Winter Harvest

by Dawn Chapman

  Looking at the model numbers, even Rei was vastly different. His young features didn’t give any indication to his age, but they’d all been in the game system fighting for their lives—and for us—for a long time. I don’t think anything could take that away from them; in my mind they were heroes. And I wanted to follow in their footsteps. To do the one thing no one had, that they’d all given up hope for. To go home. If that meant defeating Arndale, then I would do that first, then the almost impossible.

  I heard something at the outer field of my hearing range. Xe, is that—

  Yes, your team returns. They make quite a lot of noise, considering that they should be making less to keep the creatures here at bay.

  Do you know what other creatures are down here?

  I have access to a lot of information that you don’t.

  I don’t like the sound of that.

  No, you wouldn’t, and you shouldn’t because until my others are fixed and running properly, a lot of your neural pathways and files were corrupted due to us needing the materials.

  Okay, I get you. I need to get fixed up some. We’ll do it as soon as they’re back and we’ve supplies, is that good for you?

  That is adequate. If your needs were more than desperate, I would let you know, and you’d be much worse off health-wise. Just know this: I would not joke with these words. Full compliance is required.

  I think the word choice told me enough that there was death, and if she uttered those, I would do everything in my power to get to the stuff I needed or die trying. That’s a deal I think I can make, and I would do everything I could to not die.

  Sounds and voices grow louder and louder, and I moved to intercept them at the door. Jai was carrying a large animal, and the others seemed to be lugging a couple of wriggling bags.

  “What the hell is in those?”

  “Naylar said it would be good to study them in here, or at least get you to see if you could break open their shells and see into the inside.”

  Naylar put one of her bags down on the table, and I was surprised when a metallic pincer came through the side of the bag. I backed away with worry. I didn’t want to be near it if it was going to stab me. I had enough to worry over.

  “No,” she said, “come here. You can take a better look while I’ve got hold of it.”

  Jai pushed me closer, and she tipped the bag. A metallic creature slid out and twanged onto the metal table. It was sharp, shiny and looking around like we were going to kill it. Everything about screamed at me danger, danger. But the more I looked at it, the more I thought it wasn’t really a thing at all. It seemed conscious, scared even. It was more alive than I was. I was sure of it. I looked closer, and the longer I stared the more I could see. Tiny fragments of electric pulses flittered across its eyes.

  The creature was alive. I mean, the way it danced across the table and looked at me, it was. It really was.

  “What are you thinking?” Naylar asked me.

  “I want to look inside its computer system, but I’m not qualified. I’m too basic a level.”

  “But what if you weren’t? Would you? Can you see past the alien side of it to what it really is?”

  I thought on her words and wanted to shy away from her, and from it. But I also wondered how it might be bonded as a familiar. Maybe if you avoided its pincers, you could best it. Its intelligence shined through, that was for sure. I really wanted to learn more.

  I stepped in closer and waited for its spike to come slamming home, and it did. Just shy of my face. And it would have gotten me for sure if Naylar hadn’t stepped in and stopped it.

  I took another step towards it and reaching out, I quickly picked up the spike, holding it by its tail. Scorpion-looking, timid it was not when it had a hand attached to its backside. It was now screaming. I wanted to stop it because it hurt my ears, but I didn’t know any way apart from killing it. The noise grew to horrid levels, and Rei approached me from the side.

  “Only way it will shut up now is if you take its cords out. They’re just below the throat, and they use it to do nothing else but distract us. We managed to do it outside, but they regrow really fast, much faster than anything I’ve ever been able to.”

  “You think they’re better than us in tech?” I asked.

  If that was the case, I would have a lot to learn from this, and I really wanted to. It could be engineered backwards with the right equipment.

  “Not only that, but they do everything better. There’s more competition for food and their nutrients, and they know this. Only the strongest of their own will survive.”

  Naylar’s open hand held a knife, and I picked it up. Grabbing hold of the critter by its metallic head, I cut just below its chin. The wailing scream stopped, and I could hear myself think for a while.

  I watched then as its friends in the bags near us stopped squirming and went quiet too. It looked like the one we had on the table was the leader. I liked this. I wanted to study it some more, for sure. But I also knew I needed to be a lot higher up than I was. Things here weren’t connecting inside my brain, and they should. I cringed at my own lack of understanding and I hoped I could only put this experience to one side to help me later on.

  “I’d love to do what you want, but at the moment I can’t, and we need them dead. If they got away and got access to the internal computers here they could give up the location to the others, and we could be heading for an invasion force coming in to get us,” Jai said. With that, he pulled out his weapons and quickly disposed of them. “They’re great when under our tight control, but if they’d gotten out, it might not have gone so well.”

  I at least now had something to study.

  I just wish I had Hiroto here to help me understand it a bit more.

  Xe, I said. Can you try and get comms back online? See how Hiroto and Xirob are doing?

  Xirob informs me that they’re almost there. They will have the blockers down soon.

  I smiled on the inside and hoped it was true. I could do with them here to help me. I did miss them.

