by Michael Shea
A fold in the hillside was their destination. There was a bit of level ground in this nook and some shrubs and small trees half filled it. One big old log, a long-fallen pine, lay at a tilt in the brush, bright green moss wrapping half its bark.
“We should stand about here,” Curtis told them. “And we’ll do our practicing on that trunk there.”
“Slip these on round your necks,” Jool said, handing them earmuffs. “You’ll cover your ears when you’re actually firing.”
Curtis took out the two sawed-off pump-actions. “Take hold of ’em like this … right. Now, snug the stocks against the padding on your shoulders. Here … like this…”
Maybe they sensed how it scared their “youngsters” to see them holding those little steel brutes. Momma’s reversion to Zoo-talk was a match for Auntie Drew’s—and she a tutor of English for so many years! “Why you puppies so long-faced?” she laughed. “You think we don’ know howda stomp some? Kick-ass our middle names!”
Curtis and Jool had them dry-fire a while, perfecting their stances, left feet advanced, whole backs and hips braced against the trigger pull. Aiming, bracing, triggering, working the slide … “How your hands, girl?” Momma asked Auntie Drew. “They looking so strong now an’ straight!”
“Thanks to you, Gracie,” she answered. “Thanks to our rakes an our shovels. Hands of steel! They could snap a damn keyboard in half!”
“OK,” Curtis told them, concealing a sinking feeling at this graver phase of their work here. “Now you load them like this … firm push with the thumb and tuck it up in there … right … OK. Five in the magazine, good. Now jack one into the chamber—pull that slide firmly, that’s it—always pull that slide crisply all the way. Now, one more in the magazine. Good. Very careful from here on out, cause remember you got one in the chamber. Bring it up sure it’s pointed away from anyone you don’t wanna hit, because now the damn thing will fire.”
Jool slipped their earmuffs on them, and then Curtis spoke louder. “Now. Lean forward and brace for the recoil and just hit that trunk, anywhere along its upper half.”
Auntie would still have pitched straight over backward if Curtis hadn’t stood braced right behind her. Momma Grace shouted, “Holy shit!” in happy awe at the thunder she’d unleashed.
Two dozen rounds they fired. Toward the end their aim got better and they dug a big splintery chasm in the trunk. Watching, Jool and Curtis were glad for their months in the mountains. How sturdy they’d gotten! There was a dazed, pleased look on their faces, and a pair of grins when each caught the other’s eye: two ladies of some power now.
But Jool and Curtis traded a different look. Both of them were going to be in what was coming, and gone for good any chance of keeping them out of it. He saw Jool wipe her eyes quickly before she said brightly, “All right! Not too shabby. Now your sidearms—”
Auntie yelped, “What’s that!?”
Curtis looked where she pointed, and then checked the hillside to see if a breeze was stirring the grass, because that thick, bright moss on the trunk was rippling.
He literally rubbed his eyes. The moss was stirring in the windless air, shuddering like the fur of some animal in the early sunlight. Shuddering and contracting, because its green pelt thickened and narrowed till it looked like a python … and just like a python, it reared up from the trunk in a thick, swaying stalk.
The stalk budded, massive buds that melted into focused shapes, three aliens: a cruel-beaked thing all studded with rubies that saw them; a crocodilian gnawing the air with its fanged shovel-jaws; a carnivorous ape with a triad of ironic blue eyes.
These absurdities melted back into a featureless python as fast as they’d formed. The python poured off the trunk and into the undergrowth, moving like muscle, graceful along its green length, tucking into the foliage and vanishing.
The little group stood stunned. It was cinematic, a perfect little scene they’d been snared into watching: a little bow from an alien visitor to their world.
They commed Japh and Cap and Chops, and damn quick had a lot of help searching the hills, dozens of them fanning out, rummaging through grass and shrub.
They knew they’d been mocked, two of them survivors of Alien Hunger whom Val Margolian might be specially ticked at. That little demo had addressed questions he knew they were desperate to answer: what would they be facing? How could they fight it?
