John Wright - Titans of Chaos

Colin rolled away from Trismegistus and put his hand somehow through and inside me without touching me, plucked out the deadly music with his hand. That saved my life, though it did not stop the pain or internal bleeding.

The music-thing looked like a scorpion made of fire in Colin's hand. He threw it at Trismegistus.

The barrage of various heavy weapons lining the dragon armor, now that Trismegistus could not step sideways into the fourth dimension, could hurt him.

Or, they would have hurt him, had he not been able to outrun the bullets shot at him. Trismegistus turned into a blur of motion, but it was a blur localized at about a hundred yards off the port side of our damaged ship, and, with no space-bending techniques at hand, he could not outrun some of Victor's energy weapons, many of which were firing at faster-than-light speeds Newton would allow, but not Einstein.

Colin waved his hand at the chaos muck boiling and seething off the port side. His teeth were red and clenched with pain; his fist was shaking with weakness. His voice was breathy and lacked timbre: "Dream-stuff! Your Prince calls! Dance and play! Rip and rend and slay!"

Evidently, despite his weakness, he was inspired with pain and anger, because the whole environment caught fire, and the liquid earth, which had merely been bubbling and splashing, now erupted as if a million land mines, buried beneath the fluid gunk, had all gone off at once. The whole section of ground in that quarter jumped into the sky; the sky there fell.

The blue metal eye shot out of the mouth of the dragon and floated over to the blind and eyeless Victor. A valve or aperture opened in Victor's brow, and he placed the metal eye half within.

It glowed and rotated. Now Victor could see again.

The metal foil covering his body puffed up with magnetic charge. He moved. He was here, gently picking up both Colin and me.

Then he was down belowdeck. Vanity had been clawed and cut by the beast, and I saw red arterial blood spurting. Quentin's spirit was dissolving and flickering, but it was bent over Vanity, trying to apply pressure to her horrible wounds. His hands were insubstantial, though, and the precious blood simply flooded through them. Tears of fire were burning on Quentin's cheeks. He was too dazed to realize that his hands were only made of phantom-stuff, and could not help her.

Victor's voice came from his chest plate, amplified tremendously to outshout the thunder of the guns and thunderbolts going off overhead: "You'll die without your body, Quentin."

Quentin moaned something, but his wand, up on deck, tapped impatiently.

Quentin's spirit flashed upward through the deck boards and returned with his clay body. The spirit seemed to have great difficulty getting back into it, however. The dark and fiery silhouette was trying to wriggle into it through the mouth like a man putting on a wetsuit, but the spirit was losing fire and color, as if it were fainting, bleeding, dying.

The wand jumped up in the air, and a light came from it.

It poked the Quentin-body in the mouth, and seemed to act as a shoehorn. The spirit was slurped inside, a reverse-genie returning to a tiny lamp.

Colin could not stand. He dragged himself on his belly over to Vanity, he bit back a cry of horror and alarm, and he lifted up his hands to apply pressure to her spurting wounds. 'Tourniquet!" His voice was desperation. "Tourniquet here, or it is death!"

Victor was having blood drip out of one hand. No, not blood, but his molecular blood-creatures, the ones programmed to heal.

With his other hand, Victor was tearing up long strips from the deck boards he knelt on, which were bubbling and turning into bandages when the beam from his one eye struck them.

Victor's metal cloth suit ripped itself into shreds or tentacles. One strand formed a noose around Vanity's gushing arm, tightening. The spurting stopped. The others, like a hundred-armed hydra of medicine, took bandages, applied them, probed other wounds.

I am ashamed to admit I was too much in pain to move. That does not sound shameful, does it?

But the truth was, I was too much in pain to try to move, and I could not think straight. The only thing I was thinking at the time was, Why are they all looking at Vanity? Why isn't Victor helping me?

Sometimes the best in people comes out during emergencies. Sometimes not.

Quentin staggered over to Vanity.

I heard Colin say, "Don't look. This is pretty bloody bad."

Quentin made a noise like a whipped dog, a painful whimpering. He whispered, "Darling, don't die. Don't die."

Vanity mumbled something, and made a noise something between a groan and a shriek. I heard gargling. It sounded like blood was obstructing her throat.

My eyes could not focus. I stared at the ceiling. I heard the conversation, but I did not look at Vanity. My imagination was filled with pictures of her soft flesh cut and lacerated, blood and other fluid seeping and spurting from open wounds, white bone fragments sticking from flesh.

Maybe the reality was not so bad as what I imagined. Or maybe it was worse.

Quentin said, "What is going on? What are you doing to her?"

Victor said in a cold voice, "Leader, we must wake Vanity back up, so that she can get us out of here before Trismegistus returns. Her body is trying to put her into shock, to release her from pain. Do I have your permission to apply a stimulant?"

"Wh-what? Is it going to hurt her?"

"The pain-signals reaching her brain from her nervous system will increase."

"If, if we don't-"

"Leader, we cannot possibly withstand another attack from Trismegistus. All of you are wounded, and I lost ninety percent of my body mass. Will you give the order?"

I did not hear Quentin's reply; he must have nodded.

Colin said, "Steady on. Steady." I do not know if he was telling Victor to be careful in applying medication to Vanity, or telling Quentin to retain his self-control.

Vanity let out a gasping scream. It sounded horrible.

Quentin: "Darling, I'm here. Don't worry. It will be over in a moment. We need to-"

Vanity: (Something inaudible.)

Quentin: "What?"

Colin: "She said the chaos was in the way. She needs solid reality, something with walls, boundaries, definitions."

Quentin: "Victor, can you stabilize the area?"

Victor: "Yes. But Trismegistus will find us the moment the storm drops."

Quentin: "Do it."

Victor pried his blue orb eye out of his head and threw it upward. I saw it fly up overhead. At the top of its arc, it passed through the trapdoor and shot blue light in a fan toward the starboard side, the side away from where Trismegistus still (I hoped) was struggling with the storm and dodging cannon fire from the dragon-corpse.

Chaotic matter was evidently even easier to command than solid matter. The storm on that side fell quiet with an eerie swiftness.

Vanity mumbled something. A command. I saw the reflection of a green dazzle coming from her position where she lay.