Heavy Weather

CHAPTER 4

Normally, Jane didn't really mind Rick Sedletter. Normally, she got along with Rick Sedletter as well as any interface designer ever got along with any creep-ass techie code grinder. But this was not a normal day. The two of them had been on the road for hours, and she had Rick writhing on the hook of the patented Jane Unger Silent Treatment.

Both of them knew what the struggle was about: Alex. Jane was sure that Rick was already regretting his rashness in harassing her brother. But as the hours and kilometers wore on, Jane had plenty of time to dwell on her own recklessness in bringing Alex to the Troupe in the first place. He was already causing trouble, and that was nothing compared with what he might do. She had dire, recurrent visions of Alex hemorrhaging a spew of Mexican lung narcotics over the unsuspecting Martha and Buzzard.

She'd taken a big, stupid risk to rescue Alex, and his chances of success were so small. Suppose that Alex did make it through his first long hard day of road pursuit. Suppose that Alex got along in the Troupe, and somehow learned how to pull weight for the first time in his life without folding up and falling into little pieces. It would still do her very little good. She might very well have saved his life, but Alex would never be grateful about it, not in a hundnd years.

Jane wondered if Alex had spared her even one thought all day-if it had even occurred to Alex to wonder how his sister was getting along. She very much doubted it.

Charlie emitted a not-entirely-necessary bell-and-whistle alert and extruded a map screen from the dash. It held Jerry's latest nowcast. Rick stopped pecking at his laptop and pretended a lot of deep professional interest in the map's colored contours of upper-air velocity fields.

Rick was doing this just to get back at her. Both of them could see at a glance that nothing was tearing loose at the moment.

Outside, up to the north, lurked the trailing tower of the squall line, rippling in hot midafternoon sunlight and sucking hard for the adiabatic juice. Jerry had been sending them the full spectrum of regular updates: satellite overviews, the progress of the squall's pseudo-cold front, SESAME's wind-shear estimates, big bulging downpours of rain off the Dopplers. The front was gushing precip, dropping hail in big lemon-sized chunks, and blowing some impressive gust fronts. But there were no spikes.

The Troupe had scared up an F-2 early in the day. The spike had come very suddenly, and rather unexpectedly, and Out in the middle of nowhere. And that was all to the good, because the Troupe had had the spike all to themselves. Greg and Carol had taped the entire development sequence, from wall cloud to rope-out, at close range from the ground. Buzzard and Martha had nailed it with chaff, so Peter and Joanne in the Radar Bus had gotten some very good internal data. That one had to be counted a success.

Now the afternoon's solar heat loading was reaching its peak, and the chances had improved for a major F-4 or F-S. The squall line was headed for the Texas-Oklahoma border, moving fast and dragging the midlevel jet with it. The chase situation would be a lot different now. As the Troupe pursued they'd be leaving the abandoned lands, reaching places where the aquifers were still patchily existent, and where a lot of people still actually lived.

Once they had come off the arid plains of King and Stonewall counties and into the great flat floodplain of the Red River, any spikes would be swarming with storm-chase spotters. There would be environmental feds from the national storm centers, and heavy network brass from SESAME. Local cops and firemen, maybe Rangers or Oklahoma National Guard. Television news crews. And amateur chaser wannabes, out on their own, with Christ only knew what kind of homemade equipment. Plus the usual ugly scattering of lurking creeps: wreck freaks, structure hitters, and professional looters.

Plus, of course, the people who were there because they couldn't help it: the everyday, poor damned civilians, trying to mind their own business until a spike tore their town apart.

The help would be the last to show up: choppers food-bombing the disaster area, ground convoys of federal rescue paramedics, bureaucrat refugee managers with their hard-ass official charity of soup-kitchen tents and paper clothes. Eventually, help would arrive, all right. You couldn't keep the government help away. After so many years of heavy weather, the help didn't have a lot of genuine compassion left, but they sure as hell had had a lot of practice.

"For Christ's sake, Janey, lighten up," Rick blurted suddenly. "It's not like we killed the kid."

Jane said nothing.

"He took that a lot better than you think!"

Before joining Jerry and the Troupe, Jane had never been much good at saying nothing. But Jane was plenty good at saying nothing now.

She'd had a lot of practice. She'd learned how to say nothing in her second month of Troupe life, after her ugly scream fest and punch-out with Martha Madronich. Jerry hadn't scolded her about the fight. He hadn't taken sides, or made judgments, or criticized. But he had asked Jane to take a formal vow of silence for a week.

