NEAL STEPHENSON

297

“manna’s messenger waits for three days, and when she fails to return from the nether world, goes to the gods asking for their help. None of the gods is willing to help except for Enki.”

“So our buddy, Enki, the hacker god, has to bail her ass out of Hell.”

“Enki creates two people and sends them into the netherworid to rescue manna. Through their magic, Inanna is brought back to life. She returns from the netherworld, followed by a host of the dead.”

“Juanita went to the Raft three days ago,” Hiro says. “It’s time to get hacking.”

___________ Earth is still where he left it, zoomed in to show a magnified view of the Raft. In the light of last night’s chat with Chuck Wrightson, it’s not hard to find the hunk of raft that was staked out by the Orthos when the Enterprise swung by TROKK a few weeks back. There’s a couple of big.assed Soviet freighters tied together, a swarm of small boats around them. Most of the Raft is dead brown and organic, but this section is all white fiberglass: pleasure craft looted from the comfortable retirees of TROKK. Thousands of them.

Now the Raft is off Port Sherman, so, Hiro figures, that’s where the high priests of Asherah are hanging out. In a few days, they’ll be in Eureka, then San Francisco, then L.A..-a floating land link, tying the Orthos’ operations on the Raft to the closest available point on the mainland.

He turns away from the Raft, skims across the ocean to Port Sherman to do a bit of reconnoitering there.

Down along the waterfront, there’s a nice crescent of cheap motels with yellow logos. Hiro rifles through them, looking for Russian names.

That’s easy. There’s a Spectrum 2000 right in the middle of the waterfront. As the name implies, each one has a whole range of rooms, from human coin lockers in the lobby all the way to luxury suites on the top. And a whole range of rooms has been rented out by a bunch of people with names ending in -off and

-ovski and other dead Slavic giveaways. Thefoot soldiers sleep in the lobby, laid out straight and narrow in coin lockers next to

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