Free The Chaos Weapon by Colin Kapp

activated-carbon filters. Then he brought the motors up to a thunderous scream and engaged the torque converter. The vehicle leaped forward like a startled animal and roared away across the desert past the molten remains of what had recently been the patrol-ship.
    Curiously, even the great engine noise inside the cabin failed to prevent their perception of the clicking sticks; and behind and beyond the engine’s roar, the baying of the great horn slipped inexorably down below the lowest registers of the human auditory threshold. The slow throb of its pulse seemed alternately to attract and repel them, so that they began to sway like grasses in a wind.
    With a strong oath, Wildheit switched on thecrawler’s powerful searchlights and swept them over the desert scene. The scanning beam revealed nothing of note, so he armed the automatic cannon and put a complete circle of close-spaced super-high explosive charges round them at minimum range. The clicking sticks became silent, and the vast horn choked in mid-utterance and was dead. To complete the certainty of their deliverance, the marshal then put out a second circle of explosive death pitched at a slightly greater range. When he was certain that nothing within the span of his fire could be alive, he slowed the crawler back to cruising speed.
    “That’s for Dabria,” he said disgustedly. “I should have guessed he’d lay ambush. Letting us escape wasn’t the only way he could keep control. Killing us would have been more effective. Nor would the Federation have bothered to send another marshal once the Chaos Seer was dead. What I don’t figure is how they had access to a device that could destroy a parked patrol-ship.”
    “They wouldn’t need a device,” said Roamer. “Nor need it have been Dabria’s work. There are seers who can mentally trigger any source of potential energy.”
    Now the beam of the searchlight began to pick up the blast craters, and near them he could see occasional bodies clad in the black tunic-dress of the Guardians. Several white sticks lay in the path, and farther out a buckled device of hoops and canvas was all that was left of the great subsonic horn.
    “It’s a pity they had to learn the hard way,” said Wildheit seriously.
    “What do we do now?” asked Roamer. Her relief at their escape from the ambush was evident, but a lingering fear still haunted her.
    “We have to find another route off-world—and quickly. How far is the nearest spaceport?”
    “There isn’t one. When Mayo was declared off-limits, all the spaceports were dismantled and all the ships destroyed. That’s how they made the prohibition absolute.”
    Wildheit brought thecrawler to a halt, then let the engines die.
    “Coul, I wish to speak with Marshal Hover. Can you enter communion with Talloth?”
    “I see no great evidence of need,” Coul said archly. “Have I not told you the purpose of communion is other than to circumvent your pedestrian communications system. Why not use your FTL transmitter?”
    “Because the crawler’s FTL set isn’t powerful enough to reach Terra direct, and it could take days to attract the attention of a relay station. Anyway, the local sun broadcasts so much sub-etheric noise we’d never get any intelligence through the channel.”
    “Then, because you love me, I’ll communicate with Talloth. If he’s of like mind, we may grant your wish.”
    Wildheit relaxed and tried to be patient, knowing there was no way he could force the issue. Despite their careful mimicry of human conversation, the gods spoke to each other by unknown means across a whole spectrum of dimensions and with a complexity of thought a human mind was never likely to comprehend. At some instant of quantized time and in some alter-universe the two gods neared each other—perhaps shared a finite fraction of a second of composite identity. They were reluctant to use their powers of communion for the purpose of human communication, but the rare occasions when