Tribulation

by Kaz Morran

  Drowned in sweat and fear, they could do little more than wait for nature to force their move.

  He felt Nel’s whole body trembling against him with each heaving breath of toxins she inhaled. Their arms locked and her matted hair nuzzled under his chin. Taiyo stood the closest to the knee-high opening, afraid to make a sound by picking up and adding the rocks at his feet to the barrier. He nudged tightly against Nel, unashamed of his cowardice. Everyone shuffled down, careful not to bump the raft and knock it down.

  The crocodile was a mere trinket in the universe’s sack of deadly toys, an opening act to the myriad ways a life could be taken. Humans had evolved an existence bias; they’d made denying mortality a pillar of culture. But there was no reason to prefer existence to non-existence. For the vast majority of the universe’s thirteen-plus billion years Taiyo had not existed, and it hadn’t bothered him one bit, so why could he not embrace his impending death?

  He squeezed his eyes shut, then open, to clear the sting of sweat and dark thoughts.

  In time, he took to shifting foot to foot behind the wall to ease the cramping in his back. He rested his forehead against the crate in front of his face but stayed alert. He had to be ready to … To do what? To jump out and spear the croc? His head hurt. Was that really the plan?

  “Ronin,” he whispered. “Do you have a spear?”

  “No, you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “How so?”

  “Just keep waiting,” Ronin said. “It’ll follow its nose to us, then we leap out at it.”

  “Unarmed?” He pictured them running around in the pitch black, feeling the ground for the spears.

  Nel said she thought Kristen had fallen asleep leaning back against the rock heap in the corner.

  “Wake her up,” Ronin ordered. It was okay if Kristen had passed out from exhaustion, but not if because of the bad air.

  Ronin’s intuition turned out right. It took a sustained effort for Nel to shake her awake, and even then, Kristen barely stayed conscious. She needed a rebreather.

  Taiyo also felt like shit, but the sensation was of fogginess more than of teetering on collapse. And brutally hot. He’d have killed for the water bottle from his backpack, but that was outside the shelter, too.

  Nel squirmed in the sweltering confines as she stripped down to shorts and an undershirt. Her bare skin against his made him wonder how many generations it would take to speciate if they stayed underground, populating the lava tubes in isolation from the outside world. In time, would they evolve infrared sight or echolocation?

  He wondered if the crocodile could see in the dark. Certainly better than humans could. And with so much of its surface area on the ground, it could probably sense the vibrations of their footsteps.

  Vibrations. Was that the feeling going through his skull right now? His forehead rested against the laminate of the crate. The resonance of his own breathing? One of the other AsCans’ trembling? An aftershock? With effort, he raised his hands and held them at the sides of his head. He hovered his open palms a centimeter from the surface of the crate. Unsure if he wanted to follow through with the experiment, he delayed, but finally relented and placed his hands on the laminate.

  Vibrations. Deep. Faint. Low-frequency.

  He could feel the monster purring.

  He drew back his hands, wrung them together, and without a conscious thought, he began to draw with a finger, three stickmen onto his palm.

  “Hey, hafu,” Ronin whispered. “You’re the lure.” The croc could’ve easily pried through the opening, from which Taiyo stood the closest. “Stick out your arm, or whistle for it or something.”

  Their position, pressed behind the wall of the raft, reminded him of Sakura and her parents: their contorted bodies pinned by the wave, hands pressed to the glass of the sliding door.

  “You do it if it’s such a good idea,” Nel hissed.

  “It’s got to be from your side, hafu,” Ronin said, but Taiyo could not speak. “Stop being a pussy and just do it already.”

  “Please, Taiyo,” Kristen said. Her words startled him. Taiyo whipped his forehead away from the crate and turned to her direction as she spoke her insignificant last words: “It’s so hot in here. I’m seriously going to collapse if we don’t—”

  The raft exploded. Taiyo flew with the shower of splintered plastic, hard into the rocks. If Kristen screamed, he hadn’t heard it, but in the frantic beams of light, he saw her dead limbs bobbing from the sides of the crocodile’s mouth as it lifted her in the air, unhinged its jaws and chucked her deeper down, head-first, into its maw. Behind him, as he scrambled up the rock heap, he heard the monster crunching down on a mouthful of her bones.

