When her partner is off doing something in Reality, his avatar goes kind of slack. The body sits there like an inflatable love doll, and the face continues to go through all kinds of stretching exercises. She does not know what he's doing, but it looks like it must be exciting, because most of the time he's either extremely surprised or scared shitless.
Shortly after he gets done talking to the Librarian dude about the aircraft carrier, she begins to hear deep rumbling noises -- Reality noises -- from outside. Sounds like a cross between a machine gun and a buzz saw. Whenever she hears that noise, Hiro's face gets this astonished look like: I'm about to die. Someone is tapping her on the shoulder. Some suit who has an early morning appointment in the Metaverse, figures that whatever this Kourier is doing can't be all that important. She ignores it for a minute.
Then Hiro's office goes out of focus, jumps up in the air like it is painted on a window shade, and she's looking into the face of a guy. An Asian guy. A creep. A wirehead. One of the scary antenna dudes.
"Okay," she says, "what do you want?"
He grabs her by the arm and hauls her out of the booth. There's another one with him, and he grabs her other arm. They all start walking out of there.
"Let go my fucking arm," she says. "I'll go with you. It's okay."
It's not the first time she's been thrown out of a building full of suits. This time it's a little different, though. This time, the bouncers are a couple of life-sized plastic action figures from Toys R Us.
And it's not just that these guys probably don't speak English. They just don't act normal. She actually manages to twist one of her arms loose and the guy doesn't smack her or anything, just turns rigidly toward her and paws at her mechanically until he's got her by the arm again. No change in his face. His eyes stare like busted headlights. His mouth is open enough to let him breathe through it, but the lips never move, never change expression.
They are in a complex of ship cabins and sliced-open containers that acts as the lobby of the hotel. The wireheads drag her out the door, over the blunt cross hairs of the helipad. Just in time, too, because a chopper happens to be coming in for a landing. The safety procedures in this place suck -- they could have got their heads chopped off. It is the slick corporate chopper with the RARE logo that she saw earlier.
The wireheads try to drag her over a gangplank thingy that leads them across open water to the next ship. She manages to get turned around backward, grabs the railings with both hands, hooks her ankles into the stanchions, and hangs on. One of them grabs her around the waist from behind and tries to yank her body loose while the other one stands in front of her and pries her fingers loose, one at a time.
Several guys are piling out of the RARE chopper. They are wearing coveralls with gear stuck into the pockets, and she sees at least one stethoscope. They haul big fiberglass cases out of the chopper, with red crosses painted on their sides, and run into the containership. Y.T. knows that this is not being done for the benefit of some fat businessman who stroked a lobe over his stewed prunes. They are going in there to reanimate her boyfriend. Raven pumped full of speed: just what the world needs right now.
They drag her across the deck of the next ship. From there they take a stairway thingy up to the next ship after that, which is very big. She thinks it's an oil tanker. She can look across its broad deck, through a tangle of pipes, rust seeping through white paint, and see the Enterprise on the other side. That's where they're going.
There's no direct connection. A crane on the deck of the Enterprise has swung itself over to dangle a small wire cage over the tanker, just a few feet off the deck -- it bobs up and down and glides back and forth over a fairly large area as the two ships rock in different ways and it swings like a pendulum at the end of its cable. It has a door on one side, which is hanging open.
They sort of toss her into it head first, keeping her arms pinned to her sides so she can't push it away from her, and then they spend a few seconds folding her legs in behind her. It's obvious by now that talking doesn't work, so she just fights silently. She manages to give one of them a good stomp to the bridge of the nose, and both feels and hears the bone break, but the man doesn't react in any way, other than snapping his head back on impact. She's so busy watching him, waiting to see when he's going to figure out that his nose is broken and that she's responsible for it, that she stops kicking and flailing long enough to get all shoved into the cage. Then the door snaps shut.
An experienced raccoon could get the latch open. This cage isn't made to hold people. But by the time she gets her body worked around to the point where she can reach it, she's twenty feet above the deck, looking down on a lead of black water between the tanker and the Enterprise. Down below, she can see an abandoned zodiac caroming back and forth between the steel walls.
Not everything is exactly right on the Enterprise. Something is burning somewhere. People are firing guns. She's not entirely sure she wants to be there. As long as she is high up in the air, she reconnoiters the ship and confirms that there is no way off, no handy gangplanks or stairway thingies.
She is being lowered toward the Enterprise. The cage is careening back and forth, skimming just over the deck on its cable, and when it finally touches the deck, it skids for a few feet before coming to a halt. She pops the latch and climbs out of there. Now what?
There's a bullseye painted on the deck, a few helicopters parked around the edges and lashed down. And there is one helicopter, a mammoth twin-engine jet number, kind of a flying bathtub festooned with guns and missiles, sitting right in the middle of the bullseye, all of its lights on, engine whining, rotors spinning desultorily. A small cluster of men is standing next to it.
Y.T. walks toward it. She hates this. She knows this is exactly what she's supposed to do. But there really is no other choice. She wishes, profoundly, that she had her plank with her. The deck of this aircraft carrier is some of the best skating territory she has ever seen. She has seen, in movies, that carriers have big steam catapults for throwing airplanes into the sky. Think of what it would be like to ride a steam catapult on your plank!
As she is walking toward the helicopter, one of the men standing by it detaches himself from the group and walks toward her.
He's big, with a body like a fifty-five-gallon drum, and a mustache that turns up at the corners. And as he comes toward her he is laughing in a satisfied way, which pisses her off.
"Well, don't you look like a forlorn lil thang!" he says. "Shit, honey, you look like a drowned rat that got dried out again."
"Thanks," she says. "You look like chiseled Spam."
"Very funny," h............