Inside Straight by George R. R. Martin
The Djinn glared down at them. His monstrous hands came down and plucked the tank from the barrier. He lifted it high, and Michael and the others scattered like roaches. There was no place to go—but the Djinn flung the tank effortlessly sideways over the side of the dam. They heard it hit the ground far below, as the Djinn flicked his massive hands as if brushing away crumbs, sweeping aside the rest of the barricade. Behind the Djinn, Michael could see troops in the uniform of the caliphate. One of the soldiers held a banner of red on which a crescent moon enclosed an eight-pointed star made of scimitar blades, both symbols yellow against the blood-hued backdrop: the Djinn’s personal banner. They were advancing at a walk, the Righteous Djinn behind them, the roadway shuddering under his step, the army behind him.
The lioness of Sekhmet stood her ground, her tail lashing furiously, her glow almost blinding.
Michael remembered Lohengrin’s other warning: You can’t get near him. If he touches you, he will steal your power entirely away.
Looming above ranks of his elite guard, the Djinn extended his huge hand, palm-up, toward Sekhmet, his fingers curling back toward him in unmistakable invitation. The elite guard pressed to either side of the roadway, leaving an open path to the Djinn. Michael could hear the sounds of the army of the caliphate advancing relentlessly behind the Djinn and his guards—part shouts, part the chatter of tank treads and the growl of diesel engines, part stones tumbling and timbers cracking, part the varied barks of weaponry. All of it the sound of death.
“Kate!”
She glanced over to him. Her eyes widened slightly. He wondered what she was thinking, what he must look like—one arm hanging and bloody, his clothing torn and filthy with gore. He could not read her face. She looked quickly back to Sekhmet. “John!” she called loudly. “Don’t!”
The lioness roared, and searing flames erupted from her mouth. Some of the caliph’s soldiers, their uniforms afire, fled as the lioness bounded toward the Djinn, claws extended. She looked like a kitten attacking an adult. Sekhmet’s fire seemed not to affect the Djinn at all, her claws left red scratches on the hand the Djinn lifted to send Sekhmet tumbling back. The Djinn reached for the stunned lioness, but Sekhmet’s attack had broken the stasis of fear that held them. Kate was flinging rocks, making the Djinn bring his hand back as though it had been bee-stung. Lohengrin lifted his sword. “Yield!“ he shouted. “Yield, Righteous Djinn, and you may yet live!”
And Ana … she had dropped to the ground. On her hands and knees, her head down, she looked as if she were praying. A rumbling shivered Michael’s feet from the roadway beneath him.
Laughing, the Djinn made his gesture of invitation once more, as Sekhmet shook her head and stood once more. The lioness snarled, smoke curling around her snout. Her claws tore furrows in the concrete of the road, and Michael knew that Sekhmet would renew her attack in a moment. The rumbling under Michael’s feet grew, and the roadway lifted up and fell under him like a concrete wave. “Cripes,” Rusty grunted, nearly stumbling. Michael could see the ripple growing higher, as it knocked Kate and Lohengrin from their feet entirely, as it raced toward the Djinn.
The elite guard had responded to the attack on their leader also. Their weapons opened up—Lohengrin rolled in front of Kate; Rusty moved to shield Michael. Tiny puffs of dust erupted all around; concrete chips flew. Sekhmet leaped toward the prone Ana. Most of the bullets struck the lioness as she roared and spat flame, but Ana gave a cry, rolling over and clutching her side below the short Kevlar vest.
Michael could see blood.
The low grumbling beneath them ceased. Ana’s wave stopped sluggishly, but there was enough of a slope under the Djinn’s feet that he fell backward. The impact of his body on the dam sent reverberations through the entire structure and sent clouds of dust skyward. The mound of Ana’s earth wave collapsed noisily, leaving a deep and jagged fissure separating the groups. Water rushed in to fill it, pouring over the north side of the dam. The Djinn’s guards continued to fire wildly over the gap as they moved back quickly from the breach, as the Djinn picked himself up.
