Andromeda's Gates: The story of Yseult Brenneaux

Chapter 5: The Gyrocube

Gedron Briskett rapped the fingers of one hand irregularly on the table while he scanned the details on the digi-page he held in the other. Yseult sat, arms folded, opposite him getting increasingly impatient. Being in M.A.N.T.I.S., she thought to herself, seems to involve a lot of sitting at tables waiting for people to think of something to say to me. She shifted her position in her seat, as loudly and obviously as she was able to. Briskett briefly looked up from the digi-page, then promptly ignored her and went back to looking over whatever report they'd compiled on her for his benefit.

"The Brawling Beauty." He finally said with a half-raised eyebrow. Yseult tensed at the name. The Beauty was something she thought about almost every day, but talked about... never, and she didn't like to – especially not with some 'full of himself' desk pilot she'd never met before. "You're a freight pilot then?" he continued, laying the digi-page on the table in front of him. "who got caught pulling short cons on that swamp-infested mudhole..." he paused for a moment in clear belief that he was about to say something clever, "...without a ship".

He tried to let the irony hang for a moment but her ability to look unimpressed got to him before his increasingly annoying personality got to her. "Box Runners are ten-a-credit." He continued, "What does that mad scientist think we need the likes of you for?" 'Box Runner' was a slang term for small independent freight operators. Hearing it brought back memories, the briefest moment of nostalgia. Don't go back there, it was a different time, you were a different person. "How should I know?" she responded, dismissively. "You made a deal, I got you the credits back, you owed me a new bike... Now I just stick around until you give a reason to leave." She knew that prospect would please him. "Fine." he said, as if trying to out-scheme her, "We'll put you though our usual pilot assessment and see where it spits you out." A cocky smile had developed upon his face.

The gyrocube was a full-rotation simulator designed to test a pilot's ability to separate visual, auditory and gravitational sensory inputs and decide which to trust and how to react. The program's scenarios mostly involved being in a spacecraft that was wildly out of control and dangerously close to hitting a planet, or something to that effect. Yseult sat in the pod at the centre of the device, intense concentration on her face. She'd flown through the 'principles of spaceflight', 'astro-navigation' and 'Gate dynamics' tests, that was expected, but freighters weren't known for their manoeuvrability and rarely got into unstable high-G situations. This is where they expect me to fail, she thought as she felt the grips of the controls in her hands... But they never flew with me.

Dragging the rear of the simulated ship round and down, the imitation 'gravitational anomaly' put her in a flat yaw spin with an edge of pitch climb. Her feet had countered the spin a little, reacting immediately with rudder thrust but it would never have been enough. It feels like roll but it isn't, don't fall for it. She countered intuitively, using the rudder and bursts of opposing roll control in time with the rate of rotation to halt the spin. Now she was cartwheeling down a rapidly decaying orbit.

Briskett stood beside the operator in the control booth, a look of annoyance already on his face. "She's arresting the decay." The operator announced. "She'll maintain orbit at this rate." "I can see that!" Briskett retorted. He thought for a moment. "Blow the starboard nose thrusters." He ordered. The operator hesitated. "Those are the one's she's using to stop the spin" he informed. "I know." Briskett snapped back. "Blow them".

With the ship gently rolling on its axis, Yseult had to wait to be facing the right way every time she used a thruster or it would only make things worse. With the flat spin almost under control, she made one final burst... The simulated explosion set off every alarm and for the briefest moment, she lost track of which way she was facing. Red warnings lit up on her displays. The entire nose thruster assembly was inoperable. She checked the flight gyro. Now she was spinning in every direction. She tried to counter it but with so little control now, nothing seemed to work. A new alarm sounded "RE-ENTRY, RE-ENTRY." the verbal warning announced. Air. Something I can work with. She reversed the controls and stopped trying to recover the spin. She put the engines into full reverse and opened the aerobrakes on one side at the ship's rear; as they caught the increasingly dense atmosphere, the additional resistance encouraged the ship out of the tumble. With less air resistance than the rear of the ship, the nose stayed pointing down and the ship slid into a whirlpool-like spin. Opening the aerobrakes on the other side and increasing the roll, the ship soon became a spinning top of reverse thrust. Inside the pod, Yseult was trying hard not to throw up, or pass out. She watched the flight gyro as the rotation steadily settled into a rolling nose-dive. Just a little longer. She was still descending way too fast but arresting the roll, she finally began to pull up.

In the control room, a small crowd of pilots and techs had gathered behind Briskett, watching the unknown pilot handle the ridiculous sequence of events she'd been handed and were responding far too positively for his liking. "Fail engine one." Silence fell. He didn't wait for the operator to hesitate this time. "Fail it". Yseult felt the drop at the rear immediately but in an already desperate situation, using every Newton of thrust to halt her descent, it slipped away so quickly... There's only so much you can do, but I won't give up this time. She fought it to the end, every metre.

The gyrocube came to a gentle rest and a tech helped the disoriented pilot out of the pod. She felt them holding her under an arm as she fumbled down some steps where a fuzzy image of a man with a sickeningly wavy smirk stood before her. He said something but she didn't hear it, she was busy convulsing as her body wrenched free of the techs and she fell to her hands and knees, vomiting when she hit the floor. She noticed some boots, splattered with sick, turn and walk away... Then she wretched and threw up again.