorest Refus.
"Sorry," the guard says in a reedy, insincere voice, "I did not know -
" He points to Hiro's passport.
The franchulate is literally a breath of fresh air. It doesn't have
that Third World ambience, doesn't smell like urine at all. Which means it
must be the local headquarters, or close to it, because most of Hong Kong's
Port Sherman real estate probably consists of nothing more than a gunman
hogging a pay phone in a lobby. But this place is spacious, clean, and nice.
A few hundred Refus stare at him through the windows, held at bay not by the
mere plate glass but by the eloquent promise of the three Rat Thing hutches
lined up against one wall. From the looks of it, two of those have just been
moved in recently. Pays to beef up your security when the Raft is coming
through.
Hiro proceeds to the counter. A man is talking on the phone in
Cantonese, which means that he is, in fact, shouting. Hiro recognizes him as
the Port Sherman proconsul. He is deeply involved in this little chat, but
he has definitely noticed Hiro's swords, is watching him carefully.
"We are very busy," the man says, hanging up.
"Now you are a lot busier," Hiro says. "I would like to charter your
boat, the Kowloon."
"It's very expensive," the man says.
"I just threw away a brand-new top-of-the-line motorcycle in the middle
of the street because I didn't feel like pushing it half a block to the
garage," Hiro says. "I am on an expense account that would blow your mind."
"It's broken."
"I appreciate your politeness in not wanting to come out and just say
no," Hiro says, "but I happen to know that it is, in fact, not broken, and
so I must consider your refusal equivalent to a no."
"It's not available," the man says. "Someone else is using it."
"It has not yet left the pier," Hiro says, "so you can cancel that
engagement, using one of the excuses you have just given me, and then I will
pay you more money."
"We cannot do this," the man says.
"Then I will go out into the street and inform the Refus that the
Kowloon is leaving for L.A. in exactly one hour, and that they have enough
room to take twenty Refus along with them, first come, first served," Hiro
says.
"No," the man says.
"I will tell them to contact you personally."
"Where do you want to go on the Kowloon?" the man says.
"The Raft."
"Oh, well, why didn't you say so," the man says. "That's where our
other passenger is going."
"You've got someone else who wants to go to the Raft?"
"That's what I said. Your passport, please."
Hiro hands it over. The man shoves it into a slot. Hiro's name,
personal data, and mug shots are digitally transferred into the
franchulate's bios, and with a little bit of key-pounding, the man persuades
it to spit out a laminated photo ID card.
"You get onto the pier with this," he says. "It's good for six hours.
You make your own deal with the other passenger. After that, I never want to
see you again."
"What if I need more consular services?"
"I can always go out and tell people," the man says, "that a nigger
with swords is out raping Chinese refugees."
"Hmm. This isn't exactly the best service I've ever had at a Mr. Lee's
Greater Hong Kong."
"This is not a normal situation," the man says. "Look out the window,
asshole."
Not much has apparently changed down at the waterfront. The Orthos have
organized their defense in the lobby of the Spectrum 2000: furniture has
been overturned, barricades set up. Inside the hotel itself, Hiro presumes
furious activity is going on.
It's still not clear whom the Orthos are defending themselves against.
Making his way through the waterfront area, Hiro doesn't see much: just more
Chinese Refus in baggy clothes. It's just that some of them look a lot more
alert than others. They have a whole different affect. Most of the Chinese
have their eyes on the mud in front of their feet, and their minds on
something else. But some of them are just strolling up and down the street,
looking all around, alertly, and most of these people happen to be young men
wearing bulky jackets. And haircuts that are from a whole other stylistic
universe than what the others are sporting. There is evidence of styling
gel.
The entrance to the rich people's pier is sandbagged, barbwired, and
guarded. Hiro approaches slowly, his hands in plain sight, and shows his
pass to the head guard, who is the only white person Hiro has seen in Port
Sherman.
