by Michael Shea
It would be a nice shot of them, swarming up from behind just when most of the town would be turning to face the main host flying down from the hillsides. That would be a nice touch. If Mark, that greedy skulker, hadn’t come thieving, Val would never have thought of such a redeployment. Improvisation was the spice of art.
The sun’s rim seared the sky above the peaks, its slant shafts striping the town in gold and shadow. This was technically sunrise, but that orb, like the moon’s, took eleven minutes to rise one full diameter.
Let’s wait a bit.
How much better this was than people galloping pell-mell into a studio set! See them there pausing in the midst of desperate preparation. Look how they waited, frozen, weapons in hand, others bent over their not-quite-completed defenses. Everyone united in sudden suspense, in cruel last-minute doubt of all their contrivances and calculations. Here was Everyman, facing not unreal monsters, but Fate itself.
Now? No, a few minutes more.
He hung there savoring this imminence—not of a carnivorous mêlée, but of battle. He’d been lucky to get his raft-bottoms armored in time once he’d learned of the town’s machine guns, but had done it in time too short for lightweight work, for dura-lacquer laminations. He’d made do with metal, and his boats were bottom heavy, slightly but distinctly slower in tight maneuvers than Devlin’s tiny raft squad. Devlin. That sly little bitch. She’d get some special APP attention, but meanwhile he’d have to—
Movement in the eastern sky. From a thousand feet up, straight out of the sun’s growing glare, an arrow of rafts dropped down on his boats from eleven o’clock high, machine-gun fire blistering the morning quiet. It was near-vertical fire and his rafts’ deflector-shields walled but did not roof them. The thirty-cal poured into the cockpits of raft after raft.
Val’s pilots snapped to, tilting their craft bottoms-out as they peeled from Devlin’s squadron’s dive-path, but two—with only dead meat at their helms—plunged on rudderless, one skyward, but the other—angled down—crashed into the legs of the water tower and lodged there. Two of Devlin’s rafts whipped back to it, and they already had a pilot aboard it while Margolian’s fleet-monitors were registering casualties. A dozen … no, fifteen people lay bleeding aboard his boats, some surely dead. All this while he keyed his army awake, his fingers flying to pluck them up into the sky.
His APP displays, all dark, began to show glints of light and dim hints of mass in motion. Soil and turf hatched outward, and admitted still more light. Sky appeared, fringed with grass blades. And then, as his terrible children shouldered free of the earth, the whole green mountainside, the golden sky, the great gilded trees gently stirring in the morning breeze—all this flooded into their jeweled eyes, and thence onto his display.
Each hatchling saw its brethren hatching all about it now, all those globed eyes encompassed by a hall of mirrors, all echoed by themselves a hundredfold on every side. Each of Val’s screens was a sprouting jungle of jeweled heads and now—like flashing swords unsheathed from the turf—arose their great wings whose whirr slashed rainbows from the sunlight and lifted … lifted from the soil gaunt sleek bodies, spare machinelike legs and—lastly—tapered stingers curved like sabers, black as death.
The hum of their ascension filled the air, growing louder each second. Beautiful. Val grimly smiled, and commed the fleet.
“Action,” he said.
XVII
ACTION
Margolian’s armada swept out of the west. On the roof of the Masonic Temple, Japh prayed that all their improvisations would work. Two hundred pairs of foot patrol on the sidewalks, one of each pair with a gas sprayer, and flanking the sprayer, his gunner. A blast of hot buckshot had seemed like the quickest way to ignite a gas-sprayed body, but would it work?
The whole mid-street was cleared for their armored vehicles: gnarly pickups with gunners in the beds, midsize flatbeds for resupply and rescue of wounded. Wheel Right choppers threaded among them, their sidecars carrying more gunners. All windshields had been covered with patches of chain link, ditto all headlights for the two night battles. The guys in the truckbeds carried equal arrays of twelve-gauges and forty-five cal Thompson submachine guns. Heavy arms, but would they work on what they’d be facing?
