"What the hell! Did you get caught in that gust front?"
"A little."
Martha laughed. "You're a real prize. Well, get up! We gotta pursue."
"Wait a minute," Alex said. "You don't mean to tell me there's gonna be another one of those?"
"Maybe," Martha said, deftly wrapping her gear. "You've been lucky, for a first chase. Jerry's a good now-caster, the best around, but he only hits a spike one chase out of two. Okay, maybe three out of five, lately
But"-Martha stood up straight, waving her black-nailed hand overhead with a lasso-tossing gesture-"with this kind of midlevel vorticity? Man, we could log half a dozen spikes out of a front like this one."
"Oh, man," Alex said.
"Gotta get movin'. These spring squalls always move like a bat out of hell, they're doing fifty klicks an hour.. . . We'll be lucky if we don't end up in Anadarko, by midnight." She gazed down at Buzzard's inert carcass, seeming to resist a sudden urge to kick him out of his chair.
"Midnight?" Alex said.
"Hell yeah! 'Bout two hours after sundown, that's when nocturnal convection gives everything a fresh dose of the juice." Martha grinned. "Dude, you haven't really chased spikes till you've chased 'em in the dark."
"Don't you people ever relax?" Alex said.
"Kid, we got all goddamn winter to relax. This is storm season."
Alex thought it over. "You got any salt tablets?"
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 e
ven 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."
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