Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) (12 page)

When she and Japh first became lovers, Kate was self-conscious of being the elder, being herself still young enough to think six years quite a span. She hadn’t realized what a point she’d made of mating in the dark till one night Japh said, as she reached for the switch, “Wait, sweet-cake. Why don’t we just put a bag over my head, put a couple holes in it so I can see, and leave the lights on? I mean I know I’m no pinup, but I haven’t seen you naked for a week now.”

“It hasn’t been a week.”

“The last four times!”

“You fool. It’s not you.” She lay back, brought up her knees, and hooked her elbows over them, spreading herself. “Is that naked enough?”

“Oh, Katie, you are a peach.”

“Do I look bony enough for you?”

“I’m the one gettin bony here.”

They’d always laughed when they made love, and in the light they laughed more—as if with recurring amazement at how wonderfully they fit together. Tonight, as her eyes got fiercer with his thrusting, he flashed on the first time he’d seen her, sliding down the steep pitch of a toppled building.

Though still a hundred feet above him, her face in its terror was indelibly clear—a long-limbed, black-haired woman with the eyes of a frightened angel. He pushed himself, pushed himself to reach her, to touch her heart, ease it, make her know she was safe, was home with him. Home.

As they lay resting, holding each other, a noise of light hail came rattling down on the house.

“Hail in midsummer?” Kate drowsily asked. “What’s going on here, country boy?”—teasing as usual his birth in a ’Rise in L.A.

“Wull Mayum, ya getcher midsummer hayulls up hurr now’n then. Why I ’member one in ought six—”

Tickling, then tickle-wrestling ensued. Almost, they made love again, but for the toll of their long days’ work on Sunrise’s defense. Wrestling became cuddling, and sleep won them over.

But stepping out into the slant light of early morning, they saw a subtle glitter on everything. Walls, roof, deck, yard, trees—all glinted here and there. Japh opened his Buck and selected one glint from the porch column, digging it out of the redwood’s soft grain.

It proved to be a minute gem. Kate, ex-assistant director, understood it at once: a lens, a micro-cam.

As his house was rigged, so the whole town proved to be, and all the homesteads around it.

With one day’s preparation left, a general consensus developed: start digging them out, and there’d be no end to it. People returned to installing gun emplacements and barricades, to drilling mobile troops fighting from pickup beds or small trailers pulled by three-wheelers.

Kate got to work practicing fast crosstown manuevers with the raft squadron, skimming rooftops, dipping into the streets and out again. But she never stopped feeling the glint of those micro-cams feeding on the town’s every movement.

It felt like an ant swarm nibbling her skin. She understood the “texture” this would give Val’s final cut, the myriad close-ups of chaos and carnage. The whole town toiled inside one huge insect eye.… She thought when the shoot-fleet arrived she might fly straight up to Val and to his face call him the monster he was, scream it out for his whole crew to hear. But she knew how his eyes would mock her, mock the moral outrage of a former ex-assistant director.

Japh received a com from Cap. At the hardware store, he found Chops and Gillian already with him, helping unload heavy crates from a panel truck.

“Hefty,” grunted Japh. “What’s in ’em?”

“Machetes.” Cap left that hanging, like a man expecting surprise.

Chops set his crate on the stack. “OK. Why machetes?”

“Close fightin. Something to pull if you lose your piece.”

Chops set his crate on the stack. “Good idea for close work.”

“Right.”

He was talking about a moment in
Alien Hunger
.

“That’s it.” Cap grinned, his gold tooth flashing—and then he casually gave the finger to the street at large. It was nothing personal. People were doing the same everywhere as they worked—flipping off the micro-cams sparkling around them.

“Fangs and legs,” Japh echoed. “You think it’ll be another kind of bug this time?”

“Naw. Last I heard, Big Val doesn’t repeat himself. Now when we get these opened, I got another little project back at the sawmill. Cause if these choppers are sorta like swords, then what about shields?”

*   *   *

“The bow is
drawn, my man,” Razz said to Mark. They sat over coffee in Argosy Studio’s canteen, at a corner table. “And I have to tell you,” he grinned, “I feel like an arrowhead, poised to slice into the flesh of the beast.”

“Me too. I know what you mean. And it is a big beast, a live-action shoot. But I see what we’re doing more as dropping a net on the beast.”

