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Garin bit his own tongue to punish his wayward thoughts. Daydreaming about Sazahk having a color just for him and getting his hopes up about what brown meant… If it meant anything, it probably wasn’t flattering. Sazahk showing an interest in Garin’s well-being meant Sazahk was a good person, not that Garin was special.
Sazahk continued as he studied the yellow fungus Garin had pointed out. “And I said there may be an energy source that was possibly geothermal in nature. It very well could be something else. An enormous pile of decaying biomass from a die off of the animal we observed, perhaps.”
“I’d prefer the boiling water.” Garin wrinkled his nose at the idea of an amorphous pile of death and shook off the last of his embarrassment. “Speaking of animals…”
“I didn’t see or hear any while you were sleeping.” Sazahk lead them down the passage, around a corner, and into another narrow tunnel, this one draped with flickering strands of mycelium hanging from the ceiling.
“Were you paying attention?” Garin paused and stared at the beauty of the dancing lights before them, despite his judgmental tone on the topic of distraction.
“I was.” Sazahk cut a scowl in his direction. Then he pressed his lips together. “In the beginning, at least. I admit to giving the job of keeping watch less than my full attention when the threat level proved to be low.”
Garin sighed and moved to overtake Sazahk’s position in front. “I’m going first.”
Sazahk’s forehead streaked with purple, and he opened his mouth, but he closed it again after a half second and nodded.
Garin hesitated at Sazahk’s acquiescence, off balance after having braced for the argument. Not forcing Garin down a fungus-infested tunnel, not fighting him when he was protective… This was about the sex, wasn’t it? This was Sazahk trying to make Garin comfortable after his humiliating display. He was stroking Garin’s ego, so he felt big and strong again when Sazahk was the one who’d had to save him. Garin ducked his head and powered onward.
This was stupid. These were stupid thoughts. He was the one making such a big deal out of this, not Sazahk. All he had to do was focus on his job and this would all blow over.
With that as his mantra, Garin lead them through the twisty tunnels, careful not to touch anything that looked anything like a mushroom while Sazahk puttered around after him, poking things and taking clippings and muttering to himself.
Focus on the job, the feelings will blow over.
Focus on the job.
And yet, every once in a while, Garin caught himself watching the qesh instead of their surroundings, captivated by the yellows and greens rippling across his skin and the infectious excitement in his dark eyes. But he understood the excitement in those eyes enough for his stomach to drop when it suddenly spiked.
“I recognize that!” Sazahk took off past Garin, slipping through his hands before he could grab him.
“Recognize what?” Garin stumbled after him, ducking under a hanging curtain of mycelium.
“This.” Sazahk dropped to his knees before a bulbous black rock.
Garin’s gorge rose when the tiny tentacles covering it writhed toward Sazahk. “Don’t?—”
“I’m gonna touch it!” Sazahk shoved Garin’s hand away without looking at him. So much for the brief bout of accommodation. “It’s Insect.”
Garin realized, once he got a calm look at the thing, that its shiny black casing and twisting cilia did match the videos he’d seen of Insects and their structures. “We are close to where you encountered them.”
Sazahk offered his hand to the strange rock, and the cilia wrapped up his long index finger. “Even so, these sensory growths must spread very aggressively to have made it all the way here in such little time. I theorized that the Insects might have an effect on the ecology of their surroundings, and if that’s true, I suspect these growths are largely responsible.”
“Do you think the Insects did all this?” Garin gestured at the surrounding fungi forest.
“Unlikely.” Sazahk extricated his fingers and dug around the growth, revealing a thick taproot descending into the ground. “The level of infestation throughout the so-far-explored subterranean system is too great to have resulted from an introduction by the Insects. But the Insect growths could have facilitated the transfer of the mycelium to other parts of the Dead Zone’s soil which could have aided in the plant growth I observed.”
Insect creep didn’t seem as inherently dangerous as mind-altering mushrooms, and Garin had let Sazahk muck about with those, so he let his eyes wander as Sazahk dug around the growth. He didn’t see any other Insect?—
A flash of movement caught his eye.
He froze and stared into the gloom, hunting for motion. Several seconds later, he got it. Something dashed under the hood of an over-sized mushroom. Then Garin found himself staring into a new pair of dark eyes, the light of the bioluminescent fungus glinting off the huge orbs.
“Sazahk,” Garin whispered as he reached for the gun hanging at his hip.
The dark eyes twenty yards away blinked, and two seconds later, three more pairs joined them.
“Sazahk,” Garin hissed more urgently, not daring to take his eyes off their growing audience. He trained his gun at them.
Each eye was large based on the amount of light reflected off them, but the spacing between them was not. That could mean a large animal with closely spaced eyes, but most likely it meant a smaller animal. Something the size of a dog perhaps, and not one of those monstrously massive ones the rich families on Earth liked to breed. But Garin counted five pairs now and even if each animal was only the size of a house cat, if it hunted in packs, it posed a serious threat.
