Yuen-Mong's Revenge (16 page)

     
"Wow, we did it, we did it," cried Yuen-mong, releasing her seat
restraint and jumping out of her seat, laughing and shaking her raised
arms. He got out of his seat too and before he knew it, she had embraced
him, holding him close, putting her cheek against his. His heart raced
away anew. How he loved that woman!

     
"This is only a beginning," he said when she released him. "We’re
still a long way from actually flying this machine, let alone get it into
orbit."

 
     
"Oh, you pessimist," she exclaimed, slapping his shoulder lightly. "I
will not let that spoil my excitement… Anyway you cannot fool me. I
know that you are excited too."

 
     
Yes, I am, but maybe for a different reason.
She smiled at him, as if
she had guessed his thoughts, and he smiled back.

     
Next, they rehearsed their second maneuver, a short flight. That meant
getting the shuttle off the ground with the vertical thrusters, pitch the
nose up about 30 degrees and immediately engage the main engine.
Again the craft accelerated much faster than Atun had expected and it
took him a few seconds to reduce the thrust. Under main engine thrust,
the craft was much more stable, and Yuen-mong’s only activity was to
turn the craft around in a wide circle. It became more tricky once he cut
the main engine and they slowed the craft for landing. They had a close
call when it suddenly rolled and pitched at the same time. Once on the
ground, it took them a few seconds to recover from that final moment of
fright.

     
When they got out of the craft for fresh air, they saw a large group of
savages assembled on the bare hilltop with the rock outcrops.

     
"I don’t like this," remarked Yuen-mong. "I am sure they still have
hearsay knowledge of having come to Aros in a space craft. Some may
try to capture the craft. I’d rather not have a blood bath."

 
     
"What can we do?"

 
     
"We can fly the craft to the top of our rock."

 
     
"You cannot be serious!" He searched her eyes and saw mild
amusement. "You are serious! … No, Yuen-mong, this is too dangerous.
Let’s not risk damaging the craft and ruining everything."

 
     
"Leaving it here is putting it at risk also. They might damage
something. We would have to stay here and guard it every day… Let’s at
least move it closer to our rock. We could land on the large sandy area a
bit north of the rock, next to the swamp where I often pick greens, you
know?"

 
     
It’s crazy!
cried his mind.
We’re not ready yet. We’ll kill ourselves.
He was wringing his hands, shaking his head, avoiding her gaze.

     
"Atun." She touched his arm. "Look at me." With a great effort he
met her eyes. "I trust you… Trust yourself … trust me. We can do it.
Come inside. Let’s see what it would involve."

 
     
She trusted him… how could he not trust her. She took his hand, and
he let himself be pulled inside the shuttle. At that point, he would have
granted her anything, even abandon their quest to get off-planet and
spend the rest of his life on Aros at her side.

* * *

They talked about the pros and cons and what such a flight would involve
for almost an hour, and then rehearsed several times the taking off and
landing maneuvers. They agreed that they could abort the flight and
return to the comparatively easy landing conditions in the spear grass
field. By mid-afternoon they were ready to take off. Again Yuen-mong
found that getting the craft into a stable position for the main engine to
be fired was tricky, but once airborne, the flight went smoothly. They
reached an altitude above the sea she guessed to be higher than the chain
of mountains to the east — to fool the savages into thinking they had left
Aros — before they banked back to shore and cut the main engine, letting
the shuttle float, controlling its path with the thrusters. She could not stop
smiling, feeling free like the mighty craw, exhilarated as never before in
her life. It was over too fast. Barely five minutes later they set the craft
down in the dunes, well away from the water in a cloud of dust, that
settled when the lift thrusters were finally cut too.

     
On their way to the cave, she picked a bunch of fresh swamp spinach.
They had not had a cooked meal for three days, and she was keen for a
succulent fish soup and some freshly baked spiced bread. There might
even be some fresh sweetberries on the few mature bushes that had
survived the storm on their rock.

     
Back in the cave, she was filled with a sense of home. Every feature
was dear to her, reminding her of her childhood with her parents, of
growing into a fearless woman after their death. How could she leave all
this for an unknown future? A mild panic gripped her, and she tried to
shake it off by busying herself with preparing the meal. For the first time,
being attentively watched by Atun was unsettling. It was his crashing on
Aros that had set all this in motion.
No, that’s not true! It only opened the
possibility of leaving. It was my choice to grab it and I can still stop it.
But she knew she would not. She knew that she wanted to get to her
parents’ home world. That wish had always been in her ever since childhood and since Atun’s remark that there was no record of her parents’
mission to Aros — surprising at first — this fact had become ominous.
Why had it not been entered into the log of explorations? Was it not
obligatory so that future explorations had as much information available
as possible? So why had it been suppressed? She needed to find out,
either to set her mind at ease that it had only been an oversight or if not
to know the reason why they had been sent to their death, and that she
could only do by going to Andromatis.

     
While the soup was cooking, she had the urge to go out to the cave
balcony, to savor the view, to store it in its ever-changing variety for
ever. She let her eyes roam down the length of the beach — three stripes
of different colors, the blue sea, the dark green forest, separated by a strip
of almost white sand, turning cream in the late afternoon sun, with the
golden ring like a halo over it. In a few days, she would leave, never to
see this again. Irresistible tears misted her vision and ran down her cheek.

