“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 screams. But he freezes instead of throwing himself out into the gray storm.
“Close the door or we’re both dead,” Huw says.
“Bonnie!” One meaty hand reaches out—then closes on the air lock 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 color 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 outward and collapses across the wasteland in front of the air lock.
They’re not out of danger. Sam howls and grabs at his face, falling backwards against the opposite wall of the air lock. “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 says.
Sam half turns toward 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.
Sam gurgles, and Huw yanks down the emergency first aid kit and pulls out a gel pack that says something about burns and bites and massive tissue injuries on its side. He lays it across the top of Sam’s face, making sure to leave a hole around his mouth, then hunts out a syrette full of something morphine-esque and whacks it into Sam’s upper arm. After a tense minute, Sam’s whistling breaths slow and the shuddering spasms relax into something like sleep.
Huw is nearly out of it by this time, drunk on a cocktail of terror, pity, pain, and exhaustion. The world seems to be spinning as he hauls himself through the rear door and into the cockpit at the back of the craft. Smuggler’s swamp boat, he realizes. Doc must not have wanted to show this anywhere near Glory City. As he studies the unfamiliar controls, he comes to the unpleasant conclusion that he’s not going anywhere on his own. Don’t know how to operate it, and if I did, I wouldn’t know where to go, he thinks. He glances out the windshield at the gathering darkness punctuated by the evil, fire red bellies of ants that are trying their luck on the diamond-reinforced sapphire laminate. (Some of them are even leaving gouges in it.) Just a temporary reprieve ...
There’s a crackle from a grille on the dash. “Ready to accept WorldGov jurisdiction, you miscreant?” croaks a familiar tenor. Huw stares at the speaker as floodlights come on behind him in the depths of the swamp, spearing the cab of the smuggler’s boat with a blue white glare. “Or would you rather I crack that toy open like an egg and leave you to the ants?”
Christ, Huw thinks. It’s not as though I know how to drive this goddamned thing, anyway. He presses a button next to the grille. “Can you hear me?” he says. He repeats this with four more likely-looking buttons until Judge Judy’s cackle answers him back.
“You going to come along peacefully?”
“Sure looks like it,” he says. “Do I get to stand trial somewhere civilized?”
The judge chuckles fatalistically. “Once we shoot our way off this fucking continent and nuke it in our wake, I fully intend to drag your pimply ass all the way back to New Libya for a proper trial. Does that suit you?”
“Down to the ground,” Huw says. “Now what?”
“Herro,” Ade says, popping up out of his lantern after the judge has Huw shrink-wrapped and tossed in a narrow hold, her dalek suit and the golems filling up all the available space on Sam’s boat. “Ew,” he says when he catches sight of Sam’s ruin of a face. “That can’t be doing good things for Rosa’s audience ratings. Wasn’t supposed to be a horror show. ...”
“He’ll get fixed up once he gets to civilization,” Huw says. “Judge is taking us to New Libya.” He sighs and attempts to get comfortable in his enforced, plastic-wrapped vermicularitude. “The ants ate Bonnie,” he says, his voice hollow and echoing in the cramped hold.
“You don’t say?” Ade says. “Well, that’s too bad. Scratch one useful idiot.”
“You know, it’s going to be a pleasure to rat you out to the court,” Huw says bitterly. “A pleasure to get the ambassador cut free and fed to a disassembler. Your movement stinks.”
The tiny Adrian plants its hands on its hips and cocks its head at Huw. “Useful idiots I have patience for,” he says. “Useless idiots, well, that’s something else altogether.”
The boat judders to a halt. A tearing noise, like a sheet the size of the sky being ripped asunder, ripples overhead: then the floor shakes with a series of percussive thuds from either side. We’re being bombed, Huw realizes, eerily calm, afloat with the pure, cold fatalism that is possible only with a burned-out adrenal gland. The boat bounces like a pea on a plate. “Sam, are you conscious yet?” he says aloud. Sam doesn’t move. Just as well, he thinks, and prepares to die.
Adrian says, “I radioed your position to the Bishop so that he could capture you, not kill you. The ambassador needs a host.”
He hears the golems slam past his hold and run out to do battle, then more jouncing crashes.
“I have diplomatic immunity,” the judge says as something drags her past his cell. A moment later, the hatch opens, and Huw and Sam are lifted, dumped into a gigantic airtight hamster-ball, sealed, and rolled away back toward Glory City.
“Children,” the Bishop says. He is thin and weak-chinned and watery-eyed, and his voice is familiar. It takes Huw a moment to place it, and then he remembers the voice, moist in his ear: Sinner, can you hear me?
“You are in: So. Much. Trouble.” Judge
Giuliani is no longer hissing like a teakettle, but her rage is still clearly barely under control. “What do the words ‘diplomatic immunity’ mean to you?”
“Not an awful lot, We’re afraid,” the Bishop says, and witters a little laugh. “We don’t much go in for formalities here in the new world, you know.”
They’ve amputated the dalek suit’s gun and damped its public address system, so that Judge Judy is reduced to a neutered head on a peppermill with a black robe of office draped round it. Nevertheless, she is still capable of giving looks that could curdle milk and make sheep miscarry. Huw numbly watches her glare at the Bishop, and the Bishop’s watery answering stare.