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sick of all this fucking water."
Raven ushers Y.T. onto a flat-assed boat with a canopy on top. It is
some kind of a riverboat that has been turned into a
Vietnamese/Arnerican/Thai/Chinese business establishment, kind of a
bar/restaurant/whorehouse/gambling den. It has a few big rooms, where lots
of people are letting it all hang out, and a lot of little tiny steel-walled
rooms down below where God knows what kind of activity is taking place.
The main room is packed with lowlife revelry. The smoke ties her
bronchial passages into granny knots. The place is equipped with a
shattering Third World sound system: pure distortion echoing off painted
steel walls at three hundred decibels. A television set bolted onto one wall
is showing foreign cartoons, done up in a two-color scheme of faded magenta
and lime green, in which a ghoulish wolf, kind of like Wile E. Coyote with
rabies, gets repeatedly executed in ways more violent than even Warner Bros.
could think up. It's a snuff cartoon. The soundtrack is either turned off
completely or else overwhelmed by the screeching melody coming out of the
speakers. A bunch of erotic dancers are performing at one end of the room.
It's impossibly crowded, they'll never get a place to sit. But shortly
after Raven comes into the room, half a dozen guys in the comer suddenly
stand bolt upright and scatter from a table, snatching up their cigarettes
and drinks almost as an afterthought. Raven pushes Y.T. through the room
ahead of him, like she's a figurehead on his kayak, and everywhere they go,
people are shoved out of her way by Raven's almost palpable personal force
field.
Raven bends down and looks under the table, picks a chair up off the
floor and looks at the underside - you can never be too careful about those
chair bombs - sets it down, pushed all the way back into the corner where
two steel walls meet, and sits down. He gestures for Y.T. to do the same,
and she does, her back to the action. From here, she can see Raven's face,
illuminated mostly by occasional stabs of light filtering through the crowd
from the mirrored ball over the erotic dancers, and by the generalized
green-and-magenta haze coming out of the TV set, spiked by the occasional
flash when the cartoon wolf makes the mistake of swallowing another hydrogen
bomb, or has the misfortune to get hosed down again with a flamethrower.
A waiter's there immediately. Raven commences hollering across the
table at her. She can't hear him, but maybe he's asking her what she wants.
"A cheeseburger!" she screams back at him.
Raven laughs, shakes his head. "You see any cows around here?"
"Anything but fish!" she screams.
Raven talks to the waiter for a while in some variant of Taxilinga.
"I ordered you some squid," he hollers. "That's a mollusk."
Great. Raven, the last of the true gentlemen.
There is a shouted conversation lasting the better part of an hour.
Raven does most of the shouting. Y.T. just listens, smiles, and nods.
Hopefully, he's not saying something like "I enjoy really violent, abusive
sex acts." She doesn't think he's talking about that at all. He's talking
politics. She hears a fragmented history of the Aleuts, a burst here and a
burst here, when Raven isn't poking squid into his mouth and the music isn't
too loud:
"Russians fucked us over ... smallpox had a ninety-percent mortality
rate ... worked as slaves in their sealing industry ... Seward's folly ...
Fucking Nipponese took away my father in forty-two, put him in a POW camp
for the duration ...
"Then the Americans fucking nuked us. Can you believe that shit?" Raven
says. There's a lull in the music; suddenly she can hear complete sentences.
"The Nipponese say they're the only people who were ever nuked. But every
nuclear power has one aboriginal group whose territory they nuked to test
their weapons. In America, they nuked the Aleutians. Amchitka. My father,"
Raven says, grinning proudly, "was nuked twice: once at Nagasaki, when he
was blinded, and then again in 1972, when the Americans nuked our homeland."
Great, Y.T. thinks. She's got a new boyfriend and he's a mutant.
Explains one or two things.
"I was born a few months later," Raven continues, by way of totally
hammering that point home.
"How did you get hooked up with these Orthos?"
"I got away from our traditions and ended up living in Soldotna,
working on oil rigs," Raven says, like Y.T. is supposed to just know where
Soldotna is. "That was when I did my drinking and got this," he says,
pointing to his tattoo. "That's also when I learned how to make love to a
woman - which is the only thing I do better than harpooning."
Y.T. can't help but think that fucking and harpooning are closely
related activities in Raven's mind. But as crude as the man is, she can't
get around the fact that he's making her uncomfortably horny.
"I used to work fishing boats too, to make a little extra money. We
would come back from a forty-eight-hour halibut opening - this was back in
the old days when they had fishing regulations -and we'd put on our survival
suits, stick beers into the pockets, and jump into the water and just float
around drinking all night long. And one time we were doing this and I drank
until I passed out. And when I woke up, it was the next day, or maybe a
couple of days later, I don't know. And I was floating in my survival suit
out in the middle of the Cook Inlet, all alone. The other guys on my fishing
boat had forgotten about me."
Conveniently enough, Y.T. thinks.
"Anyway, I floated for a couple of days. Got real thirsty. Ended up
washing ashore on Kodiak Island. By this time, I was real sick with the DTs
and everything else. But I washed up near a Russian Orthodox church and they
found me, took me in, and straightened me out. And that was when I saw that
the Western, American lifestyle had come this close to killing me."
Here comes the sermon.
"And I saw that we can only live through faith, living a simple
lifestyle. No booze. No television. None of that stuff."
"So what are we doing in this place?"
He shrugs. "This is an example of the bad places I used to hang out.
But if you're going to get decent food on. the Raft, you have to come to a
place like this."
A waiter approaches the table. His eyes are big, his movements
tentative. He's not coming to take an order; he's coming to deliver bad
news.
"Sir, you are wanted on the radio. I'm sorry."
"Who is it?" Raven says.
The waiter just looks around him like he can't even speak the name in
public. "It's very important," he says.
Raven heaves a big sigh, grabs one last piece of fish and pokes it into
his mouth. He stands up, and before Y.T. can react, gives her a kiss on the
cheek. "Honey, I got a job to do, or something. Just wait right here for me,
okay?"
"Here?"
"Nobody will fuck with you," Raven says, as much for the benefit of the
waiter as for Y.T.
The Raft looks uncannily cheerful from a few miles away. A dozen
searchlights, and at least that many lasers, are mounted on the towering
superstructure of the Enterprise, waving back and forth against the clouds
like a Hollywood premiere. Closer up, it doesn't look so bright and crisp.
The vast matted tangle of small boats radiates a murky cloud of yellow light
that spoils the contrast.
A couple of patches of the Raft are burning. Not a nice cheery bonfire
type of thing, but a high burbling flame with black smoke sliding out of it,
like you get from a large quantity of gasoline.
"Gang warfare, maybe," Eliot theorizes.
"Energy source," Hiro guesses.
"Entertainment," Fisheye says. "They don't have cable on the fucking
Raft."
Before they really plunge into Hell, Eliot takes the lid off the fuel
tank and slides the dipstick into there, checking the fuel supply. He
doesn't say anything, but he doesn't look especially happy.
"Turn off all the lights," Eliot says when it seems they are still
miles away. "Remember that we have already been sighted by several hundred
or even several thousand people who are armed and hungry."
Vic is already going around the boat shutting off lights via the simple
expedient of a ball peen hammer. Fisheye just stands there and listens
intently to Eliot, suddenly respectful. Eliot continues. "Take off all the
bright orange clothing, even if it means we get cold. From now on, we lay
down on the decks, expose ourselves as little as possible, and we don't talk
to each other unless necessary. Vic, you stay midships with your rifle and
wait for someone to hit us with a spotlight. Anyone hits us with a spotlight
from any direction, you shoot it out. That includes flashlights from small
boats. Hiro, your job is gunwale patrol. You just keep going around the
edges of this yacht, anywhere that a swimmer could climb up over the edge
and slip on board, and when that happens, cut his arms off. Also, be on the
lookout for any kind of grappling-hook type stuff. Fisheye, if any other
floating object comes within a hundred feet of us, sink it.
"If you see Raft people with antennas coming out of their heads, try to
kill them first, because they can talk to each other."
"Antennas coming out of their heads?" Hiro says.
"Yeah. Raft gargoyle types," Eliot says.
"Who are they?"
"How the fuck should I know? I've just seen 'em a few times, from a
distance. Anyway, I'm going to take us straight in toward the center, and
once we get close enough, I'll turn to starboard and swing around the Raft
counterclockwise, looking for someone who might be willing to sell us fuel.
If worse comes to worst and we end up on the Raft itself, we stick together
and we hire ourselves a guide, because if we try to move across the Raft
without the help of someone who knows the web, we'll get into a bad
situation."
"Like what kind of a bad situation?" Fisheye asks.
"Like hanging on a rotted-out slime-covered cargo net between two ships
rocking different ways, with nothing underneath us except ice water full of
plague rats, toxic waste, and killer whales. Any questions?"
"Yeah," Fisheye says. "Can I go home now?"
Good. If Fisheye is scared, so's Hiro.
"Remember what happened to the pirate named Bruce Lee," Eliot says. "He
was well-armed and powerful. He pulled up alongside a life raft full of
Refus one day, looking for some poontang, and he was dead before he knew it.
Now there are a lot of people who want to do that to us."
"Don't they have some kind of cops or something?" Vic says. "I heard
they did."
In other words, Vic has killed a lot of time going to Raft movies in
Times Square.
