Tribulation

by Kaz Morran

  Ronin released him to slide down the wall. His face began to sting, and he again became aware of his body, though his head was too heavy to support itself. He didn’t actually know how many times Ronin had hit him, or if the grip on his throat had done more damage than the punches. But he was conscious.

  Taiyo’s hands began to tremble when he looked up and saw Ronin standing over him. He pressed himself as far from Ronin—as flush against the wall—as he could, raising his arms to cushion the next blow if it came. The trembling grew to a full body tremor, and Taiyo’s breathing went raspy.

  The looming shadow faded, and with it went any illusion Taiyo had of possessing the composure of an astronaut.

  “Clean yourself up,” Ronin called from the doorway of the office.

  Taiyo looked through his arms, up from his cowering seat on the hallway floor, as a box of tissue flew at his head. He deflected it before it hit him, then he used the tissue to mop the blood from his eyes, and snot from his nose.

  Physically, he wasn’t hurt too badly. He stood, stuffed a handful of tissue in his pocket, and tossed the box and used tissues down in front of Ronin’s door. Maybe Ronin would see the bloody mess and think about what a horrible person he was. Maybe someone else would. But probably not.

  He saw the campus nurse. Instead of checking him for a concussion, she reminded him not to horse around in the hallways. She put his black eyes down in the medical log as “wrestling-related,” and he left it at that. Ronin was hardly the worst of his worries, neither last year nor now.

  He spent the rest of the day in his own office, in Error Room 404, sweating in front of the little USB desk fan, turning the detective’s card over in his hand.

  24

  A moment of stunned silence passed following Ronin Aro’s visa-marriage proposal to Coco the Filipina bar hostess, and claim of having stolen five hundred gigabytes of intelligence from the Chinese National Space Agency.

  Aro let Coco refill his glass with the overpriced wine cooler, reciprocated, drank, and then told Sumida, “The gantry has hold of the nosecone, right? So all I do is move the joystick a little and the whole rocket comes crashing down. Boom! Right through the wall of the high bay. Pretty neat thing to witness actually. Good decoy, too.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” said Sumida.

  “Everyone’s running around in the dust and debris, coughing from the smell and pulling their hair out and shouting over the alarms, and so I swipe the laptop from some guy’s hands and run the hell out of there.”

  “What rocket was it? Not the Long March 9, was it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Aro, “The data on the laptop wasn’t for any one rocket.”

  “Then for what?”

  “I’m getting to it.”

  Sumida waved at Aro to continue.

  “I’m tough, right? And even tougher back then.”

  “You are so brave,” said Coco, stroking his knee.

  “Like a judo master.” Aro grabbed the empty wine bottle off the table and stopped just short of cracking Sumida on the head with it.

  Coco laughed, then coughed. She snuggled up to Aro and moved his hand between her thighs, but he spoke with such animated gestures that he soon broke free. “My mind, not my legs, is what gives me the gas to run. I run for a whole day and all night, into the desert, tripping and getting up. I don’t care. I get up again and again until my body spends more flat out than upright. I shred my calves. Explode a knee. I just run. Torture. The skin is tearing off my feet, separating like a leather tread of a shoe. Sun-blistered skin. I never look back, and they never catch up. I make it all the way to a town in Mongolia. The cadres won’t run across the desert, but they’ll come after me in their jeeps and helicopters, and they’ll use their assets in Mongolia to hunt me down.”

  “So brave.”

  Coco was looking drunker by the minute.

  “I’m sitting in the dirt getting blasted by wind and looking at the town in the distance rippling in the waves of heat coming off the dessert. It’s beautiful, the big blue sky and open space. I swear, I can see the curve of the Earth. Beautiful. I should be basking in it after what I’ve been through, but I’m fuming inside. I’m hotter than the sun that’s cooking me.”

  Aro showed off the leathery skin on the tops of his ears. Sumida nodded but refrained from taking too close of a look. Coco didn’t hesitate: she leaned in to tongue Aro’s ear and suck audibly on his neck as if slurping ramen.

