by Kaz Morran
But won’t humiliating Ronin only provoke him? Still …
Taiyo continued: “When the sum of our incoming rainwater’s internal, kinetic, and potential energies is constant, the flow at any point along our lava tube network, including here in the Asylum, will be equal. So, the dynamic pressure and kinetic energy of the flow—that is, the velocity of the water pouring down the cave—will increase as the sum of the flow’s internal energy, potential energy, and static pressure decreases… It’s actually much simpler than something like a flight dynamics problem. No barotropic fluids to deal with, so we can use the simplified uncompressible fluids equation, where total pressure is just static pressure plus dynamic pressure. I know what you’re thinking: ‘But Bernoulli’s equation doesn’t apply to the boundary area …”
“Right. A flooded cave is just plumbing,” Ronin said. He sat on his crate, emaciated, fiddling with his severed ponytail. “Forget the crates. We need to go to head north.”
“Pardon?”
“We have to head north.” Ronin leaped off the crate, ready for action.
“What? Why?” said Taiyo. “What’s north?”
“The back wall.”
“The back wall?”
“Let’s go.”
***
“Fuck off,” Ronin told Anton. “It’s not mutiny.”
“Insubordination then,” said Taiyo in support of the medic, but not before backing several paces away from Ronin. Taiyo felt a little more confident about speaking up against Ronin now but still knew to tread carefully.
“No, insubordination is arguing with your commander’s orders.”
Walter polished off a water bottle and chucked it into an open crate. “We’re being proactive, bro,” he assured Taiyo and gave his shoulder an affectionate squeeze. Walter and Ronin were the only ones in favor of heading north.
They hadn’t explored the back wall yet, and no one doubted T3 would send them there eventually. But given the flood warning, it seemed obvious to the rest of the team that to wait for T3 to give the official order before setting off on an expedition.
“Fine,” Taiyo said. It wasn’t worth going against his commander or dividing the team over. It was less than eight hundred meters away, the work would be interesting. There might be more cave art, and they’d get to record and sample the environment. They might even discover something living down there with them.
They did the necessary flood prep before heading out. Anton and Nel packed away the hammocks and stacked the crates to keep them from floating off, Kristen readied the diving gear—just in case—, Walter scooped dust into THRONE bags to use as sandbags, and “consulting” duties fell to Ronin.
Taiyo put the topographic map he and Nel had made with their bot on 3D view, added layers and grids, populated it with cubes to represent the crates, and then built virtual pyramids and stairs to confirm once and for all they could not reach the chimney.
But that made Taiyo think of something else. What about strapping a bunch crates together with the climbing ropes to build a raft? In a worst-case scenario, they could rise with the water up to the chimney and crawl through to the outside.
He looked up from his screen and saw Ronin’s silhouette pacing bull-like beneath the floodlight. Making a raft would delay their hike northward, likely instigating another bout of Ronin-rage.
Taiyo resigned himself to coloring some of the cubes red and arranging them into the shape of a rocket. Then he doodled an alien smiley face in the window. In spite of the flood risk, he felt no real sense of urgency. NASA, JAXA, ESA, and the CSA wouldn’t have overlooked such an obvious threat, so whatever flooding was on the way wouldn’t be a big deal. Then again, the agencies weren’t directly conducting the project. T3 was.
Everyone’s phones pinged at once.
Weather Advisory Update
Candidates please be advised of the following:
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[fwd]
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SEVERE TROPICAL CYCLONE ALERT [IDQLD37900]
CATEGORY 4
BUREAU OF METEOROLOGY QUEENSLAND REGIONAL OFFICE — TROPICAL CYCLONE WARNING CENTRE BRISBANE
TOP PRIORITY
TROPICAL CYCLONE [39] ‘MOANA’
Issued at AEST [UTC+10h] 12:15 pm Thursday 25 August
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A CYCLONE WARNING for a SEVERE CATEGORY 4 CYCLONE is now current for coastal areas between Lockhart and Townsville. A CYCLONE WATCH extends south along the Coral Coast to Cairns and includes adjacent inland parts of the Cape York Peninsula.