     
"Yuen-mong," she heard Atun voice softly, "why are you crying?"

 
     
She swept her open hand over the scene. "Because of this. Because it
hurts leaving this."

 
     
"We don’t have to go… we could stay here. I think I could be happy
here with you."

 
     
She turned to him. "You are very kind, Atun, but I think we must
leave. We don’t really belong here. No humans belong to Aros." She
returned to the hearth to finish preparing their meal.

     
That evening they made plans for the final departure. Atun recalled
that the outer edge of the ring was at an altitude of about 35,000 km
above the surface of Aros. That edge followed a clockwise orbit of 33
standard hours. The only feasible way to find Vishnu in a reasonable
length of time was to go into a counterclockwise orbit a few thousand
kilometers above the ring. They should then encounter the ship every
sixteen to seventeen hours. After locating it, they would maneuver a U-turn well above the ring, timed such as to rendezvous with it at the next
encounter. With only manual propulsion and thruster control that may be
tricky and require several attempts. The only serious disadvantage of
such a flight trajectory was that they could not take advantage of Aros’
350-meter-per-second surface velocity and therefore would require a
higher escape velocity and consume more fuel. At maximum engine
thrust they should be able to reach such an orbit in less than three hours
from liftoff. He could not be more accurate for two reasons, both a
consequence of having no AI unit to do the calculations. First, they
would have to judge a suitable orbit by visual means. Second, the
calculations were of such complexity that he could only compute a rough
approximation by hand.

     
 Once in orbit above the ring, Atun would attempt to restore the AI
unit with the backup cube and, if that failed, get it working at least to the
extent of being able to transmit the access codes to open Vishnu’s shuttle
airlock. They agreed that if they did not manage to locate the ship and
gain access to it within ten Aros days, they would return to the surface.
They also discussed the difference between flying in air under the strong
gravity of Aros and in airless space once they were beyond its atmosphere.

     
Yuen-mong thought that it would take them about two weeks to stock
the shuttle with the necessary provisions, including precooked meals and
fresh water, to last for ten days plus, and moving all things that she
wanted to take along, either as souvenirs or to assure survival should they
have to return and not be able to land near their rock.

     
"There is one more difficulty we face, assuming we are successful,"
Atun began, sounding tentative.

     
She sensed that he was squirming inside. "Yes."

 
     
"To land on or take off from any satellite port or any inhabited world,
we need credits, not to speak of renewing our fuel. I may just have
enough credits to cover the 30,000 landing fee on Palo, but not enough
for Andromatis or to buy any supplies."

 
     
"My mother said that she had lots of credits and I have her credit
access code. So we should be fine."

 
     
"Your mother’s credits may not exist anymore. On Palo, they go to
the heirs after twenty standard years, if they’re not claimed by the rightful
owners within that time. In some worlds, it only takes ten."

 
     
"My parents left Andromatis before I was conceived, which is more
than twenty years." She looked at him with amused eyes. "You should
have crashed a year earlier, Atun."

 
     
He hesitated and then said: "Yuen-mong, this is serious… We could
take several kilograms of gold along. Each kilo is worth around 50,000
credits."

 
     
"Gold?"
That’s why he was squirming.
She could not quite suppress
an ironic smile, but regretted it immediately when she saw him go
crimson. She touched his arm and gave him a genuine smile. "It’s all
right, Atun. We can go back to the Goldnugget River."

     
His relief was visible and his eyes expressed gratitude.

     
"How much do you suggest we collect?"

 
     
"To resupply the ship for another voyage would run to about 200,000
credits. Maybe the equivalent of ten Old Earth kilograms? Do you think
it would be possible to find that much?"

 
     
"I don’t know. I have difficulties figuring out how much that is…
That pile that you collected, how much weight do you think that had?"

 
     
He avoided her gaze and replied: "About 250 grams."

 
     
"So we would need about 40 times that much. I think we should get
that easily. Closer to the mountain, the river has more and that is also in
the no-man’s-land between two clans. So we should have no trouble, and
there is a bonus. We can spend another day up in the mountains. I would
love that. I had so much fun calling the echo. It would be a fitting good-bye to Aros."

8

The evening before their planned departure, Yuen-mong was on top of
the rock, waiting for the night hunters. She wanted to greet them one
more time and say farewell to her parents’ souls. When Atun asked if he
could join her, she said no, that she needed to do this alone, but she
invited him to come with her at dawn next morning to say good-bye to
the dawn bird.

     
She left the things they did not take along in the cave at their usual
place, as if she were only going away for a few days. On the balcony she
cast a last long look south, letting her tears flow freely. She was closing
a chapter of her life, a chapter that had cast her into the woman she was.
How would that woman cope out there in the Universe where the survival
skills of Aros would be of little or no use?

     
In the shuttle, she wound her father’s pocket watch fully and attached
it on the console in front of Atun’s pilot seat. After stowing away the last
belongings they brought along, they put on the anti-G suits and suction-cup boots — in contrast to an interplanetary space craft the shuttle had
no gravity field. When she wanted to take her seat, Atun held her by the
shoulders and said: "Yuen-mong, before we trust our lives to this craft
and our skills, I want to tell you that I love you."