Strange Harvest

Part I: Surface

"Jackson, keep up in the back!" Mueller shouted 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 slow ass back to Overlook."

"Yes, sir!" I winced at the berating from my superior as I hurried to regain my position at the tail of our party. I vaulted over a fallen tree trunk, using my nullsuit's boot nodes to guide my landing onto the jungle floor. The harvest team was making its way through a large stand of slouching burnberry trees, and I'd fallen behind. Mueller, the owner of the harvest company, led our group, weaving a careful path through the grove to avoid being hit by the highly flammable fruit that sometimes dropped from the branches.

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 steeloaks that dominated this area, thrived in spite of the conditions, towering hundreds of feet over the rest of the jungle. The tree branches above us were packed so tightly that they blocked nearly all sunlight from reaching the ground.

But over our campsite last night, there was an opening in the tangled canopy just wide enough for a little drone to slip through with a crate of extra supplies. With the Packhound's force barrier creating a bubble of 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, 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. "Shouldn't have put him back there in the first place, you oughta know better."

"Boss, you know I fucking hate caboose," Chavos complained.

Mueller snapped, "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 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?"

"Yes, 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.

But with an amused laugh, Chavos holstered his rifle, stepped to the side, and waved me forward. "You ain't even close to worth it, 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," he 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 shot back, trying to stay focused on maintaining my pace without losing control. "That was just... beautiful."

"Yeah, I'll make sure and say something real nice when you wake up dead next."

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.

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 it bloated up on one end and then burst, its own guts mixing with Warren's dark red blood and oozing through Chavos' 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. 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 her body. It all seemed pretty routine, which—as the rookie—worried me more than a little bit.

We'd left Warren's body at the campsite a few hours earlier, since we couldn't wait on the harvest. Soon she'd be back in 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 overwhelming stresses of 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. 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 end up going through with it.

And 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.

***

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