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At 15:00 QLD SEVERE TROPICAL CYCLONE MOANA estimated to be
385 km east-northeast of Cairns and moving west at 15 km/h.
Severe Tropical Cyclone Moana is expected to cross the Cape York Peninsula in the vicinity of Daintree/Cape Tribulation midday Saturday 27 August.
Very destructive winds (gusts 185 to 270 km/h) and heavy rainfall (100 mm/h).
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FESA-State Emergency Service advises of the following community alerts:
RED ALERT: People in communities at Cape Tribulation & the Daintree, Cooktown, Port Douglas, Bloomfield, Rossville, Starcke are advised to evacuate coastal and low-lying areas and seek shelter. Residents are warned of the potential of a very dangerous storm tide and heavy flood-level rains as the cyclone centre makes landfall over the next few days. Residents are additionally warned of potential encounters with displaced wildlife.
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[end fwd]
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If the cyclone continues on-course toward your location, you will be evacuated tomorrow morning (Friday) along with KMC personnel and the isolation analogue will be prematurely terminated. Preparations are now underway. We will update you on a final decision by 16:00 today.
Please continue tasks as scheduled until further notice.
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Regards,
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T3/KMC (Ethan Kelly)
27
You never really know your friends from your enemies until the ice breaks.
—Inuit proverb
Nel’s light swept across the chasm.
“Shhh …” she said. “I hear something.”
Like a crew gone interstellar, the Sun left to fade in their wake, the floodlight shrunk with each stride put between themselves and camp.
They stopped to listen.
Nothing.
For a time, as they moved on, Anton and Walter played shadow puppets with their headlamp beams on the uneven ground. A day’s worth of suppressed laughter bubbled forth.
“Hold up a second,” said Nel, and the troop obeyed.
She aimed her flashlight ahead, toward the center of the Asylum.
“Do you see something?” said Anton.
“I thought I heard it again,” said Nel.
“Jumping at shadows,” Ronin muttered. “Keep going.”
They marched on, across the rugged, rock-strewn basalt. Taiyo kept his ears open but doubted he’d hear much over Ronin’s bumbling strides.
"I might've heard it, too," said Kristen.
“Hey, Ronin,” said Taiyo. “You mind picking up your knuckles when you walk?”
“Shut it, hafu.”
“Stop, stop, stop,” said Nel. “Hold on a second.”
“What?”
“You don’t hear that?”
“No.”
“It’s probably the generator.”
“Wrong direction, chimera,” Ronin told Taiyo. “If you’re scared, you can hold my hand.”
They could’ve investigated with the drone scanner if Ronin hadn’t destroyed it.
Nel whispered. “It’s water. I hear water.”
“Sounds like someone peeing,” Walter whispered back.
“Maybe.” Taiyo shrugged, though no one could see him. The involuntary gesture reminded him of his mother bowing on the phone.
Ronin clapped. No echo came back. “Ignore her,” he said of Nel. “She’s hallucinating.”
“You want me to cut som
ething else off you?” she said.
“Do you kiss your mama with that tongue?”
A minute later they found the source. A garden hose volume of water was pouring from the ceiling, falling 25 meters and spattering off the floor.
“Coming through the chimney,” Taiyo said, checking the map on his phone.
“So …”
“So?”
“So, it’s nothing,” said Ronin. “It’s probably Ethan. He’s up there laughing his ass off, pissing down the chimney on us.”
The waterfall faded into the background as they walked on, only to be replaced by a chorus of trickles and drips that grew louder as they neared the north wall. The ground turned more gnarled. Loose rock shards, boulders, and uneven ground slowed their pace.
The atmosphere grew sweaty. It smelled like a hot spring, and proved distracting enough that Nel took a tumble, down into a shallow trench, but she was fine. From what their lights could reveal, the nebulous and steamy hot trench ran the length of the north wall, was as wide as a couple lanes of traffic, and had a hard floor slick with silver-speckled green slime.
“What is it?” Nel asked. “Is it toxic?”
“Stinks like ass,” said Ronin.
“Like eggs,” said Taiyo, disagreeing instinctively.
