Buzzard suddenly yelped in surprise. "Hell! I see what you mean about that midlevel jet... . Damn, I just lost two strips of chaff."
"Get your 'thopter's ass up here, man, that wall cloud is movin'." Martha's Okie drawl thickened as her excitement grew.
"What exactly are we looking at?" Alex asked her.
"See that big drawdown at the base?" Martha told him. "Between the flankin' line and all that rain? Look close and you can see it just now startin' to turn."
Alex stared Into his goggles. As far as he could tell, the entire cloud was a mass of indistinguishable lumps. Then he realized that a whole area of the base-a couple dozen lumps, a cloudy sprawl the size of four, maybe five football fields-was beginning a slow waltz. The lumps were being tugged down-powerfully wrenched and heaved down- into a broad bulging round ridge, well below the natural level of the cloud base. The lumps were black and ugly and sullen and looked very unhappy about being forced to move. They kept struggling hard to rise into the parent cloud again, and to maintain their shape, but they were failing, and falling apart. Some pitiless unseen force was stretching them into long circular striations, like gaseous taffy.
Suddenly a new voice broke in, acid-etched with a distant crackling of lightning static. "Carol in Alpha here! We got dust whirl, over!"
"Nowcaster here," came Jerry Mulcahey's calm voice. "Give me location fix, over." Good old Dr. Jerry, Alex realized, had the advantage of the Storm Troupe's best antennas. He seemed to be hovering over the battlefield like God's recording angel.
"Greg in Alpha here," came Greg Foulks. "How's the data channel holdin' up, Jerry, over?"
"Clear enough for now, over.
"Here's your coords, then." Greg sent them, in a digital screech. "We gotta move, Jerry. That wall cloud's gonna wrap hard, and the truck's getting radar off a sheet of big-ass hail to northwest, over."
"Then move behind the hook and get the array booted," Jerry commanded. "Report in, Aerodrome. Where's the chaff, over?"
"Boswell in Aerodrome," Buzzard said, and though he was speaking from an arm's length away, his rerouted voice signal was unexpectedly thin and crispy. "I got Jesse loaded and moving in hard on the jet stream, and Kelly coming out to Aerodrome to load a second reel, over."
"Lena is right in position now, Jerry, should I strafe that dust whirl for you, over?" said Martha.
"Beautiful, Martha," Jerry told her, his deep voice rich with praise and satisfaction. "Let me bring you up on monitor... . Okay, Martha, go! Nowcaster out."
Martha's voice, lost its static and settled again at the very edge of Alex's t. "You with me, little dude?"
"Yeah."
"This is where it gets good."
The ornithopter fell out The wall cloud above them was mucn tmcKer: it didn't seem to be moving any faster. The 'thopter and Alex suddenly noticed a messy puff of filth, way dowii at ground level. The cloud of dust didn't seem to be spin-fling much. Instead, the dust cloud was spewing. It was clumsily yanking up thin dry gouts of ocher-tinted soil and trying to fling them aside.
Martha scanned the dust cloud, circling. Alex had never seen dirt behave in such an odd and frantic fashion. The dirt kept trying hard to fall, or spin loose, or escape just any old way back to the natural inertness of dirt, but it just couldn't manage the trick. Instead, whole smoky masses of the stuff would suddenly buckle and vanish utterly, as if they were being inhaled.
Then water vapor began to condense, in the very midst of the dry churning filth, and for the first time Alex fully realized the real shape, and the terrible speed, of the whirlwind. The air was being thrashed into visibility through sheer shock.
The infant tornado had a strange ocher-amber tint, like a gush of magician's stage smoke running backward in an antique movie reel. Some weird phase change, somber and slow and deeply redolent of mystery, was moving up the structure. Translucent bands of amber damp, and ocher filth, reeled slowly up the spike, silhouetting it against the sky and earth. It was very narrow at the bottom, growing broader and thicker with height...
Martha swooped in hard beside the tornado, in a complex banking figure eight, and she gained a lot of very sudden altitude. Alex winced with disorientation. Then he saw the top of the twister, dead ahead-the spinning wall cloud, shoving thick vaporous roots slowly downward toward the earth.
The 'thopter dodged and leveled out, circling back. The twister's middle looked treacherously empty: a core of utter nothingness with a great black wall melting down from above, and a bottleneck of tortured dirt rising up. But then the wall's funnel moved down very suddenly, in four thick, churning, separate runnels of octopus ink, and it seized the little dust whirl and ate it, and the world was filled with a terrible sound.
The twister's howling had crept up on Alex almost without his notice. But now, as the twister reached its full dark fury, it began to emit a grotesque earthshaking drone. Even over the ornithopter's limited microphones, it seemed a very rich and complex noise, grinding and rattling and keening, over a dreadful organ-pipe bass note, a noise that crammed the ears, mechanical and organic and orchestral.
The funnel began to migrate. It grew steadily fatter, and it spun steadily faster, and it rolled forward fitfully, across the earth. There was nothing much for it to hurt here, nothing but grass and bushes. Every bush it touched either disappeared or was knocked into tattered knots, but the tornado didn't seem to be damaging the grass much. It was casually tearing at the grass a bit, and leaving it flour-blanched with filth, but it wasn't drilling its way down through topsoil into the bedrock. It was just bellowing and screeching and humming to itself, in a meditative, utterly demonic way, deliberately rubbing the narrow tip of itself through the grass, like a migrating mastodon hunting for stray peanuts.
Martha was wheeling around the structure counterclockwise, keeping a respectful distance. On one pass, Alex caught a sudden glimpse of Pursuit Vehicle Alpha, sitting still behind the twister, shockingly close, shockingly tiny. It was only in glimpsing the Trou 's little pursuit machine that Alex realized the scale of wl~t he was witnessing: the bottom of the twister had grown as wide as a parking lot.
As it reached full speed and size the twister grew livelier. It marched confidently up the gentle slope of a hill, in a brisk, alert fashion, with its posture straight and its shoulders squared. As it marched down the slore it put its whirling foot through the rusting wreckage o a barbed-wire fence. A dozen rotten cedar posts were instantly snapped off clean at the surface of the earth, tumbling thirty meters into the air in a final exultation of tangled rusty wiring.
The fence fell to earth again in a mangled yarn ball. The twister crossed a road in a frantic blast of dust.
Everything around Alex went silent and black. He thought that Martha's drone had been smashed, that he'd lost contact; but then he remembered that the natural color of a dead virching screen was blue, not black. He was seeing blackness: black air. And he could hear Buzzard breathing hard over audio.
"You're gonna want to see this, dude," Buzzard told him. "I don't do this every day. I'm gonna punch the core."
"Where are we?"
"We're on Jesse, and we're right above the spike. We're up in the wall cloud."
"We can't fly around in here," Alex said. "It's pitch-dark!"
"Sure, man. But Greg and Carol have their array up, and the Radar Bus is on-line. I just put ninety-seven chips of straff-hell! I mean strips of chaff-down this spike! Jerry's running the camp monitors flat out! We're gonna punch the core, dude! We're gonna go right down this funnel, live, real time, flyin' on instruments! Ready?"