Tribulation Read online

  TRIBULATION

  550AU: BOOK ONE

  Kaz Morran

  Copyright © 2019 Kaz Morran

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Please don't sue me. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, companies, entities, and incidences are products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people or events is coincidental.

  First Publication: 2019

  Sendai, Japan

  ISBN 978-0-9939363-0-2

  [email protected]

  www.kazmorran.wordpress.com

  The cover photo of this book is a derivative of Blowing Springs Cave NC, used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

  by Kaz Morran. It is attributed to Dave Riggs. Many thanks. The original version can be found at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/driggs/15922680934/in/faves-47276773@N03/

  (And, yes, I know it’s not a lava tube.)

  “… because here began all our troubles.”

  — Captain James Cook, 1770

  Captain James Cook and the British-commissioned Endeavour set course for Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun. The French instructed its men-of-war to grant the Endeavour safe passage, for her mission to learn the distance to the center of the solar system was an enterprise of service to all mankind.

  The crew’s science objective now complete, Cook unsealed the secret orders for the next phase of their journey: to seek the fabled, Terra Australis Incognita.

  It was here, up the coast of the Coral Sea on the evening of June 10, 1770, that the Endeavour struck a reef, and Cook’s crew encountered a land born in the Dreamtime—born when the great landmass, Gondwana, broke free from Pangaea and new mountain ranges and coastlines thrust into being. It was an age when lava flowed like wine at the gala of wrathful deities.

  The crew encountered the Kuku Yalanji, keepers of a land where great granite outcrops plunged into canyons of raging rapids and coffee-colored rivers meandered along banks of mangroves. It was a world slowed by the hot, steamy air and hidden from daylight by the canopy of the world’s oldest rainforest. It was a land unchanged since the age of dinosaurs, where the chorus of birds insects never silenced and giant ferns and palms reach out over white sand to caress the Great Barrier Reef. It was where eight meters of rain fell in a year, but on a clear night, not a light but the Moon could be found to hinder the stars.

  The crew’s frantic efforts to bail water, make patches from sails, and pitch canons to lighten the payload succeeded in keeping the Endeavour afloat, but nothing could relieve the captain’s mood, and thus he named the place as he saw it: Cape Tribulation, “because here began all our troubles.”

  1

  When learning to fly, some prefer to start by taking off from the ground. Taiyo Yamazaki was not that type. He preferred to start at the top of a mountain and engineer his wings on the way down.

  That didn't mean he’d come to the final round of selection unprepared. Not at all. Taiyo had no delusions. Things would go wrong—were supposed to go wrong, and from adversity would emerge the candidates best suited to explore hostile worlds. What no one had anticipated, however, was just how hostile a world their home planet could be.

  The sand swallowed his naked toes as the beach turned swampy. Only a few more meters. Twenty at the most. … Maybe fifty. He’d just get to the end, snap a pic, and go back. No hanging around.

  He couldn’t see the end of the headland. It was there a minute ago before the fog rolled in: a gangrenous finger of rainforest creeping out to test the water.

  An estuary, rust-red with volcanic runoff, fanned out at the base of the headland. He stopped before wading through, remembering to check upstream and down for movement. He mentally sectioned the water and shorelines into a grid and then scanned each cell. Detecting no movement, he wiped the mist and sweat from his face and then listened.

  Nothing.

  Nothing but the cries of songbirds and cicadas, and the hot humid air made them sound distant and haunting. Without a pebble or blemish to disrupt the current, not even the water made a noise.

  After another systematic check, Taiyo waded across, and he did so quickly.

  He paused on the far bank, careful to keep back from the water’s edge.

  Back down the beach, the faint outlines of the other five candidates were mulling about beneath the palm trees. He hadn't told them he’d left. He hadn’t planned to go this far.

  Blinking away the mist, he checked the time on his phone: thirteen minutes until the end of the break.

  He kept going.

  The headland couldn’t have extended more than fifty meters into the sea but had no solid surface to speak of, aside from the slick crisscross of mangrove. Low tide had exposed the black, skeletal root network, making the cape resemble the half-submerged carcass of a giant serpent, the tufts of foliage along its spine like knots of hair.

  Taiyo clambered over the disjointed appendages

  There it was, up ahead. The fog had cleared enough to see the end, where the murky world of mangroves yielded to the clear water of the Coral Sea. He crept closer. Against the souls of his feet and palms of his hands, the roots felt more like fish scales or clammy flesh than like tree parts. The whole jumble seemed to flex under his weight as he stepped from root to root inches above the water. Standing with the aid of a wilted trunk, he saw the straw-haired tendrils of another tree drooped down through the waves and clawing at the coral. He permitted himself a smile and released a pent-up breath. This was the place. Where one World Heritage Site touched another—the Daintree Rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef.

  He pulled the phone from his belt and snapped a picture. Whatever happened to him next, he’d remember this spot as a marker between the old life and new.

  A gust rattled the skinny trunk. Taiyo put the phone away to hold on, but the tree bent back and dumped him waist-deep into the briny water between the roots. Mud and saltwater doused his eyes. Scrambling against the suction of the muck, he regained a foothold only to slip again. Two scraped shins and a thumping heart later, he hauled himself up out of the water, safe from what might lurk below.

