People of the Sky Read Free Page A

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