by Kaz Morran
They both laughed, and drew a chuckle from Ethan, Nel, and Taiyo, too.
The shorthaired woman—Kristy or Krispy or Krusty or something—shrugged her boney shoulders. Kristen. That was it.
“Oh, you’re being too extreme,” she told Ronin. “Have a little faith in humanity.”
Ethan thought Kristen needed to eat more. Didn’t astronauts need strength? She’d done alright on the diving tasks but struggled a bit during the others.
Ronin was still bragging about something. “I’d survive it,” he said. “I know about extremes. Extreme circumstance. Extreme stress.” His voice intensified, and his whole body gesticulated with his speaking. The others in the pack gave him space. “Your mind shuts down what it doesn’t need. That’s why you shit your pants. Survival mode. You shit your pants, but you get superpowers. Enhanced visual clarity. The peripheral fades. Things go silent. Time stops. All that matters is the threat at hand. That’s the time you want your heart rate going one-fifteen to one-fifty. Over that and you’re in panic mode. You shit your pants.”
“Again?” someone said.
“Yeah. You shit your pants twice. At one-seventy-five, you can’t speak. You can’t think. Total cognitive collapse. You’re an animal taken by emotion. Pure fear, or pure anger. Whatever emotion hijacks you. Your blood pools in your core. You lock up. You’re helpless. Useless. A liability to your crew. You die. And that’s why they put us on in this sim.”
“Because they want to see to see if we’ll shit our pants?”
“Yep.”
“Anyway …” said Anton, the balding Euro bloke.
“Anyway,” Ethan echoed, “I reckon these boys know more about the land and residents round here than anyone in Oz.” Ethan darted his eyes left and right at Wumba and Henry. “You blokes oughta fill these pups in on what to expect out there on the trek tomorrow?”
“Ay,” said Wumba. He leaned back but kept his eyes on the fire. He had it burning beautifully.
“Big crocodiles live here,” Henry said. The fire flickered in the whites of his eyes. He leaned forward and all around to make sure he spoke to the lot of them. “Up by Degarra where I been bridge fishing, I seen it. I seen a dinosaur. A real-as-life monster.” Then he laughed so hard he stomped the dirt. “Twenty feet long, I reckon that monster was.”
“Pub talk,” said Wumba. He reached down and plucked a leaf fragment from the toe of his boot, inspected it, and tossed it in the fire. “Maybe up round Normanton they got twenty-foot salties, but not round the Cape. Not in the Daintree.”
Henry shook his head, and his hair shook, too. “I seen it.”
“And you jumped on its back with a tape measure, I suppose,” said Wumba.
“I seen the tracks.” Henry crossed his arms and went back to pouting all cute-like.
“Pub talk,” Wumba repeated.
“I did go and tape-measured the paw print.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“Twenty-five centimeters. I gone and wrote it down. The claws got into the mud one finger deep. Back leg to back leg was one meter. So this monster’s got to be six meters. Twenty feet. I done the maths.”
Wumba prodded the fire with his stick. Henry did know his maths—they’d built the jetty with it—but he didn’t know Cape Trib and the Daintree much better than Ethan and Wumba did, so the two told old Henry the truth that nobody had ever reported such a thing as a six-meter croc around there.
“And you never seen the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but you know it’s there,” said Henry.
“Mm-hm.” Wumba kept stirring the embers, and Ethan shook his head.
“Maybe you too scared to put yer eyes on a croc like that is why ya never seen one.” Henry laughed just as soon as he said it, and then grabbed Wumba by the arm and shook a laugh out of him, too, and a laugh out of their audience. By then, all six of the blue-jumpsuited T3 folks had taken seats by the fire and were snickering along like a laugh track.
Wumba shook his head. “I refuse to believe such a thing.”
“Words a wise man never spoke.” Henry’s facial hair danced as he waved his hands and tried to explain why he wasn’t just making things up. “This croc wasn’t from round here is why. Them monsters been adapting to the changing weather. All kinds of weird rains and such these days, isn’t that so, Ethan?”
“Ay.”
