Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) by Michael Shea

calm man who was the destiny, the doom of several thousand people. Who was a Valkyrie, a chooser-of-the-slain.
    And, smiling slightly, he said, “So be it.”
    He returned to the arena with a minute to spare. Stood chatting politely with the techs who were waiting to paralyze what emerged from Mr. MacMahon’s body. Soon enough came the powerful rupturing of meat and bone. Val scrutinized what emerged. Very satisfactory …
    *   *   *
    Val did go up to the canteen then. Carried some coffee to a secluded table. Satisfied with the predators of Assault on Sunrise, he returned his thoughts to the predators who meant to prey on him.
    For the past few days, his studio spies had been filing some very suggestive reports: a movement of shoot hardware over at Argosy Studios, some funny business with raft inventories at Val’s own Properties Division, and several discreet meetings between his own Mark Millar and Argosy’s Razz Abdul.
    At first Val thought this was a cat’s-away romp between the two wannabes. A case of some juniors going extracurricular while the master was up in the mountains.
    Until it occurred to him to wonder whether the pair’s Work in Progress might not have his own shoot in Sunrise for its subject.
    Then he’d considered those blue mountain skies from a new perspective, and how his own bright flotilla of shoot-rafts would look, maneuvering in that brilliant sky above the embattled town.…
    To weigh the prospect of this spectacle was to be enraptured by it. He recognized at once that the younger men’s aim had to be the theft of his own shoot, because of the incredible scenes that shoot would yield, captured from overhead.
    More focused researches clinched it. Razz Abdul had signed off a major work order with FLOSS-WERKEN: the installation of high-altitude augments on the anti-grav engines of an impressive little fleet of rafts.
    There it was. They could only need a high-alt fleet because they were going to shoot his shoot from above.
    For the first time he found that he actually liked Mark Millar, his vision and daring. What footage there! The extras beseiged by APPS down in their town, and above them Val’s flashing fleet lit first by the sun and later by the moon, and above them Mark’s boats filming it all!
    It opened Val’s directorial third eye right up. The two second-stringers had found a cinematic mother lode. Val’s own pioneering use of public airspace in this vid—real-life Live Action—had laid his shoot naked to their cams.
    If they kept their heads, the pair of them were on the brink of an epochal vid—a genre-spawner.
    There he himself would be for them, down in the aerial traffic above the town, and below him the human/alien seethe of combat on the rooftops and in the streets. How neatly he’d been surrounded. Imprisoned in his work, while they gobbled his vid, picked his cinematic carcass to the bones.
    He commed the capo of his legal eagles.
    “Zachary? Val.”
    “Hi, Chief.”
    “Zack, I want everything on the Studio’s proprietary statutes. Here’s the situation…”
    After Val commed off, he sat thinking. From feeling under siege, he’d come to feel much better. Worst case, he could freeze their release, force them to share title before he allowed it, and then only after Sunrise had hit the screen. Best case, he could own their vid.
    Meantime, he could spare the cams to shoot them shooting him. And could he not contrive some guerilla action against them in the bargain? Could he not eke out some APPs for them as well as for his extras? Maybe.
    Peacefully absorbed now, Val followed branching trains of thought. His handsome face was perhaps most likeable in moments like these. The man himself was absent from it, and only his conception filled it. He had a look of faint absent wonder, his eyes delighting now in this detail, now in that, his face guileless—except that the crease of his cracked cheekbone (now and again darkened by shadow) gave his look an accent of