📗Strange Harvest | 1: Surface

An impulsive decision to join a lucrative honey harvest soon spirals into a surreal journey of danger, betrayal, and a dreamlike connection with the planet Surface's deadliest inhabitants...

James Hanlon

Aug 10, 2023

📗Strange Harvest
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📗Larval Haze
📗Broken Dome

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📗 Part I: Surface

“Jackson, I’m not gonna tell you again—keep up in the back, or I’ll send Chavos to do your job for you!” Mueller warned over the common channel. “I don’t want to lose any more of you idiots. That would make you worse than useless, since then we’d have to stop and waste time shipping your ass back to Overlook.”

“Yes, sir!” I winced and hurried to regain my position at the tail of our harvest team. Vaulting over a fallen tree trunk, I used my nullsuit’s boot nodes as I glided forward to pull myself back to the jungle floor.

Our party made its way along the edge of a large stand of slouching burnberry trees, and as the least experienced member, I’d fallen behind from the rest. To be honest, I’d gotten distracted trying to get a good look at the swampy burnberry grove around us. Lush, green-blue grass grew in stubborn patches in the blackened areas around the trees. Their stunted, burned trunks looked like gnarled hands trying to claw free from the earth.

Mueller blazed the trail for our group. He weaved a careful path around the grove to avoid the highly flammable fruit that dropped from the trees. Mueller said the berries would gather in piles and rot, the unstable juices pooling in the grass until something set them off, bursting into a brief wildfire. The burnberry trees’ black trunks and leafless, curled branches were evidence of that.

But the fires created updrafts necessary to carry the trees’ seeds into the air. Like dandelions, he’d said. I didn’t want to look stupid asking him what a dandelion was, so I looked it up… some kind of feathery flower from Earth. Amazing how similar our two planets really were.

Because of the increased gravity on Surface—about thirty percent higher than Earth’s—most trees tended to end up with stubby, crooked trunks and drooping boughs like the burnberries. Other species, like the massive steeloak trees that dominated this area, thrived in spite of the conditions, towering hundreds of feet over the rest of the jungle. The branches above us were packed so tightly that they blocked nearly all sunlight from reaching the ground.

Over our campsite last night, there was an opening in the tangled canopy just wide enough for a mid-size drone to slip through with a crate of extra supplies. With the Packhound transport bot’s force barrier creating a bubble of decontaminated atmosphere for us to breathe, Mueller allowed us the luxury of taking off our helmets for the first time in more than a day.

We actually ate a real meal instead of the nutrient paste rations in our nullsuits. That was our last stop before the honey harvest. We’d all recharged our suits and topped up on fluids and air, each of us preparing for today’s work. Ready for payday when we got back.

Except Warren.

“Chavos, take the goddamn greenhorn’s place before we lose him, too,” Mueller ordered, snapping me out of my thoughts. “Shouldn’t have put him back there in the first place, you oughta know better.”

“Boss, you know I fucking hate caboose,” Chavos complained.

“Quit your bitching and make sure he keeps up the pace so he doesn’t get picked off back there. This is not about you, or me, or the rookie, it’s about the harvest, remember? We make it to the harvest tonight or we miss pickup, and we maybe lose the whole batch. There’s a nasty storm coming our way from the coast, and I don’t aim to get caught out here when it hits. You hear me, Chavos?”

“Y’sir,” came the subordinate’s curt reply.

I quickly caught up to Chavos, who was standing in the trail with his beam rifle out, making a show of inspecting it as he waited for me. The weapon put me on edge, so I slowed my approach, my right hand reflexively hovering near the pistol at my hip.

With an amused laugh, Chavos holstered his rifle, stepped to the side, and waved me forward. “You ain’t even close to worth that kind of trouble, rookie. Go on, get a move on.”

I couldn’t see past his opaque black visor, but I felt his glare through it while passing by.

“You get my boot in your ass next time you slow down, Jackson,” Chavos warned. “I can already see you’ll never be half the man Warren was—and she ain’t even had man-parts.”

“Wow, I didn’t realize you could be so poetic, Chavos,” I said while trying to stay focused on maintaining a faster pace in my nullsuit without losing control. “That was just… beautiful.”

“Yeah, I’ll make sure and say something real nice when you wake up dead next.”

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I felt bad for Warren, but I couldn’t help thinking that we’d all be splitting her cut now. Yesterday, rear guard was her spot. This morning, we found her bleeding out with a four-foot quillworm wrapped around her neck. Chavos was the first to react. He yanked it off her when he saw what happened and crushed it to death with his suit’s armored gauntlets.

I was sleeping right beside her.

Apparently, it had burrowed under our campsite’s force barrier during the night and came up right underneath poor Warren as she slept. Motion detectors never picked it up. Some of its fine barbs slipped through tiny gaps in the segmented armor throat of her nullsuit and shredded her carotid artery. We might have been able to save her if anyone had noticed, but even Warren didn’t realize what was happening until the very end. Mueller said the spines were coated in a natural anesthetic—Warren didn’t feel a thing. She only woke up when she started choking on blood inside her suit.

I remember exactly the way the quillworm bloated up on one end and then burst, its orange-brown guts mixing with Warren’s dark red blood and oozing through Chavos’ gauntleted fingers before he flung its corpse off into the jungle.

Mueller actually chewed out Chavos pretty good for killing the thing, which surprised me. One of his own team members died, and Mueller got more worked up about the fucking quillworm than Warren. Said it was unnecessary. Chavos didn’t like it, and it didn’t sit right with me, either.

After the medic Goldwater called the time of death, Mueller dropped a beacon and ordered a supply drone out to pick up Warren’s body. It all seemed pretty routine, which—as the newbie—worried me more than a little bit.

We’d left Warren’s body inside her armor at the campsite a few hours earlier, since we couldn’t wait on the harvest. Once the drone reached the beacon, it would load her up. She was probably already on her way back to Overlook City. A wave of homesickness hit me then, despite the fact I’d partially signed on to the harvest to get away from the city. When I accepted the job, it didn’t sound so bad—but I’d barely skimmed the posting before sending my application. All I saw was the pay, and that it was something out there, in the wild. Out of the city. Thought it was a shot in the dark more than anything else. I never really expected to even get a call back, let alone end up going through with it.

I knew the moment I stepped off the transport and walked into the jungle for the first time, I’d made a serious mistake.

Never even been in the wild before this.

I am so fucked.