Appeals Court | Page 3

is beginning to itch as the bacteribeads try to squeeze through his puckered ringpiece: it's time to get out. "If this goes wrong, so help me I am going to make you eat this teapot," he says, picking it up. He shakes his head, then he heads downstairs to find Bonnie again and see if she's come down far enough off the hateballs to appreciate how squeaky-clean Ade's messiah manque is feeling.
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The big zeppelin lurches and buzzes as it chases its shadow across the sandy beaches and out of control neomangrove jungle that has run wild across the gulf coast. The gasoline mangroves spin their aerofoil leaves in the breeze, harnessing the wind power and pumping long-chain terpenoids into their root systems, which ultimately run all the way to the hydrocarbon refineries near Beaufort. A long-obselete relic of the feverish cross-fertilization of the North American biotechnology biz with the dinosaurs of the petroleum age, they ought by rights to have made the US the world's biggest source of refined petrochemicals -- except that since the Singularity, nobody's buying. Oil slicks glisten in the sunlight as they spread hundreds of kilometres out into the Atlantic, where they feed a whole deviant ecosystem of carbon-sequestrating petroplankton maintained by the continental quarantine authority.
Huw watches apprehensively from the observation window at the front of the bridge as Bonnie curses and swears at the iffrits, who insist that air traffic control is threatening to shoot them down if they don't steer away from the land of the Chosen People. Bonnie's verbal abuse of the ship ascends to new heights of withering scorn, and he watches her slicken her eyeballs with anger-up until they look like swollen golf-balls, slitted and watering. The ship wants to turn itself around, but she's insisting that it plough on.
"Hail ground control NOW! you fucking sad, obsolete piece of shit, so that for once, JUST! FOR! ONCE! you will have done one genuinely USEFUL! thing for SOMEONE!" she snarls with a cough, hacking up excess angry-up that has trickled back through her sinuses. She picks up the mic and begins to stalk the bridge like an attack-comedian scouting the audience for fat men with thin dates to single out in her routine.
"This is Charleston Ground Control repeating direct order to vacate sovereign Christian States of America airspace immediately or be blown out of the sky and straight to Satan. Charleston Ground Control out." The voice has the kind of robotic-slick Californian accent that tells Huw straightaway that he's talking to a missile guidance computer rather than a human being.
"HAIL! HIM! AGAIN!" Bonnie yelled, hopping from foot to foot. "Arrogant Jesus-sucking sack of SARS, scabrous toddler-fondler, religion-addled mother*fucker*," she continues, punching out with the mic for punctuation.
"Bonnie," Huw says, quietly, flinching back from her candy-apple-red eyeballs.
"WHAT?"
"Maybe you should let me talk with them?" he says.
"I am PERFECTLY! capable of negotiating with MICROCEPHALIC! GOD! BOTHERING! LUDDITES!" she screeches.
*No you're not,* Huw thinks, but he doesn't even come close to saying it. In the state she's in, she could lift a car and set it down on top of a baby, a reversal of the kind of hysterical strength he's heard that mothers possess at moments of extreme duress. "Yes, you *are*," he says. "But you need to fly the ship."
She glares at him for a moment, fingernails dug so hard into her palms that drops of blood spatter to the flooring. He's sure that she's going to charge him, and then zeppelin changes direction with a lurch. So she throws the mic at his head, viciously -- he ducks but it still beans him on the rebound -- and goes back to screaming at the ship.
Huw staggers off the bridge and sinks back against one of the bare corridor-bulkheads -- the zep that Adrian's adventurers stole is made doubly cavernous by the absense of most of its furnishings.
"This is Airship Lollipop to Charleston Ground Control requesting clearance to land in accordance with the Third International Agreement on Aeronautical Cooperation," he says into the mic, using his calmest voice. He's pretty sure he's heard of the Third International Agreement, though it may have been the Fourth. And it may have been on Aeronautical Engineering. But that there is an agreement he is sure of, and he's pretty sure that the Christian States of America is no more up to date on international affairs than he is.
"Airship Lollipop, y'all welcome to land here, but we's having trouble argumentating with this-here strategic defense battle computer that thinks y'all are goddless commie-fag euroweasels. I reckon you'se got maybe two minutes to repent before it blows y'all to Jesus."
Huw breaths a sigh of relief: at least there's a human in the loop. "How do we convince it we're not, uh, godless commie-fag euroweasels?" He asks, suppressing a twinge