The steeds were smart, fast, tireless, and strong. And brave. And well-trained. (Or should I say
"well-programmed"?) Just the kind of steed every girl dreams about.
The horses, like the women, were also "flat" in the fourth-dimensional direction, not unlike Victor, or Dr. Fell.
I should mention that I moved my cross-section one-hundredth of an inch redward into the material plane.
Had I rotated my body further, I could have produced any number of other cross-sections: phoenix, centaur, deer, dolphin, squid, energy ball, seven notes of music, or any combination thereof. But I rotated my body as little as I could, to get a body as much like my destroyed body inserted into Earth's three-space as I could get. It would have taken a scientific instrument to detect the slight differences in measurements, volume, and bone structure from the destroyed body.
The destroyed body still hurt, so I folded it into a one-dimensional space so that the pain signals could not reach the rest of my nervous system.
Oh, and I should mention my clothes vanished.
Nude again. The story of my life.
I guess I should also mention that the horses attacked me. Their cyclopean-eyes glittered and flared with strange energies. Deadly chemicals, magnetic discharges, nan-otechnology packets, nerve toxins, incendiaries, and so on and so forth blasted the trees behind me and blew wide craters into the ground.
It was really quite impressive. Really.
Then I made the horses stand on their heads.
It was fun. Really.
Amazons
Lamia reacted quickly.
I saw, approaching from the fourth dimension, shining with orb within orb of death music, Parthenope and Leucosia.
I "ducked." I folded my body into a tightly three-dimensional shape. The guitar and the hypersphere manifested themselves: I had been carrying this stuff in four-space. I folded the hypersphere from a globe to a circle to a line, which I stuck into my billfold. I slung the guitar into the saddlebags of the biotech horse. My horse. I picked the prettier one.
Parthenope passed by, about one hundred yards underground, twenty yards or so "above" me in the blue direction. She was making a quick scan, simply looking for something popping up or dropping down out of the hyperplane. She did not see me. I was flat, like a soldier hugging the terrain.
Lamia was still shouting orders to the Amazons over her little crystal eyeball when Hippolyta (at my instruction) crushed it to pieces beneath her boot heel. Antiope was quite shapely in her birthday suit. I sort of wish Colin had been here to see it. She helped me on with the black metal-cloth catsuit and tucked my hair into her helmet. My suit. It took me less than a minute to wiggle into it.
My clothes, including the jacket Vanity had just bought for me, I bundled up and stuffed into a saddlebag.
During that minute, I saw two squirrels, a brace of rabbits, and several flocks of birds streaming out of the trees to my left. A fox ran alongside the squirrels without molesting them. The rabbit paused to thrum his hind paw against the dirt, giving off the drumming warning-signal of his kind.
All the birds were shrieking with alarm.
I had heard about animals acting this way when they ran from forest fires. The noise and smoke and commotion coming through the wood was louder than any forest fire, and toppling trees groaned and creaked, wood snapped with reports like rifle shots, scores of trees smote the ground like thunder, and the cloud of dust approaching rose higher and ever higher.
Leucosia swam past, circles within circles of eyes blazing "beneath" us in the blue direction, only six inches or so below the world-plane, but scores of yards above the treetops and to our left.
Time to saddle up. I let Antiope keep the sidearm, which had bullets similar to the four types of shells carried in the rifle. My rifle. I gave her two extra magazines of the anti-psychic shells.
I figured that if those were the shells designed to work against Colin, they would work against the maenads.
It should have been the most terrible turning point in my life, the darkest moral quandary.
Instead, it was thoughtless, almost automatic. You see, it never occurred to me that the maenads were real people, that they had souls or preferences or families or anything. I just thought they were crazed monsters. Without a qualm, I ordered my two Amazon-puppets to advance through the little stand of trees separating the deer-path from the clearing where the line of electrical towers stood, and open fire upon the maenads when they crossed the open grass. Number two cyclopes-horse I sent with them, so he could start fires, create explosives, turn the air into neurotoxins, do nasty things.
I did not tell the two Amazons to fight until they died, but I did not program them with any orders to retreat either. So I guess I sent them to their deaths. One of them was stark naked, and armed only with a pistol.
I did not feel bad about it at the time. Despite all of Quentin's warnings, despite that I had been brought up as a civilized and thoughtful girl... I just sent them off.
I rode in the other direction.
The three-eyed steeds were fast.
Not fast enough. I had ridden the few tame ponies at the Academy, of course, but they were not horses like this. Everything about the artificial beast was different: its gait, its contours, its movements. I was not riding; I was clinging desperately to its back, with my hair blown back by the hurricane of its speed. The super-steed was barreling down the deer-path at the kind of clip one expects from a motorcycle, and the noise, dust, and shrieks of the maenads, undiminished, were rising through the trees behind me. After half a minute of flight, I had come only about half a mile down the path, when the deer-path opened suddenly into a little glade carpeted with knee-high marshy grass.
A troop of horsewomen were there, maybe a dozen young beauties in black catsuits and helmets, charging toward me at immense speed. The warrior-women were bent low over the necks of their steeds, their hips higher than their ponytail-shaking heads, their spines more or less parallel with the grass over which they flew.
Each rider was skilled. As each Amazonian steed jarred and thundered wetly across the whipping grass, each Amazonian rider absorbed the shocks with smooth, quick motions of her long legs, so that her prone black form seemed to float, moving not an inch up or down.