SNOW CRASH

“Then how exactly did the Orthos manage to take the place over?”

‘Well, one morning we woke up and there was an Airstream parked in the middle of Government Square in New Washington, right in the middle of all the bagos where we had set up the government. The Orthos had towed it there during the night, then took the wheels off so it couldn’t be moved. We figured it was a protest action. We told them to move it out of there. They refused and issued a proclamation, in Russian. When we got this damn thing translated, it turned out to be an order for us to pack up and leave and turn over power to the Orthos.

“Well, this was ridiculous. So we went up to this Airstrearn to move it out of there, and Gurov’s waiting for us with this nasty I grin on his face.”

“Gurov?”

“Yeah. One of the Refus who came over the Dateline from the Soviet Union. Former KGB general turned religious fanatic. He was kind of like the Minister of Defense for the government that the Orthos setup. So Gurov opens the side door of the Airstream and lets us get a load of what’s inside.”

“What was inside?”

“Well, mostly it was a bunch of equipment, you know, a portable generator, electrical wiring, a control panel, and so forth. But in the middle of the trailer, there’s this big black cone sitting on the floor. About the shape of an ice cream cone, except it’s about five feet long and it’s smooth and black. And I asked what the hell is that thing. And Gurov says, that thing is a ten-megaton hydrogen bomb we scavenged from a ballistic missile. A city. buster. Any more questions?”

“So you capitulated.”

“Couldn’t do much else.”

“Do you know how the Orthos came to be in possession of a hydrogen bomb?”

Chuck Wrightson clearly knows. He sucks in his deepest breath of the evening, lets it out, shakes his head, staring off over Hiro’s shoulder. He takes a couple of nice long swigs from his glass of beer.

“There was a Soviet nuclear-missile submarine. The commander was named Ovchinnikov. He was religiously faithful, but he