Read Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) for Free Online

harnesses. From her backseat, Sandra Devlin said, “Guys, no offense, truly—but are you sure you don’t want me piloting?”
    The two young men traded evil grins. Trek turned back to Sandy, his merriment making the little red tufts on his cheekbones sharpen. “You’re cargo, Devlin. Buckle tight.”
    They launched the boat toward the wide low hangar mouth, and—in sheer insolence, it seemed—they flipped the craft on edge, and shot through that narrow sky-slice at right angles to the ground.
    They stayed at this full tilt as the big boat whipped out through the enormous set’s night air, their left fin-tip just a meter off the street—sped down residential lanes, flying no-lights through the dark. Houses flashed past the eyes of the sideways-hanging women, who with each turn rocked softly in their harnesses. The point of their discomfort dawned on the passengers soon enough: tilted thus, the boat was visible only edge-on to the high raft-traffic busy constructing in the other half of the set.
    “Into the Crack!” Lance cackled. “Pucker up, girls!”
    “Fuck you!” piped Ming. “I could fly this thing backward and blindfolded!”
    Still, the three passengers admitted in their hearts that these two boys were slick at the stick. The women were only seeing the left side of each street they sped down … until suddenly, the boat went giddily vertical—still tilted on edge as it did so—and side-hopped something very tall on their blind side, which they only saw below them as they whipped across its crest: the rooftop of the set’s luxury hotel with its pool and plantings.
    And yawning away beneath them where the next block should have been, there was the Crack, its crooked black abyss dotted with a constellation or two of work lights.
    Trek said cheerfully, “Sure hope there’s room for us!” as they dropped edge-on like an axe-blade down into the Crack, hitting infra-red as they sank into it.
    Seventy meters deep, the opposing walls of ruptured “earth” were still being detailed by techs here and there, and one of these work-zones was not far ahead. The pilots had ramped the boat to eighty klicks. At this speed through the center of the Crack, its uneven walls—narrowing and widening—loomed scarily in-and-out at the passengers.
    In the fissure ahead, full-spectrum floods lit scaffolding webbed to one wall, where the little blue arc-torches of creters sculpted the hardened crete, and tinters followed them with their airless tint-rifles. The scaffolds swarmed with at least two-score toiling techs.
    Though her lights were still off, as she swooshed past the scaffolding the boat’s gloss reflected the wash of the workers’ lamps, and the raft gleamed with the deep-sea flash of a big predator swooping very near: the wall thrust in here and clearance from the facing wall was less than nine meters.
    Sandy saw in a neat frame of scaffolding a creter’s awed face blue-lit on one side by the torch he held, turning just in time to see them sweep near him, big as a house, and three solemn-faced women tilted on their sides watching him as they flashed past.
    Fast snaking through more darkness then, the pilots ramping up to a hundred fifty klicks—more darkness, and more dark—and then light and scaffolding again loomed toward them. Coming just past a sharp turn, this onslaught was more sudden than the first, and here there were crete rafts hovering just off the scaffold and cluttering the sector boat’s airspace.
    Lance and Trek flipped a nose dive and sliced down into deep Crack—and almost made it clear, except for a brief kiss of impact against the boat’s upper fin tip, explained an instant later by a glimpse of a raft bottom spinning like a pinwheel away up above them.
    Deep they stayed, ramped to a full two hundred klicks, crooking their way through at blur-speed, and then climbing steadily, to erupt up into the moonless night.
    They cleared the set wall by less than a meter. The pilots laid the boat