Jerry's style as a leader never ran to the standard sicko cult practices of public chew-outs and group humiliations. Jerry rarely raised his voice to anyone, and even in the Troupe's formal powwows, he rarely said anything beyond short summaries and a few measured words of praise. However, Jerry truly excelled at mysterious private conferences. Before the fight, he'd never called Jane in for one of his heavy private head-to-head sessions. But she had seen him quietly take people aside-even the Troupe's hard-bitten core people, like Carol or Greg or Ellen Mae-and she'd seen them emerge an hour or so later, looking shaken and serious and kind of square-shouldered and glowing-eyed.

A vow of silence was a very weird request. But she had never seen Jerry more serious. It was crystal clear that he was giving her a deliberate challenge, setting her an act of ritual discipline. Worst of all, she could tell that Jerry really doubted that she had the necessary strength of character to go through with it.

So Jane had quickly made the promise to him, without any complaints or debate. She'd left the tent without a word, and for seven endless days she had said nothing to anybody. No talking, and no phone calls, and no radio links. She hadn't even typed commentary onto a network.

It had been unbelievably hard, far harder than she'd ever imagined. After several reflexive near blunders, she'd secretly kept her upper and lower teeth locked together with a little piece of bent metal pin. The bent pin was a stupid thing, and kind of a cheat, but it sure helped a lot whenever Martha limped by, grinning at her and trying to strike up conversations.

Silence had been truly painful and difficult for Jane. It had been like sweating off a drug addiction. Like fasting. Like running a marathon. It had changed her a lot, inside.

It was no secret to anyone in the Troupe that she deeply fancied Jerry, and she could tell that he knew, and that he was tempted. He'd let her join the Troupe. He'd trusted her with assignments. He'd always politely listened to her advice and opinions. But he'd been painfully scrupulous about keeping his hands to himself.

Jerry was tempted, but he wasn't quite tempted enough. That was the real reason he had set her the challenge. Like everything that really interested Jerry Mulcahey, the challenge was subtle and difficult and for big stakes. The rest of the Troupe might construe it as a punishment, but Jane knew better: it was a very personal trial, make or break. Jerry wanted her to make himasolemn promise and break it. So that he'd have the excuse he needed to politely usher her out of his life. And so she'd have no excuse not to go.

But Jane hadn't broken her promise. She'd kept it. Naturally, she had said nothing at all to anyone in the Troupe about her promise to Jerry. She'd simply walked out of the tent with her mouth shut. In the too close atmosphere of Troupe life, though, they had all very quickly caught on. Her vow had been a painful burden to her, but its effect on the other Troupers was profound and startling. She'd had their grudging respect before, but she'd never had their open sympathy. They knew she was going through hell, and they were pulling for her. By the end of her week of silence, all the Troupers were treating her, for the first time, as if she really belonged.

And after that happened, things between her and Jerry had quickly turned very mega-different.

"Okay, so he passed out," Rick whined. "So he's not exactly the brawny outdoor type. Did you know he's a cannibal?"

"What?" Jane blurted.

"Yeah, he was bragging to us about eating human meat! No.t that I myself got anything against cannibalism personally... ." Rick paused, hunting words. "Y'know, there's something to that kid. He's kind of an ugly, weedy, crazy little guy, but I think he's got something going there. Actually, I kinda like him!"

"Look, he can't possibly be eating human meat," Jane said. "He's only twenty. Well, twenty-one."

"Hell, we all knew he was bullshitting us! But that's why me and Peter had to stunt him. We're not gonna put up with that! Are we? So what if he's your brother? Come on, Janey!"

"Well, he is my brother, Rick, damn it."

Rick slapped his laptop shut. "Well, hell, you can't protect him from anything! The Troupe's not your day-care center! We're chasing tornadoes out here! Why'd you even bring your brother out here?"

"Well," Jane said slowly, "can you keep a secret?"

Rick's face fell. He looked at her guardedly. "What is it?"

"I'm broke, Rick. And Alex isn't."

Rick grimaced. She'd brought up the subject of money; the Troupe's ultimate taboo. From the look on Rick's round, stubbled face, he seemed to be in genuine spiritual pain. She knew he'd be too embarrassed to complain anymore.

Jane gazed thoughtfully at the twenty-thousand-meter thunderhead rising on the horizon ahead of her and wondered if there'd ever been a time when it was a whole lot of good clean fun to have money. Maybe back before heavy weather hit, back when the world was quiet and orderly. Back before the "information economy" blew up and fell down in the faces of its eager zealot creators, just like communism. Back when there were stable and workable national currencies. And stock markets that didn't fluctuate insanely. And banks that belonged to countries and obeyed laws, instead of global pirate banks that existed nowhere in particular and made up their own laws Out of chickenwire dishes, encryption, and spit.

