Titans of Chaos

by John C. Wright

  My horse reared up-it was some implanted program or instinct-to catch a volley of gunfire meant for me in its armored fiberglass chest. Hammer blows struck my shoulder and leg on my left side as I was flung back off the saddle. My armor stiffened into metal immobility, ringing like a bell as the two shots ricocheted from the suddenly rigid surface.

  Thunk. Then I was in the wet grass, watching my horse toppling backwards, its chest blown open by incendiary fire. I reached up with tendrils of hyperspace energy to deflect his momentum and weight so he did not fall on me. With a roaring scream, almost like the whistle of a bird, my steed fell beside where I lay, but did not crush me. I took cover behind the still-heaving body.

  I was lashing out with my tendrils, trying to turn off as many monads of as many troopers as I could, as they fled. I negated the energy supplies of several rifles. Others I gave free will, and they became snakes of iron, hissing, or molten ribbons, lashing.

  Then certain of the shells, still flaring and buzzing, lodged among my dying steed's rib cage, erupted, sending ribbons of overspatial energy into the red and blue directions of hyperspace.

  I felt a ripple of pressure across my hypersurface; my tendrils were crushed back into three-space and lay prostrate.

  I saw the shining wheels of Leucosia and Parthenope draw back from the convulsion of hyperenergies; but then my "eyes" above and below the world-plane were dazed by the space-collapsing overpressure. I lost sight of the sirens, but they were not far away.

  However, this was not the irresistible pressure of one of Miss Daw's songs, nor was the pressure even, or intelligently applied. I was still able to force more substance into an unwounded tendril, wrap it around a nearby tree, negate my weight, and pull myself briefly in and out of hyperspace. I disappeared and reappeared in a tree one hundred yards away.

  I was glad I did: Blue dazzle lanced from the cyclopes-eyes of the fleeing Amazonian superhorses (who ran with their heads turned backwards) and smote the body of my steed. Some chemical or electrical reaction broke open the cyclopes-eye in my steed; a ten-foot-in-diameter area exploded into an instant mass of sticky white flame.

  This was while they were running away at sixty miles an hour. I would hate to be a normal person on the receiving end of any serious attack from them.

  Shrill screams and yells came in the near distance. I saw three or four trees flipping end-over-end through the blue sky above the tree line. The maenads were near, and getting nearer.

  Nine or ten svelte figures in black catsuits lay prone on the wet grasses near the edge of the glade, motionless as dropped dolls. These were the Amazons I had knocked senseless when I swept all their controlling monads out of alignment. Only one of them was up; she was on her knees, weapon to her shoulder, and firing at her fleeing comrades-I had taken more time with the first Amazon I struck, and implanted an entelechy, a set of instructions, into her brain atoms.

  Unfortunately, now with two sirens in the area, I could not open up any energy-channels in hyperspace to pass any new instructions to my doll. Like a windup toy, she merely fired till her magazine was empty, and then she knelt, motionless, eyes blank, finger still depressing the trigger.

  I wanted to send more instructions to her, but could not. I dearly wanted to wake up all ten Amazons and have a personal force of deadly attack dolls-but hyperspace was confused and rippling. The pressure was patchy: immense in some places, weak in others. I was getting intermediate visions from my higher senses, but it hurt to try to open my higher eyes, and my sense-impressions were uncertain and blurry.

  One thing I did sense was a flare of usefulness. With a flicker of motion, I detected a little crystal marble, one of the eyes of Lamia, sail past through the trees, not far from my position. I could not see where the marble was with my eye-the leaves blocked my vision, and my sight was impeded by surfaces at the moment. But that eye was so useful, for a moment, to Lamia, that I was sure she had found me.

  The pressure in hyperspace increased. Now I heard the sirens singing. My senses dimmed and went entirely blind.

  I started scrambling down from branch to branch.

  Through a gap in the leaves, I saw a girl. To her lips was pressed a double-flute, and her cheeks were belled out. With her right hand (on one flute) she played a tripping melody; with her left (on the other flute), she fingered the harmony. The reed had a buzzing quality like a recorder.

