Inside Straight

by George R. R. Martin

  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?”

  Curveball knelt, wrapping her arms around her friend. Earth Witch shook. “It’s okay, Ana,” Curveball said. “It’s okay.”

  “I killed them,” Earth Witch said. “I killed them, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah,” Curveball said. “You did.”

  Earth Witch stared out at the rubble, her breath in gasps. Her eyes were wide and round, caught between elation and horror.

  “Excuse me, ladies,” Holy Roller said. “I don’t mean to intrude.”

  “What’s the matter?” Curveball asked.

  “The dam,” John Fortune said, appearing at their side. “Doing that weakened the dam. It’s giving way. We need Earth Witch to shore it up. Now.”

  Earth Witch sagged into Curveball’s arms.

  “She can’t do it,” Curveball said. “She’s too tired.”

  “I can,” Earth Witch said.

  “Ana,” Curveball began, but Earth Witch shook her head. A voice called out from the shore—some stray Egyptian soldier surrendering himself to Lohengrin. Curveball stood, drawing her friend up with her.

  “I can fix it. Just…stay with me,” Earth Witch said.

  “I will,” Curveball promised.

  So to all the folks who said we were fucked, here’s the news: We won. The genocide stopped at Aswan, and we didn’t even drown all the folks we were trying to save in the process. And no, I don’t know how it’s going to play out from here. International pressure’s going to have to be placed on the Ikhlas al-Din and the government of Egypt. They may have to partition the country. That’s all complicated and nuanced and may take years to figure out. The United Nations will almost certainly have to be involved, and the caliphate. And yes, that may be a pain in the ass for some people. Live with it.

  The killing stopped. And we stopped it. And that, ladies and germs, is just plain good.

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  “Bugsy,” Fortune said. “Wake up. There’s someone here wants to see you.”

  Jonathan rolled over on his bed, blinking up into the light. Fortune looked slightly better. Still cadaverously thin, still with the deep, bruiselike bags under his eyes. He and Sekhmet apparently hadn’t quite settled on a schedule for sleep yet. And still, the poor bastard looked better.

  “Someone wants to see me?” Jonathan asked.

  “You should come.”

  “Beautiful blond entomologist with no boyfriend and a webcam?”

  “CNN,” Fortune said.

  Jonathan took in a deep breath and let it out with a sense of growing satisfaction. The traditional media finally there to agree he’d scooped them.

  “A close second,” Jonathan said. I’ll be right there.”

  He washed his hair, considered shaving, decided that the stubble was a decent manly touch—you never saw Indiana Jones breaking out a safety razor—and headed out for the lobby of the hotel that had become the aces’ barracks. The camera crew had set up shop by one of the big couches designed for travelers to lounge on in times of peace. The reporter looked familiar; black guy in his late thirties, close-cropped hair with a little gray coming in at the temples. He was wearing a khaki shirt with epaulets, like he’d been trekking through the desert instead of driving i
n from the airport.

  “Hey,” Jonathan said, “I heard you boys were looking for me?”

  Hands were shaken, admiration was expressed, someone got Jonathan a cup of coffee. Five minutes flat, and he was sitting on the couch, klieg lights shining in his face, sincere talking head leaning in toward him with an expression built to convey gravity and concern.

  It was fucking sweet. Right up until it wasn’t.

  “How do you respond to the accusations that you’ve sided with terrorists?”

  “That’s stupid,” Jonathan said. “And anyone who says it doesn’t understand anything about how international politics works.”

  “But you have come to the defense of a group that’s been accused of sheltering the Twisted Fists.”

  “Well, accused, sure …”

  “And the assassination of the Caliph.”

  “These people didn’t assassinate the Caliph,” Jonathan said. “There were kids dying out on the road. Kids! You think some eight-year-old joker kid killed the Nur?”

  “Right, and you also said in your blog that these people didn’t kill the Caliph. You have investigated the alleged link between the Living Gods and the Twisted Fists, then?”

