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  Buzzard, severed from all things earthly by his virching helmet, crouched on his cushion in the yurt's center. He was methodically putting his remote-control ornithopters through their paces, in preparation for the chase to come.

  Carol Cooper sat on the floor near the tub, methodically stitching a set of carpal tunnel wrist supports out of tanned deerskin.

  "You think I could have some more water in here?" Alex said. "Maybe like a couple hundred cc's?"

  Carol snorted. "Dude, you're damn lucky to draw what you got. Most days we wash in, like, four tablespoons. When we wash, that is."

  A Trouper in bright yellow Disaster Relief paramedical gear entered the yurt, circled around the oblivious Buzzard, and handed Carol a plastic squeeze bottle and a paper pack of antiseptic gloves. "I brought the sheep dip."

  "Thanks, Ed." Carol paused. "This is Alex."

  "Yo," Alex offered, sketching out a half salute.

  Ed gave Alex a long gaze of silent medical objectivity, then nodded once and left.

  Alex plucked the sponge from his head and began to dab at his armpits. "I take it you folks aren't real big on bathroom privacy."

  "Ed's a medic," Carol told him. "He was checking you out here earlier, when you were flat on your back and covered with barf." Carol compared her leather cutout to a pattern displayed on her laptop screen, then deftly nicked away another sliver with her pencil knife. "There's never much privacy in camp life. If we Troupe types want to have sex or something, then we sneak into one of the tepees and move some of the storage crap out of the way. Or if you want, you can drive out way over the horizon and toss a blanket over some cactus." Carol put her leather stitchwork aside and hefted the squeeze bottle. "You feel okay now, Alex?"

  "Yeah. I guess so."

  "You're not gonna pass out again, or anything?"

  "I didn't 'pass out,'" Alex said with dignity. "I just was really getting deeply into the experience, that's all."

  Carol let that ride. "This stuff is heavy-duty antiseptic. Kind of a delousing procedure. We have to do this to all the wannabes now, ever since a staph carrier showed up at camp once and gave us a bad set of boils."

  "I've had staph boils." Alex nodded.

  "Well, you never had staph like that stuff; it was like one of the plagues of Egypt."

  "I've had Guatemalan Staph IVa," Alex told her. "Never heard of the Egyptian strains before."

  Carol pondered him for a long moment, then shrugged and let it go. "I've got to wash you down in this stuff. It's gonna sting a little."

  "Oh good!" Alex said, sitting up straighter. The flaccid camp bath swashed about in its thin metal frame, and the pathetic dribble of water in the bottom did its best to slosh. "Y'know, Carol, it's really good of you to take so much time for me."

  That's okay, man. It's not everybody I know who can throw up blue goo." She paused. "I did mention that you have to clean out the helmet later, right?"

  "No, you didn't mention that. But I'm not real surprised to hear it."

  Carol tore the paper pack open and pulled out the thin plastic gloves. She drew them on. "This stuff stings some at first, but don't panic. You don't need to panic unless you get it in your eyes. It's pretty tough on mucous membranes."

  "Look, stop making excuses and just pour it in the goddamned sponge," Alex said, holding it out.

  Carol soaked the sponge down with the squeeze bottle and emptied the rest into the tub. Alex began to lather himself up. The slithering soapy concoction wasn't bad at all-kind of a pleasantly revolting medical peppermint.

  Then it began to acid-etch its way into his skin.

  Alex gritted his teeth, his eyes watering, but deliberately made no sound.

  Carol watched him with an interesting mx of compassion and open pleasure in his suffering. "Blood will tell, huh, Alex? I swear to God I saw your sister get exactly that same expression on her face. . .. Close your eyes tight, and I'll do your back and scalp.

  The sharp gnawing edge of the antiseptic faded after a moment, in Carol's steady scrubbing and the blood-colored darkness of his own closed eyelids, and he began to feel merely as if he were being laundered and drastically overbleached. The antiseptic was doing something very peculiar to the caked sweat, sebum, and skin flakes at the roots of his hair. Great metropolitan swarms of his native bacteria were perishing in microscopic anguish.

  Carol allowed him another dribble of clean water then, enough to rinse his hair and free his eyes. He was more than clean now. He was cleaner than he ever wanted to be again. He was scorched and smoking earth.

  Juanita chose this moment to storm headlong into the yurt, in boots, shorts, T-shirt, and a pair of big grimy work gloves, her square jaw set with fury and her hair knotted in a kerchief. She had to pause in midrush to skip her way over the fiber-optic trip wires of Buzzard's networked laptops. "Alex!" she yelled. "Are you all right?"

  He looked up mildly. "Did you bring a towel?"

  "I heard those bastards stunted you until you fainted!" She stopped short at his tub. She glanced at Carol, then back at him. "Is that true?"

