Someone"s in the parking lot. A Kourier, cruising in off the highway, just kind of chilling out and taking it real easy.
"Hey!" she screams. She reaches up and punches the lapel switch on her coverall, turning it bright blue and orange. "Hey! I"m a Kourier! My name"s Y.T.! These maniac sc.u.m guys kidnapped me!"
"Wow," the Kourier says. "What a drag." Then he asks her something. But she can"t hear it because the helicopter is whirling up its blades.
"They"re taking me to LAX!" she screams at the top of her lungs. Then Rife slams her into the chopper face first. The chopper lifts off, tracked precisely by an audience of antennas on the roof of Mr. Lee"s Greater Hong Kong.
In the parking lot, the Kourier watches the chopper taking off. It"s really cool to watch, and it has a lot of b.u.mping guns on it.
But those dudes inside of the chopper were harshing that chick major.
The Kourier pulls his personal phone out of its holster, jacks into RadiKS Central Command, and punches a big red b.u.t.ton. He calls a Code.
Twenty-five hundred Kouriers are ma.s.sed on the reinforced-concrete banks of the L.A. River. Down in the bottom trench of the river, Vitaly Chern.o.byl and the Meltdowns are just hitting the really good part of their next major hit single, "Control Rod Jam." A number of the Kouriers are taking advantage of this sound track to style up and down the banks of the river, only Vitaly, live, can get their adrenaline pumping hard enough to enable them to skate a sharp bank at eighty miles per hour plus without doing a wilson into the crete.
And then the dark ma.s.s of Meltdown fans turns into a gyrating, orange-red galaxy as twenty-five hundred new stars appear. It"s a mind-blowing sight, and at first they think it"s a new visual effect put together by Vitaly and his imageers. It is like a ma.s.s flicking of Bics, except brighter and more organized; each Kourier looks down on his or her belt to see that a red light is flashing on their personal telephone. Looks like some poor skater called in a Code.
In a Mr. Lee"s Greater Hong Kong franchise on the outskirts of Phoenix, Rat Thing number B-782 comes awake.
Fido is waking up because the dogs are barking tonight.
There is always barking. Much of the barking is very far away. Fido knows that faraway barks are not as important as close barks, and so he often sleeps through these.
But sometimes a faraway bark will carry a special sound that makes Fido excited, and he can"t help waking up.
He is hearing one of those barks right now. It comes from far away but it is urgent. Some nice doggie somewhere is very upset. He is so upset that his barking has spread to all the other doggies in the pack.
Fido listens to the bark. He gets excited, too. Some bad strangers have just been very close to a nice doggie"s yard. They were in a flying thing. They had lots of guns.
Fido doesn"t like guns very much. A stranger with a gun shot him once and made him hurt. Then the nice girl came and helped him.
These are extremely bad strangers. Any nice doggie in his right mind would want to hurt them and make them go away. As Fido listens to the bark, he sees what they look like and hears the way they sound. If any of these very bad strangers ever come into his yard, he will be extremely upset.
Then Fido notices that the bad strangers are chasing someone. He can tell they are hurting her by the way her voice sounds and the way she moves.
The bad strangers are hurting the nice girl who loves him!
Fido gets more angry than he has ever been, even more angry than when a bad man shot him long ago.
His job is to keep bad strangers out of his yard. He does not do anything else. But it"s even more important to protect the nice girl who loves him. That is more important than anything. And nothing can stop him. Not even the fence.
The fence is very tall. But he can remember a long time ago when he used to jump over things that were taller than his head.
Fido comes out of his doggie house, curls his long legs beneath him, and jumps over the fence around his yard before he has remembered that he is not capable of jumping over it. This contradiction is lost on him, though; as a dog, introspection is not one of his strong points.
The bark is spreading to another place far away. All the nice doggies who live in this faraway place are being warned to look out for the very bad strangers and the girl who loves Fido, because they are going to that place. Fido sees the place in his mind. It is big and wide and fiat and open, like a nice field for chasing Frisbees. It has lots of big flying things. Around the edges are a couple of yards where nice doggies live.
