People of the Sky (2 page)

Kesbe watched in fascination. She had heard other people speak of the rapid changes in Oneway’s weather, but like all things spoken of and not experienced, she didn’t really understand it. Not until now.

The blooming cloud-mass seemed to explode in slow motion, taking on the ominous anvil shape of a mature thunderhead. Kesbe banked away, choosing to fly down the middle of the narrowing corridor between it and the other line of squalls. She felt a familiar dryness on the back of her tongue. Her body knew when trouble was coming, even if her mind wouldn’t yet admit it. Blue sky still lay ahead, but a long way off.

As if in warning, a sudden gust of wind caught
Gooney
under the tail and sent the plane scooting along between the two cloudbanks. In between glances outside and adjustments to the autopilot, Kesbe secured everything in the cockpit.

Now came a critical decision. Should she forge ahead or turn back and try to fly behind the storm front? Backtracking would use up fuel reserves. She studied her lapboard with its sectional chart. According to this, if it was accurate, she was at the half-way point between Canaback Base and Mabena’s installation. So there was no turning back—and not enough excess fuel to waste in trying to maneuver around the storm.

Well, it’s not as if I was in some cockleshell of a stratocar
, Kesbe thought.
This big bird was built to fly in heavy weather. All right, old girl, we’re going through
.

Aiming the C-47’s nose at the distant vertical blue strip between the two closing cloudbanks, she throttled the engines up another notch and put the plane into a slight dive to gain airspeed.
Gooney
hurtled toward clear air.

A great iron-gray gate slid across the plane’s path, trapping her in a blind alley between two soaring walls of cloud. Kesbe nosed the C-47 up in a steep climb, as if seeking the fading sunlight as it painted the cloudtops golden and poured down into the depths of the chasm.

That way too was suddenly and brutally closed, leaving
Gooney
caught between two massive battlements of stormcloud. Like two armies on the field of war, they rumbled threats at each other and fired lightning across the narrowing gap.

No, they did not resemble armies, nor fortress walls, Kesbe thought, watching in awe. They were some fierce and angry life-form, rolling, boiling and surging with a malignant biology all their own. Purple, black and dusky green, the thunderheads bloomed in fungus colors, swelling and bursting in explosions of lightning.

As the storms converged, each began to claw at
Gooney
. Gripping the control wheel and hunching down in her seat, Kesbe fended off attacks from first one side, then the other. Buffeting winds sent sharp shocks through the airframe. Fitful rain showers rattled on the windshield.

Kesbe thought of descending, but one glance downward in the middle of a banking turn convinced her otherwise. Beneath, the Barranca had become a maw whose hidden teeth were the rock spears rising from the abyss.

As the corridor between the two weather systems narrowed to wing-widths, Kesbe prepared herself to fly on instruments. She began climbing again, following the instinctive feel that altitude would buy safety, at least for a while. The cloudtops were probably at thirteen thousand.
Gooney’s
rated ceiling was sixteen thousand, although that was in atmospheric conditions on Earth, Kesbe reminded herself.

She got on the lasercom to the base at Canaback, where she had lifted from the stratocar launchway hours earlier. “This is GOL six-seven-one-one-niner. Request clearance to level thirteen. I’m running into bad weather.”

The comm unit hissed and spat as if it were an old radio transmitter. She heard a tinny voice in her headset. “Say again, GOL six-seven-one-one-nine. Your transmission is breaking up.”

Kesbe gave her identification again, then made her request She felt the inside of her flying gloves getting slick from nervous sweat. Damn! The lasercom was supposed to be the most modern communication link yet developed. How could it be failing?

She tried again, getting nothing but static hash, and tried to quell the anxiety that leaped up. She told herself that this was a temporary communication loss, probably due to equipment malfunction at Canaback. They could still track her by the plane’s old transponder. She thought about landing. The terrain below looked bad. She decided to stay at altitude and continue on
course.

Outside, the winds grew harsher, delivering brutal slaps that sent the plane weaving from one side of the corridor to the other.
Gooney
protested the rough treatment with a chorus of creaks, shudders and groans.

