Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) (7 page)

“We are pleased to inform Sunrise that it will have additional time for its preparations. The difficulties of deploying a camera fleet for an out-of-studio shoot are new to us, and we cannot be precise. Sunrise will have at least four, and up to seven days from now, before we come to execute their sentence.”

Already aswarm with preparations, Sunrise spared no time mulling over the ambiguity of “up to seven days.” The last of its evacuees were being convoyed down from the mountains to refuges in the Central Valley. On every block, saws shrilled and hammers knocked, battening-down while steady streams of weapons and matériel flowed in.

Bars were installed over ground-level windows and shielded gun emplacements built on rooftops. In the industrial fringe, the lumber-mills, machine shops, and garages echoed with activity. Every kind of vehicle was tuning and arming and armoring for combat.

Half of the bigger garage—Ike’s Engine Repair—was allotted to the SAF (Sunrise Air Force) to hangar its rafts. Unhoused, their engines proved to be of a new generation, their cooling systems’ pipes of a new alloy that didn’t permit grafting on ice-cannon.

“We have to forget it,” said Sandy. “Built-in firepower would be a plus, but we’ll just have to carry weapons aboard. Machine guns would be perfect, if only we could find some. I’ll tell Smalls to get on that. Meantime, we should all get airborne, work out our battle zones and tactics. Lance and Trek co-fly the big boat. Me, Luce, Mazy, and Radner fly the fast-boats. Ming, you’re backup.”

Ming stood up, face blazing. “That’s bullshit! I’m a pilot! Radner’s just a copilot!”

“He co-ed for me my last year at work because he wanted to learn from me, but he piloted five years before that.”

“Just listen, Captain Devlin.” Ming struggled for calm. Devlin was the best anywhere, but if anyone else had the right to pilot one of these things in the fight, it was Ming herself. “I’m talking no offense to Radner here—Radner, you know that right? I’m just talking straight truth here—I’m faster and more accurate at the stick than you.”

The small, wiry Radner, a mild-spoken man in the main, was stung. “You’re as fast and as accurate. But truth told, your brain overheats. You get pissed and go wild!”

Sandy said, “Ming. We all know you’re a gifted pilot, but Radner’s right.”

“OK.” Her voice was cool but her anger was visible as a slight contraction of her whole body. “Your call. Here’s mine. I’m off this crew. I’m fighting somewhere else.”

Mazy had sensed Ming’s decision before she spoke it. Hearing the ice in her anger, Mazy did not even try to call her back. Watching her storm off, she sent up a mute prayer that whatever part of the fight Ming chose would bring her no harm.

And a half hour after Ming’s furious exit, Turp and Frieda Rasmussen, two of Elmer’s grandchildren, came tumbling into the shop. The tall skinny girl stridently announced—apparently in a race with her younger, more tongue-tied brother to get it all out first—“We were up by the water tank an’ you better get a raft up there quick cause there’s four
more
a these little rafts like these ones here parked up there on top!!!” The boy hadn’t even pried his lips apart before his big sister was done.

“On top of the water tank?” Sandy Devlin asked.

“That’s right, ma’am!”

Trek, eyes wide and his hair-horn seeming almost in erection, said, “What? Are you shitting us, kid?”

“Nossir!” This from the boy, who’d at last found his tongue.

“God damn,” grinned Sandy. “Mark Millar, or I’m a fool.”

And Mazy saw that if the windfall proved true, Ming could be piloting a raft after all. That they would be together in the air, where Mazy might protect her. And then knew better. Whatever part of the fight Ming found for herself, she was going to stick to out of rage at Sandy.

*   *   *

Ming marched around
Sunrise’s streets. Her anger was so perfect it was a kind of calm. She didn’t know what she would do, but she was going to do something. Up and down she marched, looking around at everything, and detesting everything she saw. Born and grown in L.A., she hated this sparkly mountain air—it made all the colors too bright, the sky infuriatingly blue, a god-damned calendar photo. And all these goddamn hicks up here!

A throaty growl started low and grew louder behind her. She turned to see a skinny kid with white hair cruise past riding a chopped Hog. With instant decision, she took off jogging in pursuit of him, right down the middle of town on swarming Glacier Avenue.

Jogged right down out of town and toward the bridge over the Sunrise River, Sunrise’s southern boundary. There she found—besides the skinny white-haired kid—Wheel Right Hogs with two other men in its big shed, amid dismembered bikes and a jungle of parts, where the boy was messing with his Harley’s engine. Straightening to her full height, she looked at each and announced, “Hi. I’m Ming. I want one of those.”

