📗Strange Harvest | 2: Harvest
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...
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.
If you’re using a web browser to read, you can use these links to help find your way:
📗Short Stories | 📘Books | 📙Personal Essays | 💌Newsletter | ❓About | 🏡Home
App Users: the categorized Tag links above don’t work in-app, so you may find it easier to use the Content Calendar or direct links to story posts to navigate my publication.
📘 Twice a week (Tues & Thurs) I’ll post a chapter from this book.
📗 New Short Stories will be added to the Content Calendar as I post.
💌 Once a month (the final Wednesday) I’ll post an author’s newsletter.
📙 Every once in a while I’ll post Non-Fiction content like Personal Essays.
Enjoy, share, and please let me know your thoughts in the comments! 💚
📗 Part II: Harvest
I choked down another mouthful of chalky pink nutrient paste from the straw in my helmet, carefully licking the plastic tube clean to avoid a mess. It left a bitter residue behind, and the taste lingered even after I washed it down with a few gulps of water. It was supposed to taste like strawberry, apparently.
The paste was enough to keep us going in the suits, but it kept me on the edge of hunger all the time. If not for the awful flavor, I might have already gone through my stores. Besides our meal yesterday, it was all any of us had eaten the past three days, since we couldn’t take our suits off in the jungle. And even then, the Packhound had to decontaminate our campsite before we could take our helmets off.
The planet Surface was nearly a perfect mirror-Earth, but there were still all kinds of nasty things in the air—without the suits and oxygen scrubbers, we’d stand a pretty good chance of catching any variety of alien diseases. Breathing this warm jungle air straight into our lungs would be a slow suicide.
A rifle butt smacked me in the back of the helmet hard enough to send me stumbling. “Move it, rookie! What you standing there for? You slow in the head too?”
Chavos again. I made no reply—just increased my pace to close the gap between me and Sarabi. The only thing I could do to keep Chavos off my ass was pull my weight.
“Two miles to the hive,” Mueller said on the common channel. “Stay sharp and keep your eyes open. Lots of wildlife around here come to eat lotus fruit from the canopy. You see something, say something. We’ve got a lot of delicate gear here and I want this to go smoothly.”
“For once,” Goldwater remarked.
The harvest team shared a subdued laugh—even Mueller—and their icons lit up with green confirmations on my contact lenses’ display.
“Alright, listen up,” Mueller continued. “We’re now inside the biggest natural lotus grove on the entire planet. Our harvesting sites are at its heart, underneath the greatest concentration of lotus. When we get to the first hive, we’ll set up at ground level over it. I’ll be going down to extract the honey, since I’ve conditioned the queen. The fabricant will come down to help me move the kegs after I check the honey, and everybody else stays up top. Just sit tight and don’t spook them. I want to avoid killing anything we don’t have to. This is a completely unique, natural cycle on Surface and we will not be the ones to disrupt it.”
Chavos snorted. “Ain’t losing any sleep over a few bugs, boss.”
“You know as well as the rest of us we’ll lose more than sleep if they decide to swarm us,” Goldwater replied. “We’ve all seen what their venom can do—and those stingers will pierce your armor if they hit you right. Show some respect to this place—just ask Warren.”
Silence on the channel. That shut him up.
“Thank you, Goldwater. Now cut the banter.” Clearly annoyed, Mueller finished his explanation. “We’ve got plenty of time to beat the storm if we stick to our schedule. All you sorry grubs need to do is stay calm and help the fabricant load the kegs back onto the Packhound.”
With Warren dead, we were six in total: there was old man Mueller, the medic Goldwater, head of security Chavos, Sarabi, myself, and a BioLock fabricant rental. Sarabi, Warren, and I had all been hired on as contractors, but Goldwater and Chavos were full partners at Mueller’s harvesting company, Royal Lotus.
The fabricant was still in stasis on the Packhound, boxed away with the rest of our gear. Since BioLock’s fees increased based on active usage and risk, Mueller wanted to wait until we were on-site to wake it. The sturdy Packhound trundled along at the center of our group between Sarabi and Goldwater, the four-legged transport bot living up to its name with its signature dog-like trot.
We moved with purpose after entering the grove. The steeloaks grew closer together here, with lotus vines growing along winding paths up their trunks and climbing to reach the canopy, where they would bloom in the sunlight. Once ripe, their fruit would fall to the jungle floor. The psychoactive chemicals in lotus fruit could be used for everything from pharmaceuticals to wine, but that wasn’t what we were after. We wanted honey.
A species of giant honey wasp in the grove had taken to eating lotus fruit to make its nectar, which they then processed into honey at their hive. Mueller got really excited when he told us about this part during our briefing—these wasps were normally omnivorous, eating insects and small animals to round out their diet. But the wasps in the grove fed exclusively on lotus fruit, using the nutrients to make their honey in hives underground, most of the time within the root system of a steeloak tree.
Scientists could make synthetic stuff that was chemically identical, but this organic straight-from-nature lotus honey fetched a much higher price. And since these wasps fed purely on the lotus fruit in the wild, it was more potent than other brands of organic lotus honey. Royal Lotus was, by far, the most expensive honey on the market. Back in Overlook City, I’d had more than my share of lotus wine, but I’d never tried lotus honey before. Getting home after a few days bottled up inside a suit would be reason enough to celebrate.
Coming all the way out on foot to harvest was a risky venture, but a dropship big enough for seven or eight people and equipment wouldn’t fit through the jungle canopy without damaging the ecosystem, as Mueller said. He, of course, refused to do this, so we had to get dropped at a clearing near the harvest site and trek through the wild instead. Then, we’d load up the honey and do it all again in reverse.
“Hey, Mueller,” Chavos said slowly, “Did you notice Warren’s still showing up at the campsite?”
A pause as Mueller checked for himself. “Huh. What the hell?”
I brought up a map overlay on my display contact lenses to see. Sure enough, Warren’s icon remained at our campsite several miles back. The drone was right next to her, offline. We were about halfway between her and the hive.
“Drone crashed, maybe?” I suggested.
“Shouldn’t have. Damn thing’s rated for nearly a ton, and in worse conditions than this.” Mueller sounded more irritated than worried—but a note of concern was obvious. “Better not be those new power cells. I’m gonna go back. Chavos, Sarabi, Jackson, stay with Goldwater and keep moving.”
“Mueller, you have to get to the grove,” Goldwater interjected. “If we don’t start on that honey by sundown, we won’t make a full harvest before the storm hits.”
The harvest leader growled with frustration. “You’re right. Chavos, you and Jackson head back and we’ll keep moving. Find out what happened. I’ll call in another drone and have it circle nearby in case the other one’s faulty. We’ll move ahead with the harvest as planned.”
***
📗Short Stories | 📘Books | 📙Personal Essays | 💌Newsletter | ❓About | 🏡Home