  Jonathan tapped his fingers on his knee. “I’ve been a little busy being shot at,” he said. “But I am perfectly comfortable that no such connection exists.”

  “And how would you reply to the critics who say that Westerners—especially self-styled crusaders like Lohengrin and religious leaders like Holy Roller—represent an unacceptable Western interference in the internal affairs of Egypt?”

  “I probably wouldn’t,” Jonathan said.

  “So you don’t think there is an issue of national sovereignty here? You are a group of aces not affiliated with any government entering into armed conflict with the military of a legitimate state. How do you see that as different from a terrorist organization?”

  “They were killing people,” Jonathan said. “Okay? Innocent people were dying. And we stopped it.”

  The reporter seemed to sense an unpleasant stinging sensation in his future. He smiled and nodded as if he were agreeing with something, then changed the subject. “Will your forces remain in Syrene when the army of the caliphate arrives?”

  “We are going to stay here until we’re sure that…” Jonathan held up a finger and licked his lips. The klieg lights seemed hotter than they’d been at the start of the interview. The couch had developed some uncomfortable lumps. “… army of the caliphate?” he asked.

  “You didn’t know the new Caliph has sworn his support for Kamal Farag Aziz and his Egyptian government? His troops have been on the move for days.”

  “Army. Of the caliphate. Ah. Well. That’s probably a pretty big army, huh?”

  The reporter shrugged. Jonathan got the feeling that the guy might be enjoying this opportunity to make the blogger look dumb.

  “About three times the size of the Egyptian forces. And the Caliph’s aces Bahir of the Scimitar and the Righteous Djinn,” the reporter said. “The Caliph says that this kind of Western adventurism is a threat to all sovereign nations of the world, and that your defense of terrorists places you in violation of international law. The Caliph also says he’s taken the secretary-general of the United Nations into protective custody to prevent his being attacked by the citizens of Cairo who are outraged by his apparent support of your cause.”

  “Ah,” Jonathan said. “Huh.”

  “Do you have a response to that?”

  Jonathan blinked into the lights. He wished Fortune was nearby; they needed to talk. They all needed to talk. A lot. And right now.

  “Jonathan,” the reporter said. “This is your chance to make a response.”

  “Oops?” Jonathan suggested.

  Incidental Music for Heroes

  S. L. Farrell

  THE WORLD ROARED AROUND Joker Plague: a barrage from the stage amplifiers; the black boxes of monitors taking the roar and hurling it back; the massive cliff-wall ramparts of the sound system thundering to either side of the stage; the crowd screaming; slap-back from the rear walls of the auditorium a second assault; the insistent rhythm of the song a hammer pounding at them.

  To stage left, Bottom thumb-slapped his Fender Precision, his ass’s head nodding aggressively in time to the music. Michael felt rather than heard Bottom’s bass, a solid minor pattern caught in lockstep with the subsonic pounding of Michael’s bass drum, the lowest of the tympanic rings set on his body. Shivers, his appearance that of a demon snatched directly from the fires of hell, stalked stage right before a wall of Marshalls, his blood-red guitar screaming like a tortured soul in hands of the same color.

  Next to Shivers was S’Live, floating behind the ranks of his keyboards like a garish hot air balloon painted with a face, multitudinous tongues flickering from a too-wide mouth to punch at the keys. And, in the gel-colored clouds of dry ice fog drifting at the front of the stage, there was something: the ghost of a thin body caught in the floodlight-colored wisps and gone again, a wireless Shure SM58 microphone floating in the air before it, though no hand seemed to hold up the black cylinder. There was a voice, though—The Voice: a powerful baritone that alternately growled and purred and shrieked the lyrics to “Self-Fulfilling Fool.”

  She says she loves you

  And you—you wonder why

  You can’t see how could that be

  When you don’t love yourself

  For you’re the only one who could

  At night when there’s no one else there

  At night when the walls close in

  You’re the only one who might care

  You want to believe them

  You don’t want them to be cruel

  But when you look in the mirror

  What looks back is a self-fulfilling fool

  Michael—“DB” to his band mates and most of his friends, “Drummer Boy” to much of the world—heard mostly The Voice. He wore earpiece monitors to dampen the 120+ decibel hurricane, with only The Voice’s vocals coming through his monitor feed. He could hear his drumming quite well, resonating through his body, and no earplugs could entirely shut out the unearthly cacophony of the stage equipment.