"The people up on the Enterprise operate in kind of a wrath-of-God
mode," Eliot says. "They have big guns mounted around the edge of the flight
deck - big Gatling guns like Reason except with larger bullets. They were
originally put there to shoot down Exocet missiles. They strike with the
force of a meteorite. If people act up out on the Raft, they will make the
problem go away. But a little murder or riot isn't enough to get their
attention. If it's a rocket duel between rival pirate organizations, that's
different."
Suddenly, they've been nailed with a spotlight so big and powerful they
can't look anywhere near it.
Then it's dark again, and a gunshot from Vic's rifle is searing and
reverberating across the water.
"Nice shooting, Vic," Fisheye says.
"It's, like, one of them drug dealer boats," Vic says, looking through
his magic sight. "Five guys on it. Headed our way." He fires another round.
"Correction. Four guys on it." Boom. "Correction, they're not headed our way
anymore." Boom. A fireball erupts from the ocean two hundred feet away.
"Correction. No boat."
Fisheye laughs and actually slaps his thigh. "You recording all of
this, Hiro?"
"No," Hiro says. "Wouldn't come out."
"Oh." Fisheye seems taken aback, like this changes everything.
"That's the first wave," Eliot says. "Rich pirates looking for easy
pickings. But they've got a lot to lose, so they scare easy."
"Another big yacht-type boat is out there," Vic says, "but they're
turning away now."
Above the deep chortling noise of their yacht's big diesel, they can
hear the high whine of outboard motors.
"Second wave," Eliot says. "Pirate wannabes. These guys will come in a
lot faster, so stay sharp."
"This thing has millimeter wave on it," Fisheye says. Hiro looks at
him; his face is illuminated from below by the glow of Reason's built-in
screen. "I can see these guys like it's fucking daylight."
Vic fires several rounds, pops the clip out of his rifle, shoves in a
new one.
A zodiac zips past, skittering across the wavetops, strafing them with
weak flashlight beams. Fisheye fires a couple of short bursts from Reason,
blasting clouds of warm steam into the cold night air, but misses them.
"Save your ammo," Eliot says. "Even with Uzis, they can't hit us until
they slow down a little bit. And even with radar, you can't hit them."
A second zodiac whips past them on the other side, closer than the last
one. Vic and Fisheye both hold their fire. They hear it orbiting them,
swinging back around the way it came.
"Those two boats are getting together out there," Vic says. "They got
two more of them. A total of four. They're talking."
"We've been reconned," Eliot says, "and they're planning their tactics.
The next time is for real."
A second later, two fantastically loud blasts sound from the rear of
the yacht, where Eliot is, accompanied by brief flashes of light. Hiro turns
around to see a body collapsing to the deck. It's not Eliot. Eliot is
crouching there holding his oversized halibut shooter.
Hiro runs back, looks at the dead swimmer in the dim light scattering
off the clouds. He's naked except for a thick coating of black grease and a
belt with a gun and a knife in it. He's still holding on to the rope that he
used to pull himself on board. The rope is attached to a grappling hook that
has caught in the jagged, broken fiberglass on one side of the yacht.
"Third wave is coming a little early," Eliot says, his voice high and
shaky. He's trying so hard to sound cool that it has the opposite effect.
"Hiro, this gun's got three rounds left in it, and I'm saving the last one
for you if any more of these motherfuckers get on board."
"Sorry," Hiro says. He draws the short wakizashi. He would feel better
if he could carry his nine in the other hand, but he needs one hand free to
steady himself and keep from failing overboard. He makes a quick circuit of
the yacht, looking for more grappling hooks, and actually finds one on the
other side, hooked into one of the railing stanchions, a taut rope trailing
out behind it into the sea.
Correction: It's a taut cable. His sword won't cut it. And the tension
on the rope is such that he can't get it unhooked from the stanchion.
As he's squatting there playing with the grappling hook, a greasy hand
rises up out of the water and grabs his wrist. Another hand gropes for
Hiro's other hand and grabs the sword instead. Hiro yanks the weapon free,
feeling it do damage, and shoves the wakizashi point first into the place
between those two hands just as someone is sinking his teeth into Hiro's
crotch. But Hiro's crotch is protected - the motorcycle outfit has a hard
plastic cup - and so this human shark just gets a mouthful of bulletproof
fabric. Then his grip loosens, and he falls into the sea. Hiro releases the
grappling hook and drops it in with him.
Vic fires three rounds in quick succession, and a fireball illuminates
one whole side of the ship. For a moment, they can see everything around
them for a distance of a hundred yards, and the effect is like turning on
your kitchen lights in the middle of the night and finding your countertops
aswarm with rats. At least a dozen small boats are around them.
"They got Molotov cocktails," Vic says.
The people in the boats can see them, too. Tracers fly around them from
several directions. Hiro can see muzzle flashes in at least three places.
Fisheye opens up once, twice with Reason, just firing short bursts of a few
dozen rounds each, and produces one fireball, this one farther away from the
yacht.
It's been at least five seconds since Hiro moved, so he checks this
area for grappling hooks again and resumes his circuit around the edge of
the yacht. This time it's clear. The two greaseballs must have been working
together.
A Molotov cocktail arcs through the sky and impacts on the starboard
side of the yacht, where it's not going to do much damage. Inside would be a
lot worse. Fisheye uses Reason to hose down the area from which the Molotov
was thrown, but now that the side of the boat is all lit up from the flames,
they draw more small-arms fire. In that light, Hiro can see trickles of
blood running down from the area where Vic ensconced himself.
On the port side, he sees something long and narrow and low in the
water, with the torso of a man rising out of it. The man has long hair that
falls down around his shoulders, and he's holding an eight-foot pole in one
hand. Just as Hiro sees him, he's throwing it.
The harpoon darts across twenty feet of open water. The million chipped
facets of its glass head refract the light and make it look like a meteor.
It takes Fisheye in the back, slices easily through the bulletproof fabric
he's wearing under his suit, and comes all the way out the other side of his
body. The impact lifts Fisheye into the air and throws him off the boat; he
lands face-first in the water, already dead.
Mental note: Raven's weapons do not show up on radar.
Hiro looks back in the direction of Raven, but he's already gone. A
couple more greaseballs, side by side, vault over the railing about ten feet
forward of Hiro, but for a moment they're dazzled by the flames. Hiro pulls
out his nine, aims it their way, and keeps pulling the trigger until both of
them have fallen back into the water. He's not sure how many rounds are left
in the gun now.
There's a coughing, hissing noise, and the flame light gets dim and
finally goes out. Eliot nailed it with a fire extinguisher.
The yacht jerks out from under Hiro's feet, and he hits the deck with
his face and shoulder. Getting up, he realizes that either they've just
rammed, or been rammed by, something big. There is a thudding noise, feet
running on the deck. Hiro hears some of these feet near him, drops his
wakizashi, pulls his katana, whirls at the same time, snapping the long
blade into someone's midsection. Meanwhile they're dragging a long knife
down his back, but it doesn't penetrate the fabric, just hurts a little. His
katana comes free easily, which is dumb luck, because he forgot to squeeze
off the blow, could have gotten it wedged in there. He turns again,
instinctively parries a knife thrust from another greaseball, raises the
katana and snaps it down into his brainpan. This time he does it right,
kills him without sticking the blade. There are greaseballs on two sides of
him now. Hiro chooses a direction, swings it sideways, decapitates one of
them.
Then he turns around. Another greaseball is staggering toward him
across the pitching deck with a spiked club, but unlike Hiro he's not
keeping his balance. Hiro shuffles up to meet him, keeping his center of
gravity over his feet, and impales him on the katana.
Another greaseball is watching all of this in astonishment from up near
the bow. Hiro shoots him, and he collapses to the deck. Two more greaseballs
jump off the boat voluntarily.
The yacht is tangled up in a spider's web of shitty old ropes and cargo
nets that were stretched out across the surface of the water as a snare for
poor suckers like them. The yacht's engine is still straining, but the prop
isn't moving; something got wrapped around the shaft.
There's no sign of Raven now. Maybe it was just a one-time contract hit
on Fisheye. Maybe he didn't want to get tangled up in the spiderweb. Maybe
he figured that, once Reason was taken out, the greaseballs would take care
of the rest.
Eliot's no longer at the controls. He's no longer even on the yacht.
Hiro calls out his name, but there's no response. Not even thrashing in the
water. The last thing he did was lean over the edge with the fire
extinguisher, putting out the Molotov flame; when they were jerked to a halt
he must have tumbled overboard.
They're a lot closer to the Enterprise than he had ever thought. They
covered a lot of water during the fight, got closer in than they should
have. In fact, Hiro's surrounded on all sides by the Raft at this point.
Meager, flickering illumination is provided by the burning remains of the
Molotov cocktail-carrying Zodiacs, which have become tangled in the net
around them.
Hiro does not think it would be wise to take the yacht back out toward
open water. It's a little too competitive there. He goes up forward. The
suitcase that serves as Reason's power supply and ammo dump is open on the
deck next to him, its color monitor screen reading: Sorry, a fatal system
error occurred. Please reboot and try again.
Then, as Hiro's looking at it, it fritzes out completely and dies of a
snow crash.
Vic got hit by one of the machine-gun bursts and is also dead. Around
them, half a dozen other boats ride on the waves, caught in the spiderweb,
nice-looking yachts all of them. But they are all empty hulks, stripped of
their engines and everything else. Just like duck decoys in front of a
hunter's blind. A hand-painted sign rides on a buoy nearby, reading FUEL in
English and other languages.