“OK. Netting it, and then slicing its flesh.”

“Razz, old friend, let’s face it. You’re a hot dog.”

Razz grinned, “Nawww.”

“Seriously. We mess with them only up to a point. Haranguing their rafts, you were right about that. Great footage there of cam-crews’ faces. Their anger, their mockery, their secret shame. But we’re staying out of the action, not joining it.”

“Hey. How not? I mean what do you think I’ve got in mind?”

“I don’t know.” Mark had to laugh.

“So whaddya say, is it time to join our fleet?”

*   *   *

Curtis and Ricky
Dawes were laying a small-plank machine-gun platform on the roof of the Pioneer Hotel. The hotel, mostly converted to rentals for older people, was flanked by lower buildings, giving its roof a good field of fire. Below them, the streets were loud with burly three-wheelers. Some pulled trailer-beds of arms or materials or barrels of gas. Others towed little railed platforms for two shotgunners or one machine-gunner. These battle chariots were making the most noise, practicing maneuvers.

Curtis said, “Look west there, near the horizon.”

“… I don’t see anything.”

“Those little dots there.”

Ricky saw them: a faint freckling low in the sky. And as he watched, they grew slightly bigger, and rose higher above the horizon. Word of them had begun to spread along the other rooftops.

It was a formation, wide and slender, like an oncoming blade.

They came with a calm and stately sweep, each dot enlarging to an elegant little shape, tapered and bright: polished chips of obsidian, red and black. Two hundred … more than two hundred anti-gravs. A grand, brilliant armada, peacefully sailing, as if come only to share with Sunrise the beauty of this mountain morning.

A roar of voices was rising from the streets. The town’s fleet left off maneuvers and deployed at hover along the length of town, Trek and Lance tilting the big raft thirty degrees up from horizontal, their cannon at ready. Sandy Devlin and Sharon Harms brought their boats to hang near the roof of the hotel. Their silence, the calm of their maneuver, communicated itself to the street below them.

Sharon looked like a corn-belt farm girl and was as dangerous as a dagger. She looked down at Ricky and grinned.

“Hey, sweet thing.”

Ricky, gaunt ox though he was, reddened, and had to clear his throat. “Hi Shar’n. What’s happenin here?”

“Not to worry, honey bun. I believe this is just the signing.”

XV

THE SIGNING

Val almost wished
Mark and Razz had already deployed their pirate fleet above him now. This scene he was part of was a gorgeous opener: his formation hanging a hundred-fifty meters up, its arc as wide as the town, the day a flawless blue, the light pure gold, all the townspeople in the streets or on the rooftops, gazing skyward at his blade of rafts come to harvest their lives.

Scene One: “The Scythe Over Sunrise.”

His own director’s raft—grander, more blade-shaped than the rest—he dropped down to hang at thirty meters, tilting his bow down enough to display himself in his chair of power, his console of bright screens before him, his magnetic shield shimmering faintly all around the gunwales of the craft.

A two-raft delegation hung just above rooftop level below him—expecting him, apparently, to descend a bit nearer. His smile declined the invitation. Mellowly, his amped voice filled the town. “Hello, Sandy. Sharon. How delightful to see you again. It’s talents like yours that have made Panoply what it is today.”

He let this echo away, gazing down at them. The two pilots stared up at him, stony-eyed.

“Citizens of Sunrise, I salute you all. I’m Val Margolian. I’ve come to consumate the contract which we—Panoply Studios and Sunrise Incorporated—have been forced to enter into.

“I won’t dishonor you with euphemisms or pretty words. Tomorrow, and the next day, in the gladiatorial spectacle we are all about to create, many of you will die. But every one of our Anti-Personnel Properties you destroy will enrich Sunrise for generations to come.

“It is Panoply Studio’s melancholy honor, our sad privilege, to engage your community as both the set and the cast of its next feature,
Assault on Sunrise
. For the next two days, in the period between the sun’s rise and the moon’s attainment of its zenith, we will shoot three acts per day, interrupted by two substantial rest periods for Sunrise’s recuperation and the repair of its defenses. I repeat that we are compelled to decry and denounce the injustice of the capital sentence we are to serve on you. But alas, in the end, the law is the law.

