Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) (24 page)

*   *   *

Aidan, the Properties
chief, was a desperately busy man. Val had just commed him to “Send half the troops in—eat ’em up. When that half’s down, send in the other half!”

There was an oddly merry tone to that command—the boss had something big of his own going, apparently. But what a kill-fest his troops had jumped into. Those swords and shields began eating them up down there. He was afraid he would smile, and that Val’s monitors would catch it.

Aidan, a wiry, redheaded, and very motivated kid from the Zoo, had worked himself all the way up from mean streets to this, his present lofty post, and while his fingers danced to kill them, his heart couldn’t help exulting in the ass-kicking that Zoo-meat down there was giving his monsters.

Aidan had installed a little shunt in his cams to steal footage from his shoots. When he drank with old Zoo friends up in his crib in the Hollywood Hills, they all viewed them laughing and shouting. Thus he shared his high life with pals who might themselves sign on as extras someday. Only a man born in the Zoo himself could understand how this was OK with his friends, how they could find in it a celebration of themselves.

Dutifully and skillfully his fingers toiled to keep his bugs alive, while thinking the whole awful game was beautiful. In the darker blocks where the battle had destroyed the floodlights, the gunfire was all flame-flashes in the moonlight, orange tongues of annihilation licking the air. And in the lit blocks, indelible cameos: a sinewy arm working the slide of a pump-gun, a fire team of two small, quick women, drenching and lighting a spill of gel in the instant it had contracted into a globe, a man toppling backward, his feet locked in a quick tongue of gel, then wrenching his feet from his rubber boots and scrambling backward on his ass as another fire team flanked in on him and drove the gel back in flames.…

Something slammed aboard Aidan’s raft. He took one glance behind him, and threw the raft into a steep, fast dive, his sole aim to topple backward the mantid reaching for him.

He felt something like the collision of a Mack truck with his neck, and he was engulfed in darkness absolute. He was … only his
head
! He was dissolving!
Shit
.…

*   *   *

Mark caught it
all. Aidan, though he dove his raft to throw the bug backward, was the first casualty, the monster then wheeling to snatch the life of one of his lieutenants, just before the raft crashed into a building.

And Mark saw, in the same instant, Razz’s raft—himself at the cameras now, and that raft-jockey, Sharon Harms, at the controls—deliver a second bug to the raft of Slake Fincher, Aidan’s co-chief of Properties. Slake thrust up an arm to save his head, and lost that arm to the shoulder, and in his convulsion yanked his raft into a backward tumble that flung—at the first flip—his crew and the APP into empty air, and went on tumbling to crash upside down on a rooftop.

Whoa! It would all be on Val now to manage his monsters, his
dwindling
monsters, which the extras were killing wherever Mark looked.

*   *   *

Val was in
it now. Home, right in the eye of the hurricane he’d conjured. From here on out, his fleet must handle all else. His whole thought was down in his storm’s vortex, keying his gel from half a dozen boards at once, letting the rest of his APPs go full-bore to attack. The crew must do as well as they could to keep them alive.

Henceforth his sole darling was the resurgent gel. The threads of it he had sneaked from all over the set, the great snake brought down from the mine—more than half of it had been sneaked into its final destination: the heaped dead of Sunrise in their hundreds.

In moonlight shadow his threads snaked unseen, crooking along the bases of buildings, crossing the old pavement along its cracks—all angling and crooking toward, all tucking in like tongues beneath that funeral pile of moon-pale faces.

Val’s keying was exquisite, the gel absorbing what it rose beneath, condensing flesh and bone into its own supple density. The bier rose, but so incrementally! All those pale, moon-aimed faces, their slight shifts and liftings made them seem to dream. The augmentation of their mass would be inevitable soon, but with delicate chiselings from beneath he kept their topmost layer intact, a long human mask just rippling faintly, rising here and there, an anthropoid lid on a bulge of death a block long.

Almost there … Down the slopes came ATVs and three-wheelers. The locals were wise to Val, but not quite in time. He gave his screens an apologetic smile. Time to take the wraps off, and go big.

