by A. R. Knight
Arcing roots and leafy tendrils swoop and dance with each other in a tight maze, the very tips of petals, larger than the Mobius, coming into view like blades from a massive fan.
Sax turns and swims back towards the pipe and the shoreline beneath it. He’s hoping the Spire’s right there, that he might be able to climb it or find an elevator, but there’s nothing more than the long, thick pipe rocketing back into the undergrowth and out of sight.
Once Sax gets himself on land, he has to deal with the air. It’s thick and scratchy, like breathing smoke, only the smell isn’t of ash - it’s pollen, leaden and stuffy. Rathfall’s air by itself won’t kill him right away, but the pollen’s going to clog his lungs eventually, leaving Sax without room to breathe in what he really needs.
That’s only one of his problems, though. Sax watches the pipe’s end, hoping Bas or even Engee’s going to pop out and join him down here, but nothing comes except the endless sludge. Eventually, Sax will have to move or he’ll die here, one more pile of waste.
If that happens, Sax won’t find Frayk. Or the Belloch.
Can’t leave a list like that unreconciled.
The only way he knows to go is along the pipe, so Sax forces himself to his feet and begins to claw his way into the wilds. The tendrils are hard and bulky, and every claw swipe that clears a root or stalk coats Sax in sticky sap. Pollen clings to him, along with bits of dirt from the ground, and soon Sax can’t even see his own gray scales. He’s all rotting yellow.
The pollen doesn’t just affect his looks either - it keeps sticking to him, to itself as Sax forges on, weighing him down, pressing him closer to the ground until Sax has to use his tail to keep his balance. And his anger to keep his energy. Few things are better Oratus fuel than a fiery desire to end an enemy. Sax keeps hacking, keeps pressing along with the pipe to his left. One claw, then the other, then the next and the next and the next...
The wind hits Sax hard, strong. Pollen blows off of him in chunks as Sax struggles to open his eyes. They’d been covered too, in the end. All of him, every last bit stuck over with sallow golden fluff until he couldn’t move anymore.
Only now it’s going away, washing off his skin and floating or rolling into the plants around him. Nature taking pity on Sax, maybe?
“Look at this,” says a voice that tickles Sax’s mind. “Never expected to find him out here.”
“Wasn’t he supposed to be watching the ship?”
“Don’t know what Plake told him.”
That name gets Sax to open his eyes fully, to look up and see two Flaum, one pure black and the other a bright silver, staring at him through breath masks attached to full suits. Black, her name, wields a wide tube that links around to a battery pack on her suit - that’s where the wind is coming from, and as Sax looks up, she blasts him in the face with it.
“Sorry, had to get that last bit off ya,” Black chitters, her voice coming through a mesh filter in the mask she’s wearing. “Would’ve looked funny with a yellow hat on your head.”
Sax tries to stand up, but his muscles are weak. He can’t seem to get enough air. His vents strain, cough, and Sax sees the poof of yellow-orange dust that comes out when they do.
“Rath-lung,” Silver says. “Have to pump him clean.”
“Whaddya think he’ll do if I try? Claw me to death?”
“I bet he can’t lift a single arm. But if we don’t help him and his pair finds out, she’ll make sure we’re meat.”
Black slots the tube into a notch near her waist, bends down and takes hold of Sax’s foreclaws. Tries to pull the Oratus, and all Sax does is shift some dirt.
“That’s not gonna work,” Black says, standing back. “Any ideas?”
“We’ve got to bring the pump to him.”
“Think they’ll allow that?”
“We won’t tell them.” Silver points to Sax. “You think Sax won’t pay us back in full? An Oratus out here ought to get us plenty.”
Sax washes out of consciousness as the lack of oxygen causes the world to fuzz. He does manage to hear the soft sounds of wheels on dirt, though, and definitely catches the fizzing suction of a vacuum going to work.
Black’s holding something like her tube, only smaller and targeted, with a funnel leading back to a large tank.
“You stay real still,” Black says as she kneels down next to Sax. “Last reward I want for saving your life is a slit throat.”