Juanita Unger happened to be an heiress. If she'd been born a hundred years earlier, Jane thought, she might have been some very nice old-fashioned twentieth-century heiress. With family money from something quaint and old-fashioned and industrial and ladylike, like laundry soap or chewing gum. And if she'd happened to get a raging case of the hots for some scientist, then she could have set him up, like, a discreet foundation grant. And she could have driven out to his research site three times a week in her goddamned three-ton internal-combustion fossil-fueled car and fucked his brains out on a backseat the size of a living-room couch.

Maybe somewhere, somehow, sometime, some twentieth-century woman had actually done all that. If so, Jane bore her no real grudge. In fact, Jane kind of hoped that the twentieth-century heiress had really enjoyed herself as she thoughtlessly squandered the planet's resources and lived like a fattened barnyard animal. Jane hoped that it had all turned out okay for the woman in the end, and that she'd been nice and dead and buried before she realized what her way of life had done to her planet. It might have been a really sweet and tasty life, under the circumstances. But it sure as hell didn't bear any resemblance to life as Jane Unger had ever experienced it.

Jane was a Storm Trouper. A Trouper who happened to have money, and she'd never met anyone as resolutely antimoney as the Storm Troupe. They genuinely thought that they could survive on wreckage, scrap, grunge computers, fellow feeling, free software, cheap thrills, and Jerry's charisma. And given that their ideas of self-sufficiency were hopelessly impractical, they'd actually done surprisingly well.There was their repair work, and the occasional bit of salvage. Most of them held city day jobs during the winter, and some of them, herself included, even had the wreckage of once-promising careers. They scraped up some cash that way. And given that they were almost all city-bred urbanites, the Troupe did pretty well at eating things that they killed and/or pulled out of the ground.

But they weren't doing genuine, first-class research, because there wasn't enough capital around for real science, until Jane Unger had shown up.

Jane had first found Dr. Gerald Mulcahey's work tucked in an obscure niche of a Santa Fe science network, very strange, very arcane, and elaborately smothered under nonlinear atmospheric mathematics that maybe five guys on the planet could understand. Jane wasn't quite the first designer to discover Mulcahey's work. The word was just getting out about it in her network circles. The word was still very street level-but Jane had a good ear for the word.

The raw power of those graphics had amazed her. It was virtuoso spectacle, and the guy wasn't even trying. He'd created a hypnotic virtuality of writhing and twisting hallucinatory fluids while seriously attempting to describe scientifically the behavior of the real world. With the proper interface and editing, and a much better choice of color, angle, and detail, the work had definite commercial potential.

So Jane, with a bit of deft network voodoo, had successfully tracked down Dr. Gerald Mulcahey. She'd gone to his research camp out in the desolate ass end of nowhere, met him, talked to him, and cut a deal with him. She'd redesigned the graphics herself and released them with a new front end over an arts distribution network. And although the whole modern structure of copyright and intellectual property was a complete joke-it had been shattered utterly during the State of Emergency and never successfully reassembled or stabilized, by anybody, anywhere, ever-Jane had actually made some money from doing this. And she'd given Mulcahey royalties.

Of course Mulcahey had immediately spent all his royalties on new hardware. And then he'd spent her share of the money too. And then the two of them had gone on, in sweet, collegial fashion, to spend a lot more of her money.

And now all of her money was pretty much gone. Though they sure had a hell of a chase team assembled. She might even get all her money back, someday.

If they found the F-6.

Jane wasn't foolish enough to think that the Troupe would have the F-6 all to themselves. She'd seen Jerry's simulations, and if Jerry was even half-right about the nature of that beast, then the F-6 would be very damned obvious, a spectacular calamity impossible to miss. But if the Troupe found the F-6, they would have a major advantage over any other media competition. Because the Troupe would be the only people in the world who actually understood the full power and horror of what they were witnessing. Because nobody else in the world understood or believed that an F-6 was even possible.

"Rick," she said.

"What?"

"I've decided to forgive you, man."

"On the condition you don't harass Alex ever again."

"Okay, okay," Rick said sourly. "He can stay for all of me. You never see me throw anybody out of the Troupe! Jerry throws people out, Greg throws people out, Carol throws people out. Me, I'm just a lowly code geek, I can put up with anybody. I don't even care if he gives me money-hell, I'm not proud. Go ahead, give me money, you and your brother! I don't care."

"Did you know Jerry has a brother?"

"Yeah, I knew that," Rick said. Rick didn't seem much surprised by the change of subject. "I never met his brother or anything... I think he's in government, state department, military, something like that. He and Jerry don't get along."

"Did Jerry ever talk about his brother, before I showed up?"

"Well, you know Jerry," Rick said. "He doesn't exactly broadcast that kind of stuff... . I did hear the subject come up, though, back when he was breaking up with Valerie. That was Valerie the seismographer, y'know."

"I know about Valerie," Jane said tightly.

