‘I do not understand, Imperator. There is no empire.’
‘What has been will be. If you are victorious.’ The machine-emperor paused. ‘The Minion thinks he has won. He has recovered the time-distorter from his Hegemonic tools and now plans to use it again for another purpose.’
‘Imperator! What is there to talk about?’ Mayar interrupted brokenly. ‘All is gone!’
Impatiently Aton cautioned Mayar to keep silence. The Imperator hummed loudly. ‘At present potential time, alike to primordial chaos, has drowned the world of real time,’ it resumed. ‘The Chronotic storm, however, is abating; soon orthogonal time will form again on the gulf’s surface, like a skin forming on a liquid. If allowed to congeal without interference, it is impossible to say what that new world will be like. That is where the Minion intends to come in. He will use the time-distorter to project a world agreeable to Hulmu, his master. That must not be. You must fight him, Aton. You must take the distorter away from him.’
‘But I don’t think I can, Imperator,’ Aton said. ‘I have already learned to my cost that the Minion is strong.’
‘With the help of religion, you can defeat him.’
Without warning a wide-angled beam of light shot out from the Imperator and bathed Aton. Immediately an extraordinary flood of thoughts and feelings flooded his mind, all connected with the religion in which he had been brought up. Prayers, catechisms and hymns such as he had been taught as a child seemed to sing in his brain.
The emotion engendered by this experience made him feel humble. Objectively, he recognised the use of a thought ray similar in principle to a field-effect device, except that it worked in reverse. The Imperator was reminding him of his religious training. But why?
‘The Minion approaches. Come.’
Once more the door to the inner chamber in the machine’s metal side opened. Aton hesitated.
Then he entered. The Imperator phased into the strat and went speeding down, seeming to know where to go. After what felt like a long wait, Aton became aware that it had killed its velocity and was idling. The door opened, and through it he could see the strat, spreading and convoluting before his tortured eyes.
The message was clear. He ventured into the strat.
He saw the Minion almost immediately, soaring up from the deep, carrying the big tube-like device Aton had seen once before. As Aton came closer he saw the jewel eyes flash and glint through the supernal fire that surrounded them both. The Minion’s mouth was agape and raucous laughter issued from it.
‘Ha ha ha! You want my little toy! Oh, no! This time Hulmu will have you!’
Aton moved in to the attack.
The Minion pointed the tube. Vapours gushed forth and Aton felt himself being wafted away, his four-dimensional form deformed and eroded. With difficulty he evaded the vapours, and then he closed with the Minion and wrestled bodily with him.
The Minion had more than one shape! Limbs and extruberances shot out from him in all the directions of the five-dimensional space in which they fought. Aton found himself encaged in a living organism of roots, limbs, and branches.
He himself was not without resource. With a supreme effort he caused every cell of his body to discharge the transcendent energy it had gained by immersion in the strat. There was a sort of explosion, an uncoiling of the immaterial continuum, and he was free.
But he was weakened. And then, before he could take stock of himself, he was imprisoned once more.
This time he seemed to be transfixed or encaged in brilliantly coloured glass or crystal. There was a sudden shift, and then he knew he had been transferred to a similar, but second prison.
He was inside the Minion’s eyes, being flashed alternately from one to the other!
Laughingly the Minion ejected him and hovered jeering. His ability to alter him in size gave Aton a real appreciation of the greater power of his enemy. He began to despair.
‘Hee hee hee! First I will reform the world, and then I will take you down again to Hulmu, poor little captain!’
Tenaciously Aton circled, and then moved in again.
Through his brain was running a prayer, one he had known since he was a child. Something within him was urging him to say this prayer aloud, and when he came near the Minion again, he sent the vibrations of the words spearing into the strat.
‘Holy Father, bringer of comfort, deliver us from the enemy of time.’
That was all, but surprisingly the Minion recoiled as if in horror. Aton pursued him, speaking the prayer over and over again.
‘Holy Father, bringer of comfort, deliver us from the enemy of time. Holy Father, bringer of comfort, deliver us from the enemy of time.’
The Minion shrieked with pain. He flashed out and writhed in a million illusory shapes, running the full gamut of his evil energies in an uncontrolled spasm. The prayer seemed to reduce him to a condition akin to the effect of nerve gas on a normal nervous system. Aton dived in and seized the time-distorter. The Minion struggled briefly to retrieve it, then fell back.
Then the Minion suddenly fell headlong into the gulf at extraordinary speed. ‘Hulmu! I have failed you again! Ohhhhhh…’
And Aton had carried out the orders of the Imperator.
The God’s Imposer was junked.
The huge ship had run head-on into countless enemy vessels. Smaller craft it had swatted like flies. But finally the total of those collisions had proved crippling. The twisted and shattered hulls of upwards of a dozen Hegemonic vessels were embedded in the God’s Imposer, and the giant drive units now were silent.
‘The ortho field won’t last long, sir!’ gasped an ensign. ‘It’s down in parts of the ship already.’
‘Then kill yourself, you little fool, like the others are doing,’ growled Commander Haight. ‘Me, I’m not hanging around like a trapped rat.’
And in fact the bridge was littered with suicides, including Prince Philipium. No one had bothered to use the ship’s many life rafts or strat suits. But Commander Haight was not on the bridge. He was down in the guts of the ship, just within its outer wall. And the ensign was stationed at one of the ports that, had the armada succeeded, would have been pouring troops on to the ground.
‘There’s something I’ve always wanted to experience,’ Haight grated out, ‘and now I’m going to. Open the port, Ensign.’
‘But, sir!’
‘You heard me, you young squirt. It’s an order. Get that port open!’
Trembling, the ensign turned his back to the port and operated a series of switches. The port whined slowly open, dilating iris-fashion. The safety cover went up.
Pressing his forearm against his eyes so that he would not be struck unconscious and fall to the deck, Commander Haight flung himself at a run into the strat.
‘To understand what has happened,’ said the Imperator to Aton, Inpriss Sorce, and the assembled archivists, ‘it is necessary to understand the nature of time and the origin of Church and empire.
‘Orthogonal time is reality. But reality cannot continue to subsist by itself. Like every structure in the universe it requires a certain kind of feedback on itself to remain steady. It requires something against which to rest itself, to react upon, otherwise, if it simply existed in a void, it would soon collapse into nothing.