Strategy #2
Whoever or whatever was blocking his way? Whether it was a green-eyed goddess or a grouchy local or fucking aliens taking a detour from Roswell? They were going to get to know Ethan Jacobson. Who was not a goddamn quitter.
No, he was ready for battle.
He didn’t bother to set up his tent or his sunshade, just set the Jeep’s parking brake and popped the tailgate door, then dragged out the pieces of one of his siege towers and leaned them against the Jeep.
He sat on the tailgate to put on his armor—legs, codpiece, hip skirts, and hell, he slung on his gambeson and arms as well.
He’d tried to make his carpentry as stable as possible, but there was always the chance he’d fall, land on one of the cacti he was trying to avoid. He should be prepared.
Of course, if he landed head-first, he’d be fucked. He never brought his padded steel helmet out for botany quests.
He was beginning to think he should start.
Once he’d shouldered his backpack of water and tools and slung his padded black drone bag on top of that, he gathered the rest of his equipment and started the trudge toward the cactus barrier.
Fuck, his gear was heavy. He’d considered himself relatively fit compared to the other hardsuit fighters he squared off against every Tuesday, but clearly he hadn’t been lifting enough weights.
It didn’t help that the sand of the wash was loose, shifting treacherously under his feet with each step.
Thankfully, he’d already planned his strategy. Once he had reached the base of the hill and the mysterious wall of cacti was in sight, he put everything down, sat cross-legged in the sand, set up his portable sunshade, and opened his drone case.
The drone had been one of his most expensive purchases back when he’d been assembling his overlanding rig, and the licenses and certifications had been a pain in the ass, but it had been worth it.
He was a decent photographer—had to be, in his line of work—but still photos could only do so much, especially now that generative AI was faking evidence for everything from cute baby peacocks to celebrity endorsements.
People were numb to appealing images now that they were everywhere.
Drone footage, though—that continued to impress.
And in the world of academia, where impressing donors was more important than groundbreaking research, effective teaching, and all the mundane measurements university teachers were asked to record, a soaring sweep of a grand landscape was golden.
He didn’t like it, chafed at the entire sucking-up-to-mundanes culture, but at least he was good at it.
Ethan carefully set the drone itself atop his siege equipment and ran through the checks and switches and buttons to get it set up for filming.
He wanted to get some general footage of his discovery, something he could use when he eventually presented his findings at a research conference, but today the drone could give him something more—an aerial view of the obstacles he would need to overcome to get to his destination.
It wouldn’t do him any good if he got past the thick ring of cacti only to be trapped in an impassable cul-de-sac of cholla, the nastiest of the desert plants.
While he knew intellectually that “jumping” cholla stems did not actually jump, they were still damn pernicious.
Worse, the plants could be tall, making the only way past them around.
If anything could make Ethan believe in the devil, it was cholla. And they were fucking everywhere on this hill, dripping evil beads of spines down to the earth.
He set the drone whirring upward, using the controller to send it high into the sky and studying the video footage displayed on the screen. He started the drone on a wide circle to begin, surveying the entirety of the hill from a distance.
He whistled in awe. “There you are.” He wasn’t quoting the movie now—didn’t feel the rightness of the words in his gut—but if he’d had any doubts that he was in the right place, this footage would have crushed them.
He felt as light as the drone itself, like he was soaring in the sky along with it, taking in the uncanny view.
The screen on the controller wasn’t very large—smaller than his iPad—but even at the reduced size, the brilliant swashes of color across the hill were stunning.
There was a slight haze over it all, dust or pollen, and with the sun approaching its zenith there were few shadows for the colors to hide in.
There was more than he had seen from the ground, far more.
The hill was crowned with flowers, from the lower reaches where he’d first seen them all the way to its crest and down the other side.
The very top of the hill held a grove of blossoming ironwood and mesquite trees, several of them in a circle, canopies of pink and yellow, and the splendor radiated outward from them like a labyrinth, twists and turns that seemed to create a path through the colors, winding down and out to the edges.
It reminded him of something, and when it struck him he laughed aloud.
“It’s like a crop circle,” he murmured, nudging the drone higher, aiming the camera straight at the ground.
The pattern didn’t have the rigid symmetrical structure of a traditional European garden, but there was purpose in all of it.
He could almost trace the intention, spiraling and radiating out from the central grove. “It’s not natural. It’s planned.”
He couldn’t decide if that was good or bad. Probably bad for his research, if the phenomenon was the result of someone else’s science. But…maybe good?
It depended on who was doing the planning. And if they were the asshole who’d been trying to keep him away.