The yacht jerks out from under Hiro’s feet, and he hits the deck with his face and shoulder. Getting up, he realizes that either they’ve just rammed, or been rammed by, something big. There is a thudding noise, feet running on the deck. Hiro hears some of these feet near him, drops his wakizashi, pulls his katana, whirls at the same time, snapping the long blade into someone’s midsection. Meanwhile they’re dragging a long knife down his back, but it doesn’t penetrate the fabric, just hurts a little. His katana comes free easily, which is dumb luck, because he forgot to squeeze off the blow, could have gotten it wedged in there. He turns again, instinctively parries a knife thrust from another greaseball, raises the katana and snaps it down into his brainpan. This time he does it right, kills him without sticking the blade. There are greaseballs on two sides of him now. Hiro chooses a direction, swings it sideways, decapitates one of them. Then he turns around. Another greaseball is staggering toward him across the pitching deck with a spiked club, but unlike Hiro he’s not keeping his balance. Hiro shuffles up to meet him, keeping his center of gravity over his feet, and impales him on the katana.
Another greaseball is watching all of this in astonishment from up near the bow. Hiro shoots him, and he collapses to the deck. Two more greaseballs jump off the boat voluntarily.
The yacht is tangled up in a spider’s web of shitty old ropes and cargo nets that were stretched out across the surface of the water as a snare for poor suckers like them. The yacht’s engine is still straining, but the prop isn’t moving; something got wrapped around the shaft.
There’s no sign of Raven now. Maybe it was just a onetime contract hit on Fisheye. Maybe he didn’t want to get tangled up in the spiderweb. Maybe he figured that, once Reason was taken out, the greaseballs would take care of the rest.
Eliot’s no longer at the controls. He’s no longer even on the yacht. Hiro calls out his name, but there’s no response. Not even thrashing in the water. The last thing he did was lean over the edge with the fire extinguisher, putting out the Molotov flame; when they were jerked to a halt he must have tumbled overboard.
They’re a lot closer to the Enterprise than he had ever thought. They covered a lot of water during the fight, got closer in than they should have. In fact, Hiro’s surrounded on all sides by the Raft at this point. Meager, flickering illumination is provided by the burning remains of the Molotov cocktail-carrying Zodiacs, which have become tangled in the net around them.
Hiro does not think it would be wise to take the yacht back out toward open water. It’s a little too competitive there. He goes up forward. The suitcase that serves as Reason’s power supply and ammo dump is open on the deck next to him, its color monitor screen reading: Sorry, a fatal system error occurred. Please reboot and try again.
Then, as Hiro’s looking at it, it fritzes out completely and dies of a snow crash.
Vic got hit by one of the machine-gun bursts and is also dead. Around them, half a dozen other boats ride on the waves, caught in the spiderweb, nice-looking yachts all of them. But they are all empty hulks, stripped of their engines and everything else. Just like duck decoys in front of a hunter’s blind. A hand-painted sign rides on a buoy nearby, reading FUEL in English and other languages.
Farther out to sea, a number of the ships that were chasing them earlier are lingering, steering well clear of the spiderweb. They know they can’t come in here; this is the exclusive domain of the black grease swimmers, the spiders in the web, almost all of whom are now dead.
If he goes onto the Raft itself, it can’t be any worse. Can it?
The yacht has its own little dinghy, the smallest size of inflatable zodiac, with a small outboard motor. Hiro gets it into the water.
“I go with you,” a voice says.
Hiro whirls, hauling out his gun, and finds himself aiming it into the face of the Filipino cabin boy. The boy blinks, looks a little surprised, but not especially scared. He has been hanging out with pirates, after all. For that matter, all the dead guys on the yacht don’t seem to faze him either.
“I be your guide,” the boy says. “ba la zin ka nu pa ra ta…”
Chapter Fifty-Two
Y.T. waits so long that she thinks the sun must have come up by now, but she knows it can’t really be more than a couple of hours. In a way, it doesn’t even matter. Nothing ever changes: the music plays, the cartoon videotape rewinds itself and starts up again, men come in and drink and try not to get caught staring at her. She might as well be shackled to the table anyway; there’s no way she could ever find her way back home from here. So she waits.
Suddenly, Raven’s standing in front of her. He’s wearing different clothes, wet slippery clothing made out of animal skins or something. His face is red and wet from being outside.
“You get your job all done?”
“Sort of,” Raven says. “I did enough.”
“What do you mean, enough?”
“I mean I don’t like being called out of a date to do bullshit work,” Raven says. “So I got things in order out there and my attitude is, let his gnomes worry about the details.”
“Well, I’ve been having a great time here.”
“Sorry, baby. Let’s get out of here,” he says, speaking with the intense, strained tones of a man with an erection.
“Let’s go to the Core,” he says, once they get into the cool air above deck.
“What’s there?”
“Everything,” he says. “The people who run this whole place. Most of these people”—he waves his hand out over the Raft—“can’t go there. I can. Want to see it?”
“Sure, why not,” she says, hating herself for sounding like such a sap. But what else is she going to say?
He starts leading her down a long moonlit series of gangplanks, in toward the big ships in the middle of the Raft. You could almost skate here, but you’d have to be really good.
“Why are you different from the other people?” Y.T. says. She kind of blurts it out without doing a whole lot of thinking first. But it seems like a good question.
He laughs. “I’m an Aleut. I’m different in a lot of ways—”
“No. I mean your brain works in a different way,” Y.T. says. “You’re not wacked out. You know what I mean? You haven’t mentioned the Word all night.”
“We have a thing we do in kayaks. It’s like surfing,” Raven says.
“Really? I surf, too—in traffic,” Y.T. says.
“We don’t do this for fun,” Raven says. “It’s part of how we live. We get from island to island by surfing on waves.”
“Same here,” Y.T. says, “except we go from one franchulate to the next by surfing on cars.”
“See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,” Raven says.
“Right. I’m totally hip to what you’re saying.”
“That’s what I’m doing with the Orthos. I agree with some of their religion. But not all of it. But their movement has a lot of power. They have a lot of people and money and ships.”
“And you’re surfing on it.”