Going Inside (22)

The candidates enter the lava tubes and Taiyo tries to make up for a costly error.

Darkness lies one inch ahead.

-- Japanese proverb

 

 

 

Taiyo hit the water smack on his rear, but the brief free-fall made the sting worth the pain. The water didn’t quite chill to the marrow as he’d expected; the lake of fire and brimstone was geothermally active.

All was dead in the bottom of the shaft once the water resettled. He made gentle swoops with his arms, almost afraid to make a disturbance, and let the buoyancy of the nitrox tank do the bulk of the work. Above, the aperture to the sky appeared like a full Moon, the variations in the clouds like craters, but in front of Taiyo, the beam of his flashlight refracted and dissolved, so determined was the darkness to rule.

The rest of the candidates repelled down the shaft and jumped into the water in sequence. They’d only be submerged for a few minutes, and only to a depth of twelve meters, on this first and crucial dive of the cave expedition. Kristen and Anton dove under to lay and mark a guideline down and up through the stem and out above the water table onto a dry section of cave.

Taiyo buddied with Walter and went next. Hand over hand, he trusted the line and primary light, the headlamp, to lead him through obscurity. The water chilled as he rounded the overhang and headed vertically, up the stem, and he felt the resistance of the inflowing current. Silence bled from walls he couldn’t see, and the only sound became that of his breath being cycled through the tubes and scrubbers of the apparatus keeping him alive. The solitude saturated his skin, and attempting to shake the sudden sense of vulnerability and foreboding made his chest hurt. He understood why such a location had been chosen; he’d truly entered another world.

And that world was about to get even more alien.

Taiyo emerged from the water into a scene to be forever captured in his mind. He shed his diving gear and stood in awe, feeling taken by the Magic School Bus on a trip through the decaying hollows of a tree stump petrified in lava. The colors themselves seemed to climb and drip under the candidates’ artificial lights: coal-black, ash-white, and the full range of hues of flames, raw meat, and rust. A forest of lavacicles hung from the ceiling. Some looked like frozen, upside-down waves or shark fins, others extended two or three meters or even reached the porous floor and linked with stalagmite mounds. 

Taiyo removed his gloves and put his hand on a lava pillar and examined it with a flashlight. He knew how it had formed--when the molten ceiling had dripped to the floor, pooling into a mound and cooling before the link had time to break--but it looked like a stack of blood clots. The whole cavern resembled the dried, scabby insides of a carcass.

The candidates snapped pictures and captioned the formations Melting Hourglass, Blood Falls, Dirty Needle, Acid Trip, and so on. 

Moving away from his crewmates, Taiyo crunched across a section of serrated, gravelly floor and came across a formation he’d go on to name Alice’s Looking Glass. The pair of pillars formed a distorted, somewhat circular, meter-wide frame. He placed a hand on each pillar, careful not to get cut by the barnacle-like pores and, as if dipping his senses into another dimension, put his face and headlamp through for a view of the broader chamber of warped-honeycombs and web-like lattices.

Ms. Frizzle’s shrooms really kicked in when the candidates descended into a broad passage resembling a mucous-riddled respiratory tract with the smell of cellar mold.

The voices of the others turned ghostly, fading and meandering, as Taiyo took the lead. The tunnel took them deeper. The lava formations on the floor, walls, and ceiling became more prominent as the throat of the passage began to narrow. The air grew sultry and the smell more musty. Taiyo clambered up a pile of fallen stalactites, scraping his helmeted head along the teeth of the ceiling.

“Stop stalling, hafu,” Ronin said, and he whacked the side of Taiyo’s foot, lightly enough to appear non-violent but too hard to be called friendly encouragement. It did get Taiyo moving, though. The candidates followed him single file over and down the other side of the rubble pile, then up an incline about the dimensions of a playground tube slide--a feature Ronin gleefully named Elephant’s Urethra--and out into a lava tube broad enough to fly a Cessna in.

“Gosh, it’s hot down here,” said Walter. “Like that sort of heat that hovers over tarmac.”

“The Highway to Hell,” Ronin exclaimed. “That’s what we’ll call this section.”

Walter cleared his voice as if about to protest--perhaps about the use of the word “Hell”--but took a swig from his water bottle and sighed like a Coke commercial instead.

“No? Then how about the Tolled Expressway to Eternal Damnation?”

A moment later, barely audible over the crunching beneath their boots, Anton said, “You guys think anyone’s ever lived down here?”

“You mean a past civilization or something?” said Taiyo.

“I guess.”

Nel reminded them that the local aborigines, the Kuku Yalanji, had been telling legends about the world beneath Kambi Valley for centuries, possibly millennia.

“But did they actually live down here?”

“Why would anyone?”

“Maybe a few strays over the years.”

“Like fugitives?”

“Could be.”