Kesbe was instruments when the storms slammed together. With her windshield blanked by cloud, she began scanning the array of indicators. Remembering those hours of practice “under the hood” in stimulated zero-visibility conditions, she let her gaze flick past the altimeter and the artificial horizon, not letting herself become fixated on any one of the instruments.

The plane bucked and rocked in the grip of severe turbulence. Each squall line tried to fights its way through the other with barrages of hail. Crackling jolts of lightning lit up the interiors of the clouds and cast an eerie light into the cockpit. The struggle became strange and violent mating as the two cloud-masses coalesced.

Sledgehammer blows from fierce gusts beat the plane down. Kesbe shuddered with
Gooney
as knife-like windshears from up-and down-drafts nearly sliced the plane in half. The wrath of the storm threatened to twist her fuselage into a corkscrew or wrench off her tail.

The once-stable surface of the flight deck became a treacherously tilting platform that could drop in any direction. Rain lashed the windows, leaking through the seals and dribbling along the side of the instrument panel. Nearby lightning discharges sent shockwaves through the plane’s metal skin. Everything–Kesbe’s skin, the plane’s controls-tingled and snapped with static electricity.

Each lightning flash was accompanied by a deafening detonation. Without distance or echo to give them any resonance, the sound of the explosions was hard and flat.

A particularly vicious blow literally stood the C-47 up on her nose. For an instant, she seemed to hand upside down, nearly tilting over onto her back. To Kesbe, the world had suddenly gone crazier than before, if that was possible. Only her safety restraint kept her from smashing face-first into the windshield. She hung from the back of her seat, her legs dangling into the rudder-pedal recess.

The surging of her engines became an angry growl, rising in pitch as the winds challenged her. Each time the storm smashed the plane down, she came back howling, as if trying to drown out the storm-demons by the fierceness of her cry. Kesbe knew now that the old C-47 was not just a baggage wagon but a warrior in her own right. Just like her ancient compatriot, an unarmed transport who was credited with a fighter kill in a mid-twentieth century war, she faced the alien strom and refused to give in.

Not satisfied with trying to batter the plane out the sky, the thunderstorm tried to drown her in rain. The cascade poured onto
Gooney’s
windshield. Leaks began as dribbles, but soon turned into fountains that spewed through the nose, soaking Kesbe’s legs. And above everything else was the noise the rain made pounding on the fuselage-a continuous sense-shattering cannonade that obliterated even the sound of the engines.

Again the plane roared back at the storm, but the sound and feel of her engines was distinctly soggy. Even the valiant spirit of the C-47 couldn’t make up for the fact that she wasn’t designed to fly in a medium that was rapidly becoming more ocean than air. In the face of the deluge, Kesbe abandoned her climb and struggled to stay altitude.

Could she really trust the altimeter reading, she wondered? Since she had last set the altimeter at Canaback, the barometric pressure had dropped. The altimeter could have a possibly fatal error, telling her she was higher than she actually was. The thought of smashing blindly into a cliff while trying to descend through the clouds loomed large in her mind.

Kesbe knew that fuel and willpower would eventually give out. She was starting to fray from the assault on her senses and the continuous battle with yoke and rudder. It was time to declare an emergency. With an arm that ached from fatigue, she reached for her lasercom microphone and spoke the syllables that still had universal meaning throughout human-settled space. “GOL six-seven-one-one-niner over Barranca Madre at ten thousand transmitting MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY…“

The only answer was a startled chirp in her headset. She hung onto the mike, repeating her call, hoping that some part of her call would punch through to Canaback. When they sent a rescue craft, it could at least pick her from the wreckage if she survived the crash. Whatever happened,
Gooney Berg
was doomed. Any attempt to land the plane in the Barranca would chew her into unsalvagable scrap.

Kesbe cursed her own foolishness and Mabena’s hardheaded insistence that the C-47 be flown instead of freighted, in order to prove its airworthiness. What the hell was she trying to prove by driving the old plane to its death in an alien canyon? Angry tears stung the corners of her eyes and spilled over, mixing with the water dripping from her hair. She blinked them away, knowing she had to concentrate on getting the C-47 down before it was ripped apart beneath her.

She knew
Gooney
had experienced other abuse due to pilot error. The last mistake, ironically, was the one that preserved the old Douglas long past the time when her contemporaries had been junked.

