Titans of Chaos

I was used to hyperspace being empty, my own private playground. Here it was seething with ahornet's nest of ships and men and armaments, the crossroads of hundreds of pathways throughtime-space. A port city for the traffic of the gods. And it was under guard. Archer's place had beenin one of the few dark corners of this multidimensional edifice.

And we had been skipping along in the middle of it. Shopping.

I had let one of the members of my squad leave me alone, to go off and play smooch-face withanother member...

Where, in all this mess and splendor and commotion of hyperspace, was Vanity?

I followed a group of morality strands, my obligations to the group, with my eye---

There! I saw the Argent Nautilus, with Vanity at the prow, sailing down one sharply curving tube(although, to her, I assume, the space looked flat and open) about twenty-five feet below thesurface of the street beneath the streets of Los Angeles, and about twenty meters in thedream-plane. Looking for me... ?

I tilted my wings and swam through the thick medium of hyperspace, moving toward Vanity andthe Argent Nautilus. She was about a quarter mile away from me, no farther, but the hyperspatialdistances here were longer because of the positive curve of the plane: It would take me twice aslong to cover the distance here that I could have covered on foot, had I dipped back into Earth'shome dimension. I was still afraid of the sleep effect rippling through the city, and wanted to stayabove (or should I say a-blue) of it.

I drew closer slowly. Victor and Quentin were standing on deck next to her, and Vanity (who, nodoubt, felt my gaze on her) was trying to point in my direction. It was not a direction she couldturn. Victor and Quentin turned their eyes left and right, but I was not left or right of them. Theylooked up and down, but I was not above or below them.

I shouted, but they did not seem to hear me. Where was Colin?

I redoubled my speed. With wings and tail and hands and feet, I clawed and waded, sloshed andswam and flew toward my friends.

There came a flash. A group of morality strands looping widely from the near distance running tome now lit up and glittered.

That blister bulging out from the dream-plane, I now saw, was the source of the sleep-spellsweeping over Los Angeles. Morality radiated in concentric waves from it, somehow obligatingthe men and machines, clocks and electric circuits of Earth to slumber.