by Michael Shea
I could feel us all thinking it, and so I shouted it out: “If we got even a piece of the take on this bootleg vid of theirs, we could bring a fucking army down on Panoply!”
That set everyone talking. No one dared turn from their guns or their gas, because they all knew what was shortly to erupt from the heaped corpses before them, but everyone was shouting some hope and some heart back and forth.
But hope’s double-edged. Start craving that future, and you really start feeling the knife at your throat here and now. I had to see Jool once more, had to hold her again before the shit hit the fan. I signaled to the others, and booked it for the church.
Everyone there was at the ready—youngest and oldest hunkered down in the pews, gunners stationed at the doors, in the aisles. Jool stood center-aisle front. She had to be quick setting her Thompson aside, so urgent I was to get my arms around her.
“Not so hard you sweet fool, you’ll crush baby.”
“Jool. Listen. Don’t … Don’t.”
There was no way to say it. I remembered the first time I saw her, standing by her book racks on the freeway off-ramp. Here she was, mine now. Her stern little Mexican/Indian don’t-fuck-with-me face. I wanted to tell her not to die, but couldn’t bring that word out between us.
But she got it, and took my face in her hands. “I won’t—we won’t. Don’t you either. Don’t you dare.”
We stood holding each other, and I looked around us. The stained-glass window’s whole top third was gone—just the fragment of a child left, lying on his mother’s lap. I looked at all these women and children around us. I couldn’t believe what was happening to us. These were people. To use them for props, for targets in a kill-fest! It seemed like something only an alien could do, some bug from Altair in a cheesy sci-fi. And there they were. Out past the headless Mother, their rafts paved the sky.
I told Jool about the captured directors’ boats. It seemed cold comfort as I said it, but the mad light it put in her eyes warmed me.
“We own the vid? You know what we could do with that kind of money?”
“Yes. Annihilate Panoply.”
She kissed me. “Go on back to work now, dear. Baby needs a new pair of shoes.”
* * *
Sunrise’s fleet cycled through the town’s airspace, and Sandy had just bullhorned “shoot minus five” to the town at large. Mazy, without tailing her outright, was keeping Ming’s raft in range, a little miffed that her hothead lover had scored a flashier raft than hers. She laughed at herself for it, but being an ace pilot in her own right, was still a bit ticked.
Ming held at hover. She seemed to be looking down into the trees on the downslope side of town. When she flew down toward them, Mazy was already slanting to intercept her.
“Whatcha got?”
“I think I saw movement. Yes. Look there, two thirds up in that pine.”
They slowed coming in, their hesitation growing as they neared a dull, glossy bulk that cleaved to the trunk.
“Is that…” Ming asked, “… a wasp?”
It might have been, if a wasp had folded its abdomen up against its thorax, and wrapped itself with its wings into a glossy-crusted, obese cocoon.
“Not anymore I don’t think,” said Mazy. “It’s like … changing into something else.”
The cocoon crinkled slightly, crumpled a little, and then swelled out again. “That’s what I saw,” said Ming. “That fucker’s gonna go active.”
As she opened up her machine gun on it, Mazy commed Sandy. “We got an APP cocooned in a tree. Looks active. We need to scope all the trees.”
* * *
In the little dormered room overlooking all the town’s guarded dead, Razz was crouched low. Down on the ground floor, the front door banged open and he heard people trooping in.
He scuttled to the side window, leaned out and gripped a sturdy downspout. Took a deep breath, and swung himself outside, hugging the wall as he did it. He managed to get his foot on the top of the masonry frame of a first-floor side window, and to push his hand up against the bottom frame of the second-story window directly above it.
With his back flat to the wall, isometrically clamped between the heels of his upthrust hands and the soles of his feet, Razz considered his position. In shape as he was, he was OK for a couple minutes, but then he would start feeling crucified. At his back and beneath him he heard people come into the room whose window frame he stood on. Down beneath his footsoles a head thrust out, looking up and down the alley that flanked the building, then pulled back inside without looking overhead.
