Titans of Chaos

Victor said, "All we need to do is open our lead. Trismegistus had to introduce a chaos storm intothe environment to prevent Vanity from using her powers to escape; if he does that again, I canquell it, or turn the storm against him. Logically, he would not have risked doing that if he hadsome other way to overtake a Phaeacian. Therefore we should be able to outdistance him. If wecan hold him off long enough! We'll see about Quentin as soon as we have time."

Vanity stood for a moment, her lip trembling, her eyes bright with unshed tears. Then she noddedat Victor, turned, and knelt on the platform. A hatch hidden beneath the boards opened beneathher fingers. Beneath was a control panel, black with dozens of buttons.

She pushed one. A shunt opened in the shaft, and we were kicked to one side. Our fall was now atan angle. A steel door slid into place behind us. The stone around her neck flared green; wepassed another threshold, and another door fell to. Again her stone flared.

She was leaving an alternating pattern of different laws of nature behind us. In one stretch ofcorridor, kinetic energy was directly proportional to speed; in another, it was inverse; in a third, itwas inverse cubed. Another section of the corridor behind us turned black as she lowered thespeed of light in that segment to five kilometers per hour; if Trismegistus tried to pass throughthat area at any faster a speed, he would be outside of our frame of reference, unable to affect us.

It was certainly the cleverest thing I ever saw Vanity do.

Clever, but in vain. It was not working.

I said to Colin, "He's skipping out of the plenum. He's just going around the barriers Vanity issetting up. Can you get him?"

Colin looked behind us and saw nothing but dwindling concentric squares as we fell past deckafter deck. He said, "I don't see him."

I said, "Look with your heart. Follow my finger. Can you see the direction I'm pointing? There."

Because I could see the slender spindle-shape of the fourth-dimensional being, sliding from dreamto dream, parallel to the ship, but in a space skew to our space.

"I see him now. Tiny little thing, isn't he?" Colin made a grabbing gesture with his hand, like aman slapping a fly. "Got 'em. Ow! It stung me."

Colin's eyes rolled up in his head, and he fell to the deck. Mist began trickling out of his mouthand nose.

"Colin!" I knelt and put my arms around him. "Oh, dear God, Colin!"