Appeals Court

by Charles Stross

  “Come on, Huw,” she says, picking up their pillow-case. “We’ve got to get to the coast.”

  “Court is in session,” screams a familiar voice as the ramp scrapes the rubberized tarmac. Three UN golems — so big they dwarf Sam — come up the ramp with alarming swiftness and clamp hold of Bonnie, Huw and Sam before any of them have time to register anything more than a dim impression of a brightly lit alleyway and in the middle of it, Judge Rosa Guilliani: encased in a dalekoid peppermill of a personal vehicle, draped in her robes of office, and scowling like she’s just discovered piss in her coffee-cup.

  * * *

  “You are charged with violating UN biohazard regulations, with wanton epidemiological disregard, with threatening the fragile peace of our world’s orderly acquisition and adoption of technology, and with attempting to flee UN jurisdiction.”

  “You’re out of your jurisdiction,” Bonnie says.

  “I’ll get to you,” the judge snaps. “I never execute a criminal without offering her last words, so you just sit tight until I call on you.”

  Sam is thrashing hard at his golem, trying to buck it off him, but he might as well be trying to lift Glory City itself for all the good it does him. For Huw, being trapped in the iron grip of a golem is oddly nostalgic, hearkening back to a simpler time when he knew he could trust his perceptions and the honest virtue of neo-Luddism.

  He closes his eyes, clears his mind, and prepares to defend himself. It’s bankrupt, he’ll say. Your UN is a sham. There’s no more virtue in your deliberation over which technologies to adopt than there is in this benighted shithole’s wholesale rejection of everything that doesn’t burn petrol or heretics or both. He’ll say, The “other side” in this fight doesn’t even notice that it’s fighting you. Its leaders are opportunists and scoundrels, its proponents are patsies at best and sadists at worst.

  Huw sucks in air to deliver this speech that will rescue him from the gibbet, ignoring the many aches and owies that light up his body like accupuncture needles, and there is a tremendous crash as another APC crunches down in the alleyway behind the Judge, its ramp falling to reveal ranked men in white robes, numerous as ants, clutching tasp-wands, scimitars, pulse-guns, ballistic guns, and cruciform spears that hum with sinister energy.

  “It’s the Inquisition,” Bonnie says. “I told you you were out of your jurisdiction.” She looks like she’s ready to say more, but Sam breaks free of his golem’s grip with a roar and snatches her up, flings her over his shoulder and disappears into the guts of his APC, which clanks away amid the whining ricochets of small arms fire from the soldiers of the Inquisition.

  Judge Rosa’s spinning turret give the Inquisitors pause, especially after it blasts a dozen of them out of their boots. Finally, one brave soul darts forward and jams a speartip down its barrel, falling to the ground when the Judge nails him with enough electricity to freeze-dry him on the spot, so that he clatters when he hits.

  They give up on moving her, surrounding her instead with bristling guns. “I have diplomatic immunity, you God-bothering imbeciles,” she screeches, the amplified howls knifing through their skulls and dropping a few of the remaining Inquisitors to their knees.

  They hustle Huw into the APC, kicking him to the grippy deck-plates and pinning him there with a gun-barrel dug hard into one kidney. They leave a detail to watch the Judge and clank away with him to the auto-da-fe.

  “This is gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts us,” one of the Inquisitors breathes right in Huw’s ear as the ramp drops in the main plaza of Glory City, where a crowd of thousands awaits his appearance.

  They drag him up by his much-abused arms, letting his feet scrape the ground. He loses a shoe on the way to the stage, and the other on the way up the steps. His overalls tear on ground, so that by the time he’s hauled erect before the crowd, the skin covering one whole side of his chest is abraded away, a weepy, striated road-pizza left behind.

  A white robe is draped around him and snapped shut in behind and around his arms. The crowd roars with anticipation, and their faces swim before him, each in a rictus of savage anticipation. Huw wishes he still believed in his God-self, but they’ve left him his copper balaclava, so he’s out of the god-box.

  “Sinner?” a voice says, hissingly, in his ear. It echoes off the walls of the plaza, off the balconies crowded with hooting spectators who fall silent when these amplified syllables are sounded. “Sinner, can you hear me?”

