📗Larval Haze | 9: Gaultmann's Bargain

Following the events of Strange Harvest, the honey must flow as life grinds on beneath the jungle's alien canopy...

Nov 24, 2023

This is Hanlon’s Reader, an independent author’s publication. Here you’ll find stories, books, essays, and other things. I’ll be tinkering away here for a while.

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📗 Part IX: Gaultmann’s Bargain

The idea that I could somehow get out of this ignited a long-smothered fire in me. Sudden, rampant clarity burned through the smog that had clouded my thoughts: I could escape this place and get back home to Overlook City.

I’d gotten lucky many times over that the Dusters had apparently built their whole operation on top of stolen Royal Lotus tech—the same company which had abandoned me here to die also kept finding ways to keep me alive.

From the menus in the display lenses, I couldn’t just call or message anyone and I couldn’t access the broader net. But the whole display lens system was just a modified version of Royal Lotus employee management software. And buried deep within the new submenus I could access with my newly-granted security clearance, I found a little red button with a link:

Apply Here for Internal Roles!

Every time I fed it my info— verified Royal Lotus Employee ID Number and all—I got a typical cheerful thank-you confirmation message assuring me they’d reach out soon following my application.

The instant I’d done it, I had this eerie looming sensation behind my ears like Gaultmann knew immediately. It could have been my only chance to get any kind of message out, so I just kept doing it over and over, adding desperate demands for pickup, throwing half-remembered security codes and passwords.

Maybe that was a dumb waste of time and it was all dead-ending somewhere. I felt that way after a while, anyway, so I stopped after probably thirty times. I’d been listening to the others and they were ready to move outside.

Barkland had gotten suited up with Fasma’s help. Once his armor was active, I watched his shared feed as he headed for the exit airlock. Impatient, I swapped over to the cameras on Gaultmann’s trio of hovering drones. Together, they had already started hunting for the alien creatures lurking outside.

I felt a little better when it became clear Gaultmann hadn’t noticed me: he was in a complete frenzy while flitting between controlling the three drones and badgering Barkland to hurry up as the darting machines searched for the octopiders.

Did Gaultmann have a fear of these things? Well, not that I didn’t—even the tiny ones fucking terrified me, I’d seen them up close—but there was an unmistakably unhinged panic in his voice. A desperate, overriding terror to avoid these things at all costs.

The drones rooted out one of the octopiders underneath the hidden grow lab’s lifted foundation. No sign of the second one, and the cameras could barely keep track of the first. It kept wriggling into crevices, curling its legs down, flattening itself, and shifting its mottled skin darker.

Using a combination of high-pitched clicks and short, deep bass notes, they drove it toward the airlock where Barkland, waiting for the outer door to swing open, bounced up and down a little as he tested his footing in the suit.

He took deep, rapid breaths like he was psyching himself up, then clicked off the safety on his beam rifle and shouldered it. Once the door opened, he’d be in position to ambush the octopider.

“Why don’t we have sentry turrets or something?” Barkland griped.

“Ever tried to steal a sentry turret?” Fasma asked. I could actually hear his eyes rolling back into his skull. “They are a bit hard to sneak up on for some reason.”

“Well, eventually it’s gonna take more than just me out here. They gotta come out of a box at some point, right—”

“Yes, a box guarded by sentry turrets—”

Gaultmann cut them off. “Both of you shut up, here it comes.”

“It?” Barkland asked sharply. “Where’s the other one?”

“Just take your shot. I’m bringing it out.”

The airlock door opened just as the first scouting drone, flickering red lights, dipping and bobbing in the air like a wounded wasp, lured the octopider right to the edge of the foundation. The other two drove it forward from underneath with aggressively loud noises that the octopider seemed physically hurt by. Much to my relief, the link in my ear automatically softened and filtered the noises for me.

But the creature reached the point where it would have to pursue the lead drone into the open and it dug in, recoiling from the encroaching drones behind it without giving Barkland a clear shot.

From the airlock, Barkland hesitated while peeking around the entrance. He didn’t want to give away his position, but the plan wasn’t working. “Come on, gimme a shot, gimme a shot.”

It tried to skitter sideways around the drones, but they had effectively penned it in and left it only one path. Then the octopider jumped, reached up with its front tentacles, flipped itself upside down, and crawled around to the outer wall.

Surprised, Barkland quickly reoriented and fired once—missed, twice—grazed its central body. The animal wasted no time flinging itself away from the wall, into the clearing it had been trying to avoid. It slipped away toward the water, to the deepest part of the swamp where it had originally come from with its hunting partner.

