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    Down Among the Mushrooms
    Down Among the Mushrooms
    Down Among the Mushrooms
    Ebook65 pages1 hour

    Down Among the Mushrooms

    By William C. Tracy

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    While the colony is being built, love will flourish

    Agetha is busy leading a construction team to build the newest section of the colony. When disaster strikes and the biomass develops strange new features, she is thrust together with a new friend: Beth.

    As their relationship develops, she soon learns Beth holds secrets of her own. Why is she stuck in a dead end job, anyway?

    But their relationship might be cut short, in the face of a looming disaster from the biomass that could erase years of construction and set the colony back to its beginning.

    Find out what happens in this short story of The Biomass Conflux, set between books Of Mycelium and Men and To a Fungus Unknown!

    Genres: Space Opera / Science Fiction / Colonization / Alien Contact / LGBT / Lesbian / Sapphic

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSpace Wizard Science Fantasy
    Release dateMay 2, 2023
    ISBN9798230269533
    Down Among the Mushrooms
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    Author

    William C. Tracy

    William C. Tracy writes tales of the Dissolutionverse: a science fantasy series about planets connected by music-based magic instead of spaceflight. He currently has five books out, from a coming of age story, to tales of political intrigue, to a Sherlock Holmes-like mystery, to a Jules Verne style adventure, to the first book of an epic space opera, titled THE SEEDS OF DISSOLUTION. Several books include LGBT-friendly elements as well. William is a North Carolina native and a lifelong fan of science fiction and fantasy. He has a master’s in mechanical engineering, and has both designed and operated heavy construction machinery. He has also trained in Wado-Ryu karate since 2003, and runs his own dojo in Raleigh NC. He is an avid video and board gamer, a reader, and of course, a writer. In his spare time, he cosplays with his wife such combinations as Steampunk Agent Carter and Jarvis, Jafar and Maleficent, and Doctor Strange and the Ancient One. They also enjoy putting their pets in cute little costumes and making them cosplay for the annual Christmas card. follow him on Twitter for writing updates, cat pictures, and thoughts on martial arts.

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      Book preview

      Down Among the Mushrooms - William C. Tracy

      Down Among the Mushrooms

      William C. Tracy

      Copyright © 2021, 2023 by William C. Tracy

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission. No part of this publication may be used in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies to generate text, including without limitation, technologies capable of generating works in the same style or genre as the publication.

      Space Wizard Science Fantasy

      Raleigh, NC

      www.spacewizardsciencefantasy.com

      Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

      Cover by William C. Tracy

      Illustration by Katie Cordy

      Copy Editing by Heather Tracy

      Book Layout © 2015 BookDesignTemplates.com

      Author’s website: www. spacewizardsciencefantasy.com

      Ma’am, we found something, my foreman called. His tone said it wasn’t good.

      Well hell. Show me. I strode by Harie, glancing to the horizon, no barrier between our construction and the overgrown surface of this planet. The thick mat visible in the distance was nearly as tall as I was, with stalks sprouting to three times my height. It was as if someone had grown moss to the size of a brown and blue shag carpet on steroids, and salted it with twigs and ferns, bulbous growths, smelly flesh-like appendages, and even less identifiable…things. It stretched as far as the eye could see. Drone surveys reported all of Lida was covered in the same sort of growth, even into the oceans.

      We broke into what looks like a shaft, Agetha, Harie said, pointing the way. His use of my name dragged my attention from the fungal biomass. He was a good kid, and had been working for me for seven years so far. It’s right on a wall line, a hole the size of the Z22 excavator. There was no sign of it on the geotechnical survey or the subsurface scan. I don’t think it was even here last week.

      So right where the distribution center for this whole neighborhood is supposed to go, I grumbled. A half-built row of apartments loomed behind us, the community garden planned across the street. It’s only the hub used to dole out emergency supplies and basic necessities to keep citizens alive as the new radian stabilizes. I stared at slabs of resinplast waiting to be turned into new walls.

      The new material wasn’t as strong as the original nanotanium from the colony ships, but the latter had been absorbed nearly twenty-five years ago into the wall around Alpha and Beta radians, shielding our growing colony from the threat of the ever-growing biomass. These days, what we had left was substandard equipment and continual delays.

      Zeta radian was taking twice as long to construct as the five previous. Out of the eight planned radians of the arcopolis—what would be a self-sustained city—this was the first to overlap the regrown flora of Lida. When we arrived, the colony ship exhausts slagged the landing site to a distance of five kilometers, and estimates were thirty years before the planet reclaimed the area. But the biomass surprised us, and no one in the colony had experience with anything growing so fast. We’d barely finished constructing Epsilon before resorting to flamethrowers to burn out the new growth.

      Was the substrata in this area saturated with moisture and we missed it? I asked. A shaft couldn’t just appear. That was solid limestone last week.

      I know, but… Harie darted a sideways glance at me as we reached the latest excavation, our boots crushing an ankle-high carpet of finger-like fungus the consistency of rubber. Some of it moved out of the way of our steps. The Z22 digger was idling to one side, Cindie with her feet up on the console. I frowned, and she put them back on the floor. Just take a look.

      With Zeta radian, there were surprises at every step, and the biomass was already deep enough to resist a mere flamethrower. From here, I could see things move, never sure whether they were settling growths, or one of the detached animal-like roaming creatures. The scientists said they were part of the biomass, though they weren’t always connected. They might have been true animals at one point, but had been subsumed by the fungus. The prevailing theory was, any species which used to live here was now subservient to the crawling fungus. We had to keep our colony from the same fate. It was why Admin pushed us so hard to finish the radian construction. Plus they had already scheduled the grand opening of the radian.

      I shook my head. Alright, break time’s over. I shoved my way into the ring my construction crew made around the shaft, gawping over the crack in the ground. Back on the colony ship, this construction would have been

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