Strange Harvest

Part III: Dusters

When we got within a mile of the old campsite, Chavos and I took cover amid the ten-foot-high exposed roots of a steeloak tree. Chavos lobbed a fist-sized sensor drone into the air and it flitted off to scout the area. We hung back while it scanned the area, watching its camera feed on our display lenses. No contact. The supply drone, with no obvious signs of damage, seemed to have parked itself in the clearing where we left Warren. Her body had vanished, a stripped nullsuit transponder lying in her place.

The back of my neck tingled, and I whispered to Chavos even though we were sitting a mile away, "Warren's gone."

The little sensor drone hovered at the edge of the campsite. "Yeah, I see it," he replied quietly. "Something's wrong here, man."

He moved it in to get a closer look and the feed went black.

"Fuck this." He opened the common channel to the rest of our team. "Mueller, Warren's gone. Call off your backup drone, we got dusters around. Coming back, keep an eye out."

Chavos turned back the way we'd just come, gliding through the jungle like an armored wraith in his black nullsuit. The way he moved—leaping, diving, twisting through tiny gaps in the dense foliage—I could tell he'd done his time out here in the wild. Compared to him, I was a lumbering sasquatch.

Where Chavos picked his way gracefully through the tangle of shrubs and vines in our way, I sometimes had to lower my shoulder and crash into thickets that he seemed to just slide right past. My lens display kept his body outlined, so I could follow him even when I couldn't get line of sight, but I still had trouble keeping up.

"Why would dusters come this far out?" I asked. "This is a fucking pain in the ass."

Chavos laughed. "Jungle grow labs for that mushroom shit they use. Harder to get caught this far away from the city."

"What do you think happened to Warren?"

"She's gone. They'll get what information they can on all of us from her suit, if they haven't already. After that, her body probably goes in a grow pit."

"Do they know about the harvest? How many you think—"

"Jesus, Jackson!" Chavos cut me off and came charging back toward me, flying out of the jungle and tackling me to the ground. He took a handful of dark mud and slung it across my visor. "Just shut the fuck up until we get back to Mueller. Understood?"

I blinked a green confirmation light to him.

"Good. Now move!" Chavos shouted. "Get up! Clean that shit off your face, rookie!"

I struggled to my feet while wiping as much mud as I could from my helmet. By the time I could see, Chavos had already taken off again. I bolted after him, streaks of mud still clinging to my visor.

"I swear, Jackson, you are the slowest damn city boy we ever brought out here. If the dusters don't get you, something out here sure as hell will." Chavos sighed. "We gotta teach you how to move, man, 'cause we ain't in the city anymore."

After an hour of relentless badgering and humiliation from Chavos—with some helpful advice sprinkled in among many blistering insults—we had almost reached Mueller and the rest of the harvest team. My body ached from the breakneck pace Chavos kept up with his acrobatic bounding through the jungle, but his short lesson seemed to have stuck. I tripped less, anyway.

Following him, watching the paths he took, how he contorted his body to slip through tiny openings I would never have noticed, helped me see that I had mostly confined myself to slogging along the ground instead of moving like Chavos did. It was some kind of jungle ballet, touching the ground only when needed, leaping and twisting in his nullsuit, pushing off tree trunks or pulling himself along vines.

We made good time, but as we approached the other harvesters, Mueller spoke to us over the common channel. "Bad news, boys. Packhound hit a snag—some snakethorn in the underbrush got ahold of it, dragged the whole damn thing into a nasty patch. Almost got me, too. Could use a couple more hands here."

"Got it," Chavos acknowledged. Then, privately to me, he snapped, "Soft old man won't just kill the pest, I know it. Could be on their way in two seconds flat with one shot, but he ain't gonna do it. Holding up the harvest for nothing."

Maintaining my silence, I didn't reply. A few moments later, Chavos said to me with an almost apologetic growl, "I didn't say none of that, got it, rook? You keep it to yourself."

I blinked him another green confirmation light.

We found the others nearby, trying to wrangle the Packhound free from the grasping vines of a snakethorn plant. This was one of the things that Mueller had warned us about. The powerful, thorny, whip-like vines would spread out around the plant, lying in wait until something touched them—and then they struck, wrapping around their prey to pull them into the snakethorn's "mouth."

The Packhound was larger than its name implied—closer to the size of a bear than a dog—so we didn't have to worry about it getting eaten whole, but we couldn't move forward with the harvest until we cut it free. All of the empty kegs and other gear for the lotus honey were on there, along with the fabricant rental.

I rushed to help Goldwater and Sarabi hold onto the Packhound's front legs, keeping it in place with the strength of our nullsuits. Meanwhile, Mueller crouched on top of the Packhound, using a long knife to slice away the tough, spiny vines from one of its other legs. All around us, just out of reach, more snakethorn plants writhed with excitement.

Chavos immediately set to work alongside Mueller, deftly pouncing onto the wriggling Packhound and pulling a similar blade from a hidden sheath on his suit's outer thigh. Within three feet of them, the snakethorn's toothless, gaping maw chomped mindlessly in anticipation of its meal. "Safer to just kill the thing, boss. For next time."

"Thoughtless to just kill the thing, you mean," Mueller corrected sharply, swiping at a vine that reached for his boot. "It's a perfectly good specimen. And besides, we'd have to clear the whole patch to make any difference. We know it's here now, so we'll go around it in the future. Superficial wounds only—cut a few of these away and we'll get moving again."

"You're the boss," Chavos muttered.

***

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