Part 36 (1/2)

They're crossing a big broad platform. Suddenly he's right behind her, his arms are around her body, and he draws her back into him. Her toes are just barely touching the ground. She can feel his cool nose against her temple and his hot breath coming into one ear. It sends a tingle straight down to her toes.

”Short-term goal or long-term goal?” Raven whispers.

”Um-long term.”

”I used to have this plan-I was going to nuke America.”

”Oh. Well, that'd be kind of harsh,” she says.

”Maybe. Depends on what kind of a mood I'm in. Other than that, no long-term goals.” Every time he whispers something, another breath tickles her ear.

”How about medium-term then?'

”In a few hours, the Raft comes apart,” Raven says. 'We're headed for California. Looking for a decent place to live. Some people might try to stop us. It's my job to help the people make it safe and sound up onto the sh.o.r.e. So you might say I'm going to war.”

”Oh, that's a shame,” she mumbles.

”So it's hard to think of anything besides the here and now.”

”Yeah, I know.”

”I rented a nice room to spend my last night in,” Raven says. ”It's got clean sheets.”

Not for long, she thinks.

She had thought that his lips would be cold and stiff, like a fish. But she's shocked at how warm they are. Every part of his body feels hot, like that's his only way of keeping warm up in the Arctic.

About thirty seconds into the kiss, he bends down, wraps his great thigh-sized forearms around her waist, cinches her up into the air, lifting her feet up off the deck.

She was afraid he would take her to some horrible place, but it turns out he rented a whole s.h.i.+pping container, stacked way up high on one of the containers.h.i.+ps in the Core. The place is like a luxury hotel for big Core wheels.

She's trying to decide what to do with her legs, which are now dangling uselessly. She's not quite ready to wrap them around him, not this early in the date. Then she feels them spreading apart-way, way apart-Raven's thighs must be bigger around than his waist. He has lifted one leg up into her crotch and put the foot up on a chair so she's straddling his thigh, and with his arms he's holding her body up against him, squeezing and relaxing, squeezing and relaxing, so that she's helplessly rocking back and forth, all her weight on her crotch. Some huge muscle, the upmost part of his quadricep, angles up where it attaches to the bone in his pelvis, and as he rocks her in closer and tighter she ends up straddling that, shoved against it so tight that she can feel the seams in the crotch of her coverall, feel the coins in the key pocket of Raven's black jeans. When he slides his hands downward, still pressing her inward, and squeezes her b.u.t.t in both hands, so big it must be like squeezing an apricot, fingers so long they wrap around and push up into her crack and she rocks forward to get away from it but there's nowhere to go except into his body, her face breaking away from the kiss and sliding against the perspiration of his broad, smooth, whiskerless neck. She can't help letting out a yelp that turns into a moan, and then she knows he's got her. Because she never makes noises during s.e.x, but this time she can't help it.

And once she's decided that, she's impatient to get on with it. She can move her arms, she can move her legs, but the middle part of her body is pinned in place, it's not going to move until Raven moves it. And he's not going to move it until she makes him want to. So she goes to work on his ear. That usually does it.

He tries to get away from her. Raven, trying to run away from something. She likes that idea. She has arms that are as strong as a man's, strong from hanging on to that poon on the freeway, so she wraps them around his head like a vise and presses her forehead against the side of his head and starts...o...b..ting the tip of her tongue around the little folded-over rim of his outer ear.

He stands paralyzed for a couple of minutes, breathing shallowly, while she works her way inward, and when she finally shoves her tongue into his ear ca.n.a.l, he bucks and grunts like he's just been harpooned, lifts her up off his leg, kicks the chair across the room so hard it cracks against the steel wall of the s.h.i.+pping container. She feels herself falling backward toward the futon, thinks for a moment she's about to get crushed beneath him, but he catches all the weight on his elbows, except for his lower body, which slams into hers all at once, sending another electric shot of pleasure up her back and down her legs. Her thighs and calves have turned solid and tight, like they've been pumped full of juice, she can't relax them. He leans up on one elbow, separating their bodies for a moment, plants his mouth on hers to maintain the contact, fills her mouth with his tongue, holds her there with it while he one-hands the fastener at the collar of her coverall and yanks the zipper all the way down to the crotch. It's open now, exposing a broad V of skin converging from her shoulders. He rolls back onto her, grabs the top of the coverall with both hands and pulls it down behind her, forcing her arms down and to her sides, stuffing the ma.s.s of fabric and pads down underneath the small of her back so she stays arched up toward him. Then he's in between her tight thighs, all those skating muscles strained to the limit, and his hands come back inside to squeeze her b.u.t.t again, this time his hot skin against hers, it's like sitting on a warm b.u.t.tered griddle, makes the whole body feel warmer. There's something she's supposed to remember at this point.

Something she has to take care of. Something important. One of those dreary duties that always seems so logical when you think about it in the abstract and, at moments like this, seems so utterly beside the point that it never even occurs to you.

