Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) (20 page)

The APP instantly gave him a tight zoom on its prey’s avenger—a second lean young woman, her face all wrath and horror, obliterating the APP’s head and eyes, and the shot itself.

More calmly now, Val accepted the carnage amidst the pines—twenty-six cocoons already savaged. Just watch them at their work—most of them rafters from Panoply itself.

And then Val realized that their fleet was larger since yesterday—was … eleven rafts strong! There was the big sector-boat, the eight fast-rafts he knew … and two more fast-rafts, slightly bigger, more powerful models. Director’s rafts.

He commed one of his assistant directors. “Harvey? Give me an exact count of Shoot Two’s fleet. See if they’re short.” He’d appropriated Mark’s pirate work above them as “Shoot Two,” an addition to their own.

He waited, weighing the possibility that Mark and Razz had joined the Sunrisers. It would give them footage from the extras’ POV—priceless stuff! But meaning, he reminded himself, that would give him that footage.

“They’re short two rafts, Val.”

“Thanks Harv. Feed me an overhead zoom on those two directors’ boats gunning the trees.”

“Roger that.”

And on the zoom, Val instantly recognized one of the pilots: that little cornflower skag, Sharon Harms—an ace Panoply payboater and notorious hot dog. A wave of dread rose in him. Though they might collude with the Sunrisers, neither Mark nor Razz would willingly put his boat in an extra’s control.…

He scanned his feeds of Glacier Avenue, a dire premonition upon him. An odd little cameo on the sidewalk drew his eye: a truck pulling to the curb, and a man—apparently still unarmed at this late hour—being handed weapons from its bed. Val zoomed in.

There he was. Razz. Assuming arms and taking up a post at an alley mouth.

Now Val could no longer resist understanding: the extras owned Millar’s whole meta-vid. They had captured its master-rafts! The two directors’ rafts were the automatic ultimate repository of their whole fleet’s shoot.

Val’s legal control of that footage made no difference anymore. The extras would bootleg it into the market for a fucking mint.

That would only sharpen the market for Val’s own vid, of course, and make him a mint of his own, but that didn’t matter. That didn’t help at all. The Studio, he, would be trumped.
Assault on Sunrise
would be stolen, stolen
by
Sunrise, and sold by Sunrise under its own imprimatur to all the wide vid-sucking world!

And as bad as this—
worse
than this, really—they had robbed him of a priceless scene, one he’d been savoring since he’d first finished scripting this opus.

Day Two, Act One, Scene One. Just minutes from now it would have unfolded: the second generation of APPs swarming up from the trees, and raining down on the rooftops. The Sunrisers took arms and ran to battle, heartened to face a foe much reduced.

And this scene’s POV was from the heap of gathered dead, from eyes that emerged from those dead. Just the tops of their heads emerged, faceted spheres that covertly erupted from the midriffs and ribs of the fallen.

Jewels, those eyes—sprouting like toadstools all over that funeral pile. Slowly they swelled, their wraparound vision capturing one another’s emergence, capturing the whole unsuspecting town in fractured-rainbow radiance.…

A pull-back shot of the heap then: whole heads sprouting everywhere, their dire jaws gaping, while all the dead grew restless, all trembling, twitching, shrinking slightly—as if they dreamed what was happening to them.

And only then would his demons tear free and take to the air.

Grim now, Val waited for what he must do. Let the sun rise.…

*   *   *

Mark Millar sat
snugly—all too snugly—in a crew chair just aft of Sandy Devlin. She was nosing their raft—Mark’s raft—to port and starboard, swaying like a cobra’s head, searching the trunks of the trees for cocoons.

Mark, himself cocooned in duct tape to his chair, said, “Sandy. Listen. These two boats of mine have cams. As long as you’re flying them, would you please just have those cams on?”

She let out a caw of derision. “Why do you think I’ve got you aboard?”

“Wonderful!” And Mark meant it; he could see now he was going to survive this. “Here it is,” he urged her. “The whole can of worms. You’ve got us, and we know you’d hurt us if we forced the issue. The thing is, you need us to edit and package and market the vid. We’ll give you twenty-five percent of the gross.”

Sandy laughed. Her eyes never left their search of the trees as she answered. “Oh Mark, you devil! Don’t you know your asses aren’t leaving our hands till you’ve deeded our clacks to us? We won’t skin you as bare as we could. You get thirty-three percent when our sixty-six is banked, and you two get codirectors’ credit along with Sunrise, Inc., but our name comes first.”

“We have to—”

“Nope. All that, or you fall out of this raft from three hundred feet, and we print and market the vid ourselves.”

“Sandy!” It was the yelp of a wounded puppy, but Sandy sensed compliance waiting in the wings, after a little more pummeling.

“And think on this, Mark,” she said. “There’s gonna be a sequel. If you do a great job here, we’re gonna let you shoot it, and for half the gross.” Still she watched the trees, but she could feel that word “sequel” banging around in Mark’s mind. And then could feel him getting it.

“All-righty then,” she said, “it’s shoot minus forty seconds.” She spun round to face him, reaching the razor beak of a utility knife toward him. She sliced just his forearms free, so he could manipulate the console. “Got enough flexibility there, Mark?”

“I can make it work, thanks.” He was keying a sharp, sweet zoom on a cocoon that a rafter was shredding with thirty-cal fire.

“Hey Millar,” said Radner. Sandy had him tail-gunning, always flew with him. He was a small, nervous guy, as well balanced as a monkey—as he had need to be, with Devlin driving. “Can you cam me too? Get some shots of my gunning?”

“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 would have everything.