48

There are four men in the life raft: Hiro Protagonist, self-employed stringer for the Central Intelligence Corporation, whose practice used to be limited to so-called "dry" operations, meaning that he sat around and soaked up information and then later spat it back into the Library, the CIC database, without ever actually doing anything. Now his practice has become formidably wet. Hiro is armed with two swords and a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, known colloquially as a nine, with two ammunition clips, each carrying eleven rounds.

Vic, unspecified last name. If there was still such a thing as income tax, then every year when Vic filled out his 1040 form he would put down, as his occupation, "sniper." In classic sniper style, Vic is reticent, unobtrusive. He is armed with a long, large-caliber rifle with a bulky mechanism mounted on its top, where a telescopic sight might be found if Vic were not at the leading edge of his profession. The exact nature of this device is not obvious, but Hiro presumes that it is an exquisitely precise sensor package with fine crosshairs superimposed on the middle. Vic may safely be presumed to be carrying additional small concealed weapons.

Eliot Chung. Eliot used to be the skipper of a boat called the Kowloon. At the moment, he is between jobs. Eliot grew up in Watts, and when he speaks English, he sounds like a black guy. Genetically speaking, he is entirely Chinese. He is fluent in both black and white English as well as Cantonese, Taxilinga, and some Vietnamese, Spanish, and Mandarin. Eliot is armed with a .44 Magnum revolver, which he carried on board the Kowloon "just for the halibut," i.e., he used it execute halibut before passengers hauled them on board. Halibut grow very large and can thrash so violently that they can easily kill the people who hook them; hence it is prudent to fire a number of shells through their heads before taking them on board. This is the only reason Eliot carries a weapon; the other defensive needs of the Kowloon were seen to by crew members who were specialists in that kind of thing.

"Fisheye." This is the man with the glass eye. He will only identify himself by his nickname. He is armed with a large, fat black suitcase.

The suitcase is massively constructed, with built-in wheels, and weighs somewhere between three hundred pounds and a metric ton, as Hiro discovers when he tries to move it. Its weight turns the normally flat bottom of the life raft into a puckered cone. The suitcase has a noteworthy attachment: a flexible three-inch-thick cable or hose or something, a couple of meters long, that emerges from one comer, runs up the sloping floor of the life raft, over the edge, and trails in the water. At the end of this mysterious tentacle is a hunk of metal about the size of a wastebasket, but so finely sculpted into so many narrow fins and vanes that it appears to have a surface area the size of Delaware. Hiro only saw this thing out of the water for a few chaotic moments, when it was being transferred into the life raft. At that time it was glowing red hot. Since then, it has lurked below the surface, light gray, impossible to see clearly because the water around it is forever churning in a full, rolling boil. Fist-sized bubbles of steam coalesce amid its fractal tracery of hot vanes and pummel the surface of the ocean, ceaselessly, all day and all night. The powerless life raft, sloshing around the North Pacific, emits a vast, spreading plume of steam like that of an Iron Horse chugging full blast over the Continental Divide. Neither Hiro nor Eliot ever mentions, or even notices, the by-now-obvious fact that Fisheye is traveling with a small, self-contained nuclear power source -- almost certainly radiothermal isotopes like the ones that power the Rat Thing. As long as Fisheye refuses to notice this fact, it would be rude for them to bring it up.

All of the participants are clad in bright orange padded suits that cover their entire bodies. They are the North Pacific version of life vests. They are bulky and awkward, but Eliot Chung likes to say that in northern waters, the only thing a life vest does is make your corpse float.

The lifeboat is an inflatable raft about ten feet long that does not come equipped with a motor. It has a tentlike, waterproof canopy that they can zip up all the way around, turning it into a sealed capsule so that the water stays out even in the most violent weather.

For a couple of days, a powerful chill wind coming down out off the mountains drives them out of Oregon, out toward the open water. Eliot explains, cheerfully, that this lifeboat was invented back in the old days, when they had navies and coast guards that would come and rescue stranded travelers. All you had to do was float and be orange. Fisheye has a walkie-talkie, but it is a short-range device. And Hiro's computer is capable of jacking into the net, but in this regard it functions much like a cellular telephone. It doesn't work out in the middle of nowhere.