"Yeah," Rick said, with an oblivious nod, "Val was into, like, aquifer collapses and subsidence and stuff, she used to hang with the Troupe and do echo blasts. .

Not much to look at, but a really bright girl, really sharp. It got pretty ugly toward the end before Jerry threw her out. She kept carryin' on about his family."

"Oh really," said Jane, with her best pretense of tepid disinterest.

"Yeah!" The long hours of silence had bottled Rick up. "It's funny what men and women argue about... . I mean, I've never been married, but from what I see it's like three basic things-sex, money, and commitment. Right?"

Jane said nothing.

"So with Valerie it was commitment. Like, what do you care about more-me or your work, me or your friends, me or your family, me or your brain? I can't figure out why a woman would ever want to ask Jerry that. The guy's obviously a fanatic! He's never gonna rest till he finds what he's looking for! A guy like that, either you pitch in and help him, or you get the hell out of his way! Otherwise, you're just gonna get stepped on. It's like a law of nature."

Jane said nothing.

Rick adjusted his glasses and spread his hands expansively. He was wearing a pair of deerskin carpal tunnel wraps on his sunburned forearms. "I can understand," he said, "intellectually speaking of course-why a woman would find Jerry attractive. I mean, he's big and strong, and he's a good-looking guy in his way, and he's really smart. And he's not mean, or dishonest. Ruthless, sure, but he's not cruel. And he's got, like, pretty serious outlaw sex appeal, because he's the stud duck of this gang of weirdos who follow him around. Women tend to go for that kind of guy. So I can see why some woman would want to ride on the back of Jerry's motorcycle and share his sleeping bag. But hell! Marry him? Have his kids? Try and put him behind a picket fence? What possible good could that do you? I mean, why even try?"

Jane laughed.

"You can laugh, Janey," Rick said, "but that's what Valerie was up to. I don't think she ever realized it. I mean, consciously. It was pure genetic imperative, that's what. Some kind of female chromosome thing."

Jane sighed. "Rick-you are the prize asshole of all tune.

"Oh," Rick said, shocked. "Okay. Sorry."

"I don't want him to marry me. I don't have a picket fence. I don't want to take him away from the Troupe. I like living with the Troupe. It really suits me. It's my Troupe."

"Sure, okay," Rick said, nodding hastily. "I never meant you, Janey. You should know that by now."

"I want the F-6 for my own reasons. And even if Jerry drops down dead, then I'm gonna find it. And I'm gonna chase it down and document it and blow the data over every network on this planet. Okay?"

"Okay, Janey." Rick grinned. "Have it your way."

"You never talked to this brother of his, right?"

"No. I don't even know where he is. But if I wanted to find out"-he looked at her-"I guess I'd start by asking Jerry's mom."

THEY GOT SPIKES just east of the Foard County line, off State Highway 70. Both sides of the highway were lined with parked spotter vehicles: cops, meandering amateurs with cheap binoculars and hand cams, a monster SESAME lidar bus with tuned lasers and a rack of parabolic arrays.

SESAME and the Troupe's own Radar Bus had both been showing a major circulation hook for almost an hour, and the word was out on the police bands and the public weather alerts. So far, though, there was no visible wall cloud, and the rain-free shelf looked surprisingly cramped and unpromising.

Then, at 17:30, two spikes made a simultaneous appearance; not in the front pocket inside the hook, where they might have been expected, but wriggling off the back of the storm.

Rick picked up the first alert by nicking it off the air traffic of a surprised and excited TV crew. He immediately spread the word to the Troupe and booted the binocular cameras on Charlie's front weapons mount.

Given the chance, Troupers in ground pursuit would anticipate the path of the moving spike, getting ahead of it and to the right, so as to silhouette the approaching spike against brighter air. The ideal was to set up a series of target grids of intense, networked instrumentation and have the spike wander through the grids. This was the standard research strategy for the clearest, full-capacity data collection, and the SESAME people with their computational heavy iron probably had much the same idea.

That wouldn't be possible with these new twin spikes, though. Their position off the back of the storm put them right behind a moving wall of hail.

Jane gleefully showed the amateurs what they were up against by ordering Charlie into unconventional mode and lea'~'ing the highway entirely in a hot, fence-jumping, cross-country pursuit. The car bounded across a drenched pasture full of young sunflowers and knee-high Johnsongrass.

The binocular cameras, mounted on their own reactive pedestal, moved along with a rock-solid technological smoothness originally invented for modern fifty-caliber machine guns. Jane's nerves sang with anticipation. She was going where she loved to be: into the thick of it. Alert, alive, and in danger.

