Snow Crash Part 39

"Hiro? What the f.u.c.k'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 skysc.r.a.per 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 r.e.t.a.r.ded. 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 ca.n.a.l, 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 b.o.o.by trap, and keeps going.

The radar picks out three fuzzy pink individuals holding Chinese AK47s 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 h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.ses back underneath the b.o.o.by-trap wire and starts exploring another narrow channel that he pa.s.sed 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 Att.i.tude.

"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 h.e.l.l 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: - HELP - 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 spa.r.s.e 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 perks 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 ant.i.torpedo 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 pushes 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 hunks 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 Pa.s.sAGEWAY. 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 s.h.i.tless.

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 f.u.c.king 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 fibergla.s.s 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 racc.o.o.n 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 p.i.s.ses her off.

"Well, don't you look like a forlorn lil thang!" he says. "s.h.i.t, 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 f.u.c.king 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 s.h.i.t," 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 f.u.c.king 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n environment."