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

shoulders. Here … like this…”
    Maybe they sensed how it scared their “youngsters” to see them holding those little steel brutes. Momma’s reversion to Zoo-talk was a match for Auntie Drew’s—and she a tutor of English for so many years! “Why you puppies so long-faced?” she laughed. “You think we don’ know howda stomp some? Kick-ass our middle names!”
    Curtis and Jool had them dry-fire a while, perfecting their stances, left feet advanced, whole backs and hips braced against the trigger pull. Aiming, bracing, triggering, working the slide … “How your hands, girl?” Momma asked Auntie Drew. “They looking so strong now an’ straight!”
    “Thanks to you, Gracie,” she answered. “Thanks to our rakes an our shovels. Hands of steel! They could snap a damn keyboard in half!”
    “OK,” Curtis told them, concealing a sinking feeling at this graver phase of their work here. “Now you load them like this … firm push with the thumb and tuck it up in there … right … OK. Five in the magazine, good. Now jack one into the chamber—pull that slide firmly, that’s it—always pull that slide crisply all the way. Now, one more in the magazine. Good. Very careful from here on out, cause remember you got one in the chamber. Bring it up sure it’s pointed away from anyone you don’t wanna hit, because now the damn thing will fire.”
    Jool slipped their earmuffs on them, and then Curtis spoke louder. “Now. Lean forward and brace for the recoil and just hit that trunk, anywhere along its upper half.”
    Auntie would still have pitched straight over backward if Curtis hadn’t stood braced right behind her. Momma Grace shouted, “Holy shit!” in happy awe at the thunder she’d unleashed.
    Two dozen rounds they fired. Toward the end their aim got better and they dug a big splintery chasm in the trunk. Watching, Jool and Curtis were glad for their months in the mountains. How sturdy they’d gotten! There was a dazed, pleased look on their faces, and a pair of grins when each caught the other’s eye: two ladies of some power now.
    But Jool and Curtis traded a different look. Both of them were going to be in what was coming, and gone for good any chance of keeping them out of it. He saw Jool wipe her eyes quickly before she said brightly, “All right! Not too shabby. Now your sidearms—”
    Auntie yelped, “What’s that!?”
    Curtis looked where she pointed, and then checked the hillside to see if a breeze was stirring the grass, because that thick, bright moss on the trunk was rippling.
    He literally rubbed his eyes. The moss was stirring in the windless air, shuddering like the fur of some animal in the early sunlight. Shuddering and contracting, because its green pelt thickened and narrowed till it looked like a python … and just like a python, it reared up from the trunk in a thick, swaying stalk.
    The stalk budded, massive buds that melted into focused shapes, three aliens: a cruel-beaked thing all studded with rubies that saw them; a crocodilian gnawing the air with its fanged shovel-jaws; a carnivorous ape with a triad of ironic blue eyes.
    These absurdities melted back into a featureless python as fast as they’d formed. The python poured off the trunk and into the undergrowth, moving like muscle, graceful along its green length, tucking into the foliage and vanishing.
    The little group stood stunned. It was cinematic, a perfect little scene they’d been snared into watching: a little bow from an alien visitor to their world.
    They commed Japh and Cap and Chops, and damn quick had a lot of help searching the hills, dozens of them fanning out, rummaging through grass and shrub.
    They knew they’d been mocked, two of them survivors of Alien Hunger whom Val Margolian might be specially ticked at. That little demo had addressed questions he knew they were desperate to answer: what would they be facing? How could they fight it?
    The answer was like some snotty magician pulling