Tribulation

by Kaz Morran

  Dr. Sylvia took a step back. Her ear hangings rattled as she nodded. “Yes, yes. Rather, I’m the project coordinator and nav-team engineering lead at the R&D lab that made it.”

  Ethan needed a sheila that was a project coordinator and nav-team engineering lead at an R&D lab. “How about we give ‘er a go outside, ay?” he said. “I’ll show you how to sex a crocodile if you fancy it. There’s one waiting just down at the brook there, yeah.”

  The whole array of plastic jewelry shook with her cackle. It was a gorgeous cackle.

  “Not a chance,” she replied, and she pulled the device to her bosom. “If you knew the pain and suffering I’ve been through weighing if I ought to let the candidates fly it …” She swatted Ethan on the arm to show she meant no malice and a warm tingle moved through him. On and on she chattered about the wonders of her device: how it used lasers to make 3D maps as it flew, making its own fuel or something by sucking in air and spitting it out the back, and so on. Ethan nodded along until she paused to cackle, and he tried again, this time suggesting they use the drone device to map the topography of the area around the camp.

  “Use the helicopter,” she told him. “I know how much you love spending time with Mach.”

  Ethan almost choked on his own tongue. “Machesney can suck a fart out of my arse.”

  “Incoming,” yelled Machesney as he emerged from his quarters around the corner. “Home sector rendezvous. All hands, check your monitors.”

  Ethan and Sylvia shared a look of restrained laughter. They only held their mutual gaze for a second; any longer and Ethan would’ve burst. The look was short, but it meant something, he was sure.

  “I repeat,” Machesney told them again, this time from just a step away. “All hands check your monitors.”

  Ethan pulled out his phone and opened the tracking app. “Facken ay,” he said without looking up. “Right on time.”

  Machesney marched on past Ethan and Dr. Wilson carrying the plastic spray bottle from the hydroponics module in his hand. Ethan followed, but at the elevator-sized airlock Machesney turned round and held an open palm up to Ethan. “One at a time, bro,” he said. “Protocol.” Machesney prodded the wall-mounted touch panel, which in reality was a broken iPad, with random finger gestures, and then he slid the clear plastic outer accordion door part way aside. It jammed because it only ran on a top rail while the bottom swung loosely over a large gap. The “airlock” was the reason so many insects had taken up residence in the hab.

  “You have to—” Ethan tried to explain. “Put one hand in the middle, then with your foot—”

  “I know, bro.”

  “That’s it, mate. No. … A bit lower down. Ay. Now wiggle the top, there.”

  Machesney finally got it open, then shut again, and the red light above the inner door turned blue to clear Ethan for entry. Ethan watched Machesney envelop himself with the spray from the bottle then descend the ramp through the mist. Ethan went through the airlock next, kicked the abandoned bottle down the ramp, and then joined Machesney in greeting the astronaut candidates down by the brook.

  21

  The trail had vanished. Taiyo’s legs tore through the tangles of vines while his feet ransacked several seasons of decaying leaves, freeing red earth and pungent odors, and terrorizing every horned and pincered bug of his childhood science books. And then—when the humidity and exhaustion had pushed the AsCans to near breakage; when the constant sweat-wiping, itching, and bug swatting had grown intrinsic to their existence; and when their soggy, torn socks and blistered feet could scarcely tolerate another water crossing—the densest, oldest, most species-rich rainforest on planet Earth came to an end as abrupt as if it’d been torn off the map.

  The AsCans stood at the bank of a shallow orange stream and took in the scene: an apocalyptic expanse of viscous rust-colored mud pockmarked with the jutting remains of victimized trees and dry islands of cracked terrain. The exposed, barren earth stretched almost as far as the AsCans could see—left, right, and up a rolling slope to a rounded peak. Only at the fringes, where the mudflat curled up like the lip of a crater, could Taiyo make out the shapes of trees.

  After four days of plying the forest, the contrast in the smell, color, and open space bewildered the senses. Torches of sunlight fringed gaps in the shifting cloud cover so that one moment the wind lashed like a hot washcloth, and in the next instant, the sun was cooking them like ants under a microscope.