  Michael loomed at center stage, pinned in spotlights, his six arms flailing as he beat on his wide, tattooed, and too-long torso with his signature graphite drumsticks, the multiple throats on his thick muscular neck gaping and flexing as they funneled and shaped the furious rhythm. He wore a set of small wireless mics on a metal collar around his upper shoulders. While the gift of his wild card talent gave him more than enough natural amplification to be heard throughout the auditorium, the volume would have been uncomfortable for everyone on stage and in the first rows: it was easier to let the sound system do the work. He prowled the stage as he drummed, the actinic blue of the spots following him as he danced with The Voice in his cold fog, grinned at Bottom’s driving, intricate bass line, screamed his approval of Shiver’s searing licks, or swayed alongside S’Live’s saliva-drenched tongue-lashing of his keyboards.

  For the moment, he thought only of being here. It was what Michael loved about being on stage: for those magical few hours he could leave the rest of the world behind. For that time, there was only the music.

  La Cavea, the outdoor venue at Rome’s Auditorium Parco della Musica, could accommodate 7,000 spectators. There were that many and more packed into the seething mass of humanity in front of him, a dark, fitfully lit sea of heads bobbing in time to the song, fists pumping their approval back to the stage, their energy fueling Joker Plague’s performance in an endless feedback loop. The pit in front of the stage was a tight crush; out in the auditorium, everyone was out of their seats and standing. Against the night sky, the beetlelike shell of the Parco della Musica loomed, caught in blue and red spotlights beyond the tall ranks of the upper balcony.

  It reminded Michael uncomfortably of an Egyptian scarab.

  The song—their third and last encore—ended in a flourish of r
iffs and cymbal crashes from Michael, a final power chord from Shiver, and an explosion of pure white light from a bank of floodlights behind the stage. The audience roared, a deluge of adulation that swelled and broke over them. “Fuckin’ yeah!” The Voice screamed at the audience through the Italian night. “Thank you! Grazie! Buona notte!” They shouted back, a wordless, thousand-throated monster’s voice. Michael underhanded his half-dozen sticks into the audience as the stage lights went dark and house lights came up at the rear of the auditorium. The audience seemed to be split nearly evenly between jokers and nats, judging from the faces Michael glimpsed, but it was the jokers who were nearest the stage, the nats mostly lurking to the rear.

  Roadies swarmed the stage, hooded flashlights guiding the band off to the tunnel behind the stage. “Fantastic show, DB! Great job! Esposizione eccellente!” they said, as he passed them, leading the way. He nodded, but he could already feel the stage adrenaline rushing away, and with it any sense of pleasure. The malaise and subdued anger he’d felt since leaving American Hero wrapped more tightly around him with every step he made toward the dressing room, the energy and pleasure of the performance fading.

  “Fuckin’ A, that was tight,” Shivers said as the door closed behind them. He tossed his ancient, scarred Stratocaster into its case, grinning—with his red-and-black-scaled face, it looked more like a leer. “Better than the Paris show. Shit, DB, those new kicks in ‘Stop Me Again’ were killer. Just killer. S’Live, you and me gotta catch those next time.”

  “Yeah,” Bottom added. He’d popped one of the champagne bottles and upturned it into his horselike snout. More of the bubbling liquid seemed to escape the sides of his mouth than went down his throat, soaking his already-sopping T-shirt. “Let’s listen to the board tape. If I punch those bass drum hits with you, it’ll be monster. Wish we’d recorded it that way in the studio. DB, man, you listening?”

  He wasn’t. Michael dropped onto the couch, multiple arms sprawled out, his eyes closed. The remnants of the show still rang in his ears. The cushions at the far end sagged a few moments later under an unseen weight and Michael felt the springs move in response.