Tribulation

by Kaz Morran

  “It’ll be okay,” Taiyo said. He swallowed hard—watching her made his throat ache.

  Kristen looked up at him and sniffled as she tried to regain control. “It is not going to be okay.” She doubled over in a fresh bout of sobs.

  “Yes, it is.” Taiyo reached out to put a reassuring hand on her hunched, quaking back but took it away without touching her. “Even if this astronaut thing doesn’t work out, I’m sure you’ve got a lot going for you. What about the lithobiology thing?”

  “Lithozoology.”

  “That alone is bound to open doors for you. You’re probably famous for it already.”

  “Oh, God! You think I’m going to end up like some washed up b-list reality TV star overdosing on opiates, don’t you?” She paused to ball some more then fought off hyperventilation to elaborate: “Th-they’re g-gonna f-f-find me on the f-floor…” she wailed.

  “What? No, they—”

  “Of a G-Greyhound b-bathroom …”

  “A bus station? Why—”

  “No. … Rolling with the motion of the b-b-bus … f-facedown in my own urine and v-v-vomit.”

  Taiyo could not deny that was a possibility, but he tried to reassure her. “Greyhound went bankrupt years ago,” he said.

  “I know,” she cried. “That makes it even worse.”

  Worse still, was that her breakdown was also on record.

  Taiyo went and set his backpack in the beached raft. He unzipped the top half of his jumpsuit and slithered out of the arms then peeled off his soaked and stinking undershirt, stuffed it into a plastic bag in the side pocket of his backpack. He took out a replacement but wiped the grime from his stinging eyes with it before putting it on, an act that probably looked like he’d caught Kristen’s crying bug. He hadn’t, but her situation did make him consider how well he’ll hold up if it was his dream getting crushed.

  Nel came up behind him and put a hand on his bare shoulder. The sensation sent warm goosebumps up his back, and a sense of satisfied fatigue arrested his body. He raised his neck like a cat being scratched, and then slowly turned around to face her.

  For a second, they locked eyes. Then Nel looked down and away, back to Taiyo, and then elsewhere once more. “Here,” she said, holding out a bottle of water. “To flush your eyes.” He took it and thanked her. She stood by, touching her bottom lip and throat while she watched him pour water into his hand and splash it into his eyes. She moved in and took the bottle from him. “Head back,” she said softly. She cushioned the back of his head with her right hand and tipped the bottle with her left. “Hold your eye open with your fingers, okay?” He did as she told him, and he didn’t blink as she poured. The water dribbled down his cheek and neck, feeling cool and revitalizing.

  When finished, while he dried his face with the shirt in his hand, she said she liked his tattoos.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said of the one on his left arm. She read it aloud: “E pur si muove.”

  “And yet it moves,” he translated the Italian, pleased his voice came out gruff, not like the nervous teen he felt like. “It’s what Galileo whispered when—”

  “After the Church forced him to renounce his claim that Earth moved around the Sun,” she said and leaned in. She held her hands at her stomach, alternating fingers as she massaged them.

  “I did this one myself.” He turned his frame so she could see the tattoo on his other arm.

  Moving from a distance JAXA’s cross-cultural communication guide called “friendly” to one it called “intimate,” she cupped her hand around his bicep, just under the tattoo of Darwin’s Tree of Life and ran her thumb across the caption, I think … .

  “And what do you think, Taiyo Yamazaki?” she said, tilting her head and raising an eyebrow while she met his eyes. Her hand stayed on his arm.

  He swallowed hard but forced himself to maintain eye contact. She had such beautiful eyes. “I think my lifestyle is not conducive to human intimacy.” He said it with a smirk, meaning to be both truthful and humorous in his word choice.

  Then Nel did one of the most hurtful things anyone had ever done to him: she pulled away and burst out laughing. She didn’t intend for her laugh to hurt him, of course. But that was precisely why it hurt so much. It had been her gut-honest reaction. Nel, the woman who rarely smiled or laughed, had broken into hysterics at the mere insinuation of Taiyo as a romantic partner.