  She was dressed in a white toga of classical design, a very wide belt, and sandals with straps crisscrossing all the way up her calves to tie at the knee. Her hair was piled atop her head and held in place with golden pins. I could see her bare back; and saw two long scars running parallel to her spine, where her wings had been removed after she and her sisters lost their duel with the Muses.

  I unslung my rifle (Did I mention I had been carrying Antiope's rifle all this time, and that its stock had been swinging against my butt and hip and leaving a bruise?), brought it to my shoulder, and took aim. I used the thumb button to chamber a dimension-flattening round.

  I could not remember if you were supposed to close one eye or not when aiming, or whether you were supposed to hold your breath, or breathe naturally, or what. Where was I supposed to put my other hand? Closer to the trigger or farther down the barrel? Was it okay to rest the barrel on a tree branch to steady it?

  Dammit. Why hadn't I learned anything useful in school?

  In films, people just shoot, and if they are bad guys they miss and if they are good guys they hit.

  In films, they also don't hesitate.

  I hesitated. Every thought I should have thought about the Amazons I now thought about this unarmed woman. I thought about Quentin's warnings, about how killing someone would bring a curse down on us.

  On the other hand, if I were dead, what did I care if I were cursed or not?

  I thought: Some woman had to suffer labor to bring into being the life I am about to destroy.

  When she was a baby, this woman had gooed and smiled and cried and taken her first steps. She was not evil, not back then. There is some mother who loves her, out there, somewhere. Even Grendel Glum had a mother who missed him.

  I decided to close one eye, rest on the tree branch, put my other hand farther down the barrel, hold my breath.

  I thought: There are countless millions of babies on this planet alone, gooing and smiling and crying and taking first steps. This woman is part of the group setting out to kill all of them. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Any jury in the world would call this self-defense.

  Curse away, curses. Sorry.

  There was no muzzle-flash, and the only noise was a sharp, flat crack. The recoil knocked me backwards off the branch, so that I was hanging upside down by my knees, the rifle swinging like a pendulum at the end of a shoulder strap I was still clutching.

  Her music stopped. Upside down and facing the wrong way, I did not see where my shot had flown. (Was I a murderess, or not?) But the multiple strands of music-energy erupted like a flare into hyperspace to the blue and red of me. The fact that I could see that happening at all seemed to indicate that I had wounded her, or at least startled her.

  The pressure in hyperspace was starting to get patchy and clear up. There was a second siren song, this one played on strings (maybe a lyre?) somewhere in the area, but it must have been farther away, because I was able to wiggle a hyperlimb into the substance of four-space, negate some of my weight by bending world-lines, and drop lightly to the ground.

  Or, not so lightly. In middrop, reality hiccuped. I was just a girl. Some maenad nearby must have done her Grendel-thing. I fell hard, and it hurt, but nothing seemed broken. I wiggled across the leaves and took up my fallen rifle.

  The lyre-music got louder. The second siren was near and getting nearer. The shrill screams and yells of the maenads rose up and drowned and quenched the lyre-music.

  A maenad came suddenly around the tree where I crouched. She had in hand a fourteen-foot length of iron pole. It looked like an I-beam
ripped from the electrical transformer towers I had passed. She turned to face me: Less than a dozen feet separated us. There were worms and serpents woven in her hair. Adders raised their heads from her oozy locks and stared at me.

  Her eyes were two pools of drugged insanity. She opened her mouth and screamed like a peacock.

  No moralizing or hesitating this time. I chambered an anti-psychic round, brought up the weapon, and shot. She was leaping toward me, and she caught the shell in her mouth. Her head exploded.

  Blood and brains flew everywhere. Instead of being grossed out, or horrified, I laughed aloud.

  I am sorry I laughed. It makes me sound like some sort of sick, sick person. But I thought I was about to die. I was sure of it. And I was relieved. I was glad to be alive.

  Her eyes, her eyes had frightened me so. Sometimes, at night, I can still see them.

