Appeals Court | Page 5

dynamic flight and banks to follow Bonnie down towards a clearing in the mangrove swamp.
The swamp rushes up to meet him in a confusion of green, buffeting him with superheated steam as he descends toward it, so that by the time the chute punches him through the canopy he feels like a dim-sum bun. Bonnie's chute is speeding ahead of him, breaking branches off and clattering from tree to tree. He tries to follow its crazy trail as best as he can, but eventually he realizes, with a sick falling sensation in his stomach, that she's no longer strapped into it. "Bonnie!" He yells, and grabs at the throttle control.
"Danger! stall warning!" the parachute intones. "Danger! Danger!"
Huw looks down, dizzily. He's skimming the ground now, or what passes for it -- muck of indeterminate depth, interspersed with clumps of curiously nibbled looking water hyacinth. The tree line starts in another couple of hundred metres, and it's wall to wall petroleum plants. Black-leafed and ominous looking, the stunted inflammabushes emit a dizzying stench of raw gasoline that makes his eyes swim and his nose water. "Fuck, where am I going to land?" he moans.
"Please fold your tray table and return your seat to the upright position," says the parachute control system. "Extinguish all joints, switch off mobile electronics, and prepare for landing." The engine note above and behind him changes, spluttering and backfiring, and then the damp muck comes up and slaps him hard across the ankles. Huw stumbles, takes a faltering step forward -- then the nanolight's engine drops down as the 'chute rigging collapses above his head and thumps him right between the eyes with a hollow *tonk*.
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"What you've got to understand, son," says the doctor, "is it's all the fault of the alien space bats." He holds up the horse syringe and flicks the barrel. A bubble wobbles slowly up through the milky fluid in the barrel. "If it wasn't for them, and their Jew banker patsies, we'd be ascended to heaven." He squeezes the plunger slightly and a thick blob of turbid liquid squeezes out of the syringe and oozes down the needle. "Property speculators." He grins horribly, baring gold plated teeth, and points the end of the needle at Huw's neck. Huw can't seem to move his eyes from Doc's moustache: it's huge and bushy, a hairy efflorescence that twitches supiciously as the barefoot medic inhales with sharp disapproval.
"Property speculators?" Huw's voice sounds weak, even to himself. He stares past the doctor at the peeling white paint on the wall of this sorry excuse for a medical centre. "What have they got to do with ..."
"Property speculators." Doc nods emphatically as he rams the blunt end of the quarter-inch needle against Huw's jugular. Tiny machines whine and click and the side of Huw's neck goes numb. "They bought up all the beachfront property, right? Hurricane alley. Then they vanished taking their mortgages with 'em and all the locals who'd put their savings into bank accounts and stocks and bonds were left holding the sack. Then the seas rose on account of globular incendiarism, and we got the double-whammy of the insurance corporations going bust."
Huw tries to swallow. The plunger is going down and white goo is flooding into his circulatory system, billions of feral redneck nanochines bouncing off his fur-lined arteries in search of damaged tissue to fix. His mouth is dry, his tongue as crinkly and musty-dry as a dead cauliflower. "But the, the alien --"
"Alien space bats, son," says Doc. He sighs lugubriously and pulls the syringe away from Huw's neck. "With their fancy orbital fresnel lens. *They're* behind the global warming thing, y'see, it's nothing to do with burning oil. It dates to the fifties. Those commies, they were smart -- using their ballistic missile radars to signal the space brothers! We live in a strongly anthropic universe, it stands to reason there must be aliens out there. It's a long-term plot, a hundred year Communist plan to bankrupt America. And it's working. All those deserters and traitors who upped and left when the Singularity hit, they just made it worse. They're the savvy ones we need to make this country great again, rebuild NASA and Space Command and go wipe those no-good Ruskie alien space bats and their Jew banker patsies from the dark side of the moon."
*Oh Jesus fuck*, Huw thinks incoherently, lying back and trying to get both eyes to focus simultaneously. He still feels sick to his stomach and a bit dizzy, the way he's been since Bonnie found him neatly curled up under a gas tree with a huge lump on his head and his parachute rigging draped across the incendiary branches. "Have you seen my teapot?" he tries to say, but he's not sure it comes out