Farther out to sea, a number of the ships that were chasing them
earlier are lingering, steering well clear of the spiderweb. They know they
can't come in here; this is the exclusive domain of the black grease
swimmers, the spiders in the web, almost all of whom are now dead.
If he goes onto the Raft itself, it can't be any worse. Can it?
The yacht has its own little dinghy, the smallest size of inflatable
zodiac, with a small outboard motor. Hiro gets it into the water.
"I go with you," a voice says.
Hiro whirls, hauling out his gun, and finds himself aiming it into the
face of the Filipino cabin boy. The boy blinks, looks a little surprised,
but not especially scared. He has been hanging out with pirates, after all.
For that matter, all the dead guys on the yacht don't seem to faze him
either.
"I be your guide," the boy says. "ba la zin ka nu pa ra ta..."
Y.T. waits so long that she thinks the sun must have come up by now,
but she knows it can't really be more than a couple of hours. In a way, it
doesn't even matter. Nothing ever changes: the music plays, the cartoon
videotape rewinds itself and starts up again, men come in and drink and try
not to get caught staring at her. She might as well be shackled to the table
anyway; there's no way she could ever find her way back home from here. So
she waits.
Suddenly, Raven's standing in front of her. He's wearing different
clothes, wet slippery clothing made out of animal skins or something. His
face is red and wet from being outside.
"You get your job all done?"
"Sort of," Raven says. "I did enough."
"What do you mean, enough?"
"I mean I don't like being called out of a date to do bullshit work,"
Raven says. "So I got things in order out there and my attitude is, let his
gnomes worry about the details."
"Well, I've been having a great time here."
"Sorry, baby. Let's get out of here," he says, speaking with the
intense, strained tones of a man with an erection.
"Let's go to the Core," he says, once they get into the cool air above
deck.
"What's there?"
"Everything," he says. "The people who run this whole place. Most of
these people" - he waves his hand out over the Raft - "can't go there. I
can. Want to see it?"
"Sure, why not," she says, hating herself for sounding like such a sap.
But what else is she going to say?
He starts leading her down a long moonlit series of gangplanks, in
toward the big ships in the middle of the Raft. You could almost skate here,
but you'd have to be really good.
"Why are you different from the other people?" Y.T. says. She kind of
blurts it out without doing a whole lot of thinking first. But it seems like
a good question.
He laughs. "I'm an Aleut. I'm different in a lot of ways - "
"No. I mean your brain works in a different way," Y.T. says. "You're
not wacked out. You know what I mean? You haven't mentioned the Word all
night."
"We have a thing we do in kayaks. It's like surfing," Raven says.
"Really? I surf, too - in traffic," Y.T. says.
"We don't do this for fun," Raven says. "It's part of how we live. We
get from island to island by surfing on waves."
"Same here," Y.T. says, "except we go from one franchulate to the next
by surfing on cars."
"See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you
know how to catch a ride, you can go places," Raven says.
"Right. I'm totally hip to what you're saying."
"That's what I'm doing with the Orthos. I agree with some of their
religion. But not all of it. But their movement has a lot of power. They
have a lot of people and money and ships."
"And you're surfing on it."
"Yeah."
"That's cool, I can relate. What are you trying to do? I mean, what's
your real goal?"
They're crossing a big broad platform. Suddenly he's right behind her,
his arms are around her body, and he draws her back into him. Her toes are
just barely touching the ground. She can feel his cool nose against her
temple and his hot breath coming into one ear. It sends a tingle straight
down to her toes.
"Short-term goal or long-term goal?" Raven whispers.
"Um - long term."
"I used to have this plan - I was going to nuke America."
"Oh. Well, that'd be kind of harsh," she says.
"Maybe. Depends on what kind of a mood I'm in. Other than that, no
long-term goals." Every time he whispers something, another breath tickles
her ear.
"How about medium-term then?"
"In a few hours, the Raft comes apart," Raven says. "We're headed for
California. Looking for a decent place to live. Some people might try to
stop us. It's my job to help the people make it safe and sound up onto the
shore. So you might say I'm going to war."
"Oh, that's a shame," she mumbles.
"So it's hard to think of anything besides the here and now."
"Yeah, I know."
"I rented a nice room to spend my last night in," Raven says. "It's got
clean sheets."
Not for long, she thinks.
She had thought that his lips would be cold and stiff, like a fish. But
she's shocked at how warm they are. Every part of his body feels hot, like
that's his only way of keeping warm up in the Arctic.
About thirty seconds into the kiss, he bends down, wraps his great
thigh-sized forearms around her waist, cinches her up into the air, lifting
her feet up off the deck.
She was afraid he would take her to some horrible place, but it turns
out he rented a whole shipping container, stacked way up high on one of the
containerships in the Core. The place is like a luxury hotel for big Core
wheels.
She's trying to decide what to do with her legs, which are now dangling
uselessly. She's not quite ready to wrap them around him, not this early in
the date. Then she feels them spreading apart - way, way apart - Raven's
thighs must be bigger around than his waist. He has lifted one leg up into
her crotch and put the foot up on a chair so she's straddling his thigh, and
with his arms he's holding her body up against him, squeezing and relaxing,
squeezing and relaxing, so that she's helplessly rocking back and forth, all
her weight on her crotch. Some huge muscle, the upmost part of his
quadricep, angles up where it attaches to the bone in his pelvis, and as he
rocks her in closer and tighter she ends up straddling that, shoved against
it so tight that she can feel the seams in the crotch of her coverall, feel
the coins in the key pocket of Raven's black jeans. When he slides his hands
downward, still pressing her inward, and squeezes her butt in both hands, so
big it must be like squeezing an apricot, fingers so long they wrap around
and push up into her crack and she rocks forward to get away from it but
there's nowhere to go except into his body, her face breaking away from the
kiss and sliding against the perspiration of his broad, smooth, whiskerless
neck. She can't help letting out a yelp that turns into a moan, and then she
knows he's got her. Because she never makes noises during sex, but this time
she can't help it.
And once she's decided that, she's impatient to get on with it. She can
move her arms, she can move her legs, but the middle part of her body is
pinned in place, it's not going to move until Raven moves it. And he's not
going to move it until she makes him want to. So she goes to work on his
ear. That usually does it.
He tries to get away from her. Raven, trying to run away from
something. She likes that idea. She has arms that are as strong as a man's,
strong from hanging on to that poon on the freeway, so she wraps them around
his head like a vise and presses her forehead against the side of his head
and starts orbiting the tip of her tongue around the little folded-over rim
of his outer ear.
He stands paralyzed for a couple of minutes, breathing shallowly, while
she works her way inward, and when she finally shoves her tongue into his
ear canal, he bucks and grunts like he's just been harpooned, lifts her up
off his leg, kicks the chair across the room so hard it cracks against the
steel wall of the shipping container. She feels herself falling backward
toward the futon, thinks for a moment she's about to get crushed beneath
him, but he catches all the weight on his elbows, except for his lower body,
which slams into hers all at once, sending another electric shot of pleasure
up her back and down her legs. Her thighs and calves have turned solid and
tight, like they've been pumped full of juice, she can't relax them. He
leans up on one elbow, separating their bodies for a moment, plants his
mouth on hers to maintain the contact, fills her mouth with his tongue,
holds her there with it while he one-hands the fastener at the collar of her
coverall and yanks the zipper all the way down to the crotch. It's open now,
exposing a broad V of skin converging from her shoulders. He rolls back onto
her, grabs the top of the coverall with both hands and pulls it down behind
her, forcing her arms down and to her sides, stuffing the mass of fabric and
pads down underneath the small of her back so she stays arched up toward
him. Then he's in between her tight thighs, all those skating muscles
strained to the limit, and his hands come back inside to squeeze her butt
again, this time his hot skin against hers, it's like sitting on a warm
buttered griddle, makes the whole body feel warmer.
There's something she's supposed to remember at this point. Something
she has to take care of. Something important. One of those dreary duties
that always seems so logical when you think about it in the abstract and, at
moments like this, seems so utterly beside the point that it never even
occurs to you.
It must be something to do with birth control. Or something like that.
But Y.T. is helpless with passion, so she has an excuse. So she squirms and
kicks her knees until the coverall and her panties have slid down to her
ankles.
Raven gets completely naked in about three seconds. He pulls his shirt
off over his head and throws it somewhere, bucks out of his pants and kicks
them off onto the floor. His skin is as smooth as hers, like the skin of a
mammal that swims through the sea, but he feels hot, not cold and fishy. She
doesn't, see his cock, but she doesn't want to, what's the point, right?
She does something she's never done before: comes as soon as he goes
into her. It's like a bolt of lightning shoots out from the middle, down the
backs of her tensed legs, up her spine, into her nipples, she sucks in air
until her whole ribcage is poking out through the skin and then screams it
all out. She just rips one. Raven's probably deaf now. Which is his fucking
problem.
She goes limp. So does he. He must have come at the same time. Which is
okay. It's early, and poor Raven was horny as a goat from being out to sea.
Later on, she'll expect more endurance.
Right now, she's content to lie underneath him and suck the warmth out
of his body. She's been cold for days. Her feet are still cold, hanging out
in the air, but that just makes the rest of her feel much better.
Raven seems content, too. Uncharacteristically so. Talk about bliss.
Most guys would already be flipping through channels on the TV. Not Raven.
He's content to lie here all night, breathing softly into her neck. As a
matter of fact, he's gone to sleep right on top of her. Like something a
woman would do.