And that gets him onto the pier. Just like that. Like the Hong Kong
franchulate, it's empty, quiet, and doesn't stink. It bobs up and down
gently on the tide, in a way that Hiro finds relaxing. It's really just a
train of rafts, plank platforms built over floating hunks of styrofoam, and
if it weren't guarded it would probably end up getting dragged out and
lashed onto the Raft.
Unlike a normal marina, it's not quiet and isolated. Usually, people
moor their boats, lock them up, and leave. Here, at least one person is
banging out on each boat, drinking coffee, keeping their weapons in plain
sight, watching Hiro very intently as he strolls up the pier. Every few
seconds, the pier thunders with footsteps, and one or two Russians run past
Hiro, making for the Kodiak Queen. They are all young men, all
sailor/soldier types, and they're diving onto the Kodiak Queen as if it's
last boat out of Hell, being shouted at by officers, running to their
stations, frantically attending to their sailor chores.
Things are a lot calmer on the Kowloon. It's guarded too, but most of
the people appear to be waiters and stewards, wearing snappy uniforms with
brass buttons and white gloves. Uniforms that are intended to be used
indoors, in pleasant, climate-controlled dining rooms. A few crew members
are visible from place to place, their black hair slicked back, clad in dark
windbreakers to protect them from the cold and spray. Hiro can only see one
man on the Kowloon who appears to be a passenger: a tall slender Caucasian
in a dark suit, strolling around chatting into a portable telephone.
Probably some Industry jerk who wants to go out for a day cruise, look at
the Refus on the Raft while he's sitting in a dining room having a gourmet
dinner.
Hiro's about halfway down the pier when all bell breaks loose on shore,
in front of the Spectrum 2000. It starts with a long series of heavy
machine-gun bursts that don't appear to do much damage, but do clear the
street pretty fast. Ninety-nine percent of the Refus just evaporate. The
others, the young men Hiro noticed, pull interesting high-tech weapons out
of their jackets and disappear into doorways and buildings. Hiro picks up
the pace a little, starts walking backward down the pier, trying to get some
of the larger vessels in between him and the action so he doesn't get hit by
a stray burst.
A fresh breeze comes off the water and down the pier. Passing by the
Kowloon, it picks up the smell of bacon frying and coffee brewing, and Hiro
can't help but meditate on the fact that his last meal was half of a cheap
beer in a Kelley's Tap in a Snooze 'n' Cruise.
The scene in front of the Spectrum 2000 has devolved into a generalized
roar of unbelievably loud white noise as all the people inside and outside
of the hotel fire their weapons back and forth across the street.
Something touches his shoulder. Hiro turns to brush it away, sees that
he's looking down at a short Chinese waitress who has come down the pier
from the Kowloon. Having gotten his attention, she puts her hands back where
they were originally, to wit, plastered over her ears.
"You Hiro Protagonist?" she mouths, basically inaudible over the
ridiculous noise of the firefight.
Hiro nods. She nods back, steps away from him, jerks her head toward
the Kowloon. With her hands plastered over her ears this way, it looks like
some kind of a folk-dance move.
Hiro follows her down the pier. Maybe they're going to let him charter
the Kowloon after all. She ushers him onto the aluminum gangplank.
As he's walking across it, he looks up to one of the higher decks,
where a couple of the crew members are hanging out in their dark
windbreakers. One of them is leaning against a railing, watching the
firefight through binoculars. Another one, an older one, approaches him,
leans over to examine his back, slaps him a couple of times between the
shoulder blades.
The guy drops his binoculars to see who's pounding him on the back. His
eyes are not Chinese. The older guy says something to him, gestures at his
throat. He's not Chinese, either.
The binocular guy nods, reaches up with one hand and presses a lapel
switch. The next time he turns around, a word is written across his back in
neon green electropigment: MAFIA.
The older guy turns away; his windbreaker says the same thing.
Hiro turns around in the middle of the gangplank. There are twenty crew
members in plain sight an around him. Suddenly, their black windbreakers all
say, MAFIA. Suddenly, they are all armed.
