by Kaz Morran
“That’s part of it,” offered Nel, who sat next to Taiyo, two spots down from Anton on the raft.
“But, Anton, I saved you. I was just …” Ronin didn’t finish. He looked up into the nest of vines and branches. His face actually looked pained.
“Yes,” said Anton. He aimed a sad smile at Ronin. “And I’m forever grateful. But there’s a broader group cohesion to think about, too.”
The others swatted bugs and nodded agreement from their seats on the edge of the raft. Taiyo wished he could talk to Ronin the way Anton was. But he wouldn’t get half a sentence in before Ronin did to him what he’d done to the crocodile.
Ronin plucked a leaf the size of his forearm off a branch, inspected one side then the other, and let out a whiny longwinded sigh like a kid finally getting off the sofa to do his homework. “Harmony,” Ronin said. He nodded to himself and, looking sedated, he added, “Okay. Point taken.
But in the next breath, Ronin’s neck and jaw tensed. His eyes turned wild as he leveled his finger down at Kristen’s face. “But what about her?” Without taking his accusing finger off Kristen, he stepped closer. Twigs snapped beneath his boots. Through gnarled teeth, Ronin’s words lashed like a whip: “Her! …She tried to kill us. She wants us dead. She’s worse than the croc.” He jabbed the air in front of Kristen’s face as if threatening her with a bayonet; his finger like the blade.
Kristen leaned back and widened her eyes. The whole row of seated candidates tensed.
Still standing nearby, Anton stayed calm. He opened his palms, stepped forward, and with a soft hand lowered Ronin’s arm as if disarming a gunman. “That’s a pretty bold claim,” he told Ronin, a hand on the seething man’s elbow. “Care to explain?”
Ronin almost doubled Anton in width and mass and came pre-wound with ten times the psychotic inertia.
“How could you think I… ?” Kristen bounced to her feet. Nel jumped up and grabbed a fistful of Kristen’s sleeve to keep her from lunging at Ronin.
“Shut it, gnashnab,” Ronin yelled. He waved a fist and veiny forearm but kept a step back from the half-ring of AsCans that had formed around him and were shouting for calm.
Ronin chuckled at Kristen through the crowd and then switched focus to the others. “And who had the balls to take control before she got us killed? Only me,” he said. “Why didn’t anyone back me up? Huh?” He kicked the ground and showered their legs with dirt and leaves.
Taiyo backed away, preferring to watch them all shout it out from the periphery. It was better to let Ronin breathe than to try and contain him, and Taiyo didn’t want to be the one whose words pushed the incident from dispute to brawl. They had over a week left together and were a long way from a hospital. The shouts got louder. Ronin and Anton bumped chests. Walter was right with Anton but busy yelling at Nel. Kristen screamed into Ronin’s ear, but Ronin’s eyes were locked deadpan on Anton.
Taiyo shifted about the sidelines like a boxing ref. His gaze ping-ponged from one combatant to another, and his gut tightened with the question of how to deescalate the situation before real violence broke out. The body cams on their belts were recording. How would Taiyo’s action, or inaction, be viewed? He stopped moving, put his hands on his head, and blew out his cheeks. “All right, all right,” he said, but it came out weak and barely audible.
Crablike, Ronin widened his stance and bulked his shoulders and arms, and pressed forward into Anton, forcing the balding medic to stumble backward into Walter.
To hell with evaluations. Taiyo wanted peace for peace’s sake.
“It was my fault,” Taiyo blurted. He straightened his back and struck a wide stance. “I’m sorry.” An astronaut had to have integrity. “It’s my fault. Stop!” he repeated the plea until he got their attention. “I checked the map on my phone at the wrong time. That’s why my paddle broke. I didn’t have both hands on the paddle. If I’d used better judgment, all this could’ve been avoided.” He looked each one of them in the eye and told everyone he was sorry, and then he folded his hands in front of himself and lowered his head, ready for judgment.
They muddled around, eyes on their own boots or up at the vines and branches, and they shuffled aside to give each other space. Taiyo’s admission said nothing about how Ronin had refused to dock the raft and brutalized the crocodile, but it pacified the mood of the group.
