Tribulation

by Kaz Morran

  The biggest tech breakthrough of the device was that it charged itself as it flew. As long as the battery had enough reserved juice to accelerate the drone up to 25 kilometers an hour, the intake would kick in and keep it flying more or less indefinitely. It occurred to Taiyo, however, that the 25 kilometer-per-hour number only applied to Earth. On Mars, where the atmosphere was ten times thinner, the drone would have to reach to 250 kilometers an hour to get the same perpetual recharging. That couldn’t be right, he thought. Just like in a car, efficiency probably varied depending on speed.

  The braided maze split this way and that, into slimy-walled, hallway-size tubes, each tapering down into its own dimension of midnight. Down the AsCans went, through another broad section of a lava tube, which eventually came to a fork.

  “Nothing around here is on the map,” Taiyo told his crewmates. He flushed with excitement. This was real. They really were explorers.

  They all agreed the path to the right looked easier and safer.

  “Left then?” said Taiyo. Going that route, however, would’ve involved a series of steep drops beneath a low, spiked ceiling.

  Ronin chucked a handful of stones down the apparent porthole. The stones skipped off walls, down a series of ledges, and plopped into water.

  “It doesn’t sound very deep,” Anton noted. “Might just be a puddle.”

  “It could still be a dead end,” said Kristen.

  “Or a passage into the tomb of a lost civilization,” said Nel.

  “No better time to test the drone than now,” Ronin said. He plunked his backpack down and unstrapped the Zeel-5. “And no one better to test it than the payload commander.” He set the case on the ground, kneeled before it and unlatched the lid like a gangster in a crime movie opening a briefcase of diamonds.

  Taiyo felt his lip curl as he watched Dr. Wilson’s baby being manhandled. Ronin flicked the propeller blades then flipped the scramjet lookalike over and violated its underside. The green ring of light came on, but he kept prodding until he found a rubber valve-like flap to jam his finger into. “Just like Ethan’s cloaca,” he said. “Autonomous piloting, off; manual piloting, on.”

  “Wait, what?” said Taiyo.

  Ronin ignored him. From his knees, Ronin fiddled with the screen of his phone. Taiyo tried again: “Are you sure that’s a good idea? I mean—”

  “You mean you’ve got a stalactite up your ass. Pull it out, hafu. Ever run through the Taiga while Paralympians are dropping down from the sky trying to snipe you off? Well, I have. But they couldn’t get me. You want to know why?”

  “No,” Taiyo said. Someone really ought to study Ronin.

  “Because a parachute is basically an autonomous vehicle. If they’d had full manual maneuverability, I’d be dead right now.”

  “Then, too.”

  “Okay, so Aro is the payload commander,” said Walter, and his wall shadow shrugged under the light of several headlamps.

  Kristen didn’t help. “It would make sense to test it in different settings.” She panned the beam of her flashlight up the wall and ceiling of the lava tube. “This looks pretty Mars-like, to me. Not that I’ve been,” she said and couldn’t resist adding, “Yet.”

  Ronin laughed, not unlike Dr. Wilson’s cackle, and turned back to trying to figure out the drone app.

  The expressions on everyone’s faces were lost in the shadows, though Taiyo caught Anton wrinkle his forehead and distort the Batman logo.

  “Geologically, everywhere down here is like Mars,” Taiyo said, deciding Kristen deserved a proper answer. “But if you don’t mind me getting pedantic, we’re more likely to find atmospheric conditions here that resemble Venus.”

  Ronin’s scabby voice surfaced: “If you don’t mind me getting pedantic, you sound like a dork.”

  “Your concerns are noted,” Taiyo said dryly. Noted by six body cams, he thought and smirked.

  “Infidel.”

  Taiyo also knew the body cams recorded his initiative and leadership, or lack thereof. “Maybe I should be the one to pilot the drone,” Taiyo said without thinking. He’d never flown anything before but didn’t want Ronin breaking Dr. Wilson’s baby—for her sake, and because of the device’s potential. He doubled down. “The drone is for recon, so flying it should fall to the navigation officer.”

  Anton was still stuck on whether or not now was even the right time to use the drone. Kristen and Nel agreed it made sense for someone to pilot the drone down the steep, constricted new passage for a preview, but neither had an opinion on who that pilot should be.

