Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy)

by Michael Shea

  “Can the studio sustain losses like this, and still have a movie tomorrow? I’m sorry to say, I don’t think they’re worried about that. I’m very much afraid that our fallen friends may be the … source of new enemies tomorrow, and when tonight’s fight is over, we’ll have to surround their bodies with guns and gas.”

  He had to raise his voice at the end, because everybody was talking now, their voices quickly rising to a roar.

  “I’m sorry!” the doctor shouted, and had to shout it again and again. And when at last he had silence—except for the sound of people sobbing here and there, he said once more, “I’m sorry. Our dead were dear to us, are dear to us. What’s been done to us was not done by men, but by monsters, human monsters worse than these they’ve sent against us. But as I believe that a second wave of killers is growing in those dear ones we’ve lost, we must be ready to incinerate them the moment they emerge.”

  “The gas doesn’t work,” someone cried. “It shrinks ’em and they shed the ash!”

  Surprising many in that room, Trish piped up. “Not necessarily! We wanna try something.” She blinked, as if startled by her own boldness, little professional skulker and outsider that she was. “We want four or five people to help us out.”

  Cap and Chops stood up. “Atcher service,” said Cap. Winters was going to speak, but Trish spoke first—finding her stage presence, it seemed. “We’ve got over an hour. We wanna try … like an experiment. Everyone that can should just keep resting up.”

  Ricky Dawes and Laoni joined them, and the six trooped outside.

  * * *

  They crossed Glacier, all looking behind them at one moment or other up to the eastern peaks. Was that a faint hint of silver light dawning? Trish led them to the concrete steps down to West Glacier, a narrower, residential street downslope. Over her shoulder she said, “We had people tracking it near the end of the battle because it was so big. They said just before shutdown it went into that house there, where the door was standing open.”

  It was a high-porched, modestly ornamented little two-story. As they climbed the steps, a touching domestic smell wafted out of it, of lavender and dried rosemary. They paused at the door, pulling it all the way open, beaming their lights inside. The little atrium and half the parlor it flanked showed stark, webbed with shadows. On the parlor’s flowered rug sat a grayish, oblate spheroid, murkily luminous within. Its bulk squatted almost waist-high to Trish, who hesitated a few steps from it. “They didn’t say it was this big … Ohmygod! There’s something behind it!”

  It was the hindquarters of a dog—a big shepherd, by the legs and tail. The stump of its stomach ended in a smooth curve which matched the arc of the gel-globe’s surface, where it lay contracted in sleep-mode mere inches away.

  The rest of the house was empty, and when they had regathered from ascertaining this, Trish shot Dr. Winters a look before speaking, and he gave her a nod. “We realized, it dawned on us, that the gel we burned in our lab had, like, consumed a big guy’s head and both his hands. It had, like, a shitload of organic material mixed in with it. So … what if that was what made it flammable?”

  “And if it was,” said Dr. Winters, “and tomorrow’s attackers are gestating in the bodies of our friends, then tomorrow’s new wasps will be vulnerable to fire. Now my friends, for safety’s sake, use the hooks, not your hands. Let’s see if we can roll it.”

  What ensued wasn’t rolling—it was more like a taffy-pull. The hooks didn’t work. They just pulled out tentacles of the gel that shed the points and snapped back into the globe.

  They unhinged a small closet door and started working it like a big spatula, forcing the door’s edge hard between globe and carpet, heaving up on it like a lever, tipping its mass off balance, and forcing the dense flabby fabric to flop torpidly forward a foot or two, where its sphere re-cohered.

  Their sweat drizzled down and their backs ached. When they’d gotten it into the front hall, Cap panted, “’Nother door!”

  Hammering out the pins of a bedroom door, Cap set it long-edge down along one wall: one bank of a channel to guide it out on the porch.

  “Now as you lever it up,” he grunted, crouching behind the second door and bracing it, “angle it in here so we can squeeze it along between this and the wall.”

  The gel, once levered into this channel, kept moving in a V-shaped front, seeking open floor to spread out and re-globe. When it poured out onto the porch, it did just this.

