Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy)

by Michael Shea

  “I’m already doing it, Rad,” Mark said pleasantly.

  * * *

  At shoot minus zero, as the sun lit shafts of flame on the crests, every cam raft in the sky, in both the smaller and the greater scythes, was sucking photons from the same spot: that funerary pavement of the dead, with all those Sunrise guns—powerless to save their lives—now trained just above their corpses.

  And through these corpses, movement rippled, and through the nerves of all those eyes-in-the-sky as well it rippled, as awe, and commiseration, and a cruel delight in power a-borning.

  Barbed bug legs erupted like a forest of thorn trees, tearing a passage for huge fanged heads. Sprays of cold blood and torn flesh celebrated their birth like flung confetti. Shreds of tissue bearding the thorns, those crooked trees clawed at the sky, seemed to find purchase on the air that hauled them higher into view. Long bodies—limber shafts—thrust up and wide green wings scissored open, became bright, buzzing blurs in the sunlight that lifted—more powerfully now—long abdomens, long, trailing legs toward the sky.

  And all this sudden crop of gorgeous demons, so furiously alive, was reaped as it rose by a sleet of machine-gun fire.

  In this zone their substance sprayed through the air, became an aerial stratum of wheeling fragments, barbed graspers sailing like flung boomerangs, eyes streaking like meteors and flashing like rainbows, wing-shards wheeling away like crystal blades … And amidst this carnival of vengeance, there were festival blazes everywhere, little bonfires that writhed and clawed for the air as they blazed and sank, wings crisping. Ignited, these brutes burned, and shrank to cinder!

  But their number was twice the dead that housed them. They rose in such a fire-absorbing locust storm that near two hundred flew unscathed above that web of fire, hung like scythe-armed angels against the sky, gem-eyed executors of an alien deity’s will. Dangling abdomens sleek-lined like war canoes. The legs their thorax trailed—two pair—long too, and strongly jointed, promising lethal leverage for the brutal forelegs—these made not for standing, but only to seize.

  A greenish iridescence was their color, and they blazed with sentience. Much bigger-headed than their models the mantids, their hemispheric eyes deployed a spherical surveillance. Nothing could elude them, and their fanged jaws declared their appetite for every biped gazing up at them.

  The two fleets hung in wonder, every eye devouring these devourers. Until … a thousand eyes zoomed quick on their first kill: a roof-gunner seized from behind in two barbed V’s, triangular jaws engulfing the man’s head from behind, and biting it clean off.

  And the Sunrisers had seen more than this. Had seen, as the bug alighted on the gray slate roof for its kill, how its whole body—even its eyes—had turned the same slate-gray, so that the roof-gunner had almost seemed seized by the air itself. But once its prey was seized, the bug resumed its own hue, a demon exquisitely distinct engulfing the head, biting it off, and letting fall the fountaining stump.

  * * *

  “Whoa!” said Mike Allen to Big Steve. They rode gunnel to gunnel, feeding off their screens, Mark and Razz’s two Assistant-Directors-Now-In-Charge. “Day Two! Val’s the Dark Wizard Himself, isn’t he?”

  “Truth! That man is deeply deranged!”

  “Whaddya mean? This is much more humane than those fuckin spiders! Think I better com Mark? His raft, I mean?”

  They had Mark too on zoom—or Mark’s head, atop a silvery mummy of duct tape. Big Steve nodded and Mike commed: “Sandy? Hi. Is it OK to speak to Mark?”

  “Hi Mike! Here he is.”

  “Hi Mark. Should we, uh, continue uplink to you?”

  “That’s a most definite affirmative, Mike. No uplink from us, though. We have a new partner. Not to worry, we all get paid, that’s guaranteed.”

  “Roger that, Mark. Back to work.”

  Mike Allen clicked off. Both he and Big Steve were still rapt by their screens.

