“Equilibria,” the man repeated.
“Yes. Exactly. Everyone thinks that it’s simple. New, invasive species comes in and it has an advantage and it outcompetes, right? That’s the story, but there’s another part to that. Always, always, the local environment resists. Yes, yes, maybe badly. Maybe without a clear idea of coping with novelty. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but I am saying it’s there. Even when an invasive species takes over, even when it wins, there is a counterbalancing process it has to overcome to do that. And—” The tall man was scowling, and his discomfort made Prax want to speak faster. To say everything he had in his heart before the hammer fell. “And that counterprocess is so deep in the fabric of living systems, it can never be absent. However well the new species is designed, however overwhelming its advantages seem to be, the pushback will always be there. If one native impulse is overcome, there will be another. You understand? Conspecifics are outcompeted? Fine, the bacterial and viral microecologies will push back. Adapt to those, and it’ll be micronutrient levels and salinity and light. And the thing is, the thing is, even when the novel species does win? Even when it takes over every niche there is, that struggle alone changes what it is. Even when you wipe out or co-opt the local environment completely, you’re changed by the pushback. Even when the previous organisms are driven to extinction, they leave markers behind. What they are can never, never be completely erased.”
Prax sat back in his chair, chin high, breath deep and fast, nostrils flared. You can kill me. You can wipe me from the rolls of history. But you can never change the mark I’ve made. I stood against you, and even when you’ve killed me, it won’t undo the things I’ve done.
The man’s scowl deepened. “Are we still talking about the yeast?”
“Yes,” Prax said. “Of course we’re talking about the yeast.”
“All right,” the man said. “That’s great, but what we need to know is who had access to that partition.”
“What?”
“The partition you put the data in,” said the Pinkwater woman. “Who could have linked to it from there?”
“Anyone with access to the workstations in the research group could have,” Prax said. “What does that have to do with it?”
The man’s hand terminal chimed, and he pulled it out from his pocket. The red backsplash on an alert made him look almost like he was blushing, but when he put the hand terminal away, his face had gone pale.
“I have to step back,” the Free Navy man said. “You finish this, yeah?” His voice was tight. Prax thought he was shaking. The woman nodded and checked her own hand terminal. Prax watched him go, confused. Wanting, almost, to call him back and insist that they finish. This was important. This was his martyrdom in the cause of freedom and science. The interrogator couldn’t just walk away in the middle of it. When the door closed, he turned to the woman, but she was still looking at her terminal. A newsfeed with something about the war.
She whistled softly, her eyes going wide. When she looked up at him, it was like she was surprised to see him.
“The yeast data,” he said, reminding her.
“Dr. Meng, you have to be more careful. You can’t do that anymore.”
“Do what?”
The woman’s impatient smile didn’t reach her eyes. “You can’t put data that might help the enemy into an open partition. I know it’s proprietary, but someone leaked it, and we have an active investigation now into who that might have been.”
“But— No, you don’t understand.”
“Dr. Meng,” she snapped. “I know you don’t like us coming in and telling you how to run your lab, but these are delicate times. I’m asking you to take a long, careful look at your lab’s security hygiene so that we don’t have a less pleasant conversation next time. You understand that?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“All right, then,” the woman said with the air of having won an argument. “You can go now.”
Prax didn’t know what to do. He sat quietly for a moment, waiting for clarification he didn’t know how to ask for. The woman checked her hand terminal, looked back at him, annoyance in her expression.
“Dr. Meng? We’re done for now. If we have any further questions, we’ll find you.”
“I should leave?”
“Yes,” she said.
And so he did. Walking through the halls and up to the public carts felt like moving through a dream. His stomach felt empty. He wasn’t hungry, there was just a massive bubble in his gut where something—pain, despair, hope, fear—was supposed to be. He rented a cart, took it to the tube station. The whole incident had been so brief, his shift wasn’t even done. It would be, though, by the time he got back to the lab. So he went home instead.
The newsfeeds on the tube were alive with whatever military action had been on the security woman’s hand terminal. He tried to make sense of it all, but the words seemed to lose their meaning somewhere between the screen and his senses. He caught himself staring emptily at a young man sitting across from him and had to make a conscious effort to look away. All he could think was the dark-skinned woman saying You can go now.
Djuna was home when he got there, sitting on the couch with her head in her hands, her eyes bloodshot and her cheeks blotchy from crying. When he stopped in the entryway from the kitchen and lifted his hand in greeting, she stared at him for a moment, stunned, and then leaped up, ran to him, and wrapped him in her arms. After a long moment, he hugged her back, and they stood in their rooms, the way he never thought they would again.
“Leslie sent me a message,” Djuna said, her voice still thick with tears. “She said they came for you at the office. That the security people took you away. I was trying to find a lawyer who would talk to me. I sent the girls to Dorian’s. I didn’t know what to tell them.”
“All right,” Prax said. “It’s all right.”
Djuna leaned back, searching his eyes like there was something written in them. “What happened?”
“I confessed,” Prax said. “I told them … I told them everything. And then they let me go.”
“They did what?”
“They said I shouldn’t do it again, and that I should leave,” he said. “It wasn’t at all the reaction I expected.”
Chapter Forty-One: Pa
I’ve got fast-movers,” Evans said. “Five, wait … Seven.”
“Coming from?” Michio asked, though she was already certain of the answer. The assaults throughout the Belt had already pulled the Free Navy’s fighters to other conflicts, thinning the defenses at Pallas. She had to give Holden his due. He hadn’t tried to use her and her ships as bullet sponges.
“Pallas Station,” Evans confirmed. “No one’s shooting out in the black.”
“PDCs have them,” Laura said. “Permission to fire?”
“You have permission,” Michio said. “Oksana, evasive maneuvers at will. Let’s show these fuckers we can dance.”
“Yes, Captain,” Oksana said between teeth bared in concentration and joy. A moment later, the Connaught lurched, shifted. Over the system, Josep howled a wordless battle cry.
The Four Horsemen, Foyle called them. The Connaught, the Serrio Mal, the Panshin, and the Solano—the most experienced of Pa’s breakaway fleet. They fell toward Pallas Station from four different directions, spreading the local defenses as thin as they could. If there had been time, maybe Marco would have pulled resources off Pallas too, sabotaged the manufacturing infrastructure, and left anyone who couldn’t escape on their own for Pa to rescue or let starve under her name.
But that assumed there was someplace for the Free Navy to run to.
“Two down,” Laura announced. “Five to go.”