Tribulation

by Kaz Morran

  “Sweet deal for me, huh?”

  Maybe that was the deal Ronin thought he’d struck with JAXA. Or, more likely, he was trying to pull some kind of psychological trick on Taiyo.

  Taiyo said, “The fuck is wrong with your head, man? Seriously.” Several minutes of angry breathing interspersed with Nel urging him to relax passed before he added, “Seriously, Ronin? Because I’m calling bullshit.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Why? What for? It doesn’t make sense. Why in the hell … ?”

  “I don’t know yet. The patents could have other applications. Maybe I can sell them to Industry. Only within Japan of course. I wouldn’t want to end up under investigation for treason like—”

  “Ronin!”

  “You don’t have to yell.”

  A little more calmly, Taiyo asked, “What possible reason would JAXA have to make you into a provocateur?”

  “To test you.”

  “What? Don’t you think getting trapped under fifteen meters of rock is enough of a test?”

  “That was unforeseen,” Ronin said, calm as ever. “That’s why I backed off after the earthquake.”

  Backed off? Unbe-fucking-lievable. Taiyo threw up his arms and said to Nel, “He thinks he backed off.” And to Ronin: “I’ve known you too long to believe you’ve been pretending to be a dick. You strung me up by my ankles and left me to die at the hands of a giant crocodile!”

  “Teeth and jaws,” Ronin corrected. “Hands, too, but much less so. Although, they might be called feet. Kristen, do reptiles have four feet or two hands and two feet?”

  “All feet. The front ones are called forefeet.”

  “Forefeet? Four feet. I bet that must get confusing in the lab sometimes.”

  Taiyo pulled his legs up to his chest and slid back along the raft, feeling for the spear as he moved. He told Nel to stay back.

  “I’ve never actually dealt with reptiles,” Kristen replied.

  “Oh, right,” said Ronin. “Rock people.”

  “Hypothetical silicon-based life.”

  “Yeah, I know. Like those little rock men we built around the perimeter.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Ronin!” Taiyo screamed.

  “Whoa. Easy, half. I didn’t intend for the monster to eat you, okay? Is that what you need to hear? Are you happy now?”

  “Oh, what, you just wanted to use me as bait?”

  “Yes.”

  “Christ.”

  Taiyo led Nel in shuffling off the deck to put a barrier between themselves and Ronin.

  “I sent the girls out to collect rocks to throw at it. Once you got it distracted, the rest of us were supposed to sneak up and stone it to death.”

  “You thought the three of you were going to throw enough rocks in my direction to kill a thousand-kilo dinosaur? Where did my survival fit into this plan?”

  “That’s why I abandoned the plan.”

  “How thoughtful.”

  “Look at me, hafu. I know where I stand. Drop me naked in the Sahara, and I’ll meet you in Antarctica on camelback. But the paths I’ve taken … Shit like that leaves a stain. I’m not the liability you think, but unless it’s crammed into the tip of a ballistic missile, I known they’re not so much as going let me sniff a launchpad.”

  The aluminum pipe felt cold in Taiyo’s hand. He made sure Nel had hers, too. “You just stay on your side of the raft, and we’ll stay on ours,” Taiyo told Ronin.

  Kristen’s light went out, and once more the Asylum turned black.

  Taiyo felt his head then belt, but came up with nothing. Nel didn’t have a light either. By touch, he guided Nel to angle her spear up at head level in case Ronin jumped down on them from the deck of the raft. Taiyo stood, his back to Nel’s, ready to defend against a side attack, and he whispered for her to regulate her breathing so they’d be able to hear Ronin’s movements.

  But for now, Ronin stayed on his side. “This whole Project Daintree thing …” he was saying. “JAXA is just going through the motions. They already made up their mind. If you can handle me pricking you in the ass for three weeks, then you’re Japan’s next astronaut.”

  “Bullshit,” Taiyo called over the raft. “Why don’t they trust me with my own data then? Why sick detectives on me?”

  “JAXA isn’t a single entity, Tai. Its components don’t always play well together. You fit into some people’s vision, but not others.”

  “And you’re the compromise.”

  “I’m the falsifiability.”

