Tribulation

by Kaz Morran

  “Yeah. Yeah. Let it go, kids,” mumbled Ronin.

  Nel wouldn’t let it go. “Why not do both? It’s already in the name,” she said.

  Taiyo hadn’t considered that either. “So …” It was hard to form the thoughts, as basic as they should’ve been. “First you get a kick from Venus atmo, then from Jupiter g. A double boost.”

  “Couldn’t you get that double boost at each planet?” said Nel. Her hair was hot a wet against Taiyo’s cheek, and she had to keep adjusting her weight to keep from sliding off him.

  “A double-double?”

  “Yeah. Why not?”

  “The gravity’s not there at Venus,” said Taiyo. “Too shallow of a well to make it worth a gravity assist.”

  “And Jupiter?”

  “Nope. Nope. Nope,” Ronin slurred, as if to confirm he hadn’t died. “You try and fish your instrument in there, and she’ll bite it off. Trust me.”

  “Sure, in a classic flyby,” Taiyo said. “But we’re not talking classic here.” He leaped to his feet so fast he almost knocked everyone down the side of the rock heap. He let a swirl of dizziness pass before saying, “This is genius.” His hands flew to the top of his head. “I mean, seriously genius.” He bent down to hug Nel.

  “I’ll call the Nobel committee as soon as we get out of here.” Nel pushed off him and turned away. “Right now I’m throwing up.”

  By the sound of it, only spittle came out.

  He rubbed her back while she knelt, head in her hands. At the same time, he thought out loud in Ronin’s direction: “The deeper into the gravity well you get, the more you bend your trajectory and the bigger the speed burst you pick up as you head out through the atmosphere on your way to somewhere else. So, obviously, you want to get to places with high gee. Jupiter or Saturn. The outer planets.”

  “Mhmn.”

  “The trade-off is that outer planets have less orbital velocity than the inner planets. You with me, Ronin?”

  “Uh huh. Jupiter’s slow as a shit-drip.” Ronin kicked a rock down the pile, and it echoed as it clacked, bounced, and rolled.

  “The inner planets move faster, but they’re too small.”

  “Hmn. Weak-gee-ass motherfuckers.”

  “Exactly. So you’re not getting much of a boost from the inner planets. At least not from gravity alone.”

  “Mhmn.”

  “You following me?”

  “Argh. Why are you still talking?”

  “But it’s not like the inner planets have no gravity, right?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Obviously the farther out from the planet’s surface that you have to make your flyby, the less of the planet’s gravity your taking advantage of. Nobody’s even considered dipping a probe down close to the surface. I mean, at those speeds—the thermals … But with the materials we have these days …”

  “Hmn,” Nel and Ronin said in unison.

  “Throw in a scramjet,” said Taiyo, “and we might even get the boost we need to reach five-fifty AU before Tabaldak gets out of range.”

  “And out of this cave?” Nel said.

  “No.”

  “Spoiler alert,” said Ronin, “everybody dies.”

  After a long silence, Ronin spoke again. “Tai?” He sounded somber.

  “What?”

  “Someone’s already figured all that out.”

  “How to get out of here?” said Nel.

  “Not that,” Ronin answered. “They already figured out AGA. Aerogravity assist.”

  “Who has?”

  “Top secret.”

  “Tell me, or I’ll sick the croc on you.”

  Ronin actually laughed, but then said he honestly wasn’t allowed to tell. “I’ll take it to my grave.”

  “This is your grave. You took it here. Your obligation is fulfilled.”

  “That’s a fair point.” Ronin mulled it over a minute before saying, “China.”

  “China?”

  “China.”

  “China knows how to do aerogravity assist?”

  “Yep.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know.”

  “How?”

  “I stole the plans.”

  “From China?”

  “From China.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Stole them and traded them to JAXA. Evidently, I traded them for a slow, painful death alongside you two idling tractors.”

  “You’re an asshole.”

  “I’m a creature of opportunity.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Then crocodiles are assholes, too.”

  “Agreed.”

  42

  “Where’d it go?”

  Taiyo could hear Nel breathing beside him. She held the drone at arm’s length and scanned the emptiness.

