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

bouquets from his pockets and waving them in their faces. What will you be facing? It could be anything! Look what I can do!
    Long after its futility lay heavy upon them, they kept up the search, stubbornly rummaging through grass and bush, grimly refusing to let an invader lie hidden here. For these were their hills. Their freedom, their peace was here.
    And all the while they searched, something was touching and tickling their bent-over backs, a radiation sly and subtle raining down: Surveillance.
    To an extent they couldn’t measure, they were all had. Those who were coming for them already had them covered. Their every move? Their every syllable?
    The sensation settled on all of them. Spread over three hillsides, they felt it as one. And felt too what they were deciding about it: that they could not know the answers to those questions, and so they could not let those answers matter. There was only the fight as it came upon them, and only them to wage the fight.

 
    VI
    HOLLYWOOD
     
    Panoply Studio’s ace sector-boat pilot, Lance, tugged at his short horn of waxed hair. “Don’t think we haven’t been asking around, Sandy. I mean before you called, even. Everyone’s wondering, and no one knows zip. It’s the best-kept secret in Panoply’s history. Development has every angle like totally under wraps, tight as a tick’s ass.”
    His copilot, Trek, licked down an expertly rolled tobacco “skinny” and fired it up. His “bones”—bright red tufts on his cheekbones—standing out on his inflated face, he added in a tight voice, “Even the title’s a total hush-hush.” Then he whooshed out his smoke and passed the skinny to Lance.
    They sat on the deck by the pilots’ pool. Their house was in the Hollywood Hills, and they gazed out over the Basin at a sky smogged its usual violet-gray.
    Sandy was shaking her head. “You’ve gotta be shitting me—no hints at all?” If anyone had scuttlebutt it would be these two ace sector-boat pilots.
    “Nope,” said Trek. “You got Mark Millar setting up Quake on the main lot. All the other lots are tied up with this an’ that. Whatever Val’s doin—an word is he’s doin something—it’s gotta be off-set, which is like, unheard of.”
    “If it’s sure he’s doing something,” Sandy said grimly, “then sure as shit, he’s shooting it at Sunrise. We spanked his ass bad on Hunger, and now he means to eat us alive up there and get the vid as he does it. Gimme one of those brews.”
    As Sandy took her first sip of beer, she gazed at them thoughtfully. She knew they’d started as payboaters for Colossal, aces both. Then Panoply lured them aboard with fat contracts to fly sector boats. These were two young men who’d gone for the gold, but were still high-speed hot dogs at heart. Look at them, on their third beers already—drinking and toking, drinking and toking, their lean, restless bodies dying for action.
    “Can I ask you guys a question?”
    “When you ask us if you can ask us something, Devlin,” Lance said, “we start thinking, Oh shit, what now?”
    “Well. Your jobs seem secure at Panoply, but are you sure Margolian’s not secretly holding something against you, like letting me get away with what I did on Hunger ?”
    “Who can ever be sure what Val knows or doesn’t? I’ll tell you though, all the fast ones you were pulling in the last hour of that shoot, they were slick. We went over all our sector footage—raft cams and set cams—and we couldn’t catch you at anything. Val might think we were wise to you, but damn if we can see what proof he’s got!”
    “Yeah,” she smiled and took another sip. “Do you guys ever miss it?”
    “Miss what?”
    “Miss rafting. I mean real rafting, high-speed—not just porking around in the air like a couple of cops.”
    “Ooooo,” Trek crooned. “You really know how to hurt a guy!”
    “Lemme be a little plainer. You’re not tied to Panoply. Aces like you could raft for any studio you