Part 4: Flipped Out
A/N: Sylvalum and Speedy wobbles. That's okay, because Alexa still loves him.
Warning: Extreme skell geekery, and Doug swears a little, but can we blame him? All the wonderful stuff belongs to the mad geniuses of MONOLITHSOFT. I fear I wrote everything for one line.
They were falling, and not in a good kind of way. Speedy had chosen precisely the wrong time to reveal a massive flaw, and Doug was not helping things.
Alexa gripped the controls a little more firmly and spread the arms of the skell, trying to get some balance, or at least have it choose only two out of three axes to spin on. One would be better, but right now she'd take two. Two and a half.
It flipped and tumbled like a rag doll tossed from an upper story window. Probably flung by a very angry and probably sticky toddler. Thank goodness the skell came with full restraints, because otherwise they both would have slammed into the ceiling at least once. As it was, Doug's weight was shoving her side to side with every roll. She could feel him trying to wedge himself more tightly into the emergency seat, but it wasn't doing much good.
"Hit the engines, Alexa!" shouted Doug.
Sure, she could do that, admit defeat and move on, but she wanted to know why this was happening. Normally, at this height, you cut the power and your skell drifted to the surface, nice as you please. It was actually kind of sweet when you did that, with the wind whistling past their darling little fingers and the silence a blessed relief. Not that she needed a break from noise, what with Speedy being a genius of quiet motion. Absolutely brilliant design, really, except now they were tumbling into a likely crash.
Stretching outward wasn't helping. Alexa flexed the arms upward, almost in a superhero pose. The skell rolled on its vertical axis all the faster, but it seemed to be spinning less in other ways. Interesting.
"Alexa! Do something!"
She ignored him. Stretch, spread, stretch, spread. Almost like swimming. The flipping was pretty much contained to two directions now, a sommersault and a twirl, with the weird cartwheeling motion almost gone. She checked their altitude. Maybe 20 more seconds? Stretch, spread. Cannonball?
The skell contracted and the spinning stopped. Whooo weee, yeah baby. This she could work with. She reached up, sharply, and stretched, as if jumping straight upward, even while falling, then swung the skell's feet just a little forward. Yes, that was it, they were falling straight now, no tumbling or shaking.
"Still falling! Alexa!"
Just before they hit the water, she eased a little into the throttle. Speedy landed as gracefully as a dragonfly on a pond's surface, and settled into a dancer's pose. The very quiet ticking seemed to say, "What? Was there something that you wanted to point out?"
Her eyes were flashing from one panel to the next, checking levels, trying to figure out just what was happening. The readouts showed no problems. But unpowered falling was definitely not Speedy's strength.
Doug was breathing heavily beside her, his hands still gripping the edges of his area. When she spared him a glance, she noticed his knuckles were literally white. Huh, so it wasn't just a figure of speech. Live and learn.
"Do you know how hard it was not to grab the damn controls from your hands?" he growled out.
She snapped her head to look at him, appalled. "You wouldn't dare!"
"Somebody else, I would have done it long ago. What the hell were you thinking?"
Alexa gave him a smile mixed with a grimace. "Prototype. Gotta find out what's wrong with it, you get it? You can't expect the whole thing to be perfect. Almost," she sighed. "So close."
Doug groaned. "This is not some game you can play without consequences. We could have been an oil slick on the water."
"I would have punched it long before then. Honestly, Dougie, it's okay." She fell silent as she reviewed the power usage graphs.
After a moment, Doug asked, "So what did happen?"
"I don't know," she replied, distractedly. "If I had to guess, this skell is so flexible, so maneuverable, that when I went into free fall, it didn't have anything to keep it steady. It went all five ways at once."
"No kidding."
"Anyway, zip it for a second while I record my log." Doug complied and Alexa rattled off the facts, hiding nothing of the disastrous yawing and spinning. Doug had to admit, she wasn't candy coating the events.
When she was done, he raised another question. "What gave you the idea to curl up that way? The skell, I mean."
"The cannonball? Oh, I don't know. Sometimes, when you've got a test that's failing, it helps just to shut it down, start it up, see what happens. Lots of times it'll go back to normal and you can keep going. You can get better data that way."
"And you send something that will freeze out onto the battlefield," Doug added coldly.
"No way! We always end up spending an insane amount of time, trying to recreate the first bug, and until we do, the skell or gun or whatever is going nowhere. But in the meantime, you can learn a lot about what's good about a product. Even if the prototype is scrapped, you can end up with some ideas for other stuff."
She scrolled through more readings, wind speed, weather, angle of all the maneuvering thrusters. "You know, just the other week, there was some armor. It kept actually falling off. Right off my arm, onto the floor, no joke. Ridiculous piece of junk. But I'd slap it back on and keep going."
"Why bother?"
"Because for one thing, the client was paying for the tests and I wanted to give them as good a job as I could. And for another, maybe it was worth fixing for some other reason."
"Was it?"
"Nope. It was a disastrous, horrible, awful, wretched…"
"I get the picture."
"Lemme finish," she said. "… stupid waste of resources. Professor B. is an idiot sometimes. It showed a lot of skin, sure, but ugh."
