by Kaz Morran
Ronin cut Machesney off. “Hey Ethan, have you snagged that porky drone woman, yet? What’s her name—Williams? Wilma? Willow? Does she know she’s the only thing keeping you from walking off the job and telling those lorem-ipsoms at T3 to take a flying fuck?”
“Bloody oath, mate.”
A sudden hand on Ethan’s shoulder made him jump. Then he nearly crumpled upon seeing who it was.
“Wilson,” she corrected Ronin from before. “Doctor Sylvia Wilson.” She cackled wildly at the screen.
Not ready to give up the spotlight, Machesney clanked his empty Red Bull down and stretched across the counter to get his face on camera. “Stick to business, Ronin, okay bro?”
“Eat it, snuff star,” replied Aro, and the call disconnected.
17
An hour later, while heading downhill toward the Daintree River, Nel’s phone chimed with the message:
Having fun? LOL
Here’s your final 3 tasks of the trek:
>
TASK 1: go find the cargo crate at:
—16°06'21.4"S 145°13'58.3"E
>
TASK 2: use contents to reach:
—16°08'12.8"S 145°16'39.2"E
>
TASK 3: abandon contents, go to:
—16°15'55.9"S 145°08'56.3"E
>
>
Your friend, Mach
(BTW any issues to report? LOL)
>
>
>
Sent from my iPad
Each of the AsCans contorted their face in his or her own way after Nel let them see her screen. The juvenile tone of the message aside, the query about having any issues stood out the most, at least to Taiyo. No actual discussion of reporting an issue ensued, perhaps because they didn’t need a consensus to report Ronin. One of them may have already done so. The idea had occurred to Taiyo, but he didn’t want blemishes on his own evaluation. JAXA wanted to see that he could play well with others.
Aside from giant snakes, giant insects, and giant spiders, they met little opposition on the way to the cargo. It must have been dropped in by helicopter—likely the one that had buzzed them—because other than the snapped branches of the poor acacia tree that had broken the crate’s fall, the area showed no signs of trampling. Taiyo ran his hands along the seamless white gloss. It was the same kind of NASA crate they’d unloaded from the pontoon boat, but at double the length it looked like a refrigerator, or perhaps like a coffin.
Taiyo hung his pack on a low branch and dropped his rear into the mess of greenery beneath the shady side of the crate beside Anton, who’d already collapsed there in exhaustion. Soaked in sweat, the two leaned back against the crate and watched Ronin shake some baby powder from a tin into his hand shove it through the zipper hole in his pants, giving himself a hardy scratch while he was in there.
“Get up, hafu. This isn’t a meditation retreat,” Ronin yelled, and he pulled his hand out of his crotch and slapped the side of the crate by Taiyo’s head. A cloud of powder enveloped Taiyo’s face. He swatted at it and coughed, and leaped to his feet. “Everybody up!” Ronin ordered.
“That’s right, you all,” said Walter, affirming Ronin’s command and snapping to attention. The outline of Walter’s gut showed through his sweat-soaked jumpsuit, and Ronin gave the belly a smack. The two had a chuckle over the resulting handprint.
The AsCans shook off their collective fatigue, rolled the crate over to put it lid-side up, and then gathered around to unlatch it.
Ronin dove in first. He rummaged around like an old polar bear who’d lost his ice sheet. He pulled out paddles, lifejackets, and—with help—a six-person inflatable dinghy, which they dragged to the nearby bank of the Daintree.
The map on Taiyo’s phone showed the width of the river varied with the landscape, squeezing through canyons in some spots, and meandering over swamplands in others. Where they stood now, it spanned a modest fifty meters from one muddy bank to the other.
Ronin gave the side of the raft a kick. “The bait goes in the bow. Halfbreed and Maple Sugar take the front seat,” he said, referring to Taiyo and Nel.
Taiyo scratched the growing stubble on his face and ran a hand over his fuzzy scalp. He’d given his head a fresh shave on their last night in basecamp and would do so again if he had the chance. Like in high school, his university hockey team had also required players to shave their heads, and up until now the habit had stuck.
To qualify as a JAXA astronaut, an applicant needed at least two years of industry-related work experience. So after doing his undergrad in Sendai, in the so-called Future Global Leadership aerospace engineering program, he’d gotten a regular salaryman job at Mitsubishi.
