But there was no comfort in that. He knew he was at the edge of his energy… and his reason.
A curving ripple of current fanned away from the left shore where the river turned downstream. The water there began to glisten and sparkle. Joao looked up to see cracks of blue striking through the clouds. He took a deep breath, pressed the igniter, counted.
The warning light blinked out.
Joao eased the throttle ahead. The motors banged, then mounted to a steady roar. The pod began to pick up speed, danced through the ripple track. She was right-side heavy and a dull sloshing could be heard from the float there.
It’ll never lift, Joao thought. He felt feverish and only loosely connected to his senses.
The pod made its racketing, sluggish way around the bend… and there it stood, the lava wall, no more than a kilometer downstream. The river ran through the wall in a notch that rose like something split out by a giant axe. Sheer black heights of rock compressed the water at their base into a tumbling agony.
“Jeeeesus,” Joao whispered.
Rhin clutched his arm. “Turn back! You’ve got to turn back.”
“We can’t,” Joao said. “There’s no other way.”
Still, his hand hesitated on the throttle. Press forward on that knob and risk explosion? There was no alternative. He could see waves in the chasm now cresting over unseen rocks, shooting milk-and-amber mist upward.
With a convulsive movement, Joao slammed the throttle ahead. The roar of the rockets drowned out the water’s sound.
Joao prayed to the float: “Hold together… please… hold together.”
Abruptly, the pod lifted onto its steps, began skimming faster and faster. In that instant, Joao saw movement on both shores beside the chasm. Something lifted dripping and snake-like across the entrance to the gorge.
“Another net!” Rhin screamed.
Joao saw the net with a dreamlike detachment, knew he couldn’t avoid it. The pod skidded over a cross-eddy and onto a glossy black pool inhabited by that dripping barrier. He saw the dark pattern of net squares and, through them, water creased into steeper and steeper furrows that flashed outward and down into the chasm.
The pod slammed into the net, pulled it, stretching it, tearing it. Joao was thrown forward against his harness as the pod tipped down by the nose. He felt the back of the seat slam his ribs. There came a thunderous tearing-grinding-bubbling sound and a sudden giving away.
The motors stopped short—flooded out or unable to suck fuel. The roaring of the water filled the cabin.
Joao pulled himself up by the wheel, looked around. The pod floated almost level, turning. But his eyes interpreted the motion as the world turning around him—black wall, green line of jungle, white water.
The pod slid down a sloping current to the right, crunched against the first obsidian buttress above the torrent. A scraping, wrenching of metal competed with the chasm’s roar.
Rhin screamed something that was lost in the avalanche sound of water.
The pod bounced outward from the rock wall, whirled, pounded across two infolding steps of explosive current. Metal creaked and groaned. The spiral cone of a whirlpool sucked at the floats, shot them sideways into a lifting, tipping, pounding delirium of motion.
A vast pulsing-rumbling like ocean waves on rocks deafened Joao. He saw a glistening ledge of black rock, its face carved by the current, loom directly ahead. The pod smashed into it, recoiled. And Joao found himself torn from his harness, on the floor, tangled with Rhin. He grabbed the base of the wheel with his right hand.
Above him the canopy buckled. He watched in unbelieving shock as the canopy tipped forward and disappeared. He saw the left wing crumple upward against rock. The pod whipped around to the right, presenting a blurred arc of sky and another black wall.
A crazy rumbling from the shattered wing added to the din.
Joao thought: We aren’t going to make it. Nothing can survive this.
He felt Rhin with both arms around his waist clinging in terror, her voice in his left ear: “Please make it stop; please make it stop.”
Joao saw the pod’s nose lift, slam down, saw white water and spume boil past where the canopy had been. He saw a sprayrifle jerk out that opening into the river, and he wedged himself more tightly between the seats and the dash. His fingers ached where he clutched the wheel. A wrenching motion of the pod turned his head and he saw Chen-Lhu’s arms wrapped around the seat back directly above him.
Chen-Lhu felt the sound like a direct contact on his nerves magnified almost beyond endurance. It grated through him in an unchecked rhythm, dominated his world: a deafening cymbal dissonance gone wild in counterpoint, a rasping, crunching, maelstrom grating. He felt that he had become a seeing-hearing-feeling receptor without any other function.
Rhin pressed her face against Joao. Everything was the hot smell of Joao’s body and insane motion. She felt the pod lift… lift… lift and slam down, twisting, turning. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down. It was like some crazy kind of sex. A staccato punching motion shook her as the pod shot down a washboard of rapids.
Joao felt all his consciousness concentrated into the terrible intensity of sight. He saw directly out an opening in the cabin side where no opening should be—a millrace chute, a black cavity of water, solid spray, damp green shade along a scarred cliff. He looked directly down into a frothed spiral of current as the pod tipped. His hand was numb where he clutched the wheel. His shoulder ached.
A brown turtleback of current rolled over directly in front of the opening. Joao felt the pod slide up onto that smoothness with a deceptively gentle gliding motion, saw the river drop away beyond.
She can’t take any more, he told himself.
The pod nosed down, faster and faster. Joao braced himself against the dash. He saw a green-brown wave curl upward past a shattered wing stump—up… up… up…
The pod smashed through it.
Green darkness and water cascaded into the cabin. There came a screech of metal. Joao felt the tail slam down, lifting him into washed twilight. He clawed his way toward the seat, dragging Rhin with him, saw Chen-Lhu’s arms still wrapped there, water pouring from the torn side of the cabin. He felt the tail section rip across rocks as the pod shot across another boiling mound of water.
Glaring sunlight!
Joao twisted around, half blinded by the brilliance. He stared past a torn hole where the motors had been, looked back up the gorge. The roaring noise of the place blasted at him. He saw the insane waves, the violence, and he thought: Did we really come through that?
He felt water around his ankles, turned, expecting to see another crazy descent of rapids. But there was only a broad pool—dark water all around. It absorbed the turbulence of the gorge and for all that violence showed only glistening bubbles and the swift spreading and converging of current runnels.
The pod lurched under him. Joao staggered in the water, clutched the right lip of the cabin, looked down at the remaining wing which appeared to float just on the surface of the river.
Rhin’s voice broke across the moment with a shocking tone of normality: “Hadn’t we better get out? We’re sinking.”
Joao tried to shake off his feeling of detachment, looked down to see her seated in her seat. He heard Chen-Lhu struggle upright behind her, coughing, saw the man loom there.
There came a metallic gurgling and the right wing dipped beneath the surface.
It occurred to Joao then with a twisted sense of elation that they were still alive… but the pod was dead. Elation drained from him.