  The speaker is right there in his ear, as close as a lover, breath moist. “I can hear you,” Huw says.

  “Will you confess your sins and be cleansed of them before we end your life on God’s earth?”

  “Sure,” Huw says. “Why the fuck not?”

  There’s a disapproving murmur from the crowd and the left side of Huw’s head lights up like someone’s stuck a live wire to it. A chunk of his ear falls wetly to the stage before him and the crowd roars as the hot blood courses down his face.

  “You will not profane this courtroom,” the hisser hisses.

  Huw struggles to remember his brave speech for the Judge, but it won’t come. “I —” he stammers. They’re going to kill me, he realises, a sick certainty rising with his gorge. “I —”

  “You stand accused!” the speaker shrieks in his ear. “Unclean! You have consorted with vile demons and the sky-born minions of Satan! You did wilfully escape from the custody of your arresting officer and were found in wanton congress with the degenerate scum who swirl in the cesspit of their own tumescent desires in the swamp of iniquity for which we are damned!” His accusor’s voice rises. “Lo, these score years and eight we have dwelt since the Rapture, the ascent of those who are bathed in the blood of the lamb, and what is it, you faithful among the fallen ask, what is it that holds us back to this land of sorrows? And I answer you: it is the likes of this miserable sinner! Behold the man, lost in the sorrow and degradation of his evil!”

  Huw manages to stay silent while the inquisitor gets himself worked up into a holy-roller frenzy of foaming denunciation. It would appear that Huw has single-handedly doomed every living human on the North American continent to a fiery and perpetual damnation by his pursuit of sins both trivial and esoteric, from sodomy to simony by way of barratry and antimony. Concentration is hard. He’s weak at the knees, and the entire side of his head feels as if it’s been dipped in molten lead. He listens to the condemnation with mounting disbelief, but not even the accusations of ministering iced-tea enemas to the ailing baby ground-squirrels in the petting zoo manage to drag a protest from him in the face of likely punishment. He can see the score to this scene and his words would merely serve as punctuation for random acts of degradation and violence against his person. Finally the inquisitor winds down, his voice ratcheting into a gloating hiss. “How do you plead, sinner?”

  “Does it make any difference?” How asks the sudden silence, hating the tremor in his voice. “You’re going to kill me anyway.”

  The small of his back explodes and he falls over, unable to draw breath with which to scream. Dimly he registers a couple of shadowy figures standing over him — one of them having just clubbed him in the kidneys.

  “How do you plead, sinner?”

  Huw isn’t about to plead anything because he can barely breathe, but the inquisitor seems to view this as deliberate recalcitrance: he raises a hand and another guard steps forward and clubs Huw between the legs.

  “How does he plead? Anyone?” The inquisitor roars at the crowd, hidden amplifiers boosting his voice and scattering it across the plaza like a shotgun blast.

  “Guilty! GUILTY! GUILTY!” roars the crowd.

  “The prosecution, having made its case before God and man, rests,” says the inquisitor, leaning heavily on a baseball bat.

  “Hmm.” Huw is distantly conscious of another, more thoughtful voice. “And what do you say, minister for the defense?”

  “Nothing to say, your Grace.” The defense attorney’s voice is thin and reedy and quavers a
little. “My client is obviously guilty as sin.”

  “Then I guess we are in agreement. Okay, y’all, let justice be done.” Guards pick Huw up off the ground and bear him to the front of the stage. “In the name of the authority vested in me by the law of the Lord, as Bishop of this principality, I hereby find you guilty of whatever the hell you’re guilty of. We don’t get to give justice, that’s his upstairs’s job. So the sentence of this court, handed down in mercy rather than in anger, is that we’re going to give you a one way ticket to ask the holy father for clemency and forgiveness in person. To heaven’s gate!”

  The crowd roars its approval and people begin to stream out of the square like ants, boiling and shifting to repel an invasion of their territory. Huw groans, gasps for air, and coughs up blood. “It won’t hurt,” the judge promises, almost kindly. “Not much, anyway.”