Razz was stuck, as on flypaper, to one wall of a set. A live-action set. It led him to a kind of epiphany. All these people here were stuck, as on flypaper, to a live-action set. Why didn’t they all just clear the fuck out of here, head for the hills? Anything but this! And then Razz remembered that pavement of dead he’d just been camming. Whatever had kept them here fighting yesterday, what kept them here now were all their fallen.
Now up in the room he’d just left were voices and movement. If he had to jump and bolt, where could he go? On the opposite side of the alley, there was a low slot of shadow in the base of the wall—an entry port to an under-floor crawl space. He reminded himself this wasn’t a set but a real town, full of odd nooks and coverts … He heard clear speech from the dormered room above:
“… our posts—it’s minus five.”
Don’t think. He jumped, arms spread for balance. His legs just took the shock, though he toppled forward and badly bruised his knee. Then he rolled, and scuttled into the crawl space.
Gasping, he lay easier in darkness, in the cool smell of earth and old floor beams. Safe. Or pretty damned likely to be, down here out of the view of death on wings. He heard fast footfalls out in the alley, and recoiled from the parallelogram of light coming in through the slot, worming deeper into the dark. One … two pairs of track shoes jogged past the slot.
Razz sighed his relief, spread his arms to assume a more comfortable prone posture, and felt his right forearm make contact with a weighty, slightly resilient mass.
His whole body contracted and he crab-scrambled sideways—lay straining his eyes into the dark, and after endless seconds began to discern the dimly lit floor beams and, just under the nearest one, a glossy, globular blackness, perhaps half again the diameter of a large beach ball.
No need to bolt—not yet. A mass of gel, in dormant mode. It wouldn’t move, not till the shoot started. But he’d have to bolt soon, find another hide. The size of that thing! It must have consumed … half a man anyway. Or pieces of several men, or women…?
Razz had thought he’d confronted what he did for a living—for a small fortune, actually. He thought that he had taken a square, manly look at it, had faced its grim realities and made his peace with them. But he, his industry, was creating these things. These wizardly machines that devoured human flesh! Had his job devoured his mind? Making things like these was not a sane thing to do!
And then he heard a noise that turned his whole body to stone. Machine-gun fire—its roar rising as gun after gun joined the chorus, a massive barrage awakening down just west of town. The shoot had started!
Razz remembered how fast—once activated—the gel could flow, and his muscles were suddenly spring-steel. He launched sideways, and rolled hard for the entry-slot.
He came flopping out into the alley and got his legs under him, and sprinted for Main Street. The shit-storm was raging and he had to get armed at once. He was in the fight now, and had to find allies but fast.
He burst out of the alley mouth, found a heavily armed young woman posted right beside it and shouted, “I lost my gun! Gimme a weapon!”
A slow smile spread on her face. “Hey!” she said brightly. “You must be the other director.”
While she spoke, Razz was realizing something. Glacier Avenue was full of fighters, all down along both sidewalks, and its forces were fully mobilized, pickups and battle-vans slowly cruising in both directions, and all the second-floor windo
ws had thirty-cal muzzles jutting from them—but no one was firing! And there were no APPs in sight!
The young soldier cupped a hand to her mouth and called, “Arms!” and a pickup slid to the curb. The guy in the bed gave her a cut-down twelve-gauge, an ammo pouch, and a shield. She gave Razz the shield first. “Wear it on your left with the left hand free enough to work the slide.” She gave him the sawed-off. “You cover that alley from here. Watch my back, and I’ll watch yours.” Her sudden grin came back. “Less than shoot minus three now, pilgrim! And counting.…”
XXIII
PREMATURE EXECUTION
Machine-gun barrages, stitching the pine trees below town. The tracers of converging fire from half a dozen rafts etched a sudden geometry of acute angles, all focused in the trees where near a hundred of his APP survivors clung cocooned. It was still shoot minus four!
Val flinched as if from a slap in the face. He ached for vengeance … and almost laughed. What greater hurt than all of this could he inflict on them?
His head wound throbbed. He fought for calm. Sit absolutely still. One heartbeat … two … three. He must not lose control.