“Or maybe they came down to hide from animals or natural disasters.”

“Or from each other,” said Ronin.

“Who knows,” said Kristen.

“Who knows,” agreed Anton.

In the widened path, Taiyo’s light failed to reach the walls, making the added space more restricting than liberating. The air remained unchanged: stagnant, chilled, and consumed by night. Spatial dimensions were no longer intuitive. Like an astronaut clinging to the outside of the Space Station for fear of falling, several times in the span of a few meters Taiyo’s gut lurched and he froze mid-step at the sudden distrust in his visual cortex as he struggled to discern whether the illuminated patch awaiting his footfall was solid rock or a vertical drop.

“Are we going the right way, navigator?” Walter asked Taiyo.

Strictly speaking, there was no “right” way when the goal was to explore. As long as they found the designated checkpoint by the end of day three.

Taiyo offered a polite laugh and replied to Walter half in jest, “Hopefully.”

“Hold on,” Walter ordered. “I’d appreciate a yes or no, sir.”

Taiyo stopped and turned to locate Walter with his headlamp. “We just passed a little offshoot, but it’s probably a dead end, so I kind of thought we’d keep on this same route a bit farther.” He plucked his phone off his chest and showed his commander the map. Everywhere they’d been in the cave system so far had already been mapped before they’d gotten there, albeit not in any detail. He pointed to a part of the map filled with gaps. “At least up to around here, then branch out from there depending on what we find.”

“How long?” Ronin said. “Because a change of scenery would be nice about now.”

“The app doesn’t have topo data for minor elevation changes, but--”

“How long, man-cub?” Ronin stepped closer, casting the light of his headlamp in Taiyo’s face.

“Six hundred meters, give or take.”

“Two thousand feet,” Kristen translated.

“Go straight or make a U-turn and take the off-ramp…” Anton said from somewhere. “What’s the call, Commander?”

“Ask the nav guy, bro,” Walter shot back. “Being commander doesn’t mean you guys get to leave every choice to me.”

Several minutes of arguing passed before they decided to stay the course and argue again in another six hundred meters.

Ronin reminded everyone the reason they’d brought the Zeel-5 drone along was to scout the routes ahead. “We should’ve used it at the offshoot,” he said more than once over the next few minutes, not that he wanted to go back. Taiyo had actually thought about using it, but he hadn’t wanted to stall their progress so early on.

“So, next junction, then,” Walter said. His voice made a short one-two hop off the wall beside Taiyo’s head.

The lava tube had now narrowed to the width of a downtown sidewalk; the lava pillars like Escher-esque lampposts and the lavacicles like upside down termite mounds.

A couple of kicked stones skipped past, bouncing along the corridor as Anton made his way from the rear to the front of the line. To Taiyo, he said, “The drone is made for exploring lava tubes, right?”

Nel answered for him from somewhere in the middle of their caravan of heavily backpacked explorers. “Sure, on Mars.”

“You guys really think it could fly on Mars?” Kristen said.

Taiyo ran his fingers against the course rock of the wall while he walked like he used to do as a kid in the school hallway and pretend his fingers were skating across the icy, low-gee surface of Europa or Enceladus. He wondered if Gluskab and Malsumis had ice. Probably. …Being that far out in the Oort Cloud. Especially if they were captured comets. The tidal tension might be just right for a liquid ocean to form. Of course, it might also have turned them into balls of molten goo. …

Walter said, “A normal drone is going to have issues.”

“Lift and air density are proportional,” said Ronin.

“That’s correct.”

Ronin yelled up ahead, “Hey, Tai? What’s the air density on Mars?”

“Uh… It varies a lot depending on where you are, and what season. Compared with sea level--”

“Blah, blah. Give me a number.”

As a kid, while his classmates could recite train station names, baseball stats, or Pokémon base stats, Taiyo had stuffed his head with physics formulas and astronomy facts. “At zero C, Mars is point-oh-one-one kilos per cubic meter.”

“The f**k, hafu?”

“Call it one percent of Earth’s.” Taiyo blew a slow breath from his cheeks. You couldn’t have conversations with people like Ronin Aro. “So you’d need bigger and faster rotors, but lightweight and…” They’d stopped listening, and he trailed off.

For the moment, Ronin went back to shoptalking with Walter. “So, one percent Earth-air density means your blades only give you one percent the lift…” And then Ronin called on Taiyo again, this time for the gravity of Mars.

“Thirty-eight percent of Earth’s,” Taiyo answered, his eye roll encoded in his voice. He shuffled along, kicking stones as he went, and he did the math out loud for Walter and Ronin: “If on Earth the Zeel-5 is, say, half a kilo, plus half a kilo of payload--it has to get one kilo of force to hover. But on Mars, the Zeel’s barely going to get point-oh-one kilos of force even though it needs thirty-eight percent of that point-five kilos. So you need point-one-nine kilos of force just to get off the Martian regolith, and that’s without considering the added mass of cameras and com instruments or whatever.”

