The native had almost reached the building, with the others eight or ten meters behind, when there was a second, heavier explosion. All three stopped to watch the glowing fragments of stems, trunks, and branches fly upward and outward, each trailing a line of red-brown nitrogen dioxide smoke and gas.
They tensed as some of the material passed over their heads, and Earrin and Kahvi held their breaths as several incandescent fragments fell into the water on both sides of the raft.
Kahvi took a step back the way they had come, but stopped as she saw her daughter’s tiny form stand firm between two water buckets. Evidently nothing had hit the tent this time.
Then a scream, in a voice much deeper than Danna’s, turned their attention back toward the jail.
II
Cooling, Carefully
The building had walls of rough stone, with no visible mortar. The cement which held it together as flammable as ordinary tent tissue, but had been applied only to the inside of the walls; it was safe from outside fire unless one of the more flammable varieties of slime were allowed to grow on the stones. The roof, however, was another matter. It had to be transparent to let sunlight reach the oxygen plants inside.
Unless some change had been made since the Fyns’ last visit, it was composed of the same material as their own tent on the raft, and their other bases. It was not actually explosive, but vulnerable to fire whendry.
The scream seemed to suggest that there had been no change, not a surprising situation for the Boston area.
Earrin dashed up to the building; he did not need Bones’ gesture to tell him the cause of the outcry, though only the Observer was tall enough to see all the roof. The man climbed the wall without difficulty, using the ample toe-spaces between the stones. His sponge was already wet.
There were three widening holes in the roof, smoking briskly around their edges. Earrin got as close as he could to the nearest, reached out with his pole, and began sponging its rim. It was tempting to move the pole too fast, but nitrate-fed fires were not smothered; they had to be cooled. Earrin had had far too much experience to let himself be rushed on this job.