“What was that?” Y.T. says.
“Meteorite,” Hiro says.
“Huh?”
“Stay tuned,” Hiro says, “I think I just got into a Gatling gun duel.”
“Are you going to sign off?”
“Just shut up for a second.”
This neighborhood is U-shaped, built around a sort of cove in the Raft where half a dozen rusty old fishing boats are tied up. A floating pier, pieced together from mismatched pontoons, runs around the edge.
The empty trawler, the one they’ve been cutting up for scrap, has been hit by a burst from the big gun on the deck of the Enterprise. It looks as though a big wave picked it up and tried to wrap it around a pillar: one whole side is collapsed in, the bow and the stern are actually bent toward each other. Its back is broken. Its empty holds are ingurgitating a vast, continuous rush of murky brown seawater, sucking in that variegated sewage like a drowning man sucks air. It’s heading for the bottom fast.
Hiro shoves Reason back into the zodiac, jumps in, and starts the motor. He doesn’t have time to untie the boat from the pontoon, so he snaps through the line with his wakizashi and takes off.
The pontoons are already sagging inward and down, pulled together by the ruined ship’s mooring lines. The trawler is falling off the surface of the water, trying to pull in the entire neighborhood like a black hole.
A couple of Filipino men are already out with short knives, hacking at the stuff that webs the neighborhood together, trying to cut loose the parts that can’t be salvaged. Hiro buzzes over to a pontoon that is already knee-deep under the water, finds the ropes that connect it to the next pontoon, which is even more deeply submerged, and probes them with his katana. The remaining ropes pop like rifle shots, and then the pontoon breaks loose, shooting up to the surface so fast that it almost capsizes the zodiac.
A whole section of the pontoon pier, along the side of the trawler, can’t be salvaged. Men with fishing knives and women with kitchen cleavers are down on their knees, the water already rising up under their chins, cutting their neighborhood free. It breaks loose one rope at a time, haphazardly, tossing the Filipinos up into the air. A boy with a machete cuts the one remaining line, which pops up and lashes him across the face. Finally, the raft is free and flexible once again, bobbing and waving back toward equilibrium, and where the trawler was, there’s nothing but a bubbling whirlpool that occasionally vomits up a loose piece of floating debris.
Some others have already clambered up onto the fishing boat that was tied up next to the trawler. It has suffered some damage, too: several men cluster around and lean over the rail to examine a couple of large impact craters on the side. Each hole is surrounded by a shiny dinner plate-sized patch that has been blown free of all paint and rust. In the middle is a hole the size of a golf ball.
Hiro decides it’s time to leave.
But before he does, he reaches into his coverall, pulls out a money clip, and counts out a few thousand Kongbucks. He puts them on the deck and weighs them down under the corner of a red steel gasoline tank. Then he hits the road.
He has no trouble finding the canal that leads to the next neighborhood. His paranoia level is way up, and so he glances back and forth as he pilots his way out of there, looking up all the little alleys. In one of those niches, he sees a wirehead, mumbling something.
The next neighborhood is Malaysian. Several dozen of them are gathered near the bridge, attracted by the noise. As Hiro is entering their neighborhood, he sees men running down the undulating pontoon bridge that serves as the main street, carrying guns and knives. The local constabulary. More men of the same description emerge from the byways and skiffs and sampans, joining them.
A tremendous whacking and splintering and tearing noise sounds right beside him, as though a lumber truck has just crashed into a brick wall. Water splashes his body, and an exhalation of steam passes over his face. Then it’s quiet again. He turns around, slowly and reluctantly. The nearest pontoon isn’t there anymore, just a bloody, turbulent soup of splinters and chaff.
He turns around and looks behind him. The wirehead he saw a few seconds ago is out in the open now, standing all by himself at the edge of a raft. Everyone else has cleared out of there. He can see the bastard’s lips moving. Hiro whips the boat around and returns to him, drawing his wakizashi with his free hand, and cuts him down on the spot.
But there will be more. Hiro knows they’re all out looking for him now. The gunners up there on the Enterprise don’t care how many of these Refus they have to kill in order to nail Hiro.
From the Malaysian neighborhood, he passes into a Chinese neighborhood. This one’s a lot more built up, it contains a number of steel ships and barges. It extends off into the distance, away from the Core, for as far as Hiro can see from his worthless sea-level vantage point.
He’s being watched by a man high up in the superstructure of one of those Chinese ships, another wirehead. Hiro can see the guy’s jaw flapping as he sends updates to Raft Central.
The big Gatling gun on the deck of the Enterprise opens up again and fires another meteorite of depleted uranium slugs into the side of an unoccupied barge about twenty feet from Hiro. The entire side of the barge chases itself inward, like the steel has become liquid and is running down a drain, and the metal turns bright as shock waves simply turn that thick layer of rust into an aerosol, blast it free from the steel borne on a wave of sound so powerful that it hurts Hiro down inside his chest and makes him feel sick.
The gun is radar controlled. It’s very accurate when it’s shooting at a piece of metal. It’s a lot less accurate when it’s trying to hit flesh and blood.