Taiyo capitalized. “So how about we all just sit down now, okay?” Nobody moved. Firmly, like before, he repeated, “Okay?” But maybe not firmly enough.
“Well, maybe if—” Ronin cleared his throat to say more, but failed to articulate. “I’m not— It’s not like …” Sweat glazed his stony features.
“Everyone sit down,” Nel demanded. The steady heft in her tone kept the tension iced. They looked at her but didn’t yet obey. She locked eyes with Ronin and didn’t blink or flinch until he turned away. Then she homed in on Walter, and then Taiyo. She was not backing down. “Sit.” She did not yell, but instead shot out her arm and pointed to the raft to emphasize.
Ronin let out an uneasy laugh, then reached back and coiled the ponytail around his fingers.
Walter looked at Taiyo. They both shrugged and retook their seats.
Once everyone complied, Nel stood in front of them and said, “Good. Now relax.” She paused while they got comfortable, but her narrow gaze never strayed. “The primary objective of this mission is the safety of the crew. Secondary objectives are the tasks we’ve been assigned, and right now that means tracking down those GPS coordinates. For now, we’re all alive. The mission is not compromised. Let’s keep it that way.” She didn’t pace like a general might’ve. Instead, like a primary teacher, she held an unwavering stance, slightly bent over her scolded, ashamed pupils. “And from now on, as individuals, we’ll think about whether it’ll make a positive contribution to the crew and to the mission objectives before we speak or before we act. Can we all agree to start acting like a crew on a mission?” The bowed row of AsCans eyed the ground or stirred the underbrush with their feet. They nodded agreement, but it wasn’t good enough. Nel hardened each word as she repeated, “Can we agree to act like crewmates?”
“Yes,” came the collective, if not enthusiastic, reply.
“I thought so,” she said. “Now let’s go find out what’s waiting for us at those coordinates.”
Thoroughly impressed, Taiyo hopped to his feet, ready to march. Unreal, he thought. Out of nowhere, Nel had stepped up and taken the group by the balls. Even Ronin had listened to her. A few paces later, midway through fording a creek, his sense of admiration dissolved into self-loathing upon realizing he should’ve been the one to step up and seize control. He’d done well to apologize, but he shouldn’t have stopped there.
Taiyo noted the coordinates of the deflated raft for a future crew to retrieve it, and the tentatively united crew hefted on their backpacks and soldiered forth through the jungle.
Somehow, Taiyo had slipped to the head of their parade. He led them past an exposed uplift of stratified rock. The formation would’ve been a geological and paleontological treasure trove, but nobody was in the mood. No one spoke, but Taiyo felt the others judging him for not putting his colleague and countryman in his place. He felt their glares cutting into his back.
Instinctively, he cared most what Nel might’ve been thinking of him. The two of them seemed to have some sort of understanding, though he couldn’t pinpoint it. Maybe it was just by default. No one else in the group really resonated with him. Anton always felt distant, like a tagalong. Whenever he spoke with Walter or Kristen the conversation felt disconnected, like the same word meant something slightly different to them as it did to Taiyo.
The troop moved single file along a long, spiny ridge, and Taiyo let himself fall back, giving Ronin the lead. Fog hid the bottom of the cliffs on either side, and Ronin's bulk hid the view ahead but quite effectively cleared the trail of spider webs.
Nel’s confidence in standing up to Ronin hadn’t risen out of nothing, but displaying
it had. It had come from a place of genuine passion and concern. Taiyo had passion. Tons. But his was more inward—more for gaining knowledge and putting it to use creatively. He knew that wasn’t good enough, though. Not for an astronaut. Not all astronauts had to be leaders, of course, but they needed to know how to lead. When things went wrong, they had to be able to channel their passion, training, and experience into whatever role the moment required.
The trail descended down the neck of the ridge, depositing the candidates back into the shadows of the canopy. Taiyo fell to the very back of the line where he belonged.
Next time, he decided, he’d be ready. Next time.
20
The only cure for stupidity is death.
—Japanese proverb
Ethan pointed through Preston Machesney, past the com desk and out the window of the hab. “Absolutely gorgeous, that one is,” he said, his voice hushed. The grace of a horn-billed heron had stolen Ethan’s attention.
“Hey, bro,” said Machesney. “They want you outside for something.”
