Tribulation

by Kaz Morran

  ***

  “Now we wait,” Ronin said when he and Nel returned from the waterfall. They’d gone to take pictures and would go again in an hour to see if the cascade from the ceiling was getting weaker or stronger.

  But Taiyo already knew the result of the experiment.

  The waterline had risen half a meter above the mark he’d carved into the wall across the painted scratches. The sock he was holding would soon go under as well. “Do we have a choice?” he said.

  Ronin laughed, which at first seemed inappropriate. But why not laugh? They might need their humor to survive.

  Taiyo added that at least they no longer had to listen to the generator.

  “But the soothing sound of the waterfall makes me want to pee,” said Kristen.

  “I just did,” said Ronin.

  “Of course you did.”

  “How long until there’s more urine than water in here?”

  “How long until we drown?” said Taiyo. The question came out before he realized it wasn’t funny.

  Taiyo tried with limited success to rest his head against the wall while floating on his back. As long as he relaxed, the natural buoyancy of his body did most of the work. It might even be possible to sleep that way if not for the mental images of Anton’s bloated body. Taiyo floated, almost hovered, in the lukewarm water and pictured the lifeless medic drifting in space to the serene background of nihility. But the body strayed, drawn by an unseen gravity well, until it began to tumble and take on an orbital path, looping in broad ellipticals; each loop a sliver tighter and faster than the last, faster and faster inward on the drain, deeper toward the realm of maximum entropy. And then the body stopped—limbs splayed and stretched to a blur like paint dashed on a spinning wheel and captured in a photograph.

  Gravity was funny like that.

  Gravity.

  Gravity wells.

  He let his mind wander. Getting out to the Sun’s gravitational focal point at 550 AU was doable—more so than going the full 10,000-plus AU, anyway—but no existing propulsion system could get a spacecraft there before Tabaldak passed out of reach. No even with the most optimistic gravity assist projections.

  It had taken a long time for Taiyo to admit that JAXA had been right to reject his proposal. It wasn’t that magnetoplasma engines couldn’t eventually work—at least not if fed by the GeKo nuclear reactors Ronin now owned the patents to. It was because there’d only been one qualifying proof-of-concept test firing: a 300-kilowatt magnetoplasma engine mounted on the exterior of the Chinese Tianhe-1 space station.

  If he was totally honest with himself, he’d also admit the design called for too many components to rely on the single-point-failure artificial magnetosphere: the radiation shielding, the magnetorquers that stood in for reaction wheels, the shaping of the liquid telescope mirror, the acoustic resonance control, the plasma confinement, and the directing of the ion flow. One hiccup in the artificial magnetosphere could mean Tabaldak and its moons would pass right on by the solar system unobserved while the would-be eye of humanity drifted off into oblivion, blinded by its own ambition.

  At the very least, for the mission to work, Taiyo had to come up with a more reliable way to reach the outer solar system. And from construction to arrival, the mission would have to take less than twelve years. The odds were not good.

  “Good news,” announced Ronin as he splashed through the darkness toward his waiting comrades. He and Nel were back from checking on the waterfall.

  Nel treaded water while she caught her breath. “The flow is getting stronger. More voluminous.”

  “That’s not good news,” said Walter, now feeling somewhat better but still weak.

  “Sure it is,” said Ronin. “We just wait for the water to go up to the chimney then we climb out.”

  “And what if the water is pouring down too hard?” Taiyo said. “Or, what if the chimney is clogged with some big eucalyptus tree or something?”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  “Isn’t it ironic,” Kristen mused, “that I left a flooded basement to come here. For all I know, my husband still hasn’t figured out how to use a bucket and mop to clean it up, and here you guys are, trapped inside the earth and drowning in a billion gallons of water but confident you can fix it.”

  “Listen, Alanis,” Ronin told her. “You oughta know not to be so pessimistic. Haven’t you ever been told you should smile more?”

  “Not while I was drowning,” she said.

  It felt more like Kristen had been criticizing her husband than her AsCan teammates, though Taiyo couldn’t quite tell. She sounded flustered, her voice shaky. She probably missed her family. As they all did.