  He wiped the sting from his eyes on his undershirt and looked around. Nothing had changed. The ordeal hadn’t even left a mark on his surrounding; how foolish he’d been to come out here. What had he been thinking?

  The water was still too close—a hand’s width between the root he was standing on and the water he’d just climbed out of. The edge of the headland and open sea loomed less than a meter in front of him. He looked around for a safer path back to the beach.

  Something shook the trunks and bushes. The water stirred. Waves lapped the roots, then crashed. With the splashing came a rhythmic thudding, rising and falling in pitch as it neared.

  Bwaaab … Bwaaab … Bwaaab …

  He spun around. Unable to spot the source through the thicket, he jerked backward, trying to flee. Water shot up between the roots. He grabbed a trunk for balance. The rising noise tightened his chest.

  Bwaaab … Bwaaab …

  He sprinted limb over limb from threat, pulse racing, deeper into the knot of mangroves for shelter. He fell through the roots. Recovered. Clambered to stay above the water. Scurried until the terrain grew too thick to go farther.

  The rhythm turned into a roar.

  Bwaaawaaawaaawaaa …

  Closer.

  Louder.

  He huddled and trembled in the branches. Birds burst into flight, squawking as they fled.

  He sprung root to root to the edge o
f the mangroves and leaped into the water feet first. Knee-deep, three bounding strides took him back to the sand. He dashed inland, stopped at the wall of jungle, grabbed a stick and spun around to fight back.

  Nothing there… Only the noise.

  Gasping to regain his breath, hands on his knees, face dripping in sweat, rain, and brackish water, Taiyo watched a pale-blue pontoon boat round the tip of the headland. The outboard motor groaned into the wind, and the bow thudded rhythmically against the waves.

  Bwaaab… Bwaaab…

  He spat the brine from his mouth and cursed, more disgusted with himself than with the taste. He rolled down a sleeve to wipe his face and caught the agency’s patch out of the corner of his eye. Explore to Realize, it said.

  Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency—JAXA.

  He headed back up the beach to reunite with the other candidates.

  The break was over. There’d be plenty of time for self-loathing later.

  2

  Ronin Aro, Taiyo’s barrel-chested, greasy-ponytailed ex-professor batted aside an overhanging fern, dumping its catchment of rainwater onto the trail and into the faces of the five other candidates behind him.

  Kristen, one of two Americans on the team, reached back for a towel to dry off with. Ronin told her, “People think survival’s about eating grubs and pine needles. It’s not. It’s about keeping your head in the game. Use it or lose it. That’s what they say in Girl Scouts, am I right?”

  “I wasn’t actually a Girl Scout.”

  “Ever killed a Tibetan snow leopard?

  “What?”

  “Beautiful animals.”

  Ronin always sounded so intense, urgent, and soaring as if everything pertained to something imminent and life-affirming. Taiyo let the paces grow between himself and Ronin, but the gap did little to stiffle the alleged academic’s croaking. “My head was in the game, then. Like those polar bears who get down real low and wait at the ice for a seal to pop up. I knew to wait. Mindful as a fucking monk. You’re a zoologist, right?”

  “Not exactly, but—”

  “So you can appreciate this.”

  “I’m not sure I—”

  “I waited until she got to suckling her cubs …”

  Kristen made a series of small noises, none of which conveyed a desire for Ronin to elaborate, and none of which made him stop.

  “The screaming and crying—Who’d have thought they’d sound so humanlike.”

  “He’s messing with you,” Taiyo called ahead to Kristen from the back of the troop, over the sound of boots slopping through the muck. “Don’t believe Ronin’s stories.”

  “Aren’t snow leopards extinct?” Kristen asked Ronin, her voice an octave higher now.

  “Sure, now.”

  The tunnel of fig, banana, and acacia trees opened to the clearing where they’d left the vehicles.

  ***

  The slick, sloppy, and sopping foundation would bedevil the team like a curse, beginning now in the parking lot, and continuing forty minutes later with Taiyo rolling his vehicle.

  The four Toyota Hilux SEs awaited. Perched on a gravel mound across the field of earthen muck, each 4x4—armed with fuck-you tires, snorkel exhaust, and a bull bar poised to raze a village—sparkled a different hue of masculinity.

  The contractors, in their white NASA-issue jumpsuits, took to the shade of a eucalyptus. The candidates, weighted by the gear on their backs, showed off their tolerance for adverse environments by standing faux-relaxed in the sun and mud, baking in their blue jumpsuits and casually batting mosquitoes while they awaited the task briefing.

  Ronin hadn’t stopped talking. He cast a bulging gaze at each pair of eyes in the crescent of candidates that’d formed around him. Basking in the attention, he stroked his ponytail as if handling a snake. “The first days of a crisis are crucial. Water. Food. Shelter. That’s all you think about. You secure your basics, and then …” He stepped closer to Kristen, forcing her to retreat into deeper mud. “That’s when your thoughts turn inward.”

