Titans of Chaos

The light (actually, volumes of an energy for which we have no name) was coming from (issuingin concentric hyperspheres) a curving bubble or blister in a nearby continuum. This continuumwas in a plane parallel to Earth's continuum. It lay about a hundred yards in the "blue" direction,and had formed this reddish blister on its hypersurface, which was swelling and shimmering. Thesight reminded me of a steel door being melted, as if the metal were expanding and about toexplode outward---

The sight made me feel, despite that I was in the freedom of hyperspace, claustrophobic.

In that gushing light, I could see that the hyperspace was swarming with traffic. In seventeendifferent time-space pockets, with the watery corridors before and behind them pinched shut,were great fleets of floating mountains of black metal, deck upon deck and turret upon turretbris-ding with deck-guns, bombards, and cannons. We had seen these lumbering battle barges onthe horizon when Mavors had allowed us to escape. Their flags showed the circle-and-spearemblem of Mars. Laestragonians.

Not far from these barges, patrolling the time-space corridors, were slim black ships,pentaconters and triremes, skipping across the curving interdimensional waters like bolts shotfrom crossbows. These black ships flew banners displaying a trident. Atlanteans.

Hanging in little time-space pockets of their own were huge machines shaped like suits of armor,half a mile or more from crown to spurs. The hulls of the machines were blazing with silver andgold, brightly enameled and decorated with delicate bas-relief. Spears or war-hammers the size ofaircraft carriers rested at the sides of the metal warlords. I gazed "past" their armored hulls attheir interior clockworks, engines, amplifiers, linkages; I saw alchemical hearts of white fireburning in glass vessels. I saw pistons the size of the Empire State Building. Tubes charged withatomic energy, like veins from the heart of the sun, ran down the core of each suit, from shoulderto heel.

The massive visors of the machines were being cranked open. Their lantern-eyes were being lit byattendants, who stood on ladders clamped to the cheek-plates, and reached carefully upward withlong poles tipped with fire. Their symbol was a crane in flight. Mulciber's people.