Chapter 28

It’s been three days since the Great Taumoeba Escape. I’ve taken no chances.

I manually shut off all the fuel bays—completely segregating each one from the fuel system. Then, one tank at a time, I opened it, collected an Astrophage sample from the line, and checked it in the microscope for Taumoeba contamination.

Thankfully, all nine tanks passed the test. I brought the spin drives back online and I’m cruising along at 1.5g’s again.

I cobble together a “Taumoeba alarm” to alert me if this happens again. I should have done that in the first place, but hindsight is 20/20.

It’s a slide of Astrophage—same as I used in the Taumoeba farms—with a light on one side and a light sensor on the other. The whole system is exposed to the open air of the lab. If Taumoeba get ahold of that Astrophage, they’ll eat it, the slide will turn clear, and the light sensor will start beeping. So far, no beeping. The slide remains jet-black.

Now that things have calmed down and the problem is contained, I can start asking the million-dollar question: How did the Taumoeba get loose?

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.