  Nel put a hand on Taiyo’s elbow, meaning she’d taken her grip off her spear. She nudged him to do the same. “You’re being paranoid,” she whispered. He imagined looking down on the standoff objectively; Ronin would’ve come across as the sane one. Was there even a standoff?

  Could it really be true that JAXA gave Ronin the rights to the MONSTAR-X data in exchange for joining Project Daintree to confirm Taiyo’s worthiness? Taiyo pushed the obvious from his mind: that being JAXA’s top choice for astronaut didn’t mean a thing if he couldn’t get out of the cave.

  “What about the investigation?” Taiyo said. “The detective and the treason stuff?”

  Ronin chuckled. “Nothing to do with JAXA.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Until the investigation’s done.”

  “Oh.”

  “Then you’re up the shitter.”

  “Even if I get selected and hired on as an official astronaut?”

  Ronin turned on a headlamp. “This place here is the last of your freedom.” He opened his arms to their soaring black confines and did a twirl. “Ironic, huh?”

  Taiyo let the spear roll from his fingers and clang to the ground.

  “Who’s ready for a hunting trip?” Ronin called out. Nobody answered. “Great. Everyone grab a corner of the raft, lift, and follow my lead.”

  ***

  Where just days earlier they’d traveled broad spans of interwoven lava flows, they now navigated a labyrinth of shattered lavacicles, toppled pillars, jagged boulders, and uplifted bedrock. And they were doing it with spears strapped to their backpacks like ninjas while hauling a living room-sized bundle of crates.

  “I said to lift it higher.”

  “I am.”

  “Then more higher.”

  “Argh! Son of a shit—”

  “Careful, there’s a boulder there,” said Taiyo, sarcastically.

  “Careful, there’s a boulder there,” came Ronin’s snotty copycat reply.

  “Knock it off, boys,” said Nel from the rear left corner of the raft.

  “I thought you two kissed and made up,” Kristen said.

  If the Ronin-as-provocateur claim was true, then Taiyo could see no evidence Ronin had dropped the act. True or not, it didn’t sit well in Taiyo’s gut. Neither did this “hunting trip”.

  To up the odds of a face-to-face with the object of Ronin’s desire, he’d wanted to head south, toward the collapsed Wormhole and croc’s food stash. And that was precisely why Taiyo had convinced Ronin they should go north.

  “We know what’s south,” Taiyo had said. “A broken down entrance and the smell of death. But we don’t know what the quake did to the north end of the Asylum. It might’ve opened a way out.” Ronin only scoffed at the speculation, but the next part of Taiyo’s pitch had won him over. “And you want to ambush that crocodile, right?” Ronin did. “Well, there are a lot more boulders and irregularities in the topography to hide behind at the north end than at the south. That was the case even before the quake.”

  Kristen’s argument against heading north—“unknown risks”—had fallen apart when Nel pointed out that using aluminum poles to spearfish a monster crocodile in the dark put any subsequent “risk” to shame.

  They shuffled forward, dropping the raft every minute or so to rest their arms. Taiyo would’ve preferred to keep moving. Unoccupied, his mind kept going back to being snared in the hammock. Going by the size of the jaws that had almost crushed his skull, the crocodile w
as probably longer than the raft and packed a great deal more mass.

  “I smell sulfur,” Kristen said, out of breath from hoisting her corner over a boulder.

  Taiyo did some fancy footwork to get around a crumpled stalagmite. “That means we’re getting close.”

  “To the wall or to Hell?” Ronin asked, but nobody answered.

  They set the raft down when they got to the foot of a newly formed mound of boulders about the height of a two-story house. Without checking if Ronin wanted to include a climb in his hunt or not, Taiyo started up the mound on all fours to counter the steep grade and loose rock. From a meter up, he called back down, “It’s a bit of a tough climb, so if any of you aren’t sure of your ability I don’t mind checking it out myself.” Immediately, Ronin scrambled on past Taiyo and beat him to the top. Nel and Kristen followed closely behind.

  From the top, as best they could tell with the limited range of their lights, the mound extended east-west like a mini mountain range running parallel to the north wall and stream.

  With spears as climbing poles, Nel led the expedition down the other side and into the trench of rock shards, snottite, and steam. Air pressure, humidity, temperature: all had grown exponentially since the first visit. Difficulty breathing and blots of confusion indicated a rise in CO2 and methane.

