"Look closer," Faraday insisted. "I may be imagining things, but those look like teeth marks."

"You're imagining things," Chippawa declared. "Come on. Anything bigger than a puppy knows better than to chew on metal."

"Unless it's what they eat," Faraday countered crossly. Chippawa didn't have to dismiss his concerns quite so cavalierly.

"What, in the Jovian atmosphere?" Chippawa scoffed. "You think floating metal grows on trees around... oh, my God."

"What?" Faraday demanded, spinning around to his own emscan display.

And felt his skin prickling. There was a school of the fat mantas out there, all right. Maybe two dozen of them.

All of them clustered around two very large blips. Blips, if the radar could be believed, that were each the size of a nice little starter house in the suburbs.

Chippawa's comment on this development would undoubtedly have been a very interesting one. But he never got the chance to make it Even as Faraday's brain registered the size of the newcomers the probe lurched, the background humming hiccupping into a sudden twang. "What—?" Faraday yelped.

"Something hit the tether," Chippawa said. "There—look."

Faraday craned his neck. Another of the fat mantas was scooting along across the edge of the Skydiver's light cone. Unlike the others, this one seemed to be trailing an expanding mist of bright yellow. "He didn't just hit the tether," he said, the bad feeling in his stomach getting suddenly worse.

"He cut himself on it."

"Sure looks like it," Chippawa agreed as the manta vanished outside the range of their lights. "Better check it out." He reached for the camera control—

And suddenly the probe was slammed violently sideways.

Faraday grabbed at his board as his chair bounced down out from under him and then slammed hard up against his tailbone again. A stray thought caught oddly at the back of his mind; what had happened to his coffee cup and was it leaking on anything. There was a second jolt, this one from the other side, then a third that seemed to come from above. Something that looked like a gray wall studded with randomly placed dimples slid past bare centimeters from the Quadplexi. There was another slam from above, the worst one yet—