Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) (17 page)

And not just insect parts. Amid the crooked jumble of protrusions, a slender charcoal stump had sprouted, crowned by part of a human palm, with three crooked fingers.

Out of their stunned silence, Chops growled, grief in his rage, “Oh those murdering motherfuckers.”

And then they heard bullhorns up on Glacier Avenue, saw search beams waking sleepers on the sidewalks and porches. The crest-line of the Trinities wore a tiara of silver. The moon was two minutes from rising.

XX

A PERFECT CAMEO

Val stood gazing
at his monitors, the riot of images his scythe of cams harvested from the battle below. He paced as he scanned them, eyes sweeping here and there, the images breathtaking, like a casket of jewels: the town’s blazing rivers of battle lights, the sword-blade beams of spotlights swiveling from the roofs of the gun-trucks, the vertical hail of tracers, the shimmery haze of the predators’ wings filling the air, and the moon’s great scarred, indifferent eye watching from the silvered sky.

But scanned more carefully, the monitors were unsettling. Those damned swords and shields! What had given them the idea? A few had appeared in the First Act, but now they were everywhere—and were a perfect adaptation to his wasps’ mode of attack.

Case in point right there, that punk-haired woman got one’s stinger nailed into her shield and twisted it, wrenching the wasp down onto its back, its wings hammering pavement—and there, her burly machete hacking, hacking its head free in two strokes, and the whole monster sagging to gel.

His fingers itched to key his overrides, to dance now this bug, now that one individually was out of danger, but that way lay distraction and futility.

His eye kept gnawing at his strike-count on its screen. If he lost many more APPs to their swords and shields, the strike count was going to be key. Their dead were falling, yes, but would there be enough?

He hated this, seeing his dire, graceful machines captured, damaged, broken. He was becoming aware of an ache that his monitors were starting to give him, an ache in his cheekbone’s old fracture.

He touched his face, his fingertips rediscovering for the nth time the flaw inflicted half a lifetime ago.

He had come out of the eroded hulk of Dorsey High’s main building, the only part of it that had even half-survived the Zoo’s generations of defacement and despoilation. Ten
P.M.
He came out pumped and happy as he always did from an evening of teaching, his tie loosened, his shirt sweated through that hot July night.

He’d found himself to be a born teacher in those three years—the ringleader kind of teacher, always on his feet, incessantly bringing his pupils en masse to the board to write what they were learning, and when they were seated, prowling among them as he taught, making each and every one speak solo, with relentless kindness and humor, giving each one his or her moment of limelight and success.

He came out the back of the building, content that he’d reached them, opened a bit more of the world to their eyes—came out, and saw two large shapes standing in front of his motorbike.

There was no moon. Just the Basin’s light-haze laying a gray-purple sky on top of the Zoo’s shadow-sunk trees and all the ruins nested among them. One of the shapes flipped something into the air—it twirled end-over-end a moment against the sky: a tire iron. This dropped back and was recaptured by the shadow-hand.

He walked up to them without hesitation, still the teacher. “Hey guys. Can I help you?”

“Fuck, no. Give us the bag and empty out your pockets. You can keep your piece-shit bike. We got better.”

“You can have my money, but I need the bag. My students—”

And then his face exploded, pavement hammered his back, and his dazed eyes watched the whole sky slowly rocking back and forth. Faraway hands writhed like rats in his pockets. And then there was just silence, and the sky.

There followed a strange and terrible odyssey. First there was rolling over: an endless struggle. Then, sitting up. But standing—this was a desperate war waged against gravity, a war of a hundred reverses, of falling, and rising, and falling again.

When at last he stood, it was a different world he stood in. He saw the Zoo now for the first time. The Zoo had not robbed him. The Zoo had taught him. Had revealed, had explained itself to him. It had taken his money to show him what mattered. It had taken his satchel of books to destroy it, to show him what didn’t matter. It had damaged his body to show he was refuse—refused. Teachers couldn’t change the Zoo; therefore, they should stay the fuck out of it. The Zoo had fired him: No Teachers Need Apply.

