contains a number of steel ships and barges. It extends off into the distance, away from the Core, for as far as Hiro can see from his worthless sea-level vantage point.
He's being watched by a man high up in the superstructure of one of those Chinese ships, another wirehead. Hiro can see the guy's jaw flapping as he sends updates to Raft Central.
The big Gatling gun on the deck of the Enterprise opens up again and fires another meteorite of depleted uranium slugs into the side of an unoccupied barge about twenty feet from Hiro. The entire side of the barge chases itself inward, like the steel has become liquid and is running down a drain, and the metal turns bright as shock waves simply turn that thick layer of rust into an aerosol, blast it free from the steel borne on a wave of sound so powerful that it hurts Hiro down inside his chest and makes him feel sick.
The gun is radar controlled. It's very accurate when it's shooting at a piece of metal. It's a lot less accurate when it's trying to hit flesh and blood.
'Hiro? What the fuck's going on?' Y.T. is shouting into his earphones.
'Can't talk. Get me to my office,' Hiro says. 'Pull me onto the back of the motorcycle and then drive it there.'
'I don't know how to drive a motorcycle,' she says.
'It's only got one control. Twist the throttle and it goes.'
And then he points his boat out toward the open water and drills it. Dimly superimposed on Reality, he can see the black-and-white figure of Y.T. sitting in front of him on the motorcycle; she reaches out for the throttle and both of them jerk forward and slam into the wall of a skyscraper at Mach 1.
He turns off his view of the Metaverse entirely, making the goggles totally transparent. Then he switches his system into full gargoyle mode: enhanced visible light with false-color infrared, plus millimeter-wave radar.
His view of the world goes into grainy black and white, much brighter than it was before. Here and there, certain objects glow fuzzily in pink or red. This comes from the infrared, and it means that these things are warm or hot; people are pink, engines and fires are red.
The millimeter-wave radar stuff is superimposed much more cleanly and crisply in neon green. Anything made of metal shows up. Hiro is now navigating down a grainy, charcoal-gray avenue of water lined with grainy, light gray pontoon bridges tied up to crisp neon-green barges and ships that glow reddishly from place to place, wherever they are generating heat. It's not pretty. In fact, it's so ugly that it probably explains why gargoyles are, in general, so socially retarded. But it's a lot more useful than the charcoal-on-ebony view he had before.
And it saves his life. As he's buzzing down a curving, narrow canal, a narrow green parabola appears hanging across the water in front of him, suddenly rising out of the water and snapping into a perfectly straight line at neck level. It's a piece of piano wire. Hiro ducks under it, waves to the young Chinese men who set the booby trap, and keeps going.
The radar picks out three fuzzy pink individuals holding Chinese AK-47s standing by the side of the channel. Hiro cuts into a side channel and avoids them. But it's a narrower channel, and he's not sure where it goes.
'Y.T.,' he says, 'where the hell are we?'
'Driving down the street toward your house. We overshot it about six times.'
Up ahead, the channel dead-ends. Hiro does a one-eighty. With the big heat exchanger dragging behind it, the boat is not nearly as maneuverable or as fast as Hiro wants it to be. He passes back underneath the booby- trap wire and starts exploring another narrow channel that he passed earlier.
'Okay, we're home. You're sitting at your desk,' Y.T. says.
'Okay,' Hiro says, 'this is going to be tricky.'
He coasts down to a dead stop in the middle of the channel, makes a scan for militia men and wireheads, and finds none. There is a five-foot-tall Chinese woman in the boat next to him holding a square cleaver, chopping something. Hiro figures it's a risk he can handle, so he turns off Reality and returns to the Metaverse.
He's sitting at his desk. Y.T. is standing next to him, arms crossed, radiating Attitude.
'Librarian?'
'Yes, sir,' the Librarian says, padding in.
'I need blueprints of the aircraft carrier Enterprise. Fast. If you can get me something in 3-D, that'd be great.'
'Yes, sir,' the Librarian says.
Hiro reaches out and grabs Earth.
'YOU ARE HERE,' he says.
Earth spins around until he's staring straight down at the Raft. Then it plunges toward him at a terrifying rate. It takes all of three seconds for him to get there.
If he were in some normal, stable part of the world like lower Manhattan, this would actually work in 3-D. Instead, he's got to put up with two-dimensional satellite imagery. He is looking at a red dot superimposed on a black-and-white photograph of the Raft. The red dot is in the middle of a narrow black channel of water: YOU ARE HERE.
It's still an incredible maze. But it's a lot easier to solve a maze when you're looking down on it. Within about sixty seconds, he's out in the open Pacific. It's a foggy gray dawn. The plume of steam coming out of Reason's heat exchanger just thickens it a little.
'Where the hell are you?' Y.T. says.
'Leaving the Raft.'
'Gee, thanks for all your help.'
'I'll be back in a minute. I just need a second to get myself organized.'
'There's a lot of scary guys around here,' Y.T. says. 'They're watching me.'
'It's okay,' Hiro says. 'I'm sure they'll listen to Reason.'
59
He flips open the big suitcase. The screen is still on, showing him a flat desktop display with a menu bar at the top. He uses a trackball to pull down a menu: HELP
Getting ready
Firing Reason
Tactical tips
Maintenance
Resupply
Troubleshooting
Miscellaneous
Under the 'Getting ready' heading is more information than he could possibly want on that subject, including half an hour of badly overexposed video starring a stocky, scar-faced Asian guy whose face seems paralyzed into a permanent look of disdain. He puts on his clothes. He limbers up with special stretching exercises. He opens up Reason. He checks the barrels for damage or dirt. Hiro fast-forwards through all of this.
Finally the stocky Asian man puts on the gun.
Fisheye wasn't really using Reason the right way; it comes with its own mount that straps to your body so that you can soak up the recoil with your pelvis, taking the force right in your body's center of gravity. The mount has shock absorbers and miniature hydraulic goodies to compensate for the weight and the recoil. If you put all this stuff on the right way, the gun's a lot easier to use accurately. And if you're goggled into a computer, it'll superimpose a handy cross hairs over whatever the gun's aimed at.
'Your information, sir,' the Librarian says.
'Are you smart enough to tie that information into YOU ARE HERE?' Hiro says.
'I'll see what I can do, sir. The formats appear to be reconcilable. Sir?'
'Yes?'
'These blueprints are several years old. Since they were made, the Enterprise has been purchased by a private owner - '
