'Torque this baby,' Rife says to the pilot. 'Let's go to L.A. We got a Mission to Control.'
The pilot has an angular face that, after her experiences on the Raft, Y.T. recognizes as typically Russian. He starts dicking with his controls. The engines whine louder and the thwacking of the chopper blades picks up.
Y.T. feels, but does not hear, a couple of small explosions. Everyone else feels it, too, but only Tony reacts; he crouches down on the floor of the chopper, pulls a gun out from under his jacket, and opens the door on his side. Meanwhile, the engines sigh back down in pitch and the rotor coasts back down to an idle.
Y.T. can see him out the window. It's Hiro. He's all covered with smoke and blood, and he's holding a pistol in one hand. He's just fired a couple of shots in the air, to get their attention, and now he backs behind one of the parked choppers, taking cover.
'You're a dead man,' Rife shouts. 'You're stuck on the Raft, asshole. I got a million Myrmidons here. You gonna kill 'em all?'
'Swords don't run out of ammo,' Hiro shouts.
'Well, what do you want?'
'I want the tablet. You give me the tablet, then you can take off and let your million wireheads kill me. You don't give me the tablet, I'm gonna empty this clip into the windshield of your chopper.'
'It's bulletproof! Haw!' Rife says.
'No it isn't,' Hiro says, 'as the rebels in Afghanistan found out.'
'He is right,' the pilot says.
'Fucking Soviet piece of shit! They put all that steel in its belly and then made the windshield out of glass?'
'Give me the tablet,' Hiro says' 'or I'm taking it.'
'No you ain't,' Rife says, 'cause I got Tinkerbell here.'
At the last minute, Y.T. tries to duck down and hide, so he won't see her. She's ashamed. But Hiro locks eyes with her for just a moment, and she can see the defeat come into his face.
She makes a dive for the door and gets halfway out, under the downblast of the rotors. Tony grabs her coverall's collar and hauls her back inside. He shoves her down on her belly and puts one knee in the small of her back to hold her there. Meanwhile, the engine is powering up again, and out the open door she can see the steel horizon of the carrier's deck drop from view.
After all this time, she fucked up the plan. She owes Hiro a refund.
Or maybe not.
She puts the heel of one hand against the edge of the clay tablet and shoves as hard as she can. It slides across the floor, teeters on the threshold, and spins out of the chopper.
Another delivery made, another satisfied customer.
61
For a minute or so, the chopper hovers twenty feet overhead. All the people inside are staring down at the tablet, which has burst out of its wrappings in the middle of the bullseye. The plastic has torn apart around the corners and fragments - large fragments - of the tablet have sprayed out for a few feet in either direction.
Hiro stares at it, too, still safe behind the cover of a parked chopper. He stares at it so hard that be forgets to stare at anything else. Then a couple of wireheads land on his back, smashing his face into the flank of the chopper. He slides down and lands on his belly. His gun arm is still free, but a couple more wireheads sit on that. A couple on his legs, too. He can't move at all. He can't see anything but the broken tablet, twenty feet away on the flight deck. The sound and wind of Rife's chopper diminish into a distant puttering noise that takes a long time to go away completely.
He feels a tingling behind his ear, anticipating the scalpel and the drill.
These wireheads are operating under remote control from somewhere else. Ng seemed to think that they had an organized Raft defense system. Maybe there's a hacker-in-charge, an en, sitting in the Enterprise's control tower, moving these guys around like an air traffic controller.
In any case, they are not very big on spontaneity. They sit on him for a few minutes before they decide what to do next. Then, many hands reach down and clasp him around the wrists and ankles, elbows and knees. They haul him across the flight deck like pallbearers, face up. Hiro looks up into the control tower and sees a couple of faces looking down at him. One of them - the en - is talking into a microphone.
Eventually, they come to a big flat elevator that sinks down into the guts of the ship, out of view of the control tower. It comes to rest on one of the lower decks, apparently a hangar deck where they used to maintain airplanes
Hiro hears a woman's voice, speaking words gently but clearly: 'me lu lu mu al nu urn me en ki me en me lu lu mu me al nu urn me al nu ume me me mu lu e al nu um me dug ga mu me mu. lu e al nu urn me…'
It's three feet straight down to the deck, and he covers the distance in free fall, slamming down on his back, bumping his head. All his limbs bounce loosely on the metal. Around him he sees and hears the wireheads collapsing like wet towels falling off a rack.
He cannot move any part of his body. He has a little control over his eyes. A face comes into view, and he has trouble resolving it, can't quite focus, but he recognizes something in her posture, the way she tosses her hair back over her shoulder when it falls down. It's Juanita. Juanita with an antenna rising out of the base of her skull.
She kneels down beside him, bends down, cups one hand around his ear, and whispers. The hot air tickles his ear, he tries to move away from it but can't. She's whispering another long string of syllables. Then she straightens up and gooses him in the side. He jerks away from her.
'Get up, lazybones,' she says.
He gets up. He's fine now. But all the wireheads lay around him, perfectly motionless.
'Just a little nam-shub I whipped up,' she says. 'They'll be fine.'
'Hi,' he says.
'Hi. It's good to see you, Hiro. I'm going to give you a hug now - watch out for the antenna.'
She does. He hugs her back. The antenna is upside his nose, but that's okay.
'Once we get this thing taken off, all the hair and stuff should grow back,' she whispers. Finally, she lets him go. 'That hug was really more for me than for you It's been a lonely time here. Lonely and scary.'
This is typically paradoxical behavior for Juanita - getting touchy-feely at a time like this.
'Don't get me wrong,' Hiro says, 'but aren't you one of the bad guys now?'
'Oh, you mean this?'
'Yeah. Don't you work for them?'
'If so, I'm not doing a very good job.' She laughs, gesturing at the ring of motionless wireheads. 'No. This doesn't work on me. It sort of did, for a while, but there are ways to fight it.'
'Why? Why doesn't it work on you?'
'I've spent the last several years hanging around with Jesuits,' she says. 'Look. Your brain has an immune system, just like your body. The more you use it - the more viruses you get exposed to - the better your immune system becomes. And I've got a hell of an immune system. Remember, I was an atheist for a while, and then I came back to religion the hard way.'
'Why didn't they screw you up the way they did Da5id?'
'I came here voluntarily.'
'Like Inanna.'
'Yes.'
'Why would anyone come here voluntarily?'
'Hiro, don't you realize? This is it. This is the nerve center of a religion that is at once brand new and very ancient. Being here is like following Jesus or Mohammed around, getting to observe the birth of a new faith.'
'But it's terrible. Rife is the Antichrist.'
'Of course he is. But it's still interesting. And Rife has got something else going for him: Eridu.'