  And then, once more, he was left to ruminate on the darkness that had infested the dimensions of his being, from the recesses of his psyche to the marrow of his bones. The crow had finished with his face and eyes; unquenched, it now tore at his clothes for a path to his inner organs.

  Nel and Taiyo crouched atop the rock heap, arms locked, hearts palpitating, as they piqued their ears and scanned the abyss with their one good flashlight. Behind them, Ronin paced, huffing and sweating profusely.

  “Like a polar bear trapped in a zoo,” whispered Nel.

  Ronin found a strip of even ground down the spine of the ridge and had been going back and forth for—Taiyo didn’t know how long.

  “Exercise” Ronin called it when Nel asked.

  Taiyo knew how Ronin felt: as though atmosphere itself was tightening around his arms and legs, pressing on his chest, squeezing his throat … They had more space than several stadiums, but he felt penned in, thrown into solitary, wrongfully convicted. In the hole for life. Disoriented. Up was down, and Up was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Except there was no time. The pacing could’ve been five minutes or 24 hours, and he’d have no awareness or recollection of chronology.

  The fingers of the night ran its nails up Taiyo’s neck then clenched his throat before he could swallow. The night bent down and brought its mouth to his ear, paused, parted its lips, and—ever so softly—whispered with utmost sincerity: “I’m going to kill every one of you.”

  A tremor ran through Taiyo’s body. He stole himself from the grasp of fear, and blurted out, “Someone should go get Kristen’s air tank.”

  “Someone?”

  “Who is someone?

  “Janken?”

  It wasn’t funny this time. Nevertheless, the suggestion ended Ronin’s pacing, and they played. “Rock, scissors, paper …”

  Ronin lost. He slapped Taiyo in the chest with the flashlight. “Spot me.” Ronin needed a task.

  “Grab the drone while you’re down there,” Taiyo told him. “I have an idea.”

  Minutes later, the shoosh-shoosh of the croc’s slinking dash sent Ronin scrambling back up the rock heap. He leaped boulder-to-boulder, and the tank slipped from his grasp, clanging back down the ridge.

  “How’d it go, Dundee?” Nel asked as she extended a hand to a crawling, wheezing Ronin. “Did you kill him?”

  Through his panting, on his knees, Ronin raised his head and answered, “It’s a she.”

  “You checked? —The way Ethan explained?” Taiyo said.

  Ronin shook his head, still winded. “Its disposition.”

  “How about the drone?”

  “You know what? Fuck you, hafu.” Ronin smacked Taiyo in the shin with the Zeel-5. “Krissy’s dead. Gone. So fucking what if I didn’t kill the croc?”

  “Ronin.”

  “You think I didn’t try?” His voice shook as he yelled; his whole body was shaking. “I’m still gonna kill it, you know. I fucking will.”

  “Ronin, no one blames you.”

  “Blame?” Rocks tumbled as Ronin tried to stand. “Who the shit said anything about blame?”

  “It’s okay. Please, Ronin. Come sit down,” Nel urged.

  “What’s your plan now, hafu? Huh? You gonna go carve Krissy’s initials
in the wall? Add up the dead like a scoreboard? I know you’ve been doing it, you sick shit. Fucking halfbreed. What’s your plan, huh? Take the helm, captain. Do something before I write your name on that wall.”

  Taiyo let Ronin rant. He didn’t know what to say, anyway. It took some time, but after more pacing Ronin calmed down on his own and took a seat beside Taiyo. Perhaps numbed by the bad air, nobody said anything for a long time.

  Taiyo couldn’t go back to the add Kristen’s name to the canvass. If it wasn’t safe before, it was suicide now. He didn’t know if the tribute he’d started had been the right thing to do. Maybe not. But it made him feel wretched that it would include Anton and Walter but not Kristen.

  ***

  Nel smacked her headlamp. Its flickering stopped, but it went dim. The battery wouldn’t last much longer.

