📗Larval Haze | 5: The Swamp Nest
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 V: The Swamp Nest
After gingerly touching the second display lens to my eye, I blinked a few times to settle the soft gel contact in place. A semi-transparent window with Barkland’s video feed immediately appeared in the corner of my eye. I allowed it to solidify and take over my whole field of view, showing me the world from Barkland’s perspective.
He was clinging to the trunk of a massive steeloak tree, hundreds of feet in the air, looking out at the vast swampy area around himself. The green blanket of leaves in the lower canopy below rustled wildly in the wind.
Farther out at water level, everything else seemed to be moving too. The bluish grass on the shore swayed oddly, and even the bark on the trees was… it was moving. But it wasn’t grass and it wasn’t bark.
A churning sheet of octopiders swarmed over everything in sight.
There had to be tens—no, hundreds of thousands of them, floating in the water, skittering on the grassy shore, climbing and falling from trees. I could see them dropping like fat, wriggling raindrops all over the place.
“What the fuck,” I whispered.
“You’re telling me,” muttered Barkland, and he held up into view a fistful of mangled lotus fruit with a few crushed scarlet flowers on top. “These the ones?”
Seeing them brought me a surge of relief. “Yes! But we need a lot more, and just the flowers—not the fruit.”
“I’d say about fifty,” Gaultmann offered. “Be careful with them so we don’t lose nectar. There’s not much in each flower.”
“Fifty!” Barkland protested. “Really, that many? It was hard enough to find just these ones—”
“They need it all,” I said harshly, cutting him off. The bite in my words surprised me, but I knew the eggs would be hatching soon. Threads of the wasp queen’s vision lingered in my thoughts. These five hatchlings would be warriors, necessary to counter this threat. “Scan it and use your suit to find more. The external cameras can find and tag flowers for you.”
“Scan it… how?”
So Barkland really didn’t know how to use the nullsuit, not even the basics I’d learned in my brief stint with the harvesters. He was getting by on instinct, probably, which made sense because it was designed to work intuitively. “Just hold it up in front of your helmet and squint at it for a second.”
While he struggled to get the scanner to work consistently, I faded the camera feed on my display lenses back to transparency and waved Gaultmann over. I muted myself on the little communicator link in my ear and he did the same.
“He doesn’t know what he’s doing with that suit, does he? No training? Has anyone here ever used one like that, with powered armor?” I asked.
Gaultmann shook his head. “The rest of us have null-threaded exosuits… for emergencies only, nothing like what he’s using.”
I looked him in the eyes. “Where’s my armor?”
Giving me a skeptical look, he shook his head. “Not a chance. In your condition?”
“Not for me—Fasma. He’s about my size, and he seems like he could handle it. Barkland needs help.”
Gaultmann snorted. “He doesn’t know either. Besides, it’s in no state to be used yet. It’s not like we have an armory here to repair it—we need parts and tools I don’t have.”
“Where is it? I can help. We’re going to need it.”
“It’s not that simple—”
“Bring me with you,” I demanded. Then, with a hand raised in apology, I explained, “Sorry, it’s just—we’re just waiting here for Barkland, and I’m sick of lying here in this room. Wheel me over?”
Begrudgingly, he relented and unlocked the wheeled gurney I was using as a bed, grumbling, “Don’t know why I’m taking orders from you.”
“Same reason as why we’re all out here in the first place,” I guessed. “Because we’re all desperate. Making decisions moment to moment. Surviving.”
Gaultmann grunted in agreement and pulled me along behind him as he backed out of the room. I wanted to focus back on Barkland’s video feed, but it was important for me to see the layout of this place. I moved the feed to a small window at the bottom of my field of view as Barkland awkwardly scaled the tree’s thick clusters of overgrowth near the upper canopy. He wasn’t even using the gravity nodes in the suit, he was just climbing the thing like a ladder.
I felt a little bit like Chavos then, sneering at the rookie’s incompetence.
“How long have you been doing this?” I asked as we rounded a corner at the end of the short hallway. We entered a larger open room with two rows of bench tables at one end and a kitchen with a serving counter at the other. I saw pieces of my Royal Lotus-issued nullsuit strewn across one of the long tables.
Gaultmann shrugged. “Sort of lost track, I guess. Maybe a year. Running experiments for them, researching.”
“You help to make the mushroom dust?”
“The spores, yes,” he corrected me.
“I know some people who got dosed with it,” I said.
Gaultmann nodded and busied himself with inspecting my armor, scratching at the hardened wood-paste from the lotus wasps. “Everyone does, yeah?”
My gut reaction to his nonchalance was anger. “Do you ever feel like a piece of shit for making it?”
He took a long, still moment before responding. “Did you choose to come here, Jackson? Did they ask for your permission?”
I felt my face redden and my skin actually stung a little, like the flush of blood was unwelcome, unfamiliar. “No.”
Gaultmann nodded patiently, as though he’d been waiting for this moment. “It’s only the luckiest among us who aren’t compelled to serve a master we despise.”
His words and tone had the ring of history, so I squinted at him a little and twitched my left eyelid to run a search on what he’d said. But of course I didn’t have full net access, just their comm link, so the search returned an error and I just felt stupid again. Instead I asked, “Was that a quote? Something Pre-War?”
Beaming, Gaultmann nodded. “A fellow scholar of the Revolution, I see.”
“Just what I remember from school.” I was about to ask who it was when I noticed on Barkland’s miniature window that he’d finally reached the steeloak tree’s upper canopy. Judging by the number of thick lotus vines laced around the trunk, there would be more than enough flowers for the nectar we needed. I maximized Barkland’s camera feed. “Hey, he’s at the top.”
The view thrilled me. I felt ripples of the wasp queen, triggered by the verdant treetop dotted with bright scarlet flowers. This tree was a landmark in our territory, one we’d been fond of seeking out on clear, windless days to stretch our scales in the sun, sipping nectar or nibbling at the ripe lotus fruit in the fertile patch that grew at its highest reaches.
I couldn’t help but pull myself toward the faint echo of a memory, craving the knowledge and escape from my own damaged body. I wanted to wrap myself in that warm peaceful blanket, the alien nostalgia which somehow felt natural.
Gaultmann stood beside me extracting data from Barkland’s feed and throwing it onto a nearby display monitor above the serving counter. He could handle the rest. I could just fade out a little, into the background.
But I held back. The nectar—it was too important. Trying to focus on the view on my display, but also feeling the overlapping memories of the queen, I took a deep, steadying breath. I watched as Barkland began plucking nearby lotus flowers off their stems, inspecting the first few carefully before stashing them away.
Diagrams of the flower and estimates of nectar yield appeared in a flurry of shifting light on the display above me. This felt good and right and true to the queen’s vision. Our path lay before us.
***
“You told him what?”
“I told him if we find Jackson, maybe you’d come back.”
“Maybe’s doing some heavy lifting there.”
“What do you say?”
“It’s not that easy. I’m done.”
“What if he’s still out there?”
“He’s not. Why would the Dusters keep him alive? I probably bought him a couple more hours, but Jackson… he’s gone, Chavos. I made my peace. Now it’s time to make justice.”
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