Meanwhile every flat rooftop, and even some peaked ones where ladders and platforms were rigged, had a machine-gun nest like Japh’s own. Not an angle of any street they couldn’t sweep from on high, or surveil to shout warnings to fighters below.
So many people so dear to him here, and all this firepower. He scanned the invaders’ raft-bottoms paving the sky. Armored for sure, magnetic deflectors fencing their rims. There was no hurting them with bullets, but what about themselves? All these weapons locked and loaded, muzzles blazing, tracking targets moving fast …
What control did you really have in the heat of a fight? Even now the rooftop gunners were calling back and forth, defining “fire zones” to which each gun would confine its rounds. Yeah, right, once the fight was at full blaze.
“Hey, Soldier!” Kate Harlow slid right up beside him on her raft. “Cover your eyes,” she said to her tail gunner. She leaned out and wrapped her arms around him.
He held her in his right arm, stroking her head with his left hand. This was his “new” hand. Its tactile wiring was state-of-the-art, but still not quite true. To his prosthetic fingertips, the texture of her hair, the softness of her nape were a shade less distinct, felt sketchier, as if she was, or was becoming, a ghost.
He hugged her harder, making her laugh and say, “Don’t crack me, big guy.”
“You be careful, Kate.”
“It’s Val’s gotta be careful, lover. We’ve got a treat for him.”
They kissed. Such a complete promise a kiss was. But when their lips parted, there was only its fading warmth. The ghost of a kiss. Kate skimmed away, hooked into an alley, and left his view.
Japh stood there, afraid for her, afraid for every soul in Sunrise. He remembered those seconds on the set of Alien Hunger just after the spider had injected its venom into his forearm. How many ghosts were left there, on that set, by the time those monsters had done their work?
There was one thing you could count on Margolian for: nightmares. Thank god Curtis had been there. Only he would have had the nerve to swing his axe without an instant’s pause, and chop Japh’s sudden death right off his arm.
Japh came back to the present and like everyone else stood watching the sky. Above Margolian’s armada, a second formation had appeared, much smaller, hanging hundreds of feet higher. Auxiliary forces? Why so much higher? The light in the east said sunup was imminent. What was Margolian up to?
Then a hundred voices shouted, “Look!” A thousand feet up, swift bright blurs—too fast and too vague to identify—were rising toward that higher fleet and … were striking them. Tumult rocked their formation, its members dancing crazily in and out of pattern.
Whatever the blow they had received, it was delivered in moments, and the rafts jostled back into pattern. A thousand Sunriser brains struggled to unwrap this enigma. Margolian’s scythe had taken no similar blow … so maybe it had delivered it? Were the higher boats interlopers? Were they cam-rafts like Panoply’s?
Were they stealing his vid as he shot it?
“They came to shoot the shoot!” Japh shouted. “Vid-thieves! And … Margolian’s used his APPs on them! They’re airborne! These APPs can fly!”
There was a flurry of activity among the rooftop gunners as they readjusted their machine guns’ tripods and platforms. The armored vehicles began to mount guns up on the roofs of their cabs.…
And as everyone worked, a realization spread through the town. Where was their own little airforce? None of the town’s airboats were anywhere in sight.
They were still gone as the clock ticked down, and people manned their readjusted weapons, and stood poised again.…
The first blaze of the sun flared from the peaks of the Trinities. But the solar torch kindled �
�� nothing. Not a stir from Panoply’s fleet. Not one monster, airborne or earth-born—just perfect poise and silence. Just that motionless host growing golden in the light of morning.
And the besieged, without one lifted voice, shared in perfect silence the same understanding: that this stillness above them was a sneer, was Margolian sardonically tipping his hat to them.
Every soul in Sunrise felt through those long moments a greater rage than any war cry could have roused. Then their own small air force made an answer for them. Out of the blinding arc of the rising sun, their boats plunged like bolts from a crossbow, machine-gunning Panoply’s rafts from overhead.
“Back ’em up!” howled Japh.