Barkland tried following it with his sights, but the random bursts of movement and primitive camouflage the octopider used made it impossible to get a bead on the thing. Just as he lowered his rifle, a beam of light lanced out from the base of a tree at the jungle’s edge and skewered the retreating creature.

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“What—Gaultmann, was that you?” I could see Barkland’s camera feed tilt to the side in confusion as he asked the question. He tried to zoom where the shot came from, but saw nothing.

This was followed immediately by a second shot from a different part of the treeline that took out the “lure” drone in the center of the dark clearing.

“Harvesters,” Gaultmann said. “Get inside!”

The other two drones whipped out from underneath the building and unleashed a strobing flurry of colored lights to draw as much attention as possible, whirling around casting a flood of unnatural human light through the thin fog. Barkland used the diversion to hurry back inside, but no one seemed to be taking the bait by the time the door sealed behind him.

I swapped to the exterior security feed’s night vision. Outside, the drones went dim, back to standard lighting, and hovered in place. A lone figure entered the clearing where muddy earth and scrubby grass met the water’s edge, striding easily on the uneven terrain in the unmistakable silhouette of an armored nullsuit. One of Gaultmann’s drones sped toward them, shortly followed after a delay by the other.

When I saw the way they snatched the little round drones out of the air as they approached, I knew it was Chavos. I hadn’t recognized him at first, but the motion—I’d seen him do the same thing when we were together out there looking for Warren.

Before I got stung.

My view of the situation went all blurry and wet. Oh no, was I crying? At the sight of Chavos? I would never tell him this. Never.

I quickly blinked away the tears and wiped my face on the threaded ridges of my shirtsleeve, a smile of disbelief forming on my lips as I struggled to keep my display lenses clear. For a moment I closed my eyes and watched Chavos stroll over to the octopider and use a boot to poke at its corpse.

Unless this was a coincidence, they must have gotten my messages. Other Harvesters had to be out there somewhere. Chavos made it out… Goldwater too, I hoped. And Mueller—he wouldn’t come all this way. I was surprised to see him out in the jungle at all, at his age.

And for me, one guy? One worker? He just threw me out there. And when I didn’t hit the bounce, he left me to die out there. Out here. In here. Wherever I was—and whatever I was. My past life felt distant, just old memories.

The Harvesters announcing their presence like that meant they weren’t here to raid the Dusters. It had to be part of some play. But even if they were just here to recover Warren’s old nullsuit, and my own broken armor… they were here. That alone vastly increased my chances of getting out of this.

I couldn’t assume they knew I was here, or that my messages got out. This could easily turn into a firefight and I needed to find a way to open comms with them. Maybe I could find a way through one of those drones—

Abruptly, my display lenses winked off, leaving me with just a view of the lab they’d been keeping me in. Gaultmann stood on the other side of the glass looking in with the twins, each wearing a wounded look.

“Jackson, you did this?” His voice was muffled by the window and I could barely hear him. I had been wondering when he’d find out. He must have gone digging for answers when the Harvesters showed up.

Pointing to the dead link in my ear, I waved a hand to show I couldn’t hear them. I wasn’t about to shout, with the state my… wait, the itching on the surgery scab was totally gone. Cautiously tensing the muscles in my abdomen, I felt no pain. Feigning the same weakened state, I said softly, “Can’t hear you.”

I think I saw Gaultmann’s eye twitch, but he cut me back into the common channel just as Barkland came into view. “Fuck you Jackson, you fucking slime, you sack of shit, you sold us out! You brought them here! Now we’re fucked!”

“They’re here for me,” I said evenly. “I’m going home.”

***

A sparse ring of blue lights encircled a tight cluster of red lights at a cautious distance. Gradually, the glowing blue dots grew closer to the still, red ones.

Mueller watched the map display on his lenses impassively, resting the backs of coarse fingers from one hand against his lips. “Stop. Hold position. Split and circle farther out.”

The other hand lay in his lap clutching a thin, black cylindrical device. For a moment he raised it up, then stopped and let it fall again. “Let this play out. If they don’t struggle… weakness breeds.”

Opening a new display window, Mueller sifted through a report with aerial and close-up images of the jungle swamp, heatmaps, water current analysis, and areas with anomalous gravity. Possible nullsteel deposits. At first, that seemed to be the main excitement, with much speculation devoted to potential sites.

The final portion was jumbled, clearly hastily assembled, sloppy—with dozens of underwater images and videos of a fragile-looking black mushroom with a thin stalk and a spherical cap studded with trapped air bubbles.

One single mushroom, the exact same, over and over, gently bobbing in the murky, artificially illuminated current.