In 1957, a novice transport pilot had ditched his Gooney Bird on a Greenland glacier, a fate suffered by several C-47s used in arctic areas during the 1940s, ‘50’s and ‘60s. Most were rescued soon after the incident, although one notable exception survived a 30-year hiatus before being dug up in 1988. The plane that was to become Kesbe’s suffered a much longer wait. A fierce blizzard covered the aircraft with a fifty-foot snowpack that soon became part of the glacier. Protected by the encasement, the C-47 gradually sank deep into the glacier and spent the next three and a quarter centuries moving forward until the ice-entombed aircraft emerged at the glacier’s foot.

The plane’s emergence earned it a second life and a new name. Kesbe and her grandfather slapped a salvage claim on the frozen bird just in time to prevent it from being dismantled.
Gooney’s
survival and return to airworthiness seemed miraculous. After all the C-47 had endured, how could it again be destroyed by pilot misjudgment?

Carefully Kesbe began her descent through the clouds. Though she tried to keep her eyes moving across the instrument panel, her gaze kept straying back to the altimeter as its needle unwound. Suddenly the scud about her wings began to thin.

Kesbe yanked the ailerons over and punched the rudder right in the same instant that the obstruction loomed ahead Canyon rocks smeared into a blur before her eyes as she hauled the plane off in a tight bank, vividly imagining the C-47’s belly nearly scraping boulders. Throttling both engines to full power, she lumbered into a steep climb.

Then the cold sweat broke loose. She shook so hard she could barely hold the wheel, knowing she had nearly impaled
Gooney
on one of the spires in the Barranca. Wordlessly she thanked the gods of the air and of errant pilots that she had managed to miss it.

Kesbe took a deep, long breath She had escaped the rocks but there was no room to fly beneath the clouds, the Barranca’s spires and peaks were too high. She began the heartbreaking task of preparing once again to endure the capricious wrath of the electrical storm.

Her artificial horizon was now tilting crazily, its gyro tumbled by the sharp near-miss. Though she tried to concentrate on the remaining instruments, exhaustion made her mind wander
dangerously She thought of the flying creature she had seen. Where was it now? It had looked much too delicate to fly in this sort of weather.

She caught herself drifting and forced her attention to the instruments. They confirmed that in the few short moments of inattention, she had lost her climb and was in a shallow bank, spiralling down. Fiercely she made the correction, all too aware that fatigue was muffling the sound of the storm outside and turning the sharp bucking of the aircraft to a deceptively comfortable rocking. Her vision was hazing, her mind felt wrapped in cotton batting. She wanted to think only of easy, pleasant things, like the sound of her grandfather’s voice telling the old Hopi stories, or the sight of the flier spreading its wings over the Barranca. It seemed that if she stared ahead into the hypnotic gray cloud, she could see the creature as a shadowed shape ahead of the aircraft.

Kesbe sat up in her seat, shaking her head hard. There was something ahead of her. She stared until her eyes ached, rubbed them hard and stared again. The shape dodged and weaved across her course. Its wings were lost in the blur of flight, but the shape of its body, and especially of the head, was unmistakable.

She peered ahead, suspicious that she was being lured by a phantom out of her own imagination. This couldn’t be the ethereal flier she had seen gliding over the canyon, or could it? As if in answer, a lightning flash reflected along the creature’s side and sparkled among the raindrops being thrown from the rapidly-beating wings. A gust of wind threw the flier to one side. Tossing its head like an impatient pony, it dropped back, just ahead of
Gooney Berg’s
left wingtip.

Kesbe got her second shock in as many minutes. Clinging to the creature’s neck was a small, child-like figure. She looked away, then back, thinking this might be a hallucination. The creature and its rider were still there.

The flier drifted closer to Kesbe’s cockpit window, risking the slipstream that could draw it into
Gooney’s
whirling prop. Quickly Kesbe turned on her cockpit lights to warn it off. The flier came nearer. Now she could see the rain-lashed skin and whipping black hair of the slender form crouched along its neck. Clawing at her side window, she forced it open, ignoring the rain that drenched her head and shoulders.