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.The two comedianshad an affection for each other.That worried him.At first glance Stan seemedan idiot, but it was actually more complex than that.And Ollie was ablowhard, took a great many of the pratfalls.but in the end was the dominantpersonality.Again, Gaea was working up to something.Lately he had begun to appear in some questionable roles.Not the villain perse, but someone rather unsavory.In one role, from a movie whose title hecouldn't remember, he saw himself beating Gaea.And he saw that it disturbedAdam, though he wouldn't talk about it.Adam drew a line betweenfantasy and reality.but it was a fuzzy line.Gaea was that amazing, funny,huge, and harmless lady who came to the third floor window of Tara and handedhim pretty toys.Why would Chris be beating her up? The plot wasn't important,nor was the fact that Chris, at just over seven feet tall, was hardly a worthyopponent for the fifty-foot Monroe.He was now sure he would lose, in the long run.It was all very well to be setup as Adam's conscience, but television had always had a louder voice than achild's conscience-which didn't even exist until someone nurtured it.Chris wasn't being given a chance.A year had gone by.Cirocco had said it might be as long as two years beforeshe came again.He was pretty sure it would be too late by then.It would have cheered him considerably to know Cirocco and her army werealready on the march to Hyperion.But Gaea had not seen fit to tell him, andhe had no other way of knowing.He might have gotten a clue from Gaeantelevision.Adam was asleep, and Chris was sitting slumped in front of a set.The movie was the 1995 version of Napoleon, un-altered, and on the screen vastarmies marched toward Waterloo.But by then Chris was too drunk to notice.FIVEThe second day's march saw even more soldiers pass out than on the previoustrek, though this one was shorter.Cirocco had expected that, too.It probably looked like an easy discharge.Shetold her medics to examine everyone carefully and send back only the mostserious cases.Those turned out to be sixteen in number.Everyone else shouldered packs when camp was broken and marched on intoIapetus.They crossed the two small, nameless rivers that flowed south from theTyche Mountains into the great sea of Pontus that dominated Iapetus.Thebridges were in good repair.The terrain was easy.Iapetus, an enemy of Gaea,would not hinder their progress through his domain, Cirocco knew.Theirproblems would begin in Cronus.For several "days" the army camped by the lovely sea.The weather held clearand warm.Cirocco gradually picked up the pace as the soldiers grew moreaccustomed to the rhythm of the march.But she did not push it too hard.Shewanted them tough, not exhausted, when they reached the hard parts.At the confluence of Pluto and Ophion, very near the border of Cronus, Ciroccohad her Generals pick the garrison of her extreme eastern line of defense.This time she did not go for the weak ones.She wanted veterans, the toughestmen and women she could find.They would set up a fort just west of the Plutoford, and north of Ophion.She left them Titanide canoes for crossing the bigriver.They were to patrol north and south, traveling light and fast.Theirposition was not defensible against a determined attack, but that was not thePage 206ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlpoint.It was her hope that, if attacked, the troops could send messengersback to Bellinzona and fight a delaying, guerilla action, giving the city asmuch time as possible to prepare for the assault.All this depressed her.Almost everything she had done in Iapetus waspreparation for defeat.If the Bellinzona Air Force still existed, thisoutpost of its swift messengers would be superfluous.Even the slowestDragonfly could get to Bellinzona from here in twenty minutes and sound thealarm.But the Air Force might not make it through Cronus.And of course, if her army was victorious in the coming fight, no one would bereturning from Hyperion but her own soldiers and the refugees and prisoners ofwar from Pandemonium.But she owed the city every precaution she could think of.She had conned itinto producing not just a bunch of foot soldiers, but a dedicated andmotivated fighting force.She knew that, if it came to it, these troops would fight.The Circum-Gaea had crossed the Ophion at a point just within the invisibleboundary between Iapetus and Cronus.Back when Gaby was building the Highway, Ophion crossings were her biggestchallenges.The river was very broad and fairly deep in the flatlands, and inthose places where it ran swift, it did so through unforgiving mountains.Soshe had kept the crossings to a minimum.But some had been necessary.Cronus was a good example.There was no reallyeasy way through Cronus, but the northern route was five times as hard as thesouthern.So a big bridge had been necessary.Cirocco's engineers, who had scouted the route as far as Mnemosyne and donewhat repairs were feasible to the roadway and bridges in Iapetus and, to alesser extent, in Cronus, had reported that the Ophion Bridge was hopeless [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]