'Which gang is that?'
'Lagos's gang.'
'Huh?'
'Well, it's not really his gang. But he's the guy who put it together. The nucleus around which it formed.'
'How and why and what are you talking about?'
'Okay.' He shoves his plate away from him, folds up his napkin, puts it on the table. 'Lagos had all these ideas. Ideas about all kinds of stuff.'
'So I noticed.'
'He had stacks all over the place, on all different topics. Stacks where he would pull together knowledge from all over the fucking map and tie it all together. He had these things stashed here and there around the Metaverse, waiting for the information to become useful.'
'More than one of them?' Hiro says.
'Supposedly. Well, a few years ago, Lagos approached L. Bob Rife.'
'He did?'
'Yeah. See, Rife has a million programmers working for him. He was paranoid that they were stealing his data.'
'I know that he was bugging their houses and so on.'
'The reason you know that is because you found it in Lagos's stack. And the reason Lagos bothered to look it up is because he was doing market research. Looking for someone who might pay him hard cash for the stuff he dug up in the Babel/Infocalypse stack.'
'He thought,' Hiro says, 'that L. Bob Rife might have a use for some viruses.'
'Right. See, I don't understand all this shit. But I guess he found an old virus or something that was aimed at the elite thinkers.'
'The technological priesthood,' Hiro says. 'The infocrats. It wiped out the whole infocracy of Sumer.'
'Whatever.'
'That's crazy,' Hiro says. 'That's like if you find out your employees are stealing ballpoint pens, you take them out and kill them. He wouldn't be able to use it without destroying all his programmers' minds.'
'In its original form,' the man with the glass eye says. 'But the whole point is, Lagos wanted to do research on it.'
'Informational warfare research.'
'Bingo. He wanted to isolate this thing and modify it so it could be used to control the programmers without blowing their brains sky high.'
'And did it work?'
'Who knows? Rife stole Lagos's idea. Just took it and ran with it. And after that, Lagos had no idea what Rife did with it. But a couple of years later, he started getting worried about a lot of stuff he was seeing.'
'Like the explosive growth in Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates.'
'And these Russkies who speak in tongues. And the fact that Rife was digging up this old city - '
'Eridu.'
'Yeah. And the radio astronomy thing. Lagos had a lot of stuff he was worried about. So he began to approach people. He approached us. He approached that girl you used to go out with -'
'Juanita.'
'Yeah. Nice girl. And he approached Mr. Lee. So you might say that a few different people have been working on this little project.'
46
'Where'd they go?' Hiro says.
Everyone's already looking for the float, as though they all noticed at once that it was missing. Finally they see it, a quarter mile behind them, dead in the water. The bigwigs and the bodyguards are standing up now, all looking in the same direction. The speedboat is circling around to retrieve it.
'They must have figured out a way to detach the tow cable,' Hiro says.
'Not likely,' the man with the glass eye says. 'It was attached to the bottom, under the water. And it's a steel cable, so there's no way they could cut it.'
Hiro sees another small craft bobbing on the water, about halfway between the Russians and the speedboat that was towing them. It's not obvious, because it's tiny, close to the water done up in dull natural colors. It's a one-man kayak. Carrying a long-haired man.
'Shit,' Livio says. 'Where the hell did he come from?'
The kayaker looks behind himself for a few moments, reading the waves, then suddenly turns back around and begins to paddle hard, accelerating, glancing back every few strokes. A big wave is coming, and just as it swells up underneath the kayak, he's matching its speed. The kayak stays on top of the wave and shoots forward like a missile, riding the swell, suddenly going twice as fast as anything else on the water.
Digging at the wave with one end of his paddle, the kayaker makes a few crude changes in his direction. Then he parks the paddle athwart the kayak, reaches down inside, and hauls out a small dark object, a tube about four feet long, which he hoists up to one shoulder.
He and the speedboat shoot past each other going in opposite directions, separated by a gap of only about twenty feet. Then the speedboat blows up.
The Kowloon has overshot the site of all this action by a few thousand yards. It's pulling around into as tight a turn as a vessel of this size can handle, trying to throw a one-eighty so it can go back and deal with the Russians and, somewhat more problematically, with Raven.
Raven is paddling back toward his buddies.
'He's such an asshole,' Livio says. 'What's he going to do, tow them out to the Raft behind his fucking kayak?'
'This gives me the creeps,' the man with the glass eye says. 'Make sure we got some guys up there with Stingers. They must have a chopper coming or something.'
'No other ships on the radar' says one of the other soldiers, coming in from the bridge. 'Just us and them. And no choppers either.'
'You know Raven carries a nuke, right?' Hiro says.
'So I heard. But that kayak's not big enough. It's tiny. I can't believe you'd go out to sea in something like that.'
A mountain is growing out of the sea. A bubble of black water that keeps rising and broadening. Well behind the bobbing raft, a black tower has appeared, jutting vertically out of the water, a pair of wings sprouting from its top. The tower keeps getting taller, the wings getting higher out of the water, as before and aft, the mountain rises and shapes itself. Red stars and a few numbers. But no one has to read the numbers to know it's a submarine. A nuclear-missile submarine.
Then it stops. So close to the Russians on their little raft that Gurov and friends can practically jump onto it. Raven paddles toward them, cutting through the waves like a glass knife.
'Fuck me,' the man with the glass eye says. He is utterly astounded. 'Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. Uncle Enzo's gonna be pissed.'
'You couldn't of known,' Livio says. 'Should we shoot at 'em?'
Before the man with the glass eye can make a policy decision, the deck gun on the top of the nuke sub opens up. The first shell misses them by just a few yards.
'Okay, we got a rapidly evolving situation. Hiro, you come with me.'
The crew of the Kowloon has already sized up the situation and placed their bets on the nuclear submarine. They are running up and down the rails, dropping large fiberglass capsules into the water. The capsules break open to reveal bright orange folds, which blossom into life rafts.
Once the deck gunners on the nuke sub figure out how to hit the Kowloon, the situation begins to evolve
