Cirocco had told Chris about the Squeeze, which had been Gaea's final weapon in the Oceanic Rebellion. The interior of each of the six spokes was lined with a thick coat of green which, when examined closely, turned out to be the trees of the vertical forest. It was vertical because of the ground; the trees grew horizontally from the spoke walls and dwarfed any redwood.
To apply the Big Squeeze, Gaea first deprived the forest of moisture for several weeks. It became the tallest pile of firewood ever conceived. It was not necessary for Gaea to squeeze too hard to dislodge the trees in their millions to shower over the night below. She had done this to Oceanus, setting it afire as it fell, then closing the lower spoke valve. The fire storm had scorched Oceanus down to the bedrock. He had apparently been impressed because it was ten thousand years before he dared defy Gaea again.
The hours dragged by, and Cirocco did not arrive. She had been up and down the staircases to the regional brains enough times to know within a few minutes how long the journey should take her. It had seemed unlikely that she would spend more than an hour with Phoebe, but that time came and passed, marked by the slow movements of the gyroscopic clock, and still no Cirocco. When Gaea had completed another sixty-one-minute rev, Chris joined the conference to determine whether the tents should be pitched. There was not much sentiment for the idea, though Robin and Chris had been awake a long time. Gaby hardly bothered to talk about it; unstated but known to all was the certainty that before much longer she would go after her old friend, with or without help.
Chris moved away from the group and reclined on the dry ground. He oriented his body north and south and placed the Gaean clock on his belly, its axis in the east-west plane of rotation. He could no more see it move than he could watch water freeze, but when he looked away and then looked back, the motion was apparent. They had a mechanical clock which was much more useful because it worked all the time, regardless of orientation, but this one was more fun. It seemed to him that he could feel Gaea spinning beneath him. He recalled a similar feeling on a clear night back on Earth, and suddenly he wanted to be home, with or without his cure. It was not the same to be overwhelmed by the vastness of a starry night as it was to look up the dark, towering spoke to an unseen but tangible heaven.
"Strap on those bags, you quartet of quadrupedal quacks!"
"How about I ride you this time, Captain?" Hornpipe shouted.
"Hey, Rocky, how do you stay balanced so long?"
Her return brought Chris back from the edge of sleep. The group was transformed into a swirl of energy that Cirocco shaped toward the task of breaking the rough camp and getting back to the canoes. But finally, Gaby asked the question they all wanted answered.
"How did it go, Rocky?"
"Not bad, not bad, I guess. She was more ... talkative than I've seen her. I almost got the impression that it was she who..." She looked up and into Chris's eyes, then pursed her lips. "Tell you later. But I'm nervous. Not anything I can put my finger on, but I had the feeling she was up to something. The sooner we're out of here, the better I'll feel."
"Me, too," Gaby said. "Let's get moving."
Chris had worries of his own as he swung astride Valiha. The palms of his hands were wet, and there was a fluttering in his stomach, heat flashes washing over his body. Combining these symptoms with the sense of foreboding that now crept over him, he was as sure as he had ever been that another attack was imminent.
And so what? Tough it out; let it happen; these folks can take care of themselves. If anyone got hurt, it would probably be he, not they. It was not the first time he had thought of telling someone an attack was coming on. As before, he now decided against it, changed his mind, again elected to say nothing. Part of him knew this process of vacillation was the perfect defense because there was little chance he would act until it was too late.
No! Not this time. He turned to Gaby, who rode a meter to his right. As he did, he saw from the corner of one eye that Valiha had turned her head to look at him, and from the other he detected a flicker of motion.
He saw it a fraction of a second before Valiha did. Just a gaping mouth bristling with spikes, silently expanding, a circle cut by a thin horizontal line. It was far away and it was upon them, just like that. So little time.
He leaped, hit Gaby hard enough to carry her from Psaltery's back.
"Down! Get down!" he shouted, while Valiha shrieked an alarm in Titanide.
The sound hit like a fist, solid as an avalanche, as the buzz bomb ignited its torch and accelerated no more than a meter off the ground. The air pulsed with the rhythm of its engine; then Chris was blinded by what seemed like a flashbulb exploding in his eyes, and the sound dopplered far down the scale. He put his hand to the back of his head and felt hair singed into little knots.
Gaby struggled out from under him, fighting for breath. Robin was prone, ten meters away. Her hands were held together in front of her. A thin blue-white line grew from her fists, followed rapidly by another. The tiny warheads popped like firecrackers, far short of their goal.
"It came from the cable," Cirocco called out "Everyone stay down."
Chris did as she said, then squirmed until he faced the dark prominence silhouetted against the upturned sands of Tethys. He realized that was what had saved them; he had seen the buzz bomb's motion before it was on the deck, during the last part of its fall from a perch on the cable.
"There's another!" Cirocco warned. Chris tried to make his spine meet his belly. The second attacker roared by to his right, followed in echelon by two more, seconds apart.
"I don't like this," Gaby yelled, very close to Chris's left ear. "The Titanides are too big, and the ground is too flat." Chris turned and saw her face, a few centimeters from his own and smeared with dirt He felt his hand squeezed tightly. "Thanks," she whispered.
"I don't like it either," Cirocco shouted back. "But we can't get up yet."
"Crawl to the lowest place you can find then," Gaby suggested. "Come on," she said quietly. "Psaltery's in the lowest spot around here."
The brown-skinned Titanide was two meters behind them, in the center of a depression that even wishful thinking could not make more than forty centimeters deep. Gaby slapped Psaltery's flank as Chris edged in beside them.
"Don't get up and look around, old friend," Gaby said.
"I won't. You keep your head down, Boss." Psaltery coughed, a strange and oddly melodious sound.
"Are you all right?" Gaby asked.
"I hit the ground pretty hard," was all he would say.
"We'll get Hautbois to take a look when we get out of here. Damn!" She wiped her hand on her pants. "Wouldn't you know we'd land in the only patch of wet ground on this stinking hill?"
"Northwest," Valiha called from a position Chris could not see. He did not try to find the approaching buzz bomb but did succeed in making himself smaller and flatter than he would have thought possible. The monster roared by, again followed by two more. He wondered why the first had not come in formation.
When he risked a look, he was actually able to see one dropping away from the cable. It was just a speck, and it must have been three kilometers up. It had clung there, nose down, waiting for the right opportunity. It might have come at them when they approached the cable but had sense enough to know that when the group left, their backs would be turned.
This one also seemed to know it was now useless to try for a kill. It passed fifty meters above them, snorting an insolent challenge. Another ignited shortly after dropping from the cable and could not resist making a pass at about the same altitude. That was a bad mistake since it gave Robin a good wide target at a realistic range, plenty of time to follow it, and three tries to get it right. Both the second and third shots connected. Chris got his best view yet as the swift shape was captured in the twin flashes of the exploding bullets. It was a tapered cylinder with swept-back rigid wings and a double tail. There was an eye tucked under the wing. The buzz bomb was a great black shark of the skies, all mouth and appetite, with sound effects added.