📗Larval Haze | 1: Safe and Warm and Dry
Following the events of Strange Harvest, the honey must flow as life grinds on beneath the jungle's alien canopy...
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📗 Part I: Safe and Warm and Dry
We’re only alive because the Dusters thought I was dead.
Easy to see why they had that impression, with my guts ripped into and stuffed with the wasp queen’s eggs. Her alien venom and pheromones had me half-paralyzed, but somehow hadn’t killed me. I sure looked like a corpse, though: my skin had lost color, and my veins were dark, inky blue.
My best guess is at first, the Dusters never intended to save me or my future hatchlings; they just wanted my nullsuit, same as Warren’s stolen armor, so they had to bring my body along with them.
As for why they didn’t just kill me and throw me in a grow pit along with the eggs… I wasn’t sure about that yet. It had been days since I woke up from the surgery, and they had made no demands. Not even for information on Royal Lotus—hive locations, harvest schedules, crew rosters, nothing.
If that’s what they were after, they could just force me to breathe some of that fucking… fungal-spore-mind-control “dust” they loved so much and I’d say anything they wanted. It’s probably how they’d gotten most of the stuff I saw around me.
Instead they were… giving me followup care? Hatching my eggs?
At least the Dusters had pillaged some pretty good tech out here—including the SurgeonBot module in the corner of the room. That’s how they had extracted my eggs without completely butchering me. No idea where they managed to get that from, but it obviously got the job done or I wouldn’t be here.
There was more from Royal Lotus, too, and not just the nullsuits. Next to my bed, a battered Hive Frame housed my five eggs. It wasn’t a full-fledged automated nursery incubator, but its form would be familiar to the larvae: the Hive Frame was squat and teardrop-shaped, with removable racks that contained neat rows of the same distinctive round, oblong cells found in natural hives. Even the exterior was colored and textured to resemble the mottled gray-brown husk stuff the wasps made.
Someone here clearly had enough knowledge about the lotus wasps to prepare the incubator and extract the eggs, but why were they bothering with any of this? Would we be experimented on? Enslaved?
All the answers I could think of involved being used somehow.
No matter what my path turned into, it would not be what the queen wanted. Or what I wanted… it was hard to tell the difference.
They killed her for honey.
Hot tears sprang to my eyes as a wave of raw, uncontrollable grief swept through me. It was an emotional nerve I tried to avoid twisting. My delirious visions of the queen’s life were not just a story: they were a mixture of feelings, thoughts, plans, and most of all they were orders.
Love, grief, and the urgency of care intruded on my every waking moment.
And for that reason, one realization overwhelmed me completely: all six of us would likely die here, meaning her vision would never come to pass. It would just keep looping endlessly in my head—her ghost, her venomous memory haunting my thoughts, running me in circles for whatever remained of my life.
This was never meant for me. I wasn’t fit to do anything more than feed her young with meat from my broken body—yet I also couldn’t ignore the need to try. I couldn’t stop it from whipping my thoughts and feelings into a futile frenzy. So I would do what could be done, and try to push down the rest.
My unpleasant thoughts were interrupted when the door to the small, cramped equipment storage room swung open and thumped against the wall.
“Meal time, freak.”
It was Leguro, my least favorite keeper. Like most of the other Dusters, he didn’t need any provocation to be an aggressive asshole, so I wouldn’t give him any. I sat up on my elbow so I could clear a spot for the oaf to put my tray on my bedside table.
He dropped everything onto the table without waiting for me, sloshing the water cup and spilling some into a bowl of what looked like yellowish oatmeal. The tray also hit my toothbrush, which tottered briefly on the edge before falling onto the ground and tumbling underneath my stretcher-bed.
Squinting with hollow eyes down the bridge of his broad, flat nose, Leguro sniff-grunted—it was a weird tic he had, this gurgling little strained noise in the back of his throat—and his loose, jowly cheeks twitched with amusement.
A lot of us from Surface don’t know too many Earth species, but we all at least know a few kinds of dogs from primary school; Leguro reminded me one hundred percent of a bulldog. There was just no better way to instantly describe the man.