*   *   *

We kept angling
our flash-beams this way and that on the rubble that choked the shaft mouth, but it didn’t change things. There were half a dozen little rat holes in the rubble, the biggest two inches across, but dust-free, and showing narrow, smooth tracks through the loose earth below them. How many APPs had been down there? How much gel had he brought up?

“East side of town,” said Smalls, his binocs scanning Sunrise below us. “There’s no one fighting there—everyone’s in the street fighting bugs.”

I said, “He’s going for our dead.”

I didn’t know my thought until I spoke it. It froze us all a moment, as we took it in. If the gel could incorporate our dead, it would grow gigantic. We fired up the three-wheelers, and went straight down the slopes, no time for the road’s lazy curves.

It was like riding a flung stone skipping out across incoming waves—we were in the air more than half the time, hanging on desperately, our teeth gritted to keep them from rattling loose.

Halfway down we could make out that the heap of our dead looked larger. Smalls had commed, and we could see fighters running out into the Industrial Zone. We came down the last slope, and now could see—down where our dead had been—a bulge of darkness rising. The moonlight showed its surface clear, a long field of arms and faces aimed at the sky. All of them thinning and shrinking and melting away into the moon-shine. That big dome’s mass half-filled the lot.

Then it englobed. The sight made the hair on my arms stand up. It was poised like a bubble now, the whole thing drenched in moonlight. And the moonlight showed its meal was not quite done. Within its mass were human fragments, limbs and heads almost transparent, faces thin as smoke.

Like a giant nullifier. What sick brain could think this up, let alone make it?

The huge sphere had some wobbliness to it—not the smooth tension we’d seen in small masses—but it tensed into a slightly tighter sphere, as if in some last effort of digestion … and then, it divided—thinned at the center forming two separate spheres, a shrinking bar joining them like a dumbbell, then tapering and parting.…

We roared onto the flats, gunning between and around the globes, each bigger than a three-story house—and gunned flat-out for the alleys that would bring us—and them—out into the street.

“Lemme off here!” I yelled when we reached it. I had to get Jool, get her out of the church. She couldn’t be trapped inside with this shit pouring in on her.

Everyone was shouting to everyone else but yet everyone hearing somehow. Our people crowded to the side of the street away from the eastern alley mouths where the gel would pour through. Meanwhile … something was happening to the mantids.

Those trying to kill people suddenly slowed down, moved more jerkily, while those not yet engaged paused and seemed vague in their movements.

And everywhere those on the walls were leaping down and moving slow and aimless among us.

“Cut ’em down quick!” someone blared from a megaphone and then I saw her. It was Ming—her face like a gorgon’s ever since Mazy’s death. She stood in a raft with a crumpled prow, hovering at rooftop level. Stood behind the raft’s sole surviving pilot, a guy with blood on his face and Ming’s shotgun snug to the back of his neck. He was keying his console frantically.

We closed in on the Mantids in a shit-storm of swords and twelves, lopped off not just their graspers, but their heads and their wings. Their lopped-off pieces were jouncing everywhere on the pavement and going to gel, and everywhere this gel was being gassed and torched, so that we fought like fire dancers high-stepping in flames as we hacked them in a fever of rage.

It was a festival under the Summer moon, the bugs like some strange crop that had grown from our pavements, and we the harvesters who reaped them with a vengeance.

I had to shake it off, this kill-fever, like a trance. Few bugs still stood and their gel was everywhere, and I remembered that a shitload more gel was coming through those alleys any moment. And as quick as we fired the gel around us, far more than half of it was escaping under buildings and snaking its way back to the giants in the Zone.

I had a thought, but saw Smalls was ahead of me—already had fire teams up on the rooftops flanking the alleys.

And then it dawned on me: a new danger threatened us all.

I needed a second pair of hands! I looked around, and saw Ricky Dawes.

“Hey Ricky! You gotta come help me! Quick!”

And as we ran past an alley mouth, there came a tsunami of gel, filling it like a piston.

We sprinted down Glacier. “They’ll think of the hydrants soon enough,” I shouted to Ricky as we ran, “but we’ll need more water than that.”