She sticks the tube up to, and then inside Sax’s first vent. It hurts, it’s stunning, like feeling Sax’s insides roiled around inside him, but after a few seconds she pulls it away and Sax can suddenly breathe. Yet before he’s had a breath, Silver plants himself next to Black and, with a tube in both hands, spreads a gray ointment over the vent Black just cleared.
“Don’t wait for me,” Silver says to Black. “Keep going. I want to get this done before he really gets going, so we have a chance to run if he’s mad.”
“You think we’d manage to get away?” Black laughs in her suit as she suctions another vent. “I need to get you off the ship more. He’d run us down and have us carved for dinner before you manage a single call for help.”
Breathe.
That’s all.
Breathe.
Sax opens his eyes, and both Flaum are staring at him. He must have passed out again, but now there’s strength in his limbs. His mind is clear, and the blurs at the edge of his vision have passed away into nothing.
A glance at his chest confirms it; there’s seals over all of his vents now, and bits of yellow dust cling to them.
“It’ll keep the pollen out, though you’ll want to clean them off from time to time,” Silver says. “Basically required for going out on Rathfall.”
“Been wantin’ to ask you,” Black starts in. “What’re you doing way out here without a suit? Any kind of mask?”
“Also, you smell toxic.” Silver runs a glance up and down Sax’s long body. “You may want to shower, or you’ll find yourself with some tumors by morning.”
Sax decides to give his voice a try. “Fraykt took me. Took Engee and Bas and sent me through the waste channels out here.”
“Fraykt?” Black says. “Never heard that name before.”
Sax gives the short version of how he made it here, and at the end of it both Flaum shrug.
“We sold the goop, but Plake said we weren’t leaving for a bit, so Silver and I thought why not make some extra cash?” Black waves at the plants around them. “Bug catching’s a valuable service around here.”
“Only there’s a condition,” Silver says. “Once you rent the suit, you’ve gotta get enough bugs before they’ll let you back in.”
“And it turns out we’re not very good at bug-catching.” Black holds up her small claws. “These don’t work so well at grabbing them, and nobody told us to get some better equipment.”
“I said we should wait, think about it, but you wanted to go right away.” Silver ends the sentence with a sigh.
“Enough,” Sax hisses, standing to his full height. “Bring me back to the Spire. I need to find Bas.”
The two Flaum look at Sax. “Problem with that, Sax, is there’s no getting back to the Spire from here. Not unless we hit our quota.” Black says, then she presses a button on her suit.
A blue projection springs up in front of Black, with an image of the three-carapaced flying bugs that call Rathfall home, and a fat zero beneath it.
“Help us get the bugs, we’ll help you get back in,” Silver says. “It’s that simple.”
Sax narrows his eyes. Looks at both of these insignificant creatures. “There’s no other way?”
“None,” Black says. “It’s kind of the thing here. If you’re not digging up ore, you’re catchin’ bugs. They make a lot of things out of those parts.”
Well, at least it’s hunting, and if there’s one thing Sax is good at, it’s a hunt.
Sax has seen plenty of bugs; the small ones on most planets that buzz around until he swats them aw
ay, the cloud-sized ones on Alnert that glide through the atmosphere and feed on kilometer-high geysers, but Rathfall’s pollen-chasers are a unique kind of ugly.
Silver and Black lead Sax to their first view of one, sitting on a flower petal, apparently catching its breath after a pollen frenzy, seeing as its shiny lime-green heads are covered in the yellow fluff. The bug itself has twin heads, each with a dark eye cluster, connected by a long, oval body over which, now, fold a pair of wide, luminous wings. Six legs jut out from that oval, each ending in a barbed single claw that cuts through the flower petal and gives the pollen-chaser its traction. Beneath each eye cluster, as if embarrassed by them, the pollen-chaser hides a proboscis beneath a quartet of mandibles. The whole thing is a couple of meters long.
“Ugly,” Sax says.
“You’re one to talk, Oratus,” Silver replies.
Sax has to hiss a laugh at that. It’s true the Oratus aren’t on many lists of the most beautiful species to grace the galaxy, but then, if you’re designed to be perfect for a singular purpose, is that not beautiful in its own way?
