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never actually met the woman, and that you're going out with Raven?"
"She doesn't want you to understand her. She knows that's impossible.
She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable."
"You figure?"
"Yeah. Definitely."
"What makes you think I don't understand myself?"
"It's just obvious. You're a really smart hacker and the greatest sword
fighter in the world - and you're delivering pizzas and promoting concerts
that you don't make any money off of. How do you expect her to - "
The rest is drowned out by sound breaking in through his earphones,
coming in from Reality: a screeching, tearing noise riding in high and sharp
above the rumbling noise of heavy impact. Then there is just the screaming
of terrified neighborhood children, the cries of men in Tagalog, and the
groaning and popping sound of a steel fishing trawler collapsing under the
pressure of the sea.
"What was that?" Y.T. says.
"Meteorite," Hiro says.
"Huh?''
"Stay tuned," Hiro says, "I think I just got into a Gatling gun duel."
"Are you going to sign off?"
"Just shut up for a second."
This neighborhood is U-shaped, built around a sort of cove in the Raft
where half a dozen rusty old fishing boats are tied up. A floating pier,
pieced together from mismatched pontoons, runs around the edge.
The empty trawler, the one they've been cutting up for scrap, has been
hit by a burst from the big gun on the deck of the Enterprise. It looks as
though a big wave picked it up and tried to wrap it around a pillar: one
whole side is collapsed in, the bow and the stem are actually bent toward
each other. Its back is broken. Its empty holds are ingurgitating a vast,
continuous rush of murky brown seawater, sucking in that variegated sewage
like a drowning man sucks air. It's heading for the bottom fast.
Hiro shoves Reason back into the zodiac, jumps in, and starts the
motor. He doesn't have time to untie the boat from the pontoon, so he snaps
through the line with his wakizashi and takes off.
The pontoons are already sagging inward and down, pulled together by
the ruined ship's mooring lines. The trawler is falling off the surface of
the water, trying to pull in the entire neighborhood like a black hole.
A couple of Filipino men are already out with short knives, hacking at
the stuff that webs the neighborhood together, trying to cut loose the parts
that can't be salvaged. Hiro buzzes over to a pontoon that is already
knee-deep under the water, finds the ropes that connect it to the next
pontoon, which is even more deeply submerged, and probes them with his
katana. The remaining ropes pop like rifle shots, and then the pontoon
breaks loose, shooting up to the surface so fast that it almost capsizes the
zodiac.
A whole section of the pontoon pier, along the side of the trawler,
can't be salvaged. Men with fishing knives and women with kitchen cleavers
are down on their knees, the water already rising up under their chins,
cutting their neighborhood free. It breaks loose one rope at a time,
haphazardly, tossing the Filipinos up into the air. A boy with a machete
cuts the one remaining line, which pops up and lashes him across the face.
Finally, the raft is free and flexible once again, bobbing and waving back
toward equilibrium, and where the trawler was, there's nothing but a
bubbling whirlpool that occasionally vomits up a loose piece of floating
debris.
Some others have already clambered up onto the fishing boat that was
tied up next to the trawler. It has suffered some damage, too: several men
cluster around and lean over the rail to examine a couple of large impact
craters on the side. Each hole is surrounded by a shiny dinner plate-sized
patch that has been blown free of all paint and rust. In the middle is a
hole the size of a golf ball.
Hiro decides it's time to leave.
But before he does, he reaches into his coverall, pulls out a money
clip, and counts out a few thousand Kongbucks. He puts them on the deck and
weighs them down under the corner of a red steel gasoline tank. Then he hits
the road.
He has no trouble finding the canal that leads to the next
neighborhood. His paranoia level is way up, and so he glances back and forth
as he pilots his way out of there, looking up all the little alleys. In one
of those niches, he sees a wirehead, mumbling something.
The next neighborhood is Malaysian. Several dozen of them are gathered
near the bridge, attracted by the noise. As Hiro is entering their
neighborhood, he sees men running down the undulating pontoon bridge that
serves as the main street, carrying guns and knives. The local constabulary.
More men of the same description emerge from the byways and skiffs and
sampans, joining them.
A tremendous whacking and splintering and tearing noise sounds right
beside him, as though a lumber truck has just crashed into a brick wall.
Water splashes his body, and an exhalation of steam passes over his face.
Then it's quiet again. He turns around, slowly and reluctantly. The nearest
pontoon isn't there anymore, just a bloody, turbulent soup of splinters and
chaff,
He turns around and looks behind him. The wirehead he saw a few seconds
ago is out in the open now, standing all by himself at the edge of a raft.
Everyone else has cleared out of there. He can see the bastard's lips
moving. Hiro whips the boat around and returns to him, drawing his wakizashi
with his free hand, and cuts him down on the spot.
But there will be more. Hiro knows they're all out looking for him now.
The gunners up there on the Enterprise don't care how many of these Refus
they have to kill in order to nail Hiro.
From the Malaysian neighborhood, he passes into a Chinese neighborhood.
This one's a lot more built up, it contains a number of steel ships and
barges. It extends off into the distance, away from the Core, for as far as
Hiro can see from his worthless sea-level vantage point.
He's being watched by a man high up in the superstructure of one of
those Chinese ships, another wirehead. Hiro can see the guy's jaw flapping
as he sends updates to Raft Central.
The big Gatling gun on the deck of the Enterprise opens up again and
fires another meteorite of depleted uranium slugs into the side of an
unoccupied barge about twenty feet from Hiro. The entire side of the barge
chases itself inward, like the steel has become liquid and is running down a
drain, and the metal turns bright as shock waves simply turn that thick
layer of rust into an aerosol, blast it free from the steel borne on a wave
of sound so powerful that it hurts Hiro down inside his chest and makes him
feel sick.
The gun is radar controlled. It's very accurate when it's shooting at a
piece of metal. It's a lot less accurate when it's trying to hit flesh and
blood.
"Hiro? What the fuck's going on?" Y.T. is shouting into his earphones.
"Can't talk. Get me to my office," Hiro says. "Pull me onto the back of
the motorcycle and then drive it there."
"I don't know how to drive a motorcycle," she says.
"It's only got one control. Twist the throttle and it goes."
And then he points his boat out toward the open water and drills it.
Dimly superimposed on Reality, he can see the black-and-white figure of Y.T.
sitting in front of him on the motorcycle; she reaches out for the throttle
and both of them jerk forward and slam into the wall of a skyscraper at Mach
1.
He turns off his view of the Metaverse entirely, making the goggles
totally transparent. Then he switches his system into full gargoyle mode:
enhanced visible light with false-color infrared, plus millimeter-wave
radar.
His view of the world goes into grainy black and white, much brighter
than it was before. Here and there, certain objects glow fuzzily in pink or
red. This comes from the infrared, and it means that these things are warm
or hot; people are pink, engines and fires are red.
The millimeter-wave radar stuff is superimposed much more cleanly and
crisply in neon green. Anything made of metal shows up. Hiro is now
navigating down a grainy, charcoal-gray avenue of water lined with grainy,
light gray pontoon bridges tied up to crisp neon-green barges and ships that
glow reddishly from place to place, wherever they are generating heat. It's
not pretty. In fact, it's so ugly that it probably explains why gargoyles
are, in general, so socially retarded. But it's a lot more useful than the
charcoal-on-ebony view he had before.
And it saves his life. As he's buzzing down a curving, narrow canal, a
narrow green parabola appears hanging across the water in front of him,
suddenly rising out of the water and snapping into a perfectly straight line
at neck level. It's a piece of piano wire. Hiro ducks under it, waves to the
young Chinese men who set the booby trap, and keeps going.
The radar picks out three fuzzy pink individuals holding Chinese AK-47s
standing by the side of the channel. Hiro cuts into a side channel and
avoids them. But it's a narrower channel, and he's not sure where it goes.
"Y.T.," he says, "where the hell are we?"
"Driving down the street toward your house. We overshot it about six
times."
Up ahead, the channel dead-ends. Hiro does a one-eighty. With the big
heat exchanger dragging behind it, the boat is not nearly as maneuverable or
as fast as Hiro wants it to be. He passes back underneath the booby-trap
wire and starts exploring another narrow channel that he passed earlier.
"Okay, we're home. You're sitting at your desk," Y.T. says.
"Okay," Hiro says, "this is going to be tricky."
He coasts down to a dead stop in the middle of the channel, makes a
scan for militia men and wireheads, and finds none. There is a
five-foot-tall Chinese woman in the boat next to him holding a square
cleaver, chopping something. Hiro figures it's a risk he can handle, so he
turns off Reality and returns to the Metaverse.
He's sitting at his desk. Y.T. is standing next to him, arms crossed,
radiating Attitude.
"Librarian?"
"Yes, sir," the Librarian says, padding in.
"I need blueprints of the aircraft carrier Enterprise. Fast. If you can
get me something in 3-D, that'd be great."
"Yes, sir," the Librarian says.
Hiro reaches out and grabs Earth.
"YOU ARE HERE," he says.
Earth spins around until he's staring straight down at the Raft. Then
it plunges toward him at a terrifying rate. It takes all of three seconds
for him to get there.
If he were in some normal, stable part of the world like lower
Manhattan, this would actually work in 3-D. Instead, he's got to put up with
two-dimensional satellite imagery. He is looking at a red dot superimposed
on a black-and-white photograph of the Raft. The red dot is in the middle of
a narrow black channel of water: YOU ARE HERE.
It's still an incredible maze. But it's a lot easier to solve a maze
when you're looking down on it. Within about sixty seconds, he's out in the
open Pacific. It's a foggy gray dawn. The plume of steam coming out of
Reason's heat exchanger just thickens it a little.
