The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

humidity smacks you, even through the suit, thick as +8 gravity, so that you’re slick as a greased ratpig with sweat the moment you step out. It pools in your jockstrap, chafes when you walk, until it forms blisters big as testicles. (A new experience for the girls on the crew.) Although walking’s not what we do. More like wading against a sucking tide of heat and flora.

The rotting mulch suffocates our big clanking mechanical footsteps. Some of the harvesters play music on their private channels. Ro used to play opera, loud, letting it spill into The Green, until it started attracting insects the size of my head. I put a stop to it after that. I prefer to listen to the servo motors grinding in protest. I have this fantasy that I’ll be able to hear it when my suit gets compromised. The shhht of air that lets through a flood of spores like fibrous threads that burrow into metal and flesh. The faint suck of algae congealing on the plastic surfaces, seeping into the seams of the electronics, corroding the boards so the nanoconnections can’t fire. The hum of plankton slipping between the joints of my GMP between the spine and pelvic plates, to bite and sting.

The base model GMPs aren’t built for these conditions. The heat is a problem. The servo motors get clogged. The armor corrodes. The nanotronics can’t sustain. Every joint is a weak point. The damn flora develops immunity to every vegicide we try. Assuming they’re actually using vegicides, Ro would point out. Why risk the harvest when harvesters are replaceable?

Management has determined that the optimum number for a harvesting team is five. I’m the team leader. Look, Ma, leadership material. Our medtech is Shapshak, who sometimes slips me amphetamines which he gets under the counter from the labtechs along with other pharmaceuticals he doesn’t share. (It’s not like management don’t know. They’re happy if we’re productive and sometimes you need a little extra something to get through out there.) Lurie is our am-bot; a high school education and eight weeks of training in amateur botany specimen collection puts her a full pay scale above the rest of us plebs, plus she gets the most sophisticated suit – a TCD with neuro-feedback tentacle fingers built into the hands for snagging delicate samples that aren’t susceptible to snail-invasion. Rousseau and Waverley were our clearers – manual labor, their GMPs suitably equipped with bayonet progsaws that’ll cut through rock, thermo-machetes for underbrush, and extra armor plating for bludgeoning your way through the jungle with brute force when everything else failed.

In retrospect, we could have done with less brute force. Could have done with me spotting the damn stingstrings before we blundered into the middle of a migration. Could have done with being less wired on the under-the-counter stuff. One minute Waverley and Ro are plowing through dense foliage ahead, the next, there are a thousand mucusy tendrils unfurling from the canopy above us.

This wouldn’t have been a problem usually. Sure, the venom might corrode your paintwork, leave some ugly pockmarks that’ll get the maintenance guys all worked up, but they’re not hectic enough to compromise a GMP.

Unless, say, someone panics and trips and topples forward, accidentally ripping a hole in Rousseau’s suit with the razor edge of a machete, half-severing his arm. Waverley swore blind it wasn’t his fault. He tripped. But GMPs have balance/pace adjustors built-in. You have to be pretty damn incompetent to fall over in one. If Ro wasn’t a roaming brain-dead corpse-puppet right now, he might be suspicious, might think it was a conspiracy to recruit more guinea pigs for the OPP program. We know better. We know Waverley’s just a fucking moron.

There was a lot of screaming. Mainly from Ro, until Shapshak shot him up with morphine, but also Lurie threatening to kill Waverley for being so damn stupid. It took us ninety minutes to get back to homelab, me and Shapshak dragging Ro on the portable stretcher from his field kit, which is only really useful for transporting people – not armored suits – but it was too dangerous to take him out. Waverley broke through the undergrowth ahead of us – the only place where we would trust him, leaving traces of Ro’s blood painted across broken branches.

When we got to homelab, Lurie still had to file the specimens and we all had to go through decontam, no matter how much I swore at security over the intercom: Just let us back in right fucking now.

We had to sit in the cafeteria, the only communal space, listening to Rousseau die, pretending not to. It should have been easy. The loud drone of the air conditioner and the filters and the sterilizer systems all fighting The Green is the first thing you acclimatize to here. But Ro’s voice somehow broke through, a shrill shriek between clenched teeth. We hadn’t known anyone who’d ever died from the stingstrings. The labtechs must have been thrilled.

Shapshak spooned oats into his face, drifting away from it all on some drug he wasn’t sharing. Lurie couldn’t touch her food. She put on her old-school security-approved headphones, bopped her head fiercely to the music. Made like she wasn’t crying. I restrained myself from hitting Waverley, who kept whining, ‘It wasn’t my fault, okay?’ I took deep breaths against the urge to bash his big bald head on the steel table until his brains oozed out. If Ro was here and not lying, twisting around on a gurney while the meds prepared the killing dose of morphephedrine, he would have cracked the tension with a joke. About crappy last meals maybe.

The other crews were making bets on what would kill him. Marking up the odds on the back of a cigarette packet. Black humor and wise-cracking is just how you deal. We’d have been doing the same if it wasn’t one of ours. Yellow Choke 3:1. Threadworms 12:7. The Tars 15:4. New & Horrible: 1:2.

Ro’s voice changed