  Taiyo held the drone up to the pale, yellow light. “It can’t fly on its own anymore.” He flicked one of the busted rotors, and it made a sharp, sickly whir and abruptly stopped. “And the battery’s drained. But if we throw it …” He stood up, careful of the loose rocks, and struck the pose of a quarterback. “Go long,” he said.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” said Nel.

  Before answering, Taiyo considered: Drunk on toxic air, playing catch in the pitch dark atop a precarious ridge of loose rock above a lurking monster crocodile.

  “Trust me,” he said.

  Ronin made a disdainful snort.

  “I’m not fucking around here, Ronin.” The authority in Taiyo’s voice surprised himself. “Do you guys want out of here, or not? Because I’m willing to take a chance to try something. Are you?”

  They strapped the dimmer of the two headlamps to the drone so they’d be able to track it in the air, and then spread several steps apart to form a loose triangle. Vocal cues helped guide the first gentle underhand tosses. When Ronin tossed it to Nel, it looked from Taiyo’s angle like the tail of a blurry comet. Coming from Nel, head-on toward him, it was almost impossible to judge its distance, except that the light went up and then down with the arc of the trajectory.

  “Stay focused,” Taiyo ordered. “Absorb it with your body when you catch it, so it doesn’t just rebound off you.”

  When the drone’s LED ring failed to light, they spaced out more and shifted to throwing overhand. “A little harder now.”

  The atmosphere-to-electricity conversion only worked at flight speeds over 25 kilometers an hour.

  “There,” yelled Nel. “Did you see it?” The LEDs had flickered.

  “For a second,” said Ronin.

  “Okay, keep it moving. Less time between throws now.”

  The ring of light grew more stable, making the drone’s path easier to follow. After several minutes, they heard its wounded propellers come on, the remnants of which whipped Taiyo’s fingers as he made a catch. “Okay, now keep it going between the two of you while I open the app.”

  He tossed the Zeel-5 to Nel and then used the app to put it on power-saving mode. After five or so minutes he swapped places with Nel and gave her his phone.

  “Looking good,” she said. “The drone’s up to a three percent charge.”

  “How about my phone?”

  “Um. Two percent.”

  “Shit.”

  “Make that one percent,” Nel said.

  “Switch to yours.”

  She did. “Seven percent left on mine,” she said, but a minute later it was down to six.

  Nel swapped in for Ronin. His phone was almost dead, too. It occurred to Taiyo that they could salvage Kristen’s phone, but he was pretty sure she’d run the battery down days ago.

  “Hafu, can’t you get the drone to charge our phones?”

  In theory, it might’ve been possible given enough time, but without the rebreathers, time was something they didn’t have. His head and chest hurt, but only when he tried to think or breathe.

  “No chance,” Taiyo said.

  “Better get this thing charged up fast, then,” said Nel after pitching the drone through the air to Taiyo.

  Taiyo didn’t really expect to find a passage out of the Asylum, but they had to try—it’d be a lot less volatile than his backup plan. He and Nel kept the drone moving while Ronin watched the livestream on his phone.

  “Keep it still,” Ronin told them. “The mapping’s all over the place.”

  “What’s the battery at?” Taiyo asked.

  “Six percent for my phone. Four for the drone.”

  “Okay, that’ll have to do,” said Taiyo, and after his next catch, he took the drone over to the edge of the rock heap. Leaning out over the trench, facing the north wall, he held the Zeel-5 out as far as he could. “What do you see?”

  “Blackness.”

  “Take it off visible light and put it on LIDAR.”

  “Okay. Done.”

  “Now what do you see?”

  “A 3D topographic rendering of the top of your ugly head.”

  He tilted the angle of his hand. “And now?”

  “Rocks.”

  “Any openings? A fissure, or any kind of passage leading out of this place?”

  “Hold on. Looking in IR now. Holy Osiris, it’s hot down there.”

  “Anything?”

  “Fucking wait a second, hafu. … Yeah, there’s a crack, but …”

  “What?”

  “The air up here is getting pretty damn hellish, too. CO2 … methane … If you’re going to find us a way out of here, you better do it fast.”

  “Just tell me what you see.”

  “Nothing,” said Ronin. “Phone’s going to die.”

