Bunker No. 11 / Day Three / Veilwood -- North of the Gray Scar
The cargo Mauler smelled of rot and earth.
Dr. Zhang Liang stood in TM-1000C's troop bay, a shovel in his hands -- not that his doctorate was for landscaping -- while inside the bay, the conversion began in earnest last night. Seats were removed, plastic sheeting from the bunker stores laid upon the floor, and chunks of the mutated, giant snake's corpse tossed on top of it. Ten tons of meat they couldn't eat, but could use.
On top of the meat, they spread spores.
The giant mushrooms Maria had found growing on the snake's back -- they'd dubbed it pale cap since they knew not the name of this forest -- had doubled in twelve hours in the lab, and now Zhang tried to scale its production.
"This is disgusting," Dr. Rachel Kim muttered beneath her mask, more spores laying down in the spore-sown dirt. "We are farming mushrooms on a mutated snake that could've given us liver failure!"
"It's substrate," Zhang tried not to sound green. In old Earth, they grew mushrooms on dead logs, cow dung. This was same principle, but the corpse was much bigger, and the caps had low background energy, low heavy metals. Unlike meat, was clean.
Dr. Maria Rodriguez checked the humidity. "Eighty-five percent, thirty degrees. Same as outside. These things like this. Look." Where they had seeded yesterday evening, pale white, hand-sized caps pushed up and through the black flesh, faintly glowed. Growed fast, too fast. Smelled less rot, more damp.
General Ryker entered the troop bay, nose crinkled. "Report. Can we eat it?"
Zhang picked up one growing mature cap. "We ate test batch last night, General. Fried. No ill effects. Protein, fiber. If this bay produces as lab did, we can feed two hundred people per day from this one bay in three days. We have spores for three more bays."
"Then we do three more bays," Ryker said. "We have three days of corn left, remember? After that, corn is gone. I want food before that clock hits zero."
But the farm had teeth.
By afternoon, the air in the cargo Mauler was thick with spores. Not visible, but sensors detected fine dust. Settled on metal, and had begun to grow, moss-like, faintly glowing. Wiped it away and it came back.
Talia scanned it. "It's carrying trace energy from amber heart. Same as water. This mushroom has absorbed energy from snake, but doesn't store like meat. It uses it to grow. And it spreads. We need to seal this bay, negative pressure, or whole hangar will be growing mushrooms in a week."
"Seal it," Ryker ordered. "Double-filter the air."
The second problem came at dusk.
Adrian's fifty-meter clear cut was doing well. Stumps oozed white sap, but less now, as if the forest decided to seal them. Outside, water purifiers gurgled, producing clear water after double filter. Solar panels still fogged, but wind turbine they printed today helped.
Then the smell of pale cap farm reached the forest.
Wire-mites came first, hundreds, chewing at the conduit again. Then something bigger.
"Contact! North edge!" Yelena shouted from the guard tower they'd built from Mauler leg scaffolding. "Small, fast, four legs!"
Adrian ran, KPR up on his hip. In thermal, three dog-sized lizards, skin mottled like bark, eyes glowing faintly, not scared of the light, were drawn in by the smell of growing mushrooms, the rotting snake flesh in the Mauler.
They hit the perimeter wire. Sparks, one lizard yelped, but the others jumped over. Adrian fired, blue darts, short fire. One lizard dropped, black blood steaming. The others dragged it away into the dark, screeching.
"They're scavengers," Talia said, watching from the purifier roof, scanner shaking. "Probably lived off from the Giant Snake kills before. Now we are offering buffet. Corpse plus farm is bait."
"Then we need better lights, better wire, and we need to move corpse inside bunker completely," Ryker said, watching the lizards retreat. "We thought killing one big thing made us safe. It just announced dinner is open."
Fifty meters beyond clear cut, where forest began again, three cloaks of living leaves lay flat, not breathing.
Lirael, Yril, and Tass had returned at midnight as ordered. Yril was forty years old, which by elven standards was teenager, never seen human. Tass was small, fast feet, best runner.
What they saw made no sense.
Gray scar had become... works.
Lirael stared, inner thoughts racing. What are they doing?
The beetle humans had cut trees. Fifty meters around gray scar, all trees gone. Stumps bled white sap and sealed. To elves, cutting trees like that was wounding the forest, taboo unless the tree was dead. They had never seen so many trees cut at once. Even Zenithian loggers never cut so clean, so fast.
They had dug the ground. A long trench from the gray scar to two metal boxes, pipes inside. Water came out, first yellow, then clear after passing through boxes twice. Beetle humans drank it. Lirael watched engineer Park drink yellow once and sway, eyes unfocused -- dreaming. Are they poisoning themselves? Or do they drink cursed water?
And they farmed pale mushrooms. On the corpse of Great One.
Tass gagged silently under the cloak. They eat what grows on dead spirit flesh. Taboo. Even scavengers don't eat what grows on Great One. It is cursed.
Yril, young, whispered in Elvish, too loud, "They are farming death."
Lirael shushed him. "Watch."
They watched the Mauler bay open, white caps glowing inside, beetle humans harvesting with shovels, not with respect, just shoveling. They watched the dog-lizards attack and beetle humans shoot them with blue thunder sticks that made no smoke. They watched wire-mites chew and get burned by the wire.
This was not Zenithian. Zenithians would have brought priests, blessed the ground, taken the heart as relic. These did none. They just... built. Like dwarves, but without fire, without chant, with walking houses that folded legs and slept.
They do not know forest, Lirael thought. They cut, dig, drink, farm death, like they think forest is just dirt. Like humans who never lived in forest.
Then Tass did something brave and stupid.
While guard tower light swept away, he darted, fast feet barely touching moss, to the edge of the trench, grabbed one pale cap that had fallen from the harvest tray, and ran back.
He pressed it into Lirael's hand. The cap was warm, pale, faintly glowing, not rotting. Smelled like earth, not curse.
Lirael stared at it. In the village, mushrooms that grew on spirit beast were thrown away, feared. But this one... it looked clean. It had been grown by beetle humans who did not die eating it.
"We bring this to Saria," he whispered. "She must taste."
Behind them, bunker alarm chirped -- Zhang noticed one tray missing from count.
Adrian checked thermal scope, saw three cold spots moving fast through the trees, too fast for a human, too small for a giant snake. Smaller than the dog-lizards, but bipedal.
He raised KPR, then lowered. "Not lizards. Something else."
On purifier roof, Talia's scanner pinged -- trace energy, same as water dreams, moving away.
In the forest, three cloaks ran, carrying stolen pale cap, faster than any human could run, toward Mother Tree, while behind them, bunker people sealed their mushroom farm and added more wire, thinking forest only sent beasts.
Both sides thought the other was beast. Both were wrong.