Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy)

by Michael Shea

  But in the instant the graspers hinged out for him, his father seized him from behind in both arms, thrusting his son’s head down and his own forward.

  Receiving the jaws himself, his head was engulfed, his neck sheared. His son, beneath them both, howled grief and rage, tilted up his barrel, and blew the killer’s graspers off with their barbs still lodged in his father.

  Heavy gunfire raged beyond the shutters. The bugs crowding the break in the frame began to be jolted, taken apart from the sides while their forelegs still struggled for entry.

  “Holy shit!” shouted a young McCaufield happily. “The cavalry’s coming! What a clusterfuck!”

  “OK,” barked Smalls. “Get closer now! Trim off their barbs from below!”

  Flanking their splintering barriers they crouched—tough postures for the older defenders—and began to bring down a clattery rain of sundered graspers, while the focused fire outside still whittled the invaders away.

  A new danger arose inside with this turning tide: lopped parts puddling to gel, and melon-sized blobs pouring forth in attack.

  “Flame in here! Flame here!” bellowed Smalls. “George Junior, get that door ready to open!”

  Still wiping tears from his eyes, George did so. When the first flame-team burst in, Smalls shouted, “Small gas-bursts! Just get a little flame on each of ’em!”

  The team got good at this light-touch torching. Their foam-spray backup had to kill some blazes on the floorboards, but soon they had a dozen little globes quivering and vague in their movement, lit only on top, but already beginning to flatten.

  XXV

  FINGERS FALTER ON THE KEYBOARD

  Relentless artist that he was, Val never stopped keying his visual music, adjusting, steering the flow of his forces, but he now faced a grave challenge.

  The raft-gunners had been lethal. His own hands and those of his App control crew had toiled on their keyboards to reknit the programs that gunfire had scrambled in his cocoons. Many not blown to shreds had retained most of their tissue.

  Now, an hour into the First Act, it was Lazarus-come-forth time. And bug after bug hatched inoperably deformed. Graspers merged with midlegs, or wholly legless, or half-winged or half-headless. They hatched, plunged straight off their trees, and crashed dead.

  Val had lost sixty-four mantids still in cocoon. A stunning blow.

  He’d known these extras would be tough. He’d wanted a battle, of course. But today he’d gotten a broken nose in the first round. The dangerous coals of anger glowed in him. He must not be angry.

  The APP death toll for Act One already was harrowing. Bad enough their emergence into a sleet of gunfire, but the extras’ kill rate in the streets was accelerating. They developed tactics so quickly, shield-men to snag the graspers; paired swordsmen or shotgunners to sunder them.

  His mantids, his lovely monsters! He’d been too enamored of their image, their glamorous monstrosity, to see their operational limitations.

  Highly mobile and quick in their seizure—but narrowly frontal in their assault, and thus, in attack, poorly defended on both flanks. And building them with the bulk and leverage to snatch a man off his feet, he’d made them just a bit awkward against multiple assailants.

  The upshot was, at the close of this act, he might withdraw well under two hundred APPs from the set. And assailed by so few, the extras would kill many more in Act Two.

  Val had erred. His fingers had faltered on the keyboard of creation, and he was taking a grave beating. With APP-loss at this rate, his third act would be a farce, a festive town bug-hunt, conducted by the extras with jeers and hilarity!

  But what of it? Was this too not a perfect story? The town triumphant! Alien Death itself all slain! It would be the first heartwarming Live Action ever shot! A giga-blockbuster!

  But here Val hit a wall in himself. The town triumphant was not an option. He must not, would not go down so roundly beaten. His legions must not be swept from the field before the moon reached its zenith. Yet with all his forces fighting, what weapon did he have?

  A notion stirred. “A dark moment,” he murmured, a smile twitching his lips. “Dark as … a mineshaft.”

  Val woke a screen he’d not yet used on-shoot, for what it controlled had been entombed before the cameras rolled. He commed his lead raft of APP Control.

  “You tracking their director’s rafts, Aidan?”

  “Roger that, Val. Both Devlin’s and Harms’ are working low, and we got rooftop assaults in place for them.”

