Weekly Drabble #18: Where it Grows (Patreon)

nThis week's suggestion comes from Justin L with "Wildflower". I thought about trying to do something sweet, or reflective. 

Where it Grows is the result of that attempt, wherein a young man encounters a planet of orchids.

~

Where it Grows:

Pilot’s Log, January 24th, 2381

This place isn’t so bad. I mean, sure, Ceti Five has been quarantined by royal command. But it’s not like I had a choice coming here. When that plasma converter blew, it was either aim for the softest rock in the system, or become part of a new constellation. Damage was worse than I thought, so I had to bail out from high-alt before Lucky Lady came apart. What’s left of her is probably at the bottom of Ceti’s largest ocean right now. I grabbed a beacon and launched an emergency pack before the Lady blew, so help’s on the way. My supply cache came down a few kilometers from here, so I’m going to hike to it.

The air’s breathable, with no trace of contaminants, so I shouldn’t need the suit’s oxygen. There’s water – I saw a few lakes and rivers as I was chuting down – so I just need food and shelter. The cache should have food and I have an idea for the latter.

Sundown’ll be in a few hours, so I should get heading out. At least the view isn’t bad. There are flowers everywhere. It smells nice, like a field of honeysuckles.

Lieutenant Jason Wickers, His Majesty’s Royal Scout Command, signing off.

~

Pilot’s Log, January 25th, 2381

I’ve made it to the cache. It was a full moon out last night. Bigger and brighter than Luna, so I made good time. Lot of night-blooming plants here. Original survey said there weren’t any terrestrial animals, so I guess steak’s out of the question. I’d even take a cricketburger.

The cache came down fine. Enough MREs for a crew of twenty, so a single pilot should have plenty of time to get used to the taste of things like ‘steak and banana’ and ‘strawberry chicken’. Tent, medical kit. Water purifier. Extreme weather gear. Everything you need to survive in the middle of nowhere. I really hope it won’t be a long time. Because of the quarantine, ships don’t come through Ceti that much. It’s mostly a shortcut. Well, I was thinking about taking some leave. I’d just been hoping that it might be more than me and some alien flowers for company.

I got the cache’s grav sled up, so it’s an easy haul. Just before the Lady broke up, I picked up a weak beacon from dirtside. I think it’s from the Anna’s Bell, the freighter that went down here… must have been nearly twenty years ago, just before the quarantine was set. I’ll head there.

Lieutenant Jason Wickers, His Majesty’s Royal Scout Command, signing off.

~

Pilot’s Log, Thursday January 26th, 2381

It’s so quiet here. I’ve been hauling the cache towards the Bell’s position. It’s a good thing I don’t have hayfever, otherwise all these flowers would probably kill me. Most of them are small, not even knee-height. There’s a few patches of some kind of sunflower thing. Those are taller than I am. This is a huge field, a savannah maybe. There are mountains to the north, but it’d take days on foot to get there. The southern mountains are even further away.

There’s no other plants here. Just the flowers. Flowers and flowers and flowers from one horizon to the other. They all look kind of the same, like orchids or something. They’re mostly white, with some blue-purple kind of colouring. It changes depending on the time of day. If I was a botanist, I could probably tell you more. Right now, I just wonder if they’re edible. My grandmother used to make dandelion tea.

Time for supper. Tonight’s gourmet course is… ‘Apricots and Ham’.

Who the hell comes up with these flavours? Have they actually eaten food before?

Lieutenant Jason Wickers, His Majesty’s Royal Scout Command, signing off.

~

Pilot’s Log, Thursday January 28th, 2381

Fucking flowers. There was a gust of wind and I got a face full of seeds. Those things are barbed. I had to pick a dozen of the damn things out of my skin. My suit’s covered in thistles and vines. Some of these flowers have some kind of defensive reaction. They grab at me as I go by. If I stop too long, they start wrapping around my legs and climbing up the cache. This morning I had to cut the vines off the grav sled before I could go anywhere. I should be at the transmission site tomorrow, though.

The view’s starting to get a little monotonous.

~

Pilot’s Log, Thursday January 30th, 2381

I arrived at the crash site just before noon. Local noon, anyways. According to my watch, it was 1953, GMT. 

I was right. This ship is the Anna’s Bell. Plowed into the ground, carved its way through about two miles of dirt and ended up here. The ship’s completely overgrown with more of these flowers. I had to cut my way inside. There was nobody here, but I didn’t expect there to be. It’s weird, though. There’s no sign that people tried to live here. The ship’s mostly intact and we’re in the middle of a large plain. There’s no other shelter for dozens of kilometers. There’s water nearby.  You’d think someone would have tried to stick it out here, but it looks like the ship was abandoned. 

There’s no bodies, either. The ship’s computer is a mess, but the last activity before I arrived was nearly seventeen years ago. Where the hell did everyone go?