When the weather is extremely rainy, they sit under the canopy. When it's less rainy, they sit above it. They all have ways of passing the time.

Hiro dicks around with his computer, naturally. Being stranded on a life raft in the Pacific is a perfect venue for a hacker.

Vic reads and rereads a soaked paperback novel that he had in the pocket of his MAFIA windbreaker when the Kowloon got blown out from under them. These days of waiting are much easier for him. As a professional sniper, he knows how to kill time.

Eliot looks at things with his binoculars, even though there is very little to look at. He spends a lot of time messing around with the raft, fretting about it in the way that boat captains do. And he does a lot of fishing. They have plenty of stored food on the raft, but the occasional fresh halibut and salmon are nice to eat.

Fisheye has taken what appears to be an instruction manual from the heavy black suitcase. It is a miniature three-ring binder with pages of laser-printed text. The binder is just a cheap unmarked one bought from a stationery store. In these respects, it is perfectly familiar to Hiro: it bears the earmarks of a high-tech product that is still under development. All technical devices require documentation of a sort, but this stuff can only be written by the techies who are doing the actual product development, and they absolutely hate it, always put the dox question off to the very last minute. Then they type up some material on a word processor, run it off on the laser printer, send the departmental secretary out for a cheap binder, and that's that.

But this only occupies Fisheye for a little while. He spends the rest of the time just staring off at the horizon, as though he's expecting Sicily to heave into view. It doesn't. He is despondent over the failure of his mission, and spends a lot of time mumbling under his breath, trying to find a way to salvage it.

"If you don't mind my asking," Hiro says, "what was your mission anyway?"

Fisheye thinks this one over for a while. "Well it depends on how you look at it. Nominally, my objective is to get a fifteen-year-old girl back from these assholes. So my tactic was to take a bunch of their bigwigs hostage, then arrange a trade."

"Who's this fifteen-year-old girl?"

Fisheye shrugs. "You know her. It's Y.T."

"Is that really your whole objective?"

"The important thing is, Hiro, that you have to understand the Mafia way. And the Mafia way is that we pursue larger goals under the guise of personal relationships. So, for example, when you were a pizza guy you didn't deliver pizzas fast because you made more money that way, or because it was some kind of a fucking policy. You did it because you were carrying out a personal covenant between Uncle Enzo and every customer. This is how we avoid the trap of self-perpetuating ideology. Ideology is a virus So getting this chick back is more than just getting a chick back. It's the concrete manifestation of an abstract policy goal. And we like concrete -- right, Vic?"

Vic allows himself a judicious sneer and a deep grinding laugh.

"What's the abstract policy goal in this case?" Hiro says.

"Not my department," Fisheye says. "But I think Uncle Enzo is real pissed at L. Bob Rife."

Hiro is messing around in Flatland. He is doing this partly to conserve the computer's batteries; rendering a three-dimensional office takes a lot of processors working fulltime, while a simple two-dimensional desktop display requires minimal power.

But his real reason for being in Flatland is that Hiro Protagonist, last of the freelance hackers, is hacking. And when hackers are hacking, they don't mess around with the superficial world of Metaverses and avatars. They descend below this surface layer and into the netherworld of code and tangled nam-shubs that supports it, where everything that you see in the Metaverse, no matter how lifelike and beautiful and three-dimensional, reduces to a simple text file: a series of letters on an electronic page. It is a throwback to the days when people programmed computers through primitive teletypes and IBM punch cards.

Since then, pretty and user-friendly programming tools have been developed. It's possible to program a computer now by sitting at your desk in the Metaverse and manually connecting little preprogrammed units, like Tinkertoys. But a real hacker would never use such techniques, any more than a master auto mechanic would try to fix a car by sliding in behind the steering wheel and watching the idiot lights on the dashboard.

