She was not talking to me. It was Quentin who answered: 'Victor, can you stun our ladies here with some paralysis beam? They cannot attack us again without breaking the law of oaths. I spare their lives.'
A glance from my higher sense showed me the strands of moral obligation running between Victor, Vanity, and Quentin. I saw group loyalty, and an obligation to abide by the outcome of elections. I had not appointed a proper chain of command, so no one had been in charge while Colin and I were missing. They had elected Quentin leader.
Well, that was a bit of a relief, wasn't it?
Quentin gave the order to Victor, who focused a narrow beam from his eye and touched one nymph after another with it. Something in their nerve-transmission changed when he touched them, and buried commands in their brain stems triggered their narcoleptic reflexes.
Good thing they were already lying down.
I shouted, 'Something just happened! I saw the lines of moral order flicker and jump-'
Quentin said, 'What's it mean?'
I said, 'There was something-a duty. When the nymphs broke that duty, it suddenly became useful to someone or something.'
Colin said, 'Bugs. The nymphs were bugged.'
'Or booby-trapped. We were supposed to win. We tripped a trap by stunning them.' I said,
'Leader-what do we do... ?' (I really enjoyed being able to say that to someone else.) Quentin said, 'Well... first, let's all get aboard the ship. Vanity can select a set of laws of nature that does not allow for...'
Colin was not listening to the leader. He was staring at me.
No, not at me. He was looking at the Amazon, who was still seated, glassy-eyed, on her steed about ten yards behind me.
Colin shouted, 'Bugs! Hey! Remember the- She's got the damn rifle bugged, too- Look out!'
The rifle barrel was evidently mounted on gimbals, and evidently controlled via some sort of remote-camera arrangement. Even though the Amazon was not moving, and the stock was motionless in her hands, the barrel had lifted and rotated to cover us. When I say 'us,' I mean Colin and me. We two were standing, from the point of view of the gun, one behind the other, so that one bullet could pass through us both.
There was no time to scream or blink or move. Victor exploded and fell over, as the rifle and the super-steed and the poor, unconscious Amazon were consumed in an explosion of blue fire.
Far, far too rapidly for me to act...
I saw the internal nature of the bullets loaded into the chamber. I could see it clearly, the inner workings of the rifle laid out as if spread on a diagram.
All four bullet-types could not be loaded and shot at once-I could see the stresses in the space- time where the mutually contradictory paradigms cancelled each other out.
But up to two could. The anti-psychic bullet for Colin and the space-collapsing shell for me, with a buckshot shell behind them both, to make sure we were peppered with pellets. The space-collapsing shell did not even need to strike me. It did not need to be in the same dimension I was in. All it had to do was ignite somewhere in the area.
Victor must have been experimenting with neurotransmitters. I saw the internal nature of something very rapid happen in his brain stem, as if thoughts were being transmitted from one section of his brain to another by faster-than-light particles, not by the snail- pace electrochemical charges across nerve cell surfaces. Of course, it was not faster- than-light to him. It was merely particles moving in excess of three million kilometers per second. In his paradigm, there was no upper limit to velocity.
The rifle, to be sure, operated on the same paradigm, and added extra charge to the rail gun to make the bullets come out faster. But the total energy in Victor's metal eye was evidently greater than that in the smaller metal eye hidden in the stock of the barrel.
In effect, the gun-core poured as much power as possible into the rail gun as quickly as possible, and Victor poured as much power into a magnetic beam he was using to collapse the gun barrel...
The bullets came out at 6 billion meters per second, roughly two hundred times the speed of light.
The particle beam radiating from Victor traveled at roughly 7.5 billion meters per second. The kinetic energy released as heat by the motion of those particles created a flash of flame brighter than the surface of a blue-white star...
It all happened at once.
Colin stepped in front of me, using that same impossible speed he had used before. He had his hand on my wrist, and did... something... to me.
The space-collapsing shell passed through me at faster-than-light speeds. In my paradigm, that meant it was outside of my frame of reference. It was traveling too quickly to affect or be affected by anything in my light-cone. Colin did something to the damn bullet so that it obeyed my paradigm. It turned into tachyons and vanished forever from our