“What are you doing with your eggs that makes them smell like ass?”
“What makes you so sure what ass smell like?”
“Hafu, when the goddess of love disrobes in your presence, no matter how freaky the request, you oblige without judgment.”
“Or shame.”
“I told you about the Sheikha,” said Ronin.
“The kind of girl that knows how to say ‘Don’t tell my parents’ in nine languages.”
“She’s a freaky Venus. She’s got this move—I call it the woodpecker because—”
“Biofilm,” Kristen called the green ooze and then gagged from the smell. She said astrobiologists referred to it as snottite, or by the acronym, SLIME—Subsurface Life In Mineral Environments. “You can think of it as a bacteria colony’s way to shield itself from the product of hydrogen sulfide and oxygen interactions.”
“Which is … ?”
“Sulfuric acid.”
That explained the stench weighing on Taiyo’s tongue and throat. The same conditions must’ve been present in the tiered passage he’d retrieved the busted drone from back on the first day in the cave.
Taiyo used a shard of rock to prod a thick, gooey strand hanging from a boulder while, beside him, Nel fanned herself with one hand while testing the slickness of the thin-coated floor with the toe of her boot. “Why so muggy?”
“Heat and moisture,” said Ronin. “Welcome to the crotch of the love goddess.”
“Venus is dry and barren.”
“That crafty wench.”
At the wall, they found dozens of little geysers spitting steam from the rock face. Rivulets bled from cracks and bubbled from pores. What water didn’t rise as vapor percolated down into a stream that ran along the base of the wall in a fog-filled ditch.
The heat, smell, and roiling clouds prevented a detailed inspection, but Taiyo did notice one thing of interest. Aside from the small dunes of silt he’d crawled through in the Wormhole, they’d encountered little trace of sand or mud deposits, which might indicate routine flooding.
Here, however, a buildup of warm, black mud sloped against the rocky knee-high bank, spilling over and dropping into the stream, only to be swept away by the feeble current. Taiyo kneeled down and scooped a sample of with his fingers, unleashing a stench that nearly made him retch.
“CO2 is kind of high here,” said Anton. He held up his illuminated screen to get everyone’s attention. “We probably shouldn’t linger.”
Ronin told him, “So hurry up with the can then.”
Anton took a thermos-size canister from his backpack and handed it to Taiyo, who turned it over in his hands and examined it.
Kristen read from the manual on her phone: “Section six-point-one. Comprehensive two-dimensional gas-liquid chromatography. For pre-concentrating and separating volatile and semi-volatile components from divergent atmospheres, and to determine the relative composition of each component of an atmospheric gas matrix without educing decomposition, please follow this simple sampling and chromatography method of vaporization analysis.”
“Uh … Okay…” said Taiyo, canister in hand. Behind him, Walter was trying not to laugh.
“Step one: Capture a volume of atmosphere in the Suma canister for laboratory analysis.”
“How much?”
“A volume.”
Taiyo swooped the canister through the air and sealed it with the lid. He felt goofy, as if pretending to do science.
“Step two: You will need to release a portion of the sample onto a multi-bed sorption trap for sample pre-concentration.”
“Your move, payload commander,” Walter said.
Ronin plunked down the padded, toaster-size case he’d been carrying. Several minutes later, they had the device open and exposed. “In here,” Ronin bent down and tapped a glass window. Taiyo slid it open, and Nel brought her flashlight closer. It took a few tries, but Taiyo jiggled and twisted the canister into a little cup-holder device until it clicked into place, triggering a short whir of a fan and vacuum suction, presumably to remove the air sample.
“But not yet,” said Kristen.
“Pardon?”
“Yeah, don’t do all that yet. Steps three to thirty will take you through that process.”
“Oh.”
Taiyo gathered another volume of air. Like a dork.
“Step three: Prepare the gas-liquid chromatograph component separation and detection instrumentation by ensuring the mobile-phase inert gas carrier—hydrogen—is properly installed. For nominal pressurization, sealing, fixture, and release mechanisms see section seventeen, eleven-point-three and eleven-point-five. … Using a microscope, ensure that—”
“Sorry, what?” said Taiyo. “Hold on. I can’t hear you over the sound of Walter laughing his ass off.”
