Indeed. There are a few people hanging out in this town, uploading the latest Port Sherman intel. And one of them is just a punter with a video camera who goes around shooting pictures of everything.
Hiro reviews this stuff in fast-forward. A lot of it is shot from the stringer’s hotel window: hours and hours of coverage of the stream of shitty little brown boats laboring their way up the harbor, tying up to the edge of the mini-Raft that’s forming in front of Port Sherman.
But it’s semi-organized, in that some apparently self-appointed water cops are buzzing around in a speedboat, aiming guns at people, shouting through a megaphone. And that explains why, no matter how tangled the mess in the harbor becomes, there’s always a clear lane down the middle of the fjord, headed out to sea. And the terminus of that clear lane is the nice pier with the big boats.
There are two big vessels there. One is a large fishing boat flying a flag bearing the emblem of the Orthos, which is just a cross and a flame. It is obvious TROKK loot; the name on the stern is KODIAK QUEEN, and the Orthos haven’t bothered to change it yet. The other large boat is a small cruise vessel, made to carry rich people comfortably to nice places. It has a green flag and appears to be connected with Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong.
Hiro does a little more poking around in the streets of Port Sherman and finds out that there is a pretty good-sized Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong franchulate here. In typical Hong Kong style, it is more of a spray of small buildings and rooms all over town. But it’s a dense spray. Dense enough that Hong Kong has several fulltime employees here, including a proconsul. Hiro pulls up the guy’s picture so he’ll recognize him: a crusty-looking Chinese-American gent in his fifties. So it’s not an automated, unmanned franchulate like you normally see in the Lower 48.
Chapter Fourty-Three
When she first woke up, she was still in her RadiKS coverall, mummified in gaffer’s tape, lying on the floor of a shitty old Ford van blasting across the middle of nowhere. This did not put her into a very favorable mood. The stun bunny left her with a persistent nosebleed and an eternal throbbing headache, and every time the van hit a chuckhole, her head bounced on the corrugated steel floor.
First she was just pissed. Then she started having brief moments of fear—wanting to go home. After eight hours in the back of the van, there was no doubt in her mind that she wanted to go home. The only thing that kept her from giving up was curiosity. As far as she could tell from this admittedly poor vantage point, this didn’t look like a Fed operation.
The van pulled off the highway, onto a frontage road, and into a parking lot. The rear doors of the van opened up, and a couple of women climbed in. Through the open doors, Y.T. could see the Gothic arch logo of a Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates.
“Oh, you poor baby,” one of the women said. The other woman just gasped in horror at her condition. One of them just cradled her head and stroked her hair, letting her sip sweet Kool-Aid from a Dixie cup, while the other tenderly, slowly took the gaffer’s tape off.
Her shoes had already been removed when she woke up in the back of the van, and no one offered her another pair. And everything had been removed from her coverall. All the good stuff was gone. But they hadn’t gone underneath the coverall. She still had the dog tags. And one other thing, a thing between her legs called a dentata. There’s no way they could have found that.
She has always known that the dog tags were probably a fake thing anyway. Uncle Enzo doesn’t just go around giving his war souvenirs to fifteen-year-old chicks. But they still might have an effect on someone.
The two women are named Marla and Bonnie. They are with her all the time. Not only with her, but touching her. Lots of hugs, squeezes, handholding, and tousled hair. The first time she goes to the bathroom, Bonnie goes with her, opening the stall door and actually standing in there with her. Y.T. thinks that Bonnie is worried that she’s going to pass out on the toilet or something. But the next time she has to pee, Marla goes with her. She gets no privacy at all.
The only problem is she can’t deny that she likes it, in a way. The ride in the van hurt. It really hurt bad. She never felt so lonely in her life. And now she’s barefoot and defenseless in an unfamiliar place and they’re giving her what she needs.
After she had a few minutes to freshen up—whatever that means—inside the Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates, she and Marla and Bonnie climbed into a big stretch van with no windows. The floor was carpeted but there were no seats inside, everyone sat on the floor. The van was jammed when they opened the rear doors. Twenty people were packed into it, all energetic, beaming youths. It looked impossible; Y.T. shrank away from it, backing right into Marla and Bonnie. But a cheerful roar came up from the van people, white teeth flashing in the dimness, and people began to scrunch out a tiny space for them.
She spent most of the next two days packed into the van between Bonnie and Marla, holding hands with them constantly, so she couldn’t even pick her nose without permission. They sang happy songs until her brain turned to tapioca. They played wacky games.
A couple of times every hour, someone in the van would start to babble, just like the Falabalas. Just like the Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates people. The babbling would spread throughout the van like a contagious disease, and soon everyone would be doing it.