Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) (8 page)

Everyone got busy. Night would fall on our work underground, but down there night would make no difference.…

All fifteen of us put on headlamps. Ten of us carried pouches filled with five-stick clusters of dynamite and coils of wire. Four of us were gunners walking point to sweep the shaft all the way to the bottom for APPs—me, Japh, Ricky Dawes, and Chops, all carrying one sawed-off pump twelve-gauge at port arms, and a second one holstered down our backs.

We switched on our lamps, pulled up our masks, and stepped down in. Stepped down, and down, the daylight shrinking behind us with every step … and suddenly I was as scared of using my shotgun as I was of anything I might have to use it on.

Shock waves and cave-ins. Double-ought ricochets. Here, our world was a tube of raw rock and old beams. What was I doing, bringing a firearm down here? These timbers were propping up a mountain over our heads!

The cart rails had been stripped out, leaving just the cross-ties, and they were like a crazy, uneven staircase we stepped down. Our ten stringers kept pace behind us—their work to start down at the shaft’s deeper pitch. Please-god that our work wouldn’t start at all, that no gun need fire so far underground.

Climbing, your legs are taking you somewhere they want to get to. Going deep like this, their every step is taking you somewhere you want to get out of—a tomb. I’d never realized till this moment how wonderful it feels to have nothing but the sky on top of you.

Our dynamiters unlimbered their loads and started stringing the shaft. We shotgunners continued down, hearing their low voices growing dimmer above us, hearing them thin and reverb out of shape … how far down did this fucking thing go? Soon their voices sounded like rumors of restless dreams.

I glanced at my companions. With our masks and jutting weapons and the flood of our weird light around us, we looked like invading aliens—a troop of strangely beaked monsters, edging down into the earth’s grip. The air in this long coffin felt silky and dense. The sky seemed like an ancient memory. In our bubble of light, the beams of tarred wood looked like the ribs of a whale that had swallowed us.

Now, the last and steepest stretch: here the miners had made a last sharp dive for the vein as it petered out. Between the timbers, the shaft walls were crumbling. We had to step over drifts of slumped earth as we edged down the trickier pitch—the planet closing back in on its old wound.

And here, the blank wall of earth. The tunnel’s end.

“No chance that we passed it?” Ricky asked. “You said it was like a … mimic.”

“It’s possible,” I answered. “But somehow I think it’s here right at the bottom.” Because I saw it the way Jool imagined it: the cameras on the APPs would be filming their whole long, twisty, spooky ascent up the shaft, prime footage of the infernal monsters’ rise up through the earth.…

We aimed our headlamps on the floor, the roof, the walls. Rock and dirt.

For an instant it hit me as wildly funny. We were like a bunch of archeologists in a cartoon on a dead-end dig. Five baffled folks in bug-masks, no Tut’s Tomb in sight. A somber group, all scanning a perfect dead end.

I called up-shaft.

“Nothing visible. I guess we just blow it, be on the safe side.”

“Wait,” said Japh. “Turn your head back the way you just turned it—slow now.”

And as I faced again up-shaft, I saw it too. A hint of a regular pattern in the chopped stone directly over our heads as my beam swept it. There were—here, there … everywhere—little rounded nodes nested among the crude planes of the broken rock.

“You see them?” Japh asked.

“Shit!” Chops hissed. “The rock’s full of ’em!”

We beamed them at close range: smooth tapered hemispheres, about the size of a fist. They looked like the narrow ends of big eggs.

“String it faster guys!” Japh called.

“Stop,” said Ricky. “Turn your light away from the wall.”

When we put the wall back into shadow, we realized that it had started glowing softly here and there. Each one of the nodes was showing a faint blue luminescence of its own.

“Were they doing that before?” asked Chops, the answer in his voice.

“We would’ve seen it,” I said. What now? I called up-shaft. “Fuck stringing it! Spool the rest down here and get it wired. Fast!”

They came down in a little landslide of boots and dirt. All fifteen of us now in this last few yards of the shaft, working away, our noise-level low but still sounding to me like a riot down in that tubular grave.

We weren’t a minute into it when we heard a sharp little splinter of sound. Like cracking rock, I thought.

“They’re working free!” said Japh. And we saw the nodes swell, then contract, then swell again larger than before. Again that sound of crackling rock. You could see fissures sprouting through the stone around them.