  The lights on the Zeel were losing luster, too. After Taiyo and Ronin played a quick game of catch to charge the drone, again Taiyo held it out, but this time Nel took a turn with the livestream.

  “Just hot death,” she reported. The glow of her phone lit the sweat on her face and neck.

  Taiyo aimed the Zeel toward the corner of the Asylum. “How about now?”

  “Hold it there,” she said, her voice rising with excitement. “There’s something. There’s a gap. An opening in the rock face.”

  “Dimensions?”

  “About … twelve, maybe fifteen wide. Running all the way up to the ceiling. It looks like it cuts deeper back into the wall, and it’s all porous with little air pockets and—”

  “Twelve or fifteen meters?”

  “Centimeters,” she answered grimly.

  “No space to get a person through?”

  “Only low down. It widens at the stream, but you’d be crawling into a six-hundred-degree sulfuric pressure-cooker.”

  “Celsius or Fahrenheit?” said Ronin.

  “Does it matter?”

  The Zeel died, and the feed went blank.

  “Okay,” Taiyo said. “Keep your phones off to save the battery. I have one last idea.”

  ***

  Feeling dizzy, Taiyo sat down to steady himself atop of the rock heap. He had a broad enough surface to balance on, but being unable to see where the ridge dropped made him feel about to fall. He’d been cradling the Zeel-5, not unlike its inventor, Dr. Wilson, had done. Though, for Taiyo, the drone in his arms felt more like an emotional support animal than a baby.

  The Zeel-5 had worked, as far as recharging itself on air molecules. The technology really did have potential as an interplanetary cycler, making broad loops from Earth to Venus, Venus to Mars, Mars to Titan, and beyond—maybe even out to the Oort Cloud and 550 AU. Taiyo imagined it accelerating through the dense atmosphere of Venus. Even the sparse air molecules of Mars could be turned into thrust if the vehicle entered the atmosphere at a high enough velocity. Titan would be a fun one. Or it could make a run through the plumes of Enceladus …

  He wondered if the thoughts going through his head were as profound as they felt, or if delusion was one symptom of the air he was breathing. He supposed one did not exclude the other.

  Something brushed the clammy skin of his bare left arm. Snoring, Ronin w
as leaning onto Taiyo’s side, and their two sweaty craniums collided in slow-mo.

  Taiyo accepted the weight and distracted himself further. He tried to estimate the difference in travel time to 550 AU between a scramjet and the nuclear-electric magnetoplasma engines from his rejected proposal, but he couldn’t think clearly enough to come up with any solid numbers.

  He began to wonder why Ronin hadn’t wanted to talk about it before.

  “Hey, Ronin?”

  Ronin grunted but didn’t sit up.

  Taiyo nudged him. “Ronin.”

  “Fuhgoff,” Ronin growled. His voice vibrated against Taiyo’s skull in much the same way the crocodile’s tooth had in the hammock snare.

  “You said you’d heard of aerogravity assist before, right?”

  “You heard of letting a man die in peace?”

  Nel came and sat tightly against Taiyo’s right side. “Don’t die,” she mumbled across him to Ronin. “You haven’t slain the monitor lizard yet.”

  “It’s not a monitor lizard,” Ronin managed.

  “What is it then?”

  “Your mother.”

  “What’s aerogravity assist, Ronin?” asked Nel, sounding only slightly less drugged and dying than Ronin. She let her head fall against Taiyo’s cheek. A tiny grunt accompanied the impact, letting him know she hadn’t passed out but had only underestimated her delta-v. “Does it involve getting us some oxygen?”

  Taiyo kept talking to keep them awake. If they fell asleep, they wouldn’t wake up. “Basically, it’s shooting a scramjet through a planet’s atmosphere to pick up a speed burst, right Ronin?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Go to sleep.”

  “If that’s not what is …”

  “You’re just describing a scramjet,” Nel said. “But you called it aerogravity assist.”

  Taiyo hadn’t really considered that. His thoughts were murky. “I guess it’s called that because, well, it gets its boost from the atmosphere instead of from rounding a gravity well.” He that didn’t make sense.