The answer was like some snotty magician pulling bouquets from his pockets and waving them in their faces. What will you be facing? It could be anything! Look what I can do!
Long after its futility lay heavy upon them, they kept up the search, stubbornly rummaging through grass and bush, grimly refusing to let an invader lie hidden here. For these were their hills. Their freedom, their peace was here.
And all the while they searched, something was touching and tickling their bent-over backs, a radiation sly and subtle raining down: Surveillance.
To an extent they couldn’t measure, they were all had. Those who were coming for them already had them covered. Their every move? Their every syllable?
The sensation settled on all of them. Spread over three hillsides, they felt it as one. And felt too what they were deciding about it: that they could not know the answers to those questions, and so they could not let those answers matter. There was only the fight as it came upon them, and only them to wage the fight.
VI
HOLLYWOOD
Panoply Studio’s ace sector-boat pilot, Lance, tugged at his short horn of waxed hair. “Don’t think we haven’t been asking around, Sandy. I mean before you called, even. Everyone’s wondering, and no one knows zip. It’s the best-kept secret in Panoply’s history. Development has every angle like totally under wraps, tight as a tick’s ass.”
His copilot, Trek, licked down an expertly rolled tobacco “skinny” and fired it up. His “bones”—bright red tufts on his cheekbones—standing out on his inflated face, he added in a tight voice, “Even the title’s a total hush-hush.” Then he whooshed out his smoke and passed the skinny to Lance.
They sat on the deck by the pilots’ pool. Their house was in the Hollywood Hills, and they gazed out over the Basin at a sky smogged its usual violet-gray.
Sandy was shaking her head. “You’ve gotta be shitting me—no hints at all?” If anyone had scuttlebutt it would be these two ace sector-boat pilots.
“Nope,” said Trek. “You got Mark Millar setting up Quake on the main lot. All the other lots are tied up with this an’ that. Whatever Val’s doin—an word is he’s doin something—it’s gotta be off-set, which is like, unheard of.”
“If it’s sure he’s doing something,” Sandy said grimly, “then sure as shit, he’s shooting it at Sunrise. We spanked his ass bad on Hunger, and now he means to eat us alive up there and get the vid as he does it. Gimme one of those brews.”
As Sandy took her first sip of beer, she gazed at them thoughtfully. She knew they’d started as payboaters for Colossal, aces both. Then Panoply lured them aboard with fat contracts to fly sector boats. These were two young men who’d gone for the gold, but were still high-speed hot dogs at heart. Look at them, on their third beers already—drinking and toking, drinking and toking, their lean, restless bodies dying for action.
“Can I ask you guys a question?”
“When you ask us if you can ask us something, Devlin,” Lance said, “we start thinking, Oh shit, what now?”
“Well. Your jobs seem secure at Panoply, but are you sure Margolian’s not secretly holding something against you, like letting me get away with what I did on Hunger?”
“Who can ever be sure what Val knows or doesn’t? I’ll tell you though, all the fast ones you were pulling in the last hour of that shoot, they were slick. We went over all our sector footage—raft cams and set cams—and we couldn’t catch you at anything. Val might think we were wise to you, but damn if we can see what proof he’s got!”
“Yeah,” she smiled and took another sip. “Do you guys ever miss i
t?”
“Miss what?”
“Miss rafting. I mean real rafting, high-speed—not just porking around in the air like a couple of cops.”
“Ooooo,” Trek crooned. “You really know how to hurt a guy!”
“Lemme be a little plainer. You’re not tied to Panoply. Aces like you could raft for any studio you wanted—write your own ticket.”
“Oh Devlin! You’re givin me a woodie with all this sweet talk,” Lance teased.
“Well then see what this does for you: I walked off that set with mucho clacks, and I’d be happy to pay you boys a mil apiece to help me steal something.”
The pair of them grinned at each other.
“Well,” squeaked Lance, holding in another toke, “there’s no harm in talking it over.”
“OK. Do you guys know Mazy and Ming?”