Every machine gun opened up, powerless to harm the fleet, but hammering it with impacts and distracting its pilots while the Sunrise Airborne strafed the fleet from topside. Lance and Trek’s sector boat with its cannon visibly jolted each boat it hit and knocked two craft right out of formation, making one crash in the water tower’s legs.
Silence then. Japh watched the home team streak back to defensive formation just above town. They’d bitch-slapped Margolian and now the shit would hit the fan.
He looked up the slopes. Those meadows, those noble congregations of grandfather pines glinting with the sun’s gold on their crests. How he loved this place, the taste of the air, the scent of the endless green life. It was lucky he hadn’t yet gotten his parents up here, but if he was still standing when this was over he by-god would.
He sent up a prayer for all those he loved up here. He could feel how it had heartened them all that Sunrise had drawn first blood. A murmur of energy hummed through them and readiness seethed in the streets. Sunrise had spilt first blood, and took heart from it. The dragon had bled and its blow would come any time now.…
“From the east!” someone screamed. “From the hills!” Japh swung his gun round and began to fire into the host that came whirring down.
Like black angels they dove, each in its own golden blur of shining wings. Lean, jointed bodies they had, dangling long, skeletal legs and, amidst these, a slender stinger curved down.
Something dreadful in those bodies’ stillness as they hung so poised upon their wings’ dire energy.
Japh’s tracers streaked out to meet them, all his fellows’ fire raging round him. He felt big-caliber death hum past his skull—an ally’s misdirected shot. He slung himself down on his belly, and continued firing prone.
* * *
When it seemed that the gunfire had been thundering forever, Jool saw her first APP outside one of the stained-glass windows of the Church of the Blessed Redeemer.
She and Gillian were two of the five women patrolling the church’s aisles with submachine guns held at port-arms—port-arms in Jool’s case meaning lightly resting atop her slight belly, whose girth was increased by the thick flak-vest she’d donned to protect it. Momma Grace and Auntie Drew flanked the church doors with twelve-gauges.
The other forty-seven women and children were deployed amid the pews. All these—and there were others like them in other refuges—were diehard home-fronters who’d refused evacuation, many with firearms propped on the pew-backs.
She and Gillian took comfort in their fellow Thompson-wielding women. Kathy and Meegan were Rasmussens, nieces of Elmer. Back when they were settling in, before the firestorm started, lean, squint-eyed Kathy had announced to the room:
“Hey you guys. You know me an’ my sis here. I just wanna say we’re sorry for clocking those corp cops. I know I personally put paid to one a them sonsabitches, though it took me more shots with a bolt-action than it woulda done with one a these sweet pieces we got now.”
“You killed him?” squawked Meegan from the next aisle over. “Was me took the top of his head off ’fore your slug ever touched him!”
“Girls! Ladies!” This was the fifth Thompson lady, Miss Louella Wells, gray-haired and rifle-straight. She’d still been Principal of Sunrise High when the Mlles. Rasmussen had, occasionally, attended it. Since retirement she’d studiously pursued her two passions: raising flowers and hunting deer. “We’re all sure you both killed him, and we’re all sure you had no choice. They were a snare set for us all. Now we have some much more serious killing to do.”
After the words “set for us all,” Jool saw, or thought she saw, a number of eyes flick toward her. She blurted, “Listen. All of you. I was an extra. At Panoply. A lot of us feel that our presence—”
“You stopped being an extra,” Miss Wells overrode her cooly, “when you came here. Now you’re a Sunriser, and that means—” She paused. The first rays of sunlight had just struck the stained-glass windows. “And that means,” Miss Wells resumed, “our lives for yours, dear. That’s all there is to it.”
Tears jumped to Jool’s eyes. “And our lives for yours,” she said. “Our lives for yours.” And thought, the moment after, of her small companion under the flak jacket.
Long minutes passed, and then, machine-gun fire from somewhere in the sky. A long moment followed, and a longer one. Then all hell broke loose outside from what sounded like every rooftop in town.