  Before he could respond, not that he knew how to, a scream from the edge of the forest interrupted.

  18

  The voice of the fuckwit pilot, Preston Machesney, in Ethan’s headset broke through the din of the engine and rotors. “They’re coming up under us in two minutes,” he said. “Just over that ridge up there.”

  Ethan reached for the volume dial, but Machesney slapped his hand away from the console. “Who’s commanding this bird, bro?” Machesney snapped and then reached for the controls himself. Gnashing his teeth side to side, Ethan watched the hair on the Machesney’s forearm rustle in the breeze of the aircon vents.

  Machesney adjusted his sunnies. The morning Sun blasted through a gap in the hills, setting the inside of cockpit ablaze with orange. “Test. Test,” The seppo said. The accent rattled the melon between Ethan’s ears. “Testing, testing … Testestestest … Testestestestestestestest … Teeeehst … One-two, one-two, microphone check … Test-test …”

  Finally, Machesney shut his hole and went back to grinning out the windscreen of the helicopter like a wanker.

  “Mach is the pilot, and Mach calls the shots,” said Machesney, his chin in the air.

  The dickhead pilot’s name was not “Mach,” and it wasn’t "The Aviator,” as the other staffers called him, albeit in mock reverence. It was Preston Machesney. The T3 roster said as much, and the patch on his jumpsuit would have, too, if the bloody wanker hadn’t doctored it with a sharpie.

  Ethan forced a yawn to clear the pressure from his ears. He looked down out the bubble window, which wrapped around the cockpit to give views through the floor. The ravine-pocked rainforest looked like one furry map of Tassie layered over another. Absolutely gorgeous. It reminded him of his ex-missus, a woman proud of her retro hygiene, a woman who when naked looked to have captured the entire Jackson Five in a leg-lock. Ethan watched the shades of green roll by beneath his feet, imagining the trees as afros and other hair formations, and he wondered how long it would take a rescue crew to recover the wreckage if Machesney plunged the helicopter down through the canopy.

  In spite of the beauty of the view, out of habit, Ethan checked his phone. No messages. Not from the ex-missus or from anyone. He checked the forecast. The five-day looked all right, but warm for the time of year. Mixed sun and precip. The ten-day showed temps dropping later in the week. Pressure falling and winds moving inland. “You see the forecast?” he asked.

  “Not while I’m flying, bro.” Machesney lifted a cheek to get his phone from his pocket and then stuffed it in the stowage area between their two seats.

  “I’m not asking you to check the forecast,” said Ethan. “Only if you know about it.”

  “It’s fine.” Pilot Preston kept his sights aimed ahead, vigilantly on the sky.

  “Yeah, I don’t know about that, mate.” Ethan wasn’t sure how much bad weather the candidates could take, but he knew he didn’t like Machesney’s attitude. “Could be a storm moving in.” Ethan checked a different website and got the same info. “Dickhead,” he muttered into the headset.

  “Didn’t copy you, bro? Say again?”

  Ethan planted his feet wide against the transparent floor, slumped in his seat, and flicked his thumb hard across the screen of his phone. He narrowed his eyes at the blur of scrolling thumbnails and bar graphs.

  Machesney lifted his chin. “Well?” he said, his voice still painful to Ethan’s ears.

  “Well?” Ethan squeezed his phone. “Well, what about the candidates?”

  “They don’t need umbrellas where they’re going, bro.”

  Ethan pulle
d a foot up onto his seat and propped himself against the side window while he swirled his thumb around the online map, panning the terrain with fast, jagged strokes until he found the Kambi Valley. “You don’t reckon they’ll be needing bloody life jackets down there?” His hands were shaking, so he hid them in his lap.

  “Well, thanks to the good folks at T3, they’ll have some soon enough.” Machesney pointed over his shoulder with his thumb at the cargo hold.

  “I’m not talking about the river,” Ethan called into the headset but loud enough to be heard without it. “For the bloody cave, mate. You facken T3 facktards haven’t given this project a rat’s worth of thought, have ya?”