"I was planning to get in touch with Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong and
file a complaint about their proconsul here in Port Sherman," Hiro jokes.
"He was very uncooperative this morning when I insisted on renting this boat
out from under you."
Hiro is sitting in the first-class dining room of the Kowloon. On the
other side of the white linen tablecloth is the man Hiro had previously
pegged as the Industry creep on vacation. He's impeccably dressed in a black
suit, and he has a glass eye. He has not bothered to introduce himself, as
though he's expecting Hiro to know who he is already.
The man does not seem amused by Hiro's story. He seems, rather,
nonplussed. "So?"
"Don't see any reason to file a complaint now," Hiro says.
"Why not?"
"Well, because now I understand his reluctance not to displace you
guys."
"How come? You got money, don't you?"
"Yeah, but - "
"Oh!" the man with the glass eye says, and allows himself sort of a
forced smile. "Because we're the Mafia, you're saying."
"Yeah," Hiro says, feeling his face get hot. Nothing like making a
total dickhead out of yourself. Nothing in the world like it, nosireebob.
Outside, the gun battle is just a dim roar. This dining room is
insulated from noise, water, wind, and hot flying lead by a double layer of
remarkably thick glass, and the space between the panes is full of something
cool and gelatinous. The roar does not seem as steady as it used to be.
"Fucking machine guns," the man says. "I hate 'em. Maybe one out of a
thousand rounds actually hits something worth hitting. And they kill my
ears. You want some coffee or something?"
"That'd be great."
"We got a big buffet coming up soon. Bacon, eggs, fresh fruit you
wouldn't believe."
The guy that Hiro saw earlier, up on the deck, pounding Binocular Man
on the back, sticks his head into the room.
"Excuse me, boss, but we're moving into, like, third phase of our plan.
Just thought you'd wanna know."
"Thank you, Livio. Let me know when the Ivans make it to the pier." The
guy sips his coffee, notices Hiro looking confused. "See, we got a plan, and
the plan is divided up into different phases."
"Yeah, I got that."
"The first phase was immobilization. Taking out their chopper. Then we
had Phase Two, which was making them think we were trying to kill them in
the hotel. I think that this phase succeeded wonderfully."
"Me too."
"Thank you. Another important part of this phase was getting your ass
in here, which is also done."
"I'm part of this plan?"
The man with the glass eye smiles crisply. "If you were not part of
this plan, you would be dead."
"So you knew I was coming to Port Sherman?"
"You know that chick Y.T.? The one you have been using to spy on us?"
"Yeah." No point in denying it.
"Well, we have been using her to spy on you."
"Why? Why the hell do you care about me?"
"That would be a tangent from our main conversation, which is about all
the phases of the plan."
"Okay. We just finished Phase Two."
"Now, in Phase Three, which is ongoing, we allow them to think that
they are making an incredible, heroic escape, running down the street toward
the pier."
"Phase Four!" shouts Livio, the lieutenant.
"Scusi," the man with the glass eye says, scooting his chair back,
folding his napkin back onto the table. He gets up and walks out of the
dining room. Hiro follows him above deck.
A couple of dozen Russians are all trying to force their way through
the gate onto the pier. Only a few of them can get through at once, and so
they end up strung out over a couple of hundred feet, all running toward the
safety of the Kodiak Queen.
But a dozen or so manage to stay together in a clump: a group of
soldiers, forming a human shield around a smaller cluster of men in the
center.
"Bigwigs," the man with the glass eye says, shaking his head
philosophically.
They all run crablike down the pier, bent down as far as they can go,
firing the occasional covering burst of machine-gun fire back into Port
Sherman.
The man with the glass eye is squinting against a cool, sudden breeze.
He turns to Hiro with a hint of a grin. "Check this out," he says, and
presses a button on a little black box in his hand.