* * *
At the same moment, the two young women in question were lying by their own pool—both deck and pool perhaps a little smaller than Trek and Lance’s. Mazy and Ming were payraft pilots, and though similarly housed in the Hollywood Hills, they were situated just a bit farther downslope.
Mazy told Ming, “I’m not saying we should agree with her. I’m just saying we ought to go see her and listen to her.”
“I’m not gonna talk to that bitch,” snapped Ming. When she was all tightened up like this with anger, her lean little form always seemed smaller. From her partner’s tension, Mazy saw that a fight was inevitable between them. She sighed.
“I’m sorry, hon, but you’re really being immature.” Mazy was twenty-two, and Ming nineteen. Being the younger, Ming’s identity was a very Big Deal in their relationship. And being the less experienced lover only intensified her insistence on her separate self. Mazy saw she was going to have to talk fast to be heard at all.
“It’s because I love you that I have to say this: You’re mad at her because—even renegade—Sandy Devlin’s still the best rafter god ever made. Come on, Ming! We should never get mad at the best for their gifts. Never get mad at talent—learn from it!”
“I’ll respect anyone who respects me! I don’t give a shit what they can do otherwise!” Ming’s silver hair trembled. She was going shag, letting her pineapple grow out because Mazy was keeping her own.
“Honey,” said Mazy. “She’s never reprimanded anyone who didn’t fuck up, and she comes right out and tells you whenever you do a bitchin job!”
“Oh I do bitchin work—I’m as good as you or her. Better.”
“I said ‘you’ meaning anyone, you silly bitch.” Mazy said this laughing, because ‘silly bitch’ was among their love-words. But Ming could always choose to be offended when her mood so inclined, and now she jumped to her feet. “You talk to her if you want. I’m not gonna.”
She jumped in the pool—an unintentionally comic gesture, because the pool was maybe five strokes long, but she started swimming the dinky laps it allowed, getting more steamed each time she had to throw a turn.
“You know what I’m saying, Ming!” Ming’s strokes grew noisier, and Mazy half-shouted to be heard. “Sandy Devlin got out! She got out rich!”
She let that sink in.
After three more stubborn laps, Ming vaulted out, dripping, and sat with her feet in the water, glowering and at first refusing to speak.
Mazy smiled a little sadly. She knew it wasn’t the word “rich” that had gotten through to her intense partner. It was the word “out.” The few times that Sandy Devlin had dressed Ming down had been for reckless risks of rafts and extras. And Mazy knew—as she thought Devlin must have known—that Ming’s reckless dives and razor-sharp swoops were the girl’s way of dealing with her revulsion at being a rafter at all and the mass murder of which she was part.
* * *
Late the same afternoon, the five of them were at the young men’s place. The grill was still smoking—Sandy had insisted they all eat something before tonight’s work. Ming had said, “Screw that, Devlin. I didn’t come up here for lunch. Whaddaya want from us?”
And Devlin had handed each of them a neat packet of bills. “Ten K apiece, a small advance. Eat, listen, then walk if you want and keep the clacks.”
They’d eaten—all of them except Ming—and now they were waiting to listen, watching Sandy as she paced the deck.
“You know, guys,” she said, “I walked off of Hunger with six mil in payout cash. I was thinking to give you a mil each to slip into Panoply with me, into the hangar, and help me steal the four fast-rafts off one of the sector boats there.”
“Yeah, right,” Ming muttered.
But Trek had caught Sandy’s musing tone. “You were thinking. But instead?”
“I was thinking too small. Instead we’re gonna steal the whole fucking sector boat. I’ll pay you a quarter mil each. After the shoot, Sunrise will keep the fast-rafts, but you guys can sell the sector boat on the black market and split the take.”
“Whoa!” said Trek. “Bitchin! You really talkin something besides shit now, girl!”
The others were silent, but their silence had a pregnant, ripening quality in which one could almost hear their brains calc-ing out one quarter of the cash a sector boat would fetch on the black market, and the freedom such cash would bring them.
Sandy smiled. “Of course it goes without saying you guys are going to be flying those rafts on the shoot, with machine guns mounted on the bows.”
“Of course,” grinned Trek and Lance almost simultaneously.