  The nasty new thing about these bugs was, they didn’t stay airborne long. They dove right onto and into the set. They hit rooftops and walls and ran nimbly across both with equal ease, even along the undersides of overhangs. And since they nearly vanished the instant they landed, it was only stray flashes, just a sketch of their shapes the defenders saw scattering everywhere. It was an uncanny adaptation. Even when they crossed an optical border—from concrete to asphalted roofing, from shadow to sunlight—their disguise was instantly bipartite, their foreparts matching what they entered, their hindquarters what they were leaving.

  But when they struck and fed, and whenever they leapt through the air, you saw them whole—they were plunging into Glacier Avenue all down its length. Windows were exploding inward, the mantids crowding inside unharmed by the shards—clearly designed for inside work as well, to scour out the refuges that had sheltered and saved so many extras yesterday.

  The mantids hatched from cocoons—scores of them surviving the air-gunning—joined the fray, flooding up from the trees below town, and melting into Sunrise’s lower rim.

  And all over town now, they harvested human defenders. The grip of their forelimbs was brusque and as absolute as heavy machinery, and as their color came clear, you saw how the men who thrashed in their grip could not shake their mechanized strength, till quick decapitation froze their struggles, and they were dropped, lax as dolls.

  Mike shouted, “Just look how they’re burning!” Fire teams had run into the streets now—gas drenched the invaders and hissing flare guns lit them up. As the wasps had done yesterday, they clenched and contracted in flight … but this generation could not snuff out their cremation. Their limbs contorted and crisped, wings buckled, and they crashed to earth to lie there ablaze.

  * * *

  Val watched on his screen the tape-silvered Mark Millar keyboarding the cam board of his own raft. Envy ate at him. Val’s peppering of imbedded lenses couldn’t give him mobile in-fight footage like this. Those two directors’ boats down there were scooping him.

  With their aerial footage and this in-battle stuff, the traitors had the whole solid geometry of his shoot in their hands; had an epic that would enclose his own like a clamshell, Val’s art itself captured from beneath and above.

  His footage of course was the pearl in the shell, the narrative that would make their meta-shoot matter at all. He, Panoply, would be immensely enriched. But the fortune they would pocket, the extras! And with Mark’s connivance their meta-vid would be professionally edited, acquired by some dummy corp to which their names had no connection.

  Two junior directors sharking for rep and for power—and they would gain both. They need only put the word of this vid on the streets in L.A. and backers would besiege them with giga-clacks. Sunrise would surely cut them serious cash, and with their Zoo connections would know just how to run it past the law and into the market.

  Grimly, resolved now to face a stark assessment, Val unwound the last tentacle of surveillance that had enfolded him. Mark’s cams had surely seized on Val’s dive last night into his seething creation, caught his orchestration of wasps and machine-gun fire, his stately retreat, and then his wounding, his own body flung slack and bloody in its throne.

  The appalling intimacy of this possession! His own near-death.

  But as outrage flared in him, his director’s eye was … dazzled. When all was said and done, what a scene!

  The director himself, wounded in action, himself risking death for his art! How it was edited would be key: his resolute entry of the fire zone, his dispassionate artistry with his two winged executioners, his thoughtful, unhurried reascension—and then his head wound, his laying low. His death itself it would seem to be at first, so close it had been.

  Almost, he resolved to deploy cam boats of his own down closer to rooftop level.

  No. Again that temptation to yield the initiative, and thus yield control. Hang tough, and wait.

  He gazed at his zoom of Mark, stiffly keying away down there. If Val had those two rafts—had just one of them—he wo
uld have everything.

  He commed Aidan Zadok, his Properties chief, and they talked about their APPs’ flight-speed maximum in short bursts. The mantids were clumsier than his wonderful wasps—foot soldiers more than airborne. They were devourers. To catch and eat weighty prey like men, they had to have mass, leverage.

  His chat with Properties brought him solace. Yes, flight-speed might be an issue, but on balance, his props chief thought that, from rooftops, the mantids might very well be gotten aboard low-flying rafts.

  XXIV

  COMBAT

  They invaded Glacier Avenue. It wasn’t the pavements they swarmed, but the walls—they came in little squadrons running slantwise across the fronts of buildings, little arrowheads and dagger-blades of half a dozen mantids, scuttling in perfect synchrony zig and zag over verticals of plaster, carpentry, and concrete.