“Look at the wingspan on her.”
“Bro?”
Ethan whipped his head away from the window and narrowed his eyes at Machesney. “What, mate?”
“Outside,” said the Yankee pilot. “The engineers want you.”
“Fair suck of the sav, mate.” Ethan shook his head. Did nothing about the Daintree impress this tosser? Ethan put his hand on the laptop to close it but stopped when he remembered what he’d been up to before the heron showed up. “Where you cunts hide the site survey? I’ve bin trying for yonks to find it,” he squinted at the screen and said to Machesney.
“Right in front of you, bro.” Machesney smacked the placemat-size map above Ethan’s workstation with an open palm, and the prefab plastic wall of the hab made a hollow thud. Then he stepped back, crossed his arms, and stared down at Ethan over his sunnies.
The topo on the wall was what had sparked Ethan’s concern in the first place. “Yeah, look at ‘er.” Ethan waved a backhand at the map. “The valley’s built like a bloody funnel, ay, and ya got one facken map? Where’s the catchment and drainage survey?” He looked up from his seat at Machesney.
Preston Machesney struck a pissing-from-the-bridge pose over Ethan and smirked. “They’re looking for you out in the mud, bro. Your turf.” His sunnies reflected the glare of the ceiling lights.
Ethan kept his eyes off Machesney so not to get triggered. He started to fold the laptop into the wall unit but changed his mind. He decided to try a spanner unknown to Machesney’s toolbox: Humility. Ethan looked up at his adversary, tipped his hat, and said, “I reckon you’d be able to find something. Ya wanna give it a go for me, mate? I’m just not as good with the techy stuff.”
Machesney contemplated, his face tightening before giving in. “Sure, sure,” he said and gave Ethan the same dismissive wave Ethan had given the wall map.
“Cheers.”
Ethan patted Machesney on the shoulder as he slid past, following the muddy footprints to the mock airlock. He ignored the checklist above the handle and slid open the inner accordion door, giving it a kick to unstick it, and then squeezed through the half-open outer one. Outside on the landing at the top of the ramp, he pretended to scan the horizon while reaching out with the toe of his boot for the spray bottle he knew would be there, tucked off to the side of the little the landing. He gave it a tap. It wobbled. He nudged it again, and it teetered. A third push satisfied him. He watched and listened to it roll down the metal ramp and sink into the mud.
Oops.
Sorry about that, Preston.
Ethan gave himself a sharp nod of approval. Halfway down the ramp, he paused to lift his face to the steamy air and sniff the allure of red earth and rain. Those space candidates were crazy. No way Mars smelled that good. He watched the heron land on the mangled remains of a tree sticking up out of the mudflat and take off again. It flapped its wings without effort, disappearing in the fog that had settled over the rainforest. The air felt especially heavy for this time of year. Heavy and calm, like a storm holding back until it’d built up a charge.
Fifty meters across the clearing, down at the edge of the forest, two T3 hires fresh out of uni stood under open umbrellas and in muddied white jumpsuits taking photos by the stream. That morning, while that same pair of engineers had been noodling away inside the hab over how to 3D print polyvinyl tiles to lay over the mud to keep their boots dry, Ethan had gone out and made a path around the hab with sticks, leaves, and palm fronds. Then he’d gone back in and told them the story of some wanker boasting to the Buddha about how he’d gone off on a ten-year retreat, meditating and training, and now he’d finally learned to cross the river by floating over water, and the Buddha looked at him and said, “But why? The ferry only costs a nickel, you twat.”
Then Ethan told them to go outside and finish the paths he’d started. It was one of Ethan’s finer moments.
Ethan followed the path of sticks and fronds down toward the engineers. On his first step from the section he’d made onto theirs, his boots broke through into the mud.
“Dude, he’s here,” one engineer told the other from beneath his umbrella.
“How ya going?” said Ethan.
The engineers, who wore the same little triangular beards, pointed to the opposite bank, where the encroaching and overhanging forest kept everything in shadow. Then they showed him some of the dozens of dark, blurry, zoomed-in pics on their phones.
“What made those footprints?” one of them asked Ethan.
Ethan squished and slid several steps closer through the mud. He bent down to inspect one footprint and then another. “I reckon these footprints were made by feet, ay,” he declared.