Hiro does not know what he is doing, what he is preparing for. That's okay, though. Most of programming is a matter of laying groundwork, building structures of words that seem to have no particular connection to the task at hand.

He knows one thing: The Metaverse has now become a place where you can get killed. Or at least have your brain reamed out to the point where you might as well be dead. This is a radical change in the nature of the place. Guns have come to Paradise.

It serves them right, he realizes now. They made the place too vulnerable. They figured that the worst thing that could happen was that a virus might get transferred into your computer and force you to ungoggle and reboot your system. Maybe destroy a little data if you were stupid enough not to install any medicine. Therefore, the Metaverse is wide open and undefended, like airports in the days before bombs and metal detectors, like elementary schools in the days before maniacs with assault rifles. Anyone can go in and do anything that they want to.

There are no cops. You can't defend yourself, you can't chase the bad people. It's going to take a lot of work to change that -- a fundamental rebuilding of the whole Metaverse, carried out on a planetwide, corporate level.

In the meantime, there may be a role for individuals who know their way around the place. A few hacks can make a lot of difference in this situation. A freelance hacker could get a lot of shit done, years before the giant software factories bestir themselves to deal with the problem.

The virus that ate through Da5id's brain was a string of binary information, shone into his face in the form of a bitmap -- a series of white and black pixels, where white represents zero and black represents one. They put the bitmap onto scrolls and gave the scrolls to avatars who went around the Metaverse looking for victims.

The Clint who tried to infect Hiro in The Black Sun got away, but he left his scroll behind -- he didn't reckon on having his arms lopped off -- and Hiro dumped it into the tunnel system below the floor, the place where the Graveyard Daemons live. Later, Hiro had a Daemon take the scroll back to his workshop. And anything that is in Hiro's house is, by definition, stored inside his own computer. He doesn't have to jack into the global network in order to access it.

It's not easy working with a piece of data that can kill you. But that's okay. In Reality, people work with dangerous substances all the time -- radioactive isotopes and toxic chemicals. You just have to have the right tools: remote manipulator arms, gloves, goggles, leaded glass. And in Flatland, when you need a tool, you just sit down and write it. So Hiro starts by writing a few simple programs that enable him to manipulate the contents of the scroll without ever seeing it.

The scroll, like any other visible thing in the Metaverse, is a piece of software. It contains some code that describes what it looks like, so that your computer will know how to draw it, and some routines that govern the way it rolls and unrolls. And it contains, somewhere inside of itself, a resource, a hunk of data, the digital version of the Snow Crash virus.

Once the virus has been extracted and isolated, it is easy enough for Hiro to write a new program called SnowScan. SnowScan is a piece of medicine. That is, it is code that protects Hiro's system -both his hardware and, as Lagos would put it, his bioware -- from the digital Snow Crash virus. Once Hiro has installed it in his system, it will constantly scan the information coming in from outside, looking for data that matches the contents of the scroll. If it notices such information, it will block it.

There's other work to do in Flatland. Hiro's good with avatars, so he writes himself an invisible avatar -- just because, in the new and more dangerous Metaverse, it might come in handy. This is easy to do poorly and surprisingly tricky to do well. Almost anyone can write an avatar that doesn't look like anything, but it will lead to a lot of problems when it is used. Some Metaverse real estate -- including The Black Sun -- wants to know how big your avatar is so that it can figure out whether you are colliding with another avatar or some obstacle. If you give it an answer of zero -- you make your avatar infinitely small -- you will either crash that piece of real estate or else make it think that something is very wrong. You will be invisible, but everywhere you go in the Metaverse you will leave a swath of destruction and confusion a mile wide. In other places, invisible avatars are illegal. If your avatar is transparent and reflects no light whatsoever -- the easiest kind to write -- it will be recognized instantly as an illegal avatar and alarms will go off. It has to be written in such a way that other people can't see it, but the real estate software doesn't realize that it's invisible.

There are about a hundred little tricks like this that Hiro wouldn't know about if he hadn't been programming avatars for people like Vitaly Chernobyl for the last couple of years. To write a really good invisible avatar from scratch would take a long time, but he puts one together in several hours by recycling bits and pieces of old projects left behind in his computer. Which is how hackers usually do it.