  “Look at that!” barked Chops—and Cap could only nod. Chops meant an arrow of them darting from a brick façade and down across gray stucco. As they crossed the juncture their foreparts grayed, hindquarters brick-red till they crossed the instant after.

  Their rippling camouflage was everywhere, pausing at windows and balconies, testing them, and here and there breaking through and pouring inside.

  “They’re after refuges!” Cap shouted to the street—“They want max kills!”—as he and Chops were sprinting to intercept a squad slanting down the face of the three-story Traveller’s Rest. Cap came under them, shield hoisted on his left, his up-stretched right unleashing double-ought ammo that just missed, spraying off a gout of abdomen, chambered a second while still running and found his aim, tearing a hind leg out from under the bug.

  One instant it faltered and the next it leapt off the wall, resuming its own color then, its wings unscissoring with a greenish flash to steer its swift dive straight on Cap.

  He twisted his bulk down tight into his shield-shadow. The beast’s full weight pressed down, the graspers bit wood at both sides, the spiked tip of the left gashing his forearm deep, as its jeweled eyes and fangs thrust near Cap’s face and chawed at the air.

  So intimate with the monster’s mass was he, Cap felt through his shoulder Chops’s shotgun blast, the concussion of its double-ought with the brute’s left grasper at the shoulder.

  It sagged away to gel as Cap heaved his own strength up and outward against the bug’s half-grip on him, a grip it could not free from the soft wood that had snagged it. The mantid’s missing rear leg told—its center of gravity shifted sideward and it was torqued nearly to the ground. In this brief contest Chops found time to circle round behind and blow the mantid’s head off and to gel.

  The APP did not for an instant cease to press its grim strength contrary to Cap’s muscle-cracking labor to pin it down. “Its other arm!” he bellowed, “Then it’s got nothing!”

  But Chops was already doing it: Whack! Slick-click Whack!

  And with that arm blown free, not only it but the whole mantid deflated to gel.

  “Those skanky fuckers!” Cap raged. “The trigger’s both arms!”

  They saw the street was now full of struggle. The wall-swarms had come leaking everywhere down onto the ground, were asphalt and concrete in color, but now there was no mistaking seven-foot eye-level monsters. It was full engagement, and everyone had to know now.

  “Both their arms!” Cap bellowed to the town. “Take off both their arms!”

  He knew his end one pulse before it came—a swift deployment of mass above and behind him. Barbs sank into his shoulders and his chest, hoisting him up and back into the jaws. A demon’s head with rainbow eyes engulfed his own, and closed the book of his kindness and courage forever.

  Everywhere shield and sword teams had brutes down, barbs locked on shields, and with a frenzied diligence were hacking at every part of them. Headless thoraxes, half their legs gone, dragged sword teams in circles as our people hacked at any piece of the homicidal amputees they could reach.

  But word spread, and after a timeless fury, a fugue of dark, adrenalized toil, new danger underfoot was everywhere, because bugs were collapsing wholesale to globes and big tongues of questing gel.

  But then the bugs had flowed up to the walls again, resumed their evasive flow, their searching for entry into buildings. A lull had come to the attack down in the street. Chops, wiping his eyes, dragged Cap off the street and wrapped him in a tarp. The palm of his hand still stung with the stars Cap had put there. He laid it on the dead man’s chest, a good-bye and a promise of vengeance.

  More than a dozen headless souls lay bleeding along the street, like toppled amphorae spilling their contents. People were grieving, were torching gel, were howling curses at the sky. Chops worked his way down the length of the street, shouting the message on Cap’s lips when he died. “Blow their arms off! Both their fucking arms!”

  * * *

  The battle plan was spreading everywhere. “Reinforce refuges and get more armed defenders inside them. The bugs are only feinting in the streets, and going for maximum kills in refuges. And don’t waste shot on anything but their arms.”

  Japh shouldered his gun—not too hot. The attack up here had been suspiciously thin—caught up a case of ammo belts, and got himself down into the street. Saw a guy he could use. “Ricky! Stop that truck and get a thirty! I need your help!”

