'How the fuck should I know? I've just seen 'em a few times, from a distance. Anyway, I'm going to take us straight in toward the center, and once we get close enough, I'll turn to starboard and swing around the Raft counterclockwise, looking for someone who might be willing to sell us fuel. If worse comes to worst and we end up on the Raft itself, we stick together and we hire ourselves a guide, because if we try to move across the Raft without the help of someone who knows the web, we'll get into a bad situation.'
'Like what kind of a bad situation?' Fisheye asks.
'Like hanging on a rotted-out slime-covered cargo net between two ships rocking different ways, with nothing underneath us except ice water full of plague rats, toxic waste, and killer whales. Any questions?'
'Yeah,' Fisheye says. 'Can I go home now?'
Good. If Fisheye is scared, so's Hiro.
'Remember what happened to the pirate named Bruce Lee,' Eliot says. 'He was well-armed and powerful. He pulled up alongside a life raft full of Refus one day, looking for some poontang, and he was dead before he knew it. Now there are a lot of people who want to do that to us.'
'Don't they have some kind of cops or something?' Vic says. 'I heard they did.'
In other words, Vic has killed a lot of time going to Raft movies in Times Square.
'The people up on the Enterprise operate in kind of a wrath-of-God mode,' Eliot says. 'They have big guns mounted around the edge of the flight deck - big Gatling guns like Reason except with larger bullets. They were originally put there to shoot down Exocet missiles. They strike with the force of a meteorite. If people act up out on the Raft, they will make the problem go away. But a little murder or riot isn't enough to get their attention. If it's a rocket duel between rival pirate organizations, that's different.'
Suddenly, they've been nailed with a spotlight so big and powerful they can't look anywhere near it.
Then it's dark again, and a gunshot from Vic's rifle is searing and reverberating across the water.
'Nice shooting, Vic,' Fisheye says.
'It's, like, one of them drug dealer boats,' Vic says, looking through his magic sight. 'Five guys on it. Headed our way.' He fires another round. 'Correction. Four guys on it.' Boom. 'Correction, they're not headed our way anymore.' Boom. A fireball erupts from the ocean two hundred feet away. 'Correction. No boat.'
Fisheye laughs and actually slaps his thigh. 'You recording all of this, Hiro?'
'No,' Hiro says. 'Wouldn't come out.'
'Oh.' Fisheye seems taken aback, like this changes everything.
'That's the first wave,' Eliot says. 'Rich pirates looking for easy pickings. But they've got a lot to lose, so they scare easy.'
'Another big yacht-type boat is out there,' Vic says, 'but they're turning away now.'
Above the deep chortling noise of their yacht's big diesel, they can hear the high whine of outboard motors.
'Second wave,' Eliot says. 'Pirate wannabes. These guys will come in a lot faster, so stay sharp.'
'This thing has millimeter wave on it,' Fisheye says. Hiro looks at him; his face is illuminated from below by the glow of Reason's built-in screen. 'I can see these guys like it's fucking daylight.'
Vic fires several rounds, pops the clip out of his rifle, shoves in a new one.
A zodiac zips past, skittering across the wavetops, strafing them with weak flashlight beams. Fisheye fires a couple of short bursts from Reason, blasting clouds of warm steam into the cold night air, but misses them.
'Save your ammo,' Eliot says. 'Even with Uzis, they can't hit us until they slow down a little bit. And even with radar, you can't hit them.'
A second zodiac whips past them on the other side, closer than the last one. Vic and Fisheye both hold their fire. They hear it orbiting them, swinging back around the way it came.
'Those two boats are getting together out there,' Vic says. 'They got two more of them. A total of four. They're talking.'
'We've been reconned,' Eliot says, 'and they're planning their tactics. The next time is for real.'
A second later, two fantastically loud blasts sound from the rear of the yacht, where Eliot is, accompanied by brief flashes of light. Hiro turns around to see a body collapsing to the deck. It's not Eliot. Eliot is crouching there holding his oversized halibut shooter.