  “You really think we’ll get out of this,” Kristen asked Ronin a few minutes later.

  “I’ve gotten out of worse.”

  The hours passed, and the waterfall did not ease. The AsCans grew cold and hungry, and the aftershocks kept coming. Hourly attempts to contact the outside only drained the batteries in their phones. The water rose. They waited. It rose more. And still, they waited, because there was nothing else they could have done.

  The failures and misfortunes of MONSTAR-X would not stop cycling in Taiyo’s brain. He felt like the lone moon bear at the Sendai zoo, which as far as he’d ever been able to tell, never did anything except pace back and forth from one gray cement corner to another.

  He distracted himself with the tyranny of the rocket equation. For years he’d pondered all sorts of fanciful ways to traverse the solar system, but he—like most people in the field—always had focused on hardware solutions. It usually came down to increasing efficiency by curtailing one parameter to enhance another. Improvements were typically incremental.

  Taiyo adjusted his grip on the sock and tried to give Nel more leverage. The five of them shared the two holds, and they huddled in close, soaked, shivering, and straining not to complain.

  But what if the secret to a more efficient mission wasn’t to improve hardware, but to improve the flight path?

  The destination of MONSTAR-X—550 times the distance from Earth to the Sun, fifteen times the distance to Pluto—really wasn’t that far in the big scheme of the universe. But even when New Horizons shaved four years off its mission by slingshotting out of Jupiter’s gravity well at 16 kilometers a second, it still took the little probe ten years to reach Pluto.

  The fastest probe ever made, the Parker Solar probe had achieved … Taiyo searched his memory, wishing to be back in the world of Google and Wikipedia. 200,000 meters a second sounded right. 700,000 kilometers an hour. Ridiculously fast. But the credit went as much to the Sun’s immense gravity as it did to the engineers.

  Imagery always helped with mental math, and if nothing else, it let him check that his head still worked. A lot like Dr. Sylvia and the Zeel-5, Taiyo thought of MONSTAR-X as his child, one that had grown out of a labor of love, and so he imagined waiting with open arms at the Sun’s gravitational focal point for the spacecraft to come to him as if it were a baby crawling away from Earth, shrinking the 82-billion-kilometer gap, toddling through the asteroid belt as a two-year-old, passing Neptune at age six, running full stride into the Oort Cloud and arriving at thirteen years old. … A year too late.

  Taiyo sighed heavily. At the fastest ever speeds achieved by a spacecraft, it would take MONSTAR-X thirteen years to reach 550 AU. An RTG-powered ion drive might cut the flight time down to eight or ten years. That still only left two to four years for development and construction. Impossible. Tabaldak would be out of range before JAXA even procured the funding.

  And then there was the problem of surviving a hellishly close shave of the Sun.

  The world’s most advanced shielding had gotten Parker to within eight or nine solar radii of the corona. If MONSTAR-X could skim within two or three solar radii, getting to 550 AU in time might actually be feasible, but no shielding in the galaxy was going to protect a probe from that much solar radiation.

  Ronin broke Taiyo’s train of though
t: “My handhold is going to be a foothold in a minute,” he said across the span of dark water between him and Taiyo.

  The hours passed with little conversation outside their own heads. Day and night had no meaning underground, except that the clock on Taiyo’s phone claimed one of each had gone by since the quake. A more apt metric was the water level, which had risen to within eight meters of the ceiling, judging by how many times the candidates had to carve out new handholds.

  As a group, they kept calm, all things considered. They fed off each other’s strength, but after twelve hours in the water in the dark, it became apparent to Taiyo that they couldn’t rely on patience and stamina. They couldn’t rely on outside help either.

  “We need food,” he said. “And Walter needs to lie down.”

  Walter did not disagree, and no one mentioned the obvious: that more than anything, they needed to find a way out before the water reached the ceiling.

  ***

  Ropes in hand, Taiyo chugged along, lungs and limbs equally propelling his weighted body through the water and thick air as he and Nel tugged the loose flotilla of crates.