The reach of corporate culture extended far beyond the office. Always at attention and in formation, employees were made to join twice-daily ceremonies where they sang the company anthem and saluted the raising or lowering of the company flag. Then a drill master led them in push-ups, marching, and jogging while they chanted slogans. The company had even been known to dictate the color of the underwear its female employees could wear. In theory, the totalitarian uniformity, along with eighty-hour work weeks, was to instill harmony and camaraderie in the office, but in reality, it just made employees collapse into psychosis or quite literally die at their desks.
In such an environment, tattoos and facial hair were seen as vulgar displays of individualism.
But Taiyo had done his time.
For two years, and not a day more, he’d hid his tattoos and kept his face clean-shaven, and now here he was, less than two weeks away from defying the odds and conquering the clutches of corporatocracy.
And yet, here he was, free from the corporate world only to suffer under Ronin. Taiyo folded his arms across his chest and squinted at Walter, the actual commander. Walter only shrugged.
Taiyo whipped his head over to glare at Ronin. “So that’s the seating arrangements then, eh?” Taiyo said. The challenging tone in his own voice surprised him, and he didn’t know where the words or attitude behind them were headed. He clenched his jaw. It wasn’t really about who sat where. “Is that what you decided? I guess it’s up to you, because you’re the boss, right?”
“The boss of them all.” Ronin stood with one foot up on the edge of the beached raft while he pointed a paddle at Taiyo as if warding off an intruder.
This is it, thought Taiyo. This is where I take a stand and put Ronin Aro in his place.
Except it wasn’t.
Taiyo put a hand on the raft to steady it against the current while he cast an apprehensive gaze downriver and up before regarding his submerged lower legs. The sight of the murky current against his body resigned him to whatever peril the water concealed—though it did bring a chill; for the moment the past felt more visceral than the present, and he remembered the time he’d stood up to his father:
Knee-deep in the icy swill of floating debris, sixteen-year-old Taiyo held the rim of the fishing skiff as it nodded and dipped in the icy floodwater. Flecks of blue paint came off in his trembling hands. His mother sat in the boat, knees to her chest and face in her arms to block the wind, and perhaps to hide her tears.
His bare hands stung; his legs felt numb. Wind pierced the pores in his jacket like a thousand ice-tipped spears but could not distract him from the bog-water stench of the rotting sea. The situation threatened to draw out every pitiful ration the shelter had fed him.
“What’s the problem, Tai?” Dad had been empathetic at first, speaking just loud enough to be heard over the wind.
“It’s like … I … My instincts say we shouldn’t do this.”
“You want to be an astronaut someday, right? If astronauts trusted their instincts, they’d believe they were falling toward Earth.”
“They are. So fast they keep going around it.”
“Get in the boat, smart ass.”
Taiyo crossed his arms.
To Taiyo’s mother, Dad yelled, “Get in the boat,” and she pul
led herself up by the vacant outboard-motor mount. She must’ve been scared because she never did what Dad said. Mind you, Dad never gave her orders. And then Dad, red-faced and nostrils flaring, turned back to Taiyo. “You, too! I already told you, Tai. Get in the goddamn boat.”
Taiyo had gone limp; his mind now as numb as his legs. But one thought pervaded: he did not want to get into that fishing skiff. His mother had protested—and caved—about “stealing” the skiff. For his part, Taiyo didn’t know if taking it from Sakura Kawashima’s house had made it better or worse, but that wasn’t the dilemma at hand.
“I can’t.” Taiyo’s words came out jittery as he strained to keep an even tone. Dad’s plan to traverse a hundred kilometers of decimated coastline would surely get them killed.
From the bow, a little over arm’s length away, Dad locked eyes with his son. “Oh yes, you can.” He rolled his neck, limbering up. “And you will.” He was no longer yelling. His tone conveyed the threat instead.
“I won’t.”
“Excuse me?”
A million thoughts raced through Taiyo’s head while he tried to make sense of Dad’s apparent madness. He pictured the crumbling cliffs, jagged rocks hidden in the floating islands of debris, unforgiving winter wind and waves … “Dad, we’ll never make it to Grandma and Grandpa’s.” That much should’ve been obvious; Dad wasn’t thinking right. Taiyo had never seen his father this way.