“Just give it bigger rotors,” said Ronin. 

“Not going to work, bro.”

“Why the s**t not?”

Rubble piles lined the sides of the lava tube and pushed the wall out of easy reach. Taiyo watched out for obstacles, and he watched the shadow puppets his headlamp made of his feet.

“There’s a reason you don’t see 747s doing VTOL,” Walter told Ronin.

“Is it the same reason the Ospreys keep crashing in Okinawa?” Taiyo thought he’d said it under his breath, but the cave made it carry.

“What was that, bro?” A circus of small stones came skidding up the corridor, this time bouncing into the backs of Taiyo’s legs. Walter said, “I wouldn’t say they keep crashing.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, so time to time, you’re gonna get glitches no matter the aircraft. Naturally, some incidents cast a bigger shadow.”

And from time to time that shadow got cast over schoolyards, thought Taiyo. “Rotorcraft don’t scale up so well. Scaling down is a whole other thing.”

“You’re talking about actuator disk theory,” said Taiyo, bringing the subject back around. The buildup of debris along the wall had grown harder to dodge, so he shifted his path into the center of the corridor. “The Zeel-5 would need more than double the power to generate the same lift on Mars as on Earth.” He thought for a second. “So, to get the same amount of power, you'd need rotors almost five times the disk area.”

Ronin splashed through a puddle Taiyo had just avoided. “Yeah, I said that. Bigger rotors.”

“You’re gonna have to whip up the rotors a lot faster, too, I imagine,” said Walter.

“Can’t you add more power?” said Kristen.

Anton joined the discussion, saying, “That’s going to add more weight.”

“Then you need even more power,” said Nel.

“That’s correct,” said Walter.

Taiyo knew it wasn’t that simple. He fell back to walk alongside Nel and told her, “Too much power gets you into supersonic flow problems, and aerodynamic shock kills your lift entirely.”

“Diminishing returns,” Nel said.

It was the same tyranny as the rocket equation.

Ronin said, “So Dr. Wilson went with a suck and blow approach. No wonder that little Aussie guy is so smitten with her.” A tap-tap echoed softly in the tunnel--probably the sound of Ronin reaching back and patting the hard plastic shell of the Zeel, which was clipped to his backpack.

Taiyo stumbled over the uneven ground and had to thank Nel for grabbing his sleeve to keep him on his feet. It took a second to figure out what Ronin meant. When he did, Taiyo replied, “The Zeel sucks, but it doesn’t blow.” The Zeel-5’s duckbill mouth did take in atmospheric gasses, but only for electricity conversion to recharge its battery, not to blow out the back as thrust.

The biggest tech breakthrough of the device was that it charged itself as it flew. As long as the battery had enough reserved juice to accelerate the drone up to 25 kilometers an hour, the intake would kick in and keep it flying more or less indefinitely. It occurred to Taiyo, however, that the 25 kilometer-per-hour number only applied to Earth. On Mars, where the atmosphere was ten times thinner, the drone would have to reach to 250 kilometers an hour to get the same perpetual recharging. That couldn’t be right, he thought. Just like in a car, efficiency probably varied depending on speed. It must’ve been more like if it flew at forty k on Mars, the battery would last a day, if it flew at eighty it’d last a day…

The braided maze split this way and that, into slimy-walled, hallway-size tubes, each tapering down into its own dimension of midnight. Down the AsCans went, through another broad section of a lava tube, which eventually came to a fork.

“Nothing around here is on the map,” Taiyo told his crewmates. He flushed with excitement. This was real. They really were explorers.

They all agreed the path to the right looked easier and safer.

“Left then?” said Taiyo. Going that route, however, would’ve involved a series of steep drops beneath a low, spiked ceiling.

Ronin chucked a handful of stones down the apparent porthole. The stones skipped off walls, down a series of ledges, and plopped into the water.

“It doesn’t sound very deep,” Anton noted. “Might just be a puddle.”

“It could still be a dead end,” said Kristen.

“Or a passage into the tomb of a lost civilization,” said Nel.

“No better time to test the drone than now,” Ronin said. He plunked his backpack down and unstrapped the Zeel-5. “And no one better to test it than the payload commander.” He set the case on the ground, kneeled before it and unlatched the lid like a gangster in a crime movie opening a briefcase of diamonds.

Taiyo felt his lip curl as he watched Dr. Wilson’s baby being manhandled. Ronin flicked the propeller blades then flipped the scramjet lookalike over and violated its underside. The green ring of light came on, but he kept prodding until he found a rubber valve-like flap to jam his finger into. “Just like Ethan’s cloaca,” he said. “Autonomous piloting, off; manual piloting, on.”

“Wait, what?” said Taiyo. 