"Where the hell are you?" Y.T. says.
"Leaving the Raft."
"Gee, thanks for all your help."
"I'll be back in a minute. I just need a second to get myself
organized."
"There's a lot of scary guys around here," Y.T. says. "They're watching
me."
"It's okay," Hiro says. "I'm sure they'll listen to Reason."
He flips open the big suitcase. The screen is still on, showing him a
flat desktop display with a menu bar at the top. He uses a trackball to pull
down a menu:
Getting ready
Firing Reason
Tactical tips
Maintenance
Resupply
Troubleshooting
Miscellaneous
Under the "Getting ready" heading is more information than he could
possibly want on that subject, including half an hour of badly overexposed
video starring a stocky, scar-faced Asian guy whose face seems paralyzed
into a permanent look of disdain. He puts on his clothes. He limbers up with
special stretching exercises. He opens up Reason. He checks the barrels for
damage or dirt. Hiro fast-forwards through all of this.
Finally the stocky Asian man puts on the gun.
Fisheye wasn't really using Reason the right way; it comes with its own
mount that straps to your body so that you can soak up the recoil with your
pelvis, taking the force right in your body's center of gravity. The mount
has shock absorbers and miniature hydraulic goodies to compensate for the
weight and the recoil. If you put all this stuff on the right way, the gun's
a lot easier to use accurately. And if you're goggled into a computer, it'll
superimpose a handy cross hairs over whatever the gun's aimed at.
"Your information, sir," the Librarian says.
"Are you smart enough to tie that information into YOU ARE HERE?" Hiro
says.
"I'll see what I can do, sir. The formats appear to be reconcilable.
Sir?"
"Yes?"
"These blueprints are several years old. Since they were made, the
Enterprise has been purchased by a private owner - "
"Who may have made some changes. Gotcha."
Hiro's back in Reality.
He finds an open boulevard of water that leads inward to the Core. It
has a sort of pedestrian catwalk running along one side of it, pieced
together haphazardly, a seemingly endless procession of gangplanks,
pontoons, logs, abandoned skiffs, aluminum canoes, oil drums. Anywhere else
in the world, it would be an obstacle course; here in the Fifth World, it's
a superhighway.
Hiro takes the boat straight down the middle, not very fast. If he runs
into something, the boat might flip. Reason will sink. And Hiro's strapped
onto Reason.
Flipping into gargoyle mode, he can clearly make out a sparse picket
line of hemispherical domes running along the edge of the Enterprise's
flight deck. The radar gear thoughtfully identifies these, onscreen, as the
radar antennas of Phalanx antimissile guns. Underneath each dome, a
multibarreled gun protrudes.
He slows to a near stop and waves the barrel of Reason back and forth
for a while until a cross hairs whips across his field of vision. That's the
aiming point. He gets it settled down in the middle, right on one of those
Phalanx guns, and jerks the trigger for half a second.
The big dome turns into a fountain of jagged, flaky debris. Underneath
it, the gun barrels are still visible, speckled with a few red marks; Hiro
lowers the cross hairs a tad and fires another fifty-round burst that cuts
the gun loose from its mount. Then its ammunition belt starts to burst
sporadically, and Hiro has to look away.
He looks at the next Phalanx gun and finds himself staring straight
down its barrels. That's so scary he jerks the trigger involuntarily and
fires a long burst that appears to do nothing at all. Then his view is
obscured by something close up; the recoil has pushed him back behind a
decrepit yacht tied up along the side of the channel.
He knows what's going to happen next - the steam makes him easy to find
- so he whips out of there. A second later, the yacht gets simply forced
under the water by a burst from the big gun. Hiro runs for a few seconds,
finds a pontoon where he can steady himself, and opens up again with a long
burst; when he's finished, the edge of the Enterprise has a jagged
semicircular bite taken out of it where the Phalanx gun used to be.
He takes to the main channel again and follows it inward until it
terminates beneath one of the Core ships, a containership, converted into a
high-rise apartment complex. A cargo net serves as a ramp from one to the
other. It probably serves as a drawbridge also, when undesirables try to
clamber up out of the ghetto. Hiro is about as undesirable as anyone can be
on the Raft, but they leave the cargo net there for him.
That's quite all right. He's staying on the little boat for now. He
buzzes down the side of the containership, makes a U-turn around its prow.
The next vessel is a big oil tanker, mostly empty and riding high in
the water. Looking up the sheer steel canyon separating the two ships, he
sees no handy cargo nets stretched between them. They don't want thieves or
terrorists to come up onto the tanker and drill for oil.
The next ship is the Enterprise.
The two giant vessels, the tanker and the aircraft carrier, ride
parallel, anywhere from ten to fifty feet apart, joined by a number of
gigantic cables and held apart by huge airbags, like they squished a few
blimps between them to keep them from rubbing. The heavy cables aren't just
lashed from one ship to another, they've done something clever with weights
and pulleys, he suspects, to allow for some slack when rough seas pull the
ships opposite ways.
Hiro rides his own little airbag in between them. This gray steel
tunnel is quiet and isolated compared to the Raft; except for him, no one
has any reason to be here. For a minute, he just wants to sit there and
relax.
Which is not too likely, when you think about it. "YOU ARE HERE," he
says.
His view of the Enterprise's hull - a gently curved expanse of gray
steel - turns into a three-dimensional wire frame drawing, showing him all
the guts of the ship on the other side.
Down here along the waterline, the Enterprise has a belt of thick
antitorpedo armor. It's not too promising. Farther up, the armor is thinner,
and there's good stuff on the other side of it, actual rooms instead of fuel
tanks or ammunition holds.
Hiro chooses a room marked WARDROOM and opens fire.
The hull of the Enterprise is surprisingly tough. Reason doesn't just
blow a crater straight through; it takes a few moments for the burst to
penetrate. And then all it does is make a hole about six inches across. The
recoil pushed Hiro back against the rusted hull of the oil tanker.
He can't take the gun with him anyway. He holds the trigger down and
just tries to keep it aimed in a consistent direction until all the
ammunition is gone. Then he unstraps it from his body and dumps the whole
thing overboard. It'll go to the bottom and mark its position with a column
of steam; later, Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong can dispatch one of its
environmental direct-action posses to pick it up. Then they can haul Hiro
before the Tribunal of Environmental Crimes, if they want to. Right now he
doesn't care.
It takes half a dozen tries to secure the grappling hook in the jagged
hole, twenty feet above the waterline.
As he's wriggling through the hole, his coverall makes popping and
hissing noises as the hot, sharp metal melts and tears through the synthetic
material. He ends up leaving scraps of it behind, welded to the hull. He's
got a few first- and second-degree burns on the parts of his skin that are
now exposed, but they don't really hurt yet. That's how wound up he is.
Later, they'll hurt. The soles of his shoes melt and sizzle as he treads on
glowing bunks of shrapnel. The room is rather smoky, but aircraft carriers
are nothing if not fire conscious, and not too much in this place is
flammable. Hiro just walks through the smoke to the door, which has been
carved into a steel doily by Reason. He kicks it out of its frame and enters
a place that, in the blueprints, is simply marked PASSAGEWAY. Then, because
this seems as good a time as any, he draws his katana.
When her partner is off doing something in Reality, his avatar goes
kind of slack. The body sits there like an inflatable love doll, and the
face continues to go through all kinds of stretching exercises. She does not
know what he's doing, but it looks like it must be exciting, because most of
the time he's either extremely surprised or scared shitless.
Shortly after he gets done talking to the Librarian dude about the
aircraft carrier, she begins to hear deep rumbling noises - Reality noises -
from outside. Sounds like a cross between a machine gun and a buzz saw.
Whenever she hears that noise, Hiro's face gets this astonished look like:
I'm about to die.
Someone is tapping her on the shoulder. Some suit who has an early
morning appointment in the Metaverse, figures that whatever this Kourier is
doing can't be all that important. She ignores it for a minute.
Then Hiro's office goes out of focus, jumps up in the air like it is
painted on a window shade, and she's looking into the face of a guy. An
Asian guy. A creep. A wirehead. One of the scary antenna dudes.
"Okay," she says, "what do you want?"
He grabs her by the arm and hauls her out of the booth. There's another
one with him, and he grabs her other arm. They all start walking out of
there.
"Let go my fucking arm," she says. "I'll go with you. It's okay."
It's not the first time she's been thrown out of a building full of
suits. This time it's a little different, though. This time, the bouncers
are a couple of life-sized plastic action figures from Toys R Us.
And it's not just that these guys probably don't speak English. They
just don't act normal. She actually manages to twist one of her arms loose
and the guy doesn't smack her or anything, just turns rigidly toward her and
paws at her mechanically until he's got her by the arm again, No change in
his face. His eyes stare like busted headlights. His mouth is open enough to
let him breathe through it, but the lips never move, never change
expression.
They are in a complex of ship cabins and sliced-open containers that
acts as the lobby of the hotel. The wireheads drag her out the door, over
the blunt cross hairs of the helipad. Just in time, too, because a chopper
happens to be coming in for a landing. The safety procedures in this place
suck; they could have got their heads chopped off. It is the slick corporate
chopper with the RARE logo that she saw earlier.
The wireheads try to drag her over a gangplank thingy that leads them
across open water to the next ship. She manages to get turned around
backward, grabs the railings with both hands, hooks her ankles into the
stanchions, and hangs on. One of them grabs her around the waist from behind
and tries to yank her body loose while the other one stands in front of her
and pries her fingers loose, one at a time.
