Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) (13 page)

“You startled the shit outta me.” It was Gillian. “Hey girl.”

“Can you give me an hour?” she asked him.

“What for?” But he was starting to smile, thinking maybe he already knew.

Gillian’s drawing was graceful and spare of line. A wolf and a telescope. She wanted it across her shoulder.

“Tell you what,” Cap told her. “I gotta settle in here real soon, but we can get it outlined, OK?”

*   *   *

Late in the
afternoon Dr. Winters and Trish came up into the swarming street for a stretch. They’d been working in their basement lab for two straight days, with nearly a full day spent determining how to proceed.

They’d agreed to focus on commercial caustics and solvents because rarer substances couldn’t be had in time.

But as both had feared, the gel proved impervious to any applied caustic. Liquids ran off it without any effect on its glossy surface. Getting such materials inside it involved a cumbersome procedure.

While it would aggressively seize, engulf, and dissolve any living mouse or insect that moved in its vicinity, the only way to get it to ingest inert materials was to use small bottles. The necks of these had to be sheared off at an angle with hot wires so they could be stabbed deeply enough into the gel to cause it to engulf them.

But once inside its globe, the gel simply dissolved the bottles and absorbed their contents, exhibiting no ill effects in doing so, beyond short-lived color changes in its interior. Moments later, it would expel a kind of silicaceous fluid which, when it dried on the pool-cover, became brittle like a plaque of glass.

At last—both of them sweaty, irritated, and mutely struggling with frustration, just had to get out in the air. They trudged up to the street, and out into the light of the sunset’s slant rays.

The street was aswarm with activity. They stood a moment, breathing in the cool mountain air, then went round behind Cap’s Hardware, and sat dangling their legs from the edge of his loading dock. Looking upslope to the east, they both knew exactly the notch in the mountains where the nearly full moon would shortly rise. Exactly where the sun too would rise, just about twelve hours from now.

Silently, they slugged it out with the gloom in their hearts. This vile, viscous invention of the studio was not going to surrender to garden-variety chemicals, and there was no way to get anything stronger in time. They absently listened to the three-wheelers roaring everywhere, the weapons reports of practice blazing away up in the hills, and heard no note of hope in the deafening noise.

As they returned to their basement, a sharp misfire from someone’s old pickup jangled Winters’ nerves. “Gasoline,” he muttered. “We might as well try that next—it has solvent properties.”

They filled a sheared-neck bottle, and stabbed a half-pint of regular into the nano-gel. The absorption of the glass occurred reliably within a few seconds of its engulfment. A brief yellowish glow ensued in the gel’s interior, and faded … then the glassy excreta … nothing more.

“Shit!” screeched Trish. The young Goth had managed to belay such outbursts up till now through love of her old teacher. She strode through the crude port in the foundation wall, and into Cap’s Hardware’s basement for a smoke, another behavior she’d been belaying as much as she could, and for the same reason. But she got no further than taking out her lighter when frustrated rage pulled her back into the “lab.” She snatched up the can, splashed the gel with gas, and lit it with her lighter—all before Winters’ horror at the danger of what she was doing allowed him to make a move to stop her.

Ablaze, the gel began a violent rippling—almost a rolling boil. It bulged and puckered chaotically all over its surface and its seething mass began to shrink. Just as Winters reached for a bucket of water to douse it, the flames were snuffed out and the gel contracted to a smoking cinder, sprouting as it shrank a cluster of black spines and crooked branches.

They stood gazing at the bristly, fuming residue, less than a third its former mass and quite rigid. An indescribable chemical stench filled the air—laced, Winters fleetingly thought, with a scent of barbecue.

He told Trish, “Get Smalls. We need a tactical meeting right now—tell him just key defense people.”

*   *   *

Out behind the
sheriff’s station, Smalls convened some two score men and women, more than half of them veteran extras. They surrounded the thorny cinder that had been the nano-gel, now lying on the pavement before them.

“Well,” said Smalls out of the silence, “I damn sure don’t like it and you know why. We’ve fielded a shitload of firearms here, and now you want gas spraying everywhere too, people strapped with tanks of it? And with all these live rounds going off?”

