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 plow 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 and coughs, 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 humiliate.
“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 yells, hopping from foot to foot. “Arrogant Jesus-sucking sack of SARS, scabrous toddler-fondler, religion-addled motherfucker,” she says, 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 legendary maternal hysterical feat of strength. “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, but the 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 absence 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 certain, 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 convincing with this darned strategic defense battle computer that thinks y’all are goddless Commie-fag euroweasels. I reckon you got maybe two minutes to repent before it blows y’all to Jesus.”
Huw breathes 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 as he realizes that, in fact, he and Bonnie meet about 130 percent of those criteria between them.
“That’s easy, y’all just gotta have a little faith,” says the airhead on the traffic control desk.
Huw grits his teeth and looks through the doorway at Bonnie, whose ears appear to be smoking. He puts a hand over the mic: “Does this thing carry missiles?” he calls to her.
“Fucking fucking arse shit bollocks—” Bonnie hammers on a control panel off to one side. It bleeps plaintively, the ancient chime of servers rebooting: “—’ing countermeasures suite!”
“Hasta la vista, sinners,” drawls the missile launch computer in a thick gubernatorial Austro-Californian accent. Two pinpricks of light blossom on the verdant horizon of the gasoline mangroves, then a third that rapidly expands into a fireball as the antique pre-cloud hypersonic missile explodes on launch. The surviving missiles stab toward them and there’s a musical chime from the countermeasures control panel. Huw feels a moment of gut-slackening terror. “You’ve got mail!” the countermeasures system announces in the syrupy tones of a kindergarten teacher. “Facebook-Goldman-AOL welcomes you to the United States of America. You have 14,023 new friend requests, which you will receive after this message from our sponsors. Your hen wants milking, your goat has been turned into a zombie, there are 14,278,123 new status updates, and you have been de-friended 1,974,231 times. There are 5,348,011 updates to the privacy policy for your review.”
Bonnie thumps something on the panel, muscles like whipcord standing out on her arm as she glares at the oncoming missiles. Huw backs away. She might actually be a communicant, he realizes in absolute horror. She might actually have a Facebook account! She’s mad enough. ...These days, tales of what Facebook did with its users during the singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales.
“Acknowledged,” says the possessed countermeasures suite in the hag-ridden tone of a computer that has surrendered to the dark side. For a moment nothing seems to happen; then one of the onrushing pinpricks of light veers toward the other. Paths cross then diverge in a haze of debris. “Displaying new privacy policy,” it sighs.
“Don’t read it!” Huw screams, but he’s too late—Bonnie has punched the console again, and messages begin scrolling across it. In the middle distance, Charleston airport’s cracked and vitrified runways are coming into view. Missile batteries off to one side cycle their launcher-erectors impotently, magazines long since fired dry at the godless Commie-fag euroweasel aid flights.
“We gotta bail out before we land, otherwise we’d have to go through customs,” she says. “That would be bad—South Carolina never ended Prohibition.”
“What? Prohibition of what? What are you talking about?” His hands are shaking, he realizes. “I need a drink.”
“Prohibition of everything, dipshit, ” Bonnie says. She pauses for a moment, prodding at her eyes with a mister, but they are so swollen that she can’t get its applicator into contact with bare mucous membrane. She roots around some more, then whacks some kind of transdermal plaster on her arm. “Sorry, gotta arse fuck come down now. Your stash, darling? It’s illegal here. If the customs crows catch you with it, they’ll stick you on the chain gang and you’ll be chibbed and fuck raped baby-eating murdered by psychotic mutant Klansmen for the next two hundred years. It’s bad for the skin, I hear.” She stands up and heads toward a battered cabinet at the rear of the bridge, which she opens to reveal a couple of grubby-looking parachutes that appear to have been hand-packed with all due care and attention by stoned marmosets. “We’ll be passing over the hot tub in about three minutes. You coming?”