Heavy Weather

"Greg in Alpha here," came Greg Foulks. "How's the data cha

"Clear enough for now, over.

"Here's your coords, then." Greg sent them, in a digital screech. "We gotta move, Jerry. That wall cloud's go

"Then move behind the hook and get the array booted," Jerry commanded. "Report in, Aerodrome. Where's the chaff, over?"

"Boswell in Aerodrome," Buzzard said, and though he was speaking from an arm's length away, his rerouted voice signal was unexpectedly thin and crispy. "I got Jesse loaded and moving in hard on the jet stream, and Kelly coming out to Aerodrome to load a second reel, over."

"Lena is right in position now, Jerry, should I strafe that dust whirl for you, over?" said Martha.

"Beautiful, Martha," Jerry told her, his deep voice rich with praise and satisfaction. "Let me bring you up on monitor... . Okay, Martha, go! Nowcaster out."

Martha's voice, lost its static and settled again at the very edge of Alex's t. "You with me, little dude?"

"Yeah."

"This is where it gets good."

The ornithopter fell out The wall cloud above them was mucn tmcKer: it didn't seem to be moving any faster. The 'thopter and Alex suddenly noticed a messy puff of filth, way dowii at ground level. The cloud of dust didn't seem to be spin-fling much. Instead, the dust cloud was spewing. It was clumsily yanking up thin dry gouts of ocher-tinted soil and trying to fling them aside.

Martha sca

Then water vapor began to condense, in the very midst of the dry churning filth, and for the first time Alex fully realized the real shape, and the terrible speed, of the whirlwind. The air was being thrashed into visibility through sheer shock.

The infant tornado had a strange ocher-amber tint, like a gush of magician's stage smoke ru

Martha swooped in hard beside the tornado, in a complex banking figure eight, and she gained a lot of very sudden altitude. Alex winced with disorientation. Then he saw the top of the twister, dead ahead-the spi

The 'thopter dodged and leveled out, circling back. The twister's middle looked treacherously empty: a core of utter nothingness with a great black wall melting down from above, and a bottleneck of tortured dirt rising up. But then the wall's fu

The twister's howling had crept up on Alex almost without his notice. But now, as the twister reached its full dark fury, it began to emit a grotesque earthshaking drone. Even over the ornithopter's limited microphones, it seemed a very rich and complex noise, grinding and rattling and keening, over a dreadful organ-pipe bass note, a noise that crammed the ears, mechanical and organic and orchestral.

The fu

Martha was wheeling around the structure counterclockwise, keeping a respectful distance. On one pass, Alex caught a sudden glimpse of Pursuit Vehicle Alpha, sitting still behind the twister, shockingly close, shockingly tiny. It was only in glimpsing the Trou 's little pursuit machine that Alex realized the scale of wl~t he was witnessing: the bottom of the twister had grown as wide as a parking lot.

As it reached full speed and size the twister grew livelier. It marched confidently up the gentle slope of a hill, in a brisk, alert fashion, with its posture straight and its shoulders squared. As it marched down the slore it put its whirling foot through the rusting wreckage o a barbed-wire fence. A dozen rotten cedar posts were instantly snapped off clean at the surface of the earth, tumbling thirty meters into the air in a final exultation of tangled rusty wiring.

The fence fell to earth again in a mangled yarn ball. The twister crossed a road in a frantic blast of dust.

Everything around Alex went silent and black. He thought that Martha's drone had been smashed, that he'd lost contact; but then he remembered that the natural color of a dead virching screen was blue, not black. He was seeing blackness: black air. And he could hear Buzzard breathing hard over audio.

"You're go

"Where are we?"

"We're on Jesse, and we're right above the spike. We're up in the wall cloud."

"We can't fly around in here," Alex said. "It's pitch-dark!"

"Sure, man. But Greg and Carol have their array up, and the Radar Bus is on-line. I just put ninety-seven chips of straff-hell! I mean strips of chaff-down this spike! Jerry's ru

Alex's heartbeat changed gears. "Yeah! Do it!"

"There's no light inside the core, either. It's almost always pitch-black inside a twister. But Jesse has a little night-light-red and infrared. I du

"Shut up and go!" Alex pressed the goggles against both eyes with the flats of his hands.

His head flooded with maxed-out roaring. Eerie red light bloomed against his eyeballs. He was shearing down the monster's tightened, spi

Hell had a structure. It had a texture. The spi

The 'thopter jerked hard once, harder again, then lost all control and punched the wall. All sound ceased at once.

The image froze, then disintegrated before Alex's eyes into a colored tangle of blocky video trails.

Then the image reintegrated and slammed back into real-time motion. They were outside the twister, flung free of it, tumbling through air with all the grace of a flung brick.

The 'thopter spread its wings and banked. Buzzard crowed aloud in the sudden silence. "We just blew both mikes," he said. "Pressure drop!"