The explosion is like a single drumbeat, coming from everywhere at
once. Hiro can feel it coming up out of the water, shaking his feet. There's
no big flame or cloud of smoke, but there is a sort of twin geyser effect
that shoots out from underneath the Kodiak Queen, sending jets of white,
steamy water upward like unfolding wings. The wings collapse in a sudden
downpour, and then the Kodiak Queen seems shockingly low in the water. Low
and getting lower.
All the men who are running down the pier suddenly stop in their
tracks.
"Now," Binocular Man mumbles into his lapel.
There are some smaller explosions down on the pier. The entire pier
buckles and writhes like a snake in the water. One segment in particular,
the segment with the bigwigs on it, is rocking and seesawing violently,
smoke rising from both ends. It has been blown loose from the rest of the
pier.
All of its occupants fall down in the same direction as it jerks
sideways and begins to move, yanked out of its place. Hiro can see the tow
cable rising up out of the water as it is stretched tight, running a couple
of hundred feet to a small open boat with a big motor on it, which is now
pulling out of the harbor.
There's still a dozen bodyguards on the segment. One of them sizes up
the situation, aims his AK-47 across the water at the boat that's towing
them, and loses his brains. There's a sniper on the top deck of the Kowloon.
All the other bodyguards throw their guns into the water.
"Time for Phase Five," the man with the glass eye says. "A big fucking
breakfast."
By the time he and Hiro have sat back down in the dining room, the
Kowloon has pulled away from the pier and is headed down the fjord,
following a course parallel to the smaller boat that is towing the segment.
As they eat, they can look out the window, across a few hundred yards of
open water, and see the segment keeping pace with them. All the bigwigs and
the bodyguards are on their asses now, keeping their centers of gravity low
as the segment bucks nastily.
"When we get farther away from land, the waves get bigger," the man
with the glass eye says. "I hate that shit. All I want is to hang on to the
breakfast long enough to tamp it down with some lunch."
"Amen," says Livio, heaping some scrambled eggs onto his plate.
"Are you going to pick those guys up?" Hiro says. "Or just let them
stay out there for a while?"
"Fuck 'em. Let 'em freeze their asses off. Then when we bring them onto
this boat, they'll be ready for it. Won't put up too much of a fight. Hey,
maybe they'll even talk to us."
Everyone seems pretty hungry. For a while, they just dig into
breakfast. After a while, the man with the glass eye breaks the ice by
announcing how great the food is, and everyone agrees. Hiro figures it's
okay to talk now.
"I was wondering why you guys were interested in me." Hiro figures that
this is always a good thing to know in the case of the Mafia.
"We're all in the same happy gang," the man with the glass eye says.
"Which gang is that?"
"Lagos's gang."
"Huh?"
"Well, it's not really his gang. But he's the guy who put it together.
The nucleus around which it formed."
"How and why and what are you talking about?"
"Okay." He shoves his plate away from him, folds up his napkin, puts it
on the table. "Lagos had all these ideas. Ideas about all kinds of stuff."
"So I noticed."
"He had stacks all over the place, on all different topics. Stacks
where he would pull together knowledge from all over the fucking map and tie
it all together. He had these things stashed here and there around the
Metaverse, waiting for the information to become useful."
"More than one of them?" Hiro says.
"Supposedly. Well, a few years ago, Lagos approached L. Bob Rife."
"He did?"
"Yeah. See, Rife has a million programmers working for him. He was
paranoid that they were stealing his data."
"I know that he was bugging their houses and so on."
"The reason you know that is because you found it in Lagos's stack. And
the reason Lagos bothered to look it up is because he was doing market
research. Looking for someone who might pay him hard cash for the stuff he
dug up in the Babel/Infocalypse stack."
"He thought," Hiro says, "that L. Bob Rife might have a use for some
viruses."
"Right. See, I don't understand all this shit. But I guess he found an
old virus or something that was aimed at the elite thinkers."
"The technological priesthood," Hiro says. "The infocrats. It wiped out
the whole infocracy of Sumer."