  “How about letting the veteran have the controls?” Walter said, subtly reminding Ronin who had the most flight hours.

  Taiyo knew Ronin really could fly. A few winters ago, a lesson of Professor Aro’s had been to whisk Taiyo away in a military chopper and land them in the snowy “suicide forest” at the base of Mt. Fuji. Ronin then stuffed Taiyo full of magic mushrooms and told him to meet him on the other side of the mountain. Ronin had called it a “personalized lesson in psychological adaptability.”

  Ronin picked up the glowing drone and held it out on his open palm. “You know, it’s times like these,” he said but didn’t finish.

  The Zeel-5 buzzed to life as the propellers began to spin.

  “I hear you, bro,” said Walter. “You know what? Giver. Rotary craft aren’t my kind of animal, anyway.”

  Ronin turned and hunched over the drone, blocking everyone’s light but his own. The shift in posture only lasted a second, and perhaps Taiyo was being paranoid, but whatever Ronin’s hands had gotten up to during that second sure felt suspicious.

  “You know what, hafu? I think Dr. Wilson would’ve wanted you to be first to pilot the Zeel. The responsibility would be good for you. It might even put some hair on your head. Black hair, hopefully.” He held the drone out at arm’s length. “If you can handle it.”

  Taiyo’s hands twitched at his side, but he resisted the reflex to snatch the drone. He wavered between a thin smile and a grimace. Refusing to pilot the drone on the grounds that Ronin had sabotaged it would raise an accusation far more harmful to the team than a failed drone flight would. And so, Taiyo accepted the piloting duty and ate the consequences.

  He would later record what happened next in the mission log:

  TASK REPORT

  A-13-09.2

  CHRON: Phase 2 / Day 1 / 13:21~13:22

  LOC: Kambi cave subsection L6-4 (-0.53’-35.1’+1.9)

  OBJECTIVE: recon w/ Zeel-5 hardware (SciPL Inv #7-039-c)

  DESCRIPTION: Initial ascent nominal. Hardware unresponsive to subsequent commands: Impromptu high-velocity lithobraking (ceiling); rapid unplanned midflight disassembly; autonomous descent (ground).

  RESULT: Sub-optimal

  NOTES: Hardware integrity compromised (loss of rotors). Total loss of data (unable to reboot). Hardware body recovered. Rotors unrecoverable.

  FOLLOW-UP: none

  Taiyo drew in a breath, held it, and eased it out along with the tension. Then he stepped away from Ronin, over to the ledge.

  “Okay,” Taiyo sputtered. “Just step back. Give me some space, and I’ll go down there and get it.”

  ***

  They’d heard the body of the Zeel-5 tumble down multiple tiers of rock, several meters toward the pool, but there was no splash to accompany the spray of debris. The shape of the opening was very much like a stairway under a stairway, as if a car-size wedge had pried open a jagged gap in the rock.

  The low, pitched ceiling kept the lights from penetrating far enough down to locate the drone.

  The diving gear clattered to the ground as Taiyo shrugged out of the straps and shed the backpack. He sat down in front of the other AsCans’ feet, inched his ass to the end of level ground, and, still sitting, let his legs fall over into the darkness. His calves were then flush with the vertical drop, but like a kid on a stool, the landing was too far down for his feet to touch. He aimed the headlamp between his knees.

  “Do you s
ee it?” Kristen asked.

  He saw a ledge the width of a two-by-four about a meter down, but he couldn’t see the drone. He scooted over, so the wall was on his left, and then ran the pads of his fingers along the cold damp rock until a protrusion landed in his palm. Cupping it for a tenuous grip, he balanced on one ass cheek while outstretching a toe to interrogate the ledge. He let Anton take his free hand and help him down onto the narrow step.

  From there, feet sideways and body twisted to face out into the void, he searched again with his headlamp and flashlight but only saw another vertical drop, though a little closer this time. The ceiling pitched more sharply and the black cones of bubbled lava shielded Taiyo the lights from all but the first two tiers.