“So they got to adapt, else they going legs up.” Henry made a legs-up gesture with his hand, then swatted Wumba’s arm. “You too, grub.”
Wumba poked the fire a few more times. The beats pulsed on in Ethan’s head as he watched the embers rise, drift, and flutter back down. It made him wonder if any of the AsCans lived in places with snow. Two Canadians among the lot, so … Maybe he’d ask about snow in a bit. For now, he liked how the stars had made everyone go quiet. But that silence also gave Ethan pause to mute the DJ and turn over what Henry had said over in his mind. Maybe the buggered climate really was making the crocs grow bigger. Some folks from the uni had come up the year before to research such things about the flora and fauna. Ethan himself had noticed the spiders and dragonflies getting bigger over the years. Now he kind of wished he'd taken measurements and written stuff down.
“The missus ever say anything about bigger crocs?” Wumba asked Ethan.
“Ex-missus, mate.”
“She still pulling folks out of caves and rivers and such?”
“Stationed in Cooktown now,” said Ethan. “But we don’t talk.” The truth was that she talked, but Ethan rarely replied. They’d split up over a few different issues, a big one being her job. Too many times, he’d gotten calls to rush to the hospital only to find she’d nearly killed herself yanking a drunk from croc water, or by repelling down a cliff to help a rock-wallaby off a ledge. “She never mentioned anything about crocs getting bigger,” he said.
“When are you going to call her?”
“Not happening, mate,” Ethan told Wumba. “So stop asking.”
After some time, Wumba broke the starry silence outside Ethan’s head and told Henry, “You know, old man, if you’re right about a dino-size croc being out there, we best stop letting tourists around the jetty and feeding pit.”
That was the threat that would draw out the truth. Henry loved watching those tourists squeal and gasp over leaping crocs, and he made a fair bit of pocket money baiting fishing poles, too. Henry took a sip of water. He said, “I always be telling tourists don’t be swimming at them jetties. I can’t work out why they still doing that.” He screwed the cap back on. “Point is, you can tell them, but they still doing it.”
“You’re head’s a point, I reckon,” said Wumba.
“And I reckon you be right about the croc pit,” said Henry, head hung. “Best we shut it down.”
Wumba brushed an ember off his jeans, thought about what ought to be done, and then gave his wishes: “And we best put up a bigger sign at the jetty, ay?”
“All right then,” said Henry. “You do the painting. I’ll do the measuring and cutting.”
“All right then.”
8
The pontoon boat bobbed some twenty meters offshore. Before anyone else could even get their masks on, Nel was in and out of the water. She’d returned to shore bear-hugging a white cube so big she looked like a minibar with flippers. Taiyo stepped aside and watched her duck-walk up the beach and set the bulky crate in the sand.
He followed right behind as she ran out to the pontoon to fetch the next container.
Each of the dozen crates looked about ninety centimeters a side, and each bore the NASA logo and trademark cream-color laminate. Although the crates themselves were made of some kind of buoyant, durable, lightweight plastic or composite, the contents made them as heavy as they were awkward, as Taiyo found out when he waded out and got one dropped on him by the nameless guy on the pontoon.
In the end, Taiyo had scored three crates, and Nel four. Ronin and Walter brought in a pair each, while the cooperative effort of Anton and Kristen yielded just one.
Taiyo looked Nel up and down as she wrung out her hair and peeled off her wetsuit.
“Can I help you?” she said snarkily.
“Sorry, just trying to figure out where you're hiding so much power.”
“It's endurance and strategic posturing,” she corrected. “Not power.”
Ethan came up and smacked them both on the back of the shoulders. "Bang up job there, love," he told Nel. Then he called to the rest of them, "Oi! This little sheila here wiped her arse with all you dickheads. As a team, you’re a facken washout. Reload the pontoon and do it again like a team.”
In hindsight, it should have been obvious to pass the cargo down a line like a fireman's brigade, as they did now. With little discussion, they posted themselves where their strengths best suited the task: Nel took the cubed container down from the pontoon guy, steadied it, and floated it to Anton, who fed it down the line to Kristen. Taiyo took the mid position, lifting the crate out of the water to Walter, who handed it off the Ronin, who finished it off.