My face is feels like it’s burning. I think I might be allergic to some of this shit after all.

~

Pilot’s Log, February 1st, 2381

I’ve got some solar panels and the cache’ emergency generator installed on the Bell. That should give this signal enough of a boost to get well out of planetary orbit. This was a lucky break. I’d have needed to climb those damn mountains for my beacon to be useful. Whoever came up with the policy of lowest bidders getting government tech contracts can kiss my unwiped ass. Same for the asshole who designs those MRE flavours. You know what you’ve done.

Anyways, now that I’ve got a good power source I’m going to try to hook my portable beacon into the ship’s comm array. Hopefully someone will hear it before I go stir-crazy.

There are flowers here, too. They’ve gotten inside the ship. I didn’t think they could survive, but they have. They’ve been dormant, but they open up whenever I turn on the lights.

My face hurts a lot more. It doesn’t feel right. 

~

Pilot’s Log, February 3rd, 2381

I had to remove one of those flowers from my cheek. It was growing inside me. I don’t know how. I got rid of all the seeds. Maybe I missed one. Its roots were trying to attach to my jaw. I didn’t even realize until I looked in the mirror and saw it trying to push out of one of the cuts on my face. I’ve heard blood is good for plants, but this is ridiculous. I’ll be more careful in the future.

The beacon’s hooked up and I’ve started broadcasting. Someone out there will hear me.

~

Pilot’s Log, February 6th, 2381

I’ve started cleaning the flowers out of the ship. I woke up and two of them had wrapped around my legs. My legs are all cut up from the thorns. I didn’t even feel it. I’m trying to get the ship’s computer running again. Maybe the logs will tell me what happened here.

~

Pilot’s Log February 9th, 2381

The plants are growing over the ship. They’re spreading like creeper vines. I have to burn and cut them off every morning and evening. They keep growing back. 

I had to remove another two flowers from my legs. The plants that grabbed me must have done something, put their seeds into my wounds. They’re growing larger thorns. I thought I was imagining it, but I’m not. I can’t grab them with my hands any more. I have to use cutters or a torch to get rid of them. 

It almost feels like they’re getting aggressive. They’re just plants, though. They want the sun and this ship is the highest point around.

~

Pilot’s Log, February 10th, 2381.

They got into the food. I found dozens of small flowers in the storeroom. They’d dissolved the packaging, put seeds in and started growing. Half my food is gone. My suit was damaged, too. It’s useless and the plants thorns are sharp enough to cut through the other clothes I have.

The computer’s finished reconstructing the data archives. I’m going to see what’s there.

I hope someone comes soon.

~

Pilot’s Log, February 11th, 2381

I’ve been watching the logs.

It’s not seeds. The seeds are just carriers. The plants have some kind of viral pollinator. Whatever the seeds land on, the infection spreads to it. That’s why there are no animals or other plants. There must have been at one point, but this… the flowers killed them all. Just started spreading and spreading until there was nothing left and they’ve been surviving like this for centuries, killing each other and waiting for more new hosts.

It’s not just a lot of little plants, either. These things form meta-colonies, like… like each flower is one cell of a brain. When something happens to the plants, they adapt. That’s what happened to Anna’s Bell.

At first, the virus was just too different to humans to do anything. Then the flowers started to adapt to our biology. It started with a mild infection. Fever, chills, weakness. It didn’t stop there. The virus got more efficient and the flowers followed.

Orchids growing out of your eyes, petals blossoming from your ears, mouth, nose, rectum and if they can’t find an opening, they’d make one. Roots growing through your guts and brain. It’s funny. It’s a joke. It’s not some alien chestburster thing or blood-eating parasite. It’s flowers, for God’s sake! Flowers.

The crew tried to do what I did. Burn them, cut them. They grew back. Stalks got harder, thorns got sharper. They got into the ship, into the water supply. I’m glad I didn’t drink it. A dozen of the crew died that way. The plants started to produce acids to eat through clothes and work suits. They made sedatives and soporifics to keep people they were infecting from realizing what was happening. 

Flowers. Jesus. Jesus Christ.

The rest of the crew realized they couldn’t stay here. They packed up and headed towards the northern mountains. It’s a long walk. I don’t think they made it. Somewhere between here and those cliffs, two dozen men and women died. Just more blood and bone for the orchids.

~

Pilot’s Log, February 14th, 2381

I’m getting headaches. I ran a scan. There’s one of those things in my skull. Maybe it came from that day in the fields, maybe from somewhere else. Don’t think it matters now. It’s already too big to remove. I can feel others inside me too, pushing to get out.

I’m appending my logs to this beacon. By the time you hear this, I’ll be dead too. Just another copse of flowers growing on this fucking funereal wreath of a planet.

Don’t come down here. Don’t ever come down here. Leave Ceti VII to the flowers.

Lieutenant Jason Wickers, His Majesty’s Royal Scout Command, signing off.