Tribulation

by Kaz Morran

  Taiyo took the flashlight from his belt and surveyed the perimeter of the ledge, mentally mapping his spatial limits before un-roping. Anton lowered Taiyo’s gear.

  Standing on the ledge on the dark, Taiyo checked the map on his phone while he waited for Anton to lower more gear. Zooming did nothing to improve the resolution; the contours of the cave hadn’t been mapped well enough. The general outline of the area did reveal something interesting, however.

  The cross-section map showed the shaft widening like a fishbowl at about ten meters below the surface of the water. And, complementing the main shaft Taiyo had repelled down, a narrow stem protruded on an angle from the base toward the surface.

  “I’m inside a giant bong,” he said to himself.

  Then he remembered the body cam and wished he hadn’t spoken out loud. But it didn’t matter. The good people at JAXA, like the vast majority of Japan, held the “drugs are bad” mantra as dogma, but they’d have no clue what a bong was.

  With a multitool and bolts, he installed an anchor ring in the wall and roped the guide and supply lines, the latter they’d use to run the backpacks down through the water, up the bong’s stem, and into a horizontal lava tube.

  The AsCans up above lowered the diving gear down the shaft.

  Running down the checklist, Taiyo opened the casing on the rebreather backpack to verify the connections. It held a single tank premixed with nitrogen and oxygen, plus a cylindrical CO2 scrubber. Like in a spacesuit, the rebreather cycled the gasses on a closed loop, filtering the CO2 and recycling it back into the loop with a bit of top-off from a small tank of pre-mixed nitrox. In a pinch, the system could even handle a tank of ambient air, though it wasn’t recommended.

  With the rebreather, Taiyo would only consume about a liter of air per minute, so he had ten hours worth of diving in his tank. The Aviator had insisted they wouldn’t need a quarter that much, to which Ronin had replied that they could celebrate the end of the mission by huffing the unused gas. “Whippets stimulate visual acuity and spatial orientation,” he’d claimed.

  The streamlined head gear portion of the rebreather separated into four pieces: skullcap, headlamp, mask, and breathing apparatus. The candidates had already made use of the headlamp and the skullcap’s double duty as a climbing helmet, and Taiyo had both on now.

  The ledge was too small to hold more than one person at a time, so the next candidate wouldn’t come down until Taiyo was in the water.

  “Ready for launch,” Taiyo called up. It came out louder than he’d wanted, but the weird acoustics made it hard to tell for sure.

  He tapped the wrist display to shrink the checklist, velcroed his phone to his chest, and then unclipped the breathing apparatus and mask from his belt and assembled the rest of the helmet. It covered the mouth and nose like a painter’s mask but wrapped around the back of the head to meet the hoses and cover the ears.

  When the mask—a visor with a heads-up display—suctioned into place to complete the seal, a green border illuminated Taiyo’s field of view. The top left showed his levels, and a blinking green icon indicated the seal. A slightly metallic taste entered his mouth, and he welcomed the change in pressure and airflow. Without a clumsy mouthpiece to bite down on, it really did feel like a space helmet. Noticeably absent from the helmet combo, however, was a transceiver. As part of the simulation, communication would be done through good old-fashioned hand signals.

  Walter did the count from above: “T-minus five…four…three…”

  Despite the similarities between ocean and space exploration, cave diving was not a spacewalk. Taiyo craved space. Not water. He wasn’t exactly scared of water. He’d endured the full regimen of open water training and certification without incident. Preparation, training, and understanding—that’s how to overcome fear. He’d known that since a kid.

  No, he wasn’t scared of water. He just didn’t like it.

  Perhaps the past should’ve caused some sort of PTSD, but it hadn’t—not according to his psych assessment, anyway. He’d shown the JAXA shrinks that he’d learned to accept and witness the memories without crumpling beneath their weight.

  Taiyo felt with his toes for the end of the ledge and stared down into the inky abyss.

  Two…one… Liftoff.

  22

  Darkness lies one inch ahead.

  — Japanese proverb

  Taiyo hit the water smack on his rear, but the brief free-fall made the sting worth the pain. The water didn’t quite chill to the marrow as he’d expected; the lake of fire and brimstone was geothermally active.

