📗Larval Haze | 7: Psathyrella Aquasepsis
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 VII: Psathyrella Aquasepsis
Queens… they would all be queens!
“Why’s he smiling like that?”
“Norczek smiled like that.”
Stirring from my dreams, I squinted up at two identical black-haired women leaning over my bed. “Who are you?”
“I’m Rachana,” said the one on my left, who had her arm in a sling. I’d seen them before when she and her… twin sister, I guessed, had refused to help Barkland get rid of Leguro’s body.
“I’m Charana,” said the other.
I snorted. “Oh, that won’t be confusing.”
With a smirk, Charana looked at her counterpart. “You hear that? This simple-minded lamblet thinks we’re the same.”
Rachana scoffed and flung her good arm in the air. “They all do, Charana.”
“What happened to me?” I asked warily.
The one without the sling, Charana, half-twirled in place back and forth, gracefully swinging her arms in loose arcs. “You lost your way, poor young thing. But you’re right at home on the dark and tangled path with us now.”
“Right.” Narrowing my eyes a bit at the eccentric sisters, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get any straight information out of them. Rachana seemed pretty lucid, but Charana was clearly out of her mind.
I needed to check in with Barkland and Gaultmann, so I opened the comms link and tried to rejoin their video feed through my display lenses. An error message appeared indicating I’d been kicked. I opened my mouth to swear at them, but almost immediately I saw an invitation from Gaultmann pop up and accepted.
“Sorry mate, welcome back to the land of the living,” Gaultmann quipped. “Had to boot you out since you wouldn’t shut your gob.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Sounded like you were speaking in tongues or something. Partial seizure, maybe. The girls gave your wound a look over, but it seems fine. You kept going on and on about queens this and queens that. I bet Norczek would have loved having you around.”
Not a good sign to be constantly compared to a dead man afflicted with the same condition. “Where’s the nectar?”
“We’re extracting it in the centrifuge now. I’ve got a few sensor drones scouting out the area here near the lab—and one lucky lad stayed behind to track down whatever hellmouth these spawn came from.” Gaultmann sent me the partially-generated map with his overlaid analysis color-coding the hotspots with most activity. “Should be alright for now, until they deplete that central zone. Then we’ll get roamers as they expand and thin out.”
I breathed a sigh of relief as Charana peered down into the artificial Hive Frame’s partially translucent observation panel and cooed at the wriggling grubs inside. Not once had I felt the need to actually look at them, I realized: it was as though I could feel their growth somehow, almost seeing it in my mind’s eye.
The hungriest of the five larvae were already nibbling at the artificial hive cell caps—a poor substitute for the delicate, flavorful, pheromone-packed membrane I recalled from the memories I shared with my… I searched for the right word, because mother wasn’t it.
Broodsire.
An ethereal, thrumming vibration ill-suited for human language reverberated in my chest and head. But I understood the meaning.
The bitter, intense spice of her venom filled my mouth and throat with a burning taste like sour chocolate and hot peppers. I could even smell the acrid pheromones paired with the venom, their urgent instructions flooding my senses.
A crushing sense of dread and hopelessness overwhelmed me, gathering its weight on my chest like a slab of stone.
Hatchlings.
A dark, empty chasm opened within myself and I fell into it.
Far, far above I could see my vision reduced to a small area. It felt like looking at Barkland’s camera feed, except I was witnessing my own perceptions from a distance and I couldn’t quite make everything out.
The twins came closer, speaking to me. I heard my own voice, distorted and guttural. They looked confused, worried. What was I saying? How could I be saying anything if I was down here in the dark?
I started pointing and grabbing at things, arms waving around, head twitching from side to side, and knocked the metal IV drip stand onto myself. And then I… I threw off my blankets and stood up—lunged forward, close enough for me to see Rachana and Charana’s shocked, bloodless expressions as they screamed at me and scrambled out of the room.
They tried to lock me in, but I was too fast. I’d grabbed the drip stand I was hooked up to and thrust it forward to block the automatic doors from shutting. They tripped over each other just outside and Charana slammed to the ground with a cry, trying to kick away from me but finding little purchase.
Rachana locked wrists with her twin and dragged her out of reach, but I was already past them, hunched over and furiously hobbling down the hallway using the IV stand as a walking stick. Even from my distant bottom-of-the-well perspective, my movements seemed erratic, jerky… inhuman.
Like something else was getting used to being in my skin.