  More running through the trees.

  I could hear the noise and earthquake-clamor of the advancing maenads to my left and right, and yellow smoke and dust hung over the treetops.

  Then, a break in the trees. There was a narrow strip of grass, and then a cliff. I could see the texture of the trees far below, like green cumulus clouds. There was a line cutting through the trees. A highway? In the distance, in the horizon, a gray smudge was gathered around a long line of blue haze. The sea? I did not see how that could be Los Angeles-the terrain looked too green and hilly. On the other hand, I did not know what the city looked like from the landward side. I did not even know what planet this was.

  I saw a group of maenads break free of the tree line about a hundred yards, maybe two hundred, to the left of me.

  I stood still, hoping they would see the uniform and conclude I was an Amazon. But they were not fooled. On they came.

  One of them laughed and simply jumped off the cliff to her death. The others screamed like falcons and ran toward me. Trees behind me swayed and toppled, and hundred-feet-tall cylinders of timber began raining over the cliffside. My armor stiffened once or twice as splinters as long as my forearm, shooting through the air at the speed of sound, bounced off the high-tech Amazonian fabric.

  It knocked me sliding off the cliff. Before I fell, the last thing I did was chamber and shoot an anti-psychic round into the cliff face half a yard away from me.

  The recoil tore the rifle out of my hands. But since the energy-pulse from the shell negated, for a moment, whatever it was the maenads were doing to me to compress me, I merely reached out with a tendril and organized the world-path of the falling rifle so that it jumped immediately back into my hand.

  On wings of silver and red shining stuff, I soared down the cliff face. Reality blinked, and I was a falling girl. I shot again. I was a soaring four-dimensional angel-thing. Blink again: 3-D girl again, falling. Shot again: 4-D angel. Blink: 3-D. Shot: 4-D. You get the picture.

  Twenty yards up from an inviting patch of grass, and I was out of that particular type of ammo. I had given Antiope my spare clips, after all. Blink: 3-D again. The girl falls.

  The armor, which stiffened on impact to protect against rifle shots, also stiffened on impact when I fell. This meant no absorbing any shock with my legs, no clever tumbling, no rolling-just a bad, bad fall.

  There was a terrible stabbing pain in my leg when I tried to stand, and I could not stand. And this was no mere "surface" pain; I was no longer occupying a huge fourth-dimensional volume, with plenty of room to disperse shocks into. No, I was simply the little blond girl the maenads wanted me to be.

  I suppose it should have been impossible to break a leg when encased in a perfectly rigid metal suit. But maybe one of the smart maenads had been inspired to believe I would break a leg when I fell. So here I was.

  The maenads swarmed down the cliff like a troop of monkeys. One girl ran down the cliffside as if it were a flat surface, her personal gravity at right angles to the rest of the Earth.

  Several of the girls flew. They did not fly like birds do; they did not move through the air like Victor levitating. No: They whirled through the air like autumn leaves in a gale, swirling high and low, pitching up and down, arms and legs spread wide, tangled hair-mops shedding grape-leaf.

  The maenads landed around me like paratroopers. Some merely touched down like ballerinas stepping off an invisible carriage step. Some landed on their heads. One of them splattered into a wash of broken bones and wide-splashed blood, and gathered herself together, and stood up, laughing drunkenly. Several of them splattered and did not get up.

  I shot and shot and shot and shot.

  The other shells, meant to stop the other paradigms, did little or nothing to these girls. Maybe one fell down on her rump and started crying, maybe two. Most of them slapped the bullets away like annoying hornets. Or brushed away the bleeding wounds as if they were nothing, Colin-like.

  They had wands and spears in hand, and more than one girl was still clutching a convenient tree or oblong slab of rock. Then they were in a circle around me, dancing and screaming and laughing, pounding me over and over, stabbing, bludgeoning, whipping. One girl on her hands and knees put her teeth to my arm and bit.

  I was bruised, but was not hurt. Even the tree trunk smashing over and over against me merely drove my armor-stiffened body into the dirt, but did not crush me instantly into red paste.