  But here it needed only one more levering forward onto the porch steps. Because once the gel was on them, it poured all the way down, rejecting each successive step in its rush for flat ground and sphericity. These it found, and re-formed by the curb.

  “Let’s find out!” snarled Cap, reaching for Trish’s gas rig—which she had to surrender quickly to avoid a bruised shoulder—and leaping down the whole porch-flight in one bound.

  They all rushed down after him, and found that the gel, drenched with gas, wore an eerie loveliness. Under its hydrocarbon sheen, lights woke within it—gleams and wisps and nebulae constellated its interior, as if it were a piece of night sky. It looked like the egg of a universe, a necroverse of malignant design, and it made more than a few of them think anew that their world had been stolen, and was now in the hands of aliens.

  Cap said, “Fire in the hole,” and they all stepped back. He thumbnailed a Diamond match alight and flicked it on the sphere.

  Then, wearing a crest of whipping flame, the globe seemed a fierce dark eye beneath a blazing brow, while plagues and a whole pox of evils seethed within its gaze. But was it scathed in there? Did it just wear this fire till shedding it?

  “… Buckling there! The sphere’s sagging.…”

  “Feed it gas! Stand away!”

  The gel began to crease in ridges, sag in hollows. “Contraction! Definite!” said Cap—they all stood smiling, watching it, the lumpish and angular subsidence of that baleful star-hive, at last into a coal-black tar, a fuming asteroid half its former mass, jutting in crazy peaks and spiky insect parts.

  And not just insect parts. Amid the crooked jumble of protrusions, a slender charcoal stump had sprouted, crowned by part of a human palm, with three crooked fingers.

  Out of their stunned silence, Chops growled, grief in his rage, “Oh those murdering motherfuckers.”

  And then they heard bullhorns up on Glacier Avenue, saw search beams waking sleepers on the sidewalks and porches. The crest-line of the Trinities wore a tiara of silver. The moon was two minutes from rising.

  XX

  A PERFECT CAMEO

  Val stood gazing at his monitors, the riot of images his scythe of cams harvested from the battle below. He paced as he scanned them, eyes sweeping here and there, the images breathtaking, like a casket of jewels: the town’s blazing rivers of battle lights, the sword-blade beams of spotlights swiveling from the roofs of the gun-trucks, the vertical hail of tracers, the shimmery haze of the predators’ wings filling the air, and the moon’s great scarred, indifferent eye watching from the silvered sky.

  But scanned more carefully, the monitors were unsettling. Those damned swords and shields! What had given them the idea? A few had appeared in the First Act, but now they were everywhere—and were a perfect adaptation to his wasps’ mode of attack.

  Case in point right there, that punk-haired woman got one’s stinger nailed into her shield and twisted it, wrenching the wasp down onto its back, its wings hammering pavement—and there, her burly machete hacking, hacking its head free in two strokes, and the whole monster sagging to gel.

  His fingers itched to key his overrides, to dance now this bug, now that one individually was out of danger, but that way lay distraction and futility.

  His eye kept gnawing at his strike-count on its screen. If he lost many more APPs to their swords and shields, the strike count was going to be key. Their dead were falling, yes, but would there be enough?

  He hated this, seeing his dire, graceful machines captured, damaged, broken. H
e was becoming aware of an ache that his monitors were starting to give him, an ache in his cheekbone’s old fracture.

  He touched his face, his fingertips rediscovering for the nth time the flaw inflicted half a lifetime ago.

  He had come out of the eroded hulk of Dorsey High’s main building, the only part of it that had even half-survived the Zoo’s generations of defacement and despoilation. Ten P.M. He came out pumped and happy as he always did from an evening of teaching, his tie loosened, his shirt sweated through that hot July night.

  He’d found himself to be a born teacher in those three years—the ringleader kind of teacher, always on his feet, incessantly bringing his pupils en masse to the board to write what they were learning, and when they were seated, prowling among them as he taught, making each and every one speak solo, with relentless kindness and humor, giving each one his or her moment of limelight and success.

  He came out the back of the building, content that he’d reached them, opened a bit more of the world to their eyes—came out, and saw two large shapes standing in front of his motorbike.