“Ana!” Kate ran to her friend. Rusty and Michael ran to her also.
“I got her,” Michael told Kate, who was crying and trying to lift the young woman. “I can carry her.” He took Ana in his lower set of arms; she fought him, crying out in pain with her eyes closed, her flailing arms striking the tympanic rings on his chest, so that wild drumbeats sounded. He tried not to look at the wound that gaped just above her right hip or the blood that poured from it. He cradled Ana and ran, crouching low. Terror gave him speed. Sekhmet roared, the guns of the Living Gods’ people chattered. Several green wasps went zipping past Michael’s head. “We’ll stand at the western end,” Lohengrin shouted. “Simoon and Bubbles will meet us there.”
They retreated, Lohengrin, Rustbelt, and Sekhmet at the rear.
The Djinn’s mocking laughter pursued them.
Michael panted, carrying Ana, who had gone terribly still in his arms. To the north, Hardhat’s girdered bridge still gleamed, wreathed in greasy smoke and filled with refugees fleeing Sehel. On the island’s eastern shore, a fleet of landing boats clustered while helicopters hovered like carrion birds overhead. The tornado of Simoon was racing south from Syrene on the western shore of the Nile, in their direction. A flotilla of bubbles was hurrying west to east across the river toward a squadron of WZ-10 attack helicopters, all with the black, green, and white insignia of the caliphate on them.
“Curveball!” Lohengrin shouted, gesturing with his sword. One of the WZ-10s emerged from the dust and smoke behind them, its black snout bristling. Its nose dipped and Michael waited for the guns to open up, or for a missile to gout fire and race toward them. But Kate had turned at Lohengrin’s shout, and, with that softball pitcher’s windup, she threw.
The stone shattered the windshield and buried itself in the pitot’s face. The chopper wailed like a wounded beast, its nose tilting straight up so that it seemed to be standing on its rear rotors, which sliced at the ground and shattered. Bits of rotor flew; Michael heard one of the followers of the Living Gods grunt and fall, his body nearly severed through. The chopper fell backward, the main rotors thrashing at the roadway. They all ran for cover. Michael heard the shrill scream of tortured metal and felt the heat of the explosion as the fuel tank went. The world was bright yellow and red, then black—the concussion sent him to his knees as he cradled Ana in all six arms.
A larger explosion came as he tried to rise; the ordnance on the craft exploding. Michael was flung down entirely, and he rolled to avoid going down on top of Ana. A series of smaller detonations followed.
He struggled up again, clinging to Ana with two arms and using the others to lever himself up. Bits of unidentifiable things were smoldering all around him. He couldn’t hear anything; the explosions still roared in his ears. Sekhmet was rising from where she had been flung. Kate was shouting something to Rusty and Lohengrin, both still on their feet. She was pointing. There was pure fright in her eyes.
A crater, twenty feet across and far deeper than that, was gouged in the dam where the chopper had been, ripping entirely through the two-lane road. The wound seemed to be widening as they watched, white foam lashing at the tumbled, broken lip. Lohengrin waved his sword, his mouth open below the helm though Michael could hear no words. Lohengrin and Kate started running; gesturing at Michael. Sekhmet spat flame, but then she, too, turned. The followers of the Living Gods, those who could, ran with them.
The dam shuddered like a living thing.
They were within sight of the western end when the dam failed.
“Scheisse,” Lohengrin breathed. Michael heard the curse. He stopped and looked back, pressing Ana to his chest with four arms.
In the center of the long, straight span, the dam bulged, broken now in two places. Water boiled, spewing wildly from twin rents in the wall. As Michael watched, the bulge sagged entirely. The confined waters of the Nile burst free, tearing away concrete and earth,
The freed Nile reached Sehel Island and bore it under.
There was no sound, not from that distance. Michael saw Hardhat’s bright girders lift, black specks of people falling from them. The girders swayed and twirled, lifting higher and higher above the flood, as if Hardhat were trying to use them to rise above the water, to find something to hold onto and survive this watery assault.