  “You sure it’s on infrared?” he whispered to her.

  She checked. “I’m sure.”

  Another round of catch had recharged the drone. From their perch on the side of the rock heap overlooking the shattered raft, the only heat signature the drone picked up was faint and dispersed—that of Kristen’s remains.

  “Does it matter that it’s coldblooded?” Ronin said.

  “No.”

  “Maybe it got tired of waiting.”

  “Then it’s smarter than us,” said Taiyo. He took the phone from Nel and checked for the rebreathers on the drone’s LIDAR map. “Okay, spot me,” he said before handing the Zeel-5 to Ronin and climbing down closer to the bottom.

  “This is crazy,” he heard Nel say. She was right, but without air, nothing else mattered.

  Taiyo kept the headlamp off. More than by sight, the croc navigated by vibration and smell, but it still seemed dumb to temp it by mounting a beacon on his forehead.

  “Nel, you’ll tell me the second something comes on screen, right?”

  Of course she would.

  Turn fifteen degrees left, he recited in his head, then straight eight paces. He tried to be cautious of obstacles without shortening his stride, and without making Nel and Ronin waste any more battery life than they had to. His ears strained on high alert, but the only sounds were the soft taps of his footfalls on basalt. He clenched the first rebreather set to his chest when he found it, somewhat amazed the only issue on the way to it had been a mild case of heart palpitations.

  Far worse than the weight of the apparatus Taiyo hauled up the heap of rocks was the anchor latched to each breath. At least, he thought as he leaned forward to adjust his balance and reached for purchase on the next boulder above, although for now the croc could breath better than them in the low-quality air, the rebreathers would give them the edge in the apocalyptic atmosphere in the trench.

  He hoped.

  He tumbled up over the last boulders and onto the top of the rock heap. There, he plunked down the rebreather gear and took the phone from Nel so she could go next.

  The battery life of her phone and had sunk to 8 percent; the drone to 6. They could’ve recharged the drone again, but Nel was already on her way down, eager to get the task over with.

  Like Taiyo, she recovered a rebreather in the dark and without trouble.

  Ronin’s turn. He took the headlamp from Taiyo and turned it on even before starting the descent. Boulders shifted beneath his weight as he climbed. Rocks tumbled.

  He called back, “Four paces out, turn right ninety degrees, four paces ahead?”

  “Five and five,” Nel told him. “Not four and four.”

  “I’ve got longer legs.”

  “Just hurry up. Batteries.”

  “Yeah. Yeah.”

  But Ronin didn’t hurry. Down the heap, distant, he looked ghostly behind the misty orb of yellow light. From their perch upon the rocks, Taiyo and Nel watched him reach the third rebreather—and then keep going.

  “What’s he doing?” said Nel. On the screen, Ronin’s heat signature moved south, farther from the rock heap. Farther into the open and away from safety.

  “Ro
nin, get your ass back here.”

  “Is it coming?”

  “Batteries,” Nel yelled.

  He ignored her.

  “Ronin!” she screamed.

  “For shit’s sake. Just let me—”

  “It’s coming! From the east. To your left. Eight meters. Seven.”

  The light blurred. Legs skittered beneath the glow. The heat signature showed the croc gaining on him.

  “Five meters, Ronin!”

  Ronin ran into something. Fell. Got up. Ran. Hid behind a boulder. Then he darted off out of range, leaving only the massive, elongated, red blotch of the crocodile to sulk across the screen.

  “Ronin!”

  The croc slinked away in Ronin’s direction, out of view.

  Nel screamed to Ronin with every fighting breath left in her lungs while Taiyo, from his knees, hurled every rock he could palm, desperate to distract the predator from its pursuit. He threw until his knuckles bled and his right arm turned ragged. Then he did the same with his left.

  But both Nel and Taiyo knew that was where their desperation to save Ronin stopped. Neither made a move to climb down the heap after him.

  Taiyo pressed his fists to the side of his head. Nel yanked him by the arm to keep him from falling over the edge as he screamed his hatred for Ronin—hatred for Ronin’s selfishness, hatred for Ronin's stupidity and arrogance. Again Taiyo threw rocks, this time hoping to hit Ronin if the son of a bitch hadn’t yet been taken out by the croc.