The bear-shaped one had a dense beard in whose foliage only his fat nose, little bear’s eyes, and plump lips were discernible. He said, “Well, hello, you pretty thing. I’m Abel. Pleased to meet you too! You say you want a great big hog? A tiny little sugar-stick like you?”

“Hog’s heavy,” said Cherokee, the taller, leaner one, not unkindly.

Ming’s jaw hardened. “Guys. Lemme introduce myself properly. I’m a gay bitch raft pilot. I’m the best fucking anti-graver ever flew. And if you think riding one of those two-wheel fart machines of yours would be a problem for me, then—all due respect—you’re as dumb as you look.”

Christy, the skinny kid, burst out laughing, and Abel followed suit—a hoarse laugh like a sea lion’s bark. Even Cherokee, whose normal style was a Native American deadpan, let out a bark.

“Well, I gotta say,” Abel told her. “I like your ’tude, but what kinda clacks you got to spend? This ride here, for instance, is my particular baby.”

“I won’t buy till I try. You gotta let me check it out.”

An hour later, Christy was out on the highway in front of the shop teaching Ming to pop a wheelie. Ming already just about had it down. Watching with satisfaction, Abel said to Cherokee, “Shit! We could teach her to ride that thing straight up a tree!”

They walked out onto the road. “Hold up a second! We gotta talk!” The bikes circled round to them and the four converged, Christy and Ming still in their saddles. “You’ve got talent,” Abel told her. “We like how you fork a bike, sure enough. The question is, can you shoot? Can you one-arm a shotgun while you ride? Cause if you can, and you’re gonna stay and fight, we’re givin you that hog. And from here on out it’s one for all, girl, and all for one.”

*   *   *

Mark Millar and
Razz Abdul lay at their ease in the great tub, passing a little Trinity County weed back and forth as they watched a replay of Val Margolian’s vid-cast.

Smiling thoughtfully, Mark said, “He’s a true genius, Razz. It galls you, doesn’t it? His gift. Sly old dog! He touched every string of audience empathy. The world market’s drooling before he’s even shot a frame.”

Razz grinned agreement. A tall, taut man, very black, he had a lathed face with cheekbones cut sharp. His status at Argosy Studios as a second-tier director was like Mark’s at Panoply.

They were relaxing at Desert Hot Springs in a mineral mud bath. Planning. With both their bodies holstered in the same hot muck, the same conspiracy, their minds meshed easily on all the details. Razz’s studio would be the source for half the pilots and rafts, while Mark would supply the other half.

They both loved the opening scene they’d planned: The lieutenant governor is in his chambers, solemnly listening to Margolian. As he listens, there’s a fast close-up of a safe beneath his desk, half ajar, with stacks of cash just hastily tucked in it.

Razz said, “OK then. We got a perfect set for the Loot Gov’s chambers, got just the guy for Val’s part, almost a ringer. But I gotta ask: we sure we want Val giving the loot his orders? Chomp the tail of the dragon?”

“Absolutely.” Mark had to hold back laughter as he went on. “You know, I’ve learned that if you don’t commit yourself a hundred and ten percent to a work of art, it will crash in flames.”

They both broke up. “I got just the guy—a dead ringer for Val—all he needs is the face scar.” More laughter, and another toke.

“Nuts and bolts,” Razz said. “There’s still a snag on the high-alt boosters for our rafts. Company agrees to our rate but wants us to buy a mandatory month’s lease. Real costly.”

“… Options?”

Razz grinned. “I happen to know someone porking the contractor’s wife might help us out, with some under-the-table extra for the contractor.”

The high-alt rafts were essential to give them the scope to catch all Margolian’s lower-alt shoot of (the title was out now)
Assault on Sunrise.
A silence fell between them, a kind of wonder that beset them now and then in their deliberations.

They were doing a new thing in the annals of cinema—capturing Live Action itself and the whole grand, brutal mechanism that it was, Panoply’s flotilla like an aerial ant-swarm gobbling the images of the life-and-death turmoil beneath them. And right below the flotilla, that turmoil itself, the floor of it all—the fighting and dying, the frantic improvisations of people struggling for their lives.

Like a living thing, their script had grown, full of cool enhancements of reality. They’d written a scene where the lieutenant gov handed the warrants across to the six goons standing at parade-rest before his desk, warning them to conceal their official identity from the “trigger happy” yokels and to draw their weapons at the least resistance.