  Taiyo squinted. He traced with his sight the gradual incline and bald ridge of the valley wall. There, against the ashen sky and distorted by mirage waves, he saw a domed structure and a helicopter, both coated in the same cream-white laminate as the NASA crates.

  He checked the coordinates on his phone in case there’d been any doubt. “This is it,” he informed the others. “Kambi Valley.”

  They’d completed the trek.

  “You think an earthquake did this?” Kristen said to nobody in particular, but she was closest to Taiyo.

  “Could be,” he told her but kept his eyes on the wasteland. He thought as their team’s geology specialist, Kristen would know better than him. “Looks like the mud slid down from up there.” He pointed to the hill with the habitat and helicopter.

  Saplings had begun to sprout here and there through the mudpack, and a few patches of foliage the size of a backyard shrub. Whatever the event, it had struck recently, but before the start of Project Daintree.

  “Look,” said Nel. She had her binoculars out and fixed on the hab.

  Taiyo did the same. He saw the door of the gleaming structure jiggle and then slide open in fits and starts. Taiyo held his breath as if about to witness humankind’s first footsteps onto Mars. The spectacle was made all the more dramatic when a cloud of mist filled the top of the ramp before settling to reveal a shadowy figure committing a slow swagger down to a thatched path in the mud. Accompanied by breeze-ruffled arm hair, oversized sunglasses, and wavy salt-and-pepper hair, the man paused at the bottom of the ramp. He angled his chin to the sky and put his hands on his hips. He was … the Aviator.

  “What a fucking douchebag,” said Ronin, who’d also been watching through binoculars.

  A figure in an Aussie bush hat appeared on the ramp behind the Aviator. The figure kicked something down the ramp and then began his own bushy-tailed descent.

  The Aviator arrived, hand outstretched, but before anyone could take him up on his congratulatory handshake, Anton diverted everyone’s attention.

  “That’s from a crocodile, right?” Anton said, pointing to the ground in front of Taiyo.

  A set of tracks ran from the stream's swirls of orange silt, up the bank, right between Taiyo’s feet, and disappeared under a swath of slow-flowing mud.

  The Aviator shrugged. “Looks like the prints of a duck to me.” Still standing in the mud, he prodded the closest print with his toe.

  “A duck?” said Ronin. “Then that duck’s swinging some damn tyrannical tally wags.” Ronin pointed his thick head around at the rest of the group, nodding to parse agreement.

  “Oh, so I guess you’re a duck-ologist, then. Is that right, bro?” the Aviator said to Ronin.

  “I know a waddle when I see one,” said Ronin.

  Walter, who stood by with arms crossed and a snicker on his face, threw in, “Okay, so I know gators, and those are closer to—”

  “A gator ain’t a croc,” said the Aviator and stuck out his chin. “And around here, we don’t call them crocs until they’re twenty feet.”

  Walter scrunched up his face. “You’re from LA, bro.”

  “Bakersfield, bro.”

  “Same pile, bro.”

  “Oh, really?” The Aviator tore off his sunglasses and stuffed them in his shirt pocket. What’s that supposed to mean, bro?” He put his sunglasses back on.

  “It means you can’t eat anywhere because you’re on some diet. But if you could eat out, you’d be on the list—definitely on the list—and you’d bring your guitar.”

  The
Aviator put his fists on his hips. “Oh and Miami Beach is top crust I guess then, bro?”

  “Tampa, bro.”

  “So you're the oiled-up no-sleeved geezer I saw trawling spring break in a Boxster blaring nineties techno.”

  “Cool it, beta.”

  Ronin faded back and merged with the others standing around and watching from the makeshift path of sticks and leaves. “Is this an East Coast-West Coast thing,” he asked Kristen. When she didn’t answer, Ronin elbowed Taiyo, nudging him to intervene. Without thinking, Taiyo slipped back into his old role as Ronin’s apprentice; one where he did as he was told for fear of getting cuffed in the back of the head or ridiculed in front of a lecture hall full of students.

  “Uh, guys?” said Taiyo. He didn’t want to make things worse by shouting, but his words had come out softer than intended. He repeated himself a bit louder. “Guys. How about we be grown-ups for a while?” Walter and the Aviator kept arguing. Taiyo tried again with more force in his tone: “Walter.” He’d wanted to call them both by name to get their attention, but he realized he didn’t know the Aviator’s real name.

