controlled manner. He put it in a bottle. An informational warfare agent for him to use at his discretion. When it is placed into a computer, it snow-crashes the computer by causing it to infect itself with new viruses. But it is much more devastating when it goes into the mind of a hacker, a person who has an understanding of binary code built into the deep structures of his brain. The binary metavirus will destroy the mind of a hacker." "So Rife can control two kinds of people," Ng says. "He can control Pentecostals by using me written in the mother tongue. And he can control hackers in a much more violent fashion by damaging their brains with binary viruses." "Exactly." "What do you think Rife wants?" Ng says. "He wants to be Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look, it's simple: Once he converts you to his religion, he can control you with me. And he can convert millions of people to his religion because it spreads like a fucking virus - people have no resistance to it because no one is used to thinking about religion, people aren't rational enough to argue about this kind of thing. Basically, anyone who reads the National Enquirer or watches pro wrestling on TV is easy to convert. And with Snow Crash as a promoter, it's even easier to get converts. "Rife's key realization was that there's no difference between modem culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV - which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite - the people who go into the Metaverse, basically - who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages. "That makes us a big stumbling block to Rife's plan. People like L. Bob Rife can't do anything without us hackers. And even if he could convert us, he wouldn't be able to use us, because what we do is creative in nature and can't be duplicated by people running me. But he can threaten us with the blunt instrument of Snow Crash. That, I think, is what happened to Da5id. It may have been an experiment, just to see if Snow Crash worked on a real hacker, and it may have been a warning shot intended to demonstrate Rife's power to the hacker community. The message: If Asherah gets broadcast into the technological priesthood - " "Napalm on wildflowers," Ng says. "As far as I know, there's no way to stop the binary virus. But there's an antidote to Rife's bogus religion. The nam-shub of Enki still exists. He gave a copy to his son Marduk, who passed it on to Hammurabi. Now, Marduk may or may not have been a real person. The point is that Enki went out of his way to leave the impression that he had passed on his nam-shub in some form. In other words, he was planting a message that later generations of hackers were supposed to decode, if Asherah should rise again. "I am fairly certain that the information we need is contained within a clay envelope that was excavated from the ancient Sumerian city of Eridu in southern Iraq ten years ago. Eridu was the seat of Enki; in other words, Enki was the local en of Eridu, and the temple of Eridu contained his me, including the nam-shub that we are looking for." "Who excavated this clay envelope?" "The Eridu dig was sponsored entirely by a religious university in Bayview, Texas." "L. Bob Rife's?" "You got it. He created an archaeology department whose sole function was to dig up the city of Eridu, locate the temple where Enki stored all of his me, and take it all home. L. Bob Rife wanted to reverse-engineer the skills that Enki possessed; by analyzing Enki's me, he wanted to create his very own neurolinguistic hackers, who could write new me that would become the ground rules, the program, for the new society that Rife wants to create." "But among these me is a copy of the nam-shub of Enki," Ng says, "which is dangerous to Rife's plan." "Right. He wanted that tablet, too - not to analyze but to keep to himself, so no one could use it against him." "If you can obtain a copy of this nam-shub," Ng says, "what effect would it have?" "If we could transmit the nam-shub of Enki to all of the en on the Raft, they would relay it to all of the Raft people. It would jam their mother-tongue neurons and prevent Rife from programming them with new me," Hiro says. "But we really need to get this done before the Raft breaks up - before the Refus all come ashore. Rife talks to his en through a central transmitter on the Enterprise, which I take to be a fairly short-range, line-of-sight type of thing. Pretty soon he'll use this system to distribute a big me that will cause all the Refus to come ashore as a unified army with coordinated marching orders. In other words, the Raft will break up, and after that it won't be possible to reach all of these people anymore with a single transmission. So we have to do it as soon as possible." "Mr. Rife will be most unhappy," Ng predicts. "He will try to retaliate by unleashing Snow Crash against the technological priesthood." "I know that," Hiro says "but I can only worry about one thing at a time. I could use a little help here." "Easier said than done," Ng says. "To reach the Core, one must fly over the Raft or drive a small boat through its midst. Rife has a million people there with rifles and missile launchers. Even high-tech weapons systems cannot defeat organized small-arms fire on a massive scale." "Get some choppers out to this vicinity, then," Hiro says. "Something. Anything. If I can get my hands on the nam-shub of Enki and infect everyone on the Raft with it, then you can approach safely." "We'll see what we can come up with," Uncle Enzo says. "Fine," Hiro says. "Now, what about Reason?" Ng mumbles something and a card appears in his hand. "Here's a new version of the system software," he says. "It should be a little less buggy." "A little less?" "No piece of software is ever bug free," Ng says. Uncle Enzo says, "I guess there's a little bit of Asherah in all of us." 58 Hiro finds his own way out and takes the elevator all the way back down to the Street. When he exits the neon skyscraper, a black-and-white girl is sitting on his motorcycle, messing with the controls. "Where are you?" she says. "I'm on the Raft, too. Hey, we just made twenty-five million dollars." He is sure that just this one time, Y.T. is going to be impressed by something that he says. But she's not. "That'll buy me a really happening funeral when they mail me home in a piece of Tupperware," she says. "Why would that happen?" "I'm in trouble," she admits - for the first time in her life. "I think my boyfriend is going to kill me." "Who's your boyfriend?" "Raven." If avatars could turn pale and woozy and have to sit down on the sidewalk, Hiro's would. "Now I know why he has POOR IMPULSE CONTROL tattooed across his forehead." "This is great. I was hoping to get a little cooperation or at least maybe some advice," she says. "If you think he's going to kill you, you're wrong, because if you were right, you'd be dead," Hiro says. "Depends on your assumptions," she says. She goes on to tell him a highly entertaining story about a dentata. "I'm going to try to help you," Hiro says, "but I'm not necessarily the safest guy on the Raft to hang out with, either." "Did you hook up with your girlfriend yet?" "No. But I have high hopes for that. Assuming I can stay alive." "High hopes for what?" "Our relationship." "Why?" she asks. "What's changed between then and now?" This is one of these utterly simple and obvious questions that is irritating because Hiro's not sure of the answer. "Well, I think I figured out what she was doing - why she came here." "So?" Another simple and obvious question. "So, I feel like I understand her now." "You do?" "Yeah, well, sort of." "And is that supposed to be a good thing?" "Well, sure." "Hiro, you are such a geek. She's a woman, you're a dude. You're not supposed to understand her. That's not what she's after." "Well, what is she after, do you suppose - keeping in mind that you've 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." 59 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 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. 60 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