Hiro runs back, looks at the dead swimmer in the dim light scattering off the clouds. He's naked except for a thick coating of black grease and a belt with a gun and a knife in it. He's still holding on to the rope that he used to pull himself on board. The rope is attached to a grappling hook that has caught in the jagged, broken fiberglass on one side of the yacht.
'Third wave is coming a little early,' Eliot says, his voice high and shaky. He's trying so hard to sound cool that it has the opposite effect. 'Hiro, this gun's got three rounds left in it, and I'm saving the last one for you if any more of these motherfuckers get on board.'
'Sorry,' Hiro says. He draws the short wakizashi. He would feel better if he could carry his nine in the other hand, but he needs one hand free to steady himself and keep from failing overboard. He makes a quick circuit of the yacht, looking for more grappling hooks, and actually finds one on the other side, hooked into one of the railing stanchions, a taut rope trailing out behind it into the sea.
Correction: It's a taut cable. His sword won't cut it. And the tension on the rope is such that he can't get it unhooked from the stanchion.
As he's squatting there playing with the grappling hook, a greasy hand rises up out of the water and grabs his wrist. Another hand gropes for Hiro's other hand and grabs the sword instead. Hiro yanks the weapon free, feeling it do damage, and shoves the wakizashi point first into the place between those two hands just as someone is sinking his teeth into Hiro's crotch. But Hiro's crotch is protected - the motorcycle outfit has a hard plastic cup - and so this human shark just gets a mouthful of bulletproof fabric. Then his grip loosens, and he falls into the sea. Hiro releases the grappling hook and drops it in with him.
Vic fires three rounds in quick succession, and a fireball illuminates one whole side of the ship. For a moment, they can see everything around them for a distance of a hundred yards, and the effect is like turning on your kitchen lights in the middle of the night and finding your countertops aswarm with rats. At least a dozen small boats are around them.
'They got Molotov cocktails,' Vic says.
The people in the boats can see them, too. Tracers fly around them from several directions. Hiro can see muzzle flashes in at least three places. Fisheye opens up once, twice with Reason, just firing short bursts of a few dozen rounds each, and produces one fireball, this one farther away from the yacht.
It's been at least five seconds since Hiro moved, so he checks this area for grappling hooks again and resumes his circuit around the edge of the yacht. This time it's clear. The two greaseballs must have been working together.
A Molotov cocktail arcs through the sky and impacts on the starboard side of the yacht, where it's not going to do much damage. Inside would be a lot worse. Fisheye uses Reason to hose down the area from which the Molotov was thrown, but now that the side of the boat is all lit up from the flames, they draw more small-arms fire. In that light, Hiro can see trickles of blood running down from the area where Vic ensconced himself.
On the port side, he sees something long and narrow and low in the water, with the torso of a man rising out of it. The man has long hair that falls down around his shoulders, and he's holding an eight-foot pole in one hand. Just as Hiro sees him, he's throwing it.
The harpoon darts across twenty feet of open water. The million chipped facets of its glass head refract the light and make it look like a meteor. It takes Fisheye in the back, slices easily through the bulletproof fabric he's wearing under his suit, and comes all the way out the other side of his body. The impact lifts Fisheye into the air and throws him off the boat; he lands face-first in the water, already dead.
Mental note: Raven's weapons do not show up on radar.
Hiro looks back in the direction of Raven, but he's already gone. A couple more greaseballs, side by side, vault over the railing about ten feet forward of Hiro, but for a moment they're dazzled by the flames. Hiro pulls out his nine, aims it their way, and keeps pulling the trigger until both of them have fallen back into the water. He's not sure how many rounds are left in the gun now.
There's a coughing, hissing noise, and the flame light gets dim and finally goes out. Eliot nailed it with a fire extinguisher.
The yacht jerks out from under Hiro's feet, and he hits the deck with his face and shoulder. Getting up, he