Spikes were very dangerous. They carried extremely high winds and often flung large, lethal chunks of debris. But the funnel wasn't the greatest danger in a pursuit. A modern pursuit vehicle could almost always dodge a visible funnel that was already on the ground. The greatest real dangers to the Troupe were big hail, lightning, and collisions.

Hail swaths were hard to predict, and they covered a lot more ground than the tip of a spike. Most hail was only nuisance hail, sleety or mushy or pebbly, but Jane had personally chased storms that dumped rock-solid hail the size of citrus fruit into heaps that were shin-deep.

Big hail didn't fall the way rain or snow or little graupel hail would fall. Big hail fell like jagged-edged lumps of solid ice dropped from the height of a three-thousand-story building. In the Oklahoma Panhandle, in the spring of 2030, Jane had been hit in the ribs by a hailstone that had put her in unguent and elastic wrap for a solid week. That same storm had caught two of the Troupe's early dune buggies and left them measled with hundreds of fist-sized dents.

Hail could be dodged, though, if you stayed out from under the mass of the storm and kept a wary eye on the radar. Lightning was different. There was no dodging lightning; lightning was roll-of-the-dice. In her pre-Troupe days, Jane had heard the usual pious civil-defense nonsense about staying away from exposed heights and throwing yourself flat if you felt your hair start to crackle, but she had seen plenty of no-kidding lightning since, and she had a firm grasp of its essential nature. Lightning was a highly nonlinear phenomenon. Most lightning sizzled along pretending to obey the standard laws of physics, but Jane had often seen even quite minor storms suddenly whip out a great crackling lick of eccentric fury that blasted the hell out of some little remote patch of ground that had absolutely nothing to do with anything. Lightning was crazy stuff, basically, and if it happened to hit you, there was damn-all you could do about it.

As for collisions, well, Charlie was a mega-sweet machine, but he ran on eight hundred and seventy-five million lines of code. Good code, solid, well-tested code, spewed through distributed parallel processors far swifter and more accurate than the nervous system of any human driver. But code was still code, and code could crash. If the code crashed when Charlie was number-crunching high-speed all-terrain pursuit, then crashing Charlie would be the same as crashing any precybernetic car: fast hard stupid metal versus soft wet human flesh.

They rounded a heavily knuckled wall of back shear and saw two spikes curling out of the back of the nimbus shelf like a gigantic pair of curved antelope horns. The twin spikes were fantastically beautiful, and they filled Jane with a deep sweet sense of gratitude and awe, but they looked like F-2s, tops. It was rare to get a really heavy spike off an unorthodox part of the storm.

With the target in sight, Charlie put his code to serious work and got a lot closer in a very short time. Suddenly the chill damp air around them was full of the Train. Only a tornado could do the Train. Once you'd heard the Train you would never forget or mistake it.

Jane loved the Train. That elemental torrent of noise hit something inside her that was as deep and primal and tender as the pulp of her teeth. It did something to her that was richer than sex. A rush of pure aesthetic battle joy rocketed up her spine and she felt as if she could jump out of her skin and spread wings of fire.

"Which one do you want?" she shouted at Rick.

Rick pulled up the rubber-rimmed lenses of the binocular videocam's goggle link. Without his glasses, his eyes looked crazed and dilated and shiny. "Go for the first to touch down!"

The horn on the right looked like the dominant one of the pair. To judge by the complex curdling of the shelf behind them, the two spikes were trying hard to go into slow orbit around one another. Rick's advice was sound: the first spike to touch down would likely get a better supply of updraft. Over the next few minutes the twin with more juice would probably starve out and eat up the other one.

But you could never tell. Spikes lived on the far side of turbulent instability and sometimes the least little extra puff of energy would push them off trajectory into a monster phase space... . Jane was coming hard to the point of decision. She slowed the car and stared upward.

"Damn!" she yelled. "That left one's backward!"

"What?"

"It's anticyclonic! Look at that damn thing spin!"

Rick swung his head, moving the slaved cameras out on the bumper. "Good Christ!" he said. The spikes were rotating in opposite directions.

It was hard to judge the vortex rotation against the curdled black background of shelf, but once she'd recognized the movement, there was no mistaking it. Jane was flabbergasted. There hadn't been an anticyclonic spike documented since the late nineties. Finding a storm spinning clockwise in the northern hemisphere was freakish, like seeing a guy running down the Street who happened to have two left feet.

"We're following that crazy one!" Jane announced. She reached beneath the seat and yanked up a pair of cordless headphones and mike.

"Good choice!" Rick said, his voice high with disbelief.