  “Good. Now listen sharp, please, Aidan.”

  Val laid his wish out concisely.

  The APP-tech was silent for a moment. “I can’t promise a yes, boss.”

  Val smiled. “Life’s a gamble. If we can get it out of there, it means a tour de force for the Third Act. I want full uplink and override of your operation, please—all your command patterns, gel sensorium, and enviro readouts up on my alpha screen. Think bright-side, Aidan: what if it works?”

  He viewed his alpha screen, and he was instantly deep in the earth. The lost APPs’ sensorium—all his buried gel’s tactile and visual experience of the colossal tomb that clasped it—was a weave of hair-thin fibers, mere molecules in thickness, probing for micro-pores in the crumbled planet-bone—for fissures up through the cave-in. There were, Val mused … eighty fingers at work on Properties’ keyboards. It was like eighty fingers threading a million needles in a benthic darkness of crushing pressures.

  So rapt he was in this that he almost missed—on one of the two screens devoted to his vid-thieves, Mark and Razz—a payoff from his preparations. It came in the act’s last moments. In Devlin’s raft, his APP crew had got a mantid aboard. Her reaction: instantaneous. But not quite quick enough—Val smiled when he saw—and not without a pleasant bit of vengeance.

  * * *

  Half a minute before Act One’s end, Sandy Devlin had a rare careless moment. It was the joy of the kill that misled her, she hanging just two stories high with a southeast angle on the bug swarm at the Majestic’s entry. From bow and stern she and Radner were gunning the shit out of mantids.

  And then, from a rooftop behind them, a mantid leapt into their raft square amidships, and lunged for the pinioned Millar.

  Sandy whipped the raft upside down, and the mantid’s graspers had to cling for support, but its jaws just missed Mark’s head, and sheared off instead his outhrust hand and forearm.

  A barrel roll flung the bug free from the craft. The act ended seconds later, and she and Radner rushed to work on Mark’s spouting stump. They got a pressure cup on it, and slammed his veins with anti-shock and tranks and Amelior—though amidships had gotten pretty slick and sticky by the time they were done. Sandy took a pad of gauze and began wiping Mark’s blood off his displays.

  Mark was gazing at the sky. Or more precisely, he’d raised his left arm’s stump, and was gazing where his hand and forearm had been, but where now was only sky. Quietly, marveling, he said, “I’m … a character in this story.”

  Radner said, “Yeah. It’s called, ‘real life.’”

  “That’s … only part of what I meant.…”

  Sandy said, “So this character’s still a director, right? A renegade director stealing his master’s shoot? For fame, and a shitload of clacks?”

  Mark raised now his right hand against the sky, and flexed his five remaining digits. “Yes…” he mused. “I believe he is.”

  He began keying, sifting the first act’s footage, his lone hand tentative at first without its mate, then taking firmer hold, rummaging more greedily through its harvest.

  Sandy commed Smalls. “So where’s that sonofabitch Razz?”

  “He kept ducking us in the fight. I think he’s into it. Real good with that shotgun. Not in sight now, gone inside somewhere.”

  “Well keep bullhorning him! Appeal to his professional pride. He’s a goddam director an’ we’ll let him direct!”

  * * *

  Val wouldn’t violate his contract with t
his town, wouldn’t assault them in the entr’acte. He’d put that temptation behind him.

  But he had no contract with Razz. Interlopers broke the rules, and couldn’t claim the rules’ protection. No need to kill him. Mark Millar’s mishap—his almost slapstick amputation—offered a useful alternative to homicide.

  * * *

  Since he was young, Razz had always regretted he’d never been to war.

  Combat! It was … transcendence! Ecstasy was standing outside yourself. The fight had been like an ugly, deafening ecstasy! What a rush!

  He now comprehended why they had put guns in his hands the instant he’d showed up—why they’d trusted him: once it started, they were all one body. He’d saved two people’s lives within the first ten minutes, and three others had saved his.