“I think you better hurry it up,” I yelled to the dynamiters. “String and fuse and drop it! We’ll blow it where it lies!”

Stone snapped like pistol shot. Several of the dynamiters bellowed almost simultaneously: “LET’S GO! TAKE OFF! GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!”

And I saw all the nodes like a constellation seem to focus. Like one big compound eye comprehending us all.

The fifteen of us launched ourselves upslope as one, fifteen pairs of male legs now demonstrating their superior endowments of stride-length and driving force. The echoes of our feet sounded like a stampede, like something was chasing us up from the bowels of the earth.

Up the steep stretch, then pumping wildly we climbed the easier grade. I kept glancing back, throwing my beam behind us, but nothing was following, not yet.… How long did they need to switch fully on? How fast were they?

The upper shaft guys had finished—they were running ahead of us. We neared the mouths of the branch tunnels, saw those crews pouring out too. All of us running now, running for the high, far mouth of the mine, and—now visible—the star-hung night sky.

I was last out. Before I had quite reached the shaft mouth—not quite in the clear but too scared to wait any longer—I screeched, “BLOW IT!”

And was so instantly obeyed that the whole sky seemed to collapse around my ears, and a hurricane of dust sprayed my back as I leapt out into the open air, and when my feet touched earth again, it was like landing on a gigantic trampoline, the blast’s convulsion of the mountainside launching me into a longer and higher arc through the air.

I lay there, seriously bruised in the dusty grass, as the aftershocks kept rocking me. The whole branching shaft groaned and settled, the mountain shuddered and repossessed the void dug out of it so long ago.

XI

THE CHOOSERS OF THE SLAIN

Wagner’s “Ride of
the Valkyries” trumpeted in Val Margolian’s headset as he lay in his recliner, watching a fleet of helicopters slicing the sky above the jungles of Vietnam. A classic vid. Solace in it as his mind’s eye superimposed a scene of his own: a fleet of anti-gravs filling the sky above Sunrise, bringing its doom in silent flight like Angels of Death. As he tapped time to the music, he counted off his recent sins, accusing himself for his fingers’ faltering on the keyboard of Art.

The first sin, arrogance. He knew—as a Bach knows each note of his fugue—just the keystrokes where pride had made him falter.

From The Maw Of Mercury
had been his working title for
Assault On Sunrise.
Some echo of it had reached its prey, and warned them to look in the mine.

Even to have a working title was callow excess, but to put such a clue in it—as if he couldn’t help tipping his hand, like an amateur! Word always gets out in a studio, especially with a vid so deep under wraps. How could he have been so stupid?

The fatal words were a signpost to his opening, a beautiful sequence that now he would never shoot. So clear still in his mind’s eye, that visual fugue of menace and swift movement.

Its POV would have been entirely that of his APPs, all of them socketed in stone, nested in the gloom of their own faint light. They would hatch from the rock, split and shed the stone as their bodies sprouted into shape and their wings broke free.

Then—their bodies still their only light—they would have flown up through the crooked shafts, a Stygian armada. Past ancient timbers and cross-ties like ladders to the sky, till from the mine’s mouth, they erupted up into the rising sun.

Airborne then, the blur of their wings like burnished copper, his children would have knifed the sky, their sabers flashing, their whirlwind descending on the town.…

That whole gorgeous sequence obliterated! Two hundred of his Black Death Angels, snuffed out by the collapse of the cinnabar mine.

It wasn’t a crippling blow. Not that. But it made him uneasy to be now so short on reserves.

No matter. He must let it go. Just this morning he’d learned that his shoot faced a new threat, or at least a dangerous distraction.…

He punched replay. Again the cloud-striding music, brazen, triumphal chords that lofted the Hueys across that plain of palms. Their blades were rotary scythes for reaping whole jungles of souls.

He was Valkyrie too, of course, his rafts and his cunning APPs choosers of the slain. But he was not at heart a death-dealer. He was first a storyteller, an artist impassioned by narrative. He followed truth down its own dark alleys, and as he’d followed those alleys down, death had shown itself to him as truth’s key ingredient in this day and age.