Jane yelled orders ~to Charlie, got tired of the verbal interface, and pulled down the steering wheel. She got into a manual-assist mode, where a tug on Charlie's steering wheel was the software equivalent of a tug on a horse's reins. This was an excellent way to pursue a storm, if your horse was a smart machine a thousand times stronger and faster than you were. Excellent, that is, if your horse didn't get its code hung between mode changes. And if you didn't forget that you weren't really driving a car at all, but instead, vaguely chairing a committee on the direction, speed, and tactics of the vehicle. It was certainly vastly safer than driving manually in the wake of a pair of tornadoes. But it was still a really good way to get killed.

Rick yelled a site report at the Troupe while bracketing the anticyclone with the camera's binocular photogrammetry. Jane thought anxiously about the chaff bazooka in the back. The bazooka's chaff rounds cost so damned much that she had never had enough practice to get good with it. Rick, unfortunately, considered himself an excellent marksman, as if it were a real feat to kill deer with a silent, high-velocity, laser-sighted electric rifle. Rick was lousy with the bazooka and overconfident, while she was lousy with the bazooka but at least properly cautious about it.

She punched Rick's shoulder. "Where're the 'thopters?"

"They're coming. It'll take a while."

"I gotta chaff-shoot that anticydonic from the ground then," she said.

"No use, Janey! Radar Bus just pulled up stakes, nobody'll get the data but SESAME!"

"Let SESAME get it then, we gotta nail it now, the goddamned thing is left-handed! It's for Science!" She stopped Charlie in the middle of the field, opened the door, and leaped out into wet knee-high grass.

Out from under the shelter of Charlie's roof, the sound of the Train was enormous, ground-shaking, cosmic. Jane ran around the car, burrowed into the back, and unstrapped the bazooka from its Velcro mounting. No use looking up at the spikes just yet. No use getting rattled.

She found the chaff rocket, unstrapped it. Removed its yellow safety tape. Twisted the rocket to arm it. Put up the bazooka's flip-up sight. Powered up the bazooka. Booted the bazooka's trajectory calc. Charlie was vibrating in place with the sheer noise of the Tram, and violent gusts of entrained updraft were ripping at the grass all around her.

Loading the chaff bazooka was a very complex business. There was a very sweet and twisted intellectual thrill about doing it exactly right in conditions of intense emotional excitement. It was like paying a lot of slow, deliberate, very focused attention to giving somebody else an orgasm.

Jane stepped out into the open, carefully braced her legs, raised the muzzle, and squinted into the bazooka's readout. She pressed the first trigger. A red light came on. She bracketed the twister in the target screen. The red light went out and a green light flicked on. Jane pulled the second trigger.

The rocket took off with a calf-scorching backwash of heat and soared directly toward the spike. It made a couple of wasplike dips as it fought turbulence and it disappeared right into the spinning murk, not quite dead on, but good. Jane stared happily into the readout, waiting for the detonation signal from the chaff's explosive canister.

Nothing. She waited.

Nothing. Another goddamned dud.

Jane lowered the smoking bazooka with a grinding disappointment and suddenly noticed movement and color over to her tight. A spindle-wheeled TV camera truck had pulled ;ust to the right of them, maybe ten meters away. A woman correspondent with a head mike and a darling little brass-toggled yellow raincoat had jumped out. She was doing a stand-up.

Not in front of the tornadoes, though. In front of Jane. Jane was on live television. The realization gave Jane a sudden rush of deep irrational fury. It was all she could do to avoid swinging the muzzle around and threatening to blow the journos away, just to watch the sons of bitches run. The bazooka was empty, though, and she had no more chaff rounds, which was just as well, because otherwise they and their human-interest spot would have been structure-hit to blazing hell-and-gone. Jane flinched away from their cameras and gritted her teeth, and set the bazooka back in place with meticulous professionalism, and ran around the car and got back in and slammed the door.

"That was great!" Rick shouted. "Damn, Janey, you're good with that thing!"

"It was a dud round," Jane shouted back.

"Oh! Shit."

Jane turned on the noise cancellation in her headphones. The Train vanished suddenly, its every sonic wavelength neatly canceled by a sound chip inside the earphones. The echoing roar was replaced by an eerie, artificial, oddly wet-sounding silence, as if she'd thrust her head into a big hollowed-out pumpkin.

When Rick shouted at her once again, his voice was a flat filtered drone. "We just got dust whirl on that right one! We're gonna lose the anticyclonic."

"I figured," Jane murmured, her voice loud in her own ears. Rick lifted his goggles, realized she had her noise-cancellation headphones on, nodded in appreciation, fetched up his own headphones from beneath the passenger seat, and clamped them over his ears.

"Can't tag 'em all," Rick uttered wetly through the phones. "I'm gettin' some real good photogrammetry, though. Move up closer on that left one."

The right-hand spike was on the ground now, trying to stabilize. It was tearing through a patch of high grass a kilometer away, stewing a blur of dirt and straw. No major debris yet, but that straw was no joke; tornado straws were flying high-speed needles that could pierce boards and tree trunks.