“Panoply expresses both its admiration for you, and its regret, with an unprecedented augmentation of payouts for each Anti-Personnel Property you destroy. Each of your kills of an APP will be recompensed with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash.”

He marked a pause here—an ironic hint that they might applaud this bounty if they chose. A low murmur spread through the town, sounding more like unease than anything. People wondering, perhaps, just how hard these APPs were going to be to kill. “These payments,” he resumed, “will not be made in the course of the shoot—a practice which might distract and endanger you. You will receive them in full at the shoot’s end.

“Ms. Devlin, I’d be honored if you were the one to signify your new allies’ acceptance of this contract with Panoply Studios. Just place your hand on this palm-printer.”

The little black apparatus came dangling down from his bow on a slender cable. Sandy slid her raft out to meet it, but did not yet touch it. She gazed up at Margolian a moment, and then higher, at the fleet above him. She spoke into a mike of her own, the town so still, it seemed her answer filled it and the whole sky above it.

“All of you rafters up there. I salute you as colleagues, because we have been colleagues. I have myself most surely done the work you’ve come to do here on us.” Her bright, hard-edged voice was beautiful in the quiet mountain air. “Now it seems I’m an extra. I just can’t tell you all how that changes your perspective. For one thing, I’m damn sure not gonna treat you people like colleagues. For starters I’ll tell you all—straight from my heart—that if any opportunity offers, I’m going to do my level best to kill every one of you I can.” She ran her eyes along the high, hovering scythe, letting her promise echo.

“Can any of you see Val’s face right now, sort of fondly smiling at me? His expression seems to say, Hey. You can’t make Live Action without killing, right? True enough. Just remember that goes for you too. And for you, Val. Especially for you.

“So OK. With this my own right hand, I seal our union. We, Sunrise Incorporated, take thee, Panoply Studios, in cine-matrimony.”

“Cine-murder-money!” someone howled from the street, and a surf-noise of anger rose in agreement, as Sandy pressed the palm-printer and let it go. It hissed back up to Margolian’s raft, and—as quick as that—Sunrise’s corporate assent had been tendered to the contract.

And before Margolian’s raft had risen back up to his fleet, and his fleet had turned and made its stately retreat from the sky, every adult able Sunriser was hard back at work.

*   *   *

With the machetes
uncrated, and Japh gone up to work on rooftop emplacements, Chops, with a touch of unease, said to Cap, “Hey Chain.”

“Hey Shackle,” Cap said, and waited. Somber Chops used slam-talk only with him, whom he knew had also been Inside, and it signaled something personal.

Chops cleared his throat. “I want a badge, on the palm of my hand. You got time? It’s a simple one.”

Cap smiled. “I got time—got people sawing out the shields already. Step into my parlor.”

The drawing Chops gave him was simple enough: the sketchy outline of an open hand, with six stars in its palm. The stars were mere asterisks, three in a horizontal line, and three at an angle below, save that the middle star in the pendant trio was a little sphere.

When he’d been working a little while, Cap said, “This rocks, design-wise. A hand in the palm of a hand.”

He worked on through another silence, weighing his next words. You didn’t pry on the block. Your cellie had to offer what he wanted you to know. But Gillian had shown all her friends Orion’s sword.

What the hell. “You been looking through Gillian’s telescope?”

Chops said, “That sphere is like a whole galaxy. It’s like six billion klicks farther out, but it’s lined up perfectly with two stars right here in our galaxy. And looks just the same size.”

Cap smiled, very glad he’d prodded. “Maybe it’s like an omen, about Sunrise. Maybe we’re a lot bigger than we look to old Margolian up there.”

And after some more silent work, he prodded again. “This kind of a secret? Maybe a surprise?”

Chops actually grinned. Cap had never seen him do it. “I know it’ll make my hand a little sore for fightin, but the pain’ll remind me.”

“Of what?”

“How bad it’d hurt to lose what I got.”

When Chops left, Cap went out back, and crossed to Leffert’s Lumber. They’d cut out near fifty shields already, just wide-topped, taper-bottomed blanks of one-inch plywood. Fairly light, and solid. Guys with shears were making leather strips for three-ply straps. Two were to be stapled to the back of each shield—one for the forearm, one for the hand. The weight seemed just about right. Cap felt a hand on his shoulder.