“Get the fuck away from our chopper!” he is shouting.
The Kouriers, by and large, do. They’re not stupid. And Y.T. is now walking around safe on the pavement, the mission is accomplished, the Code is finished, there’s no reason to hassle these chopper dudes anymore. They detach their poons from the belly of the chopper and reel in the cables.
Tony looks around and sees Y.T. She’s walking directly toward the chopper. Her sprained body moves awkwardly.
“Get back in the chopper, you lucky bitch!” he says.
Y.T. picks up a loose poon handle that no one has bothered to reel in yet. She hits the button that turns off the electromagnet and its head drops off the chopper’s armor. She reels it in until about four feet of slack is there between the reel and the head.
“There was this dude named Ahab that I read about,” she says, whirling the poon around her head. “He got his poon cable all wrapped up around the thing he was trying to poon. It was a big mistake.”
She lets the poon fly. It passes up through the plane of the rotor blades, near the center, and she can see the unbreakable cable start to wind itself around the delicate parts of the rotor’s axle, like a garrote around a ballerina’s neck. Through the chopper’s windshield she can see Sasha reacting, flipping switches frantically, pulling levers, his mouth making a long string of Russian curses. The poon’s handle gets snapped out of her hand, and she sees it get whipped into the center like it’s a black hole.
“I guess he just didn’t know when to let go, like some people,” she says. Then she turns around and walks away from the chopper. Behind her, she can hear large pieces of metal going the wrong way, running into one another at high speed.
Rife has figured it out a long time ago. He’s already running down the middle of the highway with a submachine gun in one hand, looking for a car to commandeer. Above, the RARE chopper hovers and watches; Rife looks up to it and motions forward with one hand, shouting, “Go to LAX! Go to LAX!”
The chopper makes one last orbit over the scene, watching as Sasha puts the ruined gunship into cold shutdown, watching furious Kouriers overwhelming and disarming Tony and Frank and the President, watching as Rife stands in the middle of the left lane and forces a CosaNostra Pizza car to a stop, forces the driver out. But Raven isn’t watching any of these things. He’s looking out the window at Y.T. And as the chopper finally tilts forward and accelerates into the night, he grins at her and gives her the thumbs up. Y.T. bites her lower lip and flips him the bird. With that, the relationship is over, hopefully for all time.
Y.T. borrows a plank from an awed skater and pushes herself across the street to the nearest Buy ’n’ Fly and starts trying to call Mom for a ride home.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Hiro loses Raven a few miles outside of Downtown, but it doesn’t matter by this point; he goes straight to the plaza and then starts to orbit the rim of the amphitheater at high speed, a one-man picket fence. Raven makes his approach within a few seconds. Hiro breaks out of his orbit and heads straight for him, and they come together like a couple of medieval jousters. Hiro loses his left arm and Raven drops a leg. The limbs topple to the ground. Hiro drops his katana and uses his remaining arm to draw his one-handed sword—a better match for Raven’s long knife anyway. He cuts Raven off just as he’s about to plummet over the lip of the amphitheater and forces him aside; Raven’s momentum takes him half a mile away in half a second. Hiro chases him down by following a series of educated guesses—he knows this territory like Raven knows the currents of the Aleutians—and then they are blasting through the narrow streets of the Metaverse’s financial district, waving long knives at each other, slicing and dicing hundreds of pinstriped avatars who happen to get in their way.
But they never seem to hit each other. The speeds are just too great, the targets too small. Hiro’s been lucky so far—he has got Raven caught up in the thrill of competition, made him spoil for a fight. But Raven doesn’t need this. He can get back to the amphitheater pretty easily without bothering to kill Hiro first.
And finally, he realizes it. He sheathes his knife and dives into an alley between skyscrapers. Hiro follows him, but by the time he’s gotten into that same alley, Raven’s gone.
Hiro goes over the lip of the amphitheater doing a couple of hundred miles per hour and soars out into space, in free fall, above the heads of a quarter of a million wildly cheering hackers.
They all know Hiro. He’s the guy with the swords. He’s a friend of Da5id’s. And as his own personal contribution to the benefit, he’s apparently decided to stage a sword fight with some kind of hulking, scary-looking daemon on a motorcycle. Don’t touch that dial, it’s going to be a hell of a show.
He lands on the stage and bounces to a halt next to his motorcycle. The bike still works, but it’s worthless down here. Raven is ten meters away, grinning at him.
“Bombs away,” Raven says. He pulls the glowing blue lozenge out of his sidecar with one hand and drops it on the center of the amphitheater. It breaks open like the shell of an egg and light shines out of it. The light begins to grow and take shape.
The crowd goes wild.