  There’s another brief journey by APC, this time barely out of the square and back round a couple of side roads. The guards let Huw lie on a bench seat, which is a mercy, because his legs aren’t working too well. Just get it over with, he wishes dismally. Is anyone going to tell Sandra? he wonders. She got me into this —

  The APC parks up and the ramp rumbles down. They’re in another of the huge access tunnels that run through the wall of the dome, like the one Doc and Sam dragged him in through almost a day ago. It’s been a very long day — the longest. Vast blast-proof doors close behind the APC, slamming shut with a thunderous boom. The guards frog-march Huw down the ramp and out, up the tunnel to the next set of doors. There’s another APC behind the one he arrived in, and a handful of dignitaries step out of it to witness the proceedings.

  The guard on his left lets go of him. “When the doors open, run forward,” he says. “If you dance and stamp your feet a bit they’ll figure out where you are faster. They know they’re going to be fed, though, so they’ll be waiting for you. If you make them come inside they’ll take their time.”

  “You’re going to feed me to the ants,” he realises.

  “God’s little helpers,” says the guard to his right.

  “What if I don’t cooperate?” Huw asks woozily.

  The guard on his left hefts his cattle prod thoughtfully. “Then we’d have to work you over some more and do it again.” He hefts the prod in Huw’s direction. “Not that it’s any trouble, mind. All the same to us.”

  Huw backs away from the guards until he thumps into the outer door of the airlock. “Oh. Oh shit.” The guards are wearing hermetically sealed tuppersuits. So are the official witnesses. A bell clangs from the front APC. Then the door he’s leaning against begins to grind down into the ground. Huw glances round and sees the guards and witnesses scurrying backward to the safety of their armoured vehicles, despite the security of their anti-proof suits. “Fucking cowards!” he tries to yell, but it comes out as a cracked squawk. Damn, I’m going to die and I don’t even get a good exit line. He turns back to face the opening door and takes a step forward towards the blasted wilderness that used to be North America.

  It’s like the surface of the moon — or worse. A lightning strike somewhere up the coast has set one of the petrochemical forests on fire and the resulting smogbank has smeared the baby-blue bowl of the sky with the sooty muck of a by-gone age. The sun itself is a bloated red torch aflame in a sea of shit-coloured clouds that roil and bubble above a landscape the colour of charred ash. Gas trees march into the distance from the flanks of the Glory City dome, but the ground beneath them is muddy brown and shimmers slightly — at first Huw thinks it’s covered in a slick of escaping light fraction crude, but then he looks closer and sees that the shimmer is that of motion, the incessant febrile ratcheting digestive action of a myriad of superorganisms. The ants are lords of all that they survey — and that includes him.

  Huw steps forward onto the desolate ground, leaving the tunnel mouth. He glances round once. “Bastards,” he mouths at the smugly merciful Bishop and his torturers, safe in their air-conditioned tanks. There’s a faint rattling humming noise in the air, and he takes a deep breath, wondering how long it’ll take the ants to notice him. What chance does he have of reaching another airlock? Probably not much — they wouldn’t be using this as an established means of execution if survival was easy, or even possible. But Huw has no intention of giving the assholes in the dome the satisfaction of actually seeing the ants get him. He takes another deep breath and lurches forward — one knee is very much the worse for wear and he’s light-headed and nauseous from the beating he’s taken — trying to get away from the front of the airlock.

  “Huw?”

  At first he thinks he’s hallucinating. It’s Bonnie’s voice, distant and tinny, and that grinding rasping noise is back. There’s also a faint sizzling sound, like hot fat on a grill. He shakes his head and lurches on.

  The sizzling noise is back. The ground ahead is dark, like an oil spill. “Huw? Where are you? Hang on!” He stumbles to a halt. The oil slick is spreading like a shadow, and when he looks round he sees it extends between him and the dome. That’s odd. He looks down. Ants. They’re everywhere. He can’t out-run them. So he collapses to his knees and looks at them. They’re what’s making the sizzling noise. It’s the noise of a trillion millimetre-wide cutting machine mouths chowing down on the universe. If they could speak their message would be, you will be assimilated. He reaches out one shaky hand and a winged ant alights on his fingertip. He brings it close to his face, ignoring the scattering of fiery bites on his legs and knees, trying to meet the eyes of his executioner.

