📗Broken Dome | 2: Strikebreaker's Boon
After the events of Larval Haze, rookie security contractor Wes Jackson must reckon with delicate new obligations as the prestigious Royal Lotus Harvest Company fractures under sustained pressure...
📗Strange Harvest
📗Larval Haze
📗Broken Dome
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📗 Part II: Strikebreaker’s Boon
Useless slowmeat broodslave could not save us now.
Being so fresh from our larval form, we were rich with nectar. The beast smelled us, it craved us, it needed us. So few of our kin had ever seen the snapbeak jaws of an octopider up close and survived.
We huddled together as one, watching, feeling the scrape of hard bone against the walls that held us, waiting for the filthy grasping tendrils with their coarse hair and tiny tearing clawmouths.
Like so many before us with lives we’d felt and thought, like the unborn broods lost in our old hive, we would be devoured and nourish our enemies.
Somewhere deep in the pit of my stomach where I still felt like myself, fear and revulsion kicked in at the thought of fighting this thing, of my fingers and limbs getting pulled into that writhing maw and snapped into chunks. But what overpowered that feeling was another primal emotion I’d never known until then: my daughters needed me and they would die if I didn’t save them.
Maybe it had already gotten in. Maybe its prehensile tongues had already slipped inside the glassy case and it was just slurping out what guts and fragments were left of them. Would I have felt that?
Before I could finish the thought, Charana appeared at a full sprint on my left and immediately overtook me, a volley of sizzling laser fire chasing in her wake from behind us both. So fast—unreal. At full speed, she dove through the air headfirst with both hands outstretched flat, straight for the octopider. I flinched when its hard-plated curved forelegs reacted instantly and clawed at her exposed arms viciously when she connected. It refused to give up the egg, kicking at her and scrabbling away toward the waterline.
The octopider bleated a strange growl with an unmistakable note of confusion and panic as Charana used the momentum of her flying tackle to swing herself behind its head, with her torso on top of its main body. She wrapped the inflated fleshbag on the back of its head with both arms and squeezed hard.
This forced the gas-filled sac to empty with a baffling, wet noise like a snarl, whine, belch, and yelp. From the creature’s mouth burst a visible vapor-cloud flecked with viscous drool.
Charana looked right at me with a huge grin as the octopider dropped the Hive Frame and burbled a defeated squawk before she let it skitter off into the swamp.
I barked a sharp, scornful laugh at the disgusting beast as it fled. Hot waves of hatred and derision flooded my senses. I wanted to chase, pierce, bite, snip, tear at its putrid flesh. It felt unnatural, overblown—alien. Venomous.
Like my Queen.
On the tip of my tongue danced bitter hiss-and-click curses whose meaning I could only guess at from vile flickers of underlying emotion-imagery. It was her. I could feel the dead Lotus Queen’s memory-presence again, her will—what her past self would be doing, if she controlled my body.
My legs were already a step ahead of me, striding forward to Charana. My perception stuttered, trailing behind my actions as I covered half the distance in a blink. The fabricant cradled the damaged Hive Frame with one seriously gashed arm, spilling white streams of sappy artificial blood over the casing. Her other arm, similarly mangled, was raised in surrender—not to me, to three armored Harvesters on my right with beam rifles drawn on both of us.
I ignored them, snatched the damaged glass-paned metal egg from Charana, and quickly searched it over for damage, relieved to find its top seal still intact. Large areas were deeply gouged. Slippery chunks of clay-heavy gray mud clung to it, and the whole thing was sticky with a mixture of drying yellow-green octopider slobber and milky fabricant fluids.
More armed Harvesters emerged from the treeline around the open clearing and fired warning shots at our feet, hardlight slugs slamming into the mud and bubbling hissing steam. The snap instinct to fly swiftly up and away overwhelmed me, followed by intense loathing at my incompetent wingless meatform. And a whiff of what felt like… embarrassment? Then the Lotus Queen’s presence noticeably faded back until I felt more in control, as though she knew I was better suited to respond to this new threat.
