Snow Crash Part 35

"n.o.body will f.u.c.k 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 quant.i.ty of gasoline.

"Gang warfare, maybe," Eliot theorizes.

"Energy source," Hiro guesses.

"Entertainment," Fisheye says. "They don't have cable on the f.u.c.king Raft."

Before they really plunge into h.e.l.l, 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 f.u.c.k 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-G.o.d 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 f.u.c.king 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 onto the rope that he used to pull himself onboard. The rope is attached to a grappling hook that has caught in the jagged, broken fibergla.s.s 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 motherf.u.c.kers 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 falling overboard. Vic 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 thrusts his 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 c.o.c.ktails," 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 grease-b.a.l.l.s must have been working together.

A Molotov c.o.c.ktail 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 gla.s.s 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 shirt, 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 facefirst 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 greaseb.a.l.l.s, 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 greaseb.a.l.l.s 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 greaseb.a.l.l.s jump off the boat voluntarily.

The yacht is tangled up in a spider's web of shifty 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 greaseb.a.l.l.s 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 c.o.c.ktail-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 compet.i.tive 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 ia 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 bulls.h.i.t work," Raven says. "So I got things in order out there and my att.i.tude 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?"