Through that long woozy ride, the pain that had been spiked into his head somehow held him upright. He saw the glow of vid-screens winking from dark windows everywhere. Vid was the only teacher down here, lustful turmoil and gaudy mayhem the only texts, endlessly studied by Zoo-meat while wilderness swallowed their streets.…

Val rechecked his strike-count. It was beginning to look like he would make his numbers for tomorrow. He would have scant reserves though, at this pace, might lack the strong backup he liked, to keep them struggling all-out to the very last frame.

His extras—so he still thought of them—redeployed cleverly. Most of the machine-gunners were off the roofs and positioned in second- and third-story windows, weaving a crossfire that was increasingly effective in tearing up APPs as they dropped down into or rose back up from the street. They were actually, here and there, taking their heads off with uncanny aim. Maybe, once tomorrow was secured, he would himself venture a little closer to the action. Enjoy a bit of self-indulgence.

He monitored Mark’s and Razz’s boats’ harrassment of his own. They had some good moves as they scoped his fleet. This was fine because of a recent com received from the Studio’s legal division: Panoply would win a suit for ownership of any footage taken of a shoot in progress. Their footage would simply add to the layers of his two-level epic.

He was already filming it from his side too. As Mark’s boats rained down like bright flakes, all floodlights and cams, to hang off the bows of Val’s boats and harangue them, his boats were camming and haranguing them back, calling them corpse-flies and bootleggers.

He had to smile at Mark’s ballsy enterprise. He keyed up one of the harrassments in progress just below him to the north. The enterprising Razz was the haranguer, the counter-haranguer being Trace, one of Val’s best pilots.

Razz: “Howzzit feel to watch people die for money?”

Trace: “You mean get paid to kill them, or pay them to die? You should know, you’re a fucking director!”

It was beautiful. It would suck the audience into a whole new dimension of involvement, absolve them of their own guilt by making them feel part of a moral inquiry, an exposé.

Why not go lower and tweak things a bit? He called up the feeds from his spray-cams, the freckling of transmission lenses he’d peppered the town with. Excellent for cameo close-ups … Hullo. Look at that machine-gunner in that third-floor window there. He was one of that crew that had saved Kate Harlow’s ass on
Alien Hunger,
the black kid.

Val was already diving toward the town, when he got a glimpse of another member of that crew—the big white kid. He was gunning from a window on the opposite side of the street.

A perfect window of opportunity.

Val dropped down into the upper stratum of the battle, hung amidst the seethe of wasps rising from one assault and diving to another, pistoning with a silvery hum, striking and soaring. His two chosen extras had very quick reflexes. Val could make this happen. Time for some keyboard work only he could manage.

Their two windows’ angles were offset some thirty degrees, the black one’s window a few yards higher. Val overrode two APPs now rising to either side of him. His left hand would be for the black extra, his right for the white. Bach himself had done no trickier keying than Val was about to do.

He hovered twelve meters above where the crossfire he meant to create would be flying. His fingers, in two different space-times, brought lefty and righty down to hover at opposite sides of their targets’ windows.

Oblivious to Val’s control, the gunners swung their muzzles in alignment, each intent only on what hummed and probed not two arm’s lengths from his face, not seeing that he was aiming at his ally’s window. And … action!

Two attacks, perfectly simultaneous, stingers thrust deep within the two windows’ frames. But whitey’s tracers streamed out an instant before scorching blacky’s shoulder with blazing fire. Blacky rolled away from his gun and hugged the floor.

Val probed for him with left wasp’s stinger, while feinting with right wasp to keep whitey’s fire coming. The man was quick with that machine gun, taking big abdominal chunks out of right wasp. Blacky, still hugging the floor under blistering thirty-cal fire, thrashed as limber as a lizard, ducking both fire and left wasp’s thrusts.

These boys were hard to kill.

Val’s right hand faltered ever so slightly, and right wasp paused on the downswing for just a beat. Whitey planted a veritable column of hot thirty-cal rounds on rightie, and tore off the lower half of its abdomen. End of crossfire.

And almost in the same instant, blacky flopped and writhed his way back to his machine gun, swung up the barrel, and used it to parry leftie’s stinger thrusts, and then poured concentrated fire up into its thorax, holding his target through the wasp’s evasions till suddenly the anchorage of one of its wings was shredded, and it fell out of the air.

