“We certainly cooked it,” Lieutenant Josh Brunell grumbled as brittle stalks crunched beneath his boots. “Too bad the crops went with it.” Just like the other four test plots, by the time the soil reached temperatures high enough to kill the mycopathogen, the natural flora was dead too.

“Bio-thermal soil pasteurization looks like another dead end,” sighed Captain Cora Lee. They were going to need another solution. “What about the electro-bioremediation method you guys were churning on yesterday?” Because time was of the essence, while engineering teams from the Ingenuity and the Kennedy conducted the trials, she knew Dr. Verhoeven, Lieutenant Brunell, and the ASTRA team had already begun planning alternatives.

“In principle, it would work,” Dr. Karl Verhoeven replied, his tone more muted than it’d been in the days before their experiments began. “Ion gradients and microcurrents could disrupt the fungal hyphae, but it’s not feasible at this scale.” He looked over at the civil engineer, who had been the one to shut down the idea.

“In order to achieve success, we would need to deploy and maintain a stable conductive matrix across…” Lieutenant Brunell began to say. But then he stopped. It simply wasn’t worth wasting extra words. “Across, well, everything, with perfect synchronization and controls. There’s simply no way.” Even if they could deploy planet-scale emitters, moisture and mineral content varied, and even the planet’s own geomagnetic currents would interfere. They couldn’t tune for every hyperlocal microvariation at a planetary scale, and if they made even a small mistake, they’d fry the place. “It works in smaller settings because the scope is tight, but it’s too broad here.”

“What about if we just targeted only the arable lands?” Captain Lee asked.

“That might shield the crops temporarily, but it wouldn’t help the colonists,” Lieutenant Brunell noted. “Nor would it prevent the ultimate death of the biome.”

“If the fungus isn’t stopped planetwide,” Dr. Verhoeven elaborated. “Eventually, the planet’s entire ecological system will start to collapse, and it won’t matter what we did for the crops.”

“You make it sound like the fungus, if left unchecked, will terraform the planet,” Captain Lee observed.

“In a sense, that’s exactly what it will do,” Dr. Verhoeven confirmed. “As we move towards a late-stage pan-epiphytotic episode, it will begin to change the biosphere. The dominance of the mycopathogen will fix nitrogen far beyond levels of Lepia IV’s native flora, altering soil chemistry and breaking the essential self-regulating denitrification cycle. The end result will be an increase in nitrous oxide, the formation of nitric and ammonium aerosols, and a reduction in oxygen.”

Toxic gasses. Noxious rain. Reduced oxygen. Ensign Seraphine Lunaire shuddered as the reality sunk in. “Their world will die.” This wasn’t just about saving their crops. It was about saving their world.

“A functionally accurate description, if that comes to pass,” nodded Dr. Verhoeven, his tone still oddly calm. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. He wanted to solve this as much as any of them, and he understood better than all of them what it would mean if they didn’t. It was just that, to him, such tragedies were not worth dwelling on until they came to pass. “There are still more options to explore, and I suggest that’s where we focus our energy.”

“Agreed,” nodded Captain Lee, although in her mind, she was already turning over what she might have to do if they failed. It might be time to have a conversation with Ambassador Drake about the fact that, if they couldn’t fix this, they might soon have to make the call to begin a planet-wide evacuation and relocation.