Titans of Chaos

Saturn built his world out of the raw materials of Chaos. The destiny-binding power of theOlympians can thus be factored into four component powers.

I listened with great interest as Circe taught me. Memories of a science I never knew blossomed inmy brain.

From overspace, I sensed the internal nature of the bullets that had blown that cross-section ofmy body into bloody rags. They contained a powerful field that sharply reduced the utility ofmatter, rotating the meaning-axis of material things toward zero.

It negated psychics, rendering matter useless to the paradigm used by Colin, which was also,according to our theory, one half of the same paradigm used by Vanity.

It negated what the maenads had done to me.

Please don't misunderstand me. It hurt. It really hurt. Usually hydrostatic shock will kill anyhuman struck with bullets of heavy caliber. A human body does not contain enough volume todisperse the kinetic energy of the impact.

But that body down there was merely a cross-section of mine. Merely one surface. And not myonly surface, either, and not my largest surface.

My true mass, calculating all the volumes of all my possible cross-sections, greatly exceeds whatcould be packed into a mere three-dimensional body.

No matter how much damage they did to that body, it was only harming one surface. Imagine avery painful skin wound. Even if your outermost layer of one patch of skin were entirely burned,ripped away, and destroyed, it would not destroy your body, reach any important organs, or doany real damage.

It really hurt. It hurt like the dickens.

And it made me mad.

The Amazon leader on the right-I could see from her internal information that her name wasAntiope-was saying aloud, 'Target destroyed. Request confirmation..."

Lamia was shouting, "Not Nausicaa! That one is not Nausicaa! Shoot her with the anti-siren shell!

Shoot, shoot, shoot!"

The interior workings of the rifles were fascinating. There were four separate magazines with fourseparate types of ammunition. There were four thumb-switches to select which magazine wasactive. As the round was chambered, a magnetic impulse accelerated it from the barrel. Thesedevices were not "rifles" at all, but rail guns.