It must be something to do with birth control. Or something like that. But Y.T. is helpless with pa.s.sion, so she has an excuse. So she squirms and kicks her knees until the coverall and her panties have slid down to her ankles.

Raven gets completely naked in about three seconds. He pulls his s.h.i.+rt off over his head and throws it somewhere, bucks out of his pants and kicks them off onto the floor. His skin is as smooth as hers, like the skin of a mammal that swims through the sea, but he feels hot, not cold and fishy. She doesn't see his c.o.c.k, but she doesn't want to, what's the point, right?

She does something she's never done before: comes as soon as he goes into her. It's like a bolt of lightning shoots out from the middle, down the backs of her tensed legs, up her spine, into her nipples, she sucks in air until her whole ribcage is poking out through the skin and then screams it all out. She just rips one.

Raven's probably deaf now. Which is his f.u.c.king problem.

She goes limp. So does he. He must have come at the same time. Which is okay. It's early, and poor Raven was h.o.r.n.y as a goat from being out to sea. Later on, she'll expect more endurance.

Right now, she's content to lie underneath him and suck the warmth out of his body. She's been cold for days. Her feet are still cold, hanging out in the air, but that just makes the rest of her feel much better.

Raven seems content, too. Uncharacteristically so. Talk about bliss. Most guys would already be flipping through channels on the TV. Not Raven. He's content to lie here all night, breathing softly into her neck. As a matter of fact, he's gone to sleep right on top of her. Like something a woman would do.

She dozes, too. Lies there for a minute or two, all these thoughts going through her head.

This is a pretty nice place. Like a mid-priced business hotel in the Valley. She never figured anything like this existed on the Raft. But there's rich people and poor people here, too, just like anywhere else.

When they came to a certain place on the walkway, not far from the first of the big Core s.h.i.+ps, there was an armed guard blocking the way. He let Raven go on through, and Raven took Y.T. with him, leading her by the hand, and the guard gave her a look but he didn't say anything, he was keeping most of his attention on Raven.

After that, the walkway got a lot nicer. It was broad, like the boardwalk at the beach, and not quite so crowded with old Chinese ladies carrying gigantic bundles on their backs. And it didn't smell like s.h.i.+t quite so much.

When they got to the first Core s.h.i.+p, there was a stairway that took them from sea level up to its deck. From there, they took a gangplank across to the innards of another s.h.i.+p, and Raven led her through the place like he'd been through it a million times, and eventually they crossed another gangplank into this containers.h.i.+p. And it was just like a f.u.c.king hotel in there: bellhops with white gloves carrying luggage for guys in suits, a registration desk, everything. It was still a s.h.i.+p-everything's made out of steel that has been painted white a million times over-but nothing like what she expected. There's even a little helipad where the suits can come and go. There's a chopper parked next to it with a logo she's seen before: Rife Advanced Research Enterprises. RARE. The people who gave her the envelope to deliver to EBGOC headquarters. All of this is fitting together now: the Feds and L. Bob Rife and the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates and the Raft are all part of the same deal.

”Who the h.e.l.l are all these people?” she asked Raven when she first saw it. But he just shushed her.

She asked him again later, as they were wandering around looking for their room, and he told her: These guys all work for L. Bob Rife. Programmers and engineers and communications people. Rife's an important man. Got a monopoly to run.

”Rife's here?” she asked him. Putting on an act, of course; she had it figured out by that point.

”Ssh,” he said.

It's a nice piece of intel. Hiro should like it, if she can just get it to him. And even that's going to be easy. She never thought there'd be Metaverse terminals here on the Raft, but on this s.h.i.+p there's a whole row of them, so that visiting suits can call back to civilization. All she has to do is get to one without waking up Raven. Which could be tricky. It's too bad she couldn't drug him with something, like in the Raft movies.

That's when the realization comes. It swims up out of her subconscious in the same way that a nightmare does. Or when you leave the house and remember half an hour later that you left a teakettle going on the stove. It's a cold clammy reality that she can't do a d.a.m.n thing about.

She has finally remembered what that nagging thing was that bothered her for a moment, right before the actual moment of f.u.c.king.

It was not birth control. It was not a hygiene thing.

It was her dentata. The last line of personal self-defense. Along with Uncle Enzo's dog tags, the one piece of stuff that the Orthos didn't take. They didn't take it because they don't believe in cavity searches.

Which means that at the moment Raven entered her, a very small hypodermic needle slipped imperceptibly into the engorged frontal vein of his p.e.n.i.s, automatically shooting a c.o.c.ktail of powerful narcotics and depressants into his bloodstream.

Raven's been harpooned in the place where he least expected it. Now he's going to sleep for at least four hours.

And then, boy, is he ever going to be p.i.s.sed.

Hiro remembers Eliot's warning: Don't go onto the Raft itself without a local guide. This kid must be a Refu that Bruce Lee recruited from some Filipino neighborhood on the Raft.

The kid's name is Transubstanciacion. Tranny for short. He climbs into the zodiac before Hiro tells him to.

”Wait a sec,” Hiro says. ”We have to do some packing first.”