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

watching Sandy as she paced the deck.
    “You know, guys,” she said, “I walked off of Hunger with six mil in payout cash. I was thinking to give you a mil each to slip into Panoply with me, into the hangar, and help me steal the four fast-rafts off one of the sector boats there.”
    “Yeah, right,” Ming muttered.
    But Trek had caught Sandy’s musing tone. “You were thinking. But instead?”
    “I was thinking too small. Instead we’re gonna steal the whole fucking sector boat. I’ll pay you a quarter mil each. After the shoot, Sunrise will keep the fast-rafts, but you guys can sell the sector boat on the black market and split the take.”
    “Whoa!” said Trek. “Bitchin! You really talkin something besides shit now, girl!”
    The others were silent, but their silence had a pregnant, ripening quality in which one could almost hear their brains calc-ing out one quarter of the cash a sector boat would fetch on the black market, and the freedom such cash would bring them.
    Sandy smiled. “Of course it goes without saying you guys are going to be flying those rafts on the shoot, with machine guns mounted on the bows.”
    “Of course,” grinned Trek and Lance almost simultaneously.
    Sandy said, “Just think how it’ll feel—I know I am. To be killing APPs, instead of just watching the studio kill extras.”
    *   *   *
    Near midnight, the five of them were on-set at Panoply Studios, down in the hangar at the base of the western set wall. All the sector boats—each a great arrowhead-shaped craft with two fast-rafts nested on either side against its under wings—hung from an overhead rack an eighth mile long. The three women helped boost Trek and Lance up onto the boat they’d chosen.
    Once the men were aboard, the women stood unspeaking, gazing around at the great concrete cavern. It had a wide, low slot of a mouth that opened directly onto the set’s airspace. They advanced to stand in that portal, and view the studio’s mighty works.
    The shoot of Quake was mere weeks away. The set was three-quarters completed and in intensive construction mode. Its whole eastern half was lit. Over there, anti-grav sleds and rafts swarmed in the floodlights. Foam-crete platforms hung athwart the towering girder-frames of high-rises, hosing crete onto their armatures. Smaller rafts closed in like mosquito-clouds on the freshly creted surfaces and sculpted them with little blue-tongued torches. Where they had finished, spray-rigged gondolas converged to tint and texture every surface.
    In the nearer, western half of the set there were only scattered zones of activity. One of these was the “crack”—the huge fissure that the quake was to create in the opening scene. Its chasm walls were still being touched up, and here and there shafts of work lights beamed up from its black depths.
    Now and again the women turned and looked up to consider the boat they were going to steal. All three of them were fast-rafters, and to their eyes the sector boat looked dangerously big. It was fourteen meters long and nine wide at the tips of its flank-fins. Seen edge-on it looked sleek, tapered like a dirk-blade, but a thick one with those four rafts barnacled to the under-fins, rounded though they were like half-eggs in their nestings. To the women, the sector boat looked as big as a Mack truck.
    Lance at last climbed out of it and jumped down. “OK. If we’re gonna do this we gotta be real quick about it: as close as possible to zero ticks between our decoupling and our exit from the set. So you guys stand ready, jump in, and strap down the instant we decouple.”
    Trek decoupled, and the boat dropped like a rock—causing the women neural meltdown, even as Trek switched on his cushion of anti-grav just six inches above the concrete pad. Sandy had to laugh. “You assholes,” she said to the grinning Lance.
    They swarmed aboard, and the pilots lifted the boat a couple meters for takeoff the instant the women had buckled their