I realized the Harvesters had been edging aggressively closer, pointing their guns at all of us and yelling over their external speakers, so I raised my left hand, palm up in clear surrender, the human way, and tucked the wasps’ artificial egg under my right arm, turning slightly to shield it from their line of fire with my body. Carefully, I kneeled down and rested the Hive Frame between my knees on a bushy clump of low sedge grass so I could put both hands up.
Behind the advancing guards, Chavos struggled to his feet while gripping gingerly at his throat, black Security armor dripping with swamp muck, looking like he was coughing violently inside the suit. He grabbed his fallen rifle and waved off one of the Harvesters that went to help him up, but begrudgingly accepted the knife they’d retrieved for him once he got to his feet.
“Do not approach the fabricant. Keep her covered,” I heard Chavos croak over the Harvesters’ common team channel HiveSec1 as it appeared on my HUD. He spoke in short bursts. “We got the Rookie. Prepare to move out. Eyes on that airlock.”
This was followed by a cluster of green confirmation winks from the rest of the crew. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed that. Who else was out here? I hoped to see Goldwater again as I scanned the team members I could see. It felt silly, seeing as I barely knew her really, but I owed her the big one. I didn’t see her among the cluster of eight Harvesters in view, even with their names floating over their heads on my HUD. They looked like codenames—probably a new practice out of paranoia from the Duster attacks.
Now that everyone had calmed down some, I took the opportunity to use handfuls of the lush sedge thicket I’d been kneeling on to smear off as much slime from the egg as I could manage.
On the HiveSec1 channel, an unfamiliar warm, accented male voice spoke. “Welcome back to the suck, Rookie.”
The Harvester who’d helped Chavos up walked over and cleared the black visor on his Security nullsuit, revealing his grinning face lit from inside the helmet—a middle aged man with smooth, brown-red skin, a thin black moustache, and round cheeks. He slung his gun over his shoulder as he approached, reached out a hand to help me up, and before I could respond, folded me into a hug. “Come here, bring it in. Call me Wellstone. My job, and my vow, from here on is to get you home safely.”
“Oh,” was all I could muster. “Uh, thanks.”
Several others on HiveSec1 joined in, their overlapping responses of similar sentiments muddling together before Chavos cut in gruffly, “Alright, ya big saps, that’s enough. This channel is operational only, keep a lid on it. Form up on the Packhound. And every single one of you: tag Rookie here right fuckin’ now so we don’t lose him again.”
The nearby Harvesters dispersed on his orders, forming up into two loose columns around us and the stationary Packhound, just within the faintly prismatic edge of its widened force bubble.
Encased in Wellstone’s uninvited armored embrace, all I could think about was my old captor Leguro getting absolutely meatballed by the crushing force of Barkland’s nullsuit. Reflexively, I started to wriggle out when Wellstone grabbed my shoulder with one massive gauntlet, his thumb resting on my collarbone, to push me back and hold me in place at a distance, shaking his head like he was just taking me in.
“Unreal. Eyes just like—well,” he stopped, thinking twice about whatever he was about to say, and gawked at my flimsy null-threaded pressure suit. Wellstone’s visor snapped to opaque-black. “Look at this thing, it’s ancient. How is this even keeping pressure? Cheapo Asten-brand tourist shit from the first waves, ain’t seen that for a minute. Wow, these repair seals are the only thing holding you together, my friend! Let me know if you start feeling a cough or fever coming on.”
“Wellstone, can it,” Chavos growled.
“Sorry, sir, it’s operational knowledge for the team to be aware of the dogshit condition of Rookie’s suit, sir.” Wellstone laughed as he partly guided, partly shoved me toward the Packhound. I snatched up the still-slick Hive Frame with both hands, struggling to keep from dropping it, and felt a flash of anger from the wasps as I jostled them. The force bubble trailed behind us as we walked, contracting until it only covered about a ten foot wide radius around the transport bot, with the two of us inside it. “Here, let’s get you back in a real suit before we go.”
“So my armor’s not really an option,” I started to explain. “Inside the hab, it’s disassembled—”
Wellstone looked back at me, and even though I couldn’t see his face through his darkened visor I could hear the grin in his voice as he replied, “That’s why we brought you a new one. C’mere.”