Several guys are piling out of the RARE chopper. They are wearing
coveralls with gear stuck into the pockets, and she sees at least one
stethoscope. They haul big fiberglass cases out of the chopper, with red
crosses painted on their sides, and run into the containership. Y.T. knows
that this is not being done for the benefit of some fat businessman who
stroked a lobe over his stewed prunes. They are going in there to reanimate
her boyfriend. Raven pumped full of speed: just what the world needs right
now.
They drag her across the deck of the next ship. From there they take a
stairway thingy up to the next ship after that, which is very big. She
thinks it's an oil tanker. She can look across its broad deck, through a
tangle of pipes, rust seeping through white paint, and see the Enterprise on
the other side. That's where they're going.
There's no direct connection. A crane on the deck of the Enterprise has
swung itself over to dangle a small wire cage over the tanker, just a few
feet off the deck; it bobs up and down and glides back and forth over a
fairly large area as the two ships rock in different ways and it swings like
a pendulum at the end of its cable. It has a door on one side, which is
hanging open.
They sort of toss her into it head first, keeping her arms pinned to
her sides so she can't push it away from her, and then they spend a few
seconds folding her legs in behind her. It's obvious by now that talking
doesn't work, so she just fights silently. She manages to give one of them a
good stomp to the bridge of the nose, and both feels and hears the bone
break, but the man doesn't react in any way, other than snapping his head
back on impact. She's so busy watching him, waiting to see when he's going
to figure out that his nose is broken and that she's responsible for it,
that she stops kicking and flailing long enough to get all shoved into the
cage. Then the door snaps shut.
An experienced raccoon could get the latch open. This cage isn't made
to hold people. But by the time she gets her body worked around to the point
where she can reach it, she's twenty feet above the deck, looking down on a
lead of black water between the tanker and the Enterprise. Down below, she
can see an abandoned zodiac caroming back and forth between the steel walls.
Not everything is exactly right on the Enterprise. Something is burning
somewhere. People are firing guns. She's not entirely sure she wants to be
there. As long as she is high up in the air, she reconnoiters the ship and
confirms that there is no way off, no handy gangplanks or stairway thingies.
She is being lowered toward the Enterprise. The cage is careening back
and forth, skimming just over the deck on its cable, and when it finally
touches the deck, it skids for a few feet before coming to a halt. She pops
the latch and climbs out of there. Now what?
There's a bullseye painted on the deck, a few helicopters parked around
the edges and lashed down. And there is one helicopter, a mammoth
twin-engine jet number, kind of a flying bathtub festooned with guns and
missiles, sitting right in the middle of the bullseye, all of its lights on,
engine whining, rotors spinning desultorily. A small cluster of men is
standing next to it.
Y.T. walks toward it. She hates this. She knows this is exactly what
she's supposed to do. But there really is no other choice. She wishes,
profoundly, that she had her plank with her. The deck of this aircraft
carrier is some of the best skating territory she has ever seen. She has
seen, in movies, that carriers have big steam catapults for throwing
airplanes into the sky. Think of what it would be like to ride a steam
catapult on your plank!
As she is walking toward the helicopter, one of the men standing by it
detaches himself from the group and walks toward her. He's big, with a body
like a fifty-five-gallon drum, and a mustache that turns up at the corners.
And as he comes toward her he is laughing in a satisfied way, which pisses
her off.
"Well, don't you look like a forlorn lil thang!" he says. "Shit, honey,
you look like a drowned rat that got dried out again."
"Thanks," she says. "You look like chiseled Spam."
"Very funny," he says.
"Then how come you're not laughing? Afraid it's true?"
"Look," he says, "I don't have time for this fucking adolescent banter.
I grew up and got old 'pecifically to get away from this."
"It's not that you don't have time," she says. "It's that you're not
very good at it."
"You know who I am?" he asks.
"Yeah, I know. You know who I am?"
"Y.T. A fifteen-year-old Kourier."
"And personal buddy of Uncle Enzo," she says, whipping off the string
of dog tags and tossing them. He holds out one hand, startled, and the chain
whips around his fingers. He holds them up and reads them.
"Well, well," he says, "this is quite a little memento." He throws them
back at her. "I know you're buddies with Uncle Enzo. Otherwise I just woulda
dunked you instead a bringing you here to my spread. And I frankly don't
give a shit," he says, "because by the time this day is through, either
Uncle Enzo will be out of a job, or else I'll be, as you said, chiseled
Spam. But I figure that the Big Wop will be a lot less likely to throw a
Stinger through the turbine of my chopper there if he knows his little
chiquita is on board."
"It's not like that," Y.T. says. "It's not a relationship where fucking
is part of it." But she is chagrined to learn that the dog tags, after all
this time, did not have any magical effect on the bad guys.
Rife turns around and starts walking back to the chopper. After a few
steps, he turns back and looks at her, just standing there, trying not to
cry. "You coming?" he says.
She looks at the chopper. A ticket off the Raft.
"Can I leave a note for Raven?"
"Far as Raven is concerned, I think you already made your point - haw
haw haw. Come on, girl, we're wasting jet fuel over there - that ain't good
for the goddamn environment."
She follows him to the chopper, climbs on board. It's warm and light
inside here, with nice seats. Like coming in off a hard February day of
thrashing the grittier highways and settling into a padded easy chair
"Had the interior redone," Rife says. "This is a big old Sov gunship
and it wasn't made for comfort. But that's the price you pay for all that
armor plating."
There's two other guys in here. One is about fifty, sort of gaunt, big
pores, wire-rimmed bifocals, carrying a laptop. A techie. The other is a
bulky African-American with a gun. "Y.T.," says the always polite L. Bob
Rife, meet Frank Frost, my tech director, and Tony Michaels, my security
chief."
"Ma'am," says Tony.
"Howdy," says Frank.
"Suck my toes," says Y.T.
"Don't step on that, please," Frank says.
Y.T. looks down. Climbing into the empty seat nearest the door, she has
stepped on a package resting on the floor. It's about the dimensions of a
phone book, but irregular, very heavy, swaddled in bubble pack and clear
plastic. She can see glimpses of what's inside. Light reddish brown in
color. Covered with chicken scratches. Hard as a rock.
"What's that?" Y.T. says. "Homemade bread from Mom?"
"It's an ancient artifact," Frank says, all pissed off. Rife chuckles,
pleased and relieved that Y.T. is now insulting someone else.
Another man duck-walks across the flight deck, in mortal fear of the
whirling rotor blades, and climbs in. He's about sixty, with a dirigible of
white hair that was not ruffled in any way by the downdraft.
"Hello, everyone," he says cheerfully. "I don't think I've met all of
you. Just got here this morning and now I'm on my way back again!"
"Who are you?" Tony says.
The new guy looks crestfallen. "Greg Ritchie," he says.
Then, when no one seems to react, he jogs their memory. "President of
the United States."
"Oh! Sorry. Nice to meet you, Mr. President," Tony says, extending his
hand. "Tony Michaels."
"Frank Frost," Frank says, extending his hand and looking bored.
"Don't mind me," Y.T. says, when Ritchie looks her way. "I'm a
hostage."
"Torque this baby," Rife says to the pilot. "Let's go to L.A. We got a
Mission to Control."
The pilot has an angular face that, after her experiences on the Raft,
Y.T. recognizes as typically Russian. He starts dicking with his controls.
The engines whine louder and the thwacking of the chopper blades picks up.
Y.T. feels, but does not hear, a couple of small explosions. Everyone
else feels it, too, but only Tony reacts; he crouches down on the floor of
the chopper, pulls a gun out from under his jacket, and opens the door on
his side. Meanwhile, the engines sigh back down in pitch and the rotor
coasts back down to an idle.
Y.T. can see him out the window. It's Hiro. He's all covered with smoke
and blood, and he's holding a pistol in one hand. He's just fired a couple
of shots in the air, to get their attention, and now he backs behind one of
the parked choppers, taking cover.
"You're a dead man," Rife shouts. "You're stuck on the Raft, asshole. I
got a million Myrmidons here. You gonna kill 'em all?"
"Swords don't run out of ammo," Hiro shouts.
"Well, what do you want?"
"I want the tablet. You give me the tablet, then you can take off and
let your million wireheads kill me. You don't give me the tablet, I'm gonna
empty this clip into the windshield of your chopper."
"It's bulletproof! Haw!" Rife says.
"No it isn't," Hiro says, "as the rebels in Afghanistan found out."
"He is right," the pilot says.
"Fucking Soviet piece of shit! They put all that steel in its belly and
then made the windshield out of glass?"
"Give me the tablet," Hiro says' "or I'm taking it."
"No you ain't," Rife says, "cause I got Tinkerbell here."
At the last minute, Y.T. tries to duck down and hide, so he won't see
her. She's ashamed. But Hiro locks eyes with her for just a moment, and she
can see the defeat come into his face.
She makes a dive for the door and gets halfway out, under the downblast
of the rotors. Tony grabs her coverall's collar and hauls her back inside.
He shoves her down on her belly and puts one knee in the small of her back
to hold her there. Meanwhile, the engine is powering up again, and out the
open door she can see the steel horizon of the carrier's deck drop from
view.
After all this time, she fucked up the plan. She owes Hiro a refund.
Or maybe not.
She puts the heel of one hand against the edge of the clay tablet and
shoves as hard as she can. It slides across the floor, teeters on the
threshold, and spins out of the chopper.
Another delivery made, another satisfied customer.
For a minute or so, the chopper hovers twenty feet overhead. All the
people inside are staring down at the tablet, which has burst out of its
wrappings in the middle of the bullseye. The plastic has torn apart around
the corners and fragments - large fragments - of the tablet have sprayed out
for a few feet in either direction.
