Titans of Chaos

The rifle barrel was evidently mounted on gimbals, and evidently controlled via some sort ofremote-camera arrangement. Even though the Amazon was not moving, and the stock wasmotionless in her hands, the barrel had lifted and rotated to cover us. When I say "us," I meanColin and me. We two were standing, from the point of view of the gun, one behind the other, sothat one bullet could pass through us both.

There was no time to scream or blink or move. Victor exploded and fell over, as the rifle and thesuper-steed and the poor, unconscious Amazon were consumed in an explosion of blue fire.

Far, far too rapidly for me to act...

I saw the internal nature of the bullets loaded into the chamber. I could see it clearly, the innerworkings of the rifle laid out as if spread on a diagram.

All four bullet-types could not be loaded and shot at once-I could see the stresses in the space-timewhere the mutually contradictory paradigms cancelled each other out.

But up to two could. The anti-psychic bullet for Colin and the space-collapsing shell for me, with abuckshot shell behind them both, to make sure we were peppered with pellets. Thespace-collapsing shell did not even need to strike me. It did not need to be in the same dimension Iwas in. All it had to do was ignite somewhere in the area.

Victor must have been experimenting with neurotransmitters. I saw the internal nature ofsomething very rapid happen in his brain stem, as if thoughts were being transmitted from onesection of his brain to another by faster-than-light particles, not by the snail-pace electrochemicalcharges across nerve cell surfaces. Of course, it was not faster-than-light to him. It was merelyparticles moving in excess of three million kilometers per second. In his paradigm, there was noupper limit to velocity.

The rifle, to be sure, operated on the same paradigm, and added extra charge to the rail gun tomake the bullets come out faster. But the total energy in Victor's metal eye was evidently greaterthan that in the smaller metal eye hidden in the stock of the barrel.

In effect, the gun-core poured as much power as possible into the rail gun as quickly as possible,and Victor poured as much power into a magnetic beam he was using to collapse the gun barrel...

The bullets came out at 6 billion meters per second, roughly two hundred times the speed of light.