“So how do we capture one?” Sax says.
Both Flaum glance at each other, then back at Sax.
“Hoping you would have some ideas,” Black says. “We’ve tried miners, we’re tried grabbing them, but they break and fly away as soon as we get close.”
“And we don’t need them alive?”
“This isn’t some environmental project,” Silver replies. “These plants are crawling with pollen-chasers. All we need are the wings and the mandibles.”
Sax could ask why, but... why? There’s only one goal here, and that’s getting back into the Spire. So he brushes past the two Flaum, stalks down and low, keeping one eye on the pollen-chaser. It’s using the proboscis to lick the pollen off its own head, suctioning at it like a vacuum.
Sax goes under a pair of vines, keeping close to the ground until, looking back across the thorny meadow towards Silver and Black, he can tell he’s beneath the bug. Straight up, Sax can see the green bits where the pollen-chaser’s feet have burst through.
It’s easier to harvest components from a dead creature - they tend not to struggle as you take what you want. So Sax crouches and bursts up, tearing through the thick petal and getting his claws around the pollen-chaser’s midsection.
Or, at least, he tries.
Sax’s sharp claws slide against the pollen-chaser’s green carapace, flaking off the outer shell but not biting in. For something that can tear through metal, can even get through an Ooblot, not being able to pierce the pollen-chaser’s shell throws Sax into a momentary panic, one that only grows when he finds himself being lifted off of the petal by the very bug he’s trying to capture.
The pollen-chaser’s legs close around him as its huge wings unfurl into Y-shaped gossamer. They catch the filtered light coming this far through Rathfall’s atmosphere and sparkle it out around Sax, like he’s moving through a glistening nebula. It would be beautiful, except the ground is getting awfully far away now. Silver and Black have disappeared, and the only thing Sax sees beneath him is a vast blanket of dull yellow. The wings fan floating dust against his face as they rise, forcing Sax to close his eyes.
There’s no sense killing the bug now - Sax would only plummet who knows how far. So instead the Oratus uses his talons, claws and tail to find grips and hang on as the pollen-chaser carries him through the sky.
The ride goes on long enough to fade into an almost-relaxing carriage. The cool temperature mixes with the steady wing beat, the background clicking of the pollen-chaser’s mandibles; it’s a pleasant ride.
Until the pollen-chaser decides its done carrying the Oratus. The bug’s legs open wide without warning, stretching Sax as he keeps his claws clinging. The beating wings, though slow. The breeze changes, and Sax feels the bug give in to the pull of gravity.
They’re landing. The question is, where?
The pollen-chaser answers that a moment later when it breaks into a dive, angling towards a bulky mound that appears from the dust like a dream. The mound is coated in pollen and pocked with holes, and Sax sees plenty more pollen-chasers coming and going from it, like ships to Astre’s Spire above.
It’s a nest, and the pollen-chaser’s taking Sax right to it.
As the bug nears its target entrance, Sax lets go. He doesn’t know what’s inside that nest, and being carried in without a chance to scout seems like a bad idea. Instead, the Oratus drops a few meters, smacks the side of the mound, which crumples in some at the heavy Oratus impact, and Sax rolls down until his claws and tail can bring him to a stop.
The mound itself feels like thick clay under Sax’s claws. Unlike the bugs, which blaze green in the yellow, the mound is a dirty, dried brown. At first Sax wonders if the bugs are actually digging up dirt, but the mound has a distinct scent as Sax hunkers close to it. Thick, loamy and with a hint of lemon.
The flowers. The mound is built on picked petals, placed and pressed down over who knows how long to create this strange palace in a pollen jungle. It’s obvious too that Astre’s Spire doesn’t know this place exists, or they’d have attacked it already; an easy way to harvest a horde of pollen-chasers.
Silver and Blake said the wings and mandibles are the only targets, the only valuable parts. A full-grown pollen-chaser might be a difficult catch, but if Sax is right, if that’s a nest in there, then he might find an easier option.