  “What?” Walter barked, turning to face Taiyo. “Sir.”

  Taiyo raised his palms. “It’s just— I mean, Christ already—all we do is bicker. We’re like a bunch of goddamn children.”

  Walter stomped out of the mud, onto the path, wagging a finger at Taiyo. “Bro. Sir. I’d appreciate you not using the Lord’s name like that.”

  Taiyo put his hand on his forehead and sighed. “Okay. Sorry.” He started to press his palms together but stopped when he realized it resembled prayer hands. “I’m just trying to get everyone to be nice to each other. Okay?”

  Kristen came over and placed a soft hand on Taiyo’s shoulder. He turned his head and saw her looking at him with the sympathy of a vet telling someone their dog had to be put down. “You have to respect people’s believes, Taiyo,” she said.

  Nel had a hand over her mouth to stifle the giggles, a sight Taiyo hadn’t seen often. It made him loosen his posture. “You’re absolutely right, Kristen,” he said in a tone he knew only Nel would recognize as sarcastically grave. “I’m sorry, Walter,” he said. The apology was genuine, even though he thought Walter had grossly overreacted. Maybe Walter thought so, too, because he gave Taiyo a friendly swat on the arm as if to say all was forgotten.

  “And,” Ronin said to the Aviator with a smile, “I’m sorry you didn’t know I’m duck-ologist with a Ph.D. in that’s-a-fucking-crocodile-footprint.”

  “Then welcome to Mission Control, Professor Aro,” the Aviator said. He struck a pose and made an exaggerated open-hand gesture toward the hab and helicopter.

  “Nice aircraft,” said Ronin. He’d relaxed his posture, but the arrogance hardly waned from his voice. “You could’ve given us a ride, nob-thatcher.”

  “You only had to ask, bro.”

  Walter put an arm over the top of Ronin’s backpack, across his shoulders, and told him, “Next time, I’ll have your agent get in touch with his agent.”

  A familiar voice and frolic appeared. “You facken little rippers .” Like a mayor on the campaign trail, Ethan clasped each of their hands in both of his and even dished out hugs. “Happy to see the Daintree couldn’t kill ya,” he said. “I was watching the body cam footage on me laptop. Good on ya.” Then he saw the look of horror develop on Kristen’s face. “That’s a tough one to bite, ay?”

  They followed Ethan and the Aviator up the path of forest refuse, dipping, crunching, and sinking under their own weight—across the expanse of mud, up toward the hab, to be briefed on the final phase of the mission. Halfway up the slow incline, Taiyo turned around to take in the wide-angle view. From his vantage now, the stream flushed a deeper crimson, like blood seeping into bathwater from nature’s self-inflicted wound; an incision that peeled back one landscape from another.

  “What’s that down over there,” Taiyo said. He pointed to a whitewashed shed about a hundred meters upstream from where the AsCans had emerged out of the forest. Fans and thick hoses mounted on the side gave it the appearance of an industrial air conditioning unit, but with a maintenance door.

  “That’s yer ventilation system,” Ethan exclaimed. “And, it’s your exit.”

  “Questions later,” said the Aviator, reading the inquisitive looks on the AsCans’ faces.

  ***

  "Climbing, diving, swimming, wading—by whatever means pleases you,” the Aviator said into the humid wind as they marched single-file up the expanse of mud. “Expect level five going up and down verticals and waterfalls … Bridging and edging … Vaults bigger than a jet hangar, and passages tight as a tailpipe …”

  Ethan hopped off the trail and slopped through the muck to take the lead from the Aviator. He turned around a walked backward as he told them, “When the slide wiped all the bush away, something else turned up.” Ethan sped his pace, and when the path of sticks split two ways, he waved for everyone to follow him over a route where a dense array of branches bridged an especially sloppy patch of ground. “Down over there, ay. Round the bend.” He stopped and pointed to their left. “Round the side there, back down in the valley floor looking like an axe wound. See it? That’s the breakdown.”

  “You’ll penetrate at sunrise,” the Aviator told the candidates.

  Taiyo looked over his shoulder to flash a grin at Nel but found she'd locked eyes on the escarpment as she, like him, contemplated the nature of the quest T3 had devised.