  Between glances out the cockpit window, Machesney flicked a couple switches on the instrument panel to look busy. He said, “First thing, bro. Mach is the captain of this bird, and I say no cussing. It’s bad for morale. Second thing is, get your foot off that seat. Manners and respect. Those, my friend, are the keys to life’s aircraft. And third, those ‘T3 fucktards’ include you.” By now, Ethan could feel his face about to boil over with rage, but he held it inside while Machesney continued. “I don’t feel as though you’re trying your best to appreciate what something like a Project Daintree contract means to a company.”

  Ethan crossed one leg over the other and turned back to his phone. He knew and didn't care that his frenzied taps and scrolls made it look like he was tweaking. Maybe something on his phone could make sense of this cunt, or of T3. He should never have signed on with T3. He’d been perfectly happy giving rainforest tours.

  He cursed the company out in his head while he called up their wiki page. After tunneling several footnote links deep, he learned the fate of T3 had grown entangled with the future of Australia’s freshly hatched space agency.

  The Australian agency had a directive to engage private industry but had suffered from a string of technical failures and canceled contracts. For its part, T3 had yet to recover from a mercenary scandal. The partnership with NASA on Project Daintree was probably both Australia and T3’s last chance to show they could follow through on a contract and play in the same league as the big boys.

  Ethan still had his eyes on his phone but in his periphery saw Machesney shoot him a scowl. Ethan ignored him and clicked over to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The number of people on the T3 payroll had gone from over 1,600 before the scandal and rebranding to 312 the year after, then to 291, and so on. It now teetered at 206 following the latest round of layoffs. That number included temporary hires like Ethan and Machesney.

  Machesney stretched his neck over for a view of what Ethan was looking at. “Don’t hack the hand that feeds you, bro. That shit bites back.”

  “It’s public information.”

  Ethan didn’t need or want to keep digging, but if he stopped now, Machesney would feel victorious. So Ethan nodded and stroked his chin thoughtfully as he scrolled slowly past the pages of meaningless jargon. He clicked a link to see T3’s safety and litigation records. … The page took a while to load.

  For a minute, Machesney said nothing, but the glances and neck-stretches grew more frequent until at last, he blurted, “Bro! You can’t— It’s not …” It took Preston a few tries to come up with something. "The WiFi sucks in here, huh?” he said and reached up and fiddled with the router mounted above his head.

  “Seems to be working fine, mate.” Ethan scrolled the long list of infractions.

  “It’s finicky. Really bad sometimes.” Machesney brought his hand back down. “Try it now.”

  Ethan refreshed the page but got an error screen. “Nah, you buggered it.” Unbelievable. He flopped his phone down on his knee, closed his eyes, and shook his head. Dickhead.

  “Ah well, I tried,” said the pilot. He adjusted his ear covers. “I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”

  Ethan waved his phone at Machesney. “Bloody oath, ya dodgy tosser. She was loading fine before you stabbed your nose-picker in it. How about putting ‘er back to before?” He had a lot more to say on the subject, but he remembered the people riding back in the cargo hold. He didn’t know if the headsets were all on the same channel.

  Machesney changed the subject, anyway, and told Ethan the candidates were right below. And then he banked the helicopter right, which gave Ethan a better view out the side. As well as an offline icon, Ethan’s phone showed the two helicopters’ GPS marks passing over the candidates. Rain spattered the window, and a bout of turbulence tested Ethan’s seatbelts, but the eddy in his innards didn’t come from the drops in altitude.

  Ethan would be just as blameworthy as the other T3 staffers for going along with it if something happened to the candidates. He pictured himself throwing his hat down and quitting as soon as they landed at Kambi and storming off across the mud, into the bush, and all the way back down to Wujal Wujal by himself. He wouldn’t have any supplies, though, and the trek would take days. He knew how to scavenge and hunt, though. Water would be tougher, but doable. Heading the other way, down to meet with the Mulligan Highway, would be faster. From there, he could hitch to Cooktown and …

  But he decided he’d be of more use sticking round to make sure things went as safe as possible for the candidates. If something went wrong, at least he’d be there to hustle everyone out to safety.