Ronin ignored him. From his knees, Ronin fiddled with the screen of his phone. Taiyo tried again: “Are you sure that’s a good idea? I mean--”

“You mean you’ve got a stalactite up your a*s. Pull it out, hafu. Ever run through the Taiga while Paralympians are dropping down from the sky trying to snipe you off? Well, I have. But they couldn’t get me. You want to know why?”

“No,” Taiyo said. Someone really ought to study Ronin.

“Because a parachute is basically an autonomous vehicle. If they’d had full manual maneuverability I’d be dead right now.”

“Then, too.”

“Okay, so Aro is the payload commander. …” said Walter, and his wall shadow shrugged under the light of several headlamps.

Kristen didn’t help. “It would make sense to test it in different settings.” She panned the beam of her flashlight up the wall and ceiling of the lava tube. “This looks pretty Mars-like, to me. Not that I’ve been,” she said, and then couldn’t resist adding, “Yet.”

Ronin laughed, not unlike Dr. Wilson’s cackle, and turned back to trying to figure out the drone app.

The expressions on everyone’s faces were lost in the shadows, though Taiyo caught Anton wrinkle his forehead and distort the Batman logo.

“Geologically, everywhere down here is like Mars,” Taiyo said, deciding Kristen deserved a proper answer. “But if you don’t mind me getting pedantic, we’re more likely to find atmospheric conditions here that resemble Venus.”

Ronin’s scabby voice surfaced: “If you don’t mind megetting pedantic, you sound like a dork.”

“Your concerns are noted,” Taiyo said dryly. Noted by six body cams, he thought and smirked.

“Infidel.”

Taiyo also knew the body cams recorded his initiative and leadership, or lack thereof. “Maybe I should be the one to pilot the drone,” Taiyo said without thinking. He’d never flown anything before but didn’t want Ronin breaking Dr. Wilson’s baby--for her sake, and because of the device’s potential. He doubled down. “The drone is for recon, so flying it should fall to the navigation officer.”

Anton was still stuck on whether or not now was even the right time to use the drone. Kristen and Nel agreed it made sense for someone to pilot the drone down the steep, constricted new passage for a preview, but neither had an opinion on who that pilot should be.

“How about letting the veteran have the controls?” Walter said, subtly reminding Ronin who had the most flight hours.

Taiyo knew Ronin could really fly. A few winters ago, a lesson of Professor Aro’s had been to whisk Taiyo away in a military chopper and land them in the snowy “suicide forest” at the base of Mt. Fuji. Ronin then stuffed Taiyo full of magic mushrooms and told him to meet him on the other side of the mountain. Ronin had called it a “personalized lesson in psychological adaptability.”

Ronin picked up the glowing drone and held it out on his open palm. “You know, it’s times like these…” he said but didn’t finish.

The Zeel-5 buzzed to life as the propellers began to spin.

“I hear you, bro,” said Walter. “You know what? Giver. Rotary craft aren’t my kind of animal, anyway.”

Ronin turned and hunched over the drone, blocking everyone’s light but his own. The shift in posture only lasted a second, and perhaps Taiyo was being paranoid, but whatever Ronin’s hands had gotten up to during that second sure felt suspicious.

“You know what, hafu? I think Dr. Wilson would’ve wanted you to be first to pilot the Zeel. The responsibility would be good for you. It might even put some hair on your head. Black hair, hopefully.” He held the drone out at arm’s length. “If you can handle it.”

Taiyo’s hands twitched at his side, but he resisted the reflex to snatch the drone. He wavered between a thin smile and a grimace. Refusing to pilot the drone on the grounds that Ronin had sabotaged it would raise an accusation far more harmful to the team than a failed drone flight would. And so, Taiyo accepted the piloting duty and ate the consequences.

He would later record what happened next in the mission log:

 

TASK REPORT

 

A-13-09.2

CHRON: Phase 2 / Day 1 / 13:21~13:22

LOC: Kambi cave subsection L6-4 (-0.53’-35.1’+1.9)

OBJECTIVE: recon w/ Zeel-5 hardware (SciPL Inv #7-039-c)

DESCRIPTION: Initial ascent nominal. Hardware unresponsive to subsequent commands: Impromptu high-velocity lithobraking (ceiling); rapid unplanned midflight disassembly; autonomous descent (ground).

RESULT: Sub-optimal

NOTES: Hardware integrity compromised (loss of rotors). Total loss of data (unable to reboot). Hardware body recovered. Rotors unrecoverable.

FOLLOW-UP: none

 

Taiyo drew in a breath, held it, and eased it out along with the tension. Then he stepped away from Ronin, over to the ledge.

“Okay,” Taiyo sputtered. “Just step back. Give me some space and I’ll go down there and get it.”