  Taiyo called up ahead of the line to Ethan, “Maybe we could get an early start on it. It’s only—” He looked for the bright spot among the cloud cover. “It’s only around noon. One at the latest. Lots of time for some scouting at least.”

  “Scouting is done, mate,” Ethan said. “And trust me, you’ll relish a good night’s sleep in the hab first.”

  Even in the overcast, the structure shone with all the glory of empire as it looked out over a black-red sea of its slaughtered subjects.

  “The airlock’s right up here,” Ethan said. “For realism, we can’t leave the hab without our fake spacesuits on.” Nobody mentioned the obvious: that Ethan was dressed more like a guy wandering out of the cabin for a morning pee than like an astronaut.

  “Hey, Machesney,” Ethan said to the Aviator, “Looks like you dropped this, ay?” With the toe of his khaki-colored boots, Ethan prodded a plastic spray bottle lodged halfway into the mud at the base of the ramp. The Aviator, cursing under his breath, went over and snatched it up. The action made a comical sucking sound, which Ethan imitated as he skipped happily up the ramp.

  Taiyo’s boots trod heavily up the grating behind Ethan. He stopped near the top, expecting Ethan to begin some complicated procedure to enter the airlock, but the Aussie didn’t even pause; the outer door had been left a third of the way open, and after a kick to the bottom, and a jiggle at the top, he accordioned it the rest of the way open.

  At first glance, the interior looked cramped and cast from a single plastic mold like a port-a-potty or like the bathroom of Taiyo’s apartment near the university back in Tsukuba, but the vaulted ceiling compensated for the narrow corridor, which spiraled to the right and on a slight incline. The walls were seamless except for inlaid panels and doubled as a whiteboard—as evident by the expanse of lewd doodles. Taiyo lapped up the long-lost sensation of air conditioning as he dodged a drop-down tray table—a panel left open—which had an abandoned iPad and can of Red Bull on it.

  “Did you people mess up and drop this place down on uneven ground or something?” Ronin asked Ethan.

  The gradient wasn’t huge, a few degrees, but it couldn’t be ignored. Taiyo wondered if T3 had done it on purpose, perhaps to simulate the imperfect landing of an immobile structure on Mars. In fact, Ethan said, it had been by architectural design. The route spiraled in on itself to maximize space for compartments and fold-down workstations, and the incline was so that the core hub could drop down like a half-basement and still have a bank of windows. Indiv
idual rooms, which were embedded throughout the hab and accessed by discrete slide-away panels, all had level floors.

  The six T3 residents, Ethan explained, were just as much research subjects as the astronaut candidates.

  “Just once more around to reach the hub,” said Ethan. “The hab-hub,” he added with a chuckle.

  The top of the corridor ended in a ladder, which led down several meters to the oval floor of the hub. There was also a floating staircase going up to a second-floor catwalk, which traced the rim of a glass-dome roof and overflowed with leafy plants and vegetables.

  The hum of overhead fans and electrical equipment faded as Taiyo descended the ladder behind Ethan. Over the clanging of boots on metal rungs, he heard Walter tell Anton that looking down on him from the top of the ladder he could see his bald spot.

  “Yeah, I think it’s gotten bigger since we left Wujal Wujal,” Ronin added.

  From the bottom, Taiyo took in the living room-size surroundings. In shorts and sandals, the resident personnel mulled about in various stages of work and play. The hub housed the main lab, communal area, and offshoot crew quarters, which meant a crew stationed on the Moon or Mars would spend most of their indoor time sheltered from cosmic radiation.

  A couple people sat on barstools, heads buried in their screens, along a curved counter in front of a sweeping view of the mudslide apocalypse. Others mingled around a tall circular table, which ringed a support column, like college roommates, laughing and chatting while the ghost of Kylie Minogue tried to claw free from the confines of a pair of cheap laptop speakers using only the shrill tenor of her voice. Taiyo could only assume they’d been forced to endure it as part of some ethically dubious psych experiment.

  A round of half-enthused greetings and congrats floated the AsCans’ way as they stumbled forth from the base of the ladder. Taiyo recognized most of their faces from before—three Americans, three Aussies. Mercifully, someone muted the “music” and cleared the table for the AsCans to take a seat. Another person brought bottled water and sandwiches.