  He’d never known you could feel this together with other people, strangers who were no longer strangers once the shit hit the fan. Never had he felt so completely alive. His spine was like a fine-tuned violin, and the prickly bowstring of danger kept stroking it with adrenaline.

  Now, in the entr’acte, he was still fighting for his side, but keeping discreetly out of sight in case they tried to stick him back aboard his raft. He was on a search-and-destroy patrol, yeah! Looking for laired gel on pause-mode, to rout it out and torch it. Make the fight safer for his fellow soldiers.

  He’d searched one building, then peered carefully out into the street, and darted over and into the structure beside it, a three-story Victorian.

  On the street floor, Fran’s Boutique. A smell of new clothes and cosmetics. Bouquets in a glass-doored refrigerator. Down behind the counter…? Clear.

  Up the stairway to the next floor, at its turning, was a closet. Nothing in it but coats, brooms, a vacuum.

  The floor above was an apartment—Fran’s, he guessed. The living room looked out on the street. There was a closet here too, and this one’s door was slightly ajar.

  He opened it, and bingo.

  Déjà vu. This sphere of gel was as big as the one under that building—a huge greenish-black pearl, at rest in the shadow. Recalling his abject terror that first time, he smiled. So much better to be on the offensive, be a fighter.

  It couldn’t be burned here. It could be rolled, he knew—hard, sluggish work, but it ought to go down the stairs quick enough, with gravity helping. He didn’t much like to touch it with his bare hands, though. He took a light jacket from its hanger. He made a two-handed glove of it, a hand halfway down each sleeve, leaned over the globe … and paused.

  Faintly sketching its interior, there were furtive smudges of pale luminescence. What had it consumed, to reach this mass? Surely half a man, or big parts of several men.

  Perhaps it was this thought that gave him an impulse to see the globe as a big, dark eyeball, and the blurred greenish glints in its depths like fleeting, malignant thoughts.

  It was of course a kind of eye, a camera.

  Razz had the sudden sensation of looking straight into Val Margolian’s eyes. He tingled with the feeling, his brain struggling to tear it down. Would Val himself actually be bothering to screen all his dormant gel’s sensoria?

  And Razz, in his spine, knew that question’s answer. For Val Margolian was Razz’s Dark God, was colossal Chronos to Razz’s young Zeus. Val was the best. And yes, he would be screening everything.

  Young Zeus, far more tensely poised now, conceded to himself that he was beginning to shit some bricks here.

  Just stop now. He was being paranoid.

  The sphere collapsed—a suddenness that seemed impossible in such dense mass—and though he leapt back spring-quick, it engulfed his left foot to the shin.

  He launched himself toward the stairs. Pulled short mid-leap, he slammed to the floor facedown, and scrambled like a lizard on all fours—all threes, his snagged foot dragging sluggishly behind and freezing cold now.

  Excruciating cold and brutal pressure on that foot, a crushing freeze that climbed his calf and shin, had him almost to the knee now as his hands reached the rim of the first step. Like a Hercules he hauled himself toward it, just as what clenched him broke free of its anchoring mass, and he slithered bumping on his belly down the first flight of stairs.

  Freed of the dreadful weight that had detained him, but with all his lower leg now in its vise of ice, he scrambled down the last flight in its turn, clawed himself upright against the wall, and began hopping for the front door. Tripped on the doorsill, pitched out across the porch, and rode down the porch steps too on his face, shouting, shouting.

  Help converged, and only then, as he felt hands lifting him by the shoulders, did he look at his leg.

  A marrow-freezing sight. The gel, swelling like a monstrous tick, was some ten inches in diameter and in length! Beyond that tarry knot beneath his knee, was nothing else!

  Even as they shot the meds and dope in him, he watched the gel grow spherical, consuming the last inch of him it gripped, and falling free. And then it rested there on the street, unmoving—as if to say, “I’m done! Come get me”—till it was swiftly gassed and burned.

  “Just kind of a little spanking from Val, don’t you think?”