Ricky Dawes said, “We’ve just gotta take the chance. We’re desperate for something we know’ll hurt ’em.”

“Those bug-spray tanks for gardens,” offered Japh. “How many can we field?”

As the group began talking tactics and materiel, Dr. Winters’ gaze kept lingering on the charred gel. He knelt close to it. “I believe,” he said half to himself, “this is a tarsus.…”

He looked up, blinking. The whole group had fallen silent. He cleared his throat. “I believe this”—he was gingerly touching one small, crooked stalk among the black protrusions—“is a tarsus, its two terminal segments, and these are tarsal claws.”

Everyone understood that the gel, in its fiery throes, had revealed some part of its programmed form, its fighting shape.

But it was Curtis, omnivorous reader that he was, who got it.

“Oh shit” he said. “It is bugs again.”

XVI

SUNRISE BESIEGED

In their two
director’s rafts, Mark and Razz hung high, their boats gunwale to gunwale.

Razz, his handsome, Arabic profile looking devilish in the light from his instrument panel, waved at the scene below them and intoned:

“The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And their cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.”

Mark Millar, shivering a little despite his down jacket, said, “Razz-man, you amaze me. Verse! Who is it?”

“Byron. ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib.’”

“Indeed. Wow. My own take was less poetic. Let me see what I can do with it.

Up before dawn,

Their faces all drawn.

Everyone wanting to take a nap,

Their butts still cold from taking their crap,

In outhouses on the mountainside before dawn—

Today they’re in for a bumpy ride.”

“Not bad. You mean to say they won’t be at their best today?”

“Just so, my bro.”

The fleet of R and M Productions—seventy rafts—hung at three thousand feet. East of them, the first pale fan of light crowned the dark wall of the Trinities. To the west, the moon, a day off full, was half-sunk behind the western horizon. Directly below, upon the mountains’ rolling foothills, spread a wide constellation of little lights: Margolian’s armada, breakfasting, systems-checking, readying to take to the air and advance to their shooting position above Sunrise.

Millar murmured into his com. “Left and right wings, assume your lateral stations in ten minutes on my mark and … mark!”

Razz grinned, and parodied his tone: “‘On my mark!’ Bitchin!”

“What can I say? We’re in it now, my man! Commandos! Let’s go scope the enemy.”

They turned east, shedding altitude as the mountains climbed under them. When they came to a hover over Sunrise, the town lay just a few hundred feet beneath their bows.

“Very very busy,” Razz murmured. Sunrise was all ablaze, a great crooked candelabra of activity amid the dark trees and meadows. Headlights threaded the roads, with most going townward from the outlying homesteads, and the town’s streets swarmed with movement. The partners took up binoculars.

Razz: “Whoa, machine guns on the rooftops. Where did they—”

Mark: “
Battle of the Marne
—they hijacked a shipment. Hope Val has good armor on his raft-bottoms. What have those guys on the main drag got on their backs—see there near the movie theater?”

Razz: “Some kind of packs? No—they’re tanks with, like, little hoses coming off ’em.… Hear that?”

Mark: “A bull horn, more than one. People directing things from the rooftops maybe? Can you make out what everyone’s got holstered on their backs?”

Razz: “Same thing we’ve got—pump-action twelve gauges, sawed-off for sure by the length. Is that a
sword
that guy’s got on his hip? See him climbing the ladder to the roof of that three-story on the main drag?”

Mark: “… Yeah. A sword or something like it.”

Upon the peaks, the sun’s light was a bright crown. In silence, the partners watched the busy protags-to-be of
Assault on Sunrise
.

Razz: “So you think the APPs are already here?”

Mark: “Don’t you? It stands to reason. Two days after Val laid off all those studio people, these folks blow a mine shaft up in the hills. You can bet somebody cut loose from the Studio tipped them somethin was
in
that shaft. The APPs are in the ground where Val already had ’em planted. Now. Can he get those APPs up outta that mine again? Or has he got some other card to play?”

Razz, checking his com: “Val’s going airborne! Time to go high and fall way back, let the ballet get started.”

