The Treasure of Lei Fong Wu

Chapter Twenty

River watched silently from the communication console as Devon and Rowan prepared for atmo entry. She was studying what they were doing intently. The flight sequences were much different than what Wash did on Serenity, she noted, and as she corroborated what their hands were doing with what their minds were doing, she was getting a better and better picture of how the Sky Hawk worked.

She was enjoying her time here. In the week she and her brother had been aboard, they had made two quick stops at villages on tiny moons where Duncan had regular clients. Now they were making their third, on the agro moon of St. Albans. Each time they went into the world or out of it she begged to be allowed into the cockpit. While Duncan was initially reluctant (Jayne had told him about her kitchen knife faux pas and her other eccentricities) Rowan pleaded on her behalf, and he grudgingly allowed it.

River had learned a lot. She already had an excellent technical knowledge of flight mechanics – having a photographic memory was useful like that – but to be able to see and experience the process from inside the head of the pilot allowed her to glean more practically useful information than she could have gotten in a top flight school.

But she knew she didn’t have it all. There was so much unpredictability in flight – mechanical issues, of course, but also the chaos of gravity, weather and electromagnetism – that she found it a heady challenge to contemplate how one little central nervous system with only two hands and two feet and two eyes could possibly get a multi-ton ship to go against the very nature of solid matter and leap into (or out of) the Black.

It was addicting. Like dance, only with engines.

She rode shotgun in Rowan’s mind (it was easier to get behind her eyes than Devon’s, for some reason) and saw and felt just as the other teenaged girl did. Which switches to hit. Which levers to pull. What safeties could be overridden. What protocols to