Hiro stares at it, too, still safe behind the cover of a parked
chopper. He stares at it so hard that be forgets to stare at anything else.
Then a couple of wireheads land on his back, smashing his face into the
flank of the chopper. He slides down and lands on his belly. His gun arm is
still free, but a couple more wireheads sit on that. A couple on his legs,
too. He can't move at all. He can't see anything but the broken tablet,
twenty feet away on the flight deck. The sound and wind of Rife's chopper
diminish into a distant puttering noise that takes a long time to go away
completely.
He feels a tingling behind his ear, anticipating the scalpel and the
drill.
These wireheads are operating under remote control from somewhere else.
Ng seemed to think that they had an organized Raft defense system. Maybe
there's a hacker-in-charge, an en, sitting in the Enterprise's control
tower, moving these guys around like an air traffic controller.
In any case, they are not very big on spontaneity. They sit on him for
a few minutes before they decide what to do next. Then, many hands reach
down and clasp him around the wrists and ankles, elbows and knees. They haul
him across the flight deck like pallbearers, face up. Hiro looks up into the
control tower and sees a couple of faces looking down at him. One of them -
the en - is talking into a microphone.
Eventually, they come to a big flat elevator that sinks down into the
guts of the ship, out of view of the control tower. It comes to rest on one
of the lower decks, apparently a hangar deck where they used to maintain
airplanes
Hiro hears a woman's voice, speaking words gently but clearly: "me lu
lu mu al nu urn me en ki me en me lu lu mu me al nu urn me al nu ume me me
mu lu e al nu um me dug ga mu me mu. lu e al nu urn me..."
It's three feet straight down to the deck, and he covers the distance
in free fall, slamming down on his back, bumping his head. All his limbs
bounce loosely on the metal. Around him he sees and hears the wireheads
collapsing like wet towels falling off a rack.
He cannot move any part of his body. He has a little control over his
eyes. A face comes into view, and he has trouble resolving it, can't quite
focus, but he recognizes something in her posture, the way she tosses her
hair back over her shoulder when it falls down. It's Juanita. Juanita with
an antenna rising out of the base of her skull.
She kneels down beside him, bends down, cups one hand around his ear,
and whispers. The hot air tickles his ear, he tries to move away from it but
can't. She's whispering another long string of syllables. Then she
straightens up and gooses him in the side. He jerks away from her.
"Get up, lazybones," she says.
He gets up. He's fine now. But all the wireheads lay around him,
perfectly motionless.
"Just a little nam-shub I whipped up," she says. "They'll be fine."
"Hi," he says.
"Hi. It's good to see you, Hiro. I'm going to give you a hug now -
watch out for the antenna."
She does. He hugs her back. The antenna is upside his nose, but that's
okay.
"Once we get this thing taken off, all the hair and stuff should grow
back," she whispers. Finally, she lets him go. "That hug was really more for
me than for you It's been a lonely time here. Lonely and scary."
This is typically paradoxical behavior for Juanita - getting
touchy-feely at a time like this.
"Don't get me wrong," Hiro says, "but aren't you one of the bad guys
now?"
"Oh, you mean this?"
"Yeah. Don't you work for them?"
"If so, I'm not doing a very good job." She laughs, gesturing at the
ring of motionless wireheads. "No. This doesn't work on me. It sort of did,
for a while, but there are ways to fight it."
"Why? Why doesn't it work on you?"
"I've spent the last several years hanging around with Jesuits," she
says. "Look. Your brain has an immune system, just like your body. The more
you use it - the more viruses you get exposed to - the better your immune
system becomes. And I've got a hell of an immune system. Remember, I was an
atheist for a while, and then I came back to religion the hard way."
"Why didn't they screw you up the way they did Da5id?"
"I came here voluntarily."
"Like Inanna."
"Yes."
"Why would anyone come here voluntarily?"
"Hiro, don't you realize? This is it. This is the nerve center of a
religion that is at once brand new and very ancient. Being here is like
following Jesus or Mohammed around, getting to observe the birth of a new
faith."
"But it's terrible. Rife is the Antichrist."
"Of course he is. But it's still interesting. And Rife has got
something else going for him: Eridu."
"The city of Enki."
"Exactly. He's got every tablet Enki ever wrote. For a person who's
interested in religion and hacking, this is the only place in the world to
be. If those tablets were in Arabia, I'd put on a chador and burn my
driver's license and go there. But the tablets are here, and so I let them
wire me up instead."
"So all this time, your goal was to study Enki's tablets."
"To get the me, just like Inanna. What else?"
"And have you been studying them?"
"Oh, yes."
"And?"
She points to the fallen wireheads. "And I can do it now. I'm a ba'al
shem. I can hack the brainstem."
"Okay, look. I'm happy for you, Juanita. But at the time being, we have
a little problem. We are surrounded by a million people who want to kill us.
Can you paralyze all of them?"
"Yes," she says, "but then they'd die."
"You know what we have to do, don't you, Juanita?"
"Release the nam-shub of Enki," she says. "Do the Babel thing."
"Let's go get it," Hiro says.
"First things first," Juanita says. "The control tower."
"Okay, you get ready to grab the tablet, and I'll take out the control
tower."
"How are you going to do that? By cutting people up with swords?"
"Yeah. That's the only thing they're good for."
"Let's do it the other way around," Juanita says. She gets up and walks
off across the hangar deck.
The nam-shub of Enki is a tablet wrapped up in a clay envelope covered
with the cuneiform equivalent of a warning sticker. The entire assembly has
shattered into dozens of pieces. Most of them have stayed wrapped up inside
the plastic, but some have gone spinning across the flight deck. Hiro
gathers them up from the helipad and returns them to the center.
By the time he's got the plastic wrapper cut away, Juanita is waving to
him from the windows on top of the control tower.
He takes all the pieces that look to be part of the envelope and puts
them into a separate pile. Then he assembles the remains of the tablet
itself into a coherent group. It's not obvious, yet, how to piece them
together, and he doesn't have time for jigsaw puzzles. So he goggles into
his office, uses the computer to take an electronic snapshot of the
fragments, and calls the Librarian.
"Yes, sir?"
"This hypercard contains a picture of a shattered clay tablet. Do you
know of some software that would be good at piecing it back together?"
"One moment, sir," the Librarian says. Then a hypercard appears in his
hand. He gives it to Hiro. It contains a picture of an assembled tablet.
"That's how it looks, sir."
"Can you read Sumerian?"
"Yes, sir."
"Can you read this tablet out loud?"
"Yes, sir."
"Get ready to do it. And hold on a second."
Hiro walks over to the base of the control tower. There's a door there
that gives him access to a stairwell. He climbs up to the control room, a
strange mixture of Iron Age and high-tech. Juanita's waiting there,
surrounded by peacefully slumbering wireheads. She taps a microphone that is
projecting from a communications panel at the end of a flexible gooseneck -
the same mike that the en was speaking into.
"Live to the Raft," she says. "Go for it."
Hiro puts his computer into speakerphone mode and stands up next to the
microphone. "Librarian, read it back," he says. And a string of syllables
pours out of the speaker.
In the middle of it, Hiro glances up at Juanita. She's standing in the
far comer of the room with her fingers stuck in her ears.
Down at the base of the stairs, a wirehead begins to talk. Deep down
inside the Enterprise, there's more talking going on. And none of it makes
any sense. It's just a lot of babbling.
There's an external catwalk on the control tower. Hiro goes out there
and listens to the Raft. From all around them comes a dim roar, not of waves
or wind, but of a million unchained human voices speaking in a confusion of
tongues.
Juanita comes out to listen, too. Hiro sees a trickle of red under her
ear.
"You're bleeding," he says.
"I know. A little bit of primitive surgery," she says. Her voice is
strained and uncomfortable. "I've been carrying around a scalpel blade for
cases like this."
"What did you do?"
"Slid it up under the base of the antenna and cut the wire that goes
into my skull," she says.
"When did you do that?"
"While you were down on the flight deck."
"Why?"
"Why do you think?" she says. "So I wouldn't be exposed to the nam-shub
of Enki. I'm a neurolinguistic hacker now, Hiro. I went through hell to
obtain this knowledge. It's a part of me. Don't expect me to submit to a
lobotomy."
"If we get out of this, will you be my girl?"
"Naturally," she says. "Now let's get out of it."
"I was just doing my job, man," she says. "This Enki dude wanted to get
a message to Hiro, and I delivered it."
"Shut up," Rife says. He doesn't say it like he's pissed. He just wants
her to be quiet. Because what she did doesn't make any difference now that
all those wireheads have piled on top of Hiro.
Y.T. looks out the window. They are buzzing across the Pacific, keeping
pretty low down so that the water skims quickly beneath them. She doesn't
know how fast they're going, but it looks to be pretty damn fast. She always
thought the ocean was supposed to be blue, but in fact it's the most boring
gray color she's ever seen. And there's miles and miles of it.
After a few minutes, another chopper catches up with them and begins
flying alongside, pretty close, in formation. It's the RARE chopper, the one
full of medics.
Through its cabin window, she can see Raven sitting in one of the
seats. At first she thinks he's still unconscious because he's kind of
hunched over, not moving.
Then he lifts his head and she sees that he's goggled in to the
Metaverse. He reaches up with one hand and pulls the goggles up onto his
forehead for a moment, squints out the window, and sees her watching him.
Their eyes meet and her heart starts flopping around weakly, like a bunny in
a Ziploc bag. He grins and waves.
Y.T. sits back in her seat and pulls the shade down over the window.