  "I like ultralights," he told her. "They're interesting. Get out of my bathroom."

  Carol burst into laughter. "He's okay, Jane."

  "Well, they were wrong to do that! If they'd hurt you, I'd have . . . well, you should have told them that you were never supposed to-" Juanita broke off short. "Hell! Never mind. We've got to chase storms. We've got to calibrate." She threw the back of one work glove to her sweating forehead. "Never mind . . . Alex, just for me, please, try and stay out of trouble for ten goddamn minutes, okay?"

  "I'm only doing what you wanted me to do," Alex pointed Out, exasperated. "Can't we discuss this while you're having a bath?"

  "Alex, don't drive me crazy!" Juanita stared at him. "I guess you're okay after all, huh . . . ? Y'know, you don't look half so bad now! You're still kinda pale and airsick looking, but you do look a lot better clean."

  Stung, Alex switched to their childhood household Spanish. "Listen to me, all of the world will be more happy when you get away from me, and stay away from me!'

  Juanita looked startled. "What? Slow down." She shook her head. "Never mind, I get it. Okay, I'm leaving. Have it your way." She turned to Carol, frowning. "Peter and Rick! I'm gonna think up something special for Peter and Rick."

  Carol pursed her lips. "Be nice, Janey."

  "Yeah, right, sure." Juanita left the yurt.

  Alex waited until his sister was well out of earshot. "She sure hasn't changed much," he said. "How do you people put up with that crap?"

  "Oh, for us, she's an asset," Carol assured him. "I like Jane! I always liked her. I liked her even when she first showed up in the flicking limo! I'm one of your sister's big partisans."

  "Huh," Alex said. "Well, that's your lookout, I guess." He rinsed his arms, then gazed around the yurt. "How long does it take around here before us lowly wannabes are actually given real clothes?"

  "Well, that's your lookout, dude. Maybe I could be persuaded to cut-and-paste you a paper suit that would fit you a little better." Carol shrugged. "But you'll have to pull some weight for me, in return. What are you good at?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean what do you hack?"

  Alex thought it over. "Well, I'm pretty good at ordering weird stuff with charge cards. If I can get an encrypted phone line, that is."

  Carol's eyes narrowed. "Huh."

  THERE WASN'T MUCH wrong with Charlie. He had what was known in the trade as a vegetable jam. A whip-thin length of West Texas briar had managed to work its way into the fullerene grease around the right front axle, and had been liquefied into a burned-caramel goo. Jane fetched and carried for Greg and Rudy for a while, dismounting and remounting Charlie, running diagnostics off the older Pursuit Vehicle Baker, and trying to pamper the dinosaur-like alcohol-burning Dune Buggy Able. As time ticked on, though, and the two experienced mechanics worked their way into the finer tolerances, she could sense their patience with her amateuri
sm beginning to wear.

  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.

  Alex clambered slowly to his feet. His knees shook, and his arms and back were sor
e; the bones of his spine felt like a stack of wooden napkin rings. He had a minor lump on his head that he didn't remember receiving.

  But his lungs felt good. His lungs felt very good, amazingly good. He was breathing. And that was all that mattered. For the first time in at least a year, he'd spent the entire night, deeply asleep, without a coughing fit.

  Whatever vile substance he'd received in the lung enema, and whatever misguided quack doctrine had guided the clinica staff, the treatment had nonetheless worked. The street rumors that had guided him were true: the sans of bitches in Nuevo Laredo actually had something workable. He wasn't cured-he knew full well that he wasn't cured, he could sense the sullen reservoirs of baffled sickness lurking deep in his bones-but he was much better. They had hacked him back, they had patched him up, they had propped him on his feet. And just in time to have him stolen away.

  Alex laughed aloud. He had rallied; he was on a roll again. It was very welcome; but it was very strange.

  Alex had had spells of good health before. The longest had been a solid ten months when he was seventeen, when the whole texture of his life had changed for a while, and he had even considered going to school. But that little dream had broken like a bubble of blood, when the blight set its flshhooks into him again and reeled him back gasping into its own world of checkups, injections, biopsies, and the sickbed.

  His latest siege of illness had been the worst by far, the worst since his infancy, really. At age eighteen months, he had almost coughed to death. Alex didn't remember this experience, naturally, but his parents had made twenty-four-hour nursery videotapes during the crisis. Alex had later discovered those tapes and studied them at length.

  In the harsh unsparing light of Texas morning, Alex stood naked by his battered sleeping bag and examined himself, with a care and clarity that he'd avoided for a while.

  He was past thin: he was emaciated, a stick-puppet creature, all tendon and bone. He was close to gone, way too close. He'd been neglectful, and careless.