It takes half a dozen tries to secure the grappling hook in the jagged hole, twenty feet above the waterline.
As he’s wriggling through the hole, his coverall makes popping and hissing noises as the hot, sharp metal melts and tears through the synthetic material. He ends up leaving scraps of it behind, welded to the hull. He’s got a few first-and second-degree burns on the parts of his skin that are now exposed, but they don’t really hurt yet. That’s how wound up he is. Later, they’ll hurt. The soles of his shoes melt and sizzle as he treads on glowing hunks of shrapnel. The room is rather smoky, but aircraft carriers are nothing if not fire conscious, and not too much in this place is flammable. Hiro just walks through the smoke to the door, which has been carved into a steel doily by Reason. He kicks it out of its frame and enters a place that, in the blueprints, is simply marked PASSAGEWAY. Then, because this seems as good a time as any, he draws his katana.
Chapter Sixty
When her partner is off doing something in Reality, his avatar goes kind of slack. The body sits there like an inflatable love doll, and the face continues to go through all kinds of stretching exercises. She does not know what he’s doing, but it looks like it must be exciting, because most of the time he’s either extremely surprised or scared shitless.
Shortly after he gets done talking to the Librarian dude about the aircraft carrier, she begins to hear deep rumbling noises—Reality noises—from outside. Sounds like a cross between a machine gun and a buzz saw. Whenever she hears that noise, Hiro’s face gets this astonished look like: I’m about to die.
Someone is tapping her on the shoulder. Some suit who has an early morning appointment in the Metaverse, figures that whatever this Kourier is doing can’t be all that important. She ignores it for a minute.
Then Hiro’s office goes out of focus, jumps up in the air like it is painted on a window shade, and she’s looking into the face of a guy. An Asian guy. A creep. A wirehead. One of the scary antenna dudes.
“Okay,” she says, “what do you want?”
He grabs her by the arm and hauls her out of the booth. There’s another one with him, and he grabs her other arm. They all start walking out of there.
“Let go my fucking arm,” she says. “I’ll go with you. It’s okay.”
It’s not the first time she’s been thrown out of a building full of suits. This time it’s a little different, though. This time, the bouncers are a couple of life-sized plastic action figures from Toys R Us.
And it’s not just that these guys probably don’t speak English. They just don’t act normal. She actually manages to twist one of her arms loose and the guy doesn’t smack her or anything, just turns rigidly toward her and paws at her mechanically until he’s got her by the arm again. No change in his face. His eyes stare like busted headlights. His mouth is open enough to let him breathe through it, but the lips never move, never change expression.
They are in a complex of ship cabins and sliced-open containers that acts as the lobby of the hotel. The wireheads drag her out the door, over the blunt cross hairs of the helipad. Just in time, too, because a chopper happens to be coming in for a landing. The safety procedures in this place suck; they could have got their heads chopped off. It is the slick corporate chopper with the RARE logo that she saw earlier.
The wireheads try to drag her over a gangplank thingy that leads them across open water to the next ship. She manages to get turned around backward, grabs the railings with both hands, hooks her ankles into the stanchions, and hangs on. One of them grabs her around the waist from behind and tries to yank her body loose while the other one stands in front of her and pries her fingers loose, one at a time.
Several guys are piling out of the RARE chopper. They are wearing coveralls with gear stuck into the pockets, and she sees at least one stethoscope. They haul big fiberglass cases out of the chopper, with red crosses painted on their sides, and run into the containership. Y.T. knows that this is not being done for the benefit of some fat businessman who stroked a lobe over his stewed prunes. They are going in there to reanimate her boyfriend. Raven pumped full of speed: just what the world needs right now.
They drag her across the deck of the next ship. From there they take a stairway thingy up to the next ship after that, which is very big. She thinks it’s an oil tanker. She can look across its broad deck, through a tangle of pipes, rust seeping through white paint, and see the Enterprise on the other side. That’s where they’re going.
There’s no direct connection. A crane on the deck of the Enterprise has swung itself over to dangle a small wire cage over the tanker, just a few feet off the deck; it bobs up and down and glides back and forth over a fairly large area as the two ships rock in different ways and it swings like a pendulum at the end of its cable. It has a door on one side, which is hanging open.