  The ant stares at him with CCD scanners. It spreads its wings and Huw watches, entranced, trying to read the decals embossed on each flight surface. Chitin is waxy, isn’t it? He realises. It would dissolve in the gasoline mangroves. So these aren’t —

  “Huw! Hang on! We’ll rescue you!”

  It is Bonnie’s voice, he realises, looking round in disquiet. Massively amplified, it booms out across the wasteland from the top of a vehicle that looks like an old-fashioned swamp boat with a bulbous plastic body mounted on it. The boat is surfing over the ants, he thinks, until he realises that there’s not much of a solid surface over there.

  “Can you hear me?” Bonnie yells.

  Huw waves.

  “Great! I’m going to pop the hatch and lay down an insecticide screen! When you see it go, I want you to run this way! Three! Two! One!” Bang.

  One end pops off the side of the swamp boat and a cloud of foam drifts out. Bonnie follows it, something like a flame thrower strapped to her back. She’s pumping away in all directions, striding towards him on his little raised island, and Huw realises that nothing, nothing has ever looked as beautiful to him as this pansexual posthuman, lithe and brilliant in her skin-tight neoprene suit, laying about her with grace and elegance and GABA-inhibitors as she comes to rescue him from this frankly insane situation —

  Huw lurches into motion, a drunken and lopsided wobble impelled by a now-fiery burn at the side of his face. The ants have tasted blood and they’re hungry. He howls as he runs, and Bonnie steps aside and spritzes him on the fly. “Go on!” She calls. “I’ll cover you!” He needs no urging, but lurches on towards the swamp boat rescue. Within the back of the translucent bubble he can dimly see a figure — Sam, maybe? — working the controls, keeping the big blower on the back of the boat in ceaseless motion, sucking ants through the mincing blades —

  He’s on the ground, and he can’t remember how he got there. “Shit, this is no good,” says Bonnie. “What have they done to — oh fuck.” She picks him up and begins to drag him, her breath coming in gasps. The ants see their prey escaping and close in, an ominous sizzling hymn of destruction on the wing. “Go on!” she urges, and Huw manages to get one leg working. They hop along together and Bonnie gives him an enormous shove, boosting him up the side of the boat and in through the airlock. The open ‘lock bay is crawling with fiery red ants, the disassembler toolkits on their heads whining in an irridescent blur. Huw bats at them, and Bonni
e stands up just outside the airlock to spritz down the swamp boat, and then something like a monstrous humming tornado falls on her with an audible thud. She screams once, and twitches, and Huw cowers at the back of the airlock.

  “FUCK!” The door he’s lying against crashes backwards under him, tumbling him into the swamp boat as Sam leaps over his body and dives forward. “Bonnie!”

  With the last of his strength Huw grabs one of Sam’s ankles, tumbling him into the lock. “Stop,” he gasps.

  “Bonnie!” Sam howls. But he freezes instead of throwing himself out into the gray storm.

  “Close the door or we’re both dead,” Huw gasps.

  “Bonnie!” One meaty hand reaches out — then closes on the airlock panel. “Oh god. Oh shit.” There’s a Bonnie-shaped outline just visible on its feet through the whirlwind but it’s glowing white, the colour of live bone, and something tells Huw that he’s looking at her skeleton, crucified on a storm of insectoid malice in the act of rescuing him from the swarm — they’ll be waiting for you — and Sam swings the door shut with a boom on its gaskets just as the pile of white bones at the heart of the tornado explodes outwards and collapses across the wasteland in front of the airlock.

  They’re not out of danger. Sam howls and grabs at his face, falling backwards against the opposite wall of the airlock. “Spray!” he yells, like a dying desert explorer calling for water.

  Huw fumbles around the cramped cell, squishing bugs wherever he finds them until he sees the blue spray bottles strapped to one wall. He hauls himself upright and takes aim at Sam. “Where do you want it?” he asks.

  Sam half-turns towards Huw and holds his hands out from his face. Huw retches and holds the trigger down, blasting Sam in the — in what’s left of the front of his head. The ant tornado that came down on Bonnie must have shed waves of flying biting deconstructors, for Sam’s head hosts a boiling pit of destruction, cheeks bitten through and eye sockets seething. The noises Sam makes are piteous but coherent enough that Huw is sickly afraid that the man’s going to survive. And after what happened with Bonnie he’s not sure what that means.