They watched silent, helpless.
The girders vanished. They were present one moment, towering above the foaming torrent, a flickering hope. And in the next, they were gone, as if they had never been there at all.
Michael watched as Kate wiped Ana’s face with a damp cloth while a nurse injected a syringe of morphine into her arm, before moving down to the next cot in the crowded field hospital. The chill night air under the canvas roof was laden with the plaintive cries of the wounded. Michael doubted there was enough morphine in all of Egypt for this.
“… and you saved literally thousands of lives today. We held them to the east side of the river, and most of the people got off Sehel before the dam went, thanks to Hardhat. We’ve certainly hurt the Caliph’s army.”
“The Djinn?” Ana husked. Her voice was barely a whisper.
Kate lifted a shoulder. “Alive.”
Ana tried to sit up, but fell back even before Kate could stop her. “Don’t,” Kate said.
“Listen to Curveball, Ana,” Michael commented. “You’ve lost enough blood for one day.”
Kate looked over her shoulder. Michael smiled at her. Kate bore a long cut down her right cheek, taped closed, and a smaller one over her left eye, and there were bruises on her arms. The corners of her mouth might have moved slightly in response. “Hey,” she said. “They patch you up okay?”
Michael rubbed his middle left arm, wrapped in white gauze from shoulder to elbow. “A couple dozen stitches. The doc said I’ll have a nice scar. How you holding up, Ana?”
“Fine,” Ana mumbled drowsily. “Thanks, Michael. You got me out of there.”
“Hell, I figured grabbing you was the best excuse to get the fuck away from that dam.” He tried another smile; neither woman returned it. “I just… I thought I’d see how you were. Any news about Hardhat, Kate?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. Even if he survived, he could have been swept miles downstream. …” Her voice trailed off.
“He’s strong enough. You never know,” Michael said, and knew neither one of them believed it. He wondered if they’d ever know how many hundreds or thousands had died, on Sehel, in the lower sections of Syrene, or at Aswan and on downstream, as the flood rampaged north. “Ana, you just take care of yourself for now …” he began, and noticed that she was asleep. “Kate, you want to grab some food? I’m told they got the mess tent going. Ain’t much there, but—”
Kate shook her head. “I’m going to stay here for awhile.”
“If you’d like some company …”
“No,” she said sharply, then tried to soften the words. “I’d really rather be alone right now,” she told him.
“Yeah.” He tapped at his chest; drumbeats answered. “Sure.”
They gathered at the top of the High Dam, all the aces and several of the followers of the Living Gods—at least all of them who could be there. A few were missing: Kate was still with Ana, and Holy Roller was also in the infirmary—after his panicked flight from the Djinn, plowing over and through everything in his path, his body looked as if someone had scoured him with a divine file.
As Michael glanced around, he could see few aces who were unscathed. Lohengrin appeared none the worse for the battle, untouched through his armor; Aliyah was tired but uninjured, and of course Hive looked just fine, though he was currently missing everything below his hips, his torso propped on the ledge next to Fortune. But the rest… The least wounded, like Michael, bore scabbed and stitched wounds from the battle. Fortune’s body was visibly bruised and battered. Rustbelt’s arm was wrapped and in a sling; Bubbles looked decidedly anorexic, her pupils nearly lost in the caverns of her eye sockets. The two Living Gods present appeared little better. Sobek was missing teeth, and the great bulk of Taweret’s hippopotamus body was mummy-wrapped in red-stained bandages. They had been among the last to escape Sehel.
Feluccas patrolled the waters between the Low and High Dams, and on the western side of the Nile the banks were dotted with campfires from the refugees who had fled from Syrene and Aswan. Lines of them clogged the roads leading south. Michael had been told that there were at least five thousand camped on the road between the High Dam and the airport, mostly the elderly, the infirm, and the very young. In the middle distance, the island of Philae was ablaze with lights: some natural; some, Michael suspected, wild card driven. Farther out, past the remnants of the Aswan Dam, there were few lights burning where once villages had lined the banks of the Nile. The old Nile channel had been scoured clean of life.
