Daniel Abraham - Inside Straight

Rustbelt raised a hand, shielding his eyes from the rising sun. The dam stretched out before them and behind them, water calm and glittering to the right, empty air to the left. King Cobalt crouched down behind his shield.

“Stay behind me,” King Cobalt called out. “All of you just let me get in there and soften them up.”

“Now, son,” Holy Roller called out, “I think you had best come on back for a bit, the both of you. We may be seeing some enemy movement. At the far end—over there.”

“I don’t see anything,” Rustbelt said, and a bullet ricocheted off his chest with a sound like a piston blowing. King Cobalt lowered his riot shield, sighed, and slid to the ground. Blood poured from the back of his neck.

“Medic!” Holy Roller yelled, pushing himself toward the fallen ace. “Get a medic over here! We got us a man down!”

“Oh, cripes,” Rustbest said, rubbing the shiny spot the killing bullet had left on his skin. “I’m sorry, King. I didn’t… we’ll get someone…it’ll be …”

Holy Roller reached the fallen ace, felt desperately for a pulse, and then shook his head. Leaning over carefully, the minister hooked a finger under the wrestler’s mask and gently pulled it free. The thick body thinned and diminished.

“He’s just a kid,” Fortune said.

“Dear Lord,” Holy Roller intoned. “I don’t know if this poor boy believed in you. I don’t even know his name, or if he was a Mexican, but he was a brave boy and he tried to do something good. I know you’ll find a place for him in Heaven, wrestling with your angels. He did so love to wrestle.”

They all cast their eyes down for a moment. When he looked up across the dam, the old minister’s eyes were hard. On the far side of the dam, the sun was glittering off metal. A sound came like distant thunder that never stopped. Tanks were coming.

“Time’s come,” he said. “Get on the horn to the others. It’s started.”

The tanks came first, single file. Their guns were blazing, trying to keep us back while they pushed past or through the obstacles we’d placed in their way. It turns out if you send a bunch of wasps up the barrel of those things, it just gets you closer to the shell when it goes off. It wasn’t pleasant. But then Rustbelt was in there, howling like a banshee, and the tanks started falling apart. They shot him. They shot him a lot. When the helicopters came, the detonations began. There was so much smoke in the air, I lost some wasps just to that.

The Living Gods put down suppressing fire, and Sekhmet and Holy Roller made a push of their own. I did what I could, stinging and moving and generally making sure the bad guys couldn’t keep it together. No matter how hard they tried, there wasn’t room for enough men to get onto the dam to overwhelm us. The whole thing was more or less even until a sandblasting wind kicked up, courtesy of Simoon, and Lohengrin in his armor showed up at Rustbelt’s side.

When the army started falling back to the east, we pressed them. We were all a little drunk, I think. We were winning. Simoon’s wind was vicious. It was enough to rip skin, not that it bothered Lohengrin or Rustbelt. Together the three of them moved slowly across, all the way to the far side, driving the army before them. Bubbles and Curveball made a second wave, shooting down any aircraft stupid enough to try to break through. The rest of us—all of us—came in ranks behind them. Jokers with pistols and ancient rifles and Kevlar vests that were state of the art in the 1970s. American aces who couldn’t speak a fucking word of Arabic or do anything more eloquent than give thumbs-up signs all around.

We were overconfident. The Egyptian commander was smart. We didn’t figure out what he was doing until it was too late.

Curveball crouched, a stone the size of a golf ball in her hand. Rusty and the German ace were still advancing, but it wasn’t easy to see much beyond that. The blowing sand obscured most of what lay ahead, and smoke and flakes of rust swirled madly, making the air taste like blood.

Earth Witch plucked at her sleeve and pointed out to the right, over the water. A boat was just visible, pushing out from the eastern shore.

“Got it,” Curveball said, and sidearmed the stone like she was skipping it. The detonation sent a wave across the surface of the water. Someone—John Fortune?—pressed another rock into her hand.

“It’s turning back,” Earth Witch said.

“Good work,” John said. His hand was hot, like a man with a fever. “Keep going.”

The angry chop of helicopters cut through the noise. They’d crossed the river somewhere else and were circling back to come up behind them. “Mine! I’ve got ’em!” Bubbles yelled. “Take cover!”

Machine guns spat, fire blazing from their muzzles, as two huge, iridescent bubbles rose gracefully into the air. The transparent skins swirled with colors like oil on water, trembling in the wash of the propellers. When they detonated, the concussion was like a blow. The burning hulk of the copters arced down to the water and sank.

“Forward!” Fortune shouted. “Come on! Let’s go!”

Curveball nodded, looking ahead to the battle, to the sky for an attack from above, to the water. Time didn’t mean much. They might have been doing this for ten minutes or an hour or a day. No one noticed anything had changed until she looked out to her right and the water was gone. To her left, there was no clifflike drop.

They were on the other side. They’d crossed the dam; it lay ten or twelve meters behind them. Without being aware of it, they’d fanned out into the road. John called out for Simoon to let her storm slacken. As the sand began to fall from the air, half a dozen streaks of green buzzed past.

“Does this mean we won?” Bubbles asked. “I think this means we won.”

“I don’t think so,” Curveball said.

On the dam, the battle had been restricted. Rustbelt, Lohengrin, Holy Roller, Sekhmet. They’d been able to hold a line. No more than eight or ten soldiers could reach them at a time. But the Egyptians had fallen back slowly, drawing them on. Drawing them to the shore where they could be surrounded and overwhelmed. The streets ahead were packed with men, with tanks, with guns.

They’d screwed up. They were dead.

No one noticed the sound at first. When the rumble penetrated, they realized they’d been hearing it—a deep, bone-wrenching sound. Holy Roller was craning his thick neck, trying to spot the source. The Egyptians, across the small no-man’s-land of the street, seemed confused as well.

“What’s happening?” Simoon shouted over the growing cacophony. “What is that?”

And the earth opened before them. A great chasm yawned, sand and stone sliding down into an abyss that seemed to go for miles, though it probably wasn’t more than a few hundred feet. Egyptian tanks and men slid down into the gap, rifles firing impotently. Buildings cracked and fell apart, walls tumbling end over end in the air.

Curveball turned. Earth Witch was on her knees, her hands grasping the medallion at her neck, her face red with effort. With a thump like an explosion, the chasm closed. The first wave of the army was gone, buried alive, dying under their feet. The soldiers that remained stood agape. The first of them turned and fled.

“Oh, God,” Earth Witch said. Her voice was thin and unbelieving. “Oh, God. I did that. Did I do that?”