While he's doing that, he comes across a rather old folder with some transportation software in it. This is left over from the very old days of the Metaverse, before the Monorail existed, when the only way to get around was to walk or to write a piece of ware that simulated a vehicle.

In the early days, when the Metaverse was a featureless black ball, this was a trivial job. Later on, when the Street went up and people started building real estate, it became more complicated. On the Street, you can pass through other people's avatars. But you can't pass through walls. You can't enter private property. And you can't pass through other vehicles, or through permanent Street fixtures such as the Ports and the stanchions that support the monorail line. If you try to collide with any of these things, you don't die or get kicked out of the Metaverse; You just come to a complete stop, like a cartoon character running spang into a concrete wall.

In other words, once the Metaverse began to fill up with obstacles that you could run into, the job of traveling across it at high speed suddenly became more interesting. Maneuverability became an issue. Size became an issue. Hiro and Da5id and the rest of them began to switch away from the enormous, bizarre vehicles they had favored at first -- Victorian houses on tank treads, rolling ocean liners, mile-wide crystalline spheres, flaming chariots drawn by dragons - in favor of small maneuverable vehicles. Motorcycles, basically.

A Metaverse vehicle can be as fast and nimble as a quark. There's no physics to worry about no constraints on acceleration, no air resistance. Tires never squeal and brakes never lock up. The one thing that can't be helped is the reaction time of the user. So when they were racing their latest motorcycle software, holding wild rallies through Downtown at Mach 1, they didn't worry about engine capacity. They worried about the user interface, the controls that enabled the rider to transfer his reactions into the machine, to steer, accelerate, or brake as quickly as he could think. Because when you're in a pack of bike racers going through a crowded area at that speed, and you run into something and suddenly slow down to a speed of exactly zero, you can forget about catching up. One mistake and you've lost.

Hiro had a pretty good motorcycle. He probably could have had the best one on the Street, simply because his reflexes are unearthly. But he was more preoccupied with sword fighting than motorcycle riding.

He opens up the most recent version of his motorcycle software, gets familiar with the controls again. He ascends from Flatland into the three-dimensional Metaverse and practices riding his bike around his yard for a while. Beyond the boundaries of his yard is nothing but blackness, because he's not jacked into the net. It is a lost, desolate sensation, - kind of like floating on a life raft in the Pacific Ocean.

49

Sometimes they see boats in the distance. A couple of these even swing close by to check them out, but none of them seems to be in that rescuing mood. There are few altruists in the vicinity of the Raft, and it must be evident that they don't have much to steal.

From time to time, they see an old deep-water fishing boat, fifty to a hundred feet long, with half a dozen or so small fast boats clustered around it.

When Eliot informs them that these are pirate vessels, Vic and Fisheye prick up their ears. Vic unwraps his rifle from the collection of Hefty bags that he uses to protect it from the salt spray, and detaches the bulky sight so that they can use it as a spyglass. Hiro can't see any reason to pull the sight off the rifle in order to do this, other than the fact that if you don't, it looks like you're drawing a bead on whatever you're looking at.

Whenever a pirate vessel comes into view, they all take turns looking at it through the sight, playing with all the different sensor modes: visible, infrared, and so on. Eliot has spent enough time knocking around the Rim that he has become familiar with the colors of the different pirate groups, so by examining them through the sight he can tell who they are: Clint Eastwood and his band parallel them for a few minutes one day, checking them out, and the Magnificent Seven send out one of their small boats to zoom by them and look for potential booty. Hiro's almost hoping they get taken prisoner by the Seven, because they have the nicest-looking pirate ship: a former luxury yacht with Exocet launch tubes kludged to the foredeck. But this reconnaissance leads nowhere. The pirates, unschooled in thermodynamics, do not grasp the implications of the eternal plume of steam coming from beneath the life raft.

