Chapter Twelve - Thousand Gardens

“We’re locking down sector B, rows 25 to 29 from further testing.

All plant life and plant matter in those sectors is to be disposed of by means of type 4 herbicides, followed by garden-wide ignitions. The ashes are to be collected for further analysis and proper disposal.

Note: I fucking told you that grafting antithesis shit onto cabbages was a horrific fucking idea.”

Crop Corp internal memo, 2048

***

I tapped the door release, then set a foot on the cement ground just outside the Fury. A hand on the doorframe gave me the leverage I needed to pull myself out of the car.

The Crop Corp facility was huge, huge in a way that made me feel small in comparison. It challenged my sense of scale.

The greenhouses weren’t all that wide. Maybe thirty metres to a side. They were hexagonal, with glass walls all around lit up from within by faint lights. There were orange pillars, yellow ones, even a few that glowed purple. Their roofs were capped by blue solar panels, which were folded in on themselves like the petals of some high-tech flower.

Each rose up at least a hundred metres. Nothing compared to the skyscrapers back home. In fact, in terms of sheer size, at least the size of the greenhouses, the operation wasn’t that impressive.

It was the scale that was terrifying. There had to be thousands of those pillars, all packed in tight with just enough room between them that a pair of smaller cars could dart past each other. “How big is this place?” I asked.

This is the third largest growing operation feeding New Montreal. The facility covers six square kilometres.

“That’s... a fuckload of plants,” I said.

Yes. I should have just opened with that. This facility has the third largest fuckload of plants in the New Montreal area.

I chuckled. “Yeah, alright.” I dragged my attention down from the rows of pillars. It looked like some of them were moving? They had these big vehicles, large enough to wrap around a pillar, and equipped with four wheels that were at least five metres tall. The middle of the machines looked like they could clamp onto a pillar, and there were workers crawling up and down them, securing the pillars that were about to be moved.

“Head’s up,” Gomorrah said. “We have guests coming.”

I glanced her way in time to see her slipping her mask on, then followed the low hum of an electric vehicle to see a little golf-cart looking thing zipping our way. It turned as it came to a stop, and a man in a shirt and slacks jumped out of it. “You can’t be here,” he said.

“Beg to differ,” I said.

He glared, then reached up to adjust his half-mask. He had a white hardhat on too, it was a bit incongruous over his business casual. “No, I mean this is where the gardens will be moved. Unless you want that pretty car crushed, it had better move.”

Gomorrah shrugged, and half a second later the Fury shot up and into the air. In a blink it was out of sight.

The man stared for a moment, then turned his attention back to us. “I was hoping you’d be in the car when it left,” he said.

“We’re here to help,” I said. “Got a warning that the region had some antithesis presence?”

“You’re samurai? Wait, no, of course you are. Fuck me, could have lead with that.”

“I thought it was pretty obvious,” I said. Did he get a lot of visitors in nun getup and cat-themed power-armour?

“Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “Been a bit stressful. We have several thousand pillars left to move still. We’ve only moved twenty percent. At this rate we’ll be here for another three days.”

“That’s... not ideal,” I said.

He nodded. “You’re telling me. I sent a request in for more movers three months back but headquarters said it wasn’t worth the expense. We’ll see how much they like the expense of replacing lost gardens.”

“Right,” I said. “You might not have three days to move these things.”

He shook his head. “We’ll do what we can. Might be getting some movers from Facility 187NM, that’ll cut down the workload. And if you can keep the bug bastards off our plants, that would be nice.”

“Right,” I said. “Where are our little alien friends? Oh, and got a name? I’m Stray Cat, this is Gomorrah.”

He pointed through the rows of pillars. “Sector H through J. I got reports from the boys that were there.”

“Where?”

“Moved closer to this edge. Besides, need more help loading the pillars that can be moved. Caught sight of a few aliens on the security cameras.” He reached into a breast pocket and tugged out a thin smart-phone looking thing that he unfolded to be larger. “These. I’m Jake, foreman, second class.”

“Thanks, Jake,” I said as I looked at the device. It was stuck on a still frame of a video. The lighting was crap, clearly coming from the pillars, but still dark enough that it wasn’t easy to make out the thing on the edge. Still, even out of focus there was no doubt about it.

“That’s an m-three,” Gomorrah said.

“Big dog thing with a three-hinged jaw and green-black skin,” I said. “Yeah, that’s a model three. I guess they’ll be pretty common while the hives are building up. Hey Jake, what kind of crap is around those sectors? Anything in particular the aliens would want to munch on?”

“Sectors H to J? That’s hyper wheat, trademark, super soy, trademark, and friendly broccoli, patent-pending, trademark.”

“Anything else?” I asked. “Fertilisers, big tanks full of biofuel?”

Jake stared at me for a moment. “Ma’am, this is a farm. We have several hundred tons of fertiliser.”

“That’s... fucking fantastic.” I nodded. “Okay, I’m going to head over that way. If you could send me a map of the area, and maybe link us into your security, that would be nice.” I figured that Myalis could break in, but hey, if they gave permission that would make things nice and neat.

“I’ll do what I can,” Jake said. “I’ll talk to the lead foreman and site director, but between you and me, I think they’ll be happy enough to have a samurai on site that they’d give you anything you ask for. We know we’re in a high-risk location if the aliens find out what’s here.”

“You got it,” I said. "Can we, uh, borrow that?”

Jake followed my finger towards the golf cart. “But that’s my personal transportation vehicle.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Come on Cat, we can walk,” Gomorrah said. “Leave the poor man’s golf cart alone.”

I rolled my eyes, but didn’t disagree. Gomorrah started to head towards the nearest pillars, so I jogged to catch up to her.

The world beneath all the garden pillars was strangely dark. I imagined that it was nicer at noon, but the sun had moved past that a while ago, so we were constantly in the shade as we moved along. At least the lights within the pillars helped, though they did cast everything in strange colours. It was also strangely bright whenever we reached a spot where the rows happened to line up to create a gap where the sun could shine through.

“So, what do you think we’re going to run into?” I asked.

“Not much,” Gomorrah said. “This early on, there probably isn’t anything tougher than a model four. Maybe a few model threes that are stealing from the site. Unless the hive is really close, then the antithesis doesn’t have much business sniffing around here.”

“Except that there are people here.”

“And those people are a threat that it might try to wipe out before growing bigger,” Gomorrah said. “If we can kill off the scouts, that might actually give us some time before the hive goes deep into producing combat models.”

“Less points for us, but then we won’t have to sit here all day. Or for the next couple of days.”

“Exactly,” Gomorrah said. She glanced up, and I followed her gaze to spot the Fury hovering overhead. “I think I’ve spotted something. How's your cardio?”

“What?” I asked.

Then she started jogging ahead of me, and I cursed as I ran to keep up.

Our faster pace meant that we were eating up the distance, but the size of the place still meant that it was taking forever to get anywhere. A few minutes in and I was already a little lost. The pillars weren’t all entirely identical, but the differences were just slight enough that I couldn’t tell them apart at a glance.

There was no guessing how many rows deep we were, and a glance back only revealed more pillars.

This place was going to be a mess to fight in, I just knew it.

***