Heavy Weather

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 gri

"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 Joa

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 wa

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, gri