Busted Flush

But she had muscle, neither windpipe nor spine. It gave her leverage. From her back she threw the rat from her with a spasm of mighty neck and shoulder muscles.

It landed three meters away. Huge rents showed red-raw on its body. Its fur was dark-matted with their mingled blood. Yet it instantly began to roll upright to counterattack.

The Destroyer stretched her head back and enveloped it with fire.

Screaming like a ship’s whistle, the rat-creature reared up. Its fur burned with blue flames and a stinking smoke that filled her nose like burrs and clawed her throat and lungs.

She came up rampant. With a swipe of her forepaw she knocked the huge beast through the air. It struck, rolled over and over in the sand, extinguishing the flames. It landed in a bush and lay still.

Its outline writhed. Blown sand and steam swirled up to hide it momentarily from her sight. Then it cleared.

A man lay in the bush on his back. His fat, nude, blue-white body was gashed and torn and washed with gore. His limbs stirred feebly.

Dismissing him instantly from her mind, the Destroyer turned away. Grievously wounded she might be, but she had better prey than a mere man.

But instead of the armored cars and little tanks among which she had rampaged as if they were baby gazelles, she faced a crescent of full-sized tanks. Their cannons were trained upon her.

Even if she had all her strength she could not prevail against such monstrous power. And she felt her strength draining through a hundred wounds. Within, John was silent, stunned. <We are only half of what we were meant to be, Isra thought sadly. He was meant to be Ra, with all the powers of the sun, and me but his handmaiden.>

She was Sekhmet the Destroyer; but she was also a protector. She felt duty to her comrades, puny though they were. She turned and loped back to where they huddled against the white flank of a dune. She could at least shield them with her body as she fell. She turned back to snarl at the tanks where they squatted like vast impervious turtles. Her grip began to slip. Exhaustion and injury—and despair—had sapped even the will of a goddess.

She raised her muzzle and roared defiant denial: No!

It did no good. She whirled down and down, away from being.

In an ecstasy of fearful frustration Sun Hei-lian paced the palace terrace, hugging herself tightly beneath her breasts.

Since Tom’s murder Nshombo had refused to let her and her team leave the capital. Hong monitored radio traffic from the front in real time. Even when it was encrypted his specialized Guoanbu equipment and training easily cracked it.

The war went badly. That morning Simba armor had thrust triumphantly along the Niger Delta coast toward Lagos. Abuja, well inland, was the national capital. But capturing the huge seaport would seal the conquest—strike that: liberation—of the country. Or at least its coastal oil fields.

Then Nigeria mounted a massive counterattack. Taken by surprise, the PPA spearhead was cut off. Now half-coherent reports claimed a terrible monster was ravaging the Simbas. A giant golden lioness—appropriately enough, she supposed, given “Simba” meant “lion”—had miraculously appeared to fight it.

John Fortune and Butcher Dagon were going at it in their alternate forms. But Nigerian traffic revealed an armored battalion closing in to deliver the killing blow. Not even the Destroyer could deal with that.

Hei-lian shook her head. The other Committee aces were useless in an armored battle. Toad Man, the Lama, Snowblind, Brave Hawk . . . the Committee sent us its B team, not the powerful aces who broke the Caliphate’s army at Aswan last year. Whether John Fortune had simply misjudged, or had regarded Africa as unimportant, his parsimony was about to lose it all. If only Tom still lived.

“Hei-lian?”

She stopped and spun and glared. Sprout had emerged from the French doors of the palace onto the terrace. She wore jeans and a T-shirt. She clutched a slim picture book to her chest. “I’m sad,” she said. She held out the book. “Will you read to me?”

No! Hei-lian’s mind raged. Get away from me, you unnatural thing! Why do they suffer you to wander the palace still, without your father to protect you?

Her eyes welled. “Yes,” she heard herself say, as from the depths of a pit of sadness. She took the book. Charlie and the Mouse Ace, the cover read. “Let’s sit here in the shade.”

They sat on white-enameled metal chairs beneath an awning. Hei-lian’s fingers trembled as she opened the brightly colored cover.