"Whatever."
"That's crazy," Hiro says. "That's like if you find out your employees
are stealing ballpoint pens, you take them out and kill them. He wouldn't be
able to use it without destroying all his programmers' minds."
"In its original form," the man with the glass eye says. "But the whole
point is, Lagos wanted to do research on it."
"Informational warfare research."
"Bingo. He wanted to isolate this thing and modify it so it could be
used to control the programmers without blowing their brains sky high."
"And did it work?"
"Who knows? Rife stole Lagos's idea. Just took it and ran with it. And
after that, Lagos had no idea what Rife did with it. But a couple of years
later, he started getting worried about a lot of stuff he was seeing."
"Like the explosive growth in Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates."
"And these Russkies who speak in tongues. And the fact that Rife was
digging up this old city - "
"Eridu."
"Yeah. And the radio astronomy thing. Lagos had a lot of stuff he was
worried about. So he began to approach people. He approached us. He
approached that girl you used to go out with -"
"Juanita."
"Yeah. Nice girl. And he approached Mr. Lee. So you might say that a
few different people have been working on this little project."
"Where'd they go?" Hiro says.
Everyone's already looking for the float, as though they all noticed at
once that it was missing. Finally they see it, a quarter mile behind them,
dead in the water. The bigwigs and the bodyguards are standing up now, all
looking in the same direction. The speedboat is circling around to retrieve
it.
"They must have figured out a way to detach the tow cable," Hiro says.
"Not likely," the man with the glass eye says. "It was attached to the
bottom, under the water. And it's a steel cable, so there's no way they
could cut it."
Hiro sees another small craft bobbing on the water, about halfway
between the Russians and the speedboat that was towing them. It's not
obvious, because it's tiny, close to the water done up in dull natural
colors. It's a one-man kayak. Carrying a long-haired man.
"Shit," Livio says. "Where the hell did he come from?"
The kayaker looks behind himself for a few moments, reading the waves,
then suddenly turns back around and begins to paddle hard, accelerating,
glancing back every few strokes. A big wave is coming, and just as it swells
up underneath the kayak, he's matching its speed. The kayak stays on top of
the wave and shoots forward like a missile, riding the swell, suddenly going
twice as fast as anything else on the water.
Digging at the wave with one end of his paddle, the kayaker makes a few
crude changes in his direction. Then he parks the paddle athwart the kayak,
reaches down inside, and hauls out a small dark object, a tube about four
feet long, which he hoists up to one shoulder.
He and the speedboat shoot past each other going in opposite
directions, separated by a gap of only about twenty feet. Then the speedboat
blows up.
The Kowloon has overshot the site of all this action by a few thousand
yards. It's pulling around into as tight a turn as a vessel of this size can
handle, trying to throw a one-eighty so it can go back and deal with the
Russians and, somewhat more problematically, with Raven.
Raven is paddling back toward his buddies.
"He's such an asshole," Livio says. "What's he going to do, tow them
out to the Raft behind his fucking kayak?"
"This gives me the creeps," the man with the glass eye says. "Make sure
we got some guys up there with Stingers. They must have a chopper coming or
something."
"No other ships on the radar" says one of the other soldiers, coming in
from the bridge. "Just us and them. And no choppers either."
"You know Raven carries a nuke, right?" Hiro says.
"So I heard. But that kayak's not big enough. It's tiny. I can't
believe you'd go out to sea in something like that."
A mountain is growing out of the sea. A bubble of black water that
keeps rising and broadening. Well behind the bobbing raft, a black tower has
appeared, jutting vertically out of the water, a pair of wings sprouting
from its top. The tower keeps getting taller, the wings getting higher out
of the water, as before and aft, the mountain rises and shapes itself. Red
stars and a few numbers. But no one has to read the numbers to know it's a
submarine. A nuclear-missile submarine.
Then it stops. So close to the Russians on their little raft that Gurov
and friends can practically jump onto it. Raven paddles toward them, cutting
through the waves like a glass knife.
