Michael and the technicians stood between the launchers while Ravan dialed in the platform angles from his terminal. They whirred in opposite directions, turning the warheads away from both each other and the three men standing between them.
“Better to get some distance for launch, I think,” Michael said, withdrawing into the station, the techs in tow. He positioned himself over Menar’s shoulder, near the edge of the lab table, which Menar was using as a seat. The deployment code he’d been tweaking on the flight over from New Delhi, the algorithms that charted the missiles’ course, the darts’ sub-course, and the moment of payload ignition, flashed across the screen of his laptop. Ravan thought of their father, Menar Sr., as he watched his brother make final adjustments in front of the matrix of data. The other three lab men, just as in Ravan’s childhood, stood quietly awed by the maestro.
Menar scanned the last of the figures. One final look out at the platforms and then a glance at Ravan: “So, here we go.” Everyone but Menar moved to the edge of the station’s open doors.
The tail of the first seeder went a deep, dark red. Suddenly it was orange and shimmering the air as the rocket took flight with a rowdy hiss that quieted as it ascended. They watched the narrow contrail form, lither than any airplane’s, tethering the rocket to the launcher like a harpoon.
On entry its rumble was muffled by the cloud. At just that moment, with another keystroke, Menar deployed the second rocket. It went up just like the first except for the debris that fell from it: a ring of metal, red with heat. “Was that from the platform?” Menar asked.
The second contrail took shape just below the first, which had, owing to the mix of fuel and heavy atmospheric conditions, congealed in place. The final seeder, which was meant to prepare the lower third of the cloud, fired off cleanly and revived the fading hiss of the second rocket just before it too died in the clouds. Menar had adjusted the platform panel so its path fell between the other two, but lower, creating a configuration of contrails that looked, when viewed from the monitor, which drew its signal from cameras stationed beneath the platform, like a V in three dimensions, thousands of feet deep along the z-axis.
The rocket stage of the final missile fell to earth as the six darts parted ways. They fanned out in smooth parabolic arcs until they ran parallel to the cloud base, just beneath its surface, and it was only their color, a sharp yellow from the smoldering antimony, that made their slender contrails visible against the grayscale backdrop of clouds.
A star like an asterisk formed as the darts diverged from the origin at speed. The contrails grew pale, their color thinned by cloud as the darts sliced through the gauzy base, burrowing further by the second. The lines gave out and the star peaked when the darts were too deep to see.
“Eighteen darts make three stars,” Menar said. “The other two, at the higher elevations, we can’t see, but they’re there. And that’s it.” He scrolled through the onscreen values, the mathematical trace of the darts.
“This is the definition of a warm-water cloud,” he said. “It must be a hundred degrees today, and without the sun. If there are any supercooled droplets at all in that cloud, there aren’t many.”
Menar went outside and the others followed.
“The darts run very hot,” Menar said, “creating tiny updrafts. The antimony particulate is taken up in them, you get greater diffusion. That’s the root of natural condensation. Then the binding of particulate with water microdroplets, the coalescence threshold drops, and the microdroplets suddenly turn macro. No simulation of ice crystal nuclei at all,” he trailed off. “That would be pointless in a cloud like this, it’s so warm. There’s nothing to crystallize.” Menar turned and said, “You can send the drone through again, Michael, and see the difference we’ve made already.”
Michael had kept the tiny unmanned plane in a holding pattern nearby, continuously recording data with a battery of sensors for other experiments carried out earlier in the day, but ready for use should they need it here. He made a call to the pilot and in a few moments it cut through the cloud like a larger dart, a desert tan to the dart’s reflective copper, flying upward until it emerged from the top. “Temperatures are up and rising,” Michael confirmed as he joined the others outside. The cloud thickened and yellowed, the bottom edge darkened, the black bands widened.
“You know, we do use — Ravan has probably told you — a propagation approach sometimes,” Menar said. “Identify a pocket of supercooled droplets, get it to overtake the rest of the cloud, freeze the whole thing. We’ve also tried creating that pocket ourselves, if we can’t find one. Nitrogen flares—”
Just then Michael’s eyes disappeared behind a splatter of water. He pulled the glasses from his face with a startled grin and grabbed Menar’s shoulder.
“Well then,” Menar said. “We should probably go back inside. These artificial rains can be monstrous.”
The drops were sharply formed and proportioned to a monsoon. They burst on the skin like tiny balloons, and the water released felt almost sticky. There was an uncommon discreteness to the downpour. It produced the sort of precisely articulated patter on the mudflats, like a continuous drumming of the fingers, one might expect from a much harder, more resonant surface, like the aluminum roofing of the station (though the earth had more bass to it).
The saucers started to come apart. Fissures appeared and filled with water that overflowed the cracks running like grout lines between the mud tiles. The crisp attack of the rain slowly gave way to a gurgling.
Menar leaned up against the steel table with his hands wrapped around its edge.
“Well,” Ravan said softly, sitting down at the terminal directly behind the table. The storm had transfixed the NOAA men, holding them where they were.
“Yes, well,” Menar said. “If you hadn’t seen this before, you’d be just as stunned as they are.”
As the storm swelled, the raindrops lost their form and merged into ropes. The saucers were invisible now beneath a roiled, viscous layer of water, the rain falling faster than the ground could take it in.
“This is striking, Menar, really striking. Especially with warm water,” Michael said, turning away from the storm to face him. Water ran into the station in thick rivulets, amplifying the brightness of the corrugated steel floor.
“But I am starting to worry this could become a flood,” he continued. “We should close these doors or—”
“Well if you’ve seen enough, let’s switch it off,” Menar said. “As I say, we’ve never dispersed a cloud we’ve provoked into storming, certainly not like this. I do wonder if the two agents will interact in some way. They shouldn’t. But let’s see. Close the doors, I think. The monitor will serve.”
The techs brought the door back down, muting the falling water. Menar re-adjusted the position of the eastern platform, five degrees to the west. The seeders were identical to the dispersers in appearance, save for the darts, which were a darker copper and slightly larger, carrying a 1.5 pound payload.
“We call these dispersers ‘slakers’ for a couple of reasons,” Menar said. “One is that, though the cocktail’s complicated, unslaked lime — treated lime — is a vital ingredient. But much less of it than is usually necessary to make it a desiccant or a significant source of heat. In bulk of course it’s deeply toxic, burns the eyes, and so on. But we’ve managed to get round that problem with the auxiliary compounds we’ve bound it with.”
He tapped the track-pad and the first rocket ascended in just the manner of the seeders. But the digital monitor presented it differently, more instructively, and in peculiar ways, more viscerally, than direct sight could, odd as that sounded. Under magnification the contrails seemed more deeply textured and bubbly, and also discontinuous, having a patterned structure of thicknesses harnessed to each other: a cotton rope that looked as if it were being thrown to the sky. The launch cameras caught a sun-bright gleam of orange, then gray smoke, then a missile-tipped contrail.