'So Ovchinnikov let himself be persuaded to use his submarine - which is very large and very fast - to evacuate some of these poor Refus to TROKK.
'But, naturally, he was paranoid about the idea of letting a whole bunch of unknown quantities onto his ship. These nuke-sub commanders are real security freaks, for obvious reasons. So they set up a very strict system. All the Refus who were going to get on the ship had to pass through metal detectors, had to be inspected. Then they were under armed guard all the way across to Alaska.
'Well, the Stern Orthos have this guy named Raven - '
'I'm familiar with him.'
'Well, Raven got onto that nuclear submarine.'
'Oh, my God.'
'He got over to the Siberian coast somehow - probably surfed across in his fucking kayak.'
'Surfed?'
'That's how the Aleuts get between islands.'
'Raven's an Aleut?'
'Yeah. An Aleut whale killer. You know what an Aleut is?'
'Yeah. My Dad knew one in Japan,' Hiro says. A bunch of Dad's old prison-camp tales are beginning to stir in Hiro's memory, working their way up out of deep, deep storage.
'The Aleuts just paddle out in their kayaks and catch a wave. They can outrun a steamship, you know.'
'Didn't know that.'
'Anyway, Raven went to one of these Refu camps and passed himself off as a Siberian tribesman. You can't tell some of those Siberians apart from our Indians. The Orthos apparently had some confederates in these camps who bumped Raven up to the head of the line, so he got to be on the submarine.'
'But you said there was a metal detector.'
'Didn't help. He uses glass knives. Chips them out of plate glass. It's the sharpest blade in the universe, you know.'
'Didn't know that either.'
'Yeah. The edge is only a single molecule wide. Doctors use them for eye surgery - they can cut your cornea and not leave a scar. There's Indians who make a living doing that, you know. Chipping out eye scalpels.'
'Well, you learn something new every day. That kind of a knife would be sharp enough to go through bulletproof fabric, I guess,' Hiro says.
Chuck Wrightson shrugs. 'I lost track of the number of people Raven snuffed who were wearing bulletproof fabric.'
Hiro says, 'I thought he must be carrying some kind of high-tech laser knife or something.'
'Think again. Glass knife. He had one on board the submarine. Either smuggled it on board with him, or else found a chunk of glass on the submarine and chipped it out himself.'
'And?'
Chuck gets his thousand-yard stare again, takes another slug of beer. 'On a sub, you know, there's no place for things to drain to. The survivors claimed that the blood was knee-deep all through the submarine. Raven just killed everyone. Everyone except the Orthos, a skeleton crew, and some other Refus who were able to barricade themselves in little compartments around the ship. The survivors say,' Chuck says, taking another swig, 'that it was quite a night.'
'And he forced them to steer the submarine into the hands of the Orthos.'
'To their anchorage off Kodiak,' Chuck says. 'The Orthos were all ready. They had put together a crew of ex-Navy men, guys who had worked on nuke subs in the past - X-rays, they call them - and they came and took the sub over. As for us, we had no idea that any of this had happened. Until one of the warheads showed up in our goddamn front yard.'
Chuck glances up above Hiro's head, noticing someone. Hiro feels a light tap on his shoulder. 'Excuse me, sir?' a man is saying. 'Pardon me for just a second?'
40
Hiro turns around. It's a big porky white man with wavy, slicked-back red hair and a beard. He's got a baseball cap perched on top of his head, tilted way back to expose the following words, tattooed in block letters across his forehead: MOOD SWINGS
RACIALLY INSENSITIVE
Hiro is looking up at all of this over the curving horizon of the man's flannel-clad belly.
'What is it?' Hiro says.
'Well, sir, I'm sorry to disturb you in the middle of your conversation with this gentleman here. But me and my friends were just wondering. Are you a lazy shiftless watermelon-eating black-ass nigger, or a sneaky little v.d.-infected gook?'
The man reaches up, pulls the brim of his baseball cap downward. Now Hiro can see the Confederate flag printed on the front, the embroidered words 'New South Africa Franchulate #153.'
Hiro pushes himself up over the table, spins around, and slides backward on his ass toward Chuck, trying to get the table between him and the New South African. Chuck has conveniently vanished, so Hiro ends up standing with his back comfortably to the wall, looking out over the bar.
At the same time, a dozen or so other men are standing up from their tables, forming up behind the first one in a grinning, sunburned phalanx of Confederate flags and sideburns.
'Let's see,' Hiro says, 'is that some kind of a trick question?'
There are a lot of Towne Halls in a lot of Snooze 'n' Cruise franchises where you have to check your weapons at the entrance. This is not one of them.
Hiro isn't sure if that is bad or good. Without weapons, the New South Africans would just beat the crap out of him. With weapons, Hiro can fight back, but the stakes are higher. Hiro is bulletproof up to his neck, but that just means the New South Africans will all be going for a head shot. And they pride themselves on marksmanship. It is a fetish with them.
'Isn't there an NSA franchise down the road?' Hiro says.
'Yeah,' says the point man, who has a long, spreading body and short stumpy legs. 'It's heaven. It really is. Ain't no place on earth like a New South Africa.'
'Well, then if you don't mind my asking,' Hiro says, 'if it's so damn nice, why don't y'all go back to your egg sac and hang out there?'
'There is one problem with New South Africa,' the guy says. 'Don't mean to sound unpatriotic, but it's true.'
'And what is that problem?' Hiro says.
'There's no niggers, gooks, or kikes there to beat the shit out of.'
'Ah. That is a problem,' Hiro says. 'Thank you.'
'For what?'
'For announcing your intentions - giving me the right to do this.'
Then Hiro cuts his head off.
What else can he do? There are at least twelve of them. They have made a point of blocking the only exit. They have just announced their intentions. And presumably they are all carrying heat. Besides, this kind of thing is going to happen to him about every ten seconds when he's on the Raft.
The New South African has no idea what's coming, but he starts to react as Hiro is swinging the katana at his neck, so he is flying backward when the decapitation occurs. That is good, because about half his blood supply comes lofting out the top of his neck. Twin jets, one from each carotid. Hiro doesn't get a drop on himself.
In the Metaverse, the blade just passes right through, if you swing it quickly enough. Here in Reality, Hiro's expecting a powerful shock when his blade hits the New South African's neck, like when you hit a baseball the wrong way, but he hardly feels a thing. It just goes right through and almost swings around and buries itself in the