  Rei took the dead animal from Jai. “I’ll get this cut up and cooking. Naylar can and will show him all the basic stuff about these guns. Is that okay?”

  “Sounds like a plan. If we eat, we can set up camp again with some extra security. We can all get some sleep before the next dawn, then we should move out,” Jai said. “Even if we have to carry her with us, I don’t think staying here is going to be any better for us. We can take what we can in the morning and leave. We need to be on the move to the next location by mid-day at the latest.”

  I could and did want to see where we might be going, but their mission was serious. They had to complete it, and if that meant I had to tag along and do what needed to be done with little to no basic training, then so be it. I would do that.

  I tugged the creature’s spike out of its back end. This would make a decent addition to any weapon. And that’s where I started to think a little outside the box.

  I moved to the other tables beside Naylar and Denn, and I started to pull it apart more. It was sharper than anything I’d seen before, and that wasn’t saying much, but it cut easy. I slid the blade edge across the table. “Has no one tested this on anything other than skin?”

  Jai looked at me. “No, I don’t think any of us have. Though I think our skin is a little harder than most, I think real skin, like human flesh or any animal flesh would be very easy to get through.”

  I pushed it across to Jai. “I can modify it. With some help, I could probably even push it into your main weapons, make it so that it’s attachable and that it won’t break off at the first sign of damage from an enemy.”

  “What about poison and other enhancements?” Rei asked Naylar. “I can get it enhanced. We can increase its sharpness as well, so that it would cut through almost anything. Even your skin, and that’s saying a lot, considering your strength.”

  “You can get it to do that?” I raised an eyebrow at Naylar. “That’s pretty amazing.”<
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  “Together.” She winked at me. “We’ll be amazing.”

  I tried not to worry over it, but I was. They still expected a lot from me. These people were so clever and so strong already that catching up was proving to be really difficult.

  I pushed the blade to Jai. “Take it. I’ll get the others off the other two you brought in. Then we can take it from there on how to work with it. I’d like to study it if I can and make some choices on what to do. Would that be okay with you?”

  He nodded and walked away.

  Then I saw something, a tiny glint. I touched it with a finger and picked up several little silver metal shards, which I slid onto my hand. Something popped up.

  METAL ANALYSIS.

  VIRIOOM, 100% PURE AND RARE.

  YOU FOUND A RARE ITEM. YOU MAY FIND MORE OF THIS INSIDE THOSE CRITTERS. ARE YOU REALLY GOING TO LET THEM BLOW UP A BASE YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT? USE YOUR BRAIN, KYLE. IF YOU HAVE ONE.

  I pushed it inside my jacket pocket. Then I told Rei, who grinned at me. We looked to see if we could harvest any more before we were going to eat them. Rare was something we could use in the future, and even if we didn’t use it, we could sell it at some point. I was sure.

  I admit though, the more I thought about the Vrolsh, the more I was creeped out. Eating something that might have had thoughts, feelings. But survival, right? This wasn’t Earth. This wasn’t anywhere that resembled our home, our life.

  I pushed backwards and leaned on the back of my chair. The truth was these people here were going on about their business, and I was being included in it all. Already I was more than a team member. Yet again, I seemed to just fall into something good. Found the right people.

  Lucky. Xe spoke to me.

  I agreed with her. Pushing myself up, I went to see if I could help Rei in any other way. I was no chef, but I could at least do something.

  I would agree with that, though without Hiroto and Xirob here, I don’t really feel it.

  I watched for a few minutes. I enjoyed seeing their banter. While Rei was cutting up the animal, Naylar was berating him on his use of the knife. I decided to step in and let Rei take a break—it meant I would get my first lesson in preparing meat out here, but I also think I needed it to be part of the team and to strengthen our friendship.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  I watched as Rei pulled out cooking utensils at the other side of the room and started to prepare a pot of food for us all while Naylar moved to the critters.

  She carefully moved to pull them apart, piece by piece.

  I found this the most fascinating of all because she started to describe it to me as she did so.

  “They’re pretty amazing creatures. Finding that their outer skeleton is in fact just made of pure metals, they’ve got an organic core, so they’re just creatures like us who wanted to make something better for themselves. They choose to live in their metallic constructs all the time, so if they grow out of them in size and stature, they upgrade. The only way they can upgrade sometimes is to do things for others that are dirty, so they are sometimes paid for in nefarious ways. Some of the underground here is made up of factions, some of which are dirtier than others. What I find the most interesting is that even between the five different factions, they are still splintered into even smaller factions.

  Inside the skeleton of each critter, you will find the colour of their faction. Here.” Naylar pointed to a section on the inside now that was clearly blue. “These are the ones we’re here to eliminate. A training school, we believe.”

  “They have a school here?”

  “Yes, and they’re training the next load of killing machines. These things come and attack in packs, wherever they’re sent. Relentless and deadly. Not many of our cities can survive a hit from them. When we found this planet and mapped it out—” She looked at me while she scooped out the dead thing from the inside, “—which, I might add, took us a few months, command decided we had to take it out. We had to take this one faction out.”

