Farms

I put my hands on my hips and stare at the quarantine zone.

“Which one of you did this?” I say.

None of it makes sense. The farms worked for months without any hint of a leak. The mini-farms are hermetically sealed steel capsules.

Maybe some rogue Taumoeba was lurking on the ship since the last outbreak—back at Adrian. Somehow it didn’t find any Astrophage until just now?

No. From our experiments, Rocky and I learned that Taumoeba can only last about a week without food before it starves to death. And they’re not big on moderation. Either they wildly breed and consume all Astrophage to be found, or they aren’t present at all.

One of these containers must be leaking. I can’t just jettison everything—I need these Taumoeba to save Earth—so what do I do? I have to figure out which one is the problem.

I check each farm as best I can. Since they’re in bins, I can’t operate any of the controls, but I don’t need to. They’re fully automated. It’s a pretty simple system—Rocky tends to find elegant solutions to complex problems. The farm monitors the air temperature inside. If it drops below 96.415 degrees Celsius, it means there’s no more Astrophage because the Taumoeba ate it. So it pumps in a little more Astrophage. Simple as that. And the system keeps track of how often it has to feed them. From that it makes a very rough approximation of the Taumoeba population inside. It adjusts the Astrophage feed rate as needed to control that population and, of course, has a readout to tell us the current state.

I check each farm’s readouts. Each one shows 96.415 degrees Celsius with a population estimate of 10 million Taumoeba. Exactly what they’re supposed to read.

“Hm,” I say.

The air pressure inside those farms is way lower than the nitrogen pressure surrounding them. If any of those farms had a leak, the nitrogen would get in and pretty soon the Taumoeba would all die. But they haven’t. And it’s been three days.

The breeder farms aren’t leaking. It must be the mini-farms. But how the heck does a microbe work its way through half a centimeter of Eridian steel? Rocky knows what he’s doing, and he knows all about Eridian steel. If it wasn’t good for holding microbes in place, he’d know. They don’t have Taumoeba on Erid, but they definitely have other microbes. This isn’t new to them.

***

Chapter 28