 

***

 

They’d heard the body of the Zeel-5 tumble down multiple tiers of rock, several meters toward the pool, but there was no splash to accompany the spray of debris. The shape of the opening was very much like a stairway under a stairway, as if a car-size wedge had pried open a jagged gap in the rock.

The low, pitched ceiling kept the lights from penetrating far enough down to locate the drone.

The diving gear clattered to the ground as Taiyo shrugged out of the straps and shed the backpack. He sat down in front of the other AsCans’ feet, inched his a*s to the end of the horizontal ground, and, still sitting, let his legs fall over into the darkness. His calves were then flush with the vertical drop, but like a kid on a stool, the landing was too far down for his feet to touch. He aimed the headlamp between his knees.

“Do you see it?” Kristen asked.

He saw a ledge the width of a two-by-four about a meter down, but he couldn’t see the drone. He scooted over, so the wall was on his left, and then ran the pads of his fingers along the cold damp rock until a protrusion landed in his palm. Cupping it for a tenuous grip, he balanced on one a*s cheek while outstretching a toe to interrogate the ledge. He let Anton take his free hand and help him down onto the narrow step.

From there, feet sideways and body twisted to face out into the void, he searched again with his headlamp and flashlight but only saw another vertical drop, though a little closer this time. The ceiling pitched more sharply and the black cones of bubbled lava shielded Taiyo the lights from all but the first two tiers.

“Maybe I should rope up,” Taiyo called back to the others. He didn’t think he needed to, and he didn’t want to waste any more time, but crew safety came before mission objectives. A minor injury like a twisted ankle from a fall would burden the whole crew; a bone fracture could compromise the entire mission.

“You think we’re going to wait here forever for you?” Ronin called down to Taiyo. Ronin’s voice felt like the hand of a puppeteer tugging the cords in Taiyo’s back and neck to straighten his posture.

He definitely should’ve roped up. But he didn’t.

First kneeling down on the ledge and testing the emptiness with a backward-prodding toe, he told himself it really wasn’t so far or difficult of a drop. The darkness only made it feel that way. His gut lurched at the brief freefall before his feet hit the second ledge. The drop had been a bit farther than he’d estimated, and the ledge no wider.

The smell hit him harder than the impact--like a burnt match searing his nasal cavity and staining his tongue. Sulfur dioxide. As horribly irritating as it was, a little SO₂exposure wouldn’t hurt. He took a deeper whiff, and his hands flew instinctively to his nose to rub away the stinging. He’d wanted to check for any accompanying rotten-egg smell, the smell of hydrogen sulfide, a much more potent threat. He did smell it, but the lack of protest from his lungs meant the concentration was low.

“So far no problem,” he reported to the others standing two tiers above, out of sight. He could hear their feet shuffling along the ground above his head. “Not so sure I should be breathing this air too long, though.” Assuming less than ten ppm of either gas and he’d be fine with a ten-- or twenty-minute exposure.

Nel told him to check it with the sniffer, but he hadn’t plugged the adapter into his phone. He could’ve asked Nel to get the sniffer or his mask from his backpack, but he didn’t want to bother her. If the smell got too bad, he’d just have to climb back up.

Climb back up.…He hadn’t thought that part of the task through very well either.

Even with a flashlight in hand and a lamp on his head, he had a hard time making out the width of the step. Feeling with his foot confirmed he only had a few centimeters of wiggle room.

Worse, the corrosive atmosphere now burned his throat and eyes, not just his nose, and his chest had tightened in on his breathing. The stench of rotten eggs now engulfed the foreground. He blinked and coughed away the assault.

Holding the wall for balance, he turned around to face the spiked down-sloping ceiling and whatever loomed in the blackness below. He prepared for the next drop, sliding his shoulder blades against the rock face and edging his feet out from under his haunches. He hoped the water didn’t come right up to the landing, or if it did, that it wasn’t very deep.

His helmet scraped and he found a field of lavacicles and shark fin stalactites staring him in the face.

Twisting this way and that, he tried pressing his shoulder blades to the vertical rise behind him and then his chest, but either position would risk his head or neck getting cracked on the lavacicles when he slid down to the last level.

“I’m going to try knocking some of these stalactites off to give me some headroom, okay guys?” he called up to the others. The collective glow of flashlights and headlamps reflected off the bubbly ceiling cones but was too dim to be of use.

“Negative,” Walter called back down.

Kristen reminded him they had a responsibility as stewards of Earth to keep pristine environments pristine. Lavacicles were not limestone; they wouldn’t grow back. “Bring back samples,” she ordered. “…But we have no idea what might be living down there, so try not to disturb it, okay?”

The lavacicles worked like acoustic dampeners, and her voice fell nearly dead, arriving at his ears as a whisper even though her tone suggested shouting.

“Okay,” he called back. His own voice screamed in his head. 

