Appeals Court | Page 8

outbuilding, the plasticized floors dimpling under his feet.
"He's a good boy," says Doc. "But I figure I used too many cognitive enhancements on him when he was a lad. Made him *way* too smart for his own good."
Sam returns with a serious-looking anime-bike dangling from each hand. "alt.pave-the-earth," he says, setting them down. His voice is bemused, professorial. "I'll go get the sidecar."
"He'll need a spacesuit," Doc calls after him. "What're you, about a medium?"
Huw, staring wordlessly at the stretched and striated bikes with their angular mouldings, opens his mouth. "I'm a 107 centimeter chest," he replies vaguely.
"Ah, we don't go in for that centimeter eurofaggotry around here, son. Don't really matter much. Spacesuits never fit too good. You'll get used to it. It's only six hours."
Sam returns with a low-slung sidecar under one arm and a suit of Michelin-Man armor over his shoulders.
"It's very ergonomic," he rumbles tectonically as he sits the suit down next to Huw's folding lawn-chair, then goes to work attaching the car to one of the bikes.
Huw fumbles with the michelin suit, eventually getting the legs pulled on.
"Binds a bit at the crotch," he says, hoping for some sympathy.
"Yeah, it'll do that," says Doc.
Huw modestly turns his back and reaches down to adjust himself. As he does so he fumbles with the familiar curve of the brass teapot. Peeking down he sees a phosphorescent miniature holographic Ade staring back up at him.
"Sharper than a trouser-snake's tooth," Adrian hisses.
Huw puts his hand where he'd expect to find a pocket and a little hatch pops open, exposing a hollow cavity in the thigh. Quickly, he slips the teapot into it and dogs the hatch shut. "I'm ready, I think," he says, turning round again.
Doc and Sam have already suited up; they're waiting impatiently for Huw to catch up. The bikes are bolted either side of the sidecar, and Doc waves Huw into the cramped seat. Waddling in the suit, clutching a portable aircon pack, Huw has a hard time climbing in. Everything sounds muffled except the whirr of the helmet fans, and a pronounced smell of stale gotchis and elderly rubber assaults his nose periodically, as if the suit is farting in his face. "Let's go," Sam rumbles, and they kick off towards the doorway, which irises open to admit a trickling rain of ants as the bikes roar and spurt gouts of flame against the darkness.
The jet-engine roar of the engines doesn't die down, nor does the laser-show strobing off the organic LED pixelboards on the outsized fuel-tanks, but still, somehow, Huw snoozes through the next couple of hours in a moonshine-assisted haze. Doc is rambling at length about some recondite point of randite ideology, illuminating his own rugged self-reliance with the merciless glare of A-is-A objectivist clarity, but after a few minutes Huw discovers two controls on his chest plate that raise his opinion of the suit designers: a drinking straw primed with white lightning, and the volume control on the radio. As his sort-of jailers pedal away, driving him along a pot-holed track lined with the skeletons of dead trees, he kicks back and tries to get his head together. If it wasn't for the eventual destination he could almost begin to enjoy himself, but there's a nagging sense of weirdness in his stomach (where the godvomit still nestles, awaiting a communicative impulse) and he can't help worrying about what he'll do once they get to Glory City.
#
An indeterminate time passes, and Huw is awakened by a sharp prodding pain near his bladder. "Uh." He lolls in the suit, annoyed.
"Psst, keep it quiet. They think you're sleeping." The prodding sensation goes away, replaced by a buzzing voice from just north of his bladder.
"Ade?" Huw whispers.
"No, it's the tooth fairy. Listen, have you seen Bonnie?"
"Not lately. She went for --" Huw pauses. "You know I landed bad?"
"Shit." Ade pauses. "So that's what you're with Doc for. Have they got her?"
"I don't think so." Huw desperately wants to scratch his head in puzzlement but his arms are folded down inside the sidecar and he doesn't dare let Sam or Doc figure he's awake. "Look, I woke up and the doctor -- *is* he a real doc? -- was trying to fix my neck. A motor fell on my head. Bonnie got him to help but then she left and I haven't seen her. Went off on an errand or something."
"Shit and double-shit." Ade's tinny voice sounds upset. "They're not trustworthy, mate. Sell you as soon as look at you, those two. She *said* you were hurt, but --"
"You don't know where she is, either," Huw accuses.
"Nope." They ride along in near silence for a while.
"What's the big idea?" Huw asks, trying to sustain a sense of detachment. "Packing me off to bongo-bongo land to convert the