"Thank god you didn't get a chance to put it on me."
"Female version only. Double ugh."
"Got any pix?"
"Shut up." She elbowed him hard, without taking her eyes from the screens. Stupid move, all she got was a good shot of static up her arm. Score one for Meredith ether-based armor. She might be able to see his ribs, but she wasn't going to be able to break them. Pity.
"Well, that's all I can get from this try. Time to do it again."
"Whaaaat?"
"Pro-to-type, Doug. Weren't you paying attention? I gotta try things out, and if there's a question, I gotta do it more than once."
"So we're doing another death spiral?"
"Yup. And it's going to be even better this time."
"I thought we were headed to Sylvalum."
"We are. See? Just over there. But I'd rather try this maneuver out in the open ocean, away from indigen or, I don't know, pointy cliffs, what do you think?"
"Okay, death spiral here we go." Doug heaved a sigh and took on an improved wedged position.
Death Spiral 2.0 was almost boring in comparison. Speedy climbed, Alexa cut power, Speedy freaked out like a rubber spider on an elastic string, Alexa went in and out of full cannonball position, and Speedy obediently dropped like a lawn dart straight for the ocean. Landed like a fairy. Alexa was pleased. "Well, that answers the question: are the problem and solution reproducible. Yes and yes. That's good news. Let's do it again."
Doug couldn't even muster the energy to argue.
Some point after Death Spiral 4.0, he made a suggestion. "What if you went into cannonball before dropping?"
"Ooooh, let's do that." Alexa gave him a generous smile. "I'm glad you're getting in the spirit of the thing."
"I've got nothing left to lose. My stomach already served me papers."
"Silly."
It was amazing! Doug's idea worked better than Alexa could have dreamed. The skell didn't spin, didn't plummet, didn't even do that weird arrow straight to the ground fall. Once she spread out Speedy's arms from the initial tucked bundle, the skell assumed the free fall position it was supposed to, arms wide, riding slowly against the wind as it glided towards the water.
She was a little nervous about the landing; they'd never quite completed the fall without a little engine boost. "I'm going to go for it," she warned Doug. "No power."
"You're the pilot." He fell silent and let her work.
She was watching their speed, their acceleration, the effects of the moisture in the air, a dozen different measurements, all at once. She listened to the machine, searching for any complaint. The ocean was far, then closer, then right upon them. Speedy swooped almost flat against the surface before making a small loop and settling upright, toes tracing overlapping curves in the water. Alexa could see droplets on the windshield. Outside, not condensation.
"Wow," she said.
"You think this thing is trying to show off?"
"I honestly don't know. Ready for the next go round?"
"How many more?" Doug asked, his voice as glum as his face.
"Last one. I was going to quit before this, but then you made your suggestion."
He grimaced. "Me and my smart mouth."
"It was brilliant. Thanks. It is going to help so much." Alexa was already piloting the skell upward.
It was not the last run. She did it three more times, ending with a little unexpected swoop each time. Doug kept up a suffering silence. After the third try, she parked the skell on the water's surface and gave a long and complicated commentary, pointing out various readings that Doug hadn't even noticed her making. Very professional sounding, even if her voice gave a little whoop when describing the landing.
She shut down the recording, and turned to Doug. "Sylvalum?"
He sighed, a deep, sad sound. "I'm going to regret this."
"It'll be fun. Sylvalum has those wide open plains, gentle curving dunes. We're going to tear it up, Doug."
"Not that. I'm going to regret what I'm going to say next."
"You don't want to go home?!" Alexa said in horror.
"No, yes, not the point." He sighed again. "What happens if you hit the power during the death spiral?"
"I don't know. Haven't tried it, have I?"
"Some pilot's going to freak out and do it. What if it gets worse?"
"Wow. Do you think it could? What would that be like?" She did not sound as horrified as she should have. In fact, she sounded gleeful. Doug groaned again, closed his eyes briefly, and waited. She paused, and thought about it for about a tenth of a second. She turned to him, her eyes shining. "Of course, you know we'll have to try it. Right now."
They tried it, and Alexa was deeply, deeply disappointed. Speedy simply broke out of its multidirectional irrationality and resumed a steady climb. There wasn't even a groan or shimmy as the skell rearranged its limbs into normal flight. The one consolation for this ho-hum response was the powered flip the skell did just before it righted itself. That was fun. Sakuraba would be thrilled that it didn't go into Death Spiral Cubed, but it was soooo boring. Now a flip, that had possibilities.
"Did you see that?" She slid a sly look at Doug.
"Never seen it before. This is totally new to me," he replied. He was frowning, as if he had suddenly realized something life changing.
"Honestly, I think this baby can fly upside down. I have got to try it again."
He spoke low and haltingly. His baritone voice sent a shiver up Alexa's spine. "Alexa, I've never said this to anyone before…"
"Yeah?"
"And I'm not sure I'm ready to say it now…"
"Yeah?"
"But, I'm going to regret it if I don't…"
"Spit it out, Dougie!"
"Alexa, do a barrel roll."