Thin Air
Chapter One
The clear canister sitting on the Enterprise science lab bench held no more than a few handfuls of brown soil, taken directly from a field just outside of Belle Terre's main colony on the island side of the planet. It was farm soil, nothing more. Recently tilled, the soil smelled of rich possibilities, seasons full of fresh, crisp vegetables, and the very future of Belle Terre.
Only there was something very wrong with this soil. And Spock was trying to figure out exactly what that was.
On the counter beside the canister were almost two dozen other canisters, all containing soil from different areas of Belle Terre. The soil from the explosion-blasted side of the planet seemed darker, almost black with the radiation damage from what the colonists were calling "the Burn." Two canisters seemed almost to be full of light sand.
But, from what Spock had been told, areas of soil around the planet were "going bad," as the colonists put it. Plants were dying, and in places the soil even smelled foul and rotten. Lilian Coates had asked Captain Kirk to look into it, and the captain had assigned Spock to help the coloni ... read full excerpt from: New Earth: Thin Air ebook
