Free Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) by Michael Shea Page A

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