The euphoria of the "Napalm Victory" lasted exactly twelve hours.
It evaporated the moment Captain Hareth walked into the command center—formerly the solar of the Keep—and placed a dead, bloated fish on my map table.
"The stream," Hareth said, his voice grim. "It's full of them. And dead foxes. The water smells like almonds and rot."
I didn't touch the fish. I looked at the map. The stream was our only source of fresh water, flowing down from the Frost-Peaks through the jungle edge before reaching the Keep.
"They poisoned the source," I deduced. "Warlord Thak is smarter than I calculated. He realized that heat requires fuel, and men require hydration."
"It gets worse," Hareth continued, pouring himself a cup of the murky water but not drinking it. "The scouts report the jungle edge is empty. No Yaks. The Orcs slaughtered them. Left the carcasses to rot in the sun. They aren't hunting for food, My Lord. They are hunting to deny us food."
I leaned back in my chair.
Siege Warfare.
The Orcs had initiated a blockade. They couldn't breach our walls because of the flamethrowers, so they were going to wait until we starved or died of thirst. It was a low-energy, high-probability strategy.
"Giles," I called out.
The bureaucrat scurried over, clutching his ledger. "Yes, Duke?"
"Inventory check. If we are cut off from the stream and the hunt, what is our Time-To-Failure?"
Giles flipped pages nervously. "We have the three Yaks we salted. We have forty sacks of potatoes. We have the rabbits, but they are breeding slowly. With three hundred refugees and fifty soldiers... we have food for eighteen days. Water for three."
"Three days," Hareth cursed. "We'll be drinking horse piss by the end of the week."
"Inefficient," I said, standing up. "The kidneys can't filter the toxins in urine effectively. We need a filtration plant."
I looked at the charcoal smudge on the wall—the diagram of the blast furnace.
"Hareth, take a squad to the burnt forest. Bring me charcoal. Lots of it. And sand from the riverbank."
"For what?"
"Activated Carbon Filtration," I explained. "The charcoal traps the poison. The sand traps the solids. We can drink the poisoned water if we strip the code out of it first."
"And the food?" Giles asked, his voice trembling. "Eighteen days, My Lord. The potatoes in the dungeon won't be ready for three months."
I walked to the window, looking down at the courtyard where the refugees were huddled near the furnace vents. They were warm, but they were thin.
"Nature is too slow," I muttered. "Photosynthesis is limited by the available carbon and nitrogen in the soil. We are waiting for the plants to eat, when we should be force-feeding them."
I turned back to my team.
"We aren't waiting three months. We are going to accelerate the harvest."
The Alchemy of Growth
The Dungeon Biosphere was humid and warm, heated by the sub-floor piping. But the potato plants were small, green shoots struggling in the dirt.
"Tessa," I said, pointing to the ventilation flue of the oil furnace.
Currently, the smoke (exhaust) was being piped outside.
"Redirect the exhaust," I ordered. "I want a bypass valve. I want to pump the smoke into the room."
"Smoke?" Tessa coughed, waving her hand. "You said the smoke chokes the rabbits."
"Thick smoke, yes. But invisible smoke—Carbon Dioxide—is plant food," I explained. "Trees breathe what we burn. If we increase the CO2 concentration in this room to 1200 parts per million, the plants will grow thirty percent faster."
"And the fertilizer?" Elara asked. She was carrying a heavy sack of wood ash from the kitchen.
"We make our own," I said. "The N-P-K ratio. Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium."
I pointed to the rabbit cages.
"Nitrogen comes from the manure. We mix it into the soil."
I pointed to the sack Elara held.
"Potassium comes from the wood ash. Dump it in."
"And Phosphorus?" Giles asked. "We have no bone meal."
I looked at Hareth. "The Orcs we burned on the causeway. Are the bodies still there?"
Hareth went pale. "My Lord... surely not."
"Bones are calcium phosphate," I stated coldly. "The Orcs tried to kill us. Now, their bones will feed us. It is the Law of Conservation of Mass. Grind them down."
Hareth looked like he wanted to vomit, but he nodded. In the North, morality was a luxury we couldn't afford.
"Grind them," Hareth agreed.
"Now," I clapped my hands. "We have the nutrients. But we need more space. The dungeon is full. We need to expand into the courtyard."
"It's freezing outside!" Giles cried. "Anything we plant will die in a minute."
"Not if we wrap it," I said.
I looked at the barrel of thick, black Bitumen (Tar) we had extracted from the distillation tower.