The Packhound eased itself to the ground and began to open its nullsteel-coated canopy bay doors, as though cracking open its ribs and folding them up on an unseen hinge. Inside the tightly-packed transport bot’s main cargo body lay a cylindrical nullsteel-coated pod with a translucent aquamarine glass cover, similar to the one Mueller’s old team had used to store the labor-class fabricant Lina024.
“No, no, no, we don’t have time for the fun shiny goodness yet!” Chavos joined us, wading through the slight resistance of the force barrier. I noticed with a snort that the codename he’d chosen for himself was Phantom. “We can’t afford to wait around here. Safer for everyone if we slog it for now to our fallback point, then suit him up. We’re sitting ducks out here.”
“Yessir,” Wellstone agreed. The Packhound folded itself back up, stood, and scanned the area passively while continuing to project its protective field.
Chavos turned to me and opened a private channel between us labeled DumbRook. “What gives, Rookie? We come out here to spring you and you bolt? And ambush me with this jailbroken she-bot? Stand her down, now!”
“Sorry, it’s my head,” I sputtered. “Still… foggy from the whole near-death experience, maybe you remember that? And she was helping me on her own, I don’t control her. Plus she’s… maybe crazy or something? I don’t know.”
“Could have told me!” Chavos yelled hoarsely, his voice catching from the strain. “Fucking hell, they’ll never let me live this down. Let’s get moving.”
“Well, forgive me, Phantom,” I shot back sarcastically, “I didn’t know she was gonna—”
Standing under close guard just outside the edge of the force barrier’s shimmering linked-hexagonal dome of hardlight, Charana joined our DumbRook channel and spoke in our ears without moving her lips. “Sorry too. I’m Charana. Only saw your gun. And to be clear, you never said hello first.”
Still dripping the now-congealing white fabricant fluid, she waved meekly at Chavos, who erupted, “And she’s in our comms! Great!”
“You are a good fighter, Phantom,” she noted flatly with a blank stare.
“Goddamn techwitch. Fuck-ing great!” Chavos cut out of the channel mid-growl after booting us both and whirled on his team of Harvesters, pointing angrily at them, us, the open airlock door to the habitat, the surrounding trees, and generally just flinging his arms around in various enraged gestures.
While he was distracted, I gently probed for my lingering mental connection to the five newly hatched Lotus Queens in the battered Hive Frame, only for them to signal a withering flash of groggy annoyance, impatience, and hunger before pushing my consciousness away and withdrawing. They were exhausted and I’d need to feed them soon.
The DumbRook channel reappeared in the comms window of my display lenses and Chavos snapped, “Let’s go, we’re moving out. Your fake girlfriend’s staying, and she’s lucky this bunch might be useful later, if Gaultmann’s offer can wait a few weeks. Now fall in! Vamanos!” He clapped me on the back and chuckled when I stumbled forward. “Look at that, Rookie, you and me on caboose, together in the jungle again. Just like old times—except this time no old man.”
“What do you mean—” I started to ask.
He cut me off. “Not now. I’ll explain more later, but we’re on our own out here. We need to get back to the city quick-quick and meet up with everyone else.”
The two Harvesters in the rear on each side kept their weapons drawn on Charana as she walked to the grow lab and waited outside the airlock. The fabricant stepped forward on one leg, pointed at me with an imperious, dramatic flourish, and tracked me with her forefinger as I walked with the Harvesters.
She held the pose for a moment, dripping thick, syrupy drops of white fabrication liquid. Then she twirled her finger up, winding down in an exaggerated spiral toward her own back, just behind her right shoulder, before curling and extending her finger twice. Finally, she entered the Dusters’ grow lab and sealed it shut behind her.
The fuck?
Wait, my back. I remembered when Charana adjusted something on my suit before we left the airlock. All good, she’d said, with a little pat-pat. I reached up over my shoulder with my left arm and felt some kind of fabric packet stuck to my suit. When I grabbed it, I realized it was magnetic and had been stuck to my oxygen crystal cylinder.
Before I even opened the little pouch, I knew what it was. The five small glass vials of vivid blue lotus nectar gleamed brightly under my headlamps’ artificial light. Enough for five feedings. I stashed them in my suit’s front chest pocket quickly, hopefully before anyone noticed.
Why did she help me?
