Daniel Abraham - Inside Straight

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, ripping away the tanks and trucks and soldiers of the caliphate caught on the roadway, and hurling it all northward in a tsunami of white water. The entire middle third of the dam was gone, and still the water poured through, tearing away more of the dam every second, an endless deluge. People were screaming on both sides of the river; feluccas and other river craft were tossed and tumbled under; houses crushed and ripped from their foundations on the islands and along either bank. The Nile, which after millennia of annual floods had been tamed since the first decade of the 1900s, flooded once more. A century’s worth of pent-up fury rushed downriver as the lake behind the dam emptied—toward Hardhat’s bridge, unstoppable.

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.”