She dozes, too. Lies there for a minute or two, all these thoughts
going through her head.
This is a pretty nice place. Like a mid-priced business hotel in the
Valley. She ever figured anything like this existed on the Raft. But there's
rich people and poor people here, too, just like anywhere else.
When they came to a certain place on the walkway, not far from the
first of the big Core ships, there was an armed guard blocking the way. He
let Raven go on through, and Raven took Y.T. with him, leading her by the
hand, and the guard gave her a look but he didn't say anything, he was
keeping most of his attention on Raven.
After that, the walkway got a lot nicer. It was broad, like the
boardwalk at the beach, and not quite so crowded with old Chinese ladies
carrying gigantic bundles on their backs. And it didn't smell like shit
quite so much.
When they got to the first Core ship, there was a stairway that took
them from sea level up to its deck. From there, they took a gangplank across
to the innards of another ship, and Raven led her through the place like
he'd been through it a million times, and eventually they crossed another
gangplank into this containership. And it was just like a fucking hotel in
there: bellhops with white gloves carrying luggage for guys in suits, a
registration desk, everything. It was still a ship - everything's made out
of steel that has been painted white a million times over - but nothing like
what she expected. There's even a little helipad where the suits can come
and go. There's a chopper parked next to it with a logo she's seen before:
Rife Advanced Research Enterprises. RARE. The people who gave her the
envelope to deliver to EBGOC headquarters. All of this is fitting together
now: the Feds and L. Bob Rife and the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates and the
Raft are all part of the same deal.
"Who the hell are all these people?" she asked Raven when she first saw
it. But he just shushed her.
She asked him again later, as they were wandering around looking for
their room, and he told her: These guys all work for L. Bob Rife.
Programmers and engineers and communications people. Rife's an important
man. Got a monopoly to run.
"Rife's here?" she asked him. Putting on an act, of course; she had it
figured out by that point.
"Ssh," he said.
It's a nice piece of intel. Hiro should like it, if she can just get it
to him. And even that's going to be easy. She never thought there'd be
Metaverse terminals here on the Raft, but on this ship there's a whole row
of them, so that visiting suits can call back to civilization. All she has
to do is get to one without waking up Raven. Which could be tricky. It's too
bad she couldn't drug him with something, like in the Raft movies.
That's when the realization comes. It swims up out of her subconscious
in the same way that a nightmare does. Or when you leave the house and
remember half an hour later that you left a teakettle going on the stove.
It's a cold clammy reality that she can't do a damn thing about.
She has finally remembered what that nagging thing was that bothered
her for a moment, right before the actual moment of fucking.
It was not birth control. It was not a hygiene thing.
It was her dentata. The last line of personal self-defense. Along with
Uncle Enzo's dog tags, the one piece of stuff that the Orthos didn't take.
They didn't take it because they don't believe in cavity searches. Which
means that at the moment Raven entered her, a very small hypodermic needle
slipped imperceptibly into the engorged frontal vein of his penis,
automatically shooting a cocktail of powerful narcotics and depressants into
his bloodstream.
Raven's been harpooned in the place where he least expected it. Now
he's going to sleep for at least four hours.
And then, boy, is he ever going to be pissed.
Hiro remembers Eliot's warning: Don't go onto the Raft itself without a
local guide. This kid must be a Refu that Bruce Lee recruited from some
Filipino neighborhood on the Raft.
The kid's name is Transubstanciacion. Tranny for short. He climbs into
the zodiac before Hiro tells him to.
"Wait a sec," Hiro says. "We have to do some packing first."
Hiro risks turning on a small flashlight, uses it to rummage around the
yacht, picking up valuable stuff - a few bottles of (presumably) drinkable
water, some food, extra ammunition for his nine. He takes one of the
grappling hooks, too, coiling its rope neatly. Seems like the kind of thing
that might be useful on the Raft.
He has one other chore to take care of, not something he's looking
forward to.
Hiro has lived in a lot of places where mice and even rats were a
problem. He used to get rid of them using traps. But then he had a run of
bad luck with the things. He would hear a trap snap shut in the middle of
the night, and then instead of silence he would hear pitiable squeaking and
thrashing, whacking noises as the stricken rodent tried to drag itself back
to safety with a trap snapped over some part of its anatomy, usually its
head. When you have gotten up at three in the morning to find a live mouse
on your kitchen counter leaving a contrail of brain tissue across the
formica, it is hard to get back to sleep, and so he prefers to set out
poison now.
Somewhat in the same vein, a severely wounded man - the last man Hiro
shot - is thrashing around on the deck of the yacht, up near the bow,
babbling.
More than anything he has ever wanted to do, Hiro wants to get into the
zodiac and get away from this person. He knows that in order to go up and
help him, or put him out of his misery, he's going to have to shine the
flashlight on him, and when he does that he's going to see something he'll
never be able to forget.
But he has to do it. He swallows a couple of times, because he's
already gagging and follows his flashlight beam up to the bow.
It's much worse than he had expected.
This man apparently took a bullet somewhere around the bridge of his
nose, aimed upward. Everything above that point has been pretty much blown
off. Hiro's looking into a cross-section of his lower brain.
Something is sticking up out of his head. Hiro figures it must be
fragments of skull or something. But it's too smooth and regular for that.
Now that he's gotten over his initial nausea, he's finding this easier
to look at. It helps to know that the guy is out of his misery. More than
half of his brain is gone. He's still talking - his voice sounds whistly and
gaseous, like a pipe organ gone bad, because of the changes in his skull -
but it's just a brainstem function, just a twitch in the vocal cords.
The thing sticking up out of his head is a whip antenna about a foot
long. It is encased in black rubber, like the antennas on cop
walkie-talkies, and it is strapped onto his head, above the left ear. This
is one of the antenna-heads that Eliot warned them about.
Hiro grabs the antenna and pulls. He might as well take the headset
with him - it must have something to do with the way L. Bob Rife controls
the Raft.
It doesn't come off. When Hiro pulls, what's left of the guy's head
twists around, but the antenna doesn't come loose. And that's how Hiro
figures out that this isn't a headset at all. The antenna has been
permanently grafted onto the base of the man's skull.
Hiro switches his goggles into millimeter-wave radar and stares into
the man's ruined head.
The antenna is attached to the skull by means of short screws that go
into the bone, but do not pierce all the way through. The base of the
antenna contains a few microchips, whose purpose Hiro cannot divine by
looking at them. But nowadays you can put a supercomputer on a single chip,
so anytime you see more than one chip together in one place, you're looking
at significant ware.
A single hair-thin wire emerges from the base of the antenna and
penetrates the skull. It passes straight through to the brainstem and then
branches and rebranches into a network of invisibly tiny wires embedded in
the brain tissue. Coiled around the base of the tree.
Which explains why this guy continues to pump out a steady stream of
Raft babble even when his brain is missing: It looks like L. Bob Rife has
figured out a way to make electrical contact with the part of the brain
where Asherah lives. These words aren't originating here. It's a Pentecostal
radio broadcast coming through on his antenna.
Reason is still up top, its monitor screen radiating blue static toward
heaven. Hiro finds the hard power switch and turns it off. Computers this
powerful are supposed to shut themselves down, after you've asked them to.
Turning one off with the hard switch is like lulling someone to sleep by
severing their spinal column. But when the system has snow-crashed, it loses
even the ability to turn itself off, and primitive methods are required.
Hiro packs the Gatling gun assembly back into the case and latches it shut.
Maybe it's not as heavy as he thought, or maybe he's on adrenaline
overdrive. Then he realizes why it seems so much lighter: most of its weight
was ammunition, and Fisheye used up quite a bit. He half-carries, half-drags
it back to the stem, making sure the heat exchanger stays in the water, and
somersaults it into the zodiac.
Hiro climbs in after it, joining Tranny, and starts attending to the
motor.
"No motor," Tranny says. "It snag bad."
Right. The spiderweb would get wrapped around the propeller. Tranny
shows Hiro how to snap the zodiac's oars into the oarlocks.
Hiro rows for a while and finds himself in a long clear zone that
zigzags its way through the Raft, like a lead of clear water between ice
floes in the Arctic.
"Motor okay," Tranny says.
He drops the motor into the water. Tranny pumps up the fuel line and
starts it up. It starts on the first pull; Bruce Lee ran a tight ship.
As Hiro begins to motor down the open space, he is afraid that it is
just a little cove in the ghetto. But this is just a trick of the lights. He
rounds a corner and finds it stretching out for some distance. It is a sort
of beltway that runs all the way around the Raft. Small streets and even
smaller alleys lead from this beltway into the various ghettos. Through the
scope, Hiro can see that their entrances are guarded. Anyone's free to
cruise around the beltway, but people are more protective of their
neighborhoods.
The worst thing that can happen on the Raft is for your neighborhood to
get cut loose. That's why the Raft is such a tangled mess. Each neighborhood
is afraid that the neighboring 'hoods are going to gang up on them, cut them
loose, leave them to starve in the middle of the Pacific. So they are
constantly finding new ways to tie themselves into each other, running
cables over, under, and around their neighbors, tying into more far-flung
'hoods, or preferably into one of the Core ships.