The air wasn’t good. They’d never get to him if he passed out and hit the ledge below, or fell into the water--water undoubtedly stirring with sulfuric acid. The burning in his face and throat intensified. His breathing grew rapid, shallow. He pictured getting taken over by a fit of coughing, his feet slipping, arms cartwheeling for something to hold and colliding with the stalactites, triggering a shower of serrated spears as he fell.

“You doing okay, Tai?” he thought he heard Nel ask. “How’s the air?”

“Fine,” he replied, though his throat burned to say so.

He could’ve leaned forward and rested his head on the closest spike. Instead, he put his hand on his chest to feel his breathing while he took a moment to admire the patterns the light and shadows his headlamp made in the chandelier of lava formations. A subtle tilt of his head up or down, left or right, forward or back, and the whole kaleidoscope changed.

“Fine,” he repeated, muttering to himself. He was fine, but he knew he’d better hurry. He turned his toes toward the darkness and arched his back while worming and bending his knees to get his head and shoulders below the lavacicles. His left foot slipped. He sucked in a shallow breath and tensed his muscles for the fall, but the heel of his boot regained the hold his toe had lost. Remembering his training, he let out his breath and wheezed in several more until he got his respiration under control. To free up both hands, he stuck the flashlight back on his chest.

Clack… clack-clack… clack.

A stone came tumbling over the ledge and struck Taiyo in the back of the neck then rolled down his back and landed at his feet. “Sorry,” called Ronin, “My bad,” was the last thing Taiyo heard before he stepped on the stone and his feet skidded cartoonishly on the ledge until he pitched forward and his headlamp cracked against a lava spike. He grabbed the lavacicle to steady himself. He held on with both hands. It felt horrible. Charred, boil-covered, and wart-infested like the erect, soul-tearing appendage of the troll beneath the bridge. At least it hadn’t broken off when he’d fallen forward and grabbed it.

He heard it crack.

The others called something to him, probably telling him to pick up a case of beer and a pizza on the way back. “I’m okay,” he replied, though his headlamp had been knocked ajar and now only lit the ceiling. He held on, one subtle shift in weight away from plunging face first into hard rock, and then tumbling into a toxic pool of unknown depth. He took a few breaths, trying to stretch their duration, but the air hurt his chest. He took one hand off the spike and pulled his undershirt up over his mouth and nose, and then got to thinking what to do about his grip on the troll’s waning erection.

The troll knob cracked again and jerked to the left, threatening to fall off and take Taiyo with it. He reached with his free hand through a gap in the spikes and swept his fingers blindly along the eye-level slope of the ceiling until he found a dip in the surface to jam his palms against to keep him from tumbling forward into oblivion. As he removed his hands, the lavacicle snapped off and exploded on the landing below and scattered across the water.

“You all right down there?” someone shouted.

He didn’t know. He assessed his situation before replying: His toes were hung over into space, his heels teetering on the ledge. Leaning out over the gape at a 45-degree angle, he’d braced his upper half by stretching his arms over his head and wedging the balls of his hands into indents between the ceiling spikes. This precarious position was, for the time being, keeping him from plunging into the vat of acid below. But his weakening limbs and abdomen had since caused his midsection to slump forward, almost as if his belly button had taken aim at its destination. The dozens of gangrenous troll erections surrounding his head made the pose all the more urgent, as did the sulfuric air seizing his respiratory tract. His situation was neither sustainable nor pleasant.

“Still fine,” he managed to report to his crewmates. The lone sound of his hot breath against the cold, thick air felt both meditative and eerie. “Going down to the last tier now,” he reported, feeling his voice bounce off the angled ceiling.

Ronin yelled encouragement: “If you die, your body stays there.”

Taiyo pushed off hard from the ceiling, forcing every Newton of thrust in his fingers to throw his body back at the rock face behind him. It worked. His back smacked against it. Also, his heels shot out from under him. His tailbone struck the ridge of the ledge, but his plummet didn’t stop. Fortunately, the grating of his spine against that same ridge did slow his descent, as did the aerodynamic drag his whiplashing head created during those microseconds before he hit the third and final tier. 

The impact shuddered up through his shins, knees, and thighs. But at least he’d hit feet first. He’d landed. His hand flung to his throbbing tailbone, and when that pain eased, he reached for his throat and chest. He tried to steady his breathing, but every attempt sent pain through his chest. He’d broken out in a cold sweat. He coughed up a phlegm ball, rubbed his nose and eyes and only for second before he told himself not to whine, he groaned with the irritation. He straightened his headlamp and looked around, taking in as much as he could in as little time as possible. He’d been down there too long. He had to get back up to others, and he had to do it now. 

F**k the drone.

But there it was. He could see it.

“I found it,” he called, but he doubted he’d mustered enough from his lungs to be heard. The drone was there. He could see its green glow rising from the dark. Then it faded, flickered, and died. It was still there. He’d seen it on the next landing down. 