  After a lengthy, burdensome silence, Nel suggested Ronin might have been taking the long way around to retrieve his rebreather.

  “You’re bargaining with yourself,” Taiyo told her. “Are you going to pray now, too?”

  “Fuck you.”

  Quiet. Then: “Sorry.”

  “Are you going to keep it together?” she asked. “We’ve got one more chance, right? You said you have a plan. Can you keep it together long enough to pull it off, or am I going to have to watch you run off into madness, too?”

  Rocks clacked together behind them. Taiyo sprung to his feet, shoulders tight, fists up. A boulder tumbled.

  “Ammo! Ammo!” Nel yelled.

  Teetering with each blind step, Taiyo bent down for rocks as he backed away from the sound. “Where?” He’d already thrown them all.

  His legs tensed, wanting to run. To where?

  He pawed a rock—too big—and stumbled into Nel. Both down, the sound of steps came closer. Reaching back, Taiyo coaxed a rock into the grasp of his fingers. He chucked it forward.

  “What the fuck!” Ronin shouted.

  Taiyo threw several more before his overworked shoulder forced him to stop. The ensuing scuffle might have turned vicious if the exertion didn’t make everyone want to puke and pass out.

  And so once more, the three of them sat atop the heap, panting, sulking, contemplating their imminent demise, and leaning against each other and the three rebreather sets for support. Nearby, laid the other spoils of Ronin’s rogue crusade: a bottle of water and three sharpened lengths of aluminum.

  “What now?” said Nel, deadpan and hoarse.

  “Make a spear launcher,” Ronin said as if it was self-evident. “Rig up a chemical combustion and fire a pole through its heart.” Ronin had a one-track mind.

  The concentration of methane hadn’t quite reached the 5-percent lower flammability limit, but taking revenge on an animal hardly seemed like something to risk igniting the atmosphere over.

  “As feasible as building a rocket launcher out of a hammock sounds,” he told Ronin, “I have another idea.”

  “Which is?”

  “Serendipity.”

  “You mean aimless wondering, don’t you?”

  “More or less.” But that wasn’t at all what he had in mind. If he told them, they’d revolt. Might even restrain him.

  “What the shit do you think I was just doing down there?” Ronin yelled.

  “I have something different in mind.”

  “Not hunting,” said Nel.

  “No.”

  Ronin said, “If you guys aren’t into killing monsters, that’s fine. I’m more than able to do it on my own.”

  Taiyo felt Ronin try to sit up and then give up.

  “Ronin,” Nel began. She coughed to clear her voice. “If we don’t find a way out of here fast …” She let the sentence hang.

  “I know a way,” said Taiyo.

  He really didn’t know how well it would work, or if the candidates—or croc—would survive intact. What he knew was he had to try, if for no other reason than he didn’t want to squander the chance to revive MONSTAR-X with aerogravity assist.

  Taiyo brought himself to his feet. Standing tall atop the heap of boulders. Wielding the spear, he lifted his face into the burn of sulfuric air and felt the blood heat up in his veins. He had to deliver his tribe to the surface. He had to tell the world how to break through its shell and leverage the binds of gravitation and atmosphere to extend its wings beyond the nest of Earth.

  He had to leave the cave, or die trying.

  He jabbed the butt of the spear into the ground, and as much as the deteriorating air pained the fibers in his chest, he filled his lungs and bellowed the command:

  “Ronin. Nel. Both of you. Get halfway down that side of the rock heap and stay there.” He kicked a loose rock in the direction he wanted them to take shelter, the same side as the broken raft. He levied the spear at them, not as a weapon but as an extension of his command. “Up. Now! Up and moving.”

  “Eat my ass,” said Ronin. “I’m killing that lizard.” He grunted as he got to his knees.

  “We’re not splitting up,” Nel told Taiyo, “and I’m not going hunting.” She got to her feet and came and stood with him.

  Ronin didn’t budge. Together, they steadied Ronin by the sleeves. He rose, zombie-like, without protest, and they lead him toward the south edge of the heap.