We hooked out of town at the south end and ran toward the water tower, veered just before it, and sprinted up into the City Yard. And all the way there I was thinking of Val Margolian and hating that crafty, cold-hearted son of a bitch with all my soul. The fucker was planning to make us help him burn Sunrise to the ground.

*   *   *

Val tested his
giants on the defenders who rushed back into the Yard to meet them. He recoiled them from the gas-sprays, and in the next instant counter-surged toward them in thick tongues that seized half a dozen people waist high, and dragged them under.

But though quick in action his spheres were balky and wobbly. He should have caught a score of people on that rush—could now only pour his gel in pursuit just fast enough that their retreat marred their counter-fire. Both his globes caught some flame, which he swallowed up in their rolling flow.

There was another wobbly lurch and seizure of an extra who stumbled, but again the gel took new fire. This again he engulfed … yet saw now within the gel’s bulk a flash of angry orange cancer, the blaze encysted, and only half-smothered.

The last mantid … gone. No forces here left to him with which to distract the extras’ defense. He saw too the rooftop fire teams flanking the alleys he must enter, and knew he could not emerge from those gauntlets unscathed.

And saw then, all at once, that entirely new tactics were at his disposal here. This situation could be shaped to an unforgettable end, to the archetypic climax of combat: a bright apocalypse consuming everything.

They wanted to torch him, did they? No. He was the torch! He’d let them ignite him, and then he would take their whole damned town.

His last scene glowed full-blown before his mind’s eye. Stunning! The orange light of flames devouring the moonlight. A huge, flourishing garden of flame in the shape of a town! Steeples and cornices, porches and doorways and window frames blooming and blazing and bannering crimson and gold! All of us felt it, didn’t we? That surge of Bacchanal, of festival in a total firestorm.

What a lovely conspiracy he and Sunrise had going between them. They did not foresee the crimson canvas they were going to help him paint. They would kindle his palette, and he would paint the town with it.

So. Now to send his giants through the alleys. Not too fast, neither too slow …

He morphed the globes into a pair of obese worms, tapered slugs twenty-feet thick and seventy long. He poured them into the alleys, his fingers hyper-dexterous, incessantly correcting and overriding that quiveriness and that lurking sloth in his earth-wounded monsters.

Gas rained on them, and flares came hissing down after. Both giants sprouted a dorsal crest of flames. Faster now, faster! Both torches were lit, and their blaze must be shared, before they lost the mass and the strength to distribute it.

Now came truly transcendental keyboarding, a music he must not mar with thought or hesitation. His artistry at this juncture was trancelike. Or disjuncture rather, for he split both worms lengthwise as he brought them out into the street, and diverged their halves down the sidewalks. And he set these half-worms to smearing their mass along the building fronts, smearing great stripes of flaming gel across porches and walls and doorways.

The ignited gel clung to those surfaces, long scabs of fire that bit into its new fuel. Four whole blocks … now six blocks striped with fierce-biting fire.

Then he rolled the mega-worms—smoking, but their fire mostly shed—laterally out across the street to meet new gas-and-torch assaults from the troops ranked to front them.

Still his weapons had mass enough to bear the new blazes the extras crowned them with—to keep steamrolling forward, forcing the defenders to stream laterally down the sidewalks, pour round their ends, and to start spraying and flaming their street-ward flanks.

But from that deployment, the defenders were helpless to stop Val’s giants from painting the other side of those blocks with fire as well.

And—suddenly, it seemed—they were not such giants anymore. At last, their titan strength was broken. They had ceased answering his keystrokes. They tremored now, slumping away from the walls they’d torched, feebly twisted and thrashed, and lay inert, shriveling as the flames died down.

An odd sense of ceremony filled him. Val rested his hands on his lap.
Satis est.
His piece was played, its coda echoing. Long scars, swift-growing scars of fire lit the shadows of the moon-drenched street, snapping and snarling as they gnawed the night with their yellow fangs.

A gem. A faceted jewel of split-second improvisation. He was getting older, true enough, but had lost not a jot of his gift for riding the moment, for snatching inspiration from the heat of battle. See the blaze roar in its feasting!