"These ombwas," Fisheye says, "still got cherries up in there!" The whole deck erupts in rude, screaming laughter. One of the pirates scrambles up to balance on the railing, gyrates one fist in the air, and hollers: "ba ka na zu ma lay ga no mala aria ma na p0 no a ab zu..." By that point all the other pirates have stopped laughing, gotten serious looks on their faces, and joined in, bellowing their own private streams of babble, rattling the air with a profound hoa.r.s.e ululation.
Hiro"s feet go out from under him as the raft moves suddenly; he can see Eliot falling down next to him.
He looks up at Bruce Lee"s ship and flinches involuntarily as he sees what looks like a dark wave cresting over the rail, washing over the row of standing pirates, starting at the stern of the trawler and working its way forward. But this is just some kind of optical illusion. It is not really a wave at all. Suddenly, they are fifty feet away from the trawler, not twenty feet. As the laughter on the railing dies away, Hiro hears a new sound: a low whirring noise from the direction of Fisheye, and from the atmosphere around them, a tearing, hissing noise, like the sound just before a thunderbolt strikes, like the sound of sheets being ripped in half.
Looking back at Bruce Lee"s trawler, he sees that the dark wavelike phenomenon was a wave of blood, as though someone hosed down the deck with a giant severed aorta. But it didn"t come from outside. It erupted from the pirates" bodies, one at a time, moving from the stern to the bow. The deck of Bruce Lee"s ship is now utterly quiet and motionless except for blood and gelatinized internal organs sliding down the rusted steel and plopping softly into the water.
Fisheye is up on his knees now and has torn away the canopy and s.p.a.ce blanket that have covered him until this point. In one hand he is holding a long device a couple of inches in diameter, which is the source of the whirring noise. It is a circular bundle of parallel tubes about pencil-sized and a couple of feet long, like a miniaturized Gatling gun. It whirs around so quickly that the individual tubes are difficult to make out; when it is operating, it is in fact ghostly and transparent because of this rapid motion, a glittering, translucent cloud jutting out of Fisheye"s arm. The device is attached to a wrist-thick bundle of black tubes and cables that snake down into the large suitcase, which lies open on the bottom of the raft. The suitcase has a built-in color monitor screen with graphics giving information about the status of this weapons system: how much ammo is left, the status of various subsystems. Hiro just gets a quick glimpse at it before all of the ammunition on board Bruce Lee"s ship begins to explode.
"See, I told you they"d listen to Reason," Fisheye says, shutting down the whirling gun.
Now Hiro sees a nameplate tacked onto the control panel.
REASON.
version 1.0B7 version 1.0B7 Gatling-type 3mm hypervelocity railgun system Ng Security Industries, Inc.
PRERELEASE VERSION-NOT FOR FIELD USE DO NOT TEST IN A POPULATED AREA.
- ULTIMA RATIO REGUM -.
"f.u.c.king recoil pushed us halfway to China," Fisheye says appreciatively.
"Did you do that? What just happened?" Eliot says.
"I did it. With Reason. See, it fires these teeny little metal splinters. They go real fast-more energy than a rifle bullet. Depleted uranium."
The spinning barrels have now slowed almost to a stop. It looks like there are about two dozen of them.
"I thought you hated machine guns," Hiro says.
"I hate this f.u.c.king raft even more. Let"s go get ourselves something that goes, you know. Something with a motor on it."
Because of the fires and small explosions going off on Bruce Lee"s pirate ship, it takes them a minute to realize that several people are still alive there, still shooting at them. When Fisheye becomes aware of this, he pulls the trigger again, the barrels whirl themselves up into a transparent cylinder, and the tearing, hissing noise begins again. As he waves the gun back and forth, hosing the target down with a hypersonic shower of depleted uranium, Bruce Lee"s entire ship seems to sparkle and glitter, as though Tinkerbell was flying back and forth from stem to stern, sprinkling nuclear fairy dust over it.
Bruce Lee"s smaller yacht makes the mistake of coming around to see what"s going on. Fisheye turns toward it for a moment and its high, protruding bridge slides off into the water.
Major structural elements of the trawler are losing their integrity. Enormous popping and wrenching noises are coming from inside as big pieces of Swiss-cheesed metal give way, and the superstructure is slowly collapsing down into the hull like a botched souffle. When Fisheye notes this, he ceases fire.
"Cut it out, boss," Vic says.
"I"m melting!" Fisheye crows.
"We could have used that trawler, a.s.shole," Eliot says, vindictively yanking his pants back on.
"I didn"t mean to blow it all up. I guess the little bullets just go through everything."
"Sharp thinking, Fisheye," Hiro says.
"Well, I"m sorry I took a little action to save our a.s.ses. Come on, let"s go get one of them little boats before they all burn."
They paddle in the direction of the decapitated yacht. By the time they reach it, Bruce Lee"s trawler is just a listing, empty steel hull with flames and smoke pouring out of it, spiced by the occasional explosion.
