People of the Sky Read Free

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 oncourse.
    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