The neighborhood guards are armed, needless to say. Looks like the
weapon of choice is a small Chinese knockoff of the AK-47. Its metal frame
jumps out pretty clearly on radar. The Chinese government must have stamped
out an unimaginable number of these things, back in the days when they spent
Raven ushers Y.T. onto a flat-assed boat with a canopy on top. It is
some kind of a riverboat that has been turned into a
Vietnamese/Arnerican/Thai/Chinese business establishment, kind of a
bar/restaurant/whorehouse/gambling den. It has a few big rooms, where lots
of people are letting it all hang out, and a lot of little tiny steel-walled
rooms down below where God knows what kind of activity is taking place.
The main room is packed with lowlife revelry. The smoke ties her
bronchial passages into granny knots. The place is equipped with a
shattering Third World sound system: pure distortion echoing off painted
steel walls at three hundred decibels. A television set bolted onto one wall
is showing foreign cartoons, done up in a two-color scheme of faded magenta
and lime green, in which a ghoulish wolf, kind of like Wile E. Coyote with
rabies, gets repeatedly executed in ways more violent than even Warner Bros.
could think up. It's a snuff cartoon. The soundtrack is either turned off
completely or else overwhelmed by the screeching melody coming out of the
speakers. A bunch of erotic dancers are performing at one end of the room.
It's impossibly crowded, they'll never get a place to sit. But shortly
after Raven comes into the room, half a dozen guys in the comer suddenly
stand bolt upright and scatter from a table, snatching up their cigarettes
and drinks almost as an afterthought. Raven pushes Y.T. through the room
ahead of him, like she's a figurehead on his kayak, and everywhere they go,
people are shoved out of her way by Raven's almost palpable personal force
field.
Raven bends down and looks under the table, picks a chair up off the
floor and looks at the underside - you can never be too careful about those
chair bombs - sets it down, pushed all the way back into the corner where
two steel walls meet, and sits down. He gestures for Y.T. to do the same,
and she does, her back to the action. From here, she can see Raven's face,
illuminated mostly by occasional stabs of light filtering through the crowd
from the mirrored ball over the erotic dancers, and by the generalized
green-and-magenta haze coming out of the TV set, spiked by the occasional
flash when the cartoon wolf makes the mistake of swallowing another hydrogen
bomb, or has the misfortune to get hosed down again with a flamethrower.
A waiter's there immediately. Raven commences hollering across the
table at her. She can't hear him, but maybe he's asking her what she wants.
"A cheeseburger!" she screams back at him.
Raven laughs, shakes his head. "You see any cows around here?"
"Anything but fish!" she screams.
Raven talks to the waiter for a while in some variant of Taxilinga.
"I ordered you some squid," he hollers. "That's a mollusk."
Great. Raven, the last of the true gentlemen.
There is a shouted conversation lasting the better part of an hour.
Raven does most of the shouting. Y.T. just listens, smiles, and nods.
Hopefully, he's not saying something like "I enjoy really violent, abusive
sex acts." She doesn't think he's talking about that at all. He's talking
politics. She hears a fragmented history of the Aleuts, a burst here and a
burst here, when Raven isn't poking squid into his mouth and the music isn't
too loud:
"Russians fucked us over ... smallpox had a ninety-percent mortality
rate ... worked as slaves in their sealing industry ... Seward's folly ...
Fucking Nipponese took away my father in forty-two, put him in a POW camp
for the duration ...
"Then the Americans fucking nuked us. Can you believe that shit?" Raven
says. There's a lull in the music; suddenly she can hear complete sentences.
"The Nipponese say they're the only people who were ever nuked. But every
nuclear power has one aboriginal group whose territory they nuked to test
their weapons. In America, they nuked the Aleutians. Amchitka. My father,"
Raven says, grinning proudly, "was nuked twice: once at Nagasaki, when he
was blinded, and then again in 1972, when the Americans nuked our homeland."
Great, Y.T. thinks. She's got a new boyfriend and he's a mutant.
Explains one or two things.
"I was born a few months later," Raven continues, by way of totally
hammering that point home.
"How did you get hooked up with these Orthos?"
"I got away from our traditions and ended up living in Soldotna,
working on oil rigs," Raven says, like Y.T. is supposed to just know where
Soldotna is. "That was when I did my drinking and got this," he says,
pointing to his tattoo. "That's also when I learned how to make love to a
woman - which is the only thing I do better than harpooning."
Y.T. can't help but think that fucking and harpooning are closely
related activities in Raven's mind. But as crude as the man is, she can't
get around the fact that he's making her uncomfortably horny.
"I used to work fishing boats too, to make a little extra money. We
would come back from a forty-eight-hour halibut opening - this was back in
the old days when they had fishing regulations -and we'd put on our survival
suits, stick beers into the pockets, and jump into the water and just float
around drinking all night long. And one time we were doing this and I drank
until I passed out. And when I woke up, it was the next day, or maybe a
couple of days later, I don't know. And I was floating in my survival suit
out in the middle of the Cook Inlet, all alone. The other guys on my fishing
boat had forgotten about me."
Conveniently enough, Y.T. thinks.
"Anyway, I floated for a couple of days. Got real thirsty. Ended up
washing ashore on Kodiak Island. By this time, I was real sick with the DTs
and everything else. But I washed up near a Russian Orthodox church and they
found me, took me in, and straightened me out. And that was when I saw that
the Western, American lifestyle had come this close to killing me."
Here comes the sermon.
"And I saw that we can only live through faith, living a simple
lifestyle. No booze. No television. None of that stuff."
"So what are we doing in this place?"
He shrugs. "This is an example of the bad places I used to hang out.
But if you're going to get decent food on. the Raft, you have to come to a
place like this."
A waiter approaches the table. His eyes are big, his movements
tentative. He's not coming to take an order; he's coming to deliver bad
news.
"Sir, you are wanted on the radio. I'm sorry."
"Who is it?" Raven says.
The waiter just looks around him like he can't even speak the name in
public. "It's very important," he says.
Raven heaves a big sigh, grabs one last piece of fish and pokes it into
his mouth. He stands up, and before Y.T. can react, gives her a kiss on the
cheek. "Honey, I got a job to do, or something. Just wait right here for me,
okay?"
"Here?"
"Nobody will fuck with you," Raven says, as much for the benefit of the
waiter as for Y.T.
The Raft looks uncannily cheerful from a few miles away. A dozen
searchlights, and at least that many lasers, are mounted on the towering
superstructure of the Enterprise, waving back and forth against the clouds
like a Hollywood premiere. Closer up, it doesn't look so bright and crisp.
The vast matted tangle of small boats radiates a murky cloud of yellow light
that spoils the contrast.
A couple of patches of the Raft are burning. Not a nice cheery bonfire
type of thing, but a high burbling flame with black smoke sliding out of it,
like you get from a large quantity of gasoline.
"Gang warfare, maybe," Eliot theorizes.
"Energy source," Hiro guesses.
"Entertainment," Fisheye says. "They don't have cable on the fucking
Raft."
Before they really plunge into Hell, Eliot takes the lid off the fuel
tank and slides the dipstick into there, checking the fuel supply. He
doesn't say anything, but he doesn't look especially happy.
"Turn off all the lights," Eliot says when it seems they are still
miles away. "Remember that we have already been sighted by several hundred
or even several thousand people who are armed and hungry."
Vic is already going around the boat shutting off lights via the simple
expedient of a ball peen hammer. Fisheye just stands there and listens
intently to Eliot, suddenly respectful. Eliot continues. "Take off all the
bright orange clothing, even if it means we get cold. From now on, we lay
down on the decks, expose ourselves as little as possible, and we don't talk
to each other unless necessary. Vic, you stay midships with your rifle and
wait for someone to hit us with a spotlight. Anyone hits us with a spotlight
from any direction, you shoot it out. That includes flashlights from small
boats. Hiro, your job is gunwale patrol. You just keep going around the
edges of this yacht, anywhere that a swimmer could climb up over the edge
and slip on board, and when that happens, cut his arms off. Also, be on the
lookout for any kind of grappling-hook type stuff. Fisheye, if any other
floating object comes within a hundred feet of us, sink it.
"If you see Raft people with antennas coming out of their heads, try to
kill them first, because they can talk to each other."
"Antennas coming out of their heads?" Hiro says.
"Yeah. Raft gargoyle types," Eliot says.
"Who are they?"
"How the fuck should I know? I've just seen 'em a few times, from a
distance. Anyway, I'm going to take us straight in toward the center, and
once we get close enough, I'll turn to starboard and swing around the Raft
counterclockwise, looking for someone who might be willing to sell us fuel.
If worse comes to worst and we end up on the Raft itself, we stick together
and we hire ourselves a guide, because if we try to move across the Raft
without the help of someone who knows the web, we'll get into a bad
situation."
"Like what kind of a bad situation?" Fisheye asks.
"Like hanging on a rotted-out slime-covered cargo net between two ships
rocking different ways, with nothing underneath us except ice water full of
plague rats, toxic waste, and killer whales. Any questions?"
"Yeah," Fisheye says. "Can I go home now?"
Good. If Fisheye is scared, so's Hiro.
"Remember what happened to the pirate named Bruce Lee," Eliot says. "He
was well-armed and powerful. He pulled up alongside a life raft full of
Refus one day, looking for some poontang, and he was dead before he knew it.
Now there are a lot of people who want to do that to us."
"Don't they have some kind of cops or something?" Vic says. "I heard
they did."
In other words, Vic has killed a lot of time going to Raft movies in
Times Square.