"Fuck me," the man with the glass eye says. He is utterly astounded.
"Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. Uncle Enzo's gonna be pissed."
"You couldn't of known," Livio says. "Should we shoot at 'em?"
Before the man with the glass eye can make a policy decision, the deck
gun on the top of the nuke sub opens up. The first shell misses them by just
a few yards.
"Okay, we got a rapidly evolving situation. Hiro, you come with me."
The crew of the Kowloon has already sized up the situation and placed
their bets on the nuclear submarine. They are running up and down the rails,
dropping large fiberglass capsules into the water. The capsules break open
to reveal bright orange folds, which blossom into life rafts.
Once the deck gunners on the nuke sub figure out how to hit the
Kowloon, the situation begins to evolve even more rapidly. The Kowloon can't
decide whether to sink, bum, or simply disintegrate, so it does all three at
once. By that time, most of the people who were on it have made their way
onto a life raft. They all bob on the water, zip themselves into orange
survival suits, and watch the nukesub.
Raven is the last person to go belowdecks on the submarine. He spends a
minute or two removing some gear from his kayak: a few items in bags, and
one eight-foot spear with a translucent, leaf-shaped head. Before he
disappears into the hatch, he turns toward the wreckage of the Kowloon and
holds the harpoon up over his head, a gesture of triumph and a promise all
at once. Then he's gone. A couple of minutes later, the submarine is gone,
too.
"That guy gives me the creeps," the man with the glass eye says.
Once it starts coming clear to her, again, that these people are all
twisted freaks, she starts to notice other things about them. For example,
the whole time, no one ever looks her in the eye. Especially the men. No sex
at all in these guys, they've got it pushed so far down inside of them. She
can understand why they don't look at the fat babushkas. But she's a
fifteen-year-old American chick, and she is used to getting the occasional
look. Not here.
Until she looks up from her big vat of fish one day and finds that she
is looking into some guy's chest. And when she follows his chest upward to
his neck, and his neck all the way up to his face, she sees dark eyes
staring right back at her, right over the top of the counter.
He's got something written on his forehead: POOR IMPULSE CONTROL. Which
is kind of scary. Sexy, too. It gives him a certain measure of romance that
none of these other people have. She was expecting the Raft to be dark and
dangerous, and instead it's just like working where her mother works. This
guy is the first person she's seen around this place who really looks like
he belongs on the Raft.
And he's got the look down, too. Incredibly rank style. Although he has
a long wispy mustache that doesn't do much for his face. Doesn't bring out
his features well at all.
"Do you take the nasty stuff? One fish head or two?" she says, dangling
the ladle picturesquely. She always talks trash to people because none of
them can understand what she's saying.
"I'll take whatever you're offering," the guy says. In English. Sort of
a crisp accent.
"I'm not offering anything," she says, "but if you want to stand there
and browse, that's cool."
He stands there and browses for a while. Long enough that people
farther back in line stand up on tiptoe to see what the problem is. But when
they see that the problem is this particular individual, they get down off
their toes real fast, hunch down, sort of blend in to the mass of
fishy-smelling wool.
"What's for dessert today?" the guy asks. "Got anything sweet for me?"
"We don't believe in dessert," Y.T. says. "It's a fucking sin,
remember?"
"Depends on your cultural orientation."
"Oh, yeah? What culture are you oriented to?"
"I am an Aleut."
"Oh, I've never heard of that."
'That's because we've been fucked over," the big scary Aleut says,
"worse than any other people in history."
"Sorry to hear that," Y.T. says. "So, uh, do you want me to serve up
some fish, or are you gonna stay hungry?"
The big Aleut stares at her for a while. Then he jerks his head
sideways and says, "Come on. Let's get the fuck out of here."
"What, and skip out on this cool job?"
He grins ridiculously. "I can find you a better job."
"In this job, do I get to leave my clothes on?"