Control was hard to manage, because Val had been so angry already. Had watched, with dawning disbelief, as the Sunrisers assembled round their dead, and enfiladed them with focused fire power.
A leak … Or perhaps not a leak. Val willed himself to unclench. Someone down there had known about oviposition. This was a big community—how hard was it to guess that someone here might know? Had he really thought them all hicks because they lived in the mountains? In our pride, he thought, we dumb down our enemies.
And they were by-god nailing him for it now. It was his art that they were scrambling in those cocoons, just as it had been his flesh, his face they had cracked with their tire iron so long ago. He saw it clearly for the first time, this simple, glaring truth. Those dire, gorgeous anatomies gestating there were his art and thus himself, and every one of them a killer pure and simple.
Well … fair enough. Or true enough. But what then? Each man has his own script he must live, if he chooses to create something, and not simply to follow the throng. And except for this shoot, except for this one time, Val’s career had been blameless. He had set up his booth in the open market, and offered possible death for major cash—and the takers had come, filling the sets.
And below him, on his screens right now, was the proof that he ran an honest casino. Those extras were raking in his chips down there! He’d fucked up somehow, and right from the starting gun these Sunrisers were shredding his APPs and kicking his ass.
Those crushed in the mine—how he felt their loss now! These raft-gunning bitches raking the trees were sharp-eyed. They were punching his tickets left and right as he watched. Be still, heart!
He drew a deep cleansing breath. Another. He must be cold, take counsel with himself and bide his time. He must not jump the clock by even a second. React to their lawlessness, and he’d break his inner rhythm. The extras then would set the tempo, and he would stay half a beat behind them thereafter.
That would be to repeat his near-fatal error on Alien Hunger. There, by plunging into his shoot, he’d come within an ace of being devoured by his own APPs while it was all recorded by his own cams! And memory’s cams starkly replayed for him the eyes of that huge spider, the cringing of his own flesh as its fangs so nearly pierced him.
Recalling this chastened his anger, and chilled his blood.
And in this new calm, he saw how he could indulge himself in just one tidbit of revenge. He set his fingers flying on APP uplinks … and swiftly isolated just the one he wanted out of his hundreds: one cocoon so well hidden in pine boughs that none of the raft gunners had seen it, though no less than three of them were deployed in positions not six yards from it.
Even as he watched the carnage worked on a score of his other cocoons—a spill of garbled bodies, of shredded limbs and smashed heads spraying in clots from their torn pupae—he accelerated to perfect form the hidden one at the gunners’ backs.
Even as the nearest gunner—a lean young woman—whipped round her gun toward the sound of its fractured chrysalis, its great height overtopped her, dire arms lanced toward her, and razor jaws bit off her head.
The APP instantly gave him a tight zoom on its prey’s avenger—a second lean young woman, her face all wrath and horror, obliterating the APP’s head and eyes, and the shot itself.
More calmly now, Val accepted the carnage amidst the pines—twenty-six cocoons already savaged. Just watch them at their work—most of them rafters from Panoply itself.
And then Val realized that their fleet was larger since yesterday—was … eleven rafts strong! There was the big sector-boat, the eight fast-rafts he knew … and two more fast-rafts, slightly bigger, more powerful models. Director’s rafts.
He commed one of his assistant directors. “Harvey? Give me an exact count of Shoot Two’s fleet. See if they’re short.” He’d appropriated Mark’s pirate work above them as “Shoot Two,” an addition to their own.
He waited, weighing the possibility that Mark and Razz had joined the Sunrisers. It would give them footage from the extras’ POV—priceless stuff! But meaning, he reminded himself, that would give him that footage.
“They’re short two rafts, Val.”
“Thanks Harv. Feed me an overhead zoom on those two directors’ boats gunning the trees.”
“Roger that.”
And on the zoom, Val instantly recognized one of the pilots: that little cornflower skag, Sharon Harms—an ace Panoply payboater and notorious hot dog. A wave of dread rose in him. Though they might collude with the Sunrisers, neither Mark nor Razz would willingly put his boat in an extra’s control.…
He scanned his feeds of Glacier Avenue, a dire premonition upon him. An odd little cameo on the sidewalk drew his eye: a truck pulling to the curb, and a man—apparently still unarmed at this late hour—being handed weapons from its bed. Val zoomed in.