Fido can hear those nice doggies barking in reply. He knows where they are. Far away. But you can get there by streets. Fido knows a whole lot of different streets. He just runs down streets, and he knows where he is and where he"s going.
At first, the only trace that B-782 leaves of his pa.s.sage is a dancing trail of sparks down the center of the franchise ghetto. But once he makes his way out onto a long straight piece of highway, he begins to leave further evidence: a spume of shattered blue safety gla.s.s spraying outward in parallel vanes from all four lanes of traffic as the windows and the windshields of the cars blow out of their frames, spraying into the air like rooster tails behind a speedboat.
As part of Mr. Lee"s good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido"s in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy. Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.
"Raven," Hiro says, "let me tell you a story before I kill you."
"I"ll listen," Raven says. "It"s a long ride."
All vehicles in the Metaverse have voice phones on them. Hiro simply called home to the Librarian and had him look up Raven"s number. They are riding in lockstep across the black surface of the imaginary planet now, though Hiro is gaining on Raven, meter by meter.
"My dad was in the Army in World War Two. Lied about his age to get in. They put him in the Pacific doing scut work. Anyway, he got captured by the Nipponese."
"So?"
"So they took him back to Nippon. Put him in a prison camp. There were a lot of Americans there, plus some Brits and some Chinese. And a couple of guys that they couldn"t place. They looked like Indians. Spoke a little English. But they spoke Russian even better."
"They were Aleuts," Raven says. "American citizens. But no one had ever heard of them. Most people don"t know that the j.a.panese conquered American territory during the war-several islands at the end of the Aleutian chain. Inhabited. By my people. They took the two most important Aleuts and put them in prison camps in j.a.pan. One of them was the mayor of Attu-the most important civil authority. The other was even more important, to us. He was the chief harpooneer of the Aleut nation."
Hiro says, "The mayor got sick and died. He didn"t have any immunities. But the harpooneer was one tough son of a b.i.t.c.h. He got sick a few times, but he survived. Went out to work in the fields along with the rest of the prisoners, growing food for the war effort. Worked in the kitchen, preparing slop for the prisoners and the guards. He kept to himself a lot. Everyone avoided him because he smelled terrible. His bed stank up the barracks."
"He was cooking up aconite whale poison from mushrooms and other substances that he found in the fields and secreted in his clothing," Raven says.
"Besides," Hiro continues, "they were p.i.s.sed at him because he broke out a windowpane in the barracks once, and it let cold air in for the rest of the winter. Anyway, one day, after lunch, all of the guards became terribly sick."
"Whale poison in the fish stew," Raven says.
"The prisoners were already out working in the fields, and when the guards began to get sick, they began to march them all back in toward the barracks, because they couldn"t keep watch over them when they were doubled over with stomach cramps. And this late in the war, it wasn"t easy to bring in reinforcements. My father was last in the line of prisoners. And this Aleut guy was right in front of him."
Raven says, "As the prisoners were crossing an irrigation ditch, the Aleut dove into the water and disappeared."
"My father didn"t know what to do," Hiro says, "until he heard a grunt from the guard who was bringing up the rear. He turned around and saw that this guard had a bamboo spear stuck all the way through his body. Just came out of nowhere. And he still couldn"t see the Aleut. Then another guard went down with his throat slit, and there was the Aleut, winding up and throwing another spear that brought down yet another guard."
"He had been making harpoons and hiding them under the water in the irrigation ditches," Raven says.
"Then my father realized," Hiro continues, "that he was doomed. Because no matter what he said to the guards, they would consider him to have been a part of an escape attempt, and they would bring a sword and lop his head off. So, figuring that he might as well bring down a few of the enemy before they got to him, he took the gun from the first guard who had been hit, jumped down into the cover of the irrigation ditch, and shot another couple of guards who were coming over to investigate."
Raven says, "The Aleut ran for the border fence, which was a flimsy bamboo thing. There was supposedly a minefield there, but he ran straight across it with no trouble. Either he was lucky or else the mines-if there were any-were few and far between."