Not that going into the nest of an enemy comes without consequences. Sax goes down first, descending the mound until he reaches the very bottom where it tangles with flower vines. There aren’t any pollen-chasers down here, but a few holes remain. No doubt holdovers from the mound’s earlier days. Whereas the ones above are large enough for Sax to walk through standing, these are partially collapsed, tight, so when Sax picks one to use, he has to get on his stomach and crawl.
Bas would laugh if she saw him now, squirming through dirt, brushing his filtered vents against crushed flower petals like Sax is some sort of snake.
Light disappears a meter into the tunnel and Sax has to rely on touch and the constant clicking of what must be a thousand mandibles to tell him how close he’s getting. The tunnel shrinks more and more as he moves, until Sax is essentially digging his way forward. The chittering gets louder.
How sharp are those mandibles? Can they get through his scales?
When Sax manages to get his head through the last stretch of the tunnel, he has to blink for a while and stare. Yellow light pours into the mound from the wider holes above, angling down like miner blasts. The beams strike shifting hordes of pollen-chasers, their bright green bodies shifting and crawling over each other and the walls. Some skitter right by Sax without giving him the slightest notice.
Nearby, clustered along the bottom level, are large clusters of dim-red eggs. They’re translucent, and Sax can make out squirming babies within. Clusters of yellow pollen sit around the hatchery, and, in the middle, looms the Queen. She’s more than four meters tall and looks much the same as the pollen-chaser that took Sax all the way here, only if that same chaser had been twisted by some horrifying accident: the Queen’s mandibles hang at jagged angles, and her - Sax assumes - wings stick out, bent and broken. Scars litter her darker-green shell, though the deep red egg sack hanging from her abdomen appears in good shape.
Sax can’t fight this many, even he’s not that confident. But there’s a chance he could trade the location, give away the hundreds of pollen-chasers clustered here to the ones who would have the firepower.
Proof.
That’s what Sax would ask for if someone promised him a treasure cache like this. Something that shows Sax isn’t lying to get back in. A bug part wouldn’t work, but - Sax notices the red eggs littered at the base of the mount - those would. The smaller ones would fit in a single clawed hand, too.
All Sax has to do is get across a swarming legion of pollen-chasers and he’s all set!
The Oratus clenches his claws, gets ready to div
e and run across the swarm. Grab an egg and break for one of the larger tunnels, get out and... what? Run in a random direction?
No, he has to go back the way he came, the way the pollen-chaser flew him. If Silver and Black are following, they’ll be along that path. Forging through the flowers.
Sax has a direction, now he needs a plan. The bugs would crush him, grab Sax and chew him to pieces if he tries to just run across them, which means he needs a distraction. He doesn’t have any miners, doesn’t have any tools aside from his own body, so Sax decides to make one.
Using his claws, Sax scraps off the flower-clay from the tunnel around him and presses it together into a tight ball. It’s small enough to fit into his right foreclaw’s palm, about the size of a pollen-chaser’s mandible. Now all he needs is a target.
Sax creeps to the very edge of the tunnel, where the nearest pollen-chaser is within a meter, its big body sitting in what looks like sleep along the mound’s floor. Sax pushes himself up on his midclaws, gives his foreclaws enough room to throw, and lets loose.
The clay ball flies towards the only target big enough to matter - the battered queen in the middle of the mound. Sax’s missile breaks up somewhat in flight, with nothing more than a few pebble-sized fragments streaking into the Queen’s face.
It’s enough of an insult, apparently.
The Queen jerks towards Sax, that abdomen of hers shifting more slowly to follow. Her mandibles click rapidly, and the resting bunch of bugs take notice. They rise, start to shift towards the Oratus, when Sax makes his move.
The Oratus scrambles the rest of the way out of the tunnel, jumps and plants his talons on the closest pollen-chaser and leaps to the next one.
It’s a frantic set of hops that bring Sax smashing into the pile of eggs beneath the Queen. The eggs, with their soft shells, are at least easier for Sax to climb than the hard green carapaces and he scrambles as the pollen-chasers wake themselves up enough to care.
