Jane said nothing.
Rick adjusted his glasses and spread his hands expansively. He was wearing a pair of deerskin carpal tunnel wraps on his sunburned forearms. "I can understand," he said, "intellectually speaking of course-why a woman would find Jerry attractive. I mean, he's big and strong, and he's a good-looking guy in his way, and he's really smart. And he's not mean, or dishonest. Ruthless, sure, but he's not cruel. And he's got, like, pretty serious outlaw sex appeal, because he's the stud duck of this gang of weirdos who follow him around. Women tend to go for that kind of guy. So I can see why some woman would want to ride on the back of Jerry's motorcycle and share his sleeping bag. But hell! Marry him? Have his kids? Try and put him behind a picket fence? What possible good could that do you? I mean, why even try?"
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 gonna find it. And I'm gonna chase it down and document it and blow the data over every network on this planet. Okay?"
"Okay, Janey." Rick grinned. "Have it your way."
"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 funnel wasn't the greatest danger in a pursuit. A modern pursuit vehicle could almost always dodge a visible funnel that was already on the ground. The greatest real dangers to the Troupe were big hail, lightning, and collisions.
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.
Hail could be dodged, though, if you stayed out from under the mass of the storm and kept a wary eye on the radar. Lightning was different. There was no dodging lightning; lightning was roll-of-the-dice. In her pre-Troupe days, Jane had heard the usual pious civil-defense nonsense about staying away from exposed heights and throwing yourself flat if you felt your hair start to crackle, but she had seen plenty of no-kidding lightning since, and she had a firm grasp of its essential nature. Lightning was a highly nonlinear phenomenon. Most lightning sizzled along pretending to obey the standard laws of physics, but Jane had often seen even quite minor storms suddenly whip out a great crackling lick of eccentric fury that blasted the hell out of some little remote patch of ground that had absolutely nothing to do with anything. Lightning was crazy stuff, basically, and if it happened to hit you, there was damn-all you could do about it.
As for collisions, well, Charlie was a mega-sweet machine, but he ran on eight hundred and seventy-five million lines of code. Good code, solid, well-tested code, spewed through distributed parallel processors far swifter and more accurate than the nervous system of any human driver. But code was still code, and code could crash. If the code crashed when Charlie was number-crunching high-speed all-terrain pursuit, then crashing Charlie would be the same as crashing any precybernetic car: fast hard stupid metal versus soft wet human flesh.
They rounded a heavily knuckled wall of back shear and saw two spikes curling out of the back of the nimbus shelf like a gigantic pair of curved antelope horns. The twin spikes were fantastically beautiful, and they filled Jane with a deep sweet sense of gratitude and awe, but they looked like F-2s, tops. It was rare to get a really heavy spike off an unorthodox part of the storm.
With the target in sight, Charlie put his code to serious work and got a lot closer in a very short time. Suddenly the chill damp air around them was full of the Train. Only a tornado could do the Train. Once you'd heard the Train you would never forget or mistake it.
Jane loved the Train. That elemental torrent of noise hit something inside her that was as deep and primal and tender as the pulp of her teeth. It did something to her that was richer than sex. A rush of pure aesthetic battle joy rocketed up her spine and she felt as if she could jump out of her skin and spread wings of fire.
"Which one do you want?" she shouted at Rick.
Rick pulled up the rubber-rimmed lenses of the binocular videocam's goggle link. Without his glasses, his eyes looked crazed and dilated and shiny. "Go for the first to touch down!"