And then … nothing. No one claimed them or threatened them. No one fired nukes at them, or if they had, the weapons hadn’t landed and the event hadn’t made the news. So much of Ganymede’s food was locally sourced, no one worried about going hungry. Prax had some concerns about research funding, but after the first few times he brought it up and had the issue swept aside, he’d stopped trying. They were in a holding pattern. They were keeping their heads down, doing the things they’d always done, hoping no one took notice.
And so Prax’s daily trip between his hole and Mei’s school and his offices had been weirdly unchanged. The food carts in the station served the same fried corn mash and bitter tea. The project-management meetings continued on Mondays before lunch. The generations of plant and fungus and yeast and bacteria lived and died and were analyzed just the way they would have been if no one had crippled Earth. Or killed it.
When Belters in Free Navy uniforms started appearing on the corners, no one said anything. When the Free Navy ships had started demanding resupply, their scrip had been added to the approved list of currencies and their contracts drawn up. When loyalists who’d filled their boards and feeds with support for Earth and demands that the governing board take a stand went silent, no one talked about it. It was just understood. Ganymede’s neutrality was permitted so long as the Free Navy could enforce it. Marco Inaros—who Prax had never heard of before the rocks fell—might not control the base, but he was quite willing to prune away the people who did until the organizational chart had been bonsai’d into the shape that pleased him. Pay tribute to the Free Navy, and govern yourself. Rebel, and be killed.
So nothing much changed and also everything did. The tension was there every day. In every interaction, however mundane. And it came out at strange times. Like reviewing trial-report data.
“Fuck the animal trials,” Karvonides said, her face tight and angry. “Forget them. This is ready to go into production.”
Khana crossed his arms, scowling at her. Prax, confused, had only the data to turn to, so he turned to it. Harvester yeast strain 18, sequence 10 was doing very well. The production numbers—sugars and protein both—were slightly above expected. Lipids were inside the error bars. It had been a good run. But …
His office was spare and close. The same room he’d taken when he’d brought Mei back from Luna. The first office of his tenure on the Reconstruction Committee. The others on the committee had moved on to larger places with bamboo paneling and augmented-spectrum lights, but Prax liked being where he already was. The familiar had always offered a powerful comfort. If Khana and Karvonides had worked in any other section, there would have been a couch or at least soft chairs for them to sit on. The lab stools in Prax’s office were also the same ones he’d had his first day back.
“I …” Prax said, then coughed, looked down. “I don’t see why we’d break protocol. That seems … um …”
“Completely irresponsible?” Khana said. “I think the phrase is completely irresponsible.”
“What’s irresponsible is sitting on this,” Karvonides said. “Two additions to the genome, fifty generations of growth—so less than three days—and we have a species that can beat chloroplasts for making sugars out of light and extends out almost into gamma. Plus the proteins and micronutrients. Use this for reactor shielding and you can shut down the recycler.”
“That’s hyperbole,” Khana said. “And this is protomolecule technology. If you think—”
“It is not! There is literally nothing in Hy1810 that comes from an alien sample. We looked at the protomolecule, said It can’t do that; can we? and figured out how to make something of our own. Native proteins. Native DNA. Native catalysts. Nothing that traces back to Phoebe or the ring or anything that came off Ilus or Rho or New London ever touched this.”
“That … um,” Prax said. “That doesn’t mean it’s safe, though. The animal protocol—”
“Safe?” Karvonides said, wheeling on him. “There are people starving to death all over the Earth right now. How safe are they?”
Oh, Prax thought. This isn’t anger. It’s grief. Prax understood grief.
Khana leaned forward, his hands in fists, but before he could speak, Prax put up his palm. He was in charge here, after all. It didn’t hurt to actually exercise his power now and then.
“We’ll continue with the animal protocol,” he said. “It’s better science.”
“We could save lives,” Karvonides said. Her voice was softer now. “One message. I have a friend at Guandong complex. She’d be able to replicate it.”
“I’m not going to be part of this conversation,” Khana said. The door slammed closed behind him so hard that the latch didn’t hold. The door ghosted open again, like someone invisible was coming in to take his place.
Karvonides sat, her hands on Prax’s desk. “Dr. Meng, before you say no, I want you to come with me. There’s a meeting tonight. Just a few people. Hear us out. Then, if you really don’t want to help, I won’t bring it up to you again. I swear.”
Her eyes were dark enough it was hard to tell iris from pupil. He looked back down at the data. She was probably right, in her way. Hy1810 wasn’t the first yeast that had been modified with radioplasts, and Hy1808 and most of the Hy17 runs had been in animal trials for months without any statistically significant ill effects. With things on Earth as bad as they were, the risk of Hy1810 having adverse effects was almost certainly lower than the dangers of starvation. His stomach felt tight and anxious. He wanted to leave.
“It’s proprietary,” he said, hearing the whine in his voice as he said it. “Even if we could ethically release it, the legal consequences, not just for us but for the labs in general, would be—”
“Just come hear us out,” Karvonides said. “You won’t have to say anything. You won’t even have to talk.”
Prax grunted. A little chuffing sound that centered behind his nose. Like an angry rat.
“I have a daughter,” he said.
The silence between them went on for the space of a breath. Then another. Then, “Of course, sir. I understand.”
She stood up. Her stool scraped against the flooring. It sounded cheap. The urge to say something fluttered in his chest, but he didn’t know what it would be, and before he found it, she was gone. She closed the door more gently than Khana had, but with a greater finality. Prax sat, scratching at his arm though it didn’t itch, then he closed the report.
The rest of the day was filled with his own work in the hydroponics labs. His new project was a modified fern built for water and air purification. They stood in long rows, fronds bobbing in the constant and well-regulated breeze. The leaves—so green they were almost black—smelled familiar and welcoming. The embedded sensors had been gathering data since the day before, and he looked it over like sitting with an old friend. Plants were so much easier than people.
When that was done, he stopped back by his office, returned half a dozen messages, and reviewed the meetings scheduled for the next morning. It was all routine. All the same things he’d done before the rocks hit Earth. It was like a ritual.
Today, though, he took the extra step of adding an administrative lock on the Hy1810 data. He tried not to think too much about why he’d done it. Something vague fluttered in the back of his mind about being able to show he’d done all he could do. He wasn’t sure who he imagined he’d be defending himself before, but he didn’t really want to think about that.
He felt nervous during his walk to the tube station. The pale tile walls, the arching ceiling above the platform. All of it was just as it had been ever since the rebuild. It only seemed ominous because of all the things in his own head. While he waited for his tube, he bought a wax-paper cone of fried bean curd with olive oil and salt. The vendor was an Earther, and Prax noted the way the man had kept his hair and beard long, letting them grow out from his skull to mimic the slightly larger heads of true Belters. The man’s skin was dark, so the OPA tattoos on his hands and neck didn’t stand out as much as they could have. Cryptic coloration, Prax thought as the chime announced the tube’s arrival. Probably a good idea. It was interesting to see how humanity adopted the strategies you saw anywhere in nature. They were part of nature, after all. Red in tooth and claw.