Val laughed. He had been their Fate, and they had beaten Fate. It happened—it was called heroism, and Val had enabled it, created it. A priceless piece of vid, a perfect cameo. He flagged the footage for the final cut, and began a leisurely vertical ascent.

A massive convergence of thirty-cal fire began hammering on Val’s armored underside, like all Hell with jackhammers trying to dig its way up to his ass. His craft must have been recognized—at least a dozen guns were focused on him. He rose a touch higher, and then paused in his ascent, disdaining an undignified evacuation of any part of his set.

Let them hammer away at him a bit, most of their fire was too steep to cross his bows. The state-of-the-art electro-mag force field rimming his gunwales would deflect the rest.

But, being the very latest thing, and being under increasingly heavy fire, the shield, which micro-instantaneously interpreted and counter-pulsed each impinging projectile’s angle of incidence, very briefly glitched.

A sledgehammer blow knocked Val clean out of his seat.

As his eyes slowly cleared, he beheld an otherworldly sphere of light.… Realized that he was on his back, staring up at the moon near its zenith.

Vague neural reports began trickling in to him from the outlying regions of his sprawled body. There were his legs … his arms. He summoned his right hand. The summons moved slowly through a great inner distance—and after a moment, the hand leadenly raised itself before his eyes. Then, reached down to touch the side of his head. It took a moment for his fingers to report what they touched: hot stickiness. A little more quickly, his head reported receiving this touch: a rusty crack of pain seemed to split it.

The pain was a wakening, and command of his body came with it. He struggled back up to a sitting posture, bent on knowing his damage at once.

Though his head kept swaying out of the vertical, his frame held, and he drew a deep breath. His head was scored, his scalp trenched, his skull maybe grazed, but … whole, yes. He commed Medic. “Send me a boat, please, Mirna, I’ll need stitches and a cold compress—I’m going straight up to six hundred.”

“Roger that, Val.”

It was Mirna herself who docked at his portside and came aboard.

“Thanks, dear.” Val smiled.

“My god, Val!”

“Not to worry. Just a graze. Some pain med and anti-shock. Dress it carefully please, we don’t want too bad a scar.”

His own self-possession exhilarated him as much as her medicines, which included forebrain enhancers.

So. He’d survived his second battle wound from the Zoo-meat. His first, long ago, had set him on the path to his present eminence. His second would not unhorse him. He would finish his work here tomorrow, and it would crown that eminence.

And in the process, he would sure as death search out and kill both those fucking extras, white and black.

Val commed his squad chiefs. “That’s a wrap, folks. Let’s go high, and catch some winks. Tomorrow is a busy day.”

XXI

BOTTOMS DOWN

Mark Millar said,
“Damn!”

“Roger that,” cried Razz. “Damn!”

Act Three was a wrap. Their rafts hung gunwale to gunwale. They were reviewing their footage of Val near the shoot’s end, puppeteering two APPs, almost making two extras kill each other.

“You’ve gotta admit it,” said Razz, still gazing at the display, “that’s directing!”

Mark stood up from his console, and paced thoughtfully. Val’s near death just made his daring more splendid. He suddenly felt something cowardly in this high vantage of theirs; that a kind of glass floor was sealing them out of the true mother lode of images.

He realized that Razz stood looking at him from his port side. Razz smiled. “Howdy neighbor. Whatcha thinkin right now?”

“I’m thinking. I’m thinking of getting closer shots of our own.”

“Now there’s a thought. Because what’s the one kind of footage Val won’t have? It’s street-level footage from a following cam or two.”

Mark instantly regretted his words, in which Razz had heard more boldness than he meant. His own thought had been some near-set dives and pullouts. His partner’s answer showed him at once the right way to go … and how dangerous this was.

Maybe his face betrayed his thought. A little more delicately, Razz said, “It would mean footwork of course. You up for that?”

Mark, eight years the elder, was in great shape and proud of it. And even before his nerves had quite steeled themselves for the venture, he knew that he wouldn’t decline what Razz would dare.