Jane took some time then to work on the maintenance hulk, one of the dirt-stupid machines that the state of Texas used to keep up its county roads. The Troupe sometimes made a little money working repair on busted state robotry, and it kept them in a better air with sheriff's deputies and the Texas Rangers. Out in West Texas, official repair yards were very few and far between, and worse yet, for some reason, the locals seemed to dote on structure-hitting highway machinery. The hulk in their shop had been put out of its misery by a fusillade of twenty-four shots from a deer rifle.
Jane followed the repair coaching of a state-government on-line expert system for about an hour, extending Carol's weld-and-glue work, till she hit some tangled wiring she didn't feel competent to hack.
She left the garage yurt. The wind was picking up, pulling a tangled pennant of mesquite smoke from the vent hole in the dome of the kitchen. With the approach of evening, the dry wind off the continental uplands had ripped the morning's cumulus to desiccated shreds-the dryline was pushing east.
Jane stepped into the command yurt-no sign of Jerry there-and stepped into its left annex, the telecom office.
She picked up a spare laptop between the silent helmeted heads of Mickey Kiehl, the Troupe's network sysadmin, and Sam Moncrieff, Jerry's meteorological disciple. She logged into the Troupe's own local net, then onto the federal SESAME Net.
First, a quick scan of the satellite view. It looked very tasty. Half of Texas was swamped under a classic springtime gush of suffocating damp stratus from the Gulf of Mexico.
She scrolled north. So far, 2031 did not seem to be shaping up as an El Niño year, which was something of a rarity, lately. The high midcontinental jet stream was more or less behaving itself, doing some mildly odd and tortuous things at the rim of a cold front over Iowa.
Jane kicked out of satellite view and into SESAME's complex of ground-level Doppler Lidars. She saw at once what Jerry had meant about the midlevel local jet. Along the edge of the torpidly encroaching damp there was a great flat ribbon of spew; down around San Antonio it was chopping the advancing stratus into a mass of roller bars.
Mickey's voice emerged from the laptop's speaker. "What do you think, Jane?"
She glanced over at Mickey. Mickey sat on the carpet, his gloved hands gently pawing the air, his head and face hidden in his personal virching helmet. The side of his helmet was logo'd with the peeling emblem of a mocking-bird perched on a lightning bolt. It struck Jane as a little odd that a guy sitting three steps away from her would network a vocal signal over fiber-optic wiring, when he might have just lifted his faceplate and started talking. But that was Mickey all over.
She clicked patiently through three levels of pull-downs into a vocal-chat mode and leaned into the laptop's dorky little inset mike. "Well, Mickey, I think if that midlevel local jet impacts the dryline, we are gonna have vorticity to burn."
"Me too," Mickey offered tinnily. The miked acoustics inside his helmet were exactly like the bottom of a barrel. "Are you chasing tomorrow?"
"Of course I'm chasing, man, I always do pursuit!"
"Well, SESAME has two dead relays south of Paducah, we're either gonna have to route around 'em or get our own relay ~
"Hell," Jane said. "Stupid structure-hit vandals, I hate those people!" She peered into her laptop screen. "Well, it looks to me like it'll break well south of Paducah, though. What do you think, Sam?"
Sam Moncrieff lifted his faceplate and gazed at her in total distraction. "Huh? Did you just say something?"
She paused. "Yeah, I did. Where's it gonna break?"
Sam circled his gloved hand three times in the air, stabbed out with his forefinger. "Stonewall County. Boom!"
"Damn near right on top of us," Jane said.
Sam's freckled face was the picture of satisfaction. "Jerry doesn't often miss." He shut his faceplate again with a snap.
A piece of groupware now took it upon itself to hunt Jane down on the local Net and make its presence known. Jane was rather proud about the groupware. It was the only groupware she'd ever installed-ever seen, even-that actually worked, in the sense that it genuinely helped a group manage rather than slowly driving its users bughouse. Unfortunately the code was cryptware-it reencrypted itself every goddamn month and demanded a payoff before unfreezing-but she kept up the lease out of her own pocket, even though paying actual money for code was an archaic pain in the ass.
