Strange Harvest

Part VIII: Roots

As I fell, threads of vibrant green fog wrapped around me, covering me, smothering me, until I couldn't see anything but a blinding rush of color. End over end, I rolled and twisted in the air until finally I straightened out and stabilized. I was looking down at treetops, I realized as my vision cleared, dropping like a rock from above the canopy, straight down toward Surface, pulled faster and faster by its gravitational might. Terminal velocity. No stopping. For a moment, I tried to will myself awake again and free myself from the nightmare before I hit the trees.

Then I felt my wings spread out behind me.

I wasn't falling, I was in flight.

I was her again.

In the dream, the wasp queen and I shared one form, but I wasn't in control. I knew her thoughts, I felt her movements, but she seemed unaware of my presence—as though I was a ghost haunting her memories, wearing her body, but unable to change her past. I lived her history.

At my flanks, dozens of warrior lotus wasps accelerated past me, their bright, scarlet-scaled armor flashing in the sun as they weaved through the upper branches of the jungle. I dropped in at the tail of the warriors' group, dodging through a cluster of lotus vines laden with heavy fruit—our prize. We would take new territory today. Surrounded by my fierce guardians, I knew I would taste victory.

As a young queen, I had to prove myself in combat before my mother would let me begin my own hive. These veteran fighters would lead me into battle, protecting me from being overwhelmed while I tested myself against the enemy. Sticking to the cover of top-tier branches, our swarm moved swiftly, before we lost the advantage of surprise.

A group of desperate octopiders had climbed all the way up to the canopy looking for prey, drawn by the scent of broken lotus fruit at the base of the tree. They were nimble in the treetops, but only for short periods—eventually they would have to return to the jungle swamps below. They liked to hunt wasps and other animals distracted by feeding on the ripe lotus on the treetops, and today they'd made several kills. But a few of the worker wasps they'd attacked got back to our hive and raised a warning.

I could smell them before I saw them. Their fetid stench, stagnant pondwater and tree rot, carried far on the wind. Exhausted from their long climb, ten or twelve octopiders rested on a wide bough while feasting on our hivemates' corpses.

We descended in a furious assault, without hesitation, the warriors at the front of our swarm targeting the largest octopider first. They stabbed at the exposed flesh near its eyes with their stingers, knocking the octopider off the branch with a brief, shrill scream of pain and shock.

The other tentacled creatures reacted immediately, scrambling toward the tree trunk to escape. I swooped down to cut them off, squaring off against the group as my guardian wasps landed beside me, my stinger poised to strike my enemies, powerful jaws snapping open and shut. The octopiders froze, then scattered.

Most of them turned back the other way. Two threw themselves off the branch, spreading their tentacles wide to attempt landing on another limb below. My warriors intercepted this pair instantly, mounting them from above and piercing their bodies ruthlessly as they tumbled through the trees. One small octopider made no attempt to move, seeming terrified, drooling droplets of wasp innards from its open mouth. I grabbed the foul spawn's head with my pincer-like mandibles, crushing hard and then flinging its body away before it could decide to fight back.

Another, I stabbed with my venomous stinger as it tried to skitter past me, then sliced my barbed interior hook deep into its soft midsection. I turned my head to look at my enemy, clicking victoriously and spraying it with pheromones that expressed the terrifying brutality of its final moments. After retracting my hook, I pulled free from its wounded body and pushed it off the wide steeloak bough to the jungle floor. My scent would spread through the waters below, warning its kind of our strength.

My hive would be glorious.

After my warriors killed the rest of the octopiders, I called them to me and ascended to the canopy. Ropy lotus vines climbed the steeloak's trunk, and we followed them up until we crested the treetops. As far as I could see, the jungle sprawled around me in waves, dotted with mottled red lotus fruit and their bright aquamarine leaves. We feasted on the sweet blue-green flesh inside the lotus in the morning light, warmth from the sun soaking into our shimmering scales.

The dream accelerated, sweeping me along as if I'd suddenly been caught in a current. I saw flashes of building a new hive, carefully laying eggs inside the hexagonal cells, misting them with calming pheromones, and tenderly stocking each cell with a morsel of chewed lotus fruit. The workers, I arranged neatly around the edges of the hive. They would be first to hatch, tasked with feeding the larger warrior and queen grubs I'd laid at the hive's center.

Each of my queens was a treasure to me, unique in its own way. Not all would hatch, or live to see the light of day, but I knew them all. My own mother had chosen me, out of all my sisters, because I was what she needed at the time—a warrior queen. Fierce and vicious, the largest of them all, with the strength to crush our enemies and conquer new territory. My life would be a saga of violence and celebration, war and victory. And from these successes, my queens could build their own hives, expand to new regions of the lotus grove, if I could protect and provide for them.

I wanted to linger there, but the vision began fading while I checked over the fat, soft grubs, touching them with my antennae, gently nudging them with my outer mandibles. Voices intruded on my dream state, and with a painful flash of light, reality tore me away from my hive.

I was back in my own broken body again, staring up at Mueller and Chavos in their nullsuits as they argued with each other. We were at ground level again, just outside the root tunnel leading to the hive, with the Packhound lying beside me blocking the opening. Mueller and Chavos crouched over me with their backs to the Packhound. Another flash of light exploded nearby, and a shower of black dirt rained down on the force barrier around us.

"—she's gone, Mueller!" Chavos insisted on the common channel. "They got her, she's gone. She wouldn't just leave like that. Now we have to get the fuck out of here! Sitting out here in the open like this, draining the Packhound—"

"Packhound's still got twenty percent," Mueller replied calmly, opening a small compartment on the Packhound and pulling out a rounded black tube with a wide, angled nozzle on one end. "We're not waiting for Goldwater, we're waiting for Sarabi and the fabricant to finish the harvest—because if we don't have the honey, we've got nothing to bargain with. That's what they want, not us. Why do you think they waited until now to attack? They've been following us since we set foot in the grove. They'd have taken the honey already if they could, but they need us to extract it."

"Negotiate with dusters? You want to negotiate with them?" Chavos demanded, gesturing out at the trees on the other side of the Packhound.

"Don't want to. Did. Now shut up and wait."

"What! Are you fucking—"

Mueller cut Chavos' mic when he noticed me groggily tilt my head toward them. "Jackson, try not to move. And don't speak."

"I saw—"

"I know. I know what you saw, Jackson. I know what you're feeling. You want to tell me what you saw, but I've seen it already."

Confused, I looked up at him as he knelt beside me, bringing his helmet close to mine. His visor shifted from opaque black to clear, and I was surprised to see an understanding smile on his thin, pale face. His bright blue eyes shined like sapphires, with a strange fractal glow, as the wrinkles on his skin seemed to pulse and shift. I weakly asked, "Stung you...?"

Mueller shook his head as he examined the wound on my abdomen. I still couldn't feel anything. "Not this one. Another, a long time ago. You need to listen to me now, Jackson. Judging by the fact that you're awake now, the queen's anesthetic is wearing off. You're going to be in a lot of pain soon, so we need to do this quickly. You have a choice to make." He lifted the black, nozzled tube for me to see. "Biofoam. This will save your life right now. But it will kill the eggs."

***

Click "external link" below to join the Hanlon's Reader email list at Substack:

https://jhanlon.substack.com/about