I wondered what the Dusters were up to inside. Still arguing, probably. Surely Gaultmann or someone had been watching everything, especially with the fabricant giving them a firsthand view. Or they’d all escaped while Charana ran interference. The abandoned habitat they used for their lab was small, but it had to have a second exit somewhere.
It was also possible Barkland went psycho again, killed them all, and bounced in his nullsuit. That honestly seemed pretty likely. Either way, they weren’t my problem anymore. It was good to be heading back to Capitol City with the Harvesters again. Maybe I’d call Mom and Dad, finally eat one of their home-cooked meals for the first time in… a while. I stopped counting. Too long, anyway.
Or maybe just long enough.
Just ahead of me, the trundling Packhound chirped a mild warning tone when it reached the treeline at the edge of the marshy meadow. It stopped, glanced down, then suddenly flinched with its foreleg raised in caution—only then realizing it had already been caught by the strong, whiplike trap vine of a snakethorn plant.
“This vine monster shit again? Stopping,” Chavos called as he jumped at it immediately with his long knife at the ready. He yanked a long coil away from the Packhound’s trapped leg, then abruptly jerked back, went stiff, and teetered in place, still holding onto the snakethorn vine with his left gauntlet. I reached out toward him automatically with my free hand as he started to fall when Wellstone pulled me back.
“Don’t touch him!” Wellstone crouched, swept my legs from underneath me, and fully picked me up into his arms. “Chavos down, mule down, it’s not snakethorn—”
Before Wellstone had time to get anything else out, the vine-which-wasn’t-a-vine unwound from the immobilized Packhound, retracted, and shot toward us as he stumbled backward—whipping through the air where we’d just been standing.
From shadows at the base of the towering steeloak trunk, where its broad root flare sunk into the damp earth, a dark figure erupted from a pocket of loose soil and rolled underneath the frozen Packhound. The silver whip lashed out to the nearest Harvester on the other side, caught their ankle and tripped them over—toppling them in their armor like a statue, just as the new enemy had done to Chavos.
The Harvesters’ beam rifle fire instantly lanced in from all directions, the combination of hardlight slugs and concentrated rays throwing up clouds of dirt and steam. I saw the attacker pull on the whip, still attached to the fallen Harvester, slinging themselves out along the ground from underneath the Packhound’s belly as though they weighed nothing, leaving a swirl of steam trailing behind.
“Keep your distance—” The whip snapped out. Another one down.
“Cover the Rookie!”
One by one, the Harvest team dropped from the HiveSec1 channel.
“It’s bricking our suits! Scatter and regroup at the lab!” Wellstone shouted.
Still carrying me in his armored nullsuit, he crouched low on both legs, jumped onto a nearby boulder, and executed a perfect one-legged spring into a huge bound that covered a quarter of the distance back to the Dusters’ grow lab.
I sure wished Chavos had let me put my fucking armor on. I sympathized with the young wasps now—how useless and humiliating this was, to be literally carried around instead of being able to respond to danger. We could have been headed straight into another trap.
“We’re going back?” I asked privately to Wellstone. “This could be them!”
“It’s not,” Wellstone responded with a grunt as he took another long leap. “It’s Mueller. Royal Lotus.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It does if you know we’ve been fighting their asses since you got left behind. Total work stoppage.” We landed outside the metal habitat with a splash and Wellstone lowered me onto my feet at the base of the ramp. “Got pretty nasty when Mueller went after Goldwater with what was left of Hive Security, the ones who wouldn’t strike. Fuckin’ bootlickers.”
“Where is she?” I asked.
Wellstone didn’t have time to respond because the airlock door opened as we approached. I was expecting Charana again, and so was Wellstone. He called over his external speakers, “Ambush. We’re not gonna make it. We need to regroup—”
Out stepped old man Mueller dressed in clean, stylish business attire without a pressure suit or mask. Breathing the foul night air into his lungs. His lotus-brightened, sky-blue eyes met mine through my visor. He held a coiled metallic whip in one hand as he descended the ramp into the swampy jungle.
Mueller smiled slow and wide as he said, “I’ll tell you what you need to do: get back to work. Strike’s over. You’re all coming with me.”
📗Broken Dome
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