"They didn"t bother to have strict perimeter security," Hiro says, "because j.a.pan is an island-so even if someone escaped, where could they run to?"
"An Aleut could do it, though," Raven says. "He could go to the nearest coastline and build himself a kayak. He could take to the open water and make his way up the coastline of j.a.pan, then surf from one island to the next, all the way back to the Aleutians."
"Right," Hiro says, "which is the only part of the story that I never understood-until I saw you on the open water, outrunning a speedboat in your kayak. Then I put it all together. Your father wasn"t crazy. He had a perfectly good plan."
"Yes. But your father didn"t understand it."
"My father ran in your father"s footsteps across the minefield. They were free-in Nippon. Your father started heading downhill, toward the ocean. My father wanted to head uphill, into the mountains, figuring that they could maybe live in an isolated place until the war was over."
"It was a stupid idea," Raven says. "j.a.pan is heavily populated. There is no place where they could have gone unnoticed."
"My father didn"t even know what a kayak was."
"Ignorance is no excuse," Raven says.
"Their arguing-the same argument we"re having now-was their downfall. The Nipponese caught up with them on a road just outside of Nagasaki. They didn"t even have handcuffs, so they tied their hands behind their backs with bootlaces and made them kneel on the road, facing each other. Then the lieutenant took his sword out of its sheath. It was an ancient sword, the lieutenant was from a proud family of samurai, and the only reason he was on this home-front detail was that he had nearly had one leg blown off earlier in the war. He raised the sword up above my father"s head."
"It made a high ringing sound in the air," Raven says, "that hurt my father"s ears."
"But it never came down."
"My father saw your father"s skeleton kneeling in front of him. That was the last thing he ever saw."
"My father was facing away from Nagasaki," Hiro says. "He was temporarily blinded by the light, he fell forward and pressed his face into the ground to get the terrible light out of his eyes. Then everything was back to normal again."
"Except my father was blind," Raven says. "He could only listen to your father fighting the lieutenant."
"It was a half-blind, one-legged samurai with a katana versus a big strong healthy man with his arms tied behind his back," Hiro says. "A pretty interesting fight. A pretty fair one. My father won. And that was the end of the war. The occupation troops got there a couple of weeks later. My father went home and kicked around for a while and finally had a kid during the seventies. So did yours."
Raven says, "Ainchitka, 1972. My father got nuked twice by you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."
"I understand the depth of your feelings," Hiro says. "But don"t you think you"ve had enough revenge?"
"There"s no such thing as enough," Raven says.
Hiro guns his motorcycle forward and closes on Raven, swinging his katana. But Raven reaches back-watching him in the rearview mirror-and blocks the blow, he"s carrying a big long knife in one hand. Then Raven cuts his speed down to almost nothing and dives in between a couple of the stanchions. Hiro overshoots him, slows down too much, and gets a glimpse of Raven screaming past him on the other side of the monorail; by the time he"s accelerated and cut through another gap, Raven has already slalomed over to the other side. And so it goes. They run down the length of the Street in an interlacing zigzag pattern, cutting back and forth under the monorail. The game is a simple one. All Raven has to do is make Hiro run into a stanchion. Hiro will come to a stop for a moment. By that time Raven will be gone, out of visual range, and Hiro will have no way to track him.
It"s an easier game for Raven than for Hiro. But Hiro"s better at this kind of thing than Raven is. That makes it a pretty even match. They slalom down the monorail track at speeds from sixty to sixty thousand miles per hour; all around them, low-slung commercial developments and high-tech labs and amus.e.m.e.nt parks sprawl off into the darkness. Downtown is before them, as high and bright as the aurora borealis rising from the black water of the Bering Sea.
The first poon smacks into the belly of the chopper as they are coming in low over the Valley. Y.T. feels it rather than hears it; she knows that sweet impact so well that she can sense it like one of those supersensitive seismo-thingies that detects earthquakes on the other side of the planet. Then half a dozen other poons strike in quick succession, and she has to force herself not to lean over and look out the window. Of course. The chopper"s belly is a solid wall of Soviet steel. It"ll hold poons like glue. If they just keep flying low enough to poon-which they have to, to keep the chopper under the Mafia"s radar.
