Rapture of the Nerds

worst.

Huw sucks in air to give the speech that will deliver him to the gibbet—ignoring the many aches and owies that light up his body like acupuncture needles—just as there is a tremendous crash. 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, muskets, 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 molten crater out of the ground between them. Finally, one brave soul darts forward and jams a spear tip down its barrel: he falls to the ground as the judge nails him with enough electricity to curl his pubes and his prophet’s beard.

They give up on moving her, surrounding her instead with bristling guns. “I have diplomatic immunity, you God-bothering imbeciles,” she screams, 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 against one kidney. Then 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 the ground, so that by the time he’s hauled erect before the crowd, the skin covering one whole side of his chest is abraded, a weepy, striated road-pizza left behind.

A white robe is draped around him and snapped shut behind and around his arms. The crowd roars with anticipation, and their faces swim before him, each one a savage rictus . 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 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 more roaring 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 says. They’re going to kill me, he realizes, 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 willfully 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 all damned to hellfire!” His accuser’s voice rises. “Lo, these three score years less fourteen 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, from which it would appear that Huw has single-handedly doomed every living human on the North American continent to a fiery and perpetual immolation in boiling battery acid by virtue of 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 manages 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?” Huw 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 hollers 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 charged with. 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 says, almost kindly. “Not for long, 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 through almost a day ago. It’s been a very long day—the longest in his life. 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 steps 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, 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 says.

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

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

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 air lock. “Oh. Oh shit.” The