"She doesn't want you to understand her. She knows that's impossible.
She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable."
"You figure?"
"Yeah. Definitely."
"What makes you think I don't understand myself?"
"It's just obvious. You're a really smart hacker and the greatest sword
fighter in the world - and you're delivering pizzas and promoting concerts
that you don't make any money off of. How do you expect her to - "
The rest is drowned out by sound breaking in through his earphones,
coming in from Reality: a screeching, tearing noise riding in high and sharp
above the rumbling noise of heavy impact. Then there is just the screaming
of terrified neighborhood children, the cries of men in Tagalog, and the
groaning and popping sound of a steel fishing trawler collapsing under the
pressure of the sea.
"What was that?" Y.T. says.
"Meteorite," Hiro says.
"Huh?''
"Stay tuned," Hiro says, "I think I just got into a Gatling gun duel."
"Are you going to sign off?"
"Just shut up for a second."
This neighborhood is U-shaped, built around a sort of cove in the Raft
where half a dozen rusty old fishing boats are tied up. A floating pier,
pieced together from mismatched pontoons, runs around the edge.
The empty trawler, the one they've been cutting up for scrap, has been
hit by a burst from the big gun on the deck of the Enterprise. It looks as
though a big wave picked it up and tried to wrap it around a pillar: one
whole side is collapsed in, the bow and the stem are actually bent toward
each other. Its back is broken. Its empty holds are ingurgitating a vast,
continuous rush of murky brown seawater, sucking in that variegated sewage
like a drowning man sucks air. It's heading for the bottom fast.
Hiro shoves Reason back into the zodiac, jumps in, and starts the
motor. He doesn't have time to untie the boat from the pontoon, so he snaps
through the line with his wakizashi and takes off.
The pontoons are already sagging inward and down, pulled together by
the ruined ship's mooring lines. The trawler is falling off the surface of
the water, trying to pull in the entire neighborhood like a black hole.
A couple of Filipino men are already out with short knives, hacking at
the stuff that webs the neighborhood together, trying to cut loose the parts
that can't be salvaged. Hiro buzzes over to a pontoon that is already
knee-deep under the water, finds the ropes that connect it to the next
pontoon, which is even more deeply submerged, and probes them with his
katana. The remaining ropes pop like rifle shots, and then the pontoon
breaks loose, shooting up to the surface so fast that it almost capsizes the
zodiac.
A whole section of the pontoon pier, along the side of the trawler,
can't be salvaged. Men with fishing knives and women with kitchen cleavers
are down on their knees, the water already rising up under their chins,
cutting their neighborhood free. It breaks loose one rope at a time,
haphazardly, tossing the Filipinos up into the air. A boy with a machete
cuts the one remaining line, which pops up and lashes him across the face.
Finally, the raft is free and flexible once again, bobbing and waving back
toward equilibrium, and where the trawler was, there's nothing but a
bubbling whirlpool that occasionally vomits up a loose piece of floating
debris.
Some others have already clambered up onto the fishing boat that was
tied up next to the trawler. It has suffered some damage, too: several men
cluster around and lean over the rail to examine a couple of large impact
craters on the side. Each hole is surrounded by a shiny dinner plate-sized
patch that has been blown free of all paint and rust. In the middle is a
hole the size of a golf ball.
Hiro decides it's time to leave.
But before he does, he reaches into his coverall, pulls out a money
clip, and counts out a few thousand Kongbucks. He puts them on the deck and
weighs them down under the corner of a red steel gasoline tank. Then he hits
the road.
He has no trouble finding the canal that leads to the next
neighborhood. His paranoia level is way up, and so he glances back and forth
as he pilots his way out of there, looking up all the little alleys. In one
of those niches, he sees a wirehead, mumbling something.
The next neighborhood is Malaysian. Several dozen of them are gathered
near the bridge, attracted by the noise. As Hiro is entering their
neighborhood, he sees men running down the undulating pontoon bridge that
serves as the main street, carrying guns and knives. The local constabulary.
More men of the same description emerge from the byways and skiffs and
sampans, joining them.
A tremendous whacking and splintering and tearing noise sounds right
beside him, as though a lumber truck has just crashed into a brick wall.
Water splashes his body, and an exhalation of steam passes over his face.
Then it's quiet again. He turns around, slowly and reluctantly. The nearest
pontoon isn't there anymore, just a bloody, turbulent soup of splinters and
chaff,
He turns around and looks behind him. The wirehead he saw a few seconds
ago is out in the open now, standing all by himself at the edge of a raft.
Everyone else has cleared out of there. He can see the bastard's lips
moving. Hiro whips the boat around and returns to him, drawing his wakizashi
with his free hand, and cuts him down on the spot.
But there will be more. Hiro knows they're all out looking for him now.
The gunners up there on the Enterprise don't care how many of these Refus
they have to kill in order to nail Hiro.
From the Malaysian neighborhood, he passes into a Chinese neighborhood.
This one's a lot more built up, it contains a number of steel ships and
barges. It extends off into the distance, away from the Core, for as far as
Hiro can see from his worthless sea-level vantage point.
He's being watched by a man high up in the superstructure of one of
those Chinese ships, another wirehead. Hiro can see the guy's jaw flapping
as he sends updates to Raft Central.
The big Gatling gun on the deck of the Enterprise opens up again and
fires another meteorite of depleted uranium slugs into the side of an
unoccupied barge about twenty feet from Hiro. The entire side of the barge
chases itself inward, like the steel has become liquid and is running down a
drain, and the metal turns bright as shock waves simply turn that thick
layer of rust into an aerosol, blast it free from the steel borne on a wave
of sound so powerful that it hurts Hiro down inside his chest and makes him
feel sick.
The gun is radar controlled. It's very accurate when it's shooting at a
piece of metal. It's a lot less accurate when it's trying to hit flesh and
blood.
"Hiro? What the fuck's going on?" Y.T. is shouting into his earphones.
"Can't talk. Get me to my office," Hiro says. "Pull me onto the back of
the motorcycle and then drive it there."
"I don't know how to drive a motorcycle," she says.
"It's only got one control. Twist the throttle and it goes."
And then he points his boat out toward the open water and drills it.
Dimly superimposed on Reality, he can see the black-and-white figure of Y.T.
sitting in front of him on the motorcycle; she reaches out for the throttle
and both of them jerk forward and slam into the wall of a skyscraper at Mach
1.
He turns off his view of the Metaverse entirely, making the goggles
totally transparent. Then he switches his system into full gargoyle mode:
enhanced visible light with false-color infrared, plus millimeter-wave
radar.
His view of the world goes into grainy black and white, much brighter
than it was before. Here and there, certain objects glow fuzzily in pink or
red. This comes from the infrared, and it means that these things are warm
or hot; people are pink, engines and fires are red.
The millimeter-wave radar stuff is superimposed much more cleanly and
crisply in neon green. Anything made of metal shows up. Hiro is now
navigating down a grainy, charcoal-gray avenue of water lined with grainy,
light gray pontoon bridges tied up to crisp neon-green barges and ships that
glow reddishly from place to place, wherever they are generating heat. It's
not pretty. In fact, it's so ugly that it probably explains why gargoyles
are, in general, so socially retarded. But it's a lot more useful than the
charcoal-on-ebony view he had before.
And it saves his life. As he's buzzing down a curving, narrow canal, a
narrow green parabola appears hanging across the water in front of him,
suddenly rising out of the water and snapping into a perfectly straight line
at neck level. It's a piece of piano wire. Hiro ducks under it, waves to the
young Chinese men who set the booby trap, and keeps going.
The radar picks out three fuzzy pink individuals holding Chinese AK-47s
standing by the side of the channel. Hiro cuts into a side channel and
avoids them. But it's a narrower channel, and he's not sure where it goes.
"Y.T.," he says, "where the hell are we?"
"Driving down the street toward your house. We overshot it about six
times."
Up ahead, the channel dead-ends. Hiro does a one-eighty. With the big
heat exchanger dragging behind it, the boat is not nearly as maneuverable or
as fast as Hiro wants it to be. He passes back underneath the booby-trap
wire and starts exploring another narrow channel that he passed earlier.
"Okay, we're home. You're sitting at your desk," Y.T. says.
"Okay," Hiro says, "this is going to be tricky."
He coasts down to a dead stop in the middle of the channel, makes a
scan for militia men and wireheads, and finds none. There is a
five-foot-tall Chinese woman in the boat next to him holding a square
cleaver, chopping something. Hiro figures it's a risk he can handle, so he
turns off Reality and returns to the Metaverse.
He's sitting at his desk. Y.T. is standing next to him, arms crossed,
radiating Attitude.
"Librarian?"
"Yes, sir," the Librarian says, padding in.
"I need blueprints of the aircraft carrier Enterprise. Fast. If you can
get me something in 3-D, that'd be great."
"Yes, sir," the Librarian says.
Hiro reaches out and grabs Earth.
"YOU ARE HERE," he says.
Earth spins around until he's staring straight down at the Raft. Then
it plunges toward him at a terrifying rate. It takes all of three seconds
for him to get there.
If he were in some normal, stable part of the world like lower
Manhattan, this would actually work in 3-D. Instead, he's got to put up with
two-dimensional satellite imagery. He is looking at a red dot superimposed
on a black-and-white photograph of the Raft. The red dot is in the middle of
a narrow black channel of water: YOU ARE HERE.
It's still an incredible maze. But it's a lot easier to solve a maze
when you're looking down on it. Within about sixty seconds, he's out in the
open Pacific. It's a foggy gray dawn. The plume of steam coming out of
Reason's heat exchanger just thickens it a little.