Dad’s stony stare dissolved, his eyes fell shut, and snowfall dusted his tipped-back face and hair. “Just get in the boat,” he said, sounding exhausted.
Taiyo looked over at his mother. Her knees were still drawn to her chest as she rocked with the gentle swells the water.
Dad bore his teeth. “This is the last time I’m going to tell you, Tai.”
Despite the cold, Taiyo’s hands grew hot as fear turned to anger. “I said no!” The weight of the ocean resisted Taiyo’s backward step. “I’m not leaving Sendai.”
Dad lunged. He grabbed Taiyo by the shoulder, bunching the coat in his left hand and slamming a right fist into the side of Taiyo’s face.
In the moment, the pain and breadth of the ringing made it too hard to pinpoint the site of impact. Taiyo felt his feet give out. He staggered and fell backward, but Dad yanked him up by the collar and heaped his limp body into the boat beside his screaming mother.
Dad had never hit him before and never did again, but the incident would forever make Taiyo think twice before going against a potentially violent adversary.
***
The light of morning splintered through the forested shore onto the coffee-colored water of the Daintree River. At first glance, the only movement was from the mirrored images of cloud puffs and overhanging trees. A closer look at the dark objects floating near the mangroves revealed the occasional shifting tail. But the eyes never blinked.
So encased were the sound waves by the walls of fog ahead and behind the raft that every noise felt amplified. The scraping of the rubber bottom over mud sounded like the muffled screams of someone trapped underneath, desperate to squirm free before suffocating.
The rhythmic smacking of the bow onto unbroken water had Taiyo in a trance until the sudden cry and flapping wings of a hornbill made his heart skip. The candidates watched the bird disappear into the fog. And once more, all was still and silent.
The only sound became the dips of their paddles. They took their time, dipping each stroke as if they’d warped back to prehistoric times and any wrinkle in the silky brown surface would ripple into the future and cause a cascade of unintended consequences.
The serenity didn’t last: Ronin couldn’t stop scratching his crotch and bug bites, the bird calls grew more present, the current strengthened, and a shift in the wind made their body odor overpower the earthen scents of the river ecosystem.
Taiyo sat front-left; Nel front-right. He mimicked how she put every muscle into her strokes, not just her arms. Even as the pace of the river picked up, and threw the raft over boulders and waterfalls, and as branches and vines threatened the crew with decapitation, Taiyo kept cool. He visualized the motions as he followed through: bending forward, aiming the paddle behind him, and using his core for a strong stroke as he sat up and pulled the paddle through the water.
As the map on Taiyo’s phone had promised, the river began to narrow. The arching walls of the rainforest closed in and hid the Sun. The raft picked up speed. The rapids came on in increments, and the mangroves and mud gave way to banks of steep rock.
“Back!” shouted Kristen, when they’d picked up too much speed. As the most experienced rafter, Kristen took the rear alongside Ronin, but she called the commands.
The job of tracking their position—so they didn’t overshoot the landing—fell to the mission navigator, Taiyo. He had his phone velcroed to his vest for easy access, but checking still meant giving up partial control of his paddling. On one stretch of turbulence, he had his left hand on the paddle and his right holding the phone. Wind and spray came at him from all sides, and the view ahead bounced and shifted faster than he could focus. How fast were they going? How long should it take to get there? He had an idea but had to be sure. Somewhere he had an accelerometer app. He swiped around until he found it, almost losing his phone as they hit a hole.
Current velocity: 2.7 m/s, said the app.
Back on the map, his eyes locked on the screen—only for a second to check the distance, but in that second the raft ran up a rock. The bow launched high up out of the water.
Mid-air, he fumbled the paddle and phone, desperate not to lose either. The raft twisted mid-flight and came down hard on Taiyo’s side, jamming the paddle between boulders and snapping it at the throat where the shaft met the blade. Nel slid elbow-first into Taiyo’s ribs, knocking his legs overboard into rushing water. He got the phone stuck back to his chest and held on while his feet, shins, and knees banged off the rocks. The roar of rapids muted his voice and stole his hearing. Spray crippled his vision. Disoriented and clinging to the safety rope, he gulped water and gasped for air.