“… we must prepare for tomorrow,” Fortune was saying. “The Low Dam is gone and we’ve taken out most of their air power—they now have to cross the Nile here at the High Dam.”
Sobek grunted his agreement. “The Caliph will send his army south again as soon as it’s light, pursuing those our resistance saved.”
“Maybe, but those bastards took huge losses yesterday,” Hive interjected. “If I were them, I wouldn’t be quite so anxious.”
Sobek’s crocodilian snout wrinkled, as if he were scowling. “They took losses, yes, but that will only anger them. They will come, and they will be crying for revenge.” Next to him, Taweret shifted her immense weight almost daintily. Sobek translated. “Taweret says we could retreat to Abu Simbel—we might still reach there.”
“They’ll just follow us out into the desert and kill us there, where we have no cover at all,” Fortune answered, and other voices murmured agreement. “At least here we know the ground, and we have the advantage of the river.”
“Then send a team to Aswan. Kill the Caliph,” Sobek told him. “It’s his army.”
“Yeah, there’s a great idea,” Hive grumbled. “Wasn’t killing the Caliph what started this shit in the first place?”
Taweret and Sobek both started to answer angrily, but Fortune’s voice rose over theirs. To Michael’s ears, it didn’t sound like Fortune at all. “Enough of this. There’s no other way for them to go, and we will make our stand here.” Fortune paused. No one spoke. “Good. Now—here’s the crux: we need to deal with the Righteous Djinn. He’s the real head of the beast, not Caliph Abdul—if the Djinn is removed, the loss would demoralize the army. They’d break. I’m certain of it.”
“And just how do you propose to do that?” Michael asked. Heads turned toward him. “Maybe some oracle told you about a fatal weakness? Maybe a poison arrow in the heel?”
Fortune scowled at Michael’s interruption. “We could start by making sure that people obey the orders they’re given,” Fortune answered. “We were lucky yesterday that the Djinn didn’t decide to cross here at the High Dam, because there wasn’t anyone to stop him if he had.”
Yeah, like I’d have been able to stop that guy, Michael wanted to retort. He wanted to rage and fume at Fortune, at his combined arrogance and hubris. Who the fuck elected you God? Michael swallowed the bile, and it burned all the way down. Fortune glared at him, but now there was a smirk hiding in the corners hi
Lohengrin spoke before Michael had decided what to say. “If the Djinn touches you, you are lost. He will slay you and drink your powers. We all know that. But he can’t touch me. My ghost steel will protect me. The Djinn should be mine.”
Simoon gave a bitter laugh. “The Djinn is killing my people, Klaus. If he tries to grab me, I’ll rip the flesh and muscle right from his hands. Believe me, I can take him.”
“Look, none of you know what powers the Djinn has stolen from those he’s killed, what he can do, or what his vulnerabilities might be.” That was Fortune again.
Michael had heard enough. He turned and walked away as the debate went on.
He set the bottle down on the wall around the memorial. High above him, concrete petals held a ring encircling the half moon. Stepping back from the bottle into the center of the memorial, he pulled out the sticks he’d crammed into his back pocket and started to drum. The cadence was fast and rapid, the beat from his six hands so quick that it was difficult to hear the individual strokes at all. He ignored the painful objections from his wounded arm; instead, he focused the sound with his throat openings, shaping it until the bottle started to shiver. He tightened his throat, moving the sound up just a quarter step.
The bottle jumped an inch into the air and shattered. Glass shards sparkled jewel-like in the moonlight and rained down on the concrete with a sound like sand thrown against a window.
“Beer?”
Michael shook his head. “Water,” he answered. “Couldn’t find any beer.” He glanced over his shoulder. Kate was standing at the entrance to the memorial.
“Great talent you got there,” she said. “I thought only sopranos could do that.”
“I’m pretending it’s the Djinn’s head. Or maybe Fortune’s. I haven’t decided which yet.”
She didn’t laugh.