“Dr. Meng?”
There were four people, all of them men. Two wore simple uniforms with the Pinkwater logo on the breast and shoulder. The other two were Free Navy. Prax felt his heart thud against his chest as the adrenaline hit, but he tried not to look more than a little uncomfortable. Anyone would be a little anxious when the Free Navy came asking for them. Even the innocent. He thought that was right.
“Can I help you?”
“We need you to come with us now,” the taller of the two Free Navy men said.
“I can’t,” Prax said, gesturing toward the plants he hadn’t checked. As if that were explanation enough.
They stepped closer, moving around him. They all had sidearms. Handcuffs. Canisters of restraint spray.
“You have to come with us now,” the tall man said again.
“Do … do I need my union representative?” he asked, but he wasn’t surprised when the shorter of the Free Navy men pushed him in the small of the back. I could run, he thought. It wouldn’t help, but I could do it.
They marched him out through the front office. When they passed Brice in the hall, she looked away, pretending not to notice. The front desk was abandoned, everyone suddenly called to the restroom or a coffee break at the same moment. None of the people he worked with would actually see him leave. That’s how quickly the right kinds of power could make someone disappear. Walking out the front door for what he had to assume was the last time, it felt like an epiphany. He’d wondered, watching the newsfeeds, how so many could go missing in a station with people and cameras everywhere. He understood now.
All they had to do was make it too dangerous for others to watch.
They loaded him into a cart, drove off down the main corridor, down the southern exchange ramp, and into a well-lit concrete hallway. He had the sudden, visceral memory of waiting here back after the mirrors fell, when the survival of Ganymede Station had been an open question. He’d waited in line right there, trying to find Mei. It would be her turn now to wonder what had happened to him. Symmetry.
At the Pinkwater office, they took him to a small, cold room. Green walls. Green floor. Everything stank of industrial cleaner. The kind they used to clean up blood and spit. Biohazard stuff. A chair bolted in place in front of a cheap, plastic desk. Black dots along the wall shifted toward him like the eyes of a spider. Not cameras, but the same multifrequency image arrays he used in the labs. They were sensitive enough to pick up his heart rate from changes in his skin and track the heat in every part of his body. He’d used them extensively on last year’s soybean experiments, and seeing them here felt almost like betrayal.
The taller Free Navy man came in. A dark-skinned woman in a Pinkwater uniform with him. Prax looked up. He’d imagined this moment so many times in the middle of dread-soaked nights that now that it was happening he was almost curious to see how well it met his expectations. Would they beat him? Threaten him with violence? Would they threaten Mei and Djuna and Natalia? He’d heard that sometimes they would addict prisoners to drugs and then threaten to withhold their supply and let withdrawals do the work.
“Dr. Meng,” the tall man said, sitting across from him. Did they take focus drugs? Prax had heard of focus drugs, but he didn’t know how they worked. “You were supervisor for Quiana Karvonides? You’re on record as identifying her body.”
“I am,” Prax said. Was there a way to pretend his way out of this? Would they believe him if he denied everything he could deny? Or would he give himself away? All the black, mechanical eyes on him, and the tall man’s pale-brown ones too. Only the Pinkwater woman was looking at her hand terminal. “I did. Karvonides didn’t have family on the station, I think. I’m not sure about that, though. Is something wrong?”
“She was working on proprietary yeast? Is that right?”
“That’s one of the projects we do,” Prax said, nodding. He was being too anxious. They’d know.
“She was working on it particularly?”
Prax’s mouth was dry, and the cold of the room seemed to creep up his legs and into the base of his spine. What had he done? Why hadn’t he kept his head down? But no, that wasn’t right. He had reasons for taking every action he took. And he’d known there were risks. Being here in this room was one, even if he hadn’t known which room in particular. He wondered whether there were other people watching him, or if the spider eyes fed into some sort of software that analyzed him and fed them the answers.
“Dr. Meng?”
“Yes, sorry. Yes, she worked on the harvester yeast. It’s an organism, um, that harvests a very broad range of electromagnetic radiation, the way that a plant uses light. It’s reverse-engineered from the protomolecule data. It lets the yeast generate its own sugars from the radioplasts, and then, um, its native systems can convert that into higher-complexity nutrients.”
The two shared a look. He couldn’t tell what its significance was. How would Mei do without him? She was older now. Nearly adolescent. She was going to start pulling away from the family unit soon anyway. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad time to lose him. Would they put his body back in the recycler? He couldn’t think like that. Not now.
“What can you tell us about Hy1810?” the woman asked, and Prax felt like she was looking through him. Seeing his bones and the shape of his blood vessels. He’d never felt more naked. He tried to lean back in his chair, to rock it a little back and forth, but the bolts only grated a little. There were notches and scrapes on the wall he hadn’t noticed until now. Painted over, yes, but there. He didn’t want to think about what had made them.
“It’s the tenth variation using protocol eighteen,” he said. “It’s proprietary. I’m not supposed to talk about that. I’m sorry.”
“Why did you move the Hy1810 data out of Karvonides’ partition?”
And there it was. They knew. He took a breath, and he could hear it shaking in his throat. They wouldn’t need focus drugs or psych computers. He was readable as plain text. It had been a dream that he might avoid the worst. All that was left was watching it play out. He felt a vestigial, unreasoning hope. There had to be a way. He had to get back home, or else who would make pancakes for the girls?
“I moved it on the request of some of the other project engineers. With Karvonides’ passing, they needed to have access to the run data. Otherwise there was no way to move forward. So, yes, I put it in a partition where they could reach it.”
“Did you review the permissions on that partition?”
“The information was proprietary,” Prax said, clinging to the idea like it was the last, water-logged fragment of the ship that had sunk beneath him. It sounded weak, even to him.
The man leaned forward. “That data was sent to Earth. We’ve isolated the tracking data on it, and it came from the partition you put it in.”
Lies and denials bubbled in his mind. Anyone could have accessed that data. I was sloppy. Careless with security, maybe. That’s all. I didn’t do anything wrong.
In his mind’s eye, he saw Karvonides again. The wounds on her neck and head. Yes, he could deny her again, but it wouldn’t make any difference. They already knew, or near enough. They’d push him, torture him, and he would break. It didn’t matter what he said now. He was dead. No more pancakes. No more evenings coaxing the girls into doing their homework or Sunday mornings waking up late with Djuna. Someone else would have to take over his research. Everything he’d loved, everything he’d lived for, was gone.
To his surprise, it felt less like fear than a sort of terrible freedom. He could say anything he wanted now. Including the truth.
“The thing you need to understand,” he said, an irrational, intoxicating courage blooming in his heart. “Biological equilibria? They’re not straightforward. Never.”