Fireflies and Cosmos: Interstellar Spring Book 1 by J. Darris Mitchell

Author:J. Darris Mitchell [Mitchell, J. Darris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-04-21T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 14

'So you see that's why I'd hoped for the expertise of Dr. Mercurian,' La'Shay finished lamely.

Catalina nodded. She wished that Patrick were here as well. As it happened she had sent Roman to go wander the fields while she and Farah spoke with La'Shay for fear of the entomologist beguiling the already frazzled doctor.

'So let me get this straight,' Farah said, pushing back her dark straight hair and taking a deep breathe, 'The peanuts weren't producing food or fixing nitrogen anywhere close to spec, some were even depleting your soil of what nitrogen had accumulated since the Institute’s Seedpod got here, what, 68 standards ago?'

La'Shay nodded. Farah didn't slow down enough to notice.

'You noticed there were little black beetles everywhere, so you tried to manage for them. Organics weren't working, so you tried pesticides, those worked for a year and the peanuts got better, but then the beetles came back and the peanuts did worse than ever. After that you tried the dangerously outdated strategy of expanding your peanut farmland so the beetles wouldn't have a habitat to stay in.'

'We have beekeepers who bring in the pollinators,' La'Shay started, 'there shouldn't be any pests. None were on the Seedpods and no one had introduced them. It's just these beetles,' Farah held up a hand and La'Shay's strength left her. Catalina felt bad for her. Here she was, meeting two of her heroes in the flesh, and they were bullying her. Catalina told herself she'd go nicer on the ground worm. Farah didn't seem to find this a priority.

'You tried the rather absurd strategy of planting only peanuts and, by some stroke of dumb luck, that worked, or did for a while anyway, and that's what got us to this,' Farah gestured to the peanut fields around them. They stretched on for kilometers, past the horizon, as far as they could see. They'd driven into the field on an Ultra-Reaper. But after what seemed an eternity of traversing row after row of peanuts, the Catalina had ordered La'Shay to stop. La'Shay had mumbled about the mountains not being much further, but the Farah had silenced her with a glare.

'So then what happened? The beetles came back?' Farah asked.

'No, but the peanuts are doing worse than ever,' La'Shay knelt down and pulled one of the peanut plants out from the soil. It was tiny and poorly formed and the few peanuts it had produced were shrunken.

'Well its nodes look good,' Farah said, gently touching the red lumps attached to the roots of the plants, 'and you certainly have a healthy fungus population.'

'Yes we've always been lucky with that. Even now, with the beetles gone and the peanuts dying, the mycelium seem strong as ever,' La'Shay said.

'Officer Relker, I don't understand. I'm familiar with mycelium, the underground part of mushrooms that compose the real bulk of the organism, but what on Earth-1 is a node?' Captain Mondragon asked the botanist.

'A node is the part of the peanut plant that houses the bacteria that take nitrogen from the air and fix it into the soil.

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