  “I nearly turned into a mummy out there,” said Aro, and he pulled his shirt collar aside to expose the same scarred pattern on his shoulders. “Fuck those Red Army bastards. I didn’t do anything except retake my freedom.”

  “And destroy a rocket and steal sensitive government data,” said Sumida.

  “Man, that’s the kind of attitude that perpetuates this shit.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I decided to kill myself. I didn’t have long before they'd find me, so I go into this town and buy a knife and—”

  “How did you have money?”

  “In the backpack.”

  “What backpack?”

  “Brave man with a backpack,” said Coco.

  “You don’t escape from a gulag without some baggage.”

  “Literal baggage, or metaphorical baggage?”

  “Both, Captain White-collar. I swiped the backpack off a cabbie’s seat in Urumqi. I got a change purse, a water bottle, betel nuts, toilet paper, and hemorrhoid cream. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which items are metaphorical.”

  “Maybe later.”

  “So I buy the knife. Yes, they take Chinese Yuan on the border towns. And I stock up on Mongolian donuts and these big yummy gyoza things, and I go out into the Gobi and sit down. I’m going to have one last feast and wait for the vultures and then carve up my wrist.” Aro turned to Coco and added, “A good honest way to go out, right?”

  “My daughter thought so.”

  Sumida and Aro stared at her. Sumida shook his head. “I don’t know how to respond to that,” he said.

  “Then don’t,” said Aro.

  “Point taken.”

  Coco staggered off to use the washroom. On her way out the door, an elderly couple came in. Coco greeted them in broken Japanese as though she knew them. Regulars, thought Sumida. She was definitely working on a tourist visa, which was illegal.

  “So I gobble it all down, and the vultures are watching, and I dig into the backpack for a drink and remember the laptop. The battery’s dead, but I start wondering what’s on it, and what the rocket is all about.”

  “The one you destroyed.”

  “That really bothers you, huh?”

  “I’m an aerospace engineer.”

  “No, you’re a bureaucrat with the lips of a cat’s asshole. I’m an aerospace engineer. And I’m going to be an astronaut.” Aro sucked tapioca through the straw noisily while giving Sumida the evil eye over the rim of the glass. “But we’ll get to that in a minute. … Anyway, I must’ve gotten all delirious then, because I chuck the knife through a vulture and walk on back to town to trade its body for a recharge on the laptop. Nice folks there. They bring me into their tent, and we’re having tea like family until I bring out the thumb to unlock the screen.”

  “A thumb drive?”

  “Did I say that? No. A thumb.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A fucking thumb. What’s not to get?”

  “A real thumb?”

  “A fake one wouldn’t work now would it?”

  “Whose thumb?”

  “The guy I got the laptop from.” Ronin shrugged. “What? Don’t look at me like that. I needed his print to unlock it. What would you have done?”

  Sumida glanced around the bar, not sure if he was checking that nobody had overheard or if he hoped to spot someone who had and would come to rescue him. He found neither. One hostess had gone behind the bar to get the regulars a bottle, and the other brought them a digital karaoke menu and microphones
.

  “Continue,” Sumida told Aro.

  “I put what I can on a thumb drive. Thumb it up my smuggling slot, swap the laptop for a horse, and fuck off across the desert to Kazakhstan. The end. Did you know there’s actually a monument at the edge of the desert that says point of no return? Crazy, huh?”

  “Wait, wait, wait. Where’s the data now?”

  “Good things come to people who wait.”

  “Do they?” said Sumida. He just wanted this meeting to end.

  “Actually, no,” said Aro. “Good things come to people who get off their ass and go after what they want.”

  The tune of some sentimental enka ballad rattled the speakers, one of which was mounted in the corner above Sumida’s head. Lyrics came on the wall screens a moment later, and the old man began to sing. Sumida didn’t usually listen to enka, but at the moment, he preferred it to Ronin Aro. Best would've been if Aro could hurry up with his story and whatever demands he had for Sumida and the agency.