  He and Dawes jogged down the sidewalk weightily armed. “The Majestic’s harboring hundreds. Its entries need more cover. I’ll guard the front. I think you need to guard the back too.”

  They jogged into the alley behind the theater. A Z of metal stairs climbed the back wall to the projection floor, reached through an ordinary door, not strong—and all the more obviously so as two mantids were well along in tearing it down.

  “Cheap fuckin fiber-wood door!” shouted Ricky. “We gotta shotgun ’em. Thirties’ll fly on into the theater!”

  Setting down their big guns they sprinted up the stairs drawing their sawed-offs. They stopped three risers below the brutes and opened fire on them. Chunks of their graspers went flying, but these parts’ quickness made them damnably hard to hit. One’s head came off, jounced past them down the stairs unregarded. Both mantids persisted in tearing at the doors until the double-ought’s damage commanded their attention.

  They turned in counterattack. Then their graspers, outreached from above, made better targets. A half-dozen fusillades and they’d whittled them down to the shoulder-stubs.

  An avalanche of gel poured down the stairs, and they were in.

  The door was little more than a rag of wood fiber. They unhinged it and threw it aside, lay a big metal desk on its side and blocked the lower half of the doorway. Ricky mounted his thirty behind it.

  “Cut ’em off at the waist,” Japh called, bounding back down the stairs, “and their arms can’t reach ya! Then, take their arms off.”

  Ricky went inside, down a short hall past the projection booth to a little balcony above the theater itself, where projectionists had once enjoyed their movies from an armchair. He looked down from there at his neighbors in their cavernous refuge.

  A sea of anxious eyes met his gaze. He gave them an awkward little wave, and got relieved waves in return. “Not to worry folks,” he called. “We got your backs up here.”

  Japh found covering the theater’s front doors trickier. It had a shallow, plain atrium, where the box office and posters once were, then, just beyond a sketch of a lobby, the four old-fashioned swinging doors that opened with push bars straight into the theater. These bugs could hammer right through them.

  He seriously needed more guns with him here. He set his thirty at the left of the doors to fire out at the incoming where they funneled into the atrium. Then he scanned the buildings directly across the street, figuring the angle of his gun’s elevation so his fire would hit only sky.

  Dr. Winters and Trish jogged into the atrium. Winters, recognizing in Japh a young man he knew for a reader, immediately unburdened himself. “It’s ludicrous! These things are Mantidae! They�
��re not even of the same order as wasps!”

  And, as if doing it only to express his anger at this phylogenetic outrage, when a mantis came sprinting toward them, he fired his twelve with a scowling, deliberate expertise that pleasantly surprised Japh—and blew one of its graspers off.

  * * *

  The banquet room on the ground floor of the Masonic Building, big and unpartitioned as it was, made a refuge for many people, most of them older, though most of them were armed. The front door was stout, but it had two big street windows. These had woodwork bars nailed over them, sufficient screens against the wasps, but already badly splintered by the mantids.

  Sheriff Smalls shouted, “Cluster-fire leftward! Those shutters are caving in!”

  In the arc of the defenders’ line, Smalls stood point—knelt point, with so many guns firing from either side. The Georges Junior and Senior flanked him—George Senior seated in a chair whose backrest helped him bear the recoil of his shotgun. Flanking them and a yard behind were two young Rasmussen men and two McCaufields—fourth generation natives of the same stripe. A second line of older defenders had at its center Iris Meyer, her right shoulder thickly padded, and the wheels of her chair locked to damp recoil.

  Near eighty people sat or lay behind, their gazes fixed on the fanged heads and spiked arms thrusting ever farther through the spray of glass and splinters.

  The right window’s frame caved inward from the pressure. Two mantids erupted all the way inside, the uppermost launching off the lower’s back. This forced the lower to falter in its assault, and it suffered swift amputation of its left grasper, but helped loft the upper bug, so that one landed and threatened the Georges with its graspers.

  George Junior thrust himself in front of his father to shield him. His first shot was off, only tearing a chunk from the thorax, and, off-balance already, the recoil dropped him to his knees before the brute.