John Wright - Titans of Chaos

With a mechanical precision, each Amazon shouldered her weapon.

The gun crews sent out range-finding pulses of radar energy, which I could feel, useful and innately undreamlike, bouncing obediently off our ship and returning with information to the guns.

The covens of nymphs all raised their torches. With a hissing murmur, the coven-mistresses spoke a word. The flames turned black as midnight, black as pitch, and the shadows of the women began to billow out from them like pools of ink.

The choir-leader raised her wand, and the choir of sirens drew in a breath.

Laverna smiled.

Something rose up from the pool of muck where Victor had melted.

And rose and rose, up and up.

It was a dragon. A cybernetic leviathan. An armored segmented wormlike thing, with weapons and projections built along every ring-segment of his long, long body.

The dragon-worm, five hundred yards long, thousands of tons of armed and armored flesh and horn and bone, metal and wire and substances unknown, raised a sleek serpentine head, parted serrated mandibles, and opened a mouth ringed with row on row of crystalline teeth, to reveal a central orb of blazing azure, buried deep in his throat, surrounded by a symmetrical array of boxy muscles and nerves and solenoid coils.

His eye. Victor's eye.

The crystal teeth acted as amplifiers.

What came from his mouth was brighter than the sun. It seemed almost a solid thing, and the main axis of the discharge path was surrounded with concentric tubes of lightning sparks and positronic discharges. ,

For a split second, all was utterly silent.

In silence, the beam reached across the intervening space and touched Lamia and burned her instantly to ash. The ground behind her sagged, for it was now molten rock. The mountaintop exploded in each direction, sending out tons of ash and smoke. In silence, we saw a shock wave rush out from the point of impact, a wall of dust and rubble flickering outward at the speed of sound, concentric rings of shattered destruction.

Then the sound hit us. It was as if a brick wall fell on us.

Back on the island, he had not found the materials he needed to construct all parts of his body under the sea. That had been a prototype, a toy. This was the real thing. A battlewagon. The real Victor: an adult Telchine, fully grown and fully armed.

A moment before the sound struck, I said nervously, "Leader, what do we do?" And Quentin answered softly, "Destroy them." But he was not talking to me. Quentin was in the path of a golden ray of light one of the lesser weapon-ports along the spine of the dragon-thing was shedding. Something large and dark and catlike flickered out from behind Quentin and slithered into, of all places, Colin's guitar. At the same moment, Phobetor (or, I should say, a grinning Colin inside Phobetor's body) was scuttling half-bent across the deck to snatch up the guitar.

His hoof touched a spot where the Chaos muck was still bubbling. Now he straightened up again, standing at an odd angle to the deck, as if it were a flat surface to him.

When the shock wave passed over him, it did not knock him flat. Instead, he grew larger, and the wind swirled around his mane and shaggy hair, and he spread his wings to catch it. And he laughed.

At the same moment when the dragon sheered off the top of the mountain, the siren choir, to save themselves, rotated into hyperspace and unleashed a dire barrage of death music. An all-destroying energy filled the area.

I could see them. This little pocket of dream-space in which we were stranded, this landscape of cherry blossom trees, was surrounded in all directions by a hollow four-dimensional bubble of chaos stuff. Imagine a firm island surrounded by a marshy lake, a solid planet surrounded by vacuum. The sirens jumped off the shore when their part of the island erupted, stepped into space when the planet was under attack.

It was a mistake. The guitar, with no amplifiers and no speakers, woke at the laughter of the demon prince, and jarring electric noise, as loud as the shock wave that heralded its birth, thundered out in all directions.

Colin started to play.

He was not a good player, I admit, but he had energy. He was charged with a sexual tension; his music screamed and roared and reached up with arms of invincible passion, and smashed the barrage of solemn and ornate siren choirs into stunned and broken notes. He rocked.

The death energy was absorbed and began to dance. It fell to our left and right and tore huge swaths out of the ground, toppling cherry trees and quenching the sunlight in those areas. But it did not touch us.

And the chaos, the whirling, maddened chaos in which the sirens had so foolishly flung themselves, now opened many eyes, which shone and sparkled at the roaring electronic music; and reached out with many hands, all snapping their fingers to the driving backbeat, and came alive. Chaos came alive, throbbing with Colin's rhythms.

The sirens attempted to rotate further into higher dimensions, but the passion and madness Colin wove around them with his music did not admit the possibility of higher dimensions. There was no place to run; there was no escape from chaos.

Jerking angular bodies made of chaos substance, horned and clawed and spurred, rose up, roaring, and they danced to the pounding screams of Colin's smoking guitar. The devil-things tore the sirens to bits, drew them down into the muck, and smothered them.

At once the tune changed from a ragged tumult to something wild and strange and sorrow-torn: Gold be the hue of my true lover's hair Rose red her lip, and bright her eyes I know my love and know despair

She scorns my love, for she is wise. Wisdom tells her not to be Enamored of a boy like me Her thoughts are high; her heart is fine Too fine to belong to a heart like mine. I love my love and well she knows, I love the grass whereon she goes But I know the day will never come When she and I will be as one.

And then I felt Colin's music gathering itself out of the air and then enter into me.

I did not understand what this music-creature was. Unknown energies thrilled along my nervous system. Something in Colin's driving passion woke something deep in me, and, all at once, I was aware of a wide area of time and space, dream and reality, multiple levels of the complex web of unknowns we called the universe.

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 I was wise; I became wise. My eyes opened in many dimensions, seeing many things, imaginable and unimaginable.

I saw the final cause, or the for-the-sake-of-which, of the radar beams the Amazons had bounced from us. It was child's play to rotate them into self-awareness and self-being, and send them merrily on their way. False messages were sent to the ranging circuits in the Amazon guns. Shells fell 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, but larger. I twisted the monad. I sent it to attack the nymphs.