Watching from far away, a new understanding seeped gently into the forefront of my thoughts. Gradually, like calm waves lapping at dry sand, softening, darkening… my self faded into the background and a familiar consciousness settled in. I became her again. The intent behind her instruction became clearer.
We are me.
These starving larvae, these five red queens… they were copies of herself, not children: new bodies for the same mind, implanted with the same maddening full-sensory visions as I’d been. Her consciousness? Or just her memories?
Where is our nectar?
For the first time she spoke to me directly, with a question. Not a fragmented idea or chain of visions imbued with sense and emotion, but an interaction. I had so many questions of my own to ask.
The chance to speak with her made me swell with joy and brought my response spilling out without a second thought: I concentrated intently on a mental image of Barkland in his armored nullsuit, the red lotus flowers packed within their black hard-shell case, and the likely path he’d taken based on the images I’d seen of Gaultmann’s map back to the grow lab.
Give us nectar! She swatted my thoughts away, enraged. A loud, whiplike crack sounded in my ears and I felt a flash of stinging pain on my tongue.
Forgive me, I begged.
How did I do that? I didn’t know where the centrifuge was. Somewhere in this place, sure, but I didn’t—
FEED US!
We sobbed in panic together as we both lost control. My body collapsed to the floor, curling in on itself like a dying quillworm. The queen, overwhelmed by the ravenous malnourishment of five simultaneous births, was desperate for lotus nectar. She had seized control of me to feed herself, and I couldn’t stop her. We were stuck in a loop of uncontrollable fear and hunger.
Then we caught the nectar’s scent. An intoxicating sensory overload flooded out everything else with sweet sky-blue flavors humming with cool, soft light. We needed it. Together, we took control and I rose back up into myself with a burst of adrenaline.
Lurching to my feet, I staggered against the wall and followed the intense pull from the lotus nectar’s aroma. A flash of red on my arm made me realize I’d ripped out the IV, leaving splatters of blood in a trail behind me.
Ahead, I could see a room with a long window, some lab equipment, and an open door. I panted with pathetic desperation, practically whining as I felt the nectar’s many conflicting sensations intensify the closer I got.
Iridescent patterns of painted, swirling fog filled the air around me. I could actually see it, twisting in clouds around me, and I breathed in deep as though it could pull me even closer to its source.
The second I passed through the doorway, it sliced shut behind me.
I saw red lotus flowers… but… crushed, strewn in pieces.
A trap.
Whirling around to the long window, Gaultmann stood on the other side gaping at me—clutching five small vials of clear blue liquid. Fasma, Rachana, and Charana shuffled into view cautiously, each of them clinging to one another in some way.
Immediately I went for the door controls, clawing at them blindly with a pointless, bloody smear. I slammed my hand savagely against the window and snarled hoarsely, “Feed us! Give us nectar!”
The thick glass didn’t budge. I heaved angry breaths, glaring at the gawking idiots through my dripping handprint. The disgusting meatsack fools. The wingless small-eyed bonelimbs.
Seething, I rasped vicious insults at them through clenched jaws and stalked back and forth as they flapped spittle-flecked air through their lips and clicked at each other with their small, hard teeth.
***
“What’s that mean? Pastarella…?” Barkland tried to sound it out and gave up.
“Psathyrella Aquasepsis,” Gaultmann corrected him. “It’s a rare type of mushroom that’s small, delicate, and grows underwater. When it reproduces, it explodes millions of spores into the water and rots organic material extremely fast to produce more colonies.”
“Too hard to say.”
“All you can do is your best,” Gaultmann said flatly as he turned to the others. “Well? Anyone?”
Shrugging, Fasma said, “Without Jackson and his wasps, I don’t see how this helps us. He’s gone completely out of his mind. We all saw him.”
“He’s recovering,” Gaultmann assured them quickly. With a frustrated sigh, he brought up his map of the swamp on a nearby physical display, highlighted their grow lab in green, and drew a white ring around the section with the greatest octopider density.
“The adults prey on lotus wasp larvae almost exclusively. In a month, this small, compact area of these many-tentacled bastards will have tripled in size. Many of the young will be cannibalized, starve, or find themselves prey. And they won’t spawn more ‘til next year. But they will surely expand their territory with so many in this wave. As they age, their appetites shift from eating just about anything they can find to fasting for long periods while they hunt for entire hives of wasp grubs they can gorge on all at once.”
Fasma clicked his tongue.
Charana nodded. “Honey can’t flow from empty nests.”
Rachana bobbed her head in sync. “So we kill the hungry greedy beasts.”
Barkland grunted as he chewed a stubborn hangnail.
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