A virtual finger reached forward, almost reluctantly touching the disengage icon.
The g-force slammed her back into the seat as the hyperglider cut free, bringing back the weight she hadn’t felt since she arrived on Far Away. The craft hurtled toward the blunt end of Stakeout Canyon at two hundred kilometers an hour. Immediately it lurched to starboard and began to descend. She twisted the joystick to compensate—not fast, smooth and positive—shifting the wings to alter the airflow. The response was astonishingly quick, sending her swooping upward. Then a near-spin started, and she flipped the stabilizer tips to counter it.
Every moment demanded her total concentration merely to hold the hyperglider roughly level. It wasn’t just the featureless wrap of cloud that cut her off from the outside world. Her attention was focused solely on the attitude display and the radar. As Stakeout Canyon narrowed, she had to hold her course directly down the center. All the time the rock walls closed in toward each other, growing steeper in the process, the furious buffeting increased proportionally. Wild turbulence was constantly trying to swirl the craft around into a spin, or pull it down to oblivion.
She wasn’t even aware of time passing, only the frantic, exhausting fight to keep the hyperglider on track. If she let it ascend too high, the massive upper windstreams would carry it away over the sides of the canyon as they gushed up and away, expanding in release from the escalating pressure at the base of the walls. She would wind up somewhere on the weather-blasted and boulder-strewn midslopes of Zeus or Titan, hundreds of kilometers from the recovery vehicles of the caravan.
Without any warning, the radar picked up the end of the canyon, twenty-five kilometers away. At this point, where the three volcanoes intersected, Mount Herculaneum was a simple vertical cliff, six kilometers high. Her own altitude was three and a half kilometers. Outside, the wind speed was still increasing within the constriction. The weather radar screen flared lurid scarlet around the edges as it tracked the lethal currents and shock waves reverberating off the rock. Darkness deepened around her as the shredded clouds were crushed back together.
Justine retracted the wings slightly, sacrificing the propulsive push they generated for a little more maneuverability. It had begun to rain steadily outside the cockpit now, thick droplets slashing along beside her. Paradoxically, visibility began to lift. The clouds were recondensing under the pressure. Droplets began to merge together for an instant before the raging winds tore them apart. Then they would re-form a second later, larger this time as the pressure continued to build relentlessly. Semicohesive horizontal streams of water churned and foamed around the hyperglider fuselage.
The cliff was twelve kilometers away, and she was down to three kilometers from the canyon floor. Water had become so dense, it was as if the hyperglider was surfing along inside the crest of some crazy airborne wave. The sun had risen above the volcano’s slopes, shining down into the top of the canyon. Suddenly it struck the chaotic foam whipping around the hyperglider, and the world flared into a thousand tattered sparkling rainbows, birthing and dying, clashing and colliding. Justine laughed in dazed appreciation at the astounding sight.
Three kilometers ahead of her, the gushing rivulets merged into a single writhing torrent two kilometers above the floor of Stakeout Canyon. That was a couple of kilometers from the cliff. The rocky constriction was at its narrowest, the pressure at its highest. There was only one way the churning river could escape.
Justine slid the hyperglider above the water, staring down on it in utter disbelief. The rainbows fizzled out abruptly. Rock slammed up into her vision to replace them, terrifyingly huge walls of it, stretching up halfway to heaven. Right in front of her, the flying river curved upward and began the long, impossible powerclimb to freedom as the entire storm went vertical. Blasting out an eternal thunderclap, the wind reached three hundred kilometers an hour. She knew she was yelling wordlessly, but couldn’t hear herself above the cacophony bombarding the cockpit.
The hyperglider was wrenched upward. G-force slammed Justine down into the seat again. Her knuckles grew white as she clenched the grip bars, fearful she’d lose contact with the i-spots. She wrestled the wing surfaces to obey in a desperate bid to maintain stability within the geysering air. Water rose with her, defying gravity to shoot up parallel to the cliff. Even with the hyperglider demanding her full devotion simply to survive the demented air currents, she spared the time, a couple of precious seconds, to stare at the incredible phenomenon. A waterfall going straight up.
At five kilometers altitude, the foaming sheet of water began to break apart again. The immense upright storm was beginning to spread wide as it reached the top of the canyon. Pressure and wind velocity were weakening. Throughout it all, Justine steered the hyperglider directly up the central track. Water and cloud cascaded away on either side as she burst out above the rock, two immense waves of vapor falling back down in swan-wing curves to crash onto the volcano’s lower slopes. Only in the center of the maelstrom did the wind keep howling, thrusting her forward and upward.
Mount Herculaneum’s gigantic bulk became visible below her, a desolate ground of shattered stone and saturated gravel extending for tens of kilometers around the top of the canyon. Gradually the harshness began to give way to the more welcome stains of ochre and avocado-green as the plants reasserted themselves. Tiny grasses rooted hard in crinkled fissures, hardy tropical moss welded to boulders. The storm continued to rage above them, seeking its escape to the quieter skies in the east by sliding around the slopes to the north and the south.
Justine modified the wing camber again, maintaining her speed, but rising ever higher. She was tracking a straight line between the canyon and the summit, never deviating to either side. Grassy meadows with sturdy scrub bushes passed below her now. Temperate lands, the plants lashed and cowed by the unremitting storms, but always flourishing. The twin cataracts of erupting water from the canyon were fifteen kilometers behind her, and the clouds were parting, pealing off right and left to find their own route around the volcano. Justine sought another path through the clear sunny sky ahead and above. Her speed was still colossal, sufficient to carry her well clear of the storm, but not quite enough for her ultimate goal. She began scanning the weather radar.
As if the volcano’s western midsection didn’t have enough to contend with, twisters were skittering over the rumpled slopes, a legacy of clear air turbulence from the storm. She could see them through the canopy, spindly strands of beige ephemera, whipping violently back and forth across the land. They came in all sizes, from mild spirals of dust, to brutal, dense vortices reaching kilometers in height. The onboard array plotted their courses, eliminating those too weak or too distant for her purpose. Not that any of them were truly predictable. This was where human intuition came in—and luck.
There was one, twenty kilometers ahead, and slightly more southward than she would have preferred. But it stood nearly five kilometers high, siphoning up car-sized boulders as it wove its erratic course. Justine banked around, lining the hyperglider’s nose on it. She acquired yet more speed as the craft sank closer to the ground. The wings and vertical stabilizer shrank inward, thickening as they went. Her eyes were mesmerized by the wild pirouettes of the twister’s base, leaving her hungry for a pattern, any sort of clue to which way it would swerve next.