“Much better.” But Ethan would give them no time to rest. “Next task—Diving.”
“Yessir,” said Walter.
Kristen led the dive because she was the most experienced diver, and not, as Ronin suggested, because she was the most expendable.
The extremes of going from hot, humid air into crisp seawater energized the body. Taiyo could have stayed in longer if Ethan hadn't shouted at him to stop bobbing around.
“You look like bait, mate.”
A section had been netted off expressly for keeping out predators, but for the sake of the simulation, they were to act as if the threat was real.
As a team, they had forty minutes to map a bus-size mound of coral and estimate its volume and mass. They weren't allowed to touch it, and their only tools were the apps on the waterproof phones they’d been issued. Except in the event of an emergency, Ethan would deem the task incomplete if any of the candidates surfaced before everyone imputed their results. To the team’s surprise, they did it in under thirty minutes.
Halfway back to shore, Taiyo felt a thud on his back. He spun around, his heart and fists ready to fend off a shark. But it was only Ronin, signaling for Taiyo to surface.
He did, and they lifted their masks to talk. The notable absence of any means of electronic communication between divers had not been an oversight. The inconvenience had been deliberate.
“Let's race,” said Ronin.
Ronin had taken off before he could reply. Taiyo slid his mask down, checked the readings on the display inside the mask and confirmed them on the phone app and wrist display before diving after Ronin. He easily kicked on past Ronin to reach the shore first.
No sooner than Taiyo unloaded his gear and drop his ass in the sand to take off his flippers did Ethan come galloping over. “What ya just did right there, mate,” Ethan said, panting and standing over Taiyo with his hands on his hips, “is bound to get ya killed.”
Ronin howled with laughter, made a chomping and chewing sound, and then waddled off in his flippers to take a piss. Upon the asinine aerospace professor’s return, Ethan clasped his hands behind his back and rose up and down on his toes, giddy to announce the candidates were to split into two teams for a sand sculpture competition.
Nel brought one bucket of seawater back after another to dampen their plot. After a while, she traded off with Walter and knelt down in the sand beside Taiyo to help smooth the foundation. They plowed away the excess dry sand from around the base with their hands. “So, what's MONSTAR-X?” she asked during the gap in Walter’s presence. “Your bio never said what it stood for.”
Careful not to let his voice reflect his pride, Taiyo kept patting down sand while he recited the tortured acronym that summed up his life's work: “The Microlensing Oort-cloud Nuclear Space Telescope for Astrobiological Research and Exploration.”
She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Self-explanatory.”
“A good acronym is.”
“You worked on it with Ronin, right?”
She leaned back for a hunk of palm tree bark, which she then used to carve the tail of the sculpture.
“My team and I designed it.” Taiyo shuffled forward on his knees, careful not to undo all the work around the base, and started on shaping the main body. “Ronin contributed the name.”
She nodded and lowered her eyes, a reaction Taiyo took to mean she understood the implication behind his cryptic reply. The MONSTAR-X name was the only thing Ronin had contributed. It might well have been the only original idea he'd ever had.
Not true, actually, Taiyo recalled. He knew of at least two concepts put forward by Ronin to JAXA, both for insulating the hull of a Mars-bound ship from cosmic radiation. The first idea was to fill the walls with a dense cultivation of hallucinogenic mushrooms. The ability of the mushrooms to absorb radiation would only be one of the benefits. Sealed in their tiny capsule with an uninterrupted supply of lab-grade psychedelics, the crew would hardly notice the tedium of a multi-month journey as they looked back on Earth—home to everything and everyone they'd ever known and loved—and watched it fade day-by-day into a pinprick of light no more significant than a speck of dust on the window of the tiny capsule they'd been flung adrift through the infinite chasm of space in.
Ronin's second idea utilized the crew's own biological waste as a radiation shield. Usually, smearing one's own feces on the wall would raise a psychological red flag, but for a creative genius like Ronin Aro, it was an engineering solution.