Mark: “Strike up the band!”

They shot up to five thousand, and fell back to the west again, letting a thin morning fog shield them from Panoply’s flotilla, which was now rising from the plain, and gliding into its high, high hover above Sunrise. What Razz had meant by the “ballet” was the death dance with the APPs that would begin on the ground all over Sunrise, and the aerial dance of Panoply Studio’s cam fleet above that embattled town, sucking up the carnage.

Margolian’s armada was one vast crescent lifting from the valleys like a scythe, its leading edge slicing through a sky of tarnished silver. So stately its advance, climbing the pine-furred slopes! It took its position a thousand feet above the town, just as the sun cleared the eastern peaks: Mark and Razz dropped their rafts into the center of their own converging wings, and took the whole formation to six hundred higher still, and just behind.

“Hi, Val,” Mark said softly, a nervous edge to his words, because this was the beginning of some very tricky work. They were subdivided into fourteen five-raft squadrons for independent mobility. Mark’s wing was the left, Razz’s the right, seven squads apiece, and each squad had its own angle to work on the shoot below. This included some close-up interactions with Panoply’s rafts, so every one of their boats had a gunner aboard with a twelve-gauge. Just for show, they hoped, to forestall aggression …

Mark commed his wing’s squad leaders—a tele-meeting, everyone’s face on everyone’s monitor.

He touched the detailed map of Sunrise they all shared.

“Katya,” he said, “you’re Sector One, this downslope piece of the north end of town.” He highlighted the sector on the map. “Bound to be action on this stretch of the highway near the river bridge. Bike and automotive garages along here.”

“Roger, Chief.”

“Prez, you’re—what is it?” Prez had turned sharply away from his monitor, looking behind him.

“Sorry Mark.” The man faced him again, presenting a sheepish smile. “I thought I heard—” with a yelp he wrenched himself violently offscreen. Mark turned for a visual down along his wing. At its tip, too far for details, he saw a half-dozen rafts breaking rank, some upward, some down.

“Maiko! Pick up! What’s Prez—”

Maiko’s face thrust into the vacated screen. “Mark! We’ve got bogies! Prez is dead!”

But Mark was now seeing it all along both wings, as Razz was on his own monitor. Their rafts were breaking formation above and below, while everywhere—what the fuck
were
those things? Big and shining, long skeletal legs dangling under them, black, streamlined bodies flexing and twisting … harrying his boats. He hit Code Red Alert and commed every craft, “Go high, go high, hit two K!”

All went vertical, but were scarely five hundred feet higher when it was clear that their fleet was alone in the air, and their assailants nowhere in sight.

Razz’s and Mark’s eyes met on-screen, and with one grim look they agreed that this moment must be seized and twisted to their will, or they would lose everything here and now.

Razz commed, “All craft listen up. Whatever just hit us is the same thing’s going to be hitting Sunrise down there just minutes from now. Here on out, those things won’t have time for us. I know you’re scared, but listen hard. We are
holding
six hundred mil right now on a right of first refusal to this groundbreaking, this
millennial
vid-of-a-shoot we’re about to shoot. Record what I’m gonna say—it’s a
contract
.

“Every one of you sees this through, at shoot’s end gets a million cash in pocket within twelve hours’ time, and a sixteenth point of the gross. You heard me right. Mark and I want fame, and we’re willing to pay for it.”

He took a deep breath; everything rode on the crew’s reply. “Hit your squawk button now if you want down and out.”

Razz waited through a silent slow count of five. “All right. Silence is consent. Balls or whatever, you’ve all
got
a pair.”

“Ovaries, asshole,” a woman said on the open line, and some laughter ran through the formation.

A further moment’s silence followed, as people met their crewmates’ eyes, sealing their consent.

“OK then,” said Mark. “Cover and belay your dead. They’ll take the rest of this wild ride with us, and their families get their shares. Let’s buckle down and steal this son-of-a-bitch’s vid from him.”

By the time the sun’s first blaze edged over the peaks, Mark and Razz had determined that their dead numbered thirty-one, and that no boat had less than two crew. They were good to go.