  The worst thing was the stench. Though nothing could ever smell as bad as unearthing Anton’s body, it was hard now not to wretch.

  “You guys think T3 knew how bad the air was down here?” Taiyo said through his undershirt, which he’d pulled up over his mouth and nose. Again, he wished they’d brought the rebreathers.

  “What are you getting at, conspiracy kid?” Ronin replied, and then tested the slickness of the ground with his foot.

  “Maybe they wanted us to test the drone in these conditions.”

  “Are you really still thinking about the mission tasks?” said Kristen. “How anal are you, Taiyo?”

  “Dirty talk, yeah.” Ronin rubbed his palms together, and Kristen giggled.

  “I didn’t mean I want to test the drone. It’s busted. I meant that—”

  “You busted it.”

  “I mean, they couldn’t flat out instruct us to test it in toxic air—not ethically—but that is what the thing was made to do, right? To intake a variety of atmospheres to convert into thrust. It’s a pretty big coincidence that here we find ourselves with the Zeel in what is pretty much the most alien atmosphere you could be in without leaving Earth.”

  “But the science application is for mapping caves,” Nel reminded Taiyo.

  “Right. Two selling points. And one is that it runs on shitty air.”

  Nel said, “The earthquake turned our air toxic. T3 couldn’t have known we’d get locked in a gas chamber.”

  “Nice reference,” Ronin commended. “Now, can we get moving already?”

  Nel shimmied over to Taiyo and put a hand on his shoulder. “This place is making you paranoid.”

  He rubbed his face on the inside of his sweaty shirt. He didn’t know what to believe anymore. He was still pretty sure about Ronin killing Walter—but in retrospect, the accusation of cannibalism did seem a little overly suspicious. He had to admit his cognition was bound to be taking a hit from the bad air, not to mention the lack of food and sleep, the sensory deprivation, the shock and grief of losing two crewmen, and the stress of knowing he had virtually zero chance of getting out alive and if he did get out he was going to prison for treason and Ronin had stolen his life’s work and traded it for a chance to fuck with him and he was never going to be astronaut …

  With his sweaty hand, Taiyo pulled the sweaty undershirt down from his sweaty mouth and sweaty nose and wiped his sweaty forehead.

  “I hear water,” Kristen said.

  “I’d kill for a bath,” said Ronin.

  It was the sound of the stream that ran the length of the wall.

  Like the atmosphere of Venus, the thick air scattered the beam of her flashlight and left no shadows. Between the churning clouds, Kristen’s colorless face came into view. She was teetering in her stance, in the middle of checking her pulse.

  She said, “I’m sort of dizzy.”

  As if Kristen was contagious, alternating waves of hot and cold flushed through Taiyo and made his sweat-soaked skin shudder on the bone. He felt dizzy and nauseous; the atmosphere punished his lungs for attempting to breathe. For a moment, he actually forgot he was in the slimy trench between a heap of boulders and a wall and thought he’d been left out on a spacewalk with a punctured suit.

  He checked his phone. The bars on the graphs hopped up and down, but mostly up. “Um …” he began.

  Nel’s eyes widened in the glare of his screen as she leaned in for a peek. “We really shouldn’t linger.”

  “Yeah, these readings are looking a bit too much like Venus now.”

  “Pussies,” said Ronin.

  “I thought you were done antagonizing me,” said Taiyo.

  “Hafu, that cord has already been dissed, so stop trying to sow it. You, pussy.”

  Like dragon breath on their necks, the heat and acrid smell chased the four candidates back up and over to the other side of the rock heap where they sat on the edge of the raft to recover.

  Like he'd come down from a high-altitude climb, Taiyo’s headache, labored breathing, and foggy thinking began to ease, but only slightly. Kristen wasn’t so fortunate. The nausea was almost visible, like infrared waves passing through her.

  “Maybe it’s just menopause,” said Ronin, patting her back. She flung out an arm and smacked him in the chest.

  “Or,” Nel said dryly, “maybe it's the lack of oxygen and high CO2, sulfur dioxide, and methane.”

  “You have your personal truth, I have mine.”