As for the scene of these same goons shooting it out with the Rasmussens, they’d moved it from the Rasmussen homestead to a saloon in town. There would be a roomful of hillbilly hardcases drinking alongside the Rasmussens, all armed. The goons would walk in and open their shirts, revealing their sidearms. A gorgeous scene, they’d grinningly agreed—classic Old West, which never went out of fashion.

Mark looked at Razz with a little smile. “I know, partner. There’s still that … misgiving.”

Razz smiled too, more tentatively, waiting for the rest.

“That fear that this exposé of Live Action’s … inhumanity will close every studio door to us,
saeculae saeculorum.
”

Razz smiled a little more. “You can’t help thinking about it now and then.”

“Well,” said Mark, “we just have to think back on Val shooting his first Live-Death vid. The sheer nerve of it. The raw power of Live Action as a genre to capture anything, including itself, will enthrall the world—sweep through Global Audience like a tsunami! The studios won’t shut us out. We will own the fucking studios.”

“Hey,” said Razz. “We’re on the same page. Balls out, my brother. Balls out!” And they laughed, like two kids with a brand-new death ray.

X

MUCH DEEPER SHIT

“Let’s face it,”
I told them. “It’s gotta be me. I’m the fastest one here.”

“Bullshit!” Japh wasn’t about to let me walk point. But though he was fast, he was lying about being faster than I was and everyone knew it. His size slowed him down. There were about a hundred-fifty of us at a closed meeting, all the most in-shape troops Sunrise had, and their silence was unanimous: I should walk point.

Smalls paced, swept his hand back over his scalp to smooth down the hair he no longer had, scratching his bionic arm. “All right, it’s set. Curtis at point, the first of five gunners. You ten stringers work your way down behind ’em. Any more’n fifteen in the deep shaft is too tight. And—my call as your sheriff—all those fifteen goin deep have to be men.”

A high-pitched roar of protest from the audience. Smalls weathered it, arms high for silence. “It’s my job to call it, an’ it stands. No offense meant to you females in the room, it’s just mechanics. We need longer, stronger legs down there. Footing in the deep, steepest parts is gonna be—excuse me—a bitch!”

Some of the women laughed, and most of the men took care not to join in. So. We fifteen were the deep dynamiters and I was point. Thirty feeders and stringers would come down behind us to the edge of the drop-off. Sixty others stringing the upper and branch shafts, and the rest guarding the mine-mouth with Smalls and Elmer Rasmussen, who’d worked in the mine as a young man and had given us its layout.

It was after five when a fleet of pickups and smaller rides brought us two miles up in the hills to the cinnabar mine. We offloaded three thousand yards of wire and beaucoup dynamite.

The whole expedition was the result of a call that Lance had gotten last night. He had a cousin, a woman named Spark—another rafter for Panoply, laid off after his own defection. He told her she had a place up in Sunrise if she wanted it.

“I’ve got other plans, Lance, but word’s out you guys have cash for studio scuttlebutt on Val’s next. I just don’t know if what I’ve got’s worth anything.”

“Whatever you got’s worth a hundred K, and mucho more if it pans out.”

“OK then. A friend told me that for a little while during development, Margolian had a working title for his vid. It was Maw, em ay double-you, of Mercury.”

Lance could make nothing of it. “OK Spark, you can be sure we’ll all chew that over.”

“Maw of Mercury” meant nothing to his pal Trek either, but at the morning defense meeting, when he’d aired the tip, Ricky Dawes said, “Mercury. We got the old cinnabar mine.…”

It took an ex-extra to grasp it first. My Jool snapped to it. “Think about it! Think of it, like, cinematically! Maw, like a throat. The APPs come crawling up out of the old mine shaft!—rushing up through all those crooked tunnels. Remember what’s happening here is a vid—that’s how they see it, all spooky angles and atmosphere.”

In the after-silence, you could feel it click for everyone in the room.

Now here we all were. It was late in the second day of Panoply’s “four-to-seven” and we all felt the clock ticking. We took crowbars to the wooden barricade that had sealed the shaft’s mouth for forty years.

“Look here!” someone shouted. “New nails!”

We found a lot more of them—bright sixteen-penny spikes—by the time we’d torn it all down. Someone had been inside before us, and not long ago. A poisonous air breathed out of the shaft mouth.