  The whup-whup-whup of the rotors changed to a thwack-thwack-thwack as Machesney lowered the helicopter against sweeps of wind.

  “Two hundred and descending.”

  Ethan craned his neck to see the back crew prepping the payload. Light burst from the seam around the rear door, and a rush of wind rampaged the cabin, sending Preston Machesney’s salt-and-pepper hair into a frenzy.

  “One hundred and descending.”

  At twenty meters, the back crew dropped the hydraulic door and unlatched the straps to free the payload—a glossy white, coffin-sized crate.

  “Go for deploy on your mark,” one of the crew called over the headset.

  “Bombs away,” Machesney sang.

  The helicopter pitched, and the crate slid down the rails and out the back. Through the side window, Ethan only saw a tumbling white flash before the container vanished through the canopy of the jungle.

  “Next stop, Kambi Valley,” Machesney said. “Then we’ll see how these space cadets perform in the dark.”.

  19

  Revere the Emperor and expel the barbarians.

  —Japanese proverb

  Anton called from the edge of the forest, “Guys. … Something over here. We have a visitor. Guys, can someone come?”

  Taiyo scanned the shadowed area around Anton expecting to spot an animal moving against the wall of foliage. He saw nothing at first. Then he realized the wall of foliage was the animal—a crocodile of incomprehensible proportions.

  Anton had his hands up in surrender. “Back away slowly,” Taiyo told him, keeping his tone even so he didn’t startle either Anton or the crocodile. Anton slid his left foot back to test the command. When the reptile didn’t flinch, he continued his incremental retreat until ten meters away, again with the others, who’d gathered between the forest and the shore to witness the spectacle from a maybe-safe distance.

  At the shoulder, Taiyo and the crocodile stood at the same height. The body, snout to tail, stretched way too long to be real. But real or not, it was moving toward everyone.

  Ronin snatched Taiyo’s broken paddle off the sand and marched straight for the crocodile. “Out of the way,” he yelled and took a swing at Anton but missed. The croc reared its head at Ronin. It opened its jaws and hissed. “Fuck you,” Ronin countered. It could’ve fit Ronin’s entire body in its mouth, but Ronin had a way with animals. He didn’t hesitate. With his right hand on the T-grip of the paddle and his left halfway down the shaft, he raised it up over his head and in a single motion lunged and jabbed the broken end of the paddle down hard on the top of the crocodile’s snout.

  It snapped its jaws shut and recoiled. Before it could pounce, Ronin stabbed it again in the top o
f the head. Again and again, he struck the animal. It flailed its head and tail, hissing and grunting. When at last Ronin stopped, he added a barefooted kick to the snout that sent the croc scurrying off into the rainforest.

  Ronin turned and pointed the splintered weapon at Kristen. His chest and shoulders heaved up and down. His eyeballs pulsed as he shot his murderous gaze down the length of the paddle.

  “You’re next,” he told her.

  ***

  Ronin trailed behind like a pouty toddler while the others hauled the deflated raft through hours of craggy, uncharted jungle. When they broke for a late lunch, they unrolled the raft halfway and sat on the fold. Only Ronin stayed standing. He preferred to pace the leaf litter of the forest floor.

  Anton didn’t stand or take any posture that might seem aggressive, electing to plead with Ronin instead. “Sit down,” he said. “Let’s talk.” Ronin stopped, considered, and then shook his head. He remained standing but was at least listening. “I’m sure we’d all like to get through this project as a team,” said Anton, nodding to lead Ronin along. “We’d like you to be part of this team. Can you agree to that?”

  Ronin leaned away from and squinted at Anton and then broke eye contact with a head flick that made his ponytail dance. “Is this about the croc?” Ronin said. His shoulders slumped. “It is, isn’t it?” The grimace lingered while he fiddled with a velcro strap on the front of his jumpsuit.