There he was. Razz. Assuming arms and taking up a post at an alley mouth.
Now Val could no longer resist understanding: the extras owned Millar’s whole meta-vid. They had captured its master-rafts! The two directors’ rafts were the automatic ultimate repository of their whole fleet’s shoot.
Val’s legal control of that footage made no difference anymore. The extras would bootleg it into the market for a fucking mint.
That would only sharpen the market for Val’s own vid, of course, and make him a mint of his own, but that didn’t matter. That didn’t help at all. The Studio, he, would be trumped. Assault on Sunrise would be stolen, stolen by Sunrise, and sold by Sunrise under its own imprimatur to all the wide vid-sucking world!
And as bad as this—worse than this, really—they had robbed him of a priceless scene, one he’d been savoring since he’d first finished scripting this opus.
Day Two, Act One, Scene One. Just minutes from now it would have unfolded: the second generation of APPs swarming up from the trees, and raining down on the rooftops. The Sunrisers took arms and ran to battle, heartened to face a foe much reduced.
And this scene’s POV was from the heap of gathered dead, from eyes that emerged from those dead. Just the tops of their heads emerged, faceted spheres that covertly erupted from the midriffs and ribs of the fallen.
Jewels, those eyes—sprouting like toadstools all over that funeral pile. Slowly they swelled, their wraparound vision capturing one another’s emergence, capturing the whole unsuspecting town in fractured-rainbow radiance.…
A pull-back shot of the heap then: whole heads sprouting everywhere, their dire jaws gaping, while all the dead grew restless, all trembling, twitching, shrinking slightly—as if they dreamed what was happening to them.
And only then would his demons tear free and take to the air.
Grim now, Val waited for what he must do. Let the sun rise.…
* * *
Mark Millar sat snugly—all too snugly—in a crew chair just aft of Sandy
Devlin. She was nosing their raft—Mark’s raft—to port and starboard, swaying like a cobra’s head, searching the trunks of the trees for cocoons.
Mark, himself cocooned in duct tape to his chair, said, “Sandy. Listen. These two boats of mine have cams. As long as you’re flying them, would you please just have those cams on?”
She let out a caw of derision. “Why do you think I’ve got you aboard?”
“Wonderful!” And Mark meant it; he could see now he was going to survive this. “Here it is,” he urged her. “The whole can of worms. You’ve got us, and we know you’d hurt us if we forced the issue. The thing is, you need us to edit and package and market the vid. We’ll give you twenty-five percent of the gross.”
Sandy laughed. Her eyes never left their search of the trees as she answered. “Oh Mark, you devil! Don’t you know your asses aren’t leaving our hands till you’ve deeded our clacks to us? We won’t skin you as bare as we could. You get thirty-three percent when our sixty-six is banked, and you two get codirectors’ credit along with Sunrise, Inc., but our name comes first.”
“We have to—”
“Nope. All that, or you fall out of this raft from three hundred feet, and we print and market the vid ourselves.”
“Sandy!” It was the yelp of a wounded puppy, but Sandy sensed compliance waiting in the wings, after a little more pummeling.
“And think on this, Mark,” she said. “There’s gonna be a sequel. If you do a great job here, we’re gonna let you shoot it, and for half the gross.” Still she watched the trees, but she could feel that word “sequel” banging around in Mark’s mind. And then could feel him getting it.
“All-righty then,” she said, “it’s shoot minus forty seconds.” She spun round to face him, reaching the razor beak of a utility knife toward him. She sliced just his forearms free, so he could manipulate the console. “Got enough flexibility there, Mark?”
“I can make it work, thanks.” He was keying a sharp, sweet zoom on a cocoon that a rafter was shredding with thirty-cal fire.
“Hey Millar,” said Radner. Sandy had him tail-gunning, always flew with him. He was a small, nervous guy, as well balanced as a monkey—as he had need to be, with Devlin driving. “Can you cam me too? Get some shots of my gunning?”