One morning, a big old trawler materializes very close to them, congealing out of nothing as the fog lifts. Hiro has been hearing its engines for a while, but didn't realize how close it was.

"Who are they?" Fisheye says, choking on a cup of the freeze-dried coffee he despises so much. He's wrapped up in a space blanket and partly snuggled underneath the boat's waterproof canopy, just his face and hands visible.

Eliot scopes them out with the sight. He is not a real demonstrative guy, but it's clear that he is not very happy with what he sees. "That is Bruce Lee," he says.

"How is that significant?" Fisheye says.

"Well, check out the colors," Eliot says.

The ship is close enough that everyone can see the flag pretty clearly. It's a red banner with a silver fist in the middle, a pair of nunchuks crossed beneath it, the initials B and L on either side.

"What about 'em?" Fisheye says.

"Well, the guy who calls himself Bruce Lee, who's like the leader? He got a vest with those colors on the back."

"So?"

"So, it's not just embroidered or painted, it's actually done in scalps. Patchwork, like."

"Say what?" Hiro says.

"There's a rumor, just a rumor man, that he went through the Refu ships looking for people with red or silver hair so he could collect the scalps he needed."

Hiro is still absorbing that when Fisheye makes an unexpected decision. "I want to talk to this Bruce Lee character," he says. "He interests me."

"Why the hell do you want to talk to this fucking psycho?" Eliot says.

"Yeah," Hiro says. "Didn't you see that series on Eye Spy? He's a maniac."

Fisheye throws up his hands as if to say the answer is, like Catholic theology, beyond mortal comprehension. "This is my decision," he says.

"Who the fuck are you?" Eliot says.

"President of the fucking boat," Fisheye says. "I hereby nominate myself. Is there a second?"

"Yup," Vic says, the first time he has spoken in forty-eight hours.

"All in favor say aye," Fisheye says.

"Aye," Vic says, bursting into florid eloquence.

"I win," Fisheye says. "So how do we get these Bruce Lee guys to come over here and talk to us?"

"Why should they want to?" Eliot says. "We got nothing they want except for poontang."

"Are you saying these guys are homos?" Fisheye says, his face shriveling up.

"Shit, man," Eliot says, "you didn't even blink when I told you about the scalps."

"I knew I didn't like any of this boat shit," Fisheye says.

"If this makes any difference to you, they're not gay in the sense that we usually think of it," Eliot explains. "They're het, but they're pirates. They'll go after anything that's warm and concave."

Fisheye makes a snap decision. "Okay, you two guys, Hiro and Eliot, you're Chinese. Take off your clothes."

"What?"

"Do it. I'm the president, remember? You want Vic to do it for you?"

Eliot and Hiro can't help looking over at Vic, who is just sitting there like a lump. There is something about his extremely blase attitude that inspires fear.

"Do it or I'll fucking kill you," Fisheye says, finally driving the point home.

Eliot and Hiro, bobbing awkwardly on the unsteady floor of the raft, peel off their survival suits and step out of them. Then they pull off the rest of their clothes, exposing smooth bare skin to the air for the first time in a few days.

The trawler comes right alongside of them, no more than twenty feet away, and cuts its engines. They are nicely equipped: half a dozen Zodiacs with new outboards, an Exocet-type missile, two radars, and a fifty caliber machine gun at each end of the boat, currently unmanned. A couple of speedboats are being towed behind the trawler like dinghys and each of these also has a heavy machine gun. And there is also a thirty-six-foot motor yacht, following them under its own power.

There are a couple of dozen guys in Bruce Lee's pirate band, and they are now lined up along the trawler's railing, grinning, whistling, howling like wolves, and waving unrolled trojans in the air.

"Don't worry, man, I'm not going to let 'em fuck you," Fisheye says, grinning.

"What you gonna do," Eliot says, "hand them a papal encyclical?"

"I'm sure they'll listen to reason," Fisheye says.

"These guys aren't scared of the Mafia, if that's what you have in mind," Eliot says.

"That's just because they don't know us very well."