  I looked at the creature. It was pink, gloopy, and not something I’d have associated as bad, but what got me was its face. Round, puffy, and just…damn. So fucking ugly.

  “Don’t let it fool you. This was our biggest job in a while, and they had to die.”

  “How many lives would it save you doing this?”

  “Not so much lives, but respawns. With each time a denti rises again, there’s something that’s lost. We don’t know the extent of how much because we’re never told.”

  I thought about this for a moment, thinking I understood. I watched her take the next critter apart. I wondered more about what I could learn here, what I could do with the extra knowledge, to help build up my mech training on the whole and my engineering rank.

  “Jai’s one of the oldest,” I said to her. “What does he say about it?”

  “He won’t confirm or deny anything, just that there’s a part of him he knows he’ll never see again in his memories, and that his dreams are never the same.”

  Yeah, I knew that. It had only been the one time the system had offered to ease my journey by taking my memories, and maybe it knew I would never accept that, so it didn’t offer again. Either way, it seemed a terrible trade for me at the moment. But I was sure it was tempting to some. Perhaps to most. I also understood more about their past.

  “And then there’s the thought of mission failure,” I added.

  When she looked up at me this time, there was clear worry. “Yes. We won’t fail though, right?”

  I wanted to say it. I really did. I couldn’t bring myself to lie though. “I don’t know. I’ll do my best.”

  She nodded and moved methodically back to the critter. I watched, and she pointed to the other one. “Your turn.”

  Oh, crap. I hadn’t thought she’d want me to actually do something. “Oh, okay.” I slid in beside her and carefully followed from memory what she did to break it apart.

  Almost like cracking a lobster shell, I carefully separated out the meaty parts on the inside. When I got to the centre bit, though, I froze. This thing was alive.

  Bile choked me out, and I swallowed it. Not wanting to move away, I stuck with it and told Naylar. “This one isn’t dead.”

  “What?” She moved to take it from me, and together we could see it really wasn’t dead.

  Its internal vein system was pumping what I could only say was blood around its tiny body. Its one eye looked our way, red tears staining the sides of a round, puffy-looking fish face.

  “Kill it,” Naylar said.

  I struggled with the notion. “I don’t know how?”

  “Just a knife to the top of its head, just like you’d kill any animal. It’s a killer, Kyle. It wouldn’t hesitate to kill you if the role were reversed.”

  It was the eye though. It scared me. Like it was going to do something to me. Say something, like it could even speak in English. I laughed. Really, English. I didn’t even know what language I was speaking. Just words or things they understood as denti.

  I picked up the knife once more, and I put the knife to its head and pushed in hard. It didn’t resist or do anything, but it went limp in my hands, and I suddenly felt so very sad.

  YOU HAVE KILLED YOUR FIRST AMAI.

  THIS CREATURE WOULD KILL YOU AT FIRST GLANCE THEN SERVE YOU TO ITS MASTERS AS A VESSEL TO THEN MAKE MORE OF ITS KIND.

  YOU SHOULD BE THANKFUL THE EVIL SHIT IS DEAD.

  I wasn’t really thankful, but I did look to Naylar whose face was still, cold. “They killed me more than a few times over the years. They look innocent like this, but they’re really not. I don’t know what you were thinking, but don’t think of them like that. They’re not anything you want to be associated with. Really.”

  I looked to it again and frowned. “Yeah. I’ll wash those thoughts down with my dinner. Don’t worry. I won’t take any creatures like this. It’s obvious it’s a ploy.”

  “Good, because, they’re really not trustworthy.”

  “
Kyle,” Rei shouted over, and I moved away from Naylar’s dissection of the creatures to the pot he was stirring.

  “Here’s some of the extra ingredients you need, Kyle. Watch as I put them in for you. You need to remember this in the future, because you might need them again.”

  “Okay, what do I do?”

  “This one is raw Rinnium.” He handed me the vial he’d stored it in. “Take a sniff. I promise it won’t hurt you.”

  I let out a chuckle. Yeah, after the last few attempts at tricking me. I placed my nose over the vial and sniffed.

  “Remember the smell, sometimes you may spot a plant that looks similar, but without the smell it’s not, and it would kill you outright.”

  The scent invaded my nostrils, bringing memories with it. Soft sandy beaches on a warm day, salty air, and crunchy chocolate ice scream from stands dotted here and there.

  I let out a sigh, knowing those memories would perhaps one day be taken from me, but for now they were mine.

  “Not even a chance of saving yourself?” I asked, meeting his stare as I breathed out.

  “No.” He took it back from me, and I savoured the smell that lingered around me.

  He took out a few parts of the leaves, and I noted the shape and colour. “It also needs to be added to what you’re cooking about five minutes away from the end, and the temp needs to be a consistent 140 degrees. You can’t digest it in its raw form at all, understood?”

  “Yes, it smells divine.”

  “One reason why you need to start using your skills. You need to see the properties of what you’re looking at.” He reached into his bag and pulled out something small. “Here. I was going to sell this, fancied myself an upgraded hearing set. But you’re already growing on me.”

  I took what he was offering and noted it was a chip.