"The people up on the Enterprise operate in kind of a wrath-of-God
mode," Eliot says. "They have big guns mounted around the edge of the flight
deck - big Gatling guns like Reason except with larger bullets. They were
originally put there to shoot down Exocet missiles. They strike with the
force of a meteorite. If people act up out on the Raft, they will make the
problem go away. But a little murder or riot isn't enough to get their
attention. If it's a rocket duel between rival pirate organizations, that's
different."
Suddenly, they've been nailed with a spotlight so big and powerful they
can't look anywhere near it.
Then it's dark again, and a gunshot from Vic's rifle is searing and
reverberating across the water.
"Nice shooting, Vic," Fisheye says.
"It's, like, one of them drug dealer boats," Vic says, looking through
his magic sight. "Five guys on it. Headed our way." He fires another round.
"Correction. Four guys on it." Boom. "Correction, they're not headed our way
anymore." Boom. A fireball erupts from the ocean two hundred feet away.
"Correction. No boat."
Fisheye laughs and actually slaps his thigh. "You recording all of
this, Hiro?"
"No," Hiro says. "Wouldn't come out."
"Oh." Fisheye seems taken aback, like this changes everything.
"That's the first wave," Eliot says. "Rich pirates looking for easy
pickings. But they've got a lot to lose, so they scare easy."
"Another big yacht-type boat is out there," Vic says, "but they're
turning away now."
Above the deep chortling noise of their yacht's big diesel, they can
hear the high whine of outboard motors.
"Second wave," Eliot says. "Pirate wannabes. These guys will come in a
lot faster, so stay sharp."
"This thing has millimeter wave on it," Fisheye says. Hiro looks at
him; his face is illuminated from below by the glow of Reason's built-in
screen. "I can see these guys like it's fucking daylight."
Vic fires several rounds, pops the clip out of his rifle, shoves in a
new one.
A zodiac zips past, skittering across the wavetops, strafing them with
weak flashlight beams. Fisheye fires a couple of short bursts from Reason,
blasting clouds of warm steam into the cold night air, but misses them.
"Save your ammo," Eliot says. "Even with Uzis, they can't hit us until
they slow down a little bit. And even with radar, you can't hit them."
A second zodiac whips past them on the other side, closer than the last
one. Vic and Fisheye both hold their fire. They hear it orbiting them,
swinging back around the way it came.
"Those two boats are getting together out there," Vic says. "They got
two more of them. A total of four. They're talking."
"We've been reconned," Eliot says, "and they're planning their tactics.
The next time is for real."
A second later, two fantastically loud blasts sound from the rear of
the yacht, where Eliot is, accompanied by brief flashes of light. Hiro turns
around to see a body collapsing to the deck. It's not Eliot. Eliot is
crouching there holding his oversized halibut shooter.
Hiro runs back, looks at the dead swimmer in the dim light scattering
off the clouds. He's naked except for a thick coating of black grease and a
belt with a gun and a knife in it. He's still holding on to the rope that he
used to pull himself on board. The rope is attached to a grappling hook that
has caught in the jagged, broken fiberglass on one side of the yacht.
"Third wave is coming a little early," Eliot says, his voice high and
shaky. He's trying so hard to sound cool that it has the opposite effect.
"Hiro, this gun's got three rounds left in it, and I'm saving the last one
for you if any more of these motherfuckers get on board."
"Sorry," Hiro says. He draws the short wakizashi. He would feel better
if he could carry his nine in the other hand, but he needs one hand free to
steady himself and keep from failing overboard. He makes a quick circuit of
the yacht, looking for more grappling hooks, and actually finds one on the
other side, hooked into one of the railing stanchions, a taut rope trailing
out behind it into the sea.
Correction: It's a taut cable. His sword won't cut it. And the tension
on the rope is such that he can't get it unhooked from the stanchion.
As he's squatting there playing with the grappling hook, a greasy hand
rises up out of the water and grabs his wrist. Another hand gropes for
Hiro's other hand and grabs the sword instead. Hiro yanks the weapon free,
feeling it do damage, and shoves the wakizashi point first into the place
between those two hands just as someone is sinking his teeth into Hiro's
crotch. But Hiro's crotch is protected - the motorcycle outfit has a hard
plastic cup - and so this human shark just gets a mouthful of bulletproof
fabric. Then his grip loosens, and he falls into the sea. Hiro releases the
grappling hook and drops it in with him.
Vic fires three rounds in quick succession, and a fireball illuminates
one whole side of the ship. For a moment, they can see everything around
them for a distance of a hundred yards, and the effect is like turning on
your kitchen lights in the middle of the night and finding your countertops
aswarm with rats. At least a dozen small boats are around them.
"They got Molotov cocktails," Vic says.
The people in the boats can see them, too. Tracers fly around them from
several directions. Hiro can see muzzle flashes in at least three places.
Fisheye opens up once, twice with Reason, just firing short bursts of a few
dozen rounds each, and produces one fireball, this one farther away from the
yacht.
It's been at least five seconds since Hiro moved, so he checks this
area for grappling hooks again and resumes his circuit around the edge of
the yacht. This time it's clear. The two greaseballs must have been working
together.
A Molotov cocktail arcs through the sky and impacts on the starboard
side of the yacht, where it's not going to do much damage. Inside would be a
lot worse. Fisheye uses Reason to hose down the area from which the Molotov
was thrown, but now that the side of the boat is all lit up from the flames,
they draw more small-arms fire. In that light, Hiro can see trickles of
blood running down from the area where Vic ensconced himself.
On the port side, he sees something long and narrow and low in the
water, with the torso of a man rising out of it. The man has long hair that
falls down around his shoulders, and he's holding an eight-foot pole in one
hand. Just as Hiro sees him, he's throwing it.
The harpoon darts across twenty feet of open water. The million chipped
facets of its glass head refract the light and make it look like a meteor.
It takes Fisheye in the back, slices easily through the bulletproof fabric
he's wearing under his suit, and comes all the way out the other side of his
body. The impact lifts Fisheye into the air and throws him off the boat; he
lands face-first in the water, already dead.
Mental note: Raven's weapons do not show up on radar.
Hiro looks back in the direction of Raven, but he's already gone. A
couple more greaseballs, side by side, vault over the railing about ten feet
forward of Hiro, but for a moment they're dazzled by the flames. Hiro pulls
out his nine, aims it their way, and keeps pulling the trigger until both of
them have fallen back into the water. He's not sure how many rounds are left
in the gun now.
There's a coughing, hissing noise, and the flame light gets dim and
finally goes out. Eliot nailed it with a fire extinguisher.
The yacht jerks out from under Hiro's feet, and he hits the deck with
his face and shoulder. Getting up, he realizes that either they've just
rammed, or been rammed by, something big. There is a thudding noise, feet
running on the deck. Hiro hears some of these feet near him, drops his
wakizashi, pulls his katana, whirls at the same time, snapping the long
blade into someone's midsection. Meanwhile they're dragging a long knife
down his back, but it doesn't penetrate the fabric, just hurts a little. His
katana comes free easily, which is dumb luck, because he forgot to squeeze
off the blow, could have gotten it wedged in there. He turns again,
instinctively parries a knife thrust from another greaseball, raises the
katana and snaps it down into his brainpan. This time he does it right,
kills him without sticking the blade. There are greaseballs on two sides of
him now. Hiro chooses a direction, swings it sideways, decapitates one of
them.
Then he turns around. Another greaseball is staggering toward him
across the pitching deck with a spiked club, but unlike Hiro he's not
keeping his balance. Hiro shuffles up to meet him, keeping his center of
gravity over his feet, and impales him on the katana.
Another greaseball is watching all of this in astonishment from up near
the bow. Hiro shoots him, and he collapses to the deck. Two more greaseballs
jump off the boat voluntarily.
The yacht is tangled up in a spider's web of shitty old ropes and cargo
nets that were stretched out across the surface of the water as a snare for
poor suckers like them. The yacht's engine is still straining, but the prop
isn't moving; something got wrapped around the shaft.
There's no sign of Raven now. Maybe it was just a one-time contract hit
on Fisheye. Maybe he didn't want to get tangled up in the spiderweb. Maybe
he figured that, once Reason was taken out, the greaseballs would take care
of the rest.
Eliot's no longer at the controls. He's no longer even on the yacht.
Hiro calls out his name, but there's no response. Not even thrashing in the
water. The last thing he did was lean over the edge with the fire
extinguisher, putting out the Molotov flame; when they were jerked to a halt
he must have tumbled overboard.
They're a lot closer to the Enterprise than he had ever thought. They
covered a lot of water during the fight, got closer in than they should
have. In fact, Hiro's surrounded on all sides by the Raft at this point.
Meager, flickering illumination is provided by the burning remains of the
Molotov cocktail-carrying Zodiacs, which have become tangled in the net
around them.
Hiro does not think it would be wise to take the yacht back out toward
open water. It's a little too competitive there. He goes up forward. The
suitcase that serves as Reason's power supply and ammo dump is open on the
deck next to him, its color monitor screen reading: Sorry, a fatal system
error occurred. Please reboot and try again.
Then, as Hiro's looking at it, it fritzes out completely and dies of a
snow crash.
Vic got hit by one of the machine-gun bursts and is also dead. Around
them, half a dozen other boats ride on the waves, caught in the spiderweb,
nice-looking yachts all of them. But they are all empty hulks, stripped of
their engines and everything else. Just like duck decoys in front of a
hunter's blind. A hand-painted sign rides on a buoy nearby, reading FUEL in
English and other languages.