Finally, the leader comes out, Bruce Lee himself, a fortyish guy in a Kevlar vest, an ammo vest stretched over that, a diagonal bandolier, samurai sword -- Hiro would love to take him on -- nunchuks, and his colors, the patchwork of human scalps.

He flashes them a nice grin, has a look at Hiro and Eliot, gives them a highly suggestive, thrusting thumbs-up gesture, and then struts up and down the length of the boat one time, swapping high fives with his merry men. Every so often, he picks out one of the pirates at random and gestures at the man's trojan. The pirate puts his condom to his lips and inflates it into a slippery ribbed balloon. Then Bruce Lee inspects it, making sure there are no leaks. Obviously, the man runs a tight ship.

Hiro can't help staring at the scalps on Bruce Lee's back. The pirates note his interest and mug for him, pointing to the scalps, nodding, looking back at him with wide, mocking eyes. The colors look much too uniform -- no change in the red from one to the next. Hiro concludes that Bruce Lee, contrary to his reputation, must have just gone out and gotten scalps of any old color, bleached them, and dyed them. What a wimp.

Finally, Bruce Lee works his way back to midship and flashes them another big grin. He has a great, dazzling grin and he knows it; maybe it's those one-karat diamonds Krazy Glued to his front teeth.

"Jammin' boat," he says. "Maybe you, me swap, huh? Hahaha."

Everyone on the life raft, except for Vic, just smiles a brittle smile.

"Where you goin'? Key West? Hahaha."

Bruce Lee examines Hiro and Eliot for a while, rotates his index finger to indicate that they should spin around and display their business ends. They do.

"Quanto?" Bruce Lee says, and all the pirates get uproarious, most of all Bruce Lee. Hiro can feel his anal sphincter contracting to the size of a pore.

"He's asking how much we cost," Eliot says. "It's a joke, see, because they know they can come over and have our asses for free."

"Oh, hilarious!" Fisheye says. While Hiro and Eliot literally freeze their asses, he's still snuggled up under the canopy, that bastard.

"Poonmissile, like?" Bruce Lee says, pointing to one of the antiship missiles on the deck. "Bugs? Motorolas?"

"Poonmissile is a Harpoon antiship missile, real expensive," Eliot says. "A bug is a Microchip. Motorola would be one brand, like Ford or Chevy. Bruce Lee deals in a lot of electronics -- you know, typical Asian pirate dude."

"He'd give us a Harpoon missile for you guys?" Fisheye says.

"No! He's being sarcastic, shithead!" Eliot says.

"Tell him we want a boat with an outboard motor," Fisheye says,

"Want one zode, one kicker, fillerup," Eliot says.

Suddenly Bruce Lee gets real serious and actually considers it. "Scope clause, chomsayen? Gauge and gag."

"He'll consider it if they can come and check out the merchandise first," Eliot says. "They want to check out how tight we are, and whether we are capable of sup-pressing our gag reflex. These are all terms from the Raft brothel industry."

"Ombwas scope like twelves to me, hahaha."

"Us homeboys look like we have twelve-gauge assholes," Eliot says, "i.e., that we are all stretched out and worthless."

Fisheye speaks up on his own. "No, no, four-tens, totally!"

The entire deck of the pirate ship titters with excitement.

"No way," Bruce Lee says.

"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 ma la aria ma na po 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 hoarse 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 stem 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 space 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

Gatling-type 3-mm hypervelocity railgun system

Ng Security Industries, Inc.

PRERELEASE VERSION -- NOT FOR FIELD USE

DO NOT TEST IN A POPULATED AREA

--ULTIMA RATIO REGUM--
*****************************************************

"Fucking 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 fucking 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, asshole," 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 asses. 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 fiberglass: a million tiny little glass fibers about a millimeter long. The skipper and a crew member, or rather the stew that they turned into when the bridge was hit 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-dicked 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 fucking 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 offshore," 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 offshore, 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 pissed."

"'You think they're going to be pissed. I think they're going to be scared shitless," Fisheye says. "Now drive the boat, Eliot. Come on, I'm sick of all this fucking water."