  If a thought had popped into his head before fastening the crates together, that thought had only been that he needed to make the crates easier to haul back to the other AsCans. Like gravitational drift, unguided by a conscious hand, the flotilla had emerged crate-by-crate into something grander. Something habitable.

  Upon spotting the working flashlight, like sunrise on the horizon, the waiting crewmates at the west wall stirred from barely-buoyant dormancy. A frail round of cheers trickled from their mouths at the sight of Nel and Taiyo’s DIY raft—a goal to break the shutout in an otherwise crushing defeat.

  A dozen crates arranged in three rows of four formed a rectangular raft large enough for all five candidates to lie down on. They’d assembled them lid-side up for access to stowage, and in the process found a flashlight, helmets, and a pack of freeze-dried ice cream.

  Once aboard, the candidates put on the helmets and welcomed the moment of respite. Though beaten-down, nobody could fully relax, let alone fall asleep on the raft. Not with the consequences of the next aftershock looming so literally over their heads. And so, they talked—some more than others.

  Walter and Taiyo, it turned out, shared some views on family life, albeit superficially.

  “Margery and I just don’t believe in IVF,” said Walter. “Seems a bit too much like playing God, I suppose.”

  Not counting Anton, only Kristen had kids. And none of them had grandchildren, though Walter wished he had. The problem was, Walter and his wife hadn’t been able to conceive.

  Walter continued, “If the Big Guy doesn’t want us having little ones, then who am I to argue. Right, bro?”

  They couldn’t see each other, but Taiyo presumed Walter was talking to him.

  Taiyo cleared his throat; the dust had done a number on his lungs. He’d have preferred not to get into a discussion that might force him into challenging his commander’s worldview. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Sure.”

  “They say God’s got a plan even if it’s not apparent. So maybe His plan for me is not to complicate my purpose. Gosh-darn hard to be an astronaut or a test pilot if you’ve got little ones waiting for you to come back home. At least this way there’s nobody to cry for me if the Lord’s plan includes taking me early.”

  “Except your wife,” said Nel.

  “Oh sure, but Margery's a trooper. She’d be all right. She’s getting into the autumn of her years now too. Mind you, fifty-five is by no means the end of the tarmac … But she’d be all right. The house is bought and paid. She has her bingo girls and Sunday group, and NASA takes darn-good care of astro wives. Husbands, too, for that matter. After Columbia and Challenger …”

  Taiyo had almost drifted asleep to the ambiance of Walter’s rambling when the rolling, deep-seated growls of an aftershock set the pool of their confines into motion.

  Taiyo scrambled in the dark. The crates jostled up and down, then bucked wildly with the waves, threatening to break from the ropes and fragment the raft. His hands and knees clambered across the deck. Nearly floundering, he rolled, slid, and reached out until the bottom of his foot landed on the slackened support of a rope. The raft pitched. His foot slipped. He held on by his fingers to a gap between crates. A storm of rock fragments bombarded the deck. Chunks and shards ricocheted off his helmet. A lurch sent the next crate slamming into his hands, and he lost his grip. Waves washed over him, slicking the deck and denying him a spot to grasp. Fraught for an edge or a rope, he reached and stretched with the tips of his fingers and toes of his boots, hitting his crewmates but finding no purchase.

  Kristen cried out. Taiyo, too, but in defiance.

  Something hit Taiyo’s arm. A boot. He grabbed it, but Walter yelled, so he let go.

  One end of the raft shot in the air and smacked back down only to get tossed again. Taiyo’s hands squealed and his nails scathed against the laminate as the churning black water dragged him off the raft and into the abyss.

  Each wave that struck his face, he spat back at his tormentor, planet Earth. In return, Earth underlined its authority by chucking handfuls of rocks and dust in his eyes.

  Debris clacked and pinged off Taiyo’s protected head as the aftershock ascended. Muted voices cried out to deaf ears and numb fingers sought grasps to shirk drowning. The first round of tremors had shaken loose countless boulders and stalactites, but either the ceiling had retained a cache of ammo for round two, or the underworld had rearmed, because massive stone spikes now torpedoed the water and were exploding on the raft.

