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I sighed. “And we were doing so well.”
His eyes cut to mine. “What do you mean?”
“With the lack of questions. We were doing so well.”
He laughed and picked up the deploy system and looked it over. “What does this thing do? It looks like a gas cylinder?”
I took it off him and put it back on the table. “It’s a quick deploy system. It screws into the automated weather station, measures wind speeds, pressure, temperatures.”
“Cool.” He went to grab the small solar panel and I took it before he could. “Please don’t touch. This equipment is expensive, and it’s all I’ve got.”
“I’m not gonna break it,” he said, pouting like a child.
People rarely evermeanto break things. But things get dropped by accident, and good intentions can’t fix broken equipment, and I certainly couldn’t afford to replace anything.
I took out the laptop and opened it. “What are the chances of a decent signal here?”
Tully snorted and held up two fingers. “Buckley’s and none.”
I thought as much. “That’s okay. I can still record data. And just hope nothing happens to the unit before I can send it to the cloud, that’s all.”
Tully shrugged. “We can drive out every morning if you need. Just a couple of miles to see if we can get a better signal. You can upload your data every day that way.”
I smiled at him, regretting how I’d scolded him when he was just trying to be helpful. “That’d be great, thanks.”
I fired the laptop up, entered in the location information, and in a few moments, the screen was full of a weather radar and changing stats.
“Oh, that’s cool,” Tully said. I shot him a look and he put his hands up. “I’m not gonna touch it. Show me what it does.”
“It’s from the geostationary op satellite,” I explained. “There are satellites each equipped with GLM, which is Geostationary Lightning Maps, that detects the light emissions from both cloud-to-ground and inter-cloud lightning which escape the cloud and make it to space. This technology helps severe weather forecasters identify rapidly intensifying thunderstorms so they can issue accurate and timely severe thunderstorm, and cyclone warnings, for example.”
He snorted. “And what’s the dumb version?”
“The satellites read data and track electrical storms.”
“Right. Why didn’t you just say that?”
“I did.”
“I can assure you, you did not.”
I sighed. “The bureau radars,” I said, changing topics and changing tabs on the computer, bringing up a different radar, “are different. It’s just reading data fed from local weather stations in Darwin and Warruwi.” I looked at the numbers. “Well, it’s trying to. It’s searching, lagging, mostly.”
“But the radar? Is that current?”
“No. It’s lagging too.” I went through the equipment crate and pulled out a booster. It looked like an antenna. I hooked it up to the converter, then plugged it into the laptop. “I need to find somewhere...”
He groaned. “Gaaah, why didn’t you say you had a booster? I can put it on the roof for ya,” Tully said, grinning. “Would that help?”
“Well, it would, actually. Very much.”
His face lit up, as if being helpful was his favourite thing to do. He went out and looked up at the roof, and I followed. God, the sun had some bite, and the humidity was stifling. The bunker was surprisingly cool. “What about up there,” he said, pointing to the highest pitch of the roof. “Lemme grab the ladder.”
He found a ladder around the side of the bunker and I held it as he climbed, not at all looking at his muscular legs as he went up. “I’m very glad to see there are lightning rods installed,” I said, seeing the metal diversion rods installed along the ridgeline.
“Yeah, they didn’t muck around when they built this thing,” he said, getting to the top. “Holy shit this roof’s hot,” he mumbled, but I held up the booster and he grinned as he took it from me. “Go and look on the screen and tell me when the signal’s better.”
“The cord isn’t very long. I’ll have to move the table. Sorry!” I tried to hurry because I didn’t want him to burn himself on the hot tin roof, but it did give him more cord. He moved the booster and I checked the screen.