“Is that your expert opinion?” asked the first engineer.
“They’re from a crocodile, right?” said the second.
“Yeah, nah. Yeah, … kind of,” said Ethan, toying with them. Ronin Aro isn’t the only one who can give people a stir, Ethan thought.
“How can it be kind of a crocodile?”
Ethan bent down to make a show of inspecting the tracks. “She’s hardly three meters. I’ve seen bigger salties crawling out of the toilet.”
“What?” one of the engineers said. “That’s like ten feet. That’s huge, man.”
“Bugger that. We don’t consider them real crocs till they reach at least twenty feet.” Ethan didn’t know how many meters twenty feet was, but it sounded right enough. “Round here they grow big enough to eat a ute.”
“A ute?”
“Picture a pickup truck. Got it in your mind?”
“Okay,” said the engineers as one.
“Yeah, now imagine that it’s good.”
The engineers shared a look, which Ethan couldn’t help but laugh at. They probably didn’t believe him, but nowhere in his contract did it say he couldn’t have a little fun. “Come on, kiddies. Tea time,” he told them before leading them back up the muddy slope. “I reckon you boys could eat the arse out of a low-flying duck.”
Back in the hab, Ethan found Machesney chatting up Dr. Sylvia Wilson instead of looking for the catchment and drainage survey; giving her flying tips, and trying to make her smile like a donut.
“Bloody oath,” Ethan blurted as he darted in on them. “What you got there, Sylvia?” He wedged himself between her and Machesney, who stood at the round communal table at the hub of the snail-shell shaped habitat. “Don’t mind me stealing a lookie at your device, there, love.”
Dr. Sylvia threw her head back and cackled like a Tommy gun. “This is the prototype,” she said. “Our most advanced. The Zeel-5. It’s my baby.” She flicked her hair back and laughed again. She had some form of a British accent, and she may or may not have had a partner—she did have a ring on, but she had one on every finger. They’d only been at Kambi Mission Control a day-and-a-half, so Ethan hadn’t yet found an occasion to pry in and find out.
For a divorcee in the Daintree, the pool of sheilas was a sh
allow one. “Plenty of fishes in the sea,” his missus had said when she’d parted. Plenty of rubbish in the sea, too. And the deeper you go, the more the fishes’ faces look liked smashed in arseholes. Never meant to be seen in daylight, those ones.
“So, you grew up around here, right?” Dr. Sylvia asked him while cradling the device.
That was a pickup line if Ethan ever heard one. “Yeah. Down in Wujal Wujal,” he said, and his chest inflated. He tipped his hat like a facken gentleman ought to.
If the land were the sea, and places were depth levels, then Wujal Wujal was right proper deep—the Marianas Trench of dating. He thought out loud: “Wujal Wujal’s the bad part of the sea where the derros and drongos hang round thermal vents warming their scales and sucking in sulfuric acid. Not generally where you find Nemo,” he told Dr. Sylvia. “Nah, down there’s where ya get yer hook yanked by some sloped-brow, gnarly-jawed, glowy-eyed armored personnel carrier of a creature.” Race didn’t matter to Ethan. He’d seen plenty of talented abos on the tele, but if any of them lived in Wujal Wujal, they weren’t trawling Tinder. A bloke might cop a root with a cheeky backpacker now and again, but that sort of thing wasn’t sustainable.
Nah, Ethan needed a real woman.
He needed a sheila not afraid to wrestle her meal onto the barbecue. He needed a sheila that knew how to operate a wench. And he needed a sheila like his ex who didn’t mind staying in sometimes for an evening of Eurovision and methamphetamines.
Machesney faded into the background, pretending to be useful at one of the consoles against the wall.
Dr. Sylvia Wilson told Ethan, “My team says I’m the mad scientist of the lot.” She cackled, and her loopy earrings danced like tambourines. “If I am, then this here’s our Frankenstein.” She emitted another round of outrageous laughter as she rocked the device in her arms. Only now did Ethan see it had propellers. Four of them.
“Fack a duck. You made that?” said Ethan. Though, it looked more like a platypus without a tail than a duck—a taxidermied platypus, bill open, limbs splayed, and propellers drilled into its webbed hands and feet.