Nel sent Walter to go spy on the competition under the guise of fetching water.
“So is Ronin jealous then, or what?”
Taiyo looked up over the mound of sand that would become their sculpture to make sure Ronin had gone out of earshot. “Who knows what goes on in his head," he told Nel.
Walter came back with a bucket of water and some shells Anton had shared as a good-will gesture in place of divulging sand-sculpting intel. Since pouring water on now would only wreck what they’d made, Taiyo dipped his hands in the bucket and sprinkled the top of the sculpture to make sure his commander’s diplomatic effort didn’t go to waste.
Taiyo didn't want the controversy around MONSTAR-X to become a topic of chatter during the excursion, so he tried to wrap up his conversation with Nel. “I guess it's only natural …" He formed the thoughts as he said them. “The first priority of any entity is its own survival.”
Nel dumped the rest of the water into a hole and passed the empty bucket back to Walter. “Another refill?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Ronin fucked you over, didn't he?” she said once Walter left.
Taiyo sat back on his heels. He pursed his lips and nodded. “My school gets the rights to the patents, plans, and data. Standard practice.” He held up his sandy palms in defeat.
“But?”
“But Ronin put his name as principal author on everything.”
The breeze blew Nel's hair down over her face. She spat a few strands out of her mouth and brushed the rest aside with her wrist, leaving a line of sand on her cheek.
Taiyo looked around to make sure nobody else could hear. “So now he’s first in line for any grants or job prospects that come out of it.” The words lumped in his throat.
“And if they take your design and go out and find life on those moons in the Oort Cloud … ?”
“Then for all human history, it's Doctor Ronin Aro in the textbooks.”
“He's not really a doctor, is he?”
“Of course not,” Taiyo snapped, the pitch of his voice surprising himself. He looked around and then continued, "But he’d distract you with the story of how he seduced some yak-riding Tajik nomad queen into giving him her walrus-ivory frame for you to even think of questioning the legitimacy of the degree behind the glass.”
Taiyo unclenched the sand he just realized he'd had balled up in his fists and let out a breath. "I honestly don't care about fame or fortune.”
“But you don't w
ant Ronin getting credit on your behalf.” Nel’s tone was soft.
Taiyo shrugged.
Nel said she’d read about Taiyo’s proposal to use the Sun’s gravitation focal point at 550 AU as a lens to zoom in on Tabaldak. A lot of ideas had been floated since the news had broken of the Jupiter-size body grazing the edge of the Solar System, but none of them had garnered much funding. For years now, humanity’s best telescopes had been gathering data and snapping grainy photos of Tabaldak’s binary moons, but Gluskab and Malsumis were tiny, distant, and obscured by Tabaldak. Scientists had party characterized the atmospheres, uncovering hints of active geology and chemistry, but without a closer look, conclusions about habitability remained elusive.
Nel looked up from the sand sculpture and blinked at the sunlight. “Five-fifty AU is pretty far,” she mused.
“Closer than ten thousand.”
“Still far.”
He sat back in the sand and studied her expression. Did she think it didn’t matter that Ronin had stolen the credit? —since the mission would never happen anyway.
“JAXA rejected the proposal, so It’s all kind of moot now anyway.”
“No chance of taking the idea to private industry, or to NASA, or someone?”
“Not without the data rights and patents,” he said. “Not legally, anyway” he teased, but Nel didn’t pursue it.
“Well, they have their reasons,” she said and went back to shaping the sculpture.
“They’re just scared to take a risk.”
“And you don’t think nuclear propulsion is risky?”
“Should I?”
“What about Fukushima?”
He groaned. “Apples and oranges. The faults were with the people in charge, not with the technology. I was living eighty kilometers from that triple meltdown, but I’m all for nuclear power. That should tell you something.” He stopped himself. He really didn’t want to be having this discussion. “It’s not for the people of Japan that JAXA’s hesitant to back nuclear propulsion. Americans are scared of anything nuclear, and China is scared of its neighbor playing with plutonium. But the official reason JAXA gave me was feasibility.”
