NEAL STEPHENSON
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crotch is protected-the motorcycle outfit has a hard plastic cup-and so this human shark just gets a mouthful of bulletproof fabric. Then his grip loosens, and he falls into the sea. Hiro releases the grappling hook and drops it in with him.
Vie fires three rounds in quick succession, and a fireball illuminates one whole side of the ship. For a moment, they can see everything around them for a distance of a hundred yards, and the effect is like turning on your kitchen lights in the middle of the night and finding your countertops aswarm with rats. At least a dozen small boats are around them.
“They got Molotov cocktails,” Vie says.
The people in the boats can see them, too. Tracers fly around them from several directions. Hiro can see muzzle flashes in at least three places. Fisheyc opens up once, twice with Reason, just firing short bursts of a few dozen rounds each, and produces one fireball, this one farther away from the yacht.
It’s been at least five seconds since Hiro moved, so he checks this area for grappling hooks again and resumes his circuit around the edge of the yacht. This time it’s clear. The two greaseballs must have been working together.
A Molotov cocktail arcs through the sky and impacts on the starboard side of the yacht, where it’s not going to do much damage. Inside would be a lot worse. Fisheye uses Reason to hose down the area from which the Molotov was thrown, but now that the side of the boat is all lit up from the flames, they draw more small-arms fire, in that light, Hiro can see trickles of blood run-fling down from the area where Vie ensconced himself.
On the port side, he sees something long and narrow and low in the water, with the torso of a man rising out of it. The man has long hair that falls down around his shoulders, and he’s holding an eight-foot pole in one hand. Just as Hiro sees him, he’s throwing it.
The harpoon darts across twenty feet of open water. The million chipped facets of its glass head refract the light and make it look like a meteor. It takes Fisheye in the back, slices easily through the buUetproof fabric he’s wearing under his siiit~, and comes all the way out the other side of his body. The impact lifts Fisheye into the air and throws him off the boat; he lands facefirst in the water, already dead.
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