  All was dead in the bottom of the shaft once the water resettled. He made gentle swoops with his arms, almost afraid to make a disturbance, and let the buoyancy of the nitrox tank do the bulk of the work. Above, the aperture to the sky appeared like a full Moon, the variations in the clouds like craters, but in front of Taiyo, the beam of his flashlight refracted and dissolved, so determined was the darkness to rule.

  The rest of the candidates repelled down the shaft and jumped into the water in sequence. They’d only be submerged for a few minutes, and only to a depth of twelve meters, on this first and crucial dive of the cave expedition. Kristen and Anton dove under to lay and mark a guideline down and up through the stem and out above the water table onto a dry section of the cave.

  Taiyo buddied with Walter and went next. Hand over hand, he trusted the line and primary light, the headlamp, to lead him through obscurity. The water chilled as he rounded the overhang and headed vertically, up the stem, and he felt the resistance of the inflowing current. Silence bled from walls he couldn’t see, and the only sound became that of his breath being cycled through the tubes and scrubbers of the apparatus keeping him alive. The solitude saturated his skin, and attempting to shake the sudden sense of vulnerability and foreboding made his chest hurt. He understood why such a location had been chosen; he’d truly entered another world.

  And that world was about to get even more alien.

  Taiyo emerged from the water into a scene to be forever captured in his mind. He shed his diving gear and stood in awe, feeling taken by the Magic School Bus on a trip through the decaying hollows of a tree stump petrified in lava. The colors themselves seemed to climb and drip under the candidates’ artificial lights: coal-black, ash-white, and the full range of hues of flames, raw meat, and rust. A forest of lavacicles hung from the ceiling. Some looked like frozen, upside-down waves or shark fins, others extended two or three meters or even reached the porous floor and linked with stalagmite mounds.

  Taiyo removed his gloves and put his hand on a lava pillar and examined it with a flashlight. He knew how it had formed—when the molten ceiling had dripped to the floor, pooling into a mound and cooling before the link had time to break—but it looked like a stack of blood clots. The whole cavern resembled the dried, scabby insides of a carcass.

  The candidates snapped pictures and captioned the formations Melting Hourglass, Blood Falls, Dirty Needle, Acid Trip, and so on.

  Moving away from his crewmates, Taiyo crunched across a section of serrated, gravelly floor and came across a formation he’d go on to name Alice’s Looking Glass. The pair of pillars formed a distorted, somewhat circular, meter-wide frame. He placed a hand on each pillar, careful not to get cut by the barnacle-like pores and, as if dipping his senses into another dimension, put his face and headlamp through for a view of the broader chamber of warped-honeycombs and web-like lattices.

  Ms. Frizzle’s shrooms really kicked in when the candidates descended into a broad passage resembling a mucous-riddled respiratory tract with the smell of cellar mold.

  The voices of the others turned ghostly, fading and meandering, as Taiyo took the lead. The tunnel took them deeper. The lava formations on the floor, walls, and ceiling became more prominent as the throat of the passage began to narrow. The air grew sultry and the smell mustier. Taiyo clambered up a pile of fallen stalactites, scraping his helmeted head along the teeth of the ceiling.

 
; “Stop stalling, hafu,” Ronin said and whacked the side of Taiyo’s foot, lightly enough to appear non-violent but too hard to be called friendly encouragement. It did get Taiyo moving, though. The candidates followed him single file over and down the other side of the rubble pile, then up an incline about the dimensions of a playground tube slide—a feature Ronin gleefully named Elephant’s Urethra—and out into a lava tube broad enough to fly a Cessna in.

  “Gosh, it’s hot down here,” said Walter. “Like that sort of heat that hovers over tarmac.”

  “The Highway to Hell,” Ronin exclaimed. “That’s what we’ll call this section.”

  Walter cleared his voice as if about to protest—perhaps about the use of the word “Hell”—but took a swig from his water bottle and sighed like a Coke commercial instead.

  “No? Then how about the Tolled Expressway to Eternal Damnation?”