  “Maybe I should rope up,” Taiyo called back to the others. He didn’t think he needed to, and he didn’t want to waste any more time, but crew safety came before mission objectives. A minor injury like a twisted ankle from a fall would burden the whole crew; a bone fracture could compromise the entire mission.

  “You think we’re going to wait here forever for you?” Ronin called down to Taiyo. Ronin’s voice felt like the hand of a puppeteer tugging the cords in Taiyo’s back and neck to straighten his posture.

  He definitely should’ve roped up. But he didn’t.

  First kneeling down on the ledge and testing the emptiness with a backward-prodding toe, he told himself it really wasn’t so far or difficult of a drop. The darkness only made it feel that way. His gut lurched at the brief freefall before his feet hit the second ledge. The descent had been a bit farther than he’d estimated, and the ledge no wider.

  The smell hit him harder than the impact—like a burnt match searing his nasal cavity and staining his tongue. Sulfur dioxide. As horribly irritating as it was, a little SO2 exposure wouldn’t hurt. He took a deeper whiff, and his hands flew instinctively to his nose to rub away the stinging. He’d wanted to check for any accompanying rotten-egg smell, the smell of hydrogen sulfide, a much more potent threat. He did smell it, but the lack of protest from his lungs meant the concentration was low.

  “So far no problem,” he reported to the others standing two tiers above, out of sight. He could hear their feet shuffling along the ground above his head. “Not so sure I should be breathing this air too long, though.” Assuming less than ten ppm of either gas and he’d be fine with a ten or twenty-minute exposure.

  Nel told him to check it with the sniffer, but he hadn’t plugged the adapter into his phone. He could’ve asked Nel to get the sniffer or his mask from his backpack, but he didn’t want to bother her. If the smell got too bad, he’d just have to climb back up.

  Climb back up. He hadn’t thought that part of the task through very well either.

  Even with a flashlight in hand and a lamp on his head, he had a hard time making out the width of the step. Feeling with his foot confirmed he only had a few centimeters of wiggle room.

  Worse, the corrosive atmosphere now burned his throat and eyes, not just his nose, and his chest had tightened in on his breathing. The stench of rotten eggs now engulfed the foreground. He blinked and coughed away the assault.

  Holding the wall for balance, he turned around to face the spiked down-sloping ceiling and whatever loomed in the blackness below. He prepared for the next drop, sliding his shoulder blades against the rock face and edging his feet out from under his haunches. He hoped the water didn’t come right up to the landing, or if it did, that it wasn’t very deep.

  His helmet scraped, and he found a field of lavacicles and shark fin stalactites staring him in the face.

  Twisting this way and that, he tried pressing his shoulder blades to the vertical rise behind him and then his chest, but either position would risk his head or neck getting cracked on the lavacicles when he slid down to the last level.

  “I’m going to try knocking some of these stalactites off to give me some headroom, okay guys?” he called up to the others. The collective glow of flashlights and headlamps reflected off the bubbly ceiling cones but was too dim to be of use.

  “Negative,” Walter called back down.

  Kristen reminded him they had a responsibility as stewards of Earth to keep pristine environments pristine. Lavacicles were not limestone; they wouldn’t grow back. “Bring back samples,” she ordered. “But we have no idea what might be living down there, so try not to disturb it, okay?”

  The lavacicles worked like acoustic dampeners, and her voice fell nearly dead, arriving at his ears as a whisper even though her tone suggested shouting.

  “Okay,” he called back. His own voice screamed in his head.

  The air wasn’t good. They’d never get to him if he passed out and hit the ledge below, or fell into the water—water undoubtedly stirring with sulfuric acid. The burning in his face and throat intensified. His breathing grew rapid, shallow. He pictured getting taken over by a fit of coughing, his feet slipping, arms cartwheeling for something to hold and colliding with the stalactites, triggering a shower of serrated spears as he fell.

  “You doing okay, Tai?” he thought he heard Nel ask. “How’s the air?”

  “Fine,” he replied, though his throat burned to say so.

  He could’ve leaned forward and rested his head on the closest spike. Instead, he put his hand on his chest to feel his breathing while he took a moment to admire the patterns the light and shadows his headlamp made in the chandelier of lava formations. A subtle tilt of his head up or down, left or right, forward or back, and the whole kaleidoscope changed.