Farther out to sea, a number of the ships that were chasing them
earlier are lingering, steering well clear of the spiderweb. They know they
can't come in here; this is the exclusive domain of the black grease
swimmers, the spiders in the web, almost all of whom are now dead.
If he goes onto the Raft itself, it can't be any worse. Can it?
The yacht has its own little dinghy, the smallest size of inflatable
zodiac, with a small outboard motor. Hiro gets it into the water.
"I go with you," a voice says.
Hiro whirls, hauling out his gun, and finds himself aiming it into the
face of the Filipino cabin boy. The boy blinks, looks a little surprised,
but not especially scared. He has been hanging out with pirates, after all.
For that matter, all the dead guys on the yacht don't seem to faze him
either.
"I be your guide," the boy says. "ba la zin ka nu pa ra ta..."
Y.T. waits so long that she thinks the sun must have come up by now,
but she knows it can't really be more than a couple of hours. In a way, it
doesn't even matter. Nothing ever changes: the music plays, the cartoon
videotape rewinds itself and starts up again, men come in and drink and try
not to get caught staring at her. She might as well be shackled to the table
anyway; there's no way she could ever find her way back home from here. So
she waits.
Suddenly, Raven's standing in front of her. He's wearing different
clothes, wet slippery clothing made out of animal skins or something. His
face is red and wet from being outside.
"You get your job all done?"
"Sort of," Raven says. "I did enough."
"What do you mean, enough?"
"I mean I don't like being called out of a date to do bullshit work,"
Raven says. "So I got things in order out there and my attitude is, let his
gnomes worry about the details."
"Well, I've been having a great time here."
"Sorry, baby. Let's get out of here," he says, speaking with the
intense, strained tones of a man with an erection.
"Let's go to the Core," he says, once they get into the cool air above
deck.
"What's there?"
"Everything," he says. "The people who run this whole place. Most of
these people" - he waves his hand out over the Raft - "can't go there. I
can. Want to see it?"
"Sure, why not," she says, hating herself for sounding like such a sap.
But what else is she going to say?
He starts leading her down a long moonlit series of gangplanks, in
toward the big ships in the middle of the Raft. You could almost skate here,
but you'd have to be really good.
"Why are you different from the other people?" Y.T. says. She kind of
blurts it out without doing a whole lot of thinking first. But it seems like
a good question.
He laughs. "I'm an Aleut. I'm different in a lot of ways - "
"No. I mean your brain works in a different way," Y.T. says. "You're
not wacked out. You know what I mean? You haven't mentioned the Word all
night."
"We have a thing we do in kayaks. It's like surfing," Raven says.
"Really? I surf, too - in traffic," Y.T. says.
"We don't do this for fun," Raven says. "It's part of how we live. We
get from island to island by surfing on waves."
"Same here," Y.T. says, "except we go from one franchulate to the next
by surfing on cars."
"See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you
know how to catch a ride, you can go places," Raven says.
"Right. I'm totally hip to what you're saying."
"That's what I'm doing with the Orthos. I agree with some of their
religion. But not all of it. But their movement has a lot of power. They
have a lot of people and money and ships."
"And you're surfing on it."
"Yeah."
"That's cool, I can relate. What are you trying to do? I mean, what's
your real goal?"
They're crossing a big broad platform. Suddenly he's right behind her,
his arms are around her body, and he draws her back into him. Her toes are
just barely touching the ground. She can feel his cool nose against her
temple and his hot breath coming into one ear. It sends a tingle straight
down to her toes.
"Short-term goal or long-term goal?" Raven whispers.
"Um - long term."
"I used to have this plan - I was going to nuke America."
"Oh. Well, that'd be kind of harsh," she says.
"Maybe. Depends on what kind of a mood I'm in. Other than that, no
long-term goals." Every time he whispers something, another breath tickles
her ear.
"How about medium-term then?"
"In a few hours, the Raft comes apart," Raven says. "We're headed for
California. Looking for a decent place to live. Some people might try to
stop us. It's my job to help the people make it safe and sound up onto the
shore. So you might say I'm going to war."
"Oh, that's a shame," she mumbles.
"So it's hard to think of anything besides the here and now."
"Yeah, I know."
"I rented a nice room to spend my last night in," Raven says. "It's got
clean sheets."
Not for long, she thinks.
She had thought that his lips would be cold and stiff, like a fish. But
she's shocked at how warm they are. Every part of his body feels hot, like
that's his only way of keeping warm up in the Arctic.
About thirty seconds into the kiss, he bends down, wraps his great
thigh-sized forearms around her waist, cinches her up into the air, lifting
her feet up off the deck.
She was afraid he would take her to some horrible place, but it turns
out he rented a whole shipping container, stacked way up high on one of the
containerships in the Core. The place is like a luxury hotel for big Core
wheels.
She's trying to decide what to do with her legs, which are now dangling
uselessly. She's not quite ready to wrap them around him, not this early in
the date. Then she feels them spreading apart - way, way apart - Raven's
thighs must be bigger around than his waist. He has lifted one leg up into
her crotch and put the foot up on a chair so she's straddling his thigh, and
with his arms he's holding her body up against him, squeezing and relaxing,
squeezing and relaxing, so that she's helplessly rocking back and forth, all
her weight on her crotch. Some huge muscle, the upmost part of his
quadricep, angles up where it attaches to the bone in his pelvis, and as he
rocks her in closer and tighter she ends up straddling that, shoved against
it so tight that she can feel the seams in the crotch of her coverall, feel
the coins in the key pocket of Raven's black jeans. When he slides his hands
downward, still pressing her inward, and squeezes her butt in both hands, so
big it must be like squeezing an apricot, fingers so long they wrap around
and push up into her crack and she rocks forward to get away from it but
there's nowhere to go except into his body, her face breaking away from the
kiss and sliding against the perspiration of his broad, smooth, whiskerless
neck. She can't help letting out a yelp that turns into a moan, and then she
knows he's got her. Because she never makes noises during sex, but this time
she can't help it.
And once she's decided that, she's impatient to get on with it. She can
move her arms, she can move her legs, but the middle part of her body is
pinned in place, it's not going to move until Raven moves it. And he's not
going to move it until she makes him want to. So she goes to work on his
ear. That usually does it.
He tries to get away from her. Raven, trying to run away from
something. She likes that idea. She has arms that are as strong as a man's,
strong from hanging on to that poon on the freeway, so she wraps them around
his head like a vise and presses her forehead against the side of his head
and starts orbiting the tip of her tongue around the little folded-over rim
of his outer ear.
He stands paralyzed for a couple of minutes, breathing shallowly, while
she works her way inward, and when she finally shoves her tongue into his
ear canal, he bucks and grunts like he's just been harpooned, lifts her up
off his leg, kicks the chair across the room so hard it cracks against the
steel wall of the shipping container. She feels herself falling backward
toward the futon, thinks for a moment she's about to get crushed beneath
him, but he catches all the weight on his elbows, except for his lower body,
which slams into hers all at once, sending another electric shot of pleasure
up her back and down her legs. Her thighs and calves have turned solid and
tight, like they've been pumped full of juice, she can't relax them. He
leans up on one elbow, separating their bodies for a moment, plants his
mouth on hers to maintain the contact, fills her mouth with his tongue,
holds her there with it while he one-hands the fastener at the collar of her
coverall and yanks the zipper all the way down to the crotch. It's open now,
exposing a broad V of skin converging from her shoulders. He rolls back onto
her, grabs the top of the coverall with both hands and pulls it down behind
her, forcing her arms down and to her sides, stuffing the mass of fabric and
pads down underneath the small of her back so she stays arched up toward
him. Then he's in between her tight thighs, all those skating muscles
strained to the limit, and his hands come back inside to squeeze her butt
again, this time his hot skin against hers, it's like sitting on a warm
buttered griddle, makes the whole body feel warmer.
There's something she's supposed to remember at this point. Something
she has to take care of. Something important. One of those dreary duties
that always seems so logical when you think about it in the abstract and, at
moments like this, seems so utterly beside the point that it never even
occurs to you.
It must be something to do with birth control. Or something like that.
But Y.T. is helpless with passion, so she has an excuse. So she squirms and
kicks her knees until the coverall and her panties have slid down to her
ankles.
Raven gets completely naked in about three seconds. He pulls his shirt
off over his head and throws it somewhere, bucks out of his pants and kicks
them off onto the floor. His skin is as smooth as hers, like the skin of a
mammal that swims through the sea, but he feels hot, not cold and fishy. She
doesn't, see his cock, but she doesn't want to, what's the point, right?
She does something she's never done before: comes as soon as he goes
into her. It's like a bolt of lightning shoots out from the middle, down the
backs of her tensed legs, up her spine, into her nipples, she sucks in air
until her whole ribcage is poking out through the skin and then screams it
all out. She just rips one. Raven's probably deaf now. Which is his fucking
problem.
She goes limp. So does he. He must have come at the same time. Which is
okay. It's early, and poor Raven was horny as a goat from being out to sea.
Later on, she'll expect more endurance.
Right now, she's content to lie underneath him and suck the warmth out
of his body. She's been cold for days. Her feet are still cold, hanging out
in the air, but that just makes the rest of her feel much better.
Raven seems content, too. Uncharacteristically so. Talk about bliss.
Most guys would already be flipping through channels on the TV. Not Raven.
He's content to lie here all night, breathing softly into her neck. As a
matter of fact, he's gone to sleep right on top of her. Like something a
woman would do.