  Piecing together their fragmented shouts, the AsCans gathered at the limply tied segments of the raft.

  Taiyo felt and heard Nel beside him in the water. He pulled her in close, then guided her hand underwater to open the latch of the crate both their free hands were holding. Against the weight of the water, they hefted open the lid and together stuck their heads up inside the pocket of air. Rocks pinged and thudded overhead on the topside of the deck. Waves sloshed against the sides and up inside to neck level and splashed their faces. There wasn’t much air in that tiny space, but it sufficed to ride out the worst of the rock storm.

  Kristen, Walter, and Ronin had done the same, each in a separate crate of the raft. By the end of the tremor, the group’s patchwork of ailments had grown exponentially, but all five skulls remained intact.

  They tightened up the ropes of the raft and kept the lids open and facing down, as they should have to begin with. In case of another strong aftershock, they fixed a sock to the rope at one end as a reference point, assigned each AsCan their own crate of refuge, and rehearsed seeking shelter.

  Next time, they’d be ready.

  ***

  Ronin and Kristen set off on the second dark-water expedition. They salvaged a USB backup battery, the hand-crank recharger, some granola bars, another flashlight, three unopened bottles of water, and a fragment of shredded leather and rubber—which Ronin slapped down in front of Taiyo on the deck of the raft.

  “That’s pretty fucked up,” Ronin said, who sat cross-legged behind the glow of the flashlight as if telling a ghost story.

  “You didn’t have to bring it back,” said Kristen and switched her headlamp off. She’d seen enough.

  Drips from the ceiling ran through the vents in Taiyo’s helmet. He rubbed a hand down his face to wick away the water and found his wrinkled fingertips felt soothing against his eyelids.

  With those same raisin-fingers, Taiyo untucked his knees from his chest and picked up the flashlight. He lit up the shredded rubber and steel-toe artifact.

  He picked up what was left of the boot and examined it.

  “What is?” said Kristen.

  “You know what it is,” Nel told her.

  An undeclared moment of silence settled upon the AsCans in the presence of the only known remains of their fallen crewman.

  “Look at it,” said Ronin, and he shook it at Taiyo
. “Tell me how the shit an earthquake can do that.”

  Falling stalactites, Taiyo supposed but didn’t answer. Though, after the drowning it did seem gratuitous; the severed limb and shredded pant leg, and now the boot. But what did any of them know about forensics?

  ***

  The spirits of the five surviving candidates might have lifted upon finding the waterfall had slowed from a deluge to a stream, if not for the simultaneous discovery that the ceiling now loomed just four meters above their heads.

  “Thirteen feet until freedom,” said Ronin. Walter and Kristen grunted something approximating approval. The three were in the camp that believed crawling out through the chimney would be possible.

  Taiyo sat on the edge of the raft, boots off and legs in the water. How cruel of human anatomy that the pains of fatigue could undermine the will to relax. He flicked water aimlessly with his toes and listened to the ripples echo off the approaching teeth of the ceiling. He slid closer to the edge and watched—though he could not see—the oscillations of the water. He wondered what had become of Anton once he’d left Taiyo’s grasp, and how much he’d suffered. How long had it taken Anton to reach the bottom, somewhere deep beneath Taiyo’s dangling feet?

  In his head, Taiyo repeated the truth he needed to believe: the cause of death had been the sudden filling of Anton’s lungs with water. The severed leg and shredded boot leather were not psychologically convenient to think about.

  He bent forward and cupped water onto his head and down his back. The water felt good against the stifling, humid air, he supposed.

  Nel nudged the crank charger into Taiyo’s lap. “Your turn,” she said.

  It took ages to add a single bar of battery life to his phone, but what else was there to do? He kept winding while Kristen stood in the center of the raft and examined the meter-wide mouth of the chimney with her flashlight.

  Walter, Ronin, and Nel slung their feet over and kick-paddled to keep the raft in position. Kristen stood on her tiptoes and stretched to get as close as possible to the dwindling downpour.