On the next landing?

F**k me.

The third tier hadn’t been the final one after all.

He heard Ronin’s voice cleaving at the walls of this fart-stained inner sanctum. “Getting bored up here, hafu. Hurry up already … but don’t forget the drone.”

F**k you.

The final tier--the for-real final tier--looked a little easier to get to than the last ones. No troll parts in his face, anyway. He turned around and squatted; ready to slide down backward. He aimed his leg down off the third tier, and a moment of doubt clutched his right foot midair.

Don’t hesitate.An astronaut had to be decisive.

He hovered there, gripping tiny indents in the step with his fingertips. He stretched his leg down farther, feeling for a flat surface to land on. He dropped to his left knee and slid it to the ridge of the third tier. He held on--the nails of his fingers grinding into rock--and dragged his left shin against the moist, jagged ridge, searching for the soft groove between the kneecap and top of the shin for something to lock the ridge into. With finding it, in spite of the pain, he gained new leverage to stretch his right foot a precious two or three centimeters closer to the step below, but still not close enough to touch.

His thigh, neck, and arm muscles burned against gravity’s sadism. Just a little more. He exerted his foot downward, daring the slippery rock to flick his fingers off its surface. Stretching and straining, he fished and prodded black air with the toe of his boot, desperate for solid ground but finding nothing.

Now back on the third tier, panting and curled into a squat, he looked down with his flashlight and spotted the drone. It didn’t look very far. He fought off a coughing spell and nausea, and switched legs and tried again. Dangling and straining like before, he got the same result--of course. Idiot. Come on. … Think!

It occurred to him the fourth ledge might drop off into oblivion everywhere except for a tiny outcrop holding the drone. He thought about turning back, but he couldn’t show up empty-handed. Not after getting so close. So he kept trying.

In the midst of full muscular dissonance and the shredding of the skin above his fingernails, he imagined something down there beyond the screen of darkness. Something in the water. Something floating, waterlogged, and bloated with the gasses of its own decay. A dead body. Or worse: something alive.

His bowels hiccupped. He pulled himself back upright, toes pointing to his sides and chest to the wall. Breathing heavily, he pressed his cheek to stone and gasped at the stinging air. He rubbed his burning eyes on his shoulders. Then he listened. He listened to the dripping sounds. The drops pinged the water several seconds apart, each plop a single note of an ageless chorus, and a cry of finality as they bled sulfuric acid back into the lagoon that spawned them. Nothing could live down there, he thought. The water and air would kill anything that tried. The air would kill him if he didn’t hurry. He felt dizzy. Nauseous. 

The inside of his head began to strobe.

“What’s the matter, hafu?” Ronin sounded clear but far more distant than he was, like ASMR, as if speaking down a long pipe into Taiyo’s ear. “You get lost? Too scary down there for you?”

He was not scared of dark places. Not scared of water. And yet, he could not deny the ominous presence the water implied.

So, what then? Just slide down and hope the last ledge caught him? He could land on the drone where he knew solid ground existed. He might break it. Or he could call up to Ronin that he couldn’t reach it. It might be worth facing Ronin’s ridicule. But it wouldn’t be worth the ridicule in his own head for having failed his task because of an irrational fear that something was going to pull him into the water.

Stop pissing around. You have a job to do. Now do it!

With that thought, he dropped both legs down and gave up his hold on the ledge. A knot formed in his testicles and plunged into his chest as the acceleration of gravity took over. But there’d be no sensation of freefall. Seemingly before the fall had even begun, his right foot landed on the buoyant shell of the Zeel-5. All along, it had hardly been a toenail away. He balanced a foot on the back of the drone, held onto the neck-level ledge, and let his forehead come to rest against the cold, damp rock while he tried to catch his breath, though the bad air would not allow the pressure in his head to deflate.

The drone cracked under his weight. His boot lost its grip, and he slipped off the back of the drone. Once again, he damn near ate his testicles, and unnecessarily so. His feet hit solid ground right beside the drone, but his weakened legs staggered across the ledge and sent his steps backward into the water knee deep. The submerged ground at his feet sloped sharply downward, and he slipped several times before regaining his balance back on the dry land beside the drone.

Though the passage down to the water resembled an ear canal, the calls from the others now came to him muffled. “I’m still fine,” he called back after a few pants to calm his pulse. He straightened the headlamp and watched the water, now disturbed, jostle and lick the toes of his boots. 

He was safe and sturdy on the shore with the drone at his side.

He stared out into the blackness. Squeezed between the water at his feet and the rock precipice at his back, and he felt the temperature plunge. He gasped at the rotten egg stench, forcing his lungs to consume it. And despite his heaving chest and urge to vomit, through the silt and pall of subterranean night, he could see a pair of glowing eyes, a toothy grin, a slithering tail (or was it a hand?) creeping out of the water, enticed by the pheromones of human fear.