She can hear the radio crackling up front. "Take it up, Sasha, you"re picking up some parasites."
She looks out the window. The other chopper, the little aluminum corporate number, is flying alongside them, a little bit higher in the air, and all the people inside of it are peering out the windows, watching the pavement underneath them. Except for Raven. Raven is still goggled into the Metaverse. s.h.i.t. The pilot"s pulling the chopper to a higher alt.i.tude.
"Okay, Sasha. You lost "em," the radio says. "But you still got a couple of them poon things hanging off your belly, so make sure you don"t snag "em on anything. The cables are stronger than steel."
That"s all Y.T. needs. She opens the door and jumps out of the chopper. At least that"s how it looks to the people inside. Actually she grabs a handhold on her way down and ends up dangling from the swinging, open door, looking inward toward the belly of the chopper. A couple of poons are stuck to it; thirty feet below, she can see the handles dangling on the ends of their lines, fluttering in the airstream. Looking into the open door she can"t hear Rife but she can see him, sitting there next to the pilot, motioning: Down, take it down!
Which is what she figured. This hostage thing works two ways. She"s no good to Rife unless he"s got her, and she"s in one piece.
The chopper starts losing alt.i.tude again, heading back down toward the twin stripe of loglo that marks out the avenue beneath them. Y.T. gets swinging back and forth on the door a little, finally swings in far enough that she can hook one of the poon cables with her foot. This next bit is going to hurt like h.e.l.l. But the tough fabric of the coverall should prevent her from losing too much skin. And the sight of Tony lunging at her, trying to grab her sleeve, reinforces her own natural tendency not to think about it too hard. She lets go of the chopper"s door with one of her hands, grabs the poon cable, winds it around the outside of her glove a couple of times, then lets go with the other hand.
She was right. It does hurt like h.e.l.l. As she swings down under the belly of the chopper, out of Tony"s grasp, something pops inside her hand-probably one of those d.i.n.ky little bones. But she gets the poon cable wrapped around her body the same way Raven did when he rappeled off the ship with her, and manages a controlled, burning slide down to the end. Down to the handle, that is. She hooks it onto her belt so she can"t fall and then thrashes around for what seems like a whole minute until she"s not tangled up in the cable anymore, just dangling by the waist, twisting around and around between the chopper and the street, out of control. Then she gets the handle in both hands and unhooks it from her belt so she"s hanging by the arms again, which was the whole point of the exercise. As she rotates, she sees the other chopper above her and off to the side, glimpses the faces watching her, knows that all of this is being relayed, over the radio, to Rife.
Sure enough. The chopper cuts to about half its former speed, loses some alt.i.tude.
She clicks another control and reels out the line all the way to the end, dropping twenty feet in one thrill-packed moment. Now she"s flying along, ten or fifteen feet above the highway, doing maybe forty-five miles an hour. The loglo signs shoot past her on either side like meteors. Other than a swarm of Kouriers, traffic is light. The RARE chopper comes thwacking in, dangerously close, and she looks up at it, just for an instant, and sees Raven looking at her through the window. He"s pulled his goggles up on his forehead, just for a second. He"s got a certain look on his face, and she realizes that he"s not p.i.s.sed at her at all. He loves her.
She lets go of the handle and goes into free fall.
At the same time, she jerks the manual release on her cervical collar and goes into full Michelin Man mode as tiny gas cartridges detonate in several strategic locations around her bod. The biggest one goes off like an M-80 at the nape of her neck, unfurling the coverall"s collar into a cylindrical gasbag that shoots straight up and encases her entire head. Other airbags go off around her torso and her pelvis, paying lots of attention to that spinal column. Her joints are already protected by the armorgel.
Which is not to say that it doesn"t hurt when she lands. She can"t see anything because of the airbag around her head, of course. But she feels herself bouncing at least ten times. She skids for a quarter of a mile and apparently caroms off several cars along the way; she can hear their tires squealing. Finally, she goes b.u.t.t first through someone"s windshield and ends up sprawled across their front seat; they veer into a Jersey barrier. The airbag deflates as soon as everything stops moving, and she claws it away from her face.