"Where the hell are you?" Y.T. says.
"Leaving the Raft."
"Gee, thanks for all your help."
"I'll be back in a minute. I just need a second to get myself
organized."
"There's a lot of scary guys around here," Y.T. says. "They're watching
me."
"It's okay," Hiro says. "I'm sure they'll listen to Reason."
He flips open the big suitcase. The screen is still on, showing him a
flat desktop display with a menu bar at the top. He uses a trackball to pull
down a menu:
Getting ready
Firing Reason
Tactical tips
Maintenance
Resupply
Troubleshooting
Miscellaneous
Under the "Getting ready" heading is more information than he could
possibly want on that subject, including half an hour of badly overexposed
video starring a stocky, scar-faced Asian guy whose face seems paralyzed
into a permanent look of disdain. He puts on his clothes. He limbers up with
special stretching exercises. He opens up Reason. He checks the barrels for
damage or dirt. Hiro fast-forwards through all of this.
Finally the stocky Asian man puts on the gun.
Fisheye wasn't really using Reason the right way; it comes with its own
mount that straps to your body so that you can soak up the recoil with your
pelvis, taking the force right in your body's center of gravity. The mount
has shock absorbers and miniature hydraulic goodies to compensate for the
weight and the recoil. If you put all this stuff on the right way, the gun's
a lot easier to use accurately. And if you're goggled into a computer, it'll
superimpose a handy cross hairs over whatever the gun's aimed at.
"Your information, sir," the Librarian says.
"Are you smart enough to tie that information into YOU ARE HERE?" Hiro
says.
"I'll see what I can do, sir. The formats appear to be reconcilable.
Sir?"
"Yes?"
"These blueprints are several years old. Since they were made, the
Enterprise has been purchased by a private owner - "
"Who may have made some changes. Gotcha."
Hiro's back in Reality.
He finds an open boulevard of water that leads inward to the Core. It
has a sort of pedestrian catwalk running along one side of it, pieced
together haphazardly, a seemingly endless procession of gangplanks,
pontoons, logs, abandoned skiffs, aluminum canoes, oil drums. Anywhere else
in the world, it would be an obstacle course; here in the Fifth World, it's
a superhighway.
Hiro takes the boat straight down the middle, not very fast. If he runs
into something, the boat might flip. Reason will sink. And Hiro's strapped
onto Reason.
Flipping into gargoyle mode, he can clearly make out a sparse picket
line of hemispherical domes running along the edge of the Enterprise's
flight deck. The radar gear thoughtfully identifies these, onscreen, as the
radar antennas of Phalanx antimissile guns. Underneath each dome, a
multibarreled gun protrudes.
He slows to a near stop and waves the barrel of Reason back and forth
for a while until a cross hairs whips across his field of vision. That's the
aiming point. He gets it settled down in the middle, right on one of those
Phalanx guns, and jerks the trigger for half a second.
The big dome turns into a fountain of jagged, flaky debris. Underneath
it, the gun barrels are still visible, speckled with a few red marks; Hiro
lowers the cross hairs a tad and fires another fifty-round burst that cuts
the gun loose from its mount. Then its ammunition belt starts to burst
sporadically, and Hiro has to look away.
He looks at the next Phalanx gun and finds himself staring straight
down its barrels. That's so scary he jerks the trigger involuntarily and
fires a long burst that appears to do nothing at all. Then his view is
obscured by something close up; the recoil has pushed him back behind a
decrepit yacht tied up along the side of the channel.
He knows what's going to happen next - the steam makes him easy to find
- so he whips out of there. A second later, the yacht gets simply forced
under the water by a burst from the big gun. Hiro runs for a few seconds,
finds a pontoon where he can steady himself, and opens up again with a long
burst; when he's finished, the edge of the Enterprise has a jagged
semicircular bite taken out of it where the Phalanx gun used to be.
He takes to the main channel again and follows it inward until it
terminates beneath one of the Core ships, a containership, converted into a
high-rise apartment complex. A cargo net serves as a ramp from one to the
other. It probably serves as a drawbridge also, when undesirables try to
clamber up out of the ghetto. Hiro is about as undesirable as anyone can be
on the Raft, but they leave the cargo net there for him.
That's quite all right. He's staying on the little boat for now. He
buzzes down the side of the containership, makes a U-turn around its prow.
The next vessel is a big oil tanker, mostly empty and riding high in
the water. Looking up the sheer steel canyon separating the two ships, he
sees no handy cargo nets stretched between them. They don't want thieves or
terrorists to come up onto the tanker and drill for oil.
The next ship is the Enterprise.
The two giant vessels, the tanker and the aircraft carrier, ride
parallel, anywhere from ten to fifty feet apart, joined by a number of
gigantic cables and held apart by huge airbags, like they squished a few
blimps between them to keep them from rubbing. The heavy cables aren't just
lashed from one ship to another, they've done something clever with weights
and pulleys, he suspects, to allow for some slack when rough seas pull the
ships opposite ways.
Hiro rides his own little airbag in between them. This gray steel
tunnel is quiet and isolated compared to the Raft; except for him, no one
has any reason to be here. For a minute, he just wants to sit there and
relax.
Which is not too likely, when you think about it. "YOU ARE HERE," he
says.
His view of the Enterprise's hull - a gently curved expanse of gray
steel - turns into a three-dimensional wire frame drawing, showing him all
the guts of the ship on the other side.
Down here along the waterline, the Enterprise has a belt of thick
antitorpedo armor. It's not too promising. Farther up, the armor is thinner,
and there's good stuff on the other side of it, actual rooms instead of fuel
tanks or ammunition holds.
Hiro chooses a room marked WARDROOM and opens fire.
The hull of the Enterprise is surprisingly tough. Reason doesn't just
blow a crater straight through; it takes a few moments for the burst to
penetrate. And then all it does is make a hole about six inches across. The
recoil pushed Hiro back against the rusted hull of the oil tanker.
He can't take the gun with him anyway. He holds the trigger down and
just tries to keep it aimed in a consistent direction until all the
ammunition is gone. Then he unstraps it from his body and dumps the whole
thing overboard. It'll go to the bottom and mark its position with a column
of steam; later, Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong can dispatch one of its
environmental direct-action posses to pick it up. Then they can haul Hiro
before the Tribunal of Environmental Crimes, if they want to. Right now he
doesn't care.
It takes half a dozen tries to secure the grappling hook in the jagged
hole, twenty feet above the waterline.
As he's wriggling through the hole, his coverall makes popping and
hissing noises as the hot, sharp metal melts and tears through the synthetic
material. He ends up leaving scraps of it behind, welded to the hull. He's
got a few first- and second-degree burns on the parts of his skin that are
now exposed, but they don't really hurt yet. That's how wound up he is.
Later, they'll hurt. The soles of his shoes melt and sizzle as he treads on
glowing bunks of shrapnel. The room is rather smoky, but aircraft carriers
are nothing if not fire conscious, and not too much in this place is
flammable. Hiro just walks through the smoke to the door, which has been
carved into a steel doily by Reason. He kicks it out of its frame and enters
a place that, in the blueprints, is simply marked PASSAGEWAY. Then, because
this seems as good a time as any, he draws his katana.
When her partner is off doing something in Reality, his avatar goes
kind of slack. The body sits there like an inflatable love doll, and the
face continues to go through all kinds of stretching exercises. She does not
know what he's doing, but it looks like it must be exciting, because most of
the time he's either extremely surprised or scared shitless.
Shortly after he gets done talking to the Librarian dude about the
aircraft carrier, she begins to hear deep rumbling noises - Reality noises -
from outside. Sounds like a cross between a machine gun and a buzz saw.
Whenever she hears that noise, Hiro's face gets this astonished look like:
I'm about to die.
Someone is tapping her on the shoulder. Some suit who has an early
morning appointment in the Metaverse, figures that whatever this Kourier is
doing can't be all that important. She ignores it for a minute.
Then Hiro's office goes out of focus, jumps up in the air like it is
painted on a window shade, and she's looking into the face of a guy. An
Asian guy. A creep. A wirehead. One of the scary antenna dudes.
"Okay," she says, "what do you want?"
He grabs her by the arm and hauls her out of the booth. There's another
one with him, and he grabs her other arm. They all start walking out of
there.
"Let go my fucking arm," she says. "I'll go with you. It's okay."
It's not the first time she's been thrown out of a building full of
suits. This time it's a little different, though. This time, the bouncers
are a couple of life-sized plastic action figures from Toys R Us.
And it's not just that these guys probably don't speak English. They
just don't act normal. She actually manages to twist one of her arms loose
and the guy doesn't smack her or anything, just turns rigidly toward her and
paws at her mechanically until he's got her by the arm again, No change in
his face. His eyes stare like busted headlights. His mouth is open enough to
let him breathe through it, but the lips never move, never change
expression.
They are in a complex of ship cabins and sliced-open containers that
acts as the lobby of the hotel. The wireheads drag her out the door, over
the blunt cross hairs of the helipad. Just in time, too, because a chopper
happens to be coming in for a landing. The safety procedures in this place
suck; they could have got their heads chopped off. It is the slick corporate
chopper with the RARE logo that she saw earlier.
The wireheads try to drag her over a gangplank thingy that leads them
across open water to the next ship. She manages to get turned around
backward, grabs the railings with both hands, hooks her ankles into the
stanchions, and hangs on. One of them grabs her around the waist from behind
and tries to yank her body loose while the other one stands in front of her
and pries her fingers loose, one at a time.