The chill climbed up the dripping legs of his jumpsuit, making the fabric cling to his skin. The smell, he knew, was of air cooked deep within the planet, discharged up through the fissures and cracks, released as gas bubbles through the water, and trapped between the ceiling and stagnant pit of water. The headlamp lit the yellow moisture that festered on the walls--the same substance pestering his airways.

He shuddered. 

The rising bumps and hairs on his arms and neck were beyond his control. The wet pants and socks, the cold, the sound of dripping, and the odors all merged with his sweat and triggered a flash in his mind. Not an image. More of a feeling. The feeling of being in the cannery after the tsunami, shivering, clinging to the doorframe behind the gantry, waiting for his dad while at least one decomposing body floated face up around him, hidden by the black water and dark, foul air.

 The smell in the cannery had been the unmistakable smell of death, and he smelled it now, too. Now pinned between the wall of hardened lava and the water, and compressed from above by boney tendrils of pumice, the smell deepened, and he knew no matter how rational, the rational mind, on occasion, overlooked things or made erroneous assumptions. Taiyo had assumed nothing of significance could live in such a tomblike realm. Certainly nothing capable of reaching out of the water and snagging him by the ankle.

The light of his headlamp reflected off the black surface of the water, revealing nothing. The walls looked to narrow for the water to extend much farther, but it could’ve been an illusion cast by the shadows of the ceiling spikes. He looked up at the lavacicles, and his shuffling feet made a sound like sandpaper. The acoustics played across the unknown expanse of the water like muffled conversations. The words came back to him indistinct, the product of his mind trying to form familiar patterns where none existed. The voices contained laughter. Perhaps, they were real, then. Maybe they were the voices from the others above making fun of him, egged on by Ronin.

Splash!

Taiyo jolted, pressing his back tightly to the wall and extending his arms in defense. Bloody hell. He had to laugh at himself. Rings rippled outward in the water from where a lavacicle must have hit. The echo from the voices had knocked one loose. That was all.

“Are you getting it or not?” Ronin might have said.

He began to shake. Shivering to retain body heat. It was a good sign. He didn’t really know but deduced that cool air meant that in spite of the stench, the hydrogen sulfide content was thin, having dispersed and cooled along its journey from the deep.

Under the beam of the headlamp, Taiyo looked down at the wounded device he’d come to reclaim. A Y-shaped crack scarred its back, and the propellers had all busted off. He opened and closed his hands, and rubbed them together to get the blood flowing before crouching down to pick up the drone. On his haunches, he held it in both hands and took several short-winded breaths. 

“I got it,” he yelled up to the others. “Coming back now.”

He set the drone up on the ledge and braced his hands so his arms could hoist the rest of his body back up.

“Did you get the samples?” Kristen called, her voice faint.

S**t.

He took out the flashlight, shut off the headlamp, and examined the water. The surface didn’t look right. Too calm. Too silent. The light didn’t shimmer or refract; the water simply swallowed the beam. Not a ripple remained to indicate he’d ever been there or that anything but a photon had ever struck the liquid mirror. 

It was as if the pool, or what lurked inside it, was playing dead.

The inexplicable, irrational sensation of a presence made Taiyo do something he hadn’t done since he was little. He didn’t know why he did it. Certainly not because he believed it had any effect. Or maybe it did--a kind of placebo perhaps. He tucked the drone under one arm, and with a finger, he drew three little stickmen on the palm of his hand and pretended to swallow them. It was something kids did before speaking in front of an audience, a symbol of dominance over the crowd. Taiyo’s mother had tried--unsuccessfully, for the most part--to teach him to do it anytime he needed to summon courage.

He shook his head at himself for being so foolish, but he did feel a little more composed now. He indulged in a deep breath. That had been a mistake--he spent the next several minute coughing and spitting up phlegm.

He had to hurry.

Taiyo left the drone and hopped back down to the water. Kneeling at the edge, he kept the light of the headlamp trained on the motionless water while he pulled a baggie from a pocket. He paused, convinced something was watching. His head hurt. His chest hurt more. A drip into the water startled him. He saw the ripple, though faint, and it put him at ease. Still, he kept his light and his eyes on the murky lagoon and not on his hands as he reached down and dredged the baggie through the water to collect silt and scum--for something that might contain traces of biology.

The temperature of the water felt warmer than the air. Thick like oil. He filled three of the little sample pouches, sealed, labeled, and returned them to his pocket, and then began his climb back up with the drone. Ducking the stalactites, he turned back and admired the hidden cove one last time. He squinted into the darkness and shook his head at himself for having ever entertained the idea of something prowling down there, beneath the thin liquid surface.

Idiot.

Author's Note

Does it make you want to read the next chapter?