The remaining portion of the yacht has many, many tiny little holes in it, and glitters with exploded fragments of fibergla.s.s: a million tiny little gla.s.s fibers about a millimeter long. The skipper and a crew member, or rather the stew that they turned into when the bridge was. .h.i.t by Reason, slid off into the water along with the rest of the debris, leaving behind no evidence of their having been there except for a pair of long parallel streaks trailing off into the water. But there is a Filipino boy down in the galley, the galley so low, unhurt and only dimly aware of what happened.
A number of electrical cables have been sawn in half. Eliot digs up a toolbox from belowdecks and spends the next twelve hours patching things together to the point where the engine can be started and the yacht can be steered. Hiro, who has a rudimentary knowledge of electrical stuff, acts as gofer and limp-d.i.c.ked adviser.
"Did you hear the way the pirates were talking, before Fisheye opened up on them?" Hiro asks Eliot while they are working.
"You mean in pidgin?"
"No. At the very end. The babbling."
"Yeah. That"s a Raft thing."
"It is?"
"Yeah. One guy will start in and the rest will follow. I think it"s just a fad."
"But it"s common on the Raft?"
"Yeah. They all speak different languages, you know, all those different ethnic groups. It"s like the f.u.c.king Tower of Babel. I think when they make that sound-when they babble at each other-they"re just imitating what all the other groups sound like."
The Filipino kid starts making them some food. Vic and Fisheye sit down in the main cabin belowdecks, eating, going through Chinese magazines, looking at pictures of Asian chicks, and occasionally looking at nautical charts. When Eliot gets the electrical system back up and running, Hiro plugs his personal computer in, to recharge its batteries.
By the time the yacht is up and running again, it"s dark. To the southwest, a fluctuating column of light is playing back and forth against the low overhanging cloud layer.
"Is that the Raft over there?" Fisheye says, pointing to the light, as all hands converge on Eliot"s makeshift control center.
"It is," Eliot says. "They light it up at night so that the fishing boats can find their way back to it."
"How far away do you think it is?" Fisheye says.
Eliot shrugs. "Twenty miles."
"And how far to land?"
"I have no idea. Bruce Lee"s skipper probably knew, but he"s been pureed along with everyone else."
"You"re right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on "whip" or "chop.""
"The Raft usually stays at least a hundred miles offsh.o.r.e," Hiro says, "to reduce the danger of snags."
"How we doing on gas?"
"I dipped the tank," Eliot says, "and it looks like we"re not doing so well, to tell you the truth."
"What does that mean, not doing so well?"
"It"s not always easy to read the level when you"re out to sea," Eliot says. "And I don"t know how efficient these engines are. But if we"re really eighty or a hundred miles offsh.o.r.e, we might not make it."
"So we go to the Raft," Fisheye says. "We go to the Raft and persuade someone it"s in his best interests to give us some fuel. Then, back to the mainland." No one really believes it"s going to happen this way, least of all Fisheye. "And," he continues, "while we"re there-on the Raft-after we get the fuel and before we go home-some other stuff might happen, too, you know. Life"s unpredictable."
"If you have something in mind, why don"t you just spit it out?" Hiro says.
"Okay. Policy decision. The hostage tactic failed. So we go for an extraction."
"Extraction of what?"
"Of Y.T."
"I go along with that," Hiro says, "but I have another person I want to extract also, as long as we"re extracting."
"Who?"
"Juanita. Come on, you said yourself she was a nice girl."
"If she"s on the Raft, maybe she"s not so nice," Fisheye says.
"I want to extract her anyway. We"re all in this together, right? We"re all part of Lagos"s gang."
"Bruce Lee has some people there," Eliot says.
"Correction. Had."
"But what I"m saying is, they"re going to be p.i.s.sed."
"You think they"re going to be p.i.s.sed. I think they"re going to be scared s.h.i.tless," Fisheye says. "Now drive the boat, Eliot. Come on, I"m sick of all this f.u.c.king water."
Raven ushers Y.T. onto a flat-a.s.sed boat with a canopy on top. It is some kind of a riverboat that has been turned into a Vietnamese/American/Thai/Chinese business establishment, kind of a bar/restaurant/wh.o.r.ehouse/gambling den. It has a few big rooms, where lots of people are letting it all hang out, and a lot of little tiny steel-walled rooms down below where G.o.d knows what kind of activity is taking place.
The main room is packed with lowlife revelry. The smoke ties her bronchial pa.s.sages into granny knots. The place is equipped with a shattering Third World sound system: pure distortion echoing off painted steel walls at three hundred decibels. A television set bolted onto one wall is showing foreign cartoons, done up in a two-color scheme of faded magenta and lime green, in which a ghoulish wolf, kind of like Wile E. Coyote with rabies, gets repeatedly executed in ways more violent than even Warner Bros. could think up. It"s a snuff cartoon. The soundtrack is either turned off completely or else overwhelmed by the screeching melody coming out of the speakers. A bunch of erotic dancers are performing at one end of the room.
