Starrigger

hell of a shitstorm brewing antisunward.'

I looked. Thunderheads were stacking up on a grim-looking horizon. Masses of heated air had risen all day to an icy altitude, and now were returning with a vengeance, reincarnated as rain-swollen clouds, black with fury.

'Looks nasty, all right. Could be twisters in there. Which way is it moving?'

'I've been scanning for the last ten minutes. It's heading toward us on a slant from left to right as we look at it. If we can get to those hills in time, we should miss most of it.'

'That's good news. Switch on the afterburners.'

'Show me where the switch is. I'll do my best, though. I just hope she holds together.'

'Why? Problems?'

'You're not going to ask why I took my time getting down to you back there?'

I heaved a sigh. 'No, Sam, I wasn't. I figure you had a damn good reason. Of course, if you didn't, I will take a flex-torque wrench to you with exquisite artistry.'

'I had trouble starting up, and I stalled out twice on the bridge.'

'That doesn't sound good. In fact, I don't like that at all.' I still felt sort of giddy. 'I'm not going to think about that today. I am going to sit here quietly and have the nervous breakdown that's owed me. Thank you. Good-bye.' I closed my eyes.

'Just wanted to tell you,' came a voice at my ear. I turned my head. It was Sukuma-Tayler, squatting by my seat. His face was strained, his lower lip quivering. 'Awfully sorry… damned shame to have involved you in all this. My fault….' Abruptly, he broke down and sobbed. When he had composed himself somewhat, he blubbered, 'I'm responsible for their deaths.'

'No. You've fallen into the same trap many have ? not being totally prepared for alien unknowns. The sameness of the Skyway can lull you into a false sense of security. Many have perished because of it.'

'The Guidebook,' he said, voice tightened with regret, 'I… I should have known! I had it, I read it.' He shook his head helplessly. 'But on the other side of these mountains, where the settlements are, the ecology is radically different. I covered those sections very thoroughly! I simply neglected the other aspects of the planet.'

'As I said, a common fault. We didn't bother to check the planet banks at all before we barged in here. But, we all learn, and with a little luck, we live.'

'My friends weren't so lucky.'

'They won't be the last you'll lose to a new planet. It's a dangerous universe, John.'

'Yes, I know. We have lost others, before.' He was silent for a moment, then went back to find a place to sit in the crowded cab.

We rode along in silence until the sky grew dark and the first drops of rain spattered on the forward viewport. It wasn't long before it came whipping down in force, driven by a gale-force wind coming from two points off the starboard bow. We were doing around 150 meters per second, and the rig buffeted and shook and kept yawing to the left as Sam fought to keep it on course. Pink sheets of lightning ripped through the gathering gloom above.

The lower parts of my legs were on fire, as was a large area of my left thigh. I had thought that I could handle the pain for a while, but exactly whom was I kidding? I told Darla to load up the tickler with an upper- downer cocktail: a 1 mg solution of hydromorphone with 5 mg of amphetamine sulfate thrown in to keep me alert.

'And no pharmacology lectures, please.'

'I'll do it if you can keep this rig on the road.'

'Sam, give me the wheel.'

I took the control bars in hand.

Outside, thunder walked across the plain in big, earth-shivering steps. The forward port was a solid film of wind-flattened water, distorting the view ahead. The gale grew stronger; the light kept fading until visibility dropped close to zero. I flicked on the headbeams, then focused the spotlight on the road. For good measure, the yellow fogcutters went on too. The lights helped, but visibility was still marginal. It was not blackness out there as much as it was murk, a ghastly greenish drizzle that glowed with a strange diffused light. I looked up and saw it was coming from the sky. It was a twister sky.

Shortly thereafter, Sam confirmed my suspicions.

'Jake, I've got something pretty scary on the scanners.'

Twister?'

'Well, if it is, it's the grandpappy of mem all. The electrostatic potential is in the gigavolt region. It's a monster.'

'Jesus, Sam, where is it?'

'Oh, it's paralleling us about a klick off starboard.'

'Oh.'

'You'd better hurry, son.'

'Yes, sir.*'

I floored the son of a bitch.

'Everybody hang on!' Sam yelled.

The warning didn't come in time, for right then I lost the roadway and we hit dirt with a bang, vibrated through a staccato series of bumps, then whumped into something big that splattered the viewport with mud. Whatever it was didn't stop us, but it took several seconds for the washers to clear the view.

'Sam! Find the road for me!'

A final volley of bumps and we were back on the road. I straightened the rig out and eased off on the throttle.

'There you are,' Sam said calmly. 'Now, do you want to use the thermal-imaging glasses, or do you want to keep us entertained?'

'Okay, okay. Damn things give me headaches.' I brought the contraption down and shoved my face into it. A fuzzy 3-D scan of the view ahead in pretty, dappled colors showed the road in deep purple, with ambiguous edges. Also muddying me picture were false echoes from the rain itself ? but it was an improvement.

'What did we hit back there?' Sam asked.

'One of those miserable land-crab mounds, probably. And I hope the bank turns down their loan to build a new one. Any more data on the twister?'

'Time for your shot, Mr. McGraw.' It was Darla whispering in my ear.

I started to roll up my sleeve. She shook her head.

'Uh-uh.'

'What? Woman, do you expect me to drop my pants in the middle of a howling tempest?'

'Now, Mr. McGraw, you know how'we deal with uncooperative patients. Drop 'em or it's the rubber room.'

'Sam, take over.'

He did, and I did, and she did.

'Ow. Damn it. Whoever named that thing a tickler?'

'About the twister,' Sam went on. 'Jake, I don't know what this thing is, but it looks like we can outrun it. Its periphery is moving at about half our speed.'

'That's pretty fast for a twister.'

'It's more than a twister. It's a funnel cloud of some kind, but it analyzes as something qualitatively different from a garden-variety Kansas tornado.'

'Aunty Em! Aunty Em!' I screamed in my best falsetto.

'You always were a strange boy.'

We skirted the storm for a few dozen more kilometers before we reached the foothills. The wind subsided, but the rain still fell in torrents. It was dusk now, and the sky was a hell of red-orange clouds. Visibility improved. The road bore steadily upward, snaking through the steep foothills, but it did so in a very curious and inefficient manner. On this section of the Skyway, the road lay across the mounting terrain like a carelessly dropped ribbon, twisting painfully into complicated figures, doubling back on itself, following a route laid out by.a surveyor under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. The roadway climbed grades that were much too steep, banked crazily on slopes that it should have cut into, arced over dizzying peaks it should have tunneled through. It was a civil engineer's