Jane fed the groupware a couple of clicks. It opened up.
-It was Jerry's assignments.
Calibration Tonight 2100 HQ Yurt
11 Mar 2031
ABLE: Greg Foulkes, Carol Cooper.
BAKER: Rudy Martinez, Sam Moncrieff.
CHARLIE: Rick Sedletter, Jane Unger.
AFRODROME mucic: Bosweli Harvey. Martha Madromch, Alex Unger.
RADAR Bus: Peter Vierling, Joanne Lessard.
NAVIGATION, SUPPORT JEEPS: Joe Brasseur.
BACKUP TEAM: Ellen Mae Lankton, Ed Dunnebecke, Jeff Lowe.
N~rwomc coo~i~: Mickey Kiehl.
N0WCASrER: Jerry Mukahey.
ABLE team departs 0630 to plant monitors along storm track and cover the north flank. RADAR BUS departs 0700 to deploy kite relays and cover Paducah hole around SESAME Net. BAKER departs 0800 to pursue midmorning towers on left flank. AERODROME crew departs behind dryline 0900 for chaff launch and ornithopter virching. CHARLIE departs approx 1200 to pursue secondary propagation towers.
So she was riding with Rick. How lovely. It looked as though Alex would be crammed into the back of the aerodrome truck. If Alex thought that stunting an ultralight was hairy, he'd learn otherwise if Buzzard virched him in an ornithopter to punch the core.
A tinny ringing came from Jane's laptop. In unison, Sam and Mickey both yanked the virching helmets from their heads. "Goddamn it!" Mickey said, massaging his ears. "I wish she'd stop doing that!"
Sam looked rueful, climbing to his feet. "When Ellen Mae wants you to eat, you'd better devirch and go eat, and that's all there is to it."
"I wish she'd use something else besides a chuckwagon triangle at fifty decibels, man."
Jane smiled silently. It was good to be able to pull network weight for good old Ellen Mae.
CHAPTER 3
Alex climbed out of five levels of complex nightmare to find someone kicking his ribs. He gazed up for a long, deeply dazed moment into the conical funnel of a tepee, then focused on a tall, bony young woman looming at the side of his sleeping bag.
"Hey, Medicine Boy," she said. She was sharp-nosed and bright-eyed and wearing a sleeveless multipocketed jacket and jeans.
"Yeah," Alex croaked. "Hi."
"I'm Martha, remember? You're s'posed to be on our chase team. Get up, dude."
"Right," he muttered. "Where's the sauna?" Martha smiled thinly. She swung out one long arm- her fingertips lacquered black. "The latrines are over that way." Her arm swung again from the shoulder, like the needle of a compass. "The truck's chargin' up by the solar rack. You got ten minutes." She left the tepee, leaving its flap hanging open to a malignant burst of morning glare.
Alex sat up. He'd slept all night, naked inside a padded cloth bag on a big round floor mat of bubblepak. The bag itself was old and dusty and torn, and he was pretty sure that two people in a doubtful state of cleanliness had spent a lot of time having sex in it. As for the bubblepak, it was clearly a stuff of deep unholy fascination for Storm Troupers. To judge by what he'd seen so far, the Troupe spent half their lives sprawling, sitting, and sleeping on carpet-covered bubblepak, big blisterwads of condom-thin but rawhide-tough translucent inflated film. Bubblepak was one of the basic elements of their nomad's cosmos: Bubblepak, Paper & Sticks; Chips, Wire, & Data; Wind, Clouds, & Dirt. He'd just spent the night inside a rolled-up tepee cone of polymerized recycled newsprint, a thing of paper and sticks and string, like something a little kid might make with tape and scissors.