  Coco drunk-walked back through the door, cuddled up to Aro, and mumbled something Sumida couldn’t hear over the karaoke. Aro sent her away to the bar to fetch another round.

  Sumida wondered if the bill would be part of Aro’s demands.

  “We’ve got two problems with MONSTAR-X, right?” Aro yelled over the old man’s singing.

  “Cost and feasibility,” said Sumida.

  “Four problems. Cost, time, feasibility, security. Fuck cost. There’s government money as long as there’s a way to funnel it to the company reps under your desk.”

  “That’s not—”

  “And think of time and feasibility as one. The question is if we can get a probe out to five-fifty AU before we lose Tabaldak. Nuclear propulsion's not ready for prime time. It could work. It should. But not like our boy Taiyo Yamazaki has laid out. Not in twelve years, not in thirty years.”

  “I thought the proposal came from you?”

  Aro grinned. “Only the smart parts.” He tapped the side of his head.

  “You are so smart,” said Coco. She set a tray of drinks down on the table, almost dumping everything on herself.

  “The second problem is security,” continued Aro. “Also nuke related. No way China is going stand by while we stuff rockets with plutonium.”

  “Tungsten-uranium carbide,” Sumida corrected.

  “Whatever the proposal called for.”

  “And Americans aren’t very supportive of nuclear power, either.”

  “Right. The Japanese government—your pals—are forever the loyal little bitch of that twisted carnival across the Pacific.”

  “What about the rumors?”

  “What rumors? Say it, cat hole.”

  “The Xinhua report.”

  “China’s right to be worried. You should be, too.”

  “So it’s true?”

  “You would know better than me.” Aro paused to accept his refilled glass of wine cooler. He and Coco clinked glasses, ignoring Sumida.

  The song ended, and in the break in the music Coco asked Aro if he was really going to marry her.

  “Sure,” he said. “For real, though. Not only for a visa, okay?”

  She smiled and kissed his cheek, nearly falling into his lap as she wedged her arm between his legs. “I love you.”

  Aro turned back to Sumida. “Our engineers haven’t spoken to any Americans. Not my guys. If we’re making design changes to appease the American war machine, then the order is coming from the higher-ups at JAXA. That’s you, Captain White-collar.”

  If Sumida knew the ins and outs of his agency as well as he thought he did, then the accusation was nonsense. But allegations tended to fester and metastasize. He asked, “Does the MONSTAR-X architecture in any way facilitate nuclear weaponization?”

  “Where is your allegiance, JAXA man?”

  “Where is yours, Mister Ronin Aro?”

  A chuckle rumbled up from Aro’s belly. He told Sumida, “Your question about nukes is irrelevant.”

  “Irrelevant,” Coco repeated.

  “How so?” said Sumida.

  “The final iteration of MONSTAR-X will not use nuclear power. That solves the propulsion issue, and it eliminates the political and security concerns.”

  “Very good. We are a space exploration agency after all. And a peaceful nation—”

  “Sure. Sure.”

  Coco removed her hand from Aro’s crotch to accept the refill he’d poured her.

  “Do you have the Chinese data then?” Sumida really wanted to wrap this up.

  “Drink up,” Aro told Coco. “Bring over the bill so we can get out of here. Do you like darts?”

  She nodded, downed her drink, and then banged her knee on the table trying to get up.

  Aro paid, and soon after Sumida found himself down the street an American-style pub sitting in a booth across from Aro and his apparent fiancé, Coco. Beside Sumida sat one of the other Filipina hostesses, the chain-smoking one who referred to herself as her hostess bar’s mama. At least the staff here was Japanese.

  “What do you even want the data for?” Aro demanded of Sumida once the waitress brought drinks. “You’re never going to build the spacecraft. The MONSTAR-X vision will die in your hands.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “You’re a jealous lover.” Aro said to Sumida before pointing at him and warning the mama, “Watch out for this guy. His mouth looks like a balloon knot, and he’ll kick you over a cliff before he risks seeing you in another man’s arms.”

  She looked down at Sumida’s crotch, took a long drag from her cigarette and let the smoke linger over the table. In Japanese, she said, “He’s not my type.”