  A moment later, barely audible over the crunching beneath their boots, Anton said, “You guys think anyone’s ever lived down here?”

  “You mean a past civilization or something?” said Taiyo.

  “I guess.”

  Nel reminded them that the local aborigines, the Kuku Yalanji, had been telling legends about the world beneath Kambi Valley for centuries, possibly millennia.

  “But did they actually live down here?”

  “Why would anyone?”

  “Maybe a few strays over the years.”

  “Like fugitives?”

  “Could be.”

  “Or maybe they came down to hide from animals or natural disasters.”

  “Or from each other,” said Ronin.

  “Who knows,” said Kristen.

  “Who knows,” agreed Anton.

  In the widened path, Taiyo’s light failed to reach the walls, making the added space more restricting than liberating. The air remained unchanged: stagnant, chilled, and consumed by night. Spatial dimensions were no longer intuitive. Like an astronaut clinging to the outside of the Space Station for fear of falling, several times in the span of a few meters Taiyo’s gut lurched and he froze mid-step at the sudden distrust in his visual cortex as he struggled to discern whether the illuminated patch awaiting his footfall was solid rock or a vertical drop.

  “Are we going the right way, navigator?” Walter asked Taiyo.

  Strictly speaking, there was no “right” way when the goal was to explore. As long as they found the designated checkpoint by the end of day three.

  Taiyo offered a polite laugh and replied to Walter half in jest, “Hopefully.”

  “Hold on,” Walter ordered. “I’d appreciate a yes or no, sir.”

  Taiyo stopped and turned to locate Walter with his headlamp. “We just passed a little offshoot, but it’s probably a dead end, so I kind of thought we’d keep on this same route a bit farther.” He plucked his phone off his chest and showed his commander the map. Everywhere they’d been in the cave system so far had already been mapped before they’d gotten there, albeit not in any detail. He pointed to a part of the map filled with gaps. “At least up to around here, then branch out from there depending on what we find.”

  “How long?” Ronin said. “Because a change of scenery would be nice about now.”

  “The app doesn’t have topo data for minor elevation changes, but—”

  “How long, man-cub?” Ronin stepped closer, casting the light of his headlamp in Taiyo’s face.

  “Six hundred meters, give or take.”

  “Two thousand feet,” Kristen translated.

  “Go straight or make a U-turn and take the off-ramp …” Anton said from somewhere. “What’s the call, Commander?”

  “Ask the nav guy, bro,” Walter shot back. “Being commander doesn’t mean you guys get to leave every choice to me.”

  Several minutes of arguing passed before they decided to stay the course and argue again in another six hundred meters.

  Ronin reminded everyone the reason they’d brought the Zeel-5 drone along was to scout the routes ahead. “We should’ve used it at the offshoot,” he said more than once over the next few minutes, not that he wanted to go back. Taiyo had actually thought about using it, but he hadn’t wanted to stall their progress so early on.

  “So, next junction, then,” Walter said. His voice made a short one-two hop off the wall beside Taiyo’s head.

  The lava tube had now narrowed to the width of a downtown sidewalk; the lava pillars like Escher-esque lampposts and the lavacicles like upside down termite mounds.

  A couple of kicked stones skipped past, bouncing along the corridor as Anton made his way from the rear to the front of the line. To Taiyo, he said, “The drone is made for exploring lava tubes, right?”

  Nel answered for him from somewhere in the middle of their caravan of heavily backpacked explorers. “Sure, on Mars.”

  “You guys really think it could fly on Mars?” Kristen said.

  Taiyo ran his fingers against the course rock of the wall while he walked like he used to do as a kid in the school hallway and pretend his fingers were skating across the icy, low-gee surface of Europa or Enceladus. He wondered if Gluskab and Malsumis had ice. Probably; being that far out in the Oort Cloud. Especially if they were captured comets. The tidal tension might be just right for a liquid ocean to form. Of course, it might also have turned them into balls of molten goo.

  Walter said, “A normal drone is going to have issues.”

  “Lift and air density are proportional,” said Ronin.

  “That’s correct.”

