If adrenalin and muscle power could have turned the craft, Caitland would have done better than anyone. But every time it seemed he’d succeeded in wrenching the fan around to a proper course, a fresh gust would leap from the nearest thunderhead and toss the tiny vehicle ass over rotor.
He glanced upward through the rain-smeared plex-idome. Only different shades of blackness differentiated the sky above. If the Styx was overhead, what
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Ye Who Would Stng
lay below?—granite talons and claws of gneiss, the empty-wild peaks of the Silver Spar Range. He’d been blown further north than he’d thought.
Time and again the winds sought to hammer the fan into the ground. Time and again he somehow managed to coax enough from the weakening engine to avoid the next ledge, the next crag, the next cliff.
He could not get above the ice-scoured spires; soon he was fighting just to stay in the air, the fanship dancing through the glacier valleys like a leaf running rapids. The weather was playing a wailing game with bis life, but he was almost too tired to care. The fuel gauge hovered near empty. He’d stalled the inevitable, hoping for even a slight break in the storm, hoping for a minute’s chance at a controlled landing. It seemed even that was to be denied him.
The elements had grown progressively’ more inimical. Lightning lit the surrounding mountains in rapid-fire surreal flashes, sounded in the thin-shelled ship cabin like a million kilos of frying bacon. Adhesive rain defeated the best efforts of the wipers to keep the front port clear. Navigation instrumentation told him that he was surrounded by sheer rock walls on all sides. As the canyon he’d worked his way into narrowed still further, updrafts became downdrafts, downdrafts became sidedrafts, and sidedrafts became aeolian aberrations without names. Mobiusdrafts.