SNOW CRASH

their AK-47s, and the priests and generals live in nice rooms higher up. Him pauses to wonder what a Pentecostal Russian Orthodox priest does with a Magic Fingers.

The suite on the very top is being rented out by a gentleman by the name of Gurov. Mr. KGB himself. Too much of a wimp to hang out on the actual Raft, apparently.

How’d he get from the Raft to Port Sherman? If it involves crossing a couple of hundred miles of North Pacific, it must be a decent-sized vessel.

There are half a dozen marinas in Port Sherman. At the moment, most of them are clogged with small brown boats. It looks like a post-typhoon situation, where a few hundred square miles of ocean have been swept clean of sampans that have piled up against the nearest hard place. Except this is slightly more organized than that

The Refus are coming ashore already. If they’re smart, and aggressive, they probably know that they can walk to California from here.

That explains why the piers are clogged with trashy little boats. But one of them still looks like a private marina. It’s got a dozen or so clean white vessels, lined up neatly in their slips, no riffraff. And the resolution of this image is good enough that Hiro can see the pier speckled with little doughnuts: probably rings of sandbags. That’d be the only way to keep your pnvatemoorage private when the Raft was hovering offshore.

The numbers, flags, and other identifying goodies are harder to make out. The satellite has a hard time picking that stuff out.

Hiro checks to see whether CIC has a stringer in Port Sherman. They have to, because the Raft is here, and CIC hopes to make a big business out of selling Raft intelligence to all the anxious waterfronters between Skagway and Tierra del Fuego.

Indeed. There are a few people hanging out in this town, uploading the latest Port Sherman intel. And one of them is just a punter with a video camera who goes around shooting pictures of everything.

Hiro reviews this stuff in fast-forward. A lot of it is shot from the stringer’s hotel window: hours and hours of coverage of the stream of shitty little brown boats laboring their way up the