She urged Charlie into pursuit again, avoiding the right-hand spike and drawing nearer to the anticyclonic twister. It had not touched down yet, and didn't seem likely to. The backward twister was being dragged off behind the front, in the shadow of its bigger brother, kicking and wriggling in distress.

Twisters were not living things. Twisters had no will or volition, they felt no joy or pain. Truly, realty, genuinely, tornadoes were just big storms. Just atmospheric vortices, natural organizations of rapidly moving air that blindly obeyed the laws of physics. Some of those laws were odd and complex and nonlinear, so their behavior was sometimes volatile, but twisters were not magic or mystical, they obeyed laws of nature, and Jerry understood those laws. He had patiently demonstrated their workings to her, in hours and hours of computer simulation. Jane knew all that with complete intellectual certainty.

And yet Jane still couldn't help feeling sorry for the a.nticyclonic. That mutant left-handed runt of the litter... the poor damned giant evil beautiful thing . .

The right-hand twister left the ground, bunched itself, and suddenly made a major and definite maneuver. It ripped loose from its original moorings at the back of the storm and surged forward, root and branch. The whole structure of the cloud base collapsed before it like a shattered ceiling and was torn into foggy chaos. The trailing bent tail that was the anticyclonic buckled, and dwindled, and was sucked away.

A blinding torrent of almost horizontal rain blasted across the landscape. The spike vanished behind it.

Jane immediately wheeled and started to skirt the right-hand edge of the storm. Working her way around it took her twelve long minutes of high-speed pursuit and a painful drain of battery power. On the way they passed a charging land rush of three TV camera crews, five groups of amateur spotters in their rusty ham-hacker trucks, and two sheriff's deputies.

The sky was low and overcast ahead of the twister, an endless prairie of damp unstable Gulf air, tinder before a brushfire. When Jane caught sight of the spike again, it was a squat, massive, roaring wedge, lodged right in the pocket of the circulation hook and smashing northeast like a juggernaut. She turned off her monitor to the ongoing SESAME traffic and opened her mike and headphones to the general Troupe channel. "Jane in Charlie here. We have the spike in sight again! It's a mega F-4 on the ground and in the hook! This one could go all the way, over!"

"This is Joe Brasseur at Navigation. Copy, Jane. Your spike has habitation ahead-Quanah, Texas. Chasers, watch for fleeing vehicles! Watch for civilians! Watch for debris in the air or on the ground! Remember, people, a spike is a passing thing, but a lawsuit you always have with you. Over."

It was really nice, what the people of Quanah had done. You met all kinds out on the edge of the wasteland, most of them pretty unsavory kinds, but the citizens of Quanah were a special breed. There were just over three thousand of them. Most of them had settled here since the aftermath of heavy weather. They were hard and clever and enduring people, and they had a kind of rough-hewn civic virtue that, in all sincerity, you could only call pioneer spirit.

They didn't irrigate open fields anymore, because with their aquifer declining that was illegal as well as useless, But they had genetic crops with the chlorophyll hack, and they'd done a great deal with greenhouses. Enormous greenhouses, beautiful ones, huge curved foam-metal spars and vast ribbed expanses of dew-beaded transparent membrane, greenhouses as big as cornfields, greenhouses that were their cornfields, basically. Vast expanses of well-designed, modern, moisture-tight greenhouses, pegged down tight and neat across the landscape just like a big sheet of giant bubblepak.

The F-4 walked into the midst of the greenhouse bubbles and methodically wreaked utter havoc. It simply stomped the big pockets of bubbtepak and catastrophically ruptured them, with sharp balloon-pop bangs that you could feel in your bones from a mile away. The acres of damp air inside the ruptured bubbles geysered instantly upward in fat twisting rushes of condensation fog, and before Jane's amazed, observant eyes, the F-4 literally drank up those big sweet pockets of hot wet air, just like a thug at a bar doing tequila stammers.

It ripped every greenhouse in its path into flat deflated tatters, and it entirely destroyed alt the crops inside them.

The citizens of Quanah were not just farmers. They were modern bioagriculturists. They had set up a silage refinery: stacks, towers, fermentation chambers. They were taking the worst harvest in the world: raw weed, brush, mesquite, cactus, anything-and cracking it into useful products: sugars, starches, fuel, cellulose. Silage refining was such an elaborate, laborious process that it was barely profitable. But it made a lot of honest work for people.

And it made some honest use out of the vast expanse of West Texas's abandoned wasteland. Silage refining came very close to making something useful and workable out of nothing at all.

The F-4 waded into the silage refinery and tore it apart.