She dozes, too. Lies there for a minute or two, all these thoughts
going through her head.
This is a pretty nice place. Like a mid-priced business hotel in the
Valley. She ever figured anything like this existed on the Raft. But there's
rich people and poor people here, too, just like anywhere else.
When they came to a certain place on the walkway, not far from the
first of the big Core ships, there was an armed guard blocking the way. He
let Raven go on through, and Raven took Y.T. with him, leading her by the
hand, and the guard gave her a look but he didn't say anything, he was
keeping most of his attention on Raven.
After that, the walkway got a lot nicer. It was broad, like the
boardwalk at the beach, and not quite so crowded with old Chinese ladies
carrying gigantic bundles on their backs. And it didn't smell like shit
quite so much.
When they got to the first Core ship, there was a stairway that took
them from sea level up to its deck. From there, they took a gangplank across
to the innards of another ship, and Raven led her through the place like
he'd been through it a million times, and eventually they crossed another
gangplank into this containership. And it was just like a fucking hotel in
there: bellhops with white gloves carrying luggage for guys in suits, a
registration desk, everything. It was still a ship - everything's made out
of steel that has been painted white a million times over - but nothing like
what she expected. There's even a little helipad where the suits can come
and go. There's a chopper parked next to it with a logo she's seen before:
Rife Advanced Research Enterprises. RARE. The people who gave her the
envelope to deliver to EBGOC headquarters. All of this is fitting together
now: the Feds and L. Bob Rife and the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates and the
Raft are all part of the same deal.
"Who the hell are all these people?" she asked Raven when she first saw
it. But he just shushed her.
She asked him again later, as they were wandering around looking for
their room, and he told her: These guys all work for L. Bob Rife.
Programmers and engineers and communications people. Rife's an important
man. Got a monopoly to run.
"Rife's here?" she asked him. Putting on an act, of course; she had it
figured out by that point.
"Ssh," he said.
It's a nice piece of intel. Hiro should like it, if she can just get it
to him. And even that's going to be easy. She never thought there'd be
Metaverse terminals here on the Raft, but on this ship there's a whole row
of them, so that visiting suits can call back to civilization. All she has
to do is get to one without waking up Raven. Which could be tricky. It's too
bad she couldn't drug him with something, like in the Raft movies.
That's when the realization comes. It swims up out of her subconscious
in the same way that a nightmare does. Or when you leave the house and
remember half an hour later that you left a teakettle going on the stove.
It's a cold clammy reality that she can't do a damn thing about.
She has finally remembered what that nagging thing was that bothered
her for a moment, right before the actual moment of fucking.
It was not birth control. It was not a hygiene thing.
It was her dentata. The last line of personal self-defense. Along with
Uncle Enzo's dog tags, the one piece of stuff that the Orthos didn't take.
They didn't take it because they don't believe in cavity searches. Which
means that at the moment Raven entered her, a very small hypodermic needle
slipped imperceptibly into the engorged frontal vein of his penis,
automatically shooting a cocktail of powerful narcotics and depressants into
his bloodstream.
Raven's been harpooned in the place where he least expected it. Now
he's going to sleep for at least four hours.
And then, boy, is he ever going to be pissed.
Hiro remembers Eliot's warning: Don't go onto the Raft itself without a
local guide. This kid must be a Refu that Bruce Lee recruited from some
Filipino neighborhood on the Raft.
The kid's name is Transubstanciacion. Tranny for short. He climbs into
the zodiac before Hiro tells him to.
"Wait a sec," Hiro says. "We have to do some packing first."
Hiro risks turning on a small flashlight, uses it to rummage around the
yacht, picking up valuable stuff - a few bottles of (presumably) drinkable
water, some food, extra ammunition for his nine. He takes one of the
grappling hooks, too, coiling its rope neatly. Seems like the kind of thing
that might be useful on the Raft.
He has one other chore to take care of, not something he's looking
forward to.
Hiro has lived in a lot of places where mice and even rats were a
problem. He used to get rid of them using traps. But then he had a run of
bad luck with the things. He would hear a trap snap shut in the middle of
the night, and then instead of silence he would hear pitiable squeaking and
thrashing, whacking noises as the stricken rodent tried to drag itself back
to safety with a trap snapped over some part of its anatomy, usually its
head. When you have gotten up at three in the morning to find a live mouse
on your kitchen counter leaving a contrail of brain tissue across the
formica, it is hard to get back to sleep, and so he prefers to set out
poison now.
Somewhat in the same vein, a severely wounded man - the last man Hiro
shot - is thrashing around on the deck of the yacht, up near the bow,
babbling.
More than anything he has ever wanted to do, Hiro wants to get into the
zodiac and get away from this person. He knows that in order to go up and
help him, or put him out of his misery, he's going to have to shine the
flashlight on him, and when he does that he's going to see something he'll
never be able to forget.
But he has to do it. He swallows a couple of times, because he's
already gagging and follows his flashlight beam up to the bow.
It's much worse than he had expected.
This man apparently took a bullet somewhere around the bridge of his
nose, aimed upward. Everything above that point has been pretty much blown
off. Hiro's looking into a cross-section of his lower brain.
Something is sticking up out of his head. Hiro figures it must be
fragments of skull or something. But it's too smooth and regular for that.
Now that he's gotten over his initial nausea, he's finding this easier
to look at. It helps to know that the guy is out of his misery. More than
half of his brain is gone. He's still talking - his voice sounds whistly and
gaseous, like a pipe organ gone bad, because of the changes in his skull -
but it's just a brainstem function, just a twitch in the vocal cords.
The thing sticking up out of his head is a whip antenna about a foot
long. It is encased in black rubber, like the antennas on cop
walkie-talkies, and it is strapped onto his head, above the left ear. This
is one of the antenna-heads that Eliot warned them about.
Hiro grabs the antenna and pulls. He might as well take the headset
with him - it must have something to do with the way L. Bob Rife controls
the Raft.
It doesn't come off. When Hiro pulls, what's left of the guy's head
twists around, but the antenna doesn't come loose. And that's how Hiro
figures out that this isn't a headset at all. The antenna has been
permanently grafted onto the base of the man's skull.
Hiro switches his goggles into millimeter-wave radar and stares into
the man's ruined head.
The antenna is attached to the skull by means of short screws that go
into the bone, but do not pierce all the way through. The base of the
antenna contains a few microchips, whose purpose Hiro cannot divine by
looking at them. But nowadays you can put a supercomputer on a single chip,
so anytime you see more than one chip together in one place, you're looking
at significant ware.
A single hair-thin wire emerges from the base of the antenna and
penetrates the skull. It passes straight through to the brainstem and then
branches and rebranches into a network of invisibly tiny wires embedded in
the brain tissue. Coiled around the base of the tree.
Which explains why this guy continues to pump out a steady stream of
Raft babble even when his brain is missing: It looks like L. Bob Rife has
figured out a way to make electrical contact with the part of the brain
where Asherah lives. These words aren't originating here. It's a Pentecostal
radio broadcast coming through on his antenna.
Reason is still up top, its monitor screen radiating blue static toward
heaven. Hiro finds the hard power switch and turns it off. Computers this
powerful are supposed to shut themselves down, after you've asked them to.
Turning one off with the hard switch is like lulling someone to sleep by
severing their spinal column. But when the system has snow-crashed, it loses
even the ability to turn itself off, and primitive methods are required.
Hiro packs the Gatling gun assembly back into the case and latches it shut.
Maybe it's not as heavy as he thought, or maybe he's on adrenaline
overdrive. Then he realizes why it seems so much lighter: most of its weight
was ammunition, and Fisheye used up quite a bit. He half-carries, half-drags
it back to the stem, making sure the heat exchanger stays in the water, and
somersaults it into the zodiac.
Hiro climbs in after it, joining Tranny, and starts attending to the
motor.
"No motor," Tranny says. "It snag bad."
Right. The spiderweb would get wrapped around the propeller. Tranny
shows Hiro how to snap the zodiac's oars into the oarlocks.
Hiro rows for a while and finds himself in a long clear zone that
zigzags its way through the Raft, like a lead of clear water between ice
floes in the Arctic.
"Motor okay," Tranny says.
He drops the motor into the water. Tranny pumps up the fuel line and
starts it up. It starts on the first pull; Bruce Lee ran a tight ship.
As Hiro begins to motor down the open space, he is afraid that it is
just a little cove in the ghetto. But this is just a trick of the lights. He
rounds a corner and finds it stretching out for some distance. It is a sort
of beltway that runs all the way around the Raft. Small streets and even
smaller alleys lead from this beltway into the various ghettos. Through the
scope, Hiro can see that their entrances are guarded. Anyone's free to
cruise around the beltway, but people are more protective of their
neighborhoods.
The worst thing that can happen on the Raft is for your neighborhood to
get cut loose. That's why the Raft is such a tangled mess. Each neighborhood
is afraid that the neighboring 'hoods are going to gang up on them, cut them
loose, leave them to starve in the middle of the Pacific. So they are
constantly finding new ways to tie themselves into each other, running
cables over, under, and around their neighbors, tying into more far-flung
'hoods, or preferably into one of the Core ships.
The neighborhood guards are armed, needless to say. Looks like the
weapon of choice is a small Chinese knockoff of the AK-47. Its metal frame
jumps out pretty clearly on radar. The Chinese government must have stamped
out an unimaginable number of these things, back in the days when they spent