The APPs had arrived. She wanted to com Curtis on the roof over their heads, but dared not distract him. Her ears, though ringing, still sifted the pandemonium outside for clues to what was happening, and it seemed to her that almost all the fire came from the rooftops, and most of the firepower down in the street had yet to come alive.
And then it did. Shotguns and automatics awoke right beyond the church doors, echoing between the shopfronts while their spent casings clattered on the pavements everywhere.
A big shadow dropped into view just outside the church’s big stained-glass window. There, where the Virgin Mother’s head inclined tenderly downward, gazing on the Infant on her lap, the hovering shape outside dimmed the color from the Madonna’s face and shoulders. It rose and sank gently in its airborne position, a long, horizontal silhouette, bi-partite, the forepart bulkier than the tapered rear while—eerily audible within the stuttering roar of gunfire—a purring buzz seemed to come from it.
Until, in the same instant, the shadow rose sharply and the top of the window exploded beneath it in a rainbow spray of shards.
In the void left by the Virgin Mother’s destroyed head and shoulders, they saw plainly an alien shape of black and silver in the sun: a huge wasp hanging on the air, a dire, gorgeous thing: death perfectly designed.
Jool’s and the other four Thompsons opened up in almost the same instant, hammering it fore and aft, spraying its black tissue into the sunlight, while the gun outside that had just missed it, aimed from more directly underneath, now sent gouts of its substance geysering skyward.
Yet still it flew, slid sideways, upward, and—horribly distinct in the golden sunlight—reknit, the ragged holes torn in its thorax and abdomen shrinking, closing, the entire creature contracting slightly in its self-repair.
As it slid high and out of view, the sunlight flashed off the long, glossy spike of its sting. And through the portal the wasp had vacated, the women saw a piece of sky that swarmed with its brethren.
Jool heard amid the mêlée the fragment of a hoarse shout above them. Curtis’s voice, from up on the church roof. “Rake!” she thought she heard him howl. “… Behind you!”
XVIII
THE FIRST MOVEMENT
Giant bugs—we knew that already. But airborne!
And how hard was that to forsee? Damn few bugs don’t have wings. The fucking spiders had been bad enough, but at least they had to run you down to kill you.
These bugs streaked down and froze midair, shifting a little side to side—almost like good old Margolian just wanted to give us a look at them before they killed us. I laid thirty-cal on them. Chunks whicked off their legs, wings, bodies. They zig-zagged clear, reknitting on the wing, their torn parts—slightly smaller—sprouting back. I looked at these things and I saw in them Margolian himself—his ugly will, his twisted mission. Always the entertainer, he didn’t jus
t like killing us, he liked wowing us too.
Their heads were huge eyes, two faceted hemispheres flashing rainbow in the sun. Margolian was feasting on us with these eyes, all cameras, of course, that sucked us up, spread us out up there on his monitors, where he could watch us crouching and ducking and desperately gunning. The thoraxes were bulky and angular and looked muscle-bound dangling their long segmented legs. The abdomens were fat and sleek, arcing out and down to their saber-like stingers.
But showtime was over. Now they were coming at us everywhere, our gunfire zipping up through them like a vertical blizzard. We were trimming a hail of frags off them that melted midair back to gel and spattered down on our roofs and pavements.
Their stingers were lightning-quick and people were down everywhere. We couldn’t find a rhythm for defense. Bobbing and hovering, zigging and zagging they filled the air, but when they dove to sting they were sudden and quick as thrown knives.
I was up here to protect the church but I couldn’t cover the front of it—the street forces had to do that. I worked to nail everything that even came near it, but now and then a bug dropped past me. Then, was that a window shattering beneath me? And after that, gunfire pouring out of that window?
I couldn’t go down to her, couldn’t leave their airspace uncovered—could only send prayers with each round that they fired.
“Rake!” I screamed to a friend on a rooftop across the street. “Behind you!”
It nailed him in the upper back. He went slack, his astonished eyes fixed on mine, still standing because the wasp, like a skyhook, held him upright. I laid fire on it, but it hung there shedding chunks while its abdomen pulsed, and pulsed again. It dropped him then and climbed, healing as it rose.