  Ronin yelled up ahead, “Hey, Tai? What’s the air density on Mars?”

  “Uh … It varies a lot depending on where you are, and what season. Compared with sea level—”

  “Blah, blah. Give me a number.”

  As a kid, while his classmates could recite train station names, baseball stats, or Pokémon base stats, Taiyo had stuffed his head with physics formulas and astronomy facts. “At zero C, Mars is point-oh-one-one kilos per cubic meter.”

  “The fuck, hafu?”

  “Call it one percent of Earth’s.” Taiyo blew a slow breath from his cheeks. You couldn’t have conversations with people like Ronin Aro. “So you’d need bigger and faster rotors, but lightweight and …” They’d stopped listening, and he trailed off.

  For the moment, Ronin went back to shoptalking with Walter. “So, one percent Earth-air density means your blades only give you one percent the lift …” And then Ronin called on Taiyo again, this time for the gravity of Mars.

  “Thirty-eight percent of Earth’s,” Taiyo answered, his eye roll encoded in his voice. He shuffled along, kicking stones as he went, and he did the math out loud for Walter and Ronin: “If on Earth the Zeel-5 is, say, half a kilo, plus half a kilo of payload—it has to get one kilo of force to hover. But on Mars, the Zeel’s barely going to get point-oh-one kilos of force even though it needs thirty-eight percent of that point-five kilos. So you need point-one-nine kilos of force just to get off the Martian regolith, and that’s without considering the added mass of cameras and com instruments or whatever.”

  “Just give it bigger rotors,” said Ronin.

  “Not going to work, bro.”

  “Why the shit not?”

  Rubble piles lined the sides of the lava tube and pushed the wall out of easy reach. Taiyo watched out for obstacles, and he watched the shadow puppets his headlamp made of his feet.

  “There’s a reason you don’t see 747s doing VTOL,” Walter told Ronin.

  “Is it the same reason the Ospreys keep crashing in Okinawa?” Taiyo thought he’d said it under his breath, but the cave made it carry.

  “What was that, bro?” A circus of small stones came skidding up the corridor, this time bouncing into the backs of Taiyo’s legs. Walter said, “I wouldn’t say they keep crashing.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, so time to time, you’re gonna get glitches no matter the aircraft. Naturally, some incidents cast a bigger shadow.”

  And from time to time that shad
ow got cast over schoolyards, thought Taiyo. “Rotorcraft don’t scale up so well. Scaling down is a whole other thing.”

  “You’re talking about actuator disk theory,” said Taiyo, bringing the subject back around. The buildup of debris along the wall had grown harder to dodge, so he shifted his path into the center of the corridor. “The Zeel-5 would need more than double the power to generate the same lift on Mars as on Earth.” He thought for a second. “So, to get the same amount of power, you'd need rotors almost five times the disk area.”

  Ronin splashed through a puddle Taiyo had just avoided. “Yeah, I said that. Bigger rotors.”

  “You’re gonna have to whip up the rotors a lot faster, too, I imagine,” said Walter.

  “Can’t you add more power?” said Kristen.

  Anton joined the discussion, saying, “That’s going to add more weight.”

  “Then you need even more power,” said Nel.

  “That’s correct,” said Walter.

  Taiyo knew it wasn’t that simple. He fell back to walk alongside Nel and told her, “Too much power gets you into supersonic flow problems, and aerodynamic shock kills your lift entirely.”

  “Diminishing returns,” Nel said.

  It was the same tyranny as the rocket equation.

  Ronin said, “So Dr. Wilson went with a suck and blow approach. No wonder that little Aussie guy is so smitten with her.” A tap-tap echoed softly in the tunnel—probably the sound of Ronin reaching back and patting the hard plastic shell of the Zeel, which was clipped to his backpack.

  Taiyo stumbled over the uneven ground and had to thank Nel for grabbing his sleeve to keep him on his feet. It took a second to figure out what Ronin meant. When he did, Taiyo replied, “The Zeel sucks, but it doesn’t blow.” The Zeel-5’s duckbill mouth did take in atmospheric gasses, but only for electricity conversion to recharge its battery, not to blow out the back as thrust.