Several guys are piling out of the RARE chopper. They are wearing
coveralls with gear stuck into the pockets, and she sees at least one
stethoscope. They haul big fiberglass cases out of the chopper, with red
crosses painted on their sides, and run into the containership. Y.T. knows
that this is not being done for the benefit of some fat businessman who
stroked a lobe over his stewed prunes. They are going in there to reanimate
her boyfriend. Raven pumped full of speed: just what the world needs right
now.
They drag her across the deck of the next ship. From there they take a
stairway thingy up to the next ship after that, which is very big. She
thinks it's an oil tanker. She can look across its broad deck, through a
tangle of pipes, rust seeping through white paint, and see the Enterprise on
the other side. That's where they're going.
There's no direct connection. A crane on the deck of the Enterprise has
swung itself over to dangle a small wire cage over the tanker, just a few
feet off the deck; it bobs up and down and glides back and forth over a
fairly large area as the two ships rock in different ways and it swings like
a pendulum at the end of its cable. It has a door on one side, which is
hanging open.
They sort of toss her into it head first, keeping her arms pinned to
her sides so she can't push it away from her, and then they spend a few
seconds folding her legs in behind her. It's obvious by now that talking
doesn't work, so she just fights silently. She manages to give one of them a
good stomp to the bridge of the nose, and both feels and hears the bone
break, but the man doesn't react in any way, other than snapping his head
back on impact. She's so busy watching him, waiting to see when he's going
to figure out that his nose is broken and that she's responsible for it,
that she stops kicking and flailing long enough to get all shoved into the
cage. Then the door snaps shut.
An experienced raccoon could get the latch open. This cage isn't made
to hold people. But by the time she gets her body worked around to the point
where she can reach it, she's twenty feet above the deck, looking down on a
lead of black water between the tanker and the Enterprise. Down below, she
can see an abandoned zodiac caroming back and forth between the steel walls.
Not everything is exactly right on the Enterprise. Something is burning
somewhere. People are firing guns. She's not entirely sure she wants to be
there. As long as she is high up in the air, she reconnoiters the ship and
confirms that there is no way off, no handy gangplanks or stairway thingies.
She is being lowered toward the Enterprise. The cage is careening back
and forth, skimming just over the deck on its cable, and when it finally
touches the deck, it skids for a few feet before coming to a halt. She pops
the latch and climbs out of there. Now what?
There's a bullseye painted on the deck, a few helicopters parked around
the edges and lashed down. And there is one helicopter, a mammoth
twin-engine jet number, kind of a flying bathtub festooned with guns and
missiles, sitting right in the middle of the bullseye, all of its lights on,
engine whining, rotors spinning desultorily. A small cluster of men is
standing next to it.
Y.T. walks toward it. She hates this. She knows this is exactly what
she's supposed to do. But there really is no other choice. She wishes,
profoundly, that she had her plank with her. The deck of this aircraft
carrier is some of the best skating territory she has ever seen. She has
seen, in movies, that carriers have big steam catapults for throwing
airplanes into the sky. Think of what it would be like to ride a steam
catapult on your plank!
As she is walking toward the helicopter, one of the men standing by it
detaches himself from the group and walks toward her. He's big, with a body
like a fifty-five-gallon drum, and a mustache that turns up at the corners.
And as he comes toward her he is laughing in a satisfied way, which pisses
her off.
"Well, don't you look like a forlorn lil thang!" he says. "Shit, honey,
you look like a drowned rat that got dried out again."
"Thanks," she says. "You look like chiseled Spam."
"Very funny," he says.
"Then how come you're not laughing? Afraid it's true?"
"Look," he says, "I don't have time for this fucking adolescent banter.
I grew up and got old 'pecifically to get away from this."
"It's not that you don't have time," she says. "It's that you're not
very good at it."
"You know who I am?" he asks.
"Yeah, I know. You know who I am?"
"Y.T. A fifteen-year-old Kourier."
"And personal buddy of Uncle Enzo," she says, whipping off the string
of dog tags and tossing them. He holds out one hand, startled, and the chain
whips around his fingers. He holds them up and reads them.
"Well, well," he says, "this is quite a little memento." He throws them
back at her. "I know you're buddies with Uncle Enzo. Otherwise I just woulda
dunked you instead a bringing you here to my spread. And I frankly don't
give a shit," he says, "because by the time this day is through, either
Uncle Enzo will be out of a job, or else I'll be, as you said, chiseled
Spam. But I figure that the Big Wop will be a lot less likely to throw a
Stinger through the turbine of my chopper there if he knows his little
chiquita is on board."
"It's not like that," Y.T. says. "It's not a relationship where fucking
is part of it." But she is chagrined to learn that the dog tags, after all
this time, did not have any magical effect on the bad guys.
Rife turns around and starts walking back to the chopper. After a few
steps, he turns back and looks at her, just standing there, trying not to
cry. "You coming?" he says.
She looks at the chopper. A ticket off the Raft.
"Can I leave a note for Raven?"
"Far as Raven is concerned, I think you already made your point - haw
haw haw. Come on, girl, we're wasting jet fuel over there - that ain't good
for the goddamn environment."
She follows him to the chopper, climbs on board. It's warm and light
inside here, with nice seats. Like coming in off a hard February day of
thrashing the grittier highways and settling into a padded easy chair
"Had the interior redone," Rife says. "This is a big old Sov gunship
and it wasn't made for comfort. But that's the price you pay for all that
armor plating."
There's two other guys in here. One is about fifty, sort of gaunt, big
pores, wire-rimmed bifocals, carrying a laptop. A techie. The other is a
bulky African-American with a gun. "Y.T.," says the always polite L. Bob
Rife, meet Frank Frost, my tech director, and Tony Michaels, my security
chief."
"Ma'am," says Tony.
"Howdy," says Frank.
"Suck my toes," says Y.T.
"Don't step on that, please," Frank says.
Y.T. looks down. Climbing into the empty seat nearest the door, she has
stepped on a package resting on the floor. It's about the dimensions of a
phone book, but irregular, very heavy, swaddled in bubble pack and clear
plastic. She can see glimpses of what's inside. Light reddish brown in
color. Covered with chicken scratches. Hard as a rock.
"What's that?" Y.T. says. "Homemade bread from Mom?"
"It's an ancient artifact," Frank says, all pissed off. Rife chuckles,
pleased and relieved that Y.T. is now insulting someone else.
Another man duck-walks across the flight deck, in mortal fear of the
whirling rotor blades, and climbs in. He's about sixty, with a dirigible of
white hair that was not ruffled in any way by the downdraft.
"Hello, everyone," he says cheerfully. "I don't think I've met all of
you. Just got here this morning and now I'm on my way back again!"
"Who are you?" Tony says.
The new guy looks crestfallen. "Greg Ritchie," he says.
Then, when no one seems to react, he jogs their memory. "President of
the United States."
"Oh! Sorry. Nice to meet you, Mr. President," Tony says, extending his
hand. "Tony Michaels."
"Frank Frost," Frank says, extending his hand and looking bored.
"Don't mind me," Y.T. says, when Ritchie looks her way. "I'm a
hostage."
"Torque this baby," Rife says to the pilot. "Let's go to L.A. We got a
Mission to Control."
The pilot has an angular face that, after her experiences on the Raft,
Y.T. recognizes as typically Russian. He starts dicking with his controls.
The engines whine louder and the thwacking of the chopper blades picks up.
Y.T. feels, but does not hear, a couple of small explosions. Everyone
else feels it, too, but only Tony reacts; he crouches down on the floor of
the chopper, pulls a gun out from under his jacket, and opens the door on
his side. Meanwhile, the engines sigh back down in pitch and the rotor
coasts back down to an idle.
Y.T. can see him out the window. It's Hiro. He's all covered with smoke
and blood, and he's holding a pistol in one hand. He's just fired a couple
of shots in the air, to get their attention, and now he backs behind one of
the parked choppers, taking cover.
"You're a dead man," Rife shouts. "You're stuck on the Raft, asshole. I
got a million Myrmidons here. You gonna kill 'em all?"
"Swords don't run out of ammo," Hiro shouts.
"Well, what do you want?"
"I want the tablet. You give me the tablet, then you can take off and
let your million wireheads kill me. You don't give me the tablet, I'm gonna
empty this clip into the windshield of your chopper."
"It's bulletproof! Haw!" Rife says.
"No it isn't," Hiro says, "as the rebels in Afghanistan found out."
"He is right," the pilot says.
"Fucking Soviet piece of shit! They put all that steel in its belly and
then made the windshield out of glass?"
"Give me the tablet," Hiro says' "or I'm taking it."
"No you ain't," Rife says, "cause I got Tinkerbell here."
At the last minute, Y.T. tries to duck down and hide, so he won't see
her. She's ashamed. But Hiro locks eyes with her for just a moment, and she
can see the defeat come into his face.
She makes a dive for the door and gets halfway out, under the downblast
of the rotors. Tony grabs her coverall's collar and hauls her back inside.
He shoves her down on her belly and puts one knee in the small of her back
to hold her there. Meanwhile, the engine is powering up again, and out the
open door she can see the steel horizon of the carrier's deck drop from
view.
After all this time, she fucked up the plan. She owes Hiro a refund.
Or maybe not.
She puts the heel of one hand against the edge of the clay tablet and
shoves as hard as she can. It slides across the floor, teeters on the
threshold, and spins out of the chopper.
Another delivery made, another satisfied customer.
For a minute or so, the chopper hovers twenty feet overhead. All the
people inside are staring down at the tablet, which has burst out of its
wrappings in the middle of the bullseye. The plastic has torn apart around
the corners and fragments - large fragments - of the tablet have sprayed out
for a few feet in either direction.