  Sumida slid away from her but couldn’t escape the cloud of smoke. He leaned forward to glare at Aro and jabbed his finger into the table, saying, “Do you have the data or not?”

  “There are conditions.”

  “Yes, yes. Of course. Let’s hear your demands already.”

  “I want to be an astronaut.”

  “You are so brave,” said Coco.

  Pizza and chicken wings arrived, and Coco wasted no time helping herself.

  “We all want to be astronauts,” Sumida said.

  “I’m fucking serious.”

  “I have no doubts you are.”

  “I have no doubts your face looks like a pussy’s asshole.”

  Mama nearly choked on a wing laughing. When Coco set the bones of the wing she’d just devoured directly onto the table, the mama scolded her in Tagalog, adding in English, “Not in Japan.”

  “You’re attracting attention,” Sumida pleaded with Aro, but he knew the man had no shame.

  “At least give me a shot at it,” said Aro. “Put me in the running against Taiyo Yamazaki. Me versus him. A fair fight. Winner becomes the next JAXA astronaut.”

  “That’s not within my power to—”

  The mama interrupted. “I’m going to order another drink, okay?” she said to Aro.

  Aro frowned. “Why are you asking me?”

  “Is it alright?” she repeated.

  “I don’t give a fuck.”

  “Ooh, so brave to mama,” said Coco.

  “And,” Aro told Sumida, “I want the patents and rights to all the MONSTAR-X data. ISAS relinquishes exclusive rights. I become sole owner of every paper and database I’ve authored or co-authored.”

  Sumida clenched his hands around the second beer mug the waitress had just placed in front of him. The first was still half full. He felt his face tighten, and he knew the more he let his expression show his frustration, the more Ronin Aro would think he looked like a puckered anus. “Why would you even think that’s something JAXA could do for you?” He affected a smile.

  Coco yelled to Aro, “What’s your favorite food? But I’m not good at cooking.”

  “With the plans consolidated to me, I can redesign MONSTAR-X to be nuke-free and take away any possibility that the project could be a guise for America to use Japan to weaponize space.
”

  “I don’t see why we should trust you with the patents.”

  “China wants me dead. Did you forget where I got the propulsion solution from? I’m not going to share anything with the guys who want to kill me.”

  “How about Russia, or America? Or India?”

  “China is the only one with their shit together enough to build and launch something like this on such short notice.”

  “Totalitarianism has its benefits, I suppose,” said Sumida.

  “What’s your favorite color?” Coco asked Aro.

  The mama ordered herself a shot of Kailua. She caught Ronin’s stare and paused before bringing it to her lips. “Is it okay?”

  Aro turned to Coco. “You know I came to meet you, right? Not to be one of your karaoke customers. I was piss-clear about that on Tinder.”

  “No, no,” said Coco, and she lurched away from Aro, looking genuinely shocked and offended by the accusation.

  “I’ll marry you, but I’m not your sugar daddy.” Then he pointed at the mama. “And I’m sure as shit not hers.”

  The mama downed the Kailua shot and went back to her cigarette, unperturbed.

  “No, I love you,” said Coco, and she latched back onto Aro’s arm.

  “He has no money,” the mama told Coco. “Forget him.”

  “I already let you varlets pad the bill on me. Four thousand yen for each little plastic-bottle wine cooler?” He chugged the rest of his beer, and then Sumida’s. “Fuck that. This one’s on you mama-san,” said Aro, and he stood up to leave, against Coco’s protests and begging. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “The marriage is off.”

  Aro walked out the door, leaving Sumida and the hostesses behind to stare and blink at each other. Then a fire erupted in the mama’s eyes. Before he or she could speak, Aro jerked the door back open and yelled at Sumida to get his ass outside.

  Aro walked briskly, and Sumida tried to catch his breath while he struggled to keep up. Aro continued talking, in Japanese now, as if the incident over the bill hadn’t even happened. “Maybe Russia could build something like MONSTAR-X,” he said, “but I’m on their hit list, too.”