Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) Read online

  I started well, but slipping became an issue on the steeper slopes. I left a number of skid-marks and butt-prints behind me. Anyone who wanted to track me would have no problem, if they could stop laughing. Snow looks so dry somehow, at least to a novice. It’s amazing how wet it can get you, and amazing how cold you can get when you’re wet.

  But somehow, just after my hands and my feet had gone totally numb, I did feel at one with the planet. Nothing smarmy about it either, that feeling. These peaks here I was crossing the flanks of, stuck straight up into the universe. At night, there was nothing but space between them and the stars.

  And I couldn’t help thinking the game that I and my friends were preparing to play was a Ghoul’s Dance to perform for our neighbors, the galaxies. Yet it was our dance to do, and do it we would with all of our strength.…

  Ten minutes later I had Sunrise in sight below me. Our town had a bigger profile now. Up behind the industrial zone there were two big new warehouse structures—one of them the hangar that housed our growing fleet of anti-gravs, and the other an armory-cum weapons plant.

  I went straight down into town to the Cuppa Joe, where I found Japh and Chops and Ricky Dawes slumped comfortably at the coffee bar with steaming mugs in front of them. I took the stool beside Japh.

  “Suzy, my sylph,” I said, “a cup of the same for me, please.”

  Suzy was my height, and a pretty tough customer. “Not till you tell me what a sylph is,” she said.

  “A woodland spirit.”

  “That and two-fifty will do it.”

  After a warming gulp, I asked my friends, “So. How’s our box-office boys?”

  Worn though the joke was, it always made us laugh. Assault on Sunrise Uncut had hit the market a whole month before Assault on Sunrise itself. Margolian’s third of a billion was far less than half of Sunrise Incorporated’s total wealth now, and the torrent of revenues just kept rushing in.

  But it happened, with the wintry light coming in the windows, that our laughter at that moment had an after-echo. A silence fell, and in it we heard faraway echos of voices we would never hear again. We didn’t fight the feeling. The silence drew out, and we let it.

  I noticed Ricky’s eyes were wet. He wiped them. “I always thought I had a bad memory,” he said, and cleared his throat. “But I can remember all their faces so sharp, remember things they said. We were, like, robbed of them!”

  “We’re gonna rob those fuckers back, Ricky,” Chops said. “It’s not enough, but it’s something.”

  “I’ve been reading about Hitler,” Japh told us quietly. “About his Festung Europa once he’d conquered his neighbors and barricaded his borders. Fortress Europe, he called it.”

  I cleared my throat. “And maybe you were also thinking … of Fortress Hollywood?”

  “Indeed I was, Curtis, indeed I was.”

  “Whaddaya mean, Fortress Europe?” Ricky asked.

  “Europe, you know,” Japh said. “All those countries across the Atlantic Ocean? Hitler had ’em barricaded against his enemies, who were basically us and England. And by the time we were through with him, his fortress was, like, smoking rubble.”

  “You mean like, all exploded?” he asked in a rusty voice.

  “That’s what I mean.” Japh told him.

  “Fortress Hollywood,” Ricky mused. “Smoking rubble. Man, that would be something!”

  BOOKS BY MICHAEL SHEA

  A Quest for Simbilis

  Nifft the Lean

  The Color Out of Time

  In Yana, the Touch of Undying

  Fat Face

  I, Said the Fly

  Polyphemus

  The Mines of Behemoth

  The Incompleat Nifft

  The A’Rak

  The Extra*

  Assault on Sunrise*

  Fortress Hollywood (forthcoming)*

  The Autopsy and Other Tales

  Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales

  *A Tom Doherty Associates Book

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MICHAEL SHEA is the World Fantasy Award–winning author of Nifft the Lean and other novels. He has written many short stories for major fantasy and science fiction magazines. He lives in Northern California.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  ASSAULT ON SUNRISE

  Copyright © 2013 by Michael Shea

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Stephan Martiniere

  Map by Jon Lansberg

  Edited by James Frenkel

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Shea, Michael, 1946–

  Assault on sunrise / Michael Shea. — First edition.

  pages cm

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN 978-0-7653-2436-8 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4299-8827-8 (e-book)

  1. Motion pictures—Fiction. 2. Extras (Actors)—Fiction. 3. Adventure fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.H3998A88 2013

  813'.6—dc23

  2013015149

  e-ISBN 9781429988278

  First Edition: August 2013