  “Don’t climb down too far,” Taiyo told him. “Stay at least a couple meters up, okay? Out of the croc’s reach. Find a nook or an outcrop or something to hide behind. Got it?”

  Ronin plunked his rear back down on a boulder. He ignored their pleas, yawned, and then slumped forward. Taiyo caught him by the shoulders, nearly taking a head-butt in the groin.

  Faced off in the dark with his former student, Ronin mumbled like an old sleepy drunk, “Creatures of opportunity, eh hafu? Spaceman. … Fuck your ancestors to the eighteenth generation. You do your thing. I’ll do mine. See who dies first. At least my way, that lizard dies, too.”

  “Happy hunting,” Nel said to Ronin, and she tugged at Taiyo’s hand.

  The two of them stepped back, leaving Ronin to balance on his own; elbows on his knees, head in his palms. “I’ll kill it. I will.”

  Nel waved her hand through the air. She told Ronin, “Seems more like you’re content to marinate in toxic despair.”

  “How poetic.”

  “Last chance if you’re coming with us,” she said.

  Taiyo tried to appeal to Ronin. “Realistically, Ronin, yeah, you’re right. We’re probably in the last minutes of our lives right now. Do you want to spend those last minutes trying to kill something, or do you want to spend them moving forward, where there’s a chance—however small—of survival?”

  “Survival’s overrated. I’ve done it. And there’s no shame dying in the jaws of a lizard monster,” Ronin said. “Especially if your other option is to shit your pants and choke to death.”

  Nel grunted—perhaps indifference, perhaps encouragement.

  Taiyo felt a bout of the bends coming on. He had to keep moving. “If that’s what you’ve decided, best of luck.”

  “Hafu,” Ronin’s tone beckoned. “Taiyo.” He waited until Taiyo came closer. His voice crackled through his whispering. “I know sometimes I can be a bit of a stick in the urethra. Call me traditional, but that’s the way I am.”

  Taiyo cringed. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “Let me say it.” Ronin turne
d to cough, almost wretched, and then grabbed hold of Taiyo’s wrist and pulled him in tight, face to face. “I want you to know that me being shitty to you isn’t because I hate you … and it’s not because I struck a deal with JAXA—not only. It’s because you’re a halfbreed, and I don’t think you’re fit to represent my country.”

  Taiyo yanked his hand away. Ronin didn’t react. Taiyo couldn’t see him, but he felt his presence shrivel. For the first time in Taiyo’s mind, Ronin was small. Old, vacant, and ugly. A mere speck in the fossil record.

  Taiyo turned his back on Ronin Aro. He didn’t even hate him, nor did he feel pity. The man was a withering shell of what a human being should be, and Taiyo was indifferent.

  Nel and Taiyo strapped on the rebreathers and hooked each other up to the network of hoses, valves, and tanks. A faint green light came to life as they powered on the displays.

  “You really think we’ll find an exit?” Nel said.

  “No,” he replied. “I’m an engineer. I’m going to make one.”

  ***

  O2 flickered between 11 and 13 percent. Less than at the top of Mt. Fuji—not critical, but two breaths only counted as one. And, of course, mountain climbers didn’t have high CO2, sulfur, and methane to deal with.

  Taiyo slid the mask down off his head onto his face. A coat of sweat compensated for any gap the week-old beard might have put between his cheeks and the rubber seal.

  Descending the heap of precarious boulders, he and Nel stepped carefully onto the slimy floor of the trench. Whether in spite of the danger or because of it, he welcomed the rush of endorphins. The heavy gear on his back, artificial respiration, alien terrain, noxious atmosphere—he felt like a real planetary explorer. This was no longer a simulation.

  The exhilaration faded when it struck him that the feeling in part came from freeing himself from Ronin. No matter the circumstances, it wasn’t right to feel good about abandoning someone.

  They’d left Ronin with one of the headlamps. Taiyo wore the other over the top of his mask. Down in the trench, the light could barely penetrate the fog roiling up from the stream, which ran parallel to the wall on their right as they trekked.