  There was no moon. Just the Basin’s light-haze laying a gray-purple sky on top of the Zoo’s shadow-sunk trees and all the ruins nested among them. One of the shapes flipped something into the air—it twirled end-over-end a moment against the sky: a tire iron. This dropped back and was recaptured by the shadow-hand.

  He walked up to them without hesitation, still the teacher. “Hey guys. Can I help you?”

  “Fuck, no. Give us the bag and empty out your pockets. You can keep your piece-shit bike. We got better.”

  “You can have my money, but I need the bag. My students—”

  And then his face exploded, pavement hammered his back, and his dazed eyes watched the whole sky slowly rocking back and forth. Faraway hands writhed like rats in his pockets. And then there was just silence, and the sky.

  There followed a strange and terrible odyssey. First there was rolling over: an endless struggle. Then, sitting up. But standing—this was a desperate war waged against gravity, a war of a hundred reverses, of falling, and rising, and falling again.

  When at last he stood, it was a different world he stood in. He saw the Zoo now for the first time. The Zoo had not robbed him. The Zoo had taught him. Had revealed, had explained itself to him. It had taken his money to show him what mattered. It had taken his satchel of books to destroy it, to show him what didn’t matter. It had damaged his body to show he was refuse—refused. Teachers couldn’t change the Zoo; therefore, they should stay the fuck out of it. The Zoo had fired him: No Teachers Need Apply.

  Through that long woozy ride, the pain that had been spiked into his head somehow held him upright. He saw the glow of vid-screens winking from dark windows everywhere. Vid was the only teacher down here, lustful turmoil and gaudy mayhem the only texts, endlessly studied by Zoo-meat while wilderness swallowed their streets.…

  Val rechecked his strike-count. It was beginning to look like he would make his numbers for tomorrow. He would have scant reserves though, at this pace, might lack the strong backup he liked, to keep them struggling all-out to the very last frame.

  His extras—so he still thought of them—redeployed cleverly. Most of the machine-gunners were off the roofs and positioned in second- and third-story windows, weaving a crossfire that was increasingly effective in tearing up APPs as they dropped down into or rose back up from the street. They were actually, here and there, taking their heads off with uncanny aim. Maybe, once tomorrow was secured, he would himself venture a little closer to the action. Enjoy a bit of self-indulgence.

  He monitored Mark’s and Razz’s boats’ harrassment of his own. They had some good moves as they scoped his fleet. This was fine because of a recent com received from the Studio’s legal division: Panoply would win a suit for ownership of any footage taken of a shoot in progress. Their footage would simply add to the layers of his two-level epic.

  He was already filming it from his side too. As Mark’s boats rained down like bright flakes, all floodlights and cams, to hang off the bows of Val’s boats and harangue them, his boats were camming and haranguing them back, calling them corpse-flies and bootleggers.

  He had to smile at Mark’s ballsy enterprise. He keyed up one of the harrassments in progress just below him to the north. The enterprising Razz was the haranguer, the counter-haranguer being Trace, one of Val’s best pilots.

  Razz: “Howzzit feel to watch people die for money?”

  Trace: “You mean get paid to kill them, or pay them to die? You should know, you’re a fucking director!”

  It was beautiful. It would suck the audience into a whole new dimension of involvement, absolve them of their own guilt by making them feel part of a moral inquiry, an exposé.

  Why not go lower and tweak things a bit? He called up the feeds from his spray-cams, the freckling of transmission lenses he’d peppered the town with. Excellent for cameo close-ups … Hullo. Look at that machine-gunner in that third-floor window there. He was one of that crew that had saved Kate Harlow’s ass on Alien Hunger, the black kid.

  Val was already diving toward the town, when he got a glimpse of another member of that crew—the big white kid. He was gunning from a window on the opposite side of the street.

  A perfect window of opportunity.

  Val dropped down into the upper stratum of the battle, hung amidst the seethe of wasps rising from one assault and diving to another, pistoning with a silvery hum, striking and soaring. His two chosen extras had very quick reflexes. Val could make this happen. Time for some keyboard work only he could manage.

