NEAL STEPHENSON

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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 EnteTprise. 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 plariki

As she is walking toward the helicopter, one of the men standing by it detaches himself from the group and walks toward her.

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