Hiro stares at it, too, still safe behind the cover of a parked
chopper. He stares at it so hard that be forgets to stare at anything else.
Then a couple of wireheads land on his back, smashing his face into the
flank of the chopper. He slides down and lands on his belly. His gun arm is
still free, but a couple more wireheads sit on that. A couple on his legs,
too. He can't move at all. He can't see anything but the broken tablet,
twenty feet away on the flight deck. The sound and wind of Rife's chopper
diminish into a distant puttering noise that takes a long time to go away
completely.
He feels a tingling behind his ear, anticipating the scalpel and the
drill.
These wireheads are operating under remote control from somewhere else.
Ng seemed to think that they had an organized Raft defense system. Maybe
there's a hacker-in-charge, an en, sitting in the Enterprise's control
tower, moving these guys around like an air traffic controller.
In any case, they are not very big on spontaneity. They sit on him for
a few minutes before they decide what to do next. Then, many hands reach
down and clasp him around the wrists and ankles, elbows and knees. They haul
him across the flight deck like pallbearers, face up. Hiro looks up into the
control tower and sees a couple of faces looking down at him. One of them -
the en - is talking into a microphone.
Eventually, they come to a big flat elevator that sinks down into the
guts of the ship, out of view of the control tower. It comes to rest on one
of the lower decks, apparently a hangar deck where they used to maintain
airplanes
Hiro hears a woman's voice, speaking words gently but clearly: "me lu
lu mu al nu urn me en ki me en me lu lu mu me al nu urn me al nu ume me me
mu lu e al nu um me dug ga mu me mu. lu e al nu urn me..."
It's three feet straight down to the deck, and he covers the distance
in free fall, slamming down on his back, bumping his head. All his limbs
bounce loosely on the metal. Around him he sees and hears the wireheads
collapsing like wet towels falling off a rack.
He cannot move any part of his body. He has a little control over his
eyes. A face comes into view, and he has trouble resolving it, can't quite
focus, but he recognizes something in her posture, the way she tosses her
hair back over her shoulder when it falls down. It's Juanita. Juanita with
an antenna rising out of the base of her skull.
She kneels down beside him, bends down, cups one hand around his ear,
and whispers. The hot air tickles his ear, he tries to move away from it but
can't. She's whispering another long string of syllables. Then she
straightens up and gooses him in the side. He jerks away from her.
"Get up, lazybones," she says.
He gets up. He's fine now. But all the wireheads lay around him,
perfectly motionless.
"Just a little nam-shub I whipped up," she says. "They'll be fine."
"Hi," he says.
"Hi. It's good to see you, Hiro. I'm going to give you a hug now -
watch out for the antenna."
She does. He hugs her back. The antenna is upside his nose, but that's
okay.
"Once we get this thing taken off, all the hair and stuff should grow
back," she whispers. Finally, she lets him go. "That hug was really more for
me than for you It's been a lonely time here. Lonely and scary."
This is typically paradoxical behavior for Juanita - getting
touchy-feely at a time like this.
"Don't get me wrong," Hiro says, "but aren't you one of the bad guys
now?"
"Oh, you mean this?"
"Yeah. Don't you work for them?"
"If so, I'm not doing a very good job." She laughs, gesturing at the
ring of motionless wireheads. "No. This doesn't work on me. It sort of did,
for a while, but there are ways to fight it."
"Why? Why doesn't it work on you?"
"I've spent the last several years hanging around with Jesuits," she
says. "Look. Your brain has an immune system, just like your body. The more
you use it - the more viruses you get exposed to - the better your immune
system becomes. And I've got a hell of an immune system. Remember, I was an
atheist for a while, and then I came back to religion the hard way."
"Why didn't they screw you up the way they did Da5id?"
"I came here voluntarily."
"Like Inanna."
"Yes."
"Why would anyone come here voluntarily?"
"Hiro, don't you realize? This is it. This is the nerve center of a
religion that is at once brand new and very ancient. Being here is like
following Jesus or Mohammed around, getting to observe the birth of a new
faith."
"But it's terrible. Rife is the Antichrist."
"Of course he is. But it's still interesting. And Rife has got
something else going for him: Eridu."
"The city of Enki."
"Exactly. He's got every tablet Enki ever wrote. For a person who's
interested in religion and hacking, this is the only place in the world to
be. If those tablets were in Arabia, I'd put on a chador and burn my
driver's license and go there. But the tablets are here, and so I let them
wire me up instead."
"So all this time, your goal was to study Enki's tablets."
"To get the me, just like Inanna. What else?"
"And have you been studying them?"
"Oh, yes."
"And?"
She points to the fallen wireheads. "And I can do it now. I'm a ba'al
shem. I can hack the brainstem."
"Okay, look. I'm happy for you, Juanita. But at the time being, we have
a little problem. We are surrounded by a million people who want to kill us.
Can you paralyze all of them?"
"Yes," she says, "but then they'd die."
"You know what we have to do, don't you, Juanita?"
"Release the nam-shub of Enki," she says. "Do the Babel thing."
"Let's go get it," Hiro says.
"First things first," Juanita says. "The control tower."
"Okay, you get ready to grab the tablet, and I'll take out the control
tower."
"How are you going to do that? By cutting people up with swords?"
"Yeah. That's the only thing they're good for."
"Let's do it the other way around," Juanita says. She gets up and walks
off across the hangar deck.
The nam-shub of Enki is a tablet wrapped up in a clay envelope covered
with the cuneiform equivalent of a warning sticker. The entire assembly has
shattered into dozens of pieces. Most of them have stayed wrapped up inside
the plastic, but some have gone spinning across the flight deck. Hiro
gathers them up from the helipad and returns them to the center.
By the time he's got the plastic wrapper cut away, Juanita is waving to
him from the windows on top of the control tower.
He takes all the pieces that look to be part of the envelope and puts
them into a separate pile. Then he assembles the remains of the tablet
itself into a coherent group. It's not obvious, yet, how to piece them
together, and he doesn't have time for jigsaw puzzles. So he goggles into
his office, uses the computer to take an electronic snapshot of the
fragments, and calls the Librarian.
"Yes, sir?"
"This hypercard contains a picture of a shattered clay tablet. Do you
know of some software that would be good at piecing it back together?"
"One moment, sir," the Librarian says. Then a hypercard appears in his
hand. He gives it to Hiro. It contains a picture of an assembled tablet.
"That's how it looks, sir."
"Can you read Sumerian?"
"Yes, sir."
"Can you read this tablet out loud?"
"Yes, sir."
"Get ready to do it. And hold on a second."
Hiro walks over to the base of the control tower. There's a door there
that gives him access to a stairwell. He climbs up to the control room, a
strange mixture of Iron Age and high-tech. Juanita's waiting there,
surrounded by peacefully slumbering wireheads. She taps a microphone that is
projecting from a communications panel at the end of a flexible gooseneck -
the same mike that the en was speaking into.
"Live to the Raft," she says. "Go for it."
Hiro puts his computer into speakerphone mode and stands up next to the
microphone. "Librarian, read it back," he says. And a string of syllables
pours out of the speaker.
In the middle of it, Hiro glances up at Juanita. She's standing in the
far comer of the room with her fingers stuck in her ears.
Down at the base of the stairs, a wirehead begins to talk. Deep down
inside the Enterprise, there's more talking going on. And none of it makes
any sense. It's just a lot of babbling.
There's an external catwalk on the control tower. Hiro goes out there
and listens to the Raft. From all around them comes a dim roar, not of waves
or wind, but of a million unchained human voices speaking in a confusion of
tongues.
Juanita comes out to listen, too. Hiro sees a trickle of red under her
ear.
"You're bleeding," he says.
"I know. A little bit of primitive surgery," she says. Her voice is
strained and uncomfortable. "I've been carrying around a scalpel blade for
cases like this."
"What did you do?"
"Slid it up under the base of the antenna and cut the wire that goes
into my skull," she says.
"When did you do that?"
"While you were down on the flight deck."
"Why?"
"Why do you think?" she says. "So I wouldn't be exposed to the nam-shub
of Enki. I'm a neurolinguistic hacker now, Hiro. I went through hell to
obtain this knowledge. It's a part of me. Don't expect me to submit to a
lobotomy."
"If we get out of this, will you be my girl?"
"Naturally," she says. "Now let's get out of it."
"I was just doing my job, man," she says. "This Enki dude wanted to get
a message to Hiro, and I delivered it."
"Shut up," Rife says. He doesn't say it like he's pissed. He just wants
her to be quiet. Because what she did doesn't make any difference now that
all those wireheads have piled on top of Hiro.
Y.T. looks out the window. They are buzzing across the Pacific, keeping
pretty low down so that the water skims quickly beneath them. She doesn't
know how fast they're going, but it looks to be pretty damn fast. She always
thought the ocean was supposed to be blue, but in fact it's the most boring
gray color she's ever seen. And there's miles and miles of it.
After a few minutes, another chopper catches up with them and begins
flying alongside, pretty close, in formation. It's the RARE chopper, the one
full of medics.
Through its cabin window, she can see Raven sitting in one of the
seats. At first she thinks he's still unconscious because he's kind of
hunched over, not moving.
Then he lifts his head and she sees that he's goggled in to the
Metaverse. He reaches up with one hand and pulls the goggles up onto his
forehead for a moment, squints out the window, and sees her watching him.
Their eyes meet and her heart starts flopping around weakly, like a bunny in
a Ziploc bag. He grins and waves.
Y.T. sits back in her seat and pulls the shade down over the window.