People of the Sky Page 2

  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 th
e 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.

  An expression of surprise and wonder lit up the narrow brown face of the rider. One hand lifted in a brief wave. Feeling as though she were in a dream, Kesbe waved back. The boy, or perhaps it was a girl, shouted something that was lost in the wind, then gestured ahead. The meaning was clear. Follow.

  Still unwilling to trust her sense of sight, Kesbe pulled her white aviator’s scarf from around her neck and held it out. The wind whipped it from her hand before she was ready to let it go. The flier darted away, then returned with the scarf fluttering in the hand of its rider. The little figure bound the scarf about its own arm, letting one end trail back like a banner.

  The flier shot in front of Gooney Berg, driving ahead into the curtain of overcast. Kesbe held the plane in line behind it. She fought exhaustion with new strength born of hope. Somehow she had been given a guide through this alien wilderness of sky. It did not even occur to her whether or not to trust it her numbed mind could only accept and follow.

  She throttled back to stay behind the creature. The altimeter unwound slowly as she followed her guide down into the unknown heart of the Barranca.

  Chapter 2

  The aircraft descended through layers of overcast. Kesbe kept her eyes fixed on the flier and its rider, fearful she would lose her guide in the rags of cloud whipping across Gooney Berg’s windshield. As she banked steeply to follow them through a tight turn, the warning shudder of a high-speed stall reminded her she still had an airplane to pilot.

  The small rider extended an arm, waving left. Beneath blowing tatters of cloud, Kesbe saw slate-blue cliffs. A momentary hole in the overcast showed a ledge that broke the rise of the canyon’s walls. The creature’s rider gestured again, making it unmistakably clear that she was to land here on this rain-slicked shelf of rock.

  Kesbe eyed it doubtfully. The terrace looked about two hundred and fifty feet wide, barely twice the C-47’s wingspan. She couldn’t see how long it was. She wondered briefly if her guide on his nimble flier had any appreciation of how much runway this big ship needed.

  Probably not.

  Kesbe shoved that thought from her mind. The terrace was her only chance even though the landing would be rougher than the worst pot-holed strip she’d ever set down on. She would certainly pop a tire and at worst would collapse the landing gear No The worst was that the plane would skid off the cliff edge in a mass of flaming metal…She choked off the too-vivid images that seized her. One thing a pilot shouldn’t have is too much imagination.

  The ledge was passing by under her port wingtip. If she chose to land, it would have to be now. She made her decision and began mentally reciting the litany of her pre-landing checklist.

  Fuel selectors, left engine to left main tank, right to right main, fuel booster pumps on. Don’t forget to richen the mixture or the engines might cut out just when you need that extra power.

  Her right hand playing the throttle and mixture levers, she reached across with her left to zero the directional gyro. She suppressed an impulse to look out the window for the flier. It and its rider had done their job. She was on approach for landing on something as close to an airstrip as the Barranca would offer.

  Remember short-field technique, she told herself. Keep wide on the downwind leg of the approach.

  With the bad visibility, Kesbe decided to bring the ship in on instruments. Carefully she began the procedure, trying not to let tension rush her. Airspeed, one-twenty. Forty-five degree turn, easy right bank and roll-out. Forty-five seconds on this heading…watch that clock-, this has to be precise…then into a standard-rate turn for a full one-eighty.

  As the plane completed its maneuver, she lowered full flaps to dump airspeed. Now the landing gear. The hydraulic lever and latch were located to the rear in the center aisle between pilot and co-pilot. Under usual conditions it was the co-pilot’s responsibility to operate the landing gear hydraulics. She had to do it with a quick lunge into the center aisle while maintaining control of the aircraft. Slam the lever down and fumble for the lock
ing latch with one hand while pressing the control wheel forward with the other.

  The strength of one arm wasn’t enough to hold the plane in its downward glide. The nose lifted, began to buffet. A stall warning horn wailed.

  The white chill of adrenaline shock went through Kesbe as she snatched her hand from the lever and shoved hard on the wheel. She didn’t know whether she’d managed to lock the landing gear down, she could only hope for the hydraulic gauge needle to rise as she forced Gooney’s nose down, picking up enough airspeed to avert the stall. With sweat trickling down her neck, she knew she had made a near-fatal mistake in lowering full flaps before she got the gear down. A glance at the airspeed indicator showed the needle still trembling at a dangerously low level She steepened her descent.

  With three fingers, she nudged the throttles forward, picking up enough power to keep the plane from mushing. Emerald lights shone from the instrument panel and she felt a braking effect as the C-47’s wheels descended into the slipstream.

  Kesbe risked diverting her attention from the forward view to peek out the side window past the curve of the fuselage. She had a wheel. The left side gear was down. The right side she would have to take on faith, since she had no co-pilot to sing back confirmation.

  Air whistled past her cockpit window as the engines rumbled behind her. Ahead, growing more distinct through swirling ground-fog, was her refuge, a pitifully narrow ledge of uneven rock. Wisps of cloud streamed outward, indicating a crosswind blowing off the terrace. She lowered one wing and pressed right rudder, crabbing Gooney inward.

  Glancing down, she saw the cliff edge pass beneath her wheels. Now was the time to haul back on the yoke, lifting the nose but keeping power…wings level, round her out and let her sink gently before chopping power…

  No! She was still too high. Kesbe rammed the throttles forward, but the plane was already falling. The surge of power couldn’t save Gooney from a thunderous crash on her landing gear. The plane bounced up again, nearly jerking Kesbe’s head from her shoulders. A wing dipped. Gooney Berg veered toward the rockface at the back of the ledge, ignoring Kesbe’s efforts to wrench the wheel in the opposite direction. She endured another skull-jarring smash. The screech of aluminum on bare stone accompanied an orange fountain of sparks spraying from the right wingtip as it ground against a cliff face.