  It was Sandy from her raft just above him. He looked up at her from the haze of the pain-meds and the anti-shock. “I mean,” Sandy elaborated, smiling, “that was a personal little transaction between you and him. He just gave us that gel to be torched—like a tip. I guess he wants you in your raft like we all do! He wants all your following shots down here. And what that suggests to me, Razz, is that Val expects to own your footage as well as his own!”

  XXVI

  THE LAST ENTR’ACTE

  The sun was perhaps seven diameters above the western horizon. Moonrise would be a few minutes past sunset, then twelve or thirteen minutes later the silver disc would come all the way up, and take the whole town into the gaze of its great eye.

  Just under a hundred-thirty APPs had been salvaged from the slaughter that had ended with the sun’s declining. The extras had well over three hundred effectives still in the field.

  What the moon would soon beam down on here, would be an out-and-out bug-hunt from the moment that Act III opened.

  Like a fighter who’s had an arm amputated just before the final round—that was the feeling Val had to wrestle down in his heart. He wanted to smite his foes in the field with whole batallions, and what he had were battered remnants, some missing legs, parts of wings, chunks of heads.

  As for reinforcements? These were still locked in the earth. These were black filaments a quarter mile long, worming and weaving through hundreds of meters of dense mountain rubble.

  But they were rising faster now, and faster still with each passing minute. All his rafts were pouring their spare signal strength into his Properties computers. The filaments toiled upward like worms in a feeding frenzy. He might yet enter Armageddon armed. He keyboarded like Poppa Bach.

  Again he wondered, at this cheating? To override so diligently the natural outcome of his shoot? He’d brought his great Mayhem Machine here, it had been met in battle by the spirit of these fierce defenders, and look at the heart warming end that his tale was tending to: the extras victorious. Screw it all! I’m the artist and my say goes!

  For behold, in twenty years, how many monsters he had created—all designed to work his will. Each one himself. He was a spielmeister. A master of the game. And for the first time in his career, it was a game he’d made his players play. Val knew himself at last. Of course he was a monster.

  He smiled. A peace, a tranquil power filled him. This was … completeness. He had at last evicted from his heart a sullen stowaway, a ceaselessly muttering enemy in his own mind, insisting he was something he was not: a critic of his culture, confronting it with its own brutal obsessions; schooling it.

  What horseshit! What a cozy crock! He was a punisher. He was a scourge.

  He was in fact—after all these years—still a teacher. But a teacher of the truer sort, one who taught in the medium of fles
h and blood—like all great leaders, all great generals. His will and his art were one at last, a seamless whole. He filled himself completely for the first time.

  Look now at his opponents. Ah, they were diligent and sly—a lot of them lined up at the hardware store, being issued … galoshes! Even taking the three pairs of them off the manikins in the window.

  He thought a moment, and then got it. Their keenness, their resourcefulness. Truly these people were artists themselves. How much they gave to his story. What a partnership he had created here.

  And their diligence honed his advantage. Having borne out their newly dead, their focus was in town now, reinforcing refuges, resupplying armaments. Val began to wake the dormant gel that hid everywhere in alleys and under foundations. Sneaking it in subtle filaments along the angles where walls met earth or pavement, delicately stitching it through every part of town toward his point of collection.

  And never ceasing as he did so to blend his keyboarding then with that of his APP-meisters, amplifying their signals with his own, sucking his buried giant up through the rubble of the mine shaft and flexing it as it rose to widen each little aperture, so that what came following poured more amply upward.

  * * *

  In the first minutes of the entr’acte, in the slanted sun of the waning day, lovers and friends found each other and embraced, rejoicing, each to the other a treasure still possessed, despite all the death that had just stormed among them.

  “You know what you are?” Gillian said to Chops—said to his chest, where her face was snuggled. “You’re a little wolf.”

  “Who’re you callin little?”

  “Big I said,” she giggled. “A big wolf.”

  “Then you”—he stroked her thick black Native-American hair—“are a little mink.”

  “You calling me a minx?”

  “What’s a minx?”

  Kate Harlow gripped Japh’s shoulders and pushed him off to arm’s length. Fixing his eyes sternly with hers. “Brace yourself, big guy. I’m moving in.”