He watched Coppola’s killers crossing the sky on wings of Wagner. Canting his head at a thoughtful angle, touching the crooked crevice of his cheekbone, Val weighed himself … and his heart said, so be it. What else could he do but proceed? And where else on the planet could a man find a more wonderful job? To rule the Earth from the skies, to call its wars into being, its tragedies and victories…?

But how, how could he have played such a fool? For his sin of pride, his working title had not been enough. No. Next came the sin of anger. To have petulantly expelled the raft thieves’ blameless friends from the studio! This had published the title that his pride had coined. All his layoffs had brought to Sunrise reports of every hint they’d heard.

Anger, his nemesis. Anger, his blind side. It always flared up in you just when you were least ready to outthink it! Well then. The work was wounded, no helping that. But its brilliance, its beauty were intact. The drama—a dynamite-factory of a drama. All those people so well armed, so schooled to weaponry. What a troop of guaranteed fighters, and all defending each other instead of just themselves. He still held a gem in his hands, and he meant to cut it flawlessly.

Audrey commed, one of his chiefs of APP Testing. “We’re ready, Val.”

“Great, Aud. Send me a boat.”

As he rafted across the burgeoning set of
Quake,
he conceded that Mark Millar had an eye for layout. But how would he do in the field, on unknown ground? Mark’s greatest talent was in assisting Val’s own work. Perhaps as a parasite on that work he’d do equally well.

He joined Audrey and her crew down in APP testing’s amphitheater beneath the set. Pilots practiced APP evasion here, in case they should be downed on-shoot, but the subject of this test wasn’t going to be doing any evasion.

Clearly, the man who lay on the gurney was incapable of evading anything—an older man, hair half white, whose Irish-featured face was contorted by paralysis on one side, so that he wore a cramped, pained smile, the smile stranger still for the wetness of tears in the orbits of his eyes. He was murmuring into a com, which he clicked off on Val’s approach.

“Hey, Mr. M.” His words were pretty clear because only a corner of his mouth was frozen. “I’m O.K. ’bout this, no sweat. I was jus’ sayin g’bye to m’ wife.”

“I understand, Mr. MacMahon. May I call you Jack? Please call me Val.”

“Sure, Val, and … I really ’preciate what you’ve done for my Shelly.”

Two million dollars were secured in his wife’s account in return for this gift of what were—at most—the two weeks left of his cancer-riddled life. “… But I don’ wanna talk. Can’t we just?”

“Instantly, Jack. I just have to say how I admire you, how brave and fine this is, what you are doing. There will be no pain at all, and death will be instantaneous. May we blindfold you?”

“Sure … I’d ’preciate that.”

Standing so near this disease-dwindled shape in a hospital tunic suddenly gave Val himself a sense of nakedness, the sensation he’d felt on the set of
Alien Hunger,
running for his life with an arachnid APP tight on his ass. An ice-cold emptiness between the skin on his back and the out-thrusting fangs. He’d reached out to pat the man’s shoulder, and this flashback froze his hand in midair. Catching himself, he converted the gesture to a go-ahead signal to Audrey, and stepped back from the gurney.

The APP was released into the amphitheater the moment the blindfold was placed. And as far as anyone could tell, all Jack MacMahon knew of it was a sudden soft yet powerful hum, a stirring of the air, and a touch, no more. Then he lay perfectly still.

Val asked, “How long are we looking at, Audrey?”

She smiled, a dark lean woman with probing eyes. “There’s a fifteen minute minimum. But it’s lunchtime—want us to make it an hour so you can grab a bite in the canteen?”

Val turned his gaze, his half-smiling surprise, full on his employee. “Ouch! Is that your way of saying I’m a monster? Understand—I’m not offended. You’re tops at your job here, and it’s yours as long as you want it. But really—shouldn’t you quit? Feeling that way?”

“Not if you don’t insist I do, Val.” She smiled cooly. “I like to smartass about people’s morals because I don’t have any.”

Val chuckled. “There are those who preach morals, and the rest of us who have work to do in the real world. Let’s go for the quarter hour.” A grin here. “I’ll skip lunch, and settle for taking a leak.”

And he strolled out of the arena to the showers. In the bathroom, he took time to look in the mirror a while. He liked the new calm he saw there. Audrey’s attitude had helped, had centered him.

Was this fellow in the glass here a monster? Sure. A monster-maker who was about to inflict his homicidal brood on people who had not volunteered to face them.