“Okay, just let me read it through once first,” said Kristen. “Ensure that the stationary phase layer liquid—found inside the glass tubing apparatus—is adhered to the inert solid support column—”
Ronin threw his hands up onto his headlamp and yelled, “Holy titty Christ, woman. Just fucking kill me already.”
“After,” she said and continued reading the manual. “Since the comparative retention—or, elution—times of the individual components vary within the atmospheric compounds under interaction with the stationary—”
“No!” Ronin’s voice rose like an exasperated child. “Just shut up already.”
Taiyo said, “It’s actually pretty simple if you listen.”
“It’s not. The fu— How is any of that simple?”
Nel added, perhaps trying to be sympathetic, perhaps trying to antagonize, “I guess I can see why it might be hard to understand if you don’t speak English very well.” Ronin spoke English just fine. Vulgarly, but fine.
“I think the stationary phase coating determines the analytic variables,” Kristen told Taiyo. “So, you’ll also have to calibrate the timing mechanism.”
“Got it,” said Taiyo.
“Now locate the nadir-axial pivot point of the telescopic damper strut mounted beneath the K-bolt lip channel.”
“Okay. …”
“But don’t touch it.”
“Shit.”
“First,” Kristen continued as Ronin paced behind them, occasionally snorting or kicking aside a rock, “on to step four. Engage the gas-vapor pressure valve —” Kristen stopped. She looked up from her phone.
“What?”
“You guys hear that?” she said.
Nel said, “I think I feel it.”
“See,” said Ronin. “Nel’s checked out. She can’t take the sensory deprivation.”
“Listen,” Taiyo barked. His own assertiveness surprised him. He was t
rying to focus on the sound—or the feeling. He did feel something. Something low frequency.
“More falling water?” said Anton
“Not falling,” Nel whispered. “Rising.”
Something big.
Go to the crates,” Taiyo commanded. “Now! Go!” Mid-stride, he yanked Walter by the arm, then Nel. “Come on!” he managed before the growl of the earth drowned their cries.
He sprinted across undulating bedrock; over upheaving slabs. They ran, headlamps like strobe lights against the quaking world, through the shower of debris toward the distant guiding star, the floodlight. Faster, faster they ran against the bucking ground, ran with feet driven by instinct, driven by fear. The blur of the floodlight emerged through clouds of dust. Taiyo fixed his sights on the skittering beacon. A lurch threw him to the ground and killed the headlamp.
He rose. Got slammed down again. He looked up for his beacon. The glow bounced, pitched … and everything went black.
He fled head-on into darkness, running and running, deeper into the maw of night; eyes deadened by the blackness, ears overwhelmed by the fitful crumbling of his confines. Harder he ran, unable to gauge the fruits of his exertion. Time dissolved. He pushed on against the pulsating ground, on toward the unknown. Toward no end. Chased by fear into a place larger inside than out. Chased into the depths of infinite space. Into the depths of his mind. Further, he flew; a light beam desperate to outrun the accelerating expansion of the cosmos.
The shrapnel of falling stalactites threw him down. Still, he ran. The ground heaved, slamming him blind into a boulder. He rolled off. Tripped. Skidded. His heart pumped all the blood it could muster. On his feet. Spinning. Which way? Mid-stride, a jolt buckled his legs.
Keep moving. To the Wormhole. Run! But— But staying put would be safer.
They said that. In training. They always said to stay put. Didn’t they? He stopped. It hurt to breathe. They said that about getting lost in the woods. Not earthquakes.
Think!
He had to find the way out. Move fast, but don’t run.
The ground lurched, flinging him, twisting his body in the air and dropping him right as another uplift batted him airborne once more.
The other candidates … The ground … The ceiling … It all swirled around him in a cloud of unreality. But, as had happened in 2011, a serene, disconnected clarity emerged amid the tectonic anarchy. Then and now, the dance of plates came in vertical stabs, not sways from side-to-side. Vertical shocks did the most damage. This act of analysis transformed Taiyo from a helpless victim into a witness.
