Babylon's Ashes (Expanse 6)

“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.”

“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.”