Her ears are ringing or something. She can"t hear anything. Maybe she busted her eardrums when the airbags went off.
But there"s also the question of the big chopper, which has a talent for making noise. She drags herself out onto the hood of the car, feeling little hunks of safety gla.s.s beneath her carving parallel scratches into the paint job. Rife"s big Soviet chopper is right there, hovering about twenty feet above the avenue, and by the time she sees it, it has already acc.u.mulated a dozen more poons. Her eyes follow the cables down to street level, and she sees Kouriers straining at the lines; this time, they"re not letting go.
Rife gets suspicious, and the chopper gains alt.i.tude, lifting the Kouriers off their planks. But a pa.s.sing double-bottom semi sheds a small army of Kouriers-there must be a hundred of them pooned onto the poor thing-and within a few seconds, all their MagnaPoons are airborne and at least half of them stick to the armor plating on the first try. The chopper lurches downward until all of the Kouriers are on the ground again. Twenty more Kouriers come flying in and nail it; those that can"t, grab onto someone else"s handle and add their weight. The chopper tries several times to rise, but it may as well be tethered to the asphalt by this point.
It starts to come down. The Kouriers fan out away from it so that the chopper comes down in the middle of a radial burst of poon cables.
Tony, the security guy, climbs down out of the open door, moving slowly, high-stepping his way through the web of cables but somehow retaining his balance and his dignity. He walks away from the chopper until he is out from under the rotor blades, then pulls an Uzi out from under his windbreaker and fires a short air burst.
"Get the f.u.c.k away from our chopper!" he is shouting.
The Kouriers, by and large, do. They"re not stupid. And Y.T. is now walking around safe on the pavement, the mission is accomplished, the Code is finished, there"s no reason to ha.s.sle these chopper dudes anymore. They detach their poons from the belly of the chopper and reel in the cables.
Tony looks around and sees Y.T. She"s walking directly toward the chopper. Her sprained body moves awkwardly.
"Get back in the chopper, you lucky b.i.t.c.h!" he says.
Y.T. picks up a loose poon handle that no one has bothered to reel in yet. She hits the b.u.t.ton that turns off the electromagnet and its head drops off the chopper"s armor. She reels it in until about four feet of slack is there between the reel and the head.
"There was this dude named Ahab that I read about," she says, whirling the poon around her head. "He got his poon cable all wrapped up around the thing he was trying to poon. It was a big mistake."
She lets the poon fly. It pa.s.ses up through the plane of the rotor blades, near the Center, and she can see the unbreakable cable start to wind itself around the delicate parts of the rotor"s axle, like a garrote around a ballerina"s neck. Through the chopper"s windshield she can see Sasha reacting, flipping switches frantically, pulling levers, his mouth making a long string of Russian curses. The poon"s handle gets snapped out of her hand, and she sees it get whipped into the center like it"s a black hole.
"I guess he just didn"t know when to let go, like some people," she says. Then she turns around and walks away from the chopper. Behind her, she can hear large pieces of metal going the wrong way, running into one another at high speed. Rife has figured it out a long time ago. He"s already running down the middle of the highway with a submachine gun in one hand, looking for a car to commandeer. Above, the RARE chopper hovers and watches; Rife looks up to it and motions forward with one hand, shouting, "Go to LAX! Go to LAX!"
The chopper makes one last orbit over the scene, watching as Sasha puts the ruined gunship into cold shutdown, watching furious Kouriers overwhelming and disarming Tony and Frank and the President, watching as Rife stands in the middle of the left lane and forces a CosaNostra Pizza car to a stop, forces the driver out. But Raven isn"t watching any of these things. He"s looking out the window at Y.T. And as the chopper finally tilts forward and accelerates into the night, he grins at her and gives her the thumbs up. Y.T. bites her lower lip and flips him the bird. With that, the relationship is over, hopefully for all time.
Y.T. borrows a plank from an awed skater and pushes herself across the street to the nearest Buy "n" Fly and starts trying to call Mom for a ride home.