  But I was blacking out, and the girl biting my vambrace was reaching for the seam where my helmet met my neck...

  A column of fire fell down from heaven. It was a pillar, a turning inferno fifty yards high and six yards in diameter, surrounded by a whirlwind of smoke and ash. It landed in the midst of the dancing maenads and exploded. Long ropes and tendrils of flame surged out in each direction, taking up the half-naked girls and throwing them against the cliffside.

  The maenads shrilled their horrid war cry and rushed into the fire, stabbing and swinging their spears and tree trunks. The column vomited fire across the spears and trees and ignited them.

  Then the column shrank, grew brighter, stiffened, and exploded outward in each direction with mind-numbing violence. The flash dazzled me; the report deafened me. In the afterimage, I saw the silhouettes of women spinning end over end, against rolling clouds of red and black smoke shot through with tongues of fire.

  Good thing Amazons built their armor to be fireproof. Or maybe the column of fire had done something particular to save me. Because when the swirling fires died down, there, in the midst of the smoking crater, surrounded by smoking ropes and helixes of dying flame, was Colin.

  "You look good in that outfit, Dark Mistress," were the first words out of his mouth.

  "Yeah, so do you," I whispered. He was in his classy black tuxedo, with a large gold ring shining on his finger. "Kind of hurt, here..." I finished.

  All the rapid healing the maenads had been doing must have peopled the area with a lot of healing energies, because all Colin did was lean down and kiss me on the thigh, and my leg was fixed. Once again, there was no transition, no logic to his power. One moment: broken leg, pain...

  the next: no pain.

  Maenads scattered to each side of us were groaning and giggling and climbing to their feet, shaking ashes from long (utterly unburned) hair.

  Colin put his arm around me, picked me up, hugging me tightly to his chest, and he kissed me fiercely on the lips. With his thumb, he turned the collet of his ring inward. Maenads blinked, their eyes blank, and began looking left and right, making little murmurs of annoyance and wonder.

  The fire and ash had made the maenads take their crazed eyes off us for an eyeblink, and that was all the ring of Gyges needed.

  A swarm of black feathers erupted from Colin's back as ten-feet-wide hawk wings expanded into view. And then I was in the arms of a dark-winged angel in a tux, and we were flying away, skimming the trees.

  Behind us, disappointed maenads whined and stamped their feet.

  Nymphs

  In the air, his arms around me, I spoke over the rush and whistle of the winds against his black wings. "
Pillar of fire. How did you manage that?"

  He shouted back, cheerfully. "I am a shape-changer. Why assume we are limited to organic shapes? Quentin told me the secret name of fire."

  I said, "Where are the others?"

  At that moment, I saw or imagined the rifle slung over my shoulder flicker and grow bright. It was hard to use my higher senses when I was enclosed in Colin's arms, but something in the rifle had just become very useful to someone else.

  Without pause, I shrugged my shoulder half an inch into the blue direction and let the shoulder strap fall past and through my arm, grabbed the barrel with the other hand, and flung the mass away, amplifying the outward momentum- it was the quickest way I could think of to get the weapon as far away from us as quickly as possible.

  The weapon had a computer inside it. Why not a radio link, a tracking device, a coordinating circuit for the commanding officer to find missing squad members? Why not a self-destruct mechanism?

  The weapon opened up like a flower of pale fire. In the middle of the explosion hovered a blue eye, shedding concentric shells of crystal. Shrapnel ricocheted off my suddenly stiff armor. Blue light clung to Colin, flaming like cold napalm; he was falling, his face covered with blood.

  I was weightless, with wind in my face. Colin's arms were no longer around me.

  I rotated energy-wings into this continuum and negated gravity beneath me. Weightless again, but this time the wind was blowing the other direction, since I was soaring up instead of falling down.

  Where was Colin? I saw blue sky and white clouds rotating around me as I spun.

  Energy from the higher dimension struck me, a ringing lance made of music. It cut my wings from my body and crushed my higher sense into numbness. I screamed and screamed.