It picked up the pipelines, snapped them off clean at the joints, and wielded them like supersonic bludgeons. It twisted the refinery towers until they cracked off and tumbled and fell, and it threw a hot spew of gene-twisted yeast and fungi into a contaminating acres-wide stop. It blew out windows, and ripped off roofs, and cracked cement foundations, and shorted out generators. It swiftly killed three refinery workers who had been too stubborn and dedicated to leave. After the twister had shattered half the refinery and broken the rest open, its ally the rain arrived, and thoroughly drenched everything that had been exposed.

The twister then chewed its way through Quanah's flat checkerboard of streets, smashing homes and shops, destroying the ancient trees around the courthouse, and annihilating a dance hall.

When it had finished with the town of Quanah, Texas, the twister headed, undiminished, toward the Red River, and the people of the great state of Oklahoma.

WHEN JANE GOT back to the camp, it was five in the morning. She'd managed to sleep a little in the driver's seat during the long haul back, but she was far too full of adrenaline for anything like real rest.

She drove the car under one of the camp's garage tents and prodded Rick awake. Rick got up groggily without a word and staggered off for his tepee.

Jane walked stiff-legged and trembling into the command yurt. There was no sign of Jerry, and all his machines were shut down.

She went to their favorite tepee, the one they usually used for assignations.

Jerry was on the bubblepak floor in a bag, asleep.

Jane threw her sweaty clothes off and fought her way into the bag next to him.

"You've got the shakes," he told her.

"Yeah," Jane said, trembling harder to hear him say it. "I always get the shakes whenever they kill people."

"Nothing we can do about that," he said gently. "We just bear witness.

Jane stared up at the tepee's dark conical recess. She could see stars through the smoke flap. She was stiff all over and trembling with stress and she smelled really bad.

"My life sure has changed since I met you..." she said, "you crazy son of a bitch."

Jerry laughed and put his hand on her right breast. "Yeah?"

"That's right. I've seen people get killed... . I've raced down highways at two hundred klicks an hour. I've jumped out of airplanes. I climbed up a radio tower and I jumped off it, and I beat up the woman who taught me how to do it."

"You didn't beat her up very hard," Jerry said. He slid his bearded face into the hollow of her neck.

Jane started trembling much harder. "Just once," she told him, "I'd like to fuck you in a bed. With a mattress, and clean sheets. When we've both showered. And me wearing something slinky and maybe some perfume. Don't you like that, Jerry? Perfume?"

"What I like is remembering where the condoms are. Where are they?"

"They ought to be tucked over there under that ditty bag, unless somebody used 'em all."

Jerry climbed out of the bag, naked, found a condom after prolonged search, and crawled back into the bag again. His skin had gone cold in the night air. Jane shivered violently.

Jerry turned her onto her stomach and set his solid hands to work on her shoulders. "You've got it bad tonight," he said.

She nodded. "That's good. Keep doing that. Maybe I'll live."

Silently, deftly, Jerry worked his way off her shoulders, down her spine and rib cage, going after knotted nerves that were like snarled fishline. It felt so good to have the strong human touch of someone she trusted. Someone who wouldn't stop or hesitate, who knew what he was doing and who had never hurt her. He was pulling the jitters out of her, and it was like he was chasing little devils Out of her skin. Jane stretched out on her stomach and went languorous and heavy-lidded.

She turned over and stretched her arms out in welcome. He kissed her briefly, put the condom on, climbed over her, braced himself on his elbows. He slid into her all at once on an oiled film of latex.

She put her feet in the backs of his knees. "Short and sweet, okay," she whispered. "I'm really tired, baby. I'm going right to sleep after this, I promise.

"Good," he said, hitting his favorite rhythm.

"Do me, but don't do the daylights out of me.

He said nothing.

He wasn't violent, and he wasn't ever careless, but he was a big man, a head and a half taller than she was, and he was really strong. He had ropes of muscle in his back where people shouldn't even have muscle. He wasn't acrobatic or elaborately erotic, but he never got winded easily. And when he got up to speed, he tended to hit the groove and to stay there.

She gritted her teeth, rolled her head back in the soft darkness, and had an orgasm. She came out of the far side of it gasping and limp all over, with all the tension gone from her jaw and temples and her arms hanging slack.

He stopped, and hung there over her, and let her breathe awhile. There was a big lumpy rock under her neck, beneath the bag and the bubblepak, and she squirmed on her back to miss it. She'd been very tired before, but now she was fully wrapped in the hot life-giving power of her own libido, and all the weariness and horror of the day was like something that had happened to another woman somewhere far away. When she spoke again it was rough and low.

"I changed my mind about that daylights business."

He laughed. "You always say that."

"Unless you let me get on top, I'm gonna have to scream a little bit."

"Go ahead and scream," he told her, moving hard. "You never scream all that much."