  Their two windows’ angles were offset some thirty degrees, the black one’s window a few yards higher. Val overrode two APPs now rising to either side of him. His left hand would be for the black extra, his right for the white. Bach himself had done no trickier keying than Val was about to do.

  He hovered twelve meters above where the crossfire he meant to create would be flying. His fingers, in two different space-times, brought lefty and righty down to hover at opposite sides of their targets’ windows.

  Oblivious to Val’s control, the gunners swung their muzzles in alignment, each intent only on what hummed and probed not two arm’s lengths from his face, not seeing that he was aiming at his ally’s window. And … action!

  Two attacks, perfectly simultaneous, stingers thrust deep within the two windows’ frames. But whitey’s tracers streamed out an instant before scorching blacky’s shoulder with blazing fire. Blacky rolled away from his gun and hugged the floor.

  Val probed for him with left wasp’s stinger, while feinting with right wasp to keep whitey’s fire coming. The man was quick with that machine gun, taking big abdominal chunks out of right wasp. Blacky, still hugging the floor under blistering thirty-cal fire, thrashed as limber as a lizard, ducking both fire and left wasp’s thrusts.

  These boys were hard to kill.

  Val’s right hand faltered ever so slightly, and right wasp paused on the downswing for just a beat. Whitey planted a veritable column of hot thirty-cal rounds on rightie, and tore off the lower half of its abdomen. End of crossfire.

  And almost in the same instant, blacky flopped and writhed his way back to his machine gun, swung up the barrel, and used it to parry leftie’s stinger thrusts, and then poured concentrated fire up into its thorax, holding his target through the wasp’s evasions till suddenly the anchorage of one of its wings was shredded, and it fell out of the air.

  Val laughed. He had been their Fate, and they had beaten Fate. It happened—it was called heroism, and Val had enabled it, created it. A priceless piece of vid, a perfect cameo. He flagged the footage for the final cut, and began a leisurely vertical ascent.

  A massive convergence of thirty-cal fire began hammering on Val’s armored underside, like all Hell with jackhammers trying to dig its way up to his ass. His craft must have been recognized—at least a dozen guns were focused on him. He rose a touch higher, and then paused in his ascent, d
isdaining an undignified evacuation of any part of his set.

  Let them hammer away at him a bit, most of their fire was too steep to cross his bows. The state-of-the-art electro-mag force field rimming his gunwales would deflect the rest.

  But, being the very latest thing, and being under increasingly heavy fire, the shield, which micro-instantaneously interpreted and counter-pulsed each impinging projectile’s angle of incidence, very briefly glitched.

  A sledgehammer blow knocked Val clean out of his seat.

  As his eyes slowly cleared, he beheld an otherworldly sphere of light.… Realized that he was on his back, staring up at the moon near its zenith.

  Vague neural reports began trickling in to him from the outlying regions of his sprawled body. There were his legs … his arms. He summoned his right hand. The summons moved slowly through a great inner distance—and after a moment, the hand leadenly raised itself before his eyes. Then, reached down to touch the side of his head. It took a moment for his fingers to report what they touched: hot stickiness. A little more quickly, his head reported receiving this touch: a rusty crack of pain seemed to split it.

  The pain was a wakening, and command of his body came with it. He struggled back up to a sitting posture, bent on knowing his damage at once.

  Though his head kept swaying out of the vertical, his frame held, and he drew a deep breath. His head was scored, his scalp trenched, his skull maybe grazed, but … whole, yes. He commed Medic. “Send me a boat, please, Mirna, I’ll need stitches and a cold compress—I’m going straight up to six hundred.”

  “Roger that, Val.”

  It was Mirna herself who docked at his portside and came aboard.

  “Thanks, dear.” Val smiled.

  “My god, Val!”

  “Not to worry. Just a graze. Some pain med and anti-shock. Dress it carefully please, we don’t want too bad a scar.”

  His own self-possession exhilarated him as much as her medicines, which included forebrain enhancers.

  So. He’d survived his second battle wound from the Zoo-meat. His first, long ago, had set him on the path to his present eminence. His second would not unhorse him. He would finish his work here tomorrow, and it would crown that eminence.