Heavy Weather

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 fu

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 go

Jane said nothing.

Rick adjusted his glasses and spread his hands expansively. He was wearing a pair of deerskin carpal tu

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 go

"Okay, Janey." Rick gri

"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 fu

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.