  “How are you holding up, Taiyo?” Nel asked.

  “Good enough.” He still felt horrible. “You?”

  “Good enough.”

  For once there was consensus among the AsCans: they all wanted to keep exploring the north wall, but the precautionary principle prevailed.

  “We’ll set the trap right here, then,” Ronin said and kicked the foot of the rock heap, knocking a head-sized boulder off the pile and into his shin.

  After clearing away loose rock, they stood the raft up on its side to form a wall four crates long and three high—about as tall as the wall of a home. The durable gloss coating screamed against the rough ground as they rammed one end of the upright raft into the rock heap, like sliding shut a floodgate, jamming it in place to form a narrow wedge-shaped alcove for them to take shelter in.

  “So, we hang out in here …” Ronin’s voice muffled as he squeezed his barrel chest through the open end, between the boulders on his left and the wall of crates on his right.

  Taiyo poked his head and shoulders in and heard Ronin shuffling farther into the vertex.

  Ronin turned around and shone the headlamp in Taiyo’s face, forcing him back outside the shelter. “Then we block the opening there with rocks, and when ol’ slinky-tail comes creeping up for a nibble …”

  Ronin grunted. The wall of crates lurched. A hammock pole flew out the narrow end of the shelter and clanged to the ground. Ronin burst through after, roaring like a madman and wielding a large rock over his head. “Ka-pow! I’m a motherfucking mantis shrimp,” he yelled, slamming the rock down. He cursed at getting hit by a piece of shrapnel then picked up the spear and raised his arms in triumph. “Humans, one. Lizard, zero.”

  Taiyo reached out to steady the raft-wall.

  Kristen clapped twice and then bent down with her hands on her knees, ready to jettison a meal.

  “Considering we’ve already lost two humans, I’m not so sure about your scorekeeping,” Nel told Ronin.

  “Or taxonomy,” Taiyo added under his breath.

  Ronin tossed his non-existent ponytail side-to-side while Kristen hobbled across his path, took a seat on a boulder, and threw up. Nel tended to her a moment then checked the air readings on her
phone.

  “The Venusian atmosphere is following us,” she said.

  Kristen slurred her words like a drunk. “Feels like the gravity of Jupiter.”

  “Just try and wait quietly,” Ronin said. “The lizard knows we’re here. It’s probably on its way.”

  Tucked shoulder-to-shoulder inside the shelter, Taiyo felt persecuted by an alien atmosphere; face pressed against a crate, lights off, rocks digging into his back, Ronin to his left breathing heavily into the corner, Nel’s sweat-matted hair on his right, and Kristen at the opening moaning against the tides of nausea.

  If there’d been a little more room, Taiyo could’ve brought his backpack in to use as a buffer between him and Ronin. He let his forehead rest against the cool plastic of the crate and closed his eyes. His own hot breath cycled up the raft and fell back down on him, adding the CO2 from his exhalations to the already toxic air.

  After hours of waiting motionless and trapped, Taiyo felt his head swimming in the heat and perspiration, and the words of his father infused his blood as much as the carbon dioxide:

  Give your mind something to chew on, or it’ll chew on itself.

  The axiom conjured up a memory of finding a bear trap while hiking. Absent was the bear; present was a leg.

  It seemed unfair that the Zeel-5 could’ve breathed the air that he couldn’t. He thought more about the drone, how if scaled up to be a scramjet it would be quite good at zipping through the thick atmosphere of Venus. It might even get enough of a boost to shoot right back to Earth. Of course it could! It could whip around Earth’s atmosphere a few times to pick up speed, then fling itself out to Venus for a few orbits before returning with an air sample. Or work as a cargo ferry cycling modules for a cloud station from an Earth-orbit manufacturing depot.

  “What an idea!” Taiyo cried.

  “Taiyo’s checked out,” said Ronin.

  “Or maybe it’s Aerogravity Assist.”

  “Keep your voice down, hafu. You’re going to scare away the monster.”

  “That’s what Walter’s aunt was working on.”

  “Shh.”

  Like falling out of bed into ice water, the fog had vanished from Taiyo’s head.

  “Ronin,” he said, almost pleading for permission to be giddy, “Think about this. This could really open up the solar system. Using the atmospheres of planets—”