"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?"

Alex's heartbeat changed gears. "Yeah! Do it!"

"There's no light inside the core, either. It's almost always pitch-black inside a twister. But Jesse has a little night-light-red and infrared. I dunno what we'll see, dude, but we'll see something."

"Shut up and go!" Alex pressed the goggles against both eyes with the flats of his hands.

His head flooded with maxed-out roaring. Eerie red light bloomed against his eyeballs. He was shearing down the monster's tightened, spinning throat. The 'thopter trembled violently, a dozen times a second. Inside the twister's core, the wind was moving so fast that its terrible speed was oddly unfelt and unseen, like the spin of the earth.

Hell had a structure. It had a texture. The spinning inner walls were a blurry streaky gas, and a liquid rippling sheen, and a hard black wobbling solid, all at once. Great bulging rhythmical waves and hollows of peristalsis were creeping up the funnel core, slow and dignified, like great black smoke rings in the throat of a deep thinker.

The 'thopter jerked hard once, harder again, then lost all control and punched the wall. All sound ceased at once.

The image froze, then disintegrated before Alex's eyes into a colored tangle of blocky video trails.

Then the image reintegrated and slammed back into real-time motion. They were outside the twister, flung free of it, tumbling through air with all the grace of a flung brick.

The 'thopter spread its wings and banked. Buzzard crowed aloud in the sudden silence. "We just blew both mikes," he said. "Pressure drop!"