Of course, dogs were generally friendly.
Feeding me, providing drink… these things almost seemed to cause him literal physical pain. His disgust for me was clear at all times, as though it went against his moral code to care for others and he resented being forced into it.
“Enjoy that meal. Hope it’s your last one,” my stocky, reluctant caretaker mocked as he shuffled out of the room.
Leguro’s special goodbye, just for me. Gotta keep that emotional distance.
I kept my own special comments to myself as the door locked behind him. I put my brain on autopilot, ate without tasting, drank my liquid, and let my thoughts fade into the background now that I was alone again. No one would be bothering me until tomorrow morning, so I’d have all night to focus.
My baby grub eggs were still growing. When they hatched, they would need encouragement. Guidance. Preparation. The pre-larval stage is crucial in their development, and they would already miss out on so much… there was no substitute for the sentinels’ care, their soothing hormones and even the comforting vibrations they sent with their eerily musical vocal trills.
After the Surgeonbot cut the eggs out of me, they’d added a chunk of my dead scrap flesh into each of the hive frame’s rounded hexagonal cells. The scent of food would draw the larvae from their eggs and feed them once they hatched.
Those moments would be their first memories. My rotting flesh-meat would lure them into the world, but it wouldn’t be enough to truly nourish the newborn larvae; they craved lotus nectar, and I had none to provide.
We wanted them to be healthy, free, flying in the jungle. But first we needed them to simply live. Even before fully hatching, they were forming their initial understanding of the world.
Instinct drove me inward. I needed to understand how to tend to the delicate little grubs once they hatched, and the answers were somewhere in my head. I lay back, relaxed the muscle groups in my face, then my neck, then all throughout my body, and imagined myself sinking down, my body dissolving, leaving only my thoughts.
I remembered the way the venom felt at first, the strength of it coursing through me, hoping it would empower me to find memories of sickly unhatched eggs, of weakened newborn grubs.
I focused on the way the five eggs looked now, cultivating the sense of fragility I felt about them, and my own absolute incompetent ignorance regarding their care. When initially laid inside me, they’d been much smaller, denser, more compact. Now they’d expanded, their fleshy shells thinning and stretching out in preparation for hatching. But after they were in the world, how would I keep them alive?
Guide me, lotus queen… no, not the queen, I realized—I needed the sentinels, the true caretakers of the newborn. I needed to learn from them.
When I had seen the sentinel lotus wasp back in the deep root tunnels with Goldwater, it had sparked a reflexive knowledge within my head. I knew they could care for me, I knew they were sterile; but I only knew that from understandings I’d obtained within the wasp queen’s visions.
I concentrated intensely on my own true memories of the sentinel wasp, its strength and armored carapace, its banded glow-speckled antennae… gradually I felt fragments of new thoughts and images forming, leading me toward an understanding of its pleasure to serve and gentle nature—and when threatened, its ferocity.
I felt the wasp queen’s memories, thoughts, and feelings bubbling up to the surface, intermingling with mine, and tried to sift through… I was looking for sentinels. The hive. The eggs. The hatching. Sickness.
Instantly at the thought of sickness, the visions intensified, overwhelming my tenuous control of the dreamstate. I saw terrible images of putrified hives and countless hatchlings drowned in viscous rot.
I couldn’t escape the warm smell of death—the taste of it, all the way to the back of my throat. I felt the queen’s horror and revulsion, her sense of overriding urgency.
Horrified, I descended into the alien nightmare and lost myself in the black-brown whirlwind of plague years.
***
“I think she’ll come around,” Chavos said. “She just has a good heart. Goldwater ain’t like you and me.”
“She’s too good for us,” Mueller agreed, and raised his metal cup across the table. Chavos touched his cup to Mueller’s and they drank.
“They’re supposed to hatch soon—seven to ten days, right?”
“Yep. Bit of trauma, obviously, so probably on the sooner side.”
“Damn.”
“Hm?”
“I just—nothing, you know? It’s just fucked up out here, man.”
“Circle of life.”
Chavos looked down at his plate sourly. “Shouldn’t have had eggs.”
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