Someone jerked him up by the vest. Nel. She hauled him back in, but their shifting mass made her side of the raft rise off the water. Up it went until it teetered on edge.
“High-side right!” screamed Kristen, her voice audible again.
The raft raced downstream with its right side in the air like a stunt car full of clinging passengers and no driver about to flip everyone onto the rushing rocks. Taiyo and Nel scrambled into position. They threw their weight into the floor of the raft, and their momentum sent the raft smacking back down people-side up.
“Left-forward!” Kristen hollered. “Hard!”
A sharp bend rushed toward them.
Taiyo dug in with his broken paddle. He stabbed at rock where he could, but it did little to turn the raft. A wall of exposed rock and boulders—remnants of a sheared off mountainside—loomed two hundred meters ahead.
“Lean in!”
They dropped down a fall and got showered. He blinked away the sting in his eyes.
“Lean in. Left-forward! Left-forward! … Hard!”
At ninety meters until impact, the water deepened. Taiyo couldn’t touch rock. “Swap paddles,” he called to Nel. She didn’t hesitate. He leaned out over the bow. She held his legs while he paddled.
“Hard! Hard! … Paddle hard!”
Fifty meters.
Taiyo pulled furiously at the water. His arms burned. Harder, he paddled. His abdomen tearing, he made frantic chops at the rapids, desperate to avert impact.
Thirty meters.
He screamed through his teeth to fuel his arms to paddle harder. But in a glance through the spray, he saw nothing but wall. Not once did he brace for impact. Not once did he give in to the roaring pain in his muscles. He refused to be overpowered by the water.
And he wasn’t.
“Paddle backward!” Kristen now ordered. “Back! Back! Back!”
Ten meters.
And Taiyo saw the forest and the sky
.
Nel pulled him back in, and he sat up and watched the wall race past to his left as they slalomed around hunks of rock larger than the raft. He caught his breath, and his shoulders rose and fell like the rapids. His palms stung from squeezing Nel’s paddle. His arms would barely move, shins throbbed, and eyes felt milled with sand. He swapped paddles back with Nel, and they caught their breath while they watched the Daintree River widened and returned to a meandering pace.
Taiyo checked his phone, more careful of his timing now. “Docking right side in two hundred and fifty meters,” he called out. “ETA, three minutes twenty.”
“Paddle backward,” called Kristen. They’d picked up too much speed.
He obeyed, even though his paddle was useless and his muscles twitched in protest. A gentle eddy and a small gravelly beach came into view among the mud, mangroves, and rocks.
“Backward! Backward!” A sense of panic echoed in Kristen’s voice. “Ronin … paddle backward! Ronin!”
“Not yet,” shouted Ronin. “Stop paddling,” he ordered.
“Paddle backward,” Kristen yelled. “Everyone. Backward. Back. Back. Back!”
“Everyone, stop paddling,” Ronin countered. “Stop. Stop. Stop!”
The landing was a little rough, but they got to shore anyway. Taiyo thought Kristen was going to knock Ronin out. She got right in his face, on her toes chest to chest. With fists clenched at her sides, she pummeled Ronin with insults, not punches. “What the fuck is wrong with your head? —You fucked-up, arrogant, piece of shit.”
This time Taiyo did intervene. Sort of. “Watch the water,” he told Kristen. “Keep back from the edge.” She hushed him with an open palm and continued her tirade. Just as well, thought Taiyo. Who was he to deny Ronin a much-deserved berating?
Through all Kristen’s rage, Ronin stood there without retort, arms crossed and an arrogant smirk on his face. Ronin knew—they all knew—that no matter how justified, Kristen’s reaction would not sit well with her NASA evaluators.
In the aftermath, the AsCans shared looks of concern with each other as Kristen paced the patch of shoreline up a couple meters from the water where the sand, gravel, and mud merged with larger rocks and forest spillover. After several minutes, Taiyo found her sitting on a boulder. She had her hands on her head, and her shoulders trembled as she sobbed. He knelt down and told her the sound of the river might have masked the audio on the body cams, but she shook her head. The river wouldn’t have muted all six of the devices. More than likely, her twenty-second outburst had ruined the past, present, and future of the most life-defining pursuit of her existence.