It"s impossibly crowded, they"ll never get a place to sit. But shortly after Raven comes into the room, half a dozen guys in the corner suddenly stand bolt upright and scatter from a table, s.n.a.t.c.hing up their cigarettes and drinks almost as an afterthought. Raven pushes Y.T. through the room ahead of him, like she"s a figurehead on his kayak, and everywhere they go, people are shoved out of her way by Raven"s almost palpable personal force field.
Raven bends down and looks under the table, picks a chair up off the floor and looks at the underside-you can never be too careful about those chair bombs-sets it down, pushed all the way back into the corner where two steel walls meet, and sits down. He gestures for Y.T. to do the same, and she does, her back to the action. From here, she can see Raven"s face, illuminated mostly by occasional stabs of light filtering through the crowd from the mirrored ball over the erotic dancers, and by the generalized green-and-magenta haze coming out of the TV set, spiked by the occasional flash when the cartoon wolf makes the mistake of swallowing another hydrogen bomb, or has the misfortune to get hosed down again with a flamethrower.
A waiter"s there immediately. Raven commences hollering across the table at her. She can"t hear him, but maybe he"s asking her what she wants.
"A cheeseburger!" she screams back at him.
Raven laughs, shakes his head. "You see any cows around here?"
"Anything but fish!" she screams.
Raven talks to the waiter for a while in some variant of Taxilinga.
"I ordered you some squid," he hollers. "That"s a mollusk."
Great. Raven, the last of the true gentlemen.
There is a shouted conversation lasting the better part of an hour. Raven does most of the shouting. Y.T. just listens, smiles, and nods. Hopefully, he"s not saying something like "I enjoy really violent, abusive s.e.x acts."
She doesn"t think he"s talking about that at all. He"s talking politics. She hears a fragmented history of the Aleuts, a burst here and a burst here, when Raven isn"t poking squid into his mouth and the music isn"t too loud: "Russians f.u.c.ked us over...smallpox had a ninety-percent mortality rate... worked as slaves in their sealing industry...Seward"s folly... f.u.c.king Nipponese took away my father in forty-two, put him in a POW camp for the duration...
"Then the Americans f.u.c.king nuked us. Can you believe that s.h.i.t?" Raven says. There"s a lull in the music; suddenly she can hear complete sentences. "The Nipponese say they"re the only people who were ever nuked. But every nuclear power has one aboriginal group whose territory they nuked to test their weapons. In America, they nuked the Aleutians. Amchitka. My father," Raven says, grinning proudly, "was nuked twice: once at Nagasaki, when he was blinded, and then again in 1972, when the Americans nuked our homeland."
Great, Y.T. thinks. She"s got a new boyfriend and he"s a mutant. Explains one or two things.
"I was born a few months later," Raven continues, by way of totally hammering that point home.
"How did you get hooked up with these Orthos?"
"I got away from our traditions and ended up living in Soldotna, working on oil rigs," Raven says, like Y.T. is supposed to just know where Soldotna is. "That was when I did my drinking and got this," he says, pointing to his tattoo. "That"s also when I learned how to make love to a woman-which is the only thing I do better than harpooning."
Y.T. can"t help but think that f.u.c.king and harpooning are closely related activities in Raven"s mind. But as crude as the man is, she can"t get around the fact that he is making her uncomfortably h.o.r.n.y.
"I used to work fishing boats too, to make a little extra money. We would come back from a forty-eight-hour halibut opening-this was back in the old days when they had fishing regulations-and we"d put on our survival suits, stick beers into the pockets, and jump into the water and just float around drinking all night long. And one time we were doing this and I drank until I pa.s.sed out. And when I woke up, it was the next day, or maybe a couple of days later, I don"t know. And I was floating in my survival suit out in the middle of the Cook Inlet, all alone. The other guys on my fishing boat had forgotten about me."
Conveniently enough, Y.T. thinks. "Anyway, I floated for a couple of days. Got real thirsty. Ended up washing ash.o.r.e on Kodiak Island. By this time, I was real sick with the DTs and everything else. But I washed up near a Russian Orthodox church and they found me, took me in, and straightened me out. And that was when I saw that the Western, American lifestyle had come this close to killing me."
Here comes the sermon.
"And I saw that we can only live through faith, living a simple lifestyle. No booze. No television. None of that stuff."
"So what are we doing in this place?"
He shrugs. "This is an example of the bad places I used to hang out. But if you"re going to get decent food on the Raft, you have to come to a place like this."
A waiter approaches the table. His eyes are big, his movements tentative. He"s not coming to take an order; he"s coming to deliver bad news.
"Sir, you are wanted on the radio. I"m sorry."
"Who is it?" Raven says.
The waiter just looks around him like he can"t even speak the name in public. "It"s very important," he says.
Raven heaves a big sigh, grabs one last piece of fish and pokes it into his mouth. He stands up, and before Y.T. can react, gives her a kiss on the cheek. "Honey, I got a job to do, or something. Just wait right here for me, okay?"
"Here?"