Strange Harvest

Part X: Sentinel

8/13/23 Author's Note: This story wasn't finished. Now it continues... I'm building a new home on Substack, but Wattpad is where I started so y'all get the goods first. I haven't shown this to anyone yet. More to come:

https://jhanlon.substack.com/about

Groggy and weak, I woke to the sound of a warning rustle from the workers' wings. They covered me entirely with their many bodies, blocking the tunnel they'd brought me through. All I could hear was the workers' repetitive, agitated clicking and their wings scraping against each other. Maybe the octopiders had come back, the disgusting filth.

I didn't have the strength left to fight, but the wasps seemed willing to defend me. Suddenly their agitation turned to a comforting, melodious thrum that vibrated all through my body. Blurry-eyed, completely sapped of strength, and honestly surprised to be alive, I watched as the workers—loyal scarlet-scaled protectors—parted to welcome a sentinel wasp.

Relief washed over me instantly, instinctively, as I looked into her glimmering violet eyes. She was larger than the others, with a hard exoskeleton like the queen's; although sterile, sentinels were devoted solely to tending to the grubs. Soft blue light shone from bioluminescent spots dotted along her antennae. The deep thrumming noise was coming from within her, I realized, and as she moved closer I felt my pain wash away.

The sentinel wasp clicked her mandibles cautiously and even through my suit's filters I could smell—taste?—her calming painkiller pheromones. Her long, banded antennae swept over my wounded abdomen and the jagged armor around it, clearly focused on the scent of the queen's eggs. She leaned in close and from glands at the base of her jaws, secreted a cool, tingly substance onto my swollen flesh. Gradually I felt the throbbing pain fade to nothing.

Then she sang a soft, short trill and the workers quickly cocooned over my mangled armor's stomach plates with a chewed paste of steeloak fibers and saliva. The sentinel seemed pleased with their work, humming a little tune to herself about happy hungry grubs to which the workers on standby clicked rhythmically in response.

I shivered and felt a distant twinge of pain. Her cooling secretion in my abdomen was growing stronger—radiating out, numbing like—like the queen's venom—still inside me—reacting to it—hot wave of nauseous dread—falling, spinning, a sense of inversion overwhelmed me. My self slipped away in a red haze. I fought to keep afloat, gasping, heavy, and felt myself go under.

In my dream state I saw a faraway figure in dark armor, shining with wavering light off in the distance. Like looking at someone from underwater. I was sure they wouldn't hear me from all the way up there. Too much strain. Seemed stressful. The current was pulling me along, to gentle, gentle warmth and comfort.

Like powder in water, I dissolved into the universe.

"Jackson, answer me you dumbass!" A shout jolted me back. It was Goldwater, dragging me out of the workers' little tunnel. My suit was locked up stiff.

Involuntarily I slurred, "What?"

In response, the shrieking drone of the scream beam ripped through me and I groaned in pain. It felt like tiny jackhammers all over my body. My ears rang with a piercing pitch as dozens of wasps scattered hastily around us.

Behind us, the big sentinel wasp wriggled out of the tunnel, hissed, and reared up on her hind legs with her stinger at the ready, thrumming a deep, ominous warning note. Another determined burst from the scream beam drove the sentinel away down a side passage and left me in gut-wrenched agony as Goldwater chucked two angry scouting drones after the sentinel.

Next breath wouldn't come—lancing pain every time I tried. A sob curdled on my lips.

"Sorry, Jackson." Goldwater dropped next to me with her gear at the ready. Her deft armored hands waited for nothing. "What did they do to you? Gotta get this shit off him—! Damn, it's hardened already. Stay awake!"