"You blew both mikes and you screwed the optics on Jesse, man."
Buzzard was pained. "Yeah, but there's no debris in that spike. A little dust, a little grass, it was real clean!"
"You pulled that dumb macho stunt just because you were late with the chaff!"
"Don't fuckin' start with me, Madronich," Buzzard warned. "I punched the core and the 'thopter still flies, okay? I'm not asking you to fly Jesse now. You can start flappin' your lips when you punch a core and come out in one piece."
"Jerk," Martha muttered.
Something very odd had happened to the earth in front of the twister. A huge patch of the ground was snow-white and visibly steaming. It looked volcanic. "What the hell is that?" Alex said.
"That's hail," Martha said.
"Cold hail with ground fog off it," Buzzard said. "Watch this baby suck it up!"
As the twister approached, streamers of icy fog buckled and writhed, caught up in torrents of suddenly visible ground flow. The tornado lurched headlong through the swath, sucking up torrents of chilly air from all directions, in a giant ragged overhead rosette of tormented fog.
The swatch of fallen hail was only a few dozen meters across. After half a minute the twister had cleared it. But wading knee-deep through the chilly air had visibly upset it. Its violent spew of filth at ground level dropped off drastically. Then it shivered top to bottom. The dry bands of filth around its midsection thinned and dimmed out. As the air grew clearer a pair of dense dirty runnels suddenly appeared within the spike, for all the world like a pair of stumbling, whirling legs.
"See that, dude?" Martha said triumphantly. "Suction' spots!"
The 'thopter nose-dived suddenly and was almost swept into the vortex. Martha careened free, yelping.
"Careful," Buzzard said calmly. "It's wrapped that downdraft real hard."
The twister slowed, hesitated. Down at ground level, its overstretched tip elongated, kinked hard, and reluctantly broke off. The abandoned tip of the whirl vanished in a collapsing puff of liberated dust.
The amputated twister, stranded in midair, took a great pogo hop forward, centering itself under the cloud again. Then it tried to touch down again, to stretch out and rip the earth, but it was visibly losing steam.
The two suction spots, rotating about one another, stumbled and collided. The bigger leg messily devoured the smaller leg. There was a fresh burst of vitality then, and the twister stretched out and touched down, and a torrent of dirt rocketed up the shaft. But now the funnel was much narrower, thin and quick and kinky.
"It's ropin' out," Martha said. "I like this part. This is when they start actin' really insane."
The twister had changed its character. It had once been a wedge, a vast blunt-nosed drill. Now it looked like a sloppy corkscrew made of smoke and string.
Big oblate whirling lumps were traveling up and down the corkscrew, great dirty onions of trapped vorticity that almost choked the life out of it.
Every few seconds one of the trapped lumps would blow out in spectacular fashion, spewing great ribbons of filth that tried to crawl up the cloud base. Sometimes they made it. More often they wriggled and spasmed and swam out into midair and vaporized.
The roped twister grew narrower still, so pinched at points along its length that it looked like a collapsing hose. The clear air around it was still in very violent motion, but no longer violent enough to be seen. The currents of air seemed to be losing cohesion.
The roping twister finally snaked its way into a sloppy, wriggling helix-it seemed to be trying to blend into some larger invisible vortex, to wrap itself around a bigger core and give up its fierce little life in exchange for large-scale wrath again.
But it failed. After that, it lost heart. It surrendered all its strength, in a ripple of disintegration up and down the shaft, a literal last gasp.
Martha methodically scanned the cloud base. The rotating wall cloud had broken. A great clear notch had appeared just behind it, a downdraft channeling cold air from somewhere near the stratosphere, chewing through the source of the vortex and breaking its rotation. The twister was dead and gone.
A light, filthy curtain of rain appeared, conjured up and sucked down by the twister's death spasm.
Martha headed out from under the cloud base into clear sunlit air. "Seventeen minutes," she said. "Pretty good for an
"That was an F-3 at maturity," Buzzard objected.
"You wanna bet? Let Jerry check the numbers on that chaff."
"Okay, F-2," Buzzard backed down. "It's still a little early in the day for a big one. How's Lena's battery?"
"Not good. Let's pull out, charge up the 'thopters, pull up stakes here, and head the hell after the dryline."
"Good move," Buzzard said. "Okay, you and Medicine Boy break camp, and I'll fly the 'thopters in.
"Have it your way," Martha said.
Alex pulled off his gear. He watched Martha carefully divest herself of her equipment. She got up off the sling chair, stretched, grinned, shook herself, and looked at him. Her eyes widened.
"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.