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

back belly-down on the air, and ramped up into the open sky at near four hundred clicks.
    “Whoa!” shouted Mazy. “Bitchin ride, boys!”
    “Not too bad,” piped Ming, pleased in spite of herself. “Little training from us, you guys might become pilots!”
    “Ooo, such a little hardcase you are!” grinned Lance. “Just remember what Caesar said: alea jacta est !”
    “And what’s that mean, horn-head?”
    “It means the die is cast,” said Sandy Devlin. “And so it is.”
    At Sunrise—just, in fact, as the sun came up—they nested the boat in a swale in the hills, far enough from the town so the studio spies and electronic eyes most likely would miss it, socketing it in a notch in the slope. Soon they had other hands helping, tarping it over, heaping scythed grass till it looked like a compost pile.

 
    VII
    THE VIEW FROM ABOVE
     
    On his rowing machine, Val Margolian rivered sweat, reviewing as he oared his recent triumphs and trials.
    Pull! Alien Hunger : plutonium.
    Pull! Alien Hunger , Director’s Cut, that child of mayhem and mischance: ultra-plutonium.
    Pull! He was among the richest men in California.
    But. The Cut was such a triumph because it nearly took his life and killed his reputation in one stroke. Through his own folly, the malice of his pilots, and the treachery of Mark Millar, Val had been dragged into the jaws of his own set.
    Like some hapless wage slave of the Industrial Era snatched into the mangler that he served, Val had been transformed into a scrambling extra in his own vid, madly fleeing—on camera!—a monster he had himself designed.
    His escape from its fangs had killed Raj Valdez, a brave and charismatic action star. Stunned by the mangling that his own opus had given him, Val had retreated to the south of France. His manslaughter moment had been edited out, of course, but he couldn’t edit his humiliating performance from his memory.
    Until it dawned on him. He’d always been an actor in his every vid, the invisible star that all the others played to. The audience always knew he was there. And if he’d left that moment in the Cut, they would have loved it. The cold killer genius Margolian, caught with his tail in a crack, tossing the male lead to a spider to save his ass.
    What tasty schadenfreude his viewers would have sucked from seeing him almost eaten by his art. And as it was, he’d left much in. Had shown his crash (but not its cause), had shown his danger and his near pursuit. A spicy fragment that displayed a great director’s willingness to chuckle at himself. And, had captured yet again the whole vid-sucking world’s devout attention.
    From feeling diminished, Val came to feel enlarged.
    His rowing slowed … slowed … and ceased. He smiled. Now Val Margolian bestrode an even loftier eminence than he had occupied before.
    As he showered and dressed, the mirror displayed a man who looked stronger and more handsome than ever. Lean and silver-haired—striking even with that flaw on his face, the crease down his cracked cheekbone, that an idealistic young teacher had suffered in the Zoo long ago.
    *   *   *
    Mark Millar sat his raft above the set of Quake. Quake: The Set, he thought. He bleakly scanned his chasm, the little faux city taking shape … and thought he might as well just mail this one in.
    Battle of the Somme had done well at the box office, even very well. That was the problem. In the boardroom they’d say, “ Somme did very well.” A death-knell for his career.
    He’d needed a hit to move up next in line as Val’s successor. But with so much talent around, directors who did “very well” their first time out were all but doomed to the second-string for life. He’d needed a flick that broke the mold. And a mold-breaker he’d thought Live War would be: extras in armies killing each other—each the other’s APPs.
    He saw now it was the absence of monsters that had hurt Somme. There’d proved to be something repugnant about it: