Titans of Chaos

Admiration. It was not his thanks that opened up my powers; it was his admiration. Hero-worship(heroine-worship?) burned like a fire in him; he touched me with it; I was ignited. He thought Iwas wise; I became wise. My eyes opened in many dimensions, seeing many things, imaginableand unimaginable.

I saw the final cause, or the for-the-sake-of-which, of the radar beams the Amazons had bouncedfrom us. It was child's play to rotate them into self-awareness and self-being, and send themmerrily on their way. False messages were sent to the ranging circuits in the Amazon guns. Shellsfell among the maenads, rather than among us.

The army, acting as a unit, had formed an artificial unity-of-purpose. It was like a monad, butlarger. I twisted the monad. I sent it to attack the nymphs.

The conceptual unity of the Amazon army was broken at that moment. All those calm,automaton-like fembot women in their black armor now were no longer programmed to act asone. They woke to independent thought: Some fired at the nymphs, some at the maenads, some atus. It was chaos on a mental level.

Too many fired at us. The shells fell. I could deactivate one or two dozen, but many dozens morewere still coming.

I reached out with limbs made of energy, took up my friends, sent a line of force into Vanity's ship,found another deck resting deep in another pocket in time-space, and rotated us all throughoverspace into the pocket.

I do not know what the others saw, what I looked like to them, or what they looked like tothemselves. Vanity screamed and screamed. Maybe she could see all of her bones and organsclearly. She folded in half, like a paper doll lifted too suddenly from the flat surface, and her feetwere occupying the same space as her skull, brain, eyes.

Something that lived inside Quentin's chest, something bright and pure, seemed to wake up andlook around curiously.

I could hot move Colin. He seemed solid. I could not lift him out of the hyperplane.

Boom. An explosion went off where we had been standing. The shock wave raced out in threedimensions, but did not reach us. Ripples on a pond cannot touch a bird hovering above it.

I stepped belowdeck into a small cabin. It was paneled with pale wood and lit with a silverlantern. There were barrels lashed to the cabin wall to our left, a small stack of square crateslashed down to the right.