Sandy said, “Just think how it’ll feel—I know I am. To be killing APPs, instead of just watching the studio kill extras.”
* * *
Near midnight, the five of them were on-set at Panoply Studios, down in the hangar at the base of the western set wall. All the sector boats—each a great arrowhead-shaped craft with two fast-rafts nested on either side against its under wings—hung from an overhead rack an eighth mile long. The three women helped boost Trek and Lance up onto the boat they’d chosen.
Once the men were aboard, the women stood unspeaking, gazing around at the great concrete cavern. It had a wide, low slot of a mouth that opened directly onto the set’s airspace. They advanced to stand in that portal, and view the studio’s mighty works.
The shoot of Quake was mere weeks away. The set was three-quarters completed and in intensive construction mode. Its whole eastern half was lit. Over there, anti-grav sleds and rafts swarmed in the floodlights. Foam-crete platforms hung athwart the towering girder-frames of high-rises, hosing crete onto their armatures. Smaller rafts closed in like mosquito-clouds on the freshly creted surfaces and sculpted them with little blue-tongued torches. Where they had finished, spray-rigged gondolas converged to tint and texture every surface.
In the nearer, western half of the set there were only scattered zones of activity. One of these was the “crack”—the huge fissure that the quake was to create in the opening scene. Its chasm walls were still being touched up, and here and there shafts of work lights beamed up from its black depths.
Now and again the women turned and looked up to consider the boat they were going to steal. All three of them were fast-rafters, and to their eyes the sector boat looked dangerously big. It was fourteen meters long and nine wide at the tips of its flank-fins. Seen edge-on it looked sleek, tapered like a dirk-blade, but a thick one with those four rafts barnacled to the under-fins, rounded though they were like half-eggs in their nestings. To the women, the sector boat looked as big as a Mack truck.
Lance at last climbed out of it and jumped down. “OK. If we’re gonna do this we gotta be real quick about it: as close as possible to zero ticks between our decoupling and our exit from the set. So you guys stand ready, jump in, and strap down the instant we decouple.”
Trek decoupled, and the boat dropped like a rock—causing the women neural meltdown, even as Trek switched on his cushion of anti-grav just six inches above the concrete pad. Sandy had to laugh. “You assholes,” she said to the grinning Lance.
They swarmed abo
ard, and the pilots lifted the boat a couple meters for takeoff the instant the women had buckled their harnesses. From her backseat, Sandra Devlin said, “Guys, no offense, truly—but are you sure you don’t want me piloting?”
The two young men traded evil grins. Trek turned back to Sandy, his merriment making the little red tufts on his cheekbones sharpen. “You’re cargo, Devlin. Buckle tight.”
They launched the boat toward the wide low hangar mouth, and—in sheer insolence, it seemed—they flipped the craft on edge, and shot through that narrow sky-slice at right angles to the ground.
They stayed at this full tilt as the big boat whipped out through the enormous set’s night air, their left fin-tip just a meter off the street—sped down residential lanes, flying no-lights through the dark. Houses flashed past the eyes of the sideways-hanging women, who with each turn rocked softly in their harnesses. The point of their discomfort dawned on the passengers soon enough: tilted thus, the boat was visible only edge-on to the high raft-traffic busy constructing in the other half of the set.
“Into the Crack!” Lance cackled. “Pucker up, girls!”
“Fuck you!” piped Ming. “I could fly this thing backward and blindfolded!”
Still, the three passengers admitted in their hearts that these two boys were slick at the stick. The women were only seeing the left side of each street they sped down … until suddenly, the boat went giddily vertical—still tilted on edge as it did so—and side-hopped something very tall on their blind side, which they only saw below them as they whipped across its crest: the rooftop of the set’s luxury hotel with its pool and plantings.
And yawning away beneath them where the next block should have been, there was the Crack, its crooked black abyss dotted with a constellation or two of work lights.
Trek said cheerfully, “Sure hope there’s room for us!” as they dropped edge-on like an axe-blade down into the Crack, hitting infra-red as they sank into it.