  Kristen faked a laugh. She had short, black hair and a boyish figure that made her look like a matchstick, especially next to Ronin’s minotaur of a build. Kristen would oversee the mission’s biological and geological sample collection. To the team, she brought the curious—if not irrelevant—expertise of a lithozoologist, a field she pioneered and was likely the only member of.

  Taiyo let out a groan, which made the Canadian, Nel, look his way. Side-by-side, they shared a quiet chuckle at Ronin’s expense. A head shorter than Taiyo, she stood with her back as straight as her long black hair, and she looked like a manga version of a stone Buddha: Asiatic and stoic, but baby-faced with big black eyes that undermined her severity. She raised her water bottle in cheers, and Taiyo reached behind and took the bottle from his backpack to return the gesture.

  “Is this …” —Nel pointed her chin at Ronin, making no attempt at tact— “typical?”

  Taiyo coughed and nearly choked. Half-recovered, he shook his head and suppressed a laugh. Ronin was indeed not typical. Not in Japan, anyway; not outside of a psych ward.

  Real mission or not, Ronin was a liability. That much must’ve been evident to the other candidates, and Taiyo felt guilt by association. He didn’t know the details, but midway through the first round, well after JAXA had already narrowed the pool of five thousand qualified applicants down to 32, they removed one of the finalists and replaced her with Ronin. Despite multiple failures and breaches of protocol during the first three rounds, Ronin had staved off disqualification and hung on to become the only other candidate besides Taiyo still in the running to be Japan’s next astronaut.

  Taiyo unzipped the front of his jumpsuit and rolled up his sleeves. The material felt stiff, like hospital linen. The morning had started with a wet chill in the air, but the humidity had risen as the day wore on, and it now felt as hot and steamy as the August weather he’d left in Japan. Thank Zeus and Vishnu the agencies had scheduled the simulated mission for Australian winter.

  One of the contractors had strayed across the lot to try out selfie poses in front of the 4x4s. His forearm hair danced in the breeze while he chewed his gum and looked whimsically to the sky through oversized sunglasses. As if on cue, a bird cried out overhead—not the soaring screech of an eagle, but the squawk of something less majestic. Perhaps a brush turkey.

  The man’s antics drew the nudges and giggles of his colleagues in the shade. One of them, a mid-sized, middle-aged British woman, noticed Nel and Taiyo smirking and slopped across the lot toward them. She leaned in and whispered, but not quietly, “That’s the pilot. We call him the Aviator on account of his sunnies. Not one of America’s finest, that one.” She tossed her head back and cackled so wildly Taiyo stumbled. “Couldn’t get work at home flying commercial, so he came to Oz to try his luck as a bush pilot. But his luck must be running out fast if he’s doing gigs for T3.” She cackled again.

  Taiyo and Nel both politely smiled at the woman.

  T3 was shorthand for Tactical and Technical Training, the primary contractor of Project Daintree.

  From satellite data sharing and Cold War vessel dockings to space stations and interplanetary probes, the domain of space has always been at the forefront of international cooperation. Tensions between nations looked small from orbit. In this vein, it made sense for JAXA, ESA, the CSA, and NASA to pool their potential astronauts for Project Daintree, and given NASA’s resources and legacy, few would’ve questioned that the US should lead the project.

  Taiyo was probably not alone, however, in wrinkling his forehead upon finding out NASA had handed over general operations of Project Daintree to a private security and logistics contractor, especially one of T3’s reputation. According to what Taiyo had dug up online, T3 had once been called, somewhat ominously, Executive Outcomes. EO used to recruit, train, and deploy what they called “private security personnel,” and what the United Nations called mercenaries. That violation of international law had prompted EO to shif
t focus and rebrand itself T3.

  The Aviator paced the row of Toyota 4x4s, splashing red sludge up the legs of his white jumpsuit. He spat his gum into the mud and stepped on it as if putting out a cigarette. He called for everyone’s attention, and it took several minutes before he got it.

  “The objectives of the Project Daintree missions are threefold,” said the Aviator. He raised his eyebrows and intonation at the end of each statement. “First and foremost, this simulation is a test. A test of your interdisciplinary skills, a test of your adaptability … The terrain is not intended to be an exact Martian or Lunar analog …”

  Obviously, thought Taiyo, though he didn’t show his disdain for the condescension. He stood at attention, as ramrod as in his student days at any number of assemblies and ceremonies. His posture and focus now, however, stemmed less from habit or fear of discipline, and more from a genuine display of passion and dedication for what he was about to embark on.

  Not for the first time, the magnitude of it all swept through Taiyo; a wave of combined horror and exhilaration. The coming weeks would change all six of the candidates’ lives, but none more than Taiyo’s. Although the detective hadn’t explicitly said so, he knew that facing the Japanese justice system as an astronaut rather than a regular mixed-race hafu would significantly reduce his odds of conviction or incarceration. One of the only times Japan embraced a hafu as its one of its own was when a hafu athlete, entertainer, or breakthrough scientist succeeded on the world stage. A regular hafu had a better chance of dying in custody than of being found innocent.

  “But it will mimic the physiological and psychological experiences of off-Earth exploration.” the Aviator continued. “We’ll be monitoring your activities remotely. The isolation portion at the end should be especially fun to watch.”