Titans of Chaos

"Mine office also be to afflict men for many days with wounds and sores, rotten and full ofworms," the lion-headed knight announced. Colin was interested in the possibilities here, but bythat time, Quentin had banished the entity to its tasks. A tower made of great gray stones,tumbling hugely in the zero-g, was beginning to fall to pieces off our port bow. I had seen thetower cross over from the parallel plane of Earth's dreamland, but to the others, the tower musthave seemed to appear from nowhere.

Of course, we really did not need a tower. We needed the metals and other elements, or, I shouldsay, Victor did. He assumed his faceless, gold-skinned spaceworthy form and pulled himself acrossthe vacuum on magnetic beams. In the wreckage of the tower were iron and steel, carbon andwater, and so on.

The food the creature conjured from nothing was not harmed by exposure to vacuum andradiation: If anything, it was safer than normal. Radiation kills germs.

It was salt pork and hardtack, with a barrel of apples and a barrel of limes: soldiers' food fromthe days when soldiers manned towers. The water barrels made it intact, being watertight. Vanitywas surprised the water did not freeze in the cold of outer space, and I tried to explain to her howa thermos bottle worked.

The Marquis had also thoughtfully supplied the tower with strands of cable, useful for any numberof things in wartime, but they shattered like glass after exposure to vacuum. Colin wanted to keepthe culverins and bombards, but Victor melted them down with molecular engines. He let Colinkeep a harquebus, along with a forked stick to rest it on.

The Marquis was thorough. There were drums and trumpets and other military odds and ends.

The prize of the collection, and something I slid through the fourth dimension and swept acrossthe vacuum to recover myself, was the standard: It was the Union Jack. I also kept a spear to flyit from.

Victor manipulated the elements, absorbing mass from the walls and armory of the tower, andgrew new forms of life in his stomach, which he vomited out after gestation. I like Victor a lot, aswe all know, but sometimes I wonder about kissing him, you know?