  “Fine,” he repeated, muttering to himself. He was fine, but he knew he’d better hurry. He turned his toes toward the darkness and arched his back while worming and bending his knees to get his head and shoulders below the lavacicles. His left foot slipped. He sucked in a shallow breath and tensed his muscles for the fall, but the heel of his boot regained the hold his toe had lost. Remembering his training, he let out his breath and wheezed in several more until he got his respiration under control. To free up both hands, he stuck the flashlight back on his chest.

  Clack … clack-clack … clack.

  A stone came tumbling over the ledge and struck Taiyo in the back of the neck then rolled down his back and landed at his feet. “Sorry,” called Ronin, “My bad,” was the last thing Taiyo heard before he stepped on the stone and his feet skidded cartoonishly on the ledge until he pitched forward and his headlamp cracked against a lava spike. He grabbed the lavacicle to steady himself; held on with both hands. It felt horrible. Charred, boil-covered, and wart-infested like the erect, soul-tearing appendage of the troll beneath the bridge. At least it hadn’t broken off when he’d fallen forward and grabbed it.

  He heard it crack.

  The others called something to him, probably telling him to pick up a case of beer and a pizza on the way back. “I’m okay,” he replied, though his headlamp had been knocked ajar and now only lit the ceiling. He held on, one subtle shift in weight away from plunging face first into hard rock, and then tumbling into a toxic pool of unknown depth. He took a few breaths, trying to stretch their duration, but the air hurt his chest. He took one hand off the spike and pulled his undershirt up over his mouth and nose, and then got to thinking what to do about his grip on the troll’s waning erection.

  The troll knob cracked again and jerked to the left, threatening to fall off and take Taiyo with it. He reached with his free hand through a gap in the spikes and swept his fingers blindly along the eye-level slope of the ceiling until he found a dip in the surface to jam his palms against to keep him from tumbling forward into oblivion. As he removed his hands, the lavacicle snapped off and exploded on the landing below and scattered across the water.

  “You all right down there?” someone shouted.

  He didn’t know. He assessed his situation before replying: His toes were hung over into space, his heels teetering on the ledge. Leaning out over the gape at a 45-degree angle, he’d braced his upper half by stretching his arms over his head and wedging the balls of his h
ands into indents between the ceiling spikes. This precarious position was, for the time being, keeping him from plunging into the vat of acid below. But his weakening limbs and abdomen had since caused his midsection to slump forward, almost as if his belly button had taken aim at its destination. The dozens of gangrenous troll erections surrounding his head made the pose all the more urgent, as did the sulfuric air seizing his respiratory tract. His situation was neither sustainable nor pleasant.

  “Still fine,” he managed to report to his crewmates. The lone sound of his hot breath against the cold, thick air felt both meditative and eerie. “Going down to the last tier now,” he reported, feeling his voice bounce off the angled ceiling.

  Ronin yelled encouragement: “If you die, your body stays there.”

  Taiyo pushed off hard from the ceiling, forcing every Newton of thrust in his fingers to throw his body back at the rock face behind him. It worked. His back smacked against it. Also, his heels shot out from under him. His tailbone struck the ridge of the ledge, but his plummet didn’t stop. Fortunately, the grating of his spine against that same ridge did slow his descent, as did the aerodynamic drag his whiplashing head created during those microseconds before he hit the third and final tier.

  The impact shuddered up through his shins, knees, and thighs. But at least he’d hit feet first. He’d landed. His hand flung to his throbbing tailbone, and when that pain eased, he reached for his throat and chest. He tried to steady his breathing, but every attempt sent pain through his chest. He’d broken out in a cold sweat. He coughed up a phlegm ball, rubbed his nose and eyes and only for second before he told himself not to whine, he groaned with the irritation. He straightened his headlamp and looked around, taking in as much as he could in as little time as possible. He’d been down there too long. He had to get back up to others, and he had to do it now.

  Fuck the drone.

  But there it was. He could see it.

  “I found it,” he called, but he doubted he’d mustered enough from his lungs to be heard. The drone was there. He could see its green glow rising from the dark. Then it faded, flickered, and died. It was still there. He’d seen it on the next landing down.