“You fucking bitch,” the skinny guy says.
“That was a really cool plan,” the UKOD says, “but the part I can’t figure out is, why would a nice, smart girl like you participate in a suicide mission?”
The sun comes out. About half a dozen suns, actually, all around them up in the air, so that there are no shadows. The faces of the skinny man and the UKOD look flat and featureless under this blinding illumination. Y.T. is the only person who can see worth a damn because her Knight Visions have compensated for it; the men wince and sag beneath the light.
Y.T. turns to look behind herself. One of the miniature suns is hanging above the maze of shipping containers, casting light into all its crannies, blinding the gunmen who stand guard there. The scene flashes too light and too dark as her goggles’ electronics try to make up their mind. But in the midst of this whole visual tangle she gets one image printed indelibly on her retina: the gunmen going down like a treeline in a hurricane, and for just an instant, a line of dark angular things silhouetted above the maze as they crest it like a cybernetic tsunami. Rat Things.
They have evaded the whole maze by leaping over it in long, flat parabolas. Along the way, some of them have slammed right through the bodies of men holding guns, like NFL fullbacks plowing full speed through nerdy sideline photographers. Then, as they land on the road in front of the maze, there is an instant burst of dust with frantic white sparks dancing around at the bottom, and while all this is happening, Y.T. doesn’t hear, she feels one of the Rat Things impacting on the body of the tall skinny guy, hears his ribs crackling like a ball of cellophane. Hell is already breaking loose inside the warehouse, but her eyes are trying to follow the action, watching the sparks-and-dust contrails of more Rat Things drawing themselves down the length of the road in an instant and then going airborne to the top of the next barrier.
Three seconds have passed since she threw the tube into the air. She is turning back to look inside the warehouse. But someone’s on top of the warehouse, catching her eye for a second. It’s another gunman, a sniper, stepping out from behind an air-conditioning unit, just getting used to the light, raising his weapon to his shoulder. Y.T. winces as a red laser beam from his rifle sweeps across her eyes once, twice as he zeroes his sights on her forehead. Behind him she sees the Whirlwind Reaper, its rotors making a disk under the brilliant light, a disk that is foreshortened into a narrow ellipse and then into a steady silver line. Then it flies right past the sniper.
The chopper pulls up into a hard turn, searching for additional prey, and something falls beneath it in a powerless trajectory, she thinks that it has dropped a bomb. But it’s the head of the sniper, spinning rapidly, throwing out a fine pink helix under the light. The little chopper’s rotor blade must have caught him in the nape of the neck. One part of her is dispassionately watching the head bounce and spin in the dust, and the other part of her is screaming her lungs out.
She hears a crack, the first loud noise so far. She turns to follow the sound, looking in the direction of a water tower that looms above this area, providing a fine vantage point for a sniper.
But then her attention is drawn by the pencil-thin blue-white exhaust of a tiny rocket that lances up into the sky from Ng’s van. It doesn’t do anything; it just goes up to a certain height and hovers, sitting on its exhaust. She doesn’t care, she’s kicking her way down the road now on her plank, trying to get something between her and that water tower.
There is a second cracking noise. Before this sound even reaches her ears, the rocket darts horizontally like a minnow, makes one or two minor cuts to correct its course, zeroes in on that sniper’s perch, up in the water tower’s access ladder. There is a great nasty explosion without any flame or light, like the loud pointless booms that you get sometimes at fireworks shows. For a moment, she can hear the clamor of shrapnel ringing through the ironwork of the water tower.
Just before she kicks her way back into the maze, a dustline whips past her, snapping rocks and fragments of broken glass into her face. It shoots into the maze. She hears it Ping-Pong all the way through, kicking off the steel walls in order to change direction. It’s a Rat Thing clearing the way for her.
How sweet!
“Smooth move, Ex-Lax,” she says, climbing back into Ng’s van. Her throat feels thick and swollen. Maybe it’s from screaming, maybe it’s the toxic waste, maybe she’s getting ready to gag. “Didn’t you know about the snipers?” she says. If she can keep talking about the details of the job, maybe she can keep her mind off of what the Whirlwind Reaper did.
“I didn’t know about the one on the water tower,” Ng says. “But as soon as he fired a couple of rounds, we plotted the bullets’ trajectories on millimeter-wave and back-traced them.” He talks to his van and it pulls out of its hiding place, headed for I-405.
“Seems like kind of an obvious place to look for a sniper.”
“He was in an unfortified position, exposed from all sides,” Ng says. “He chose to work from a suicidal position. Which is not a typical behavior for drug dealers. Typically, they are more pragmatic. Now, do you have any other criticisms of my performance?”
“Well, did it work?”
“Yes. The tube was inserted into a sealed chamber inside the helicopter before it discharged its contents. It was then flash-frozen in liquid helium before it could chemically self-destruct. We now have a sample of Snow Crash, something that no one else has been able to get. It is the kind of success on which reputations such as mine are constructed.”
“How about the Rat Things?”
“How about them?”
“Are they back in the van now? Back there?” Y.T. jerks her head aft.