Weekly Drabble #224: Upcoming Harvest (Patreon)

Welcome to a new a week and a new drabble; with 'shudder' from EBB and 'harvest moon' from Dayvid, we're back on Geode, that lovely little ball of bioluminescent, dangerous wildlife, paying a visit to one from Dayvid of the regular colonists. Enjoy!

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Upcoming Harvest:

Angel Rodriquez had to admit that the crops were coming in nicely. He looked at a husk of corn as long as his forearm. No sign of blight or infestation. As drones hummed back and forth around him, the farmer carefully peeled the green leaves back, inhaling the fresh scent. It didn’t smell quite like corn. At least, not the corn he was used to from back on Earth. This corn was genetically modified to survive here on Geode, resist the local microflora and microfauna and retain all the same nutrition and value that its Terran cousins did.

So it didn’t just smell different; it was different. It was a sweeter odour, somewhat like a honeydew flower that was just starting to wilt. Not bad, but not like corn was supposed to smell like. At least, not how corn that wasn’t from Geode was supposed to smell. This was just about ready to harvest. By the end of the week, the entire crop would be ready. Then auto-combines and drone collectors would move into this field, moving down the square kilometers of corn stalks, sorting out the ears and it would be time to sell. Angel didn’t have to be out here, but as the owner of this farm and head of the family, he felt it was his duty to make personal inspections of the crops and keep on top of things. That was a lesson his father had taught him. Never ask of someone what you weren’t yourself willing to do.

Angel brushed the back of his hand over his damp forehead, looked up at the sky, the light of the sun shining down through the geodesic dome that rose up from the moon’s surface like an artificial hill. The trapped sunlight and artificial lights made it warm and humid in the dome, even warmer than outside. Airlocked and isolated from one another, each dome was perfectly temperature and climate-controlled for each crop. Rodriquez had five separate domes. Two wheat, two corn and one oranges. Each of them received sunlight 24/7, with multiple growing seasons each calendar year. When one field got depleted, he put in grass seed and cycled in some of the cattle and goats from one of his neighbours to replenish the soil. Between natural and artificial fertilizers and the carefully-choreographed climate, his small farm never missed a season. He was proud of it and he was looking to expand, but it would take some time. The larger farms didn’t use domed crops like he did.

They were expensive and difficult to construct, especially at the sizes necessary for a suitable field, orchard or pasture. There were airlocks and connecting tunnels between each dome, all leading back to gates that fed from the main compound. Larger farms didn’t have to worry about those expenses or giving up arable land for buildings, but Angel wouldn’t have a field without a dome to support it, even if it limited his farm’s growth.

Other farms made do with fences, protected paddocks or even nothing at all around their borders. Rodriquez wouldn’t accept that. Even the tallest fence, electrified and barbed wasn’t as secure as inches-thick clear metalplast. Angel was not a man who left anything to chance. He didn’t trust Geode. His water system was triple-filtered and he did twice-monthly water testing from each dome and the house’s own supply. So far no one anywhere on Secondchance had reported anything like what had happened to to the first generation of colonists, but Angel wasn’t going to be caught unawares. He was thorough and he was cautious. Maybe a bit more than even Geode called for, but he took his family’s safety seriously.

He’d been one of the first to see the threat of the local wildlife and one of the first to recognize the danger of the Lucifers. He still pushed for a heavier response, calling for the defoliation of the nearest five miles of the forest, pushing it back even farther than they already had. If it were up to him, there wouldn’t be any forest at all. No place for the Lucifers or any other of Geode’s horrors to hide. The scientists kept shooting that down. They wanted to know more about this world. Angel knew more than enough already: it wanted to kill them. They had the ability to prevent that. Geode was theirs now and they should start acting like it.

His brother Manuel had teased him for it, saying their parents had gotten their names backwards; he’d even started calling him Manny for ‘Manifest Destiny’. Angel had returned the favour, calling Manuel ‘Angel’ for his soft heart. He’d give anything to have that banter back. Seven months ago, Manuel had been killed by a horngor that had broken through the fences around Manuel’s home compound. Horngors were massive rhino-like beasts. They were usually herbivorous, but they were as aggressive as hippos from Earth, and they’d would never pass up meat, especially if it came in the form of a smaller creature that couldn’t fight back. Angel had watched his brother die. He’d gotten Manuel’s children to safety, but his last sight of his brother had been of Manuel half inside in the horngor’s mouth, his arms clutching at its snout in an attempt to keep from being swallowed further.

It bit him half. Angel had gotten his brother’s gun and managed to drive the horngor off before it could slurp up the rest of Manuel, so they’d at least had something to bury. So let the rest of the colony call him ‘extreme’ and ‘paranoid’. Angel wouldn’t take a single chance with the safety of his loved ones. Not on Geode, and right now, two more good reasons for that were about ten meters away from him.

Outside, sitting at the very edge of the dome and watching him from eyes with horizontal pupils, were a pair of wire cats. Angel hated the things. They were a grotesque feline alien homunculus. They were just over four feet tall at the shoulder and when they sat on their haunches, as these two were, they were almost the height of a man. The creatures were hideously thin, with fur so short that they almost appeared bald and the folds and creases in their skin were plainly visible. They had elongated snouts with rows of needle-like teeth that sliced meat from bone as easily as obsidian shards. Their tails ended in a bioluminescent tip that they used for signalling one another, or for luring prey towards them, mimicking the colours and movement of smaller animals to draw the attention of other predators.

They were watching him. They’d been doing it for nearly forty minutes, pacing him outside the dome. Occasionally they’d leap up, climbing over the support struts on the outside of the building and staring at him that way. He hated that. He knew they couldn’t get in. Intellectually, he knew that. But part of his old, old monkey brain – or was it his lizard brain? – couldn’t get past the fact that a pair of predators were very, very close. He couldn’t look at them for too long. There was just something wrong about them, the way they looked – like someone had taken an actual cat, stretching and pinching it until it was abhorrent and grotesque. They made him shudder.

It was late afternoon; wire cats usually hunted during dusk and darkness, but a family of the things had moved into the forest nearby and would come stare through Angel’s domes, watching the drones or the people inside, trying to figure out how to get in.

People focused too much on the Lucifers; Angel had seen the raw numbers himself. Encounters with the degenerated former colonists were more likely to be fatal, but there were far more incidents with local wildlife. It wasn’t because of the Lucifers that his domes extended nearly ten meters into the ground, with tremor sensors all around them to detect tunnelling. It wasn’t Lucifers that were the biggest problems for farmers and it wasn’t a pair of Lucifers that were sitting just outside this crop-dome, eyeing Angel like he was a prime cut of meat.

He stepped towards the wire cats. The bigger of the two rose up on its hind legs and scrabbled at the clear, armoured walls. The slightly smaller one arched its back and made snapping thrusts of its head towards him as if ready to pounce. He raised the middle finger on his left hand towards the animals, swiping over that plate’s individual console and turning it completely opaque. A few seconds passed and each wire cat stuck their head out around the edges of the darkened dome section, still watching. Still waiting.

Angel glowered at them. Just wait until I get that drone security system installed. Then we’ll see if you have to balls to hang around my family, you fucks. Next season he’d be able to get it installed. One more reason, then he’d have Geode by the balls and he had no compunction about squeezing and twisting.

‘Manifest destiny’, was it? Okay. That sounds just peachy keen. “Enjoy it while you can,” he told the wire cats. “Sooner or later we’re going to get sick of your shit and then no bleeding heart scientists whining about ecosystems, knock-on effects or keystone species are going to mean a damn thing.”

He’d look forward to it.