“Our projections show this variant doesn’t stop at the arrays.” Veyne turned the cup a quarter rotation on the table without lifting it. “The Phage has been a background feature of the biological environment for long enough that most of the natural plankton community has established some degree of resistance. But the modified cultivation strain — eleven years of industrial monoculture, pressure-selected for yield and production efficiency — has none. We removed everything that didn’t optimize for output.”

“Including whatever was keeping the Phage suppressed,” she said.

“There was a companion organism. A non-photosynthetic bacterial associate that appears to have co-occurred with wild Emiliania populations in pre-cultivation surveys. It produces a surface-layer compound that interferes with the Phage’s insertion mechanism at the cell wall junction. We removed it during the initial strain development because it competed for resources and reduced FePt yield by approximately eight percent.” He paused. “It was considered acceptable attrition.”

“Eight percent.”

“At the time.”

She looked at him.

“The variant the Phage has now produced — the one that evolved specifically in the context of that missing suppressor — generates a metabolic byproduct during its replication cycle that the companion organism would have processed. Without the companion, the byproduct accumulates. At sufficient concentrations it becomes acutely toxic. Not only to the cultivation strain.” He looked at the window. “The array boundary is permeable. The ocean is not contained.”

She’d been doing the math since he said sixty to ninety days.

“How many times has something like this happened before?”

“A number of times. Smaller in scale. Managed.”

“Managed,” she said. “Quarantined. Destroyed.”

“When necessary, yes.”

“And this time.”

“This time the arrays are in the open ocean and the variant is already mobile and we don’t have a quarantine boundary that applies to eight hundred square kilometers of international water.” He met her eyes. “This time is different. Not in kind. In magnitude.”

She stood up and walked to the window. Outside, the six units were still in their positions in the clearing. The quadrotor sat in the flat grass with its running lights cycling slowly. The afternoon light was moving across her tomato beds in the long way it did this late in the season.

“Come with us,” Veyne said. “Your background in symbiotic organism ecology — the lichen work, the soil amendment research, the companion organism documentation you’ve been conducting for the past six years — it’s the closest thing to a map we have for where the solution might be.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

He did not change expression.

“Dr. Bishop —”

“I’ve watched the Company manage its way through four of these events in my career. I know what managed means. I know what comes after managed.” She turned from the window. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“I asked you to come willingly,” Veyne said, “as if you had a choice.”

He pressed something on the device at his wrist.

The door opened.

The first unit through was fast — faster than she’d expected, faster than the walk across the clearing had suggested. She had time to turn and then the current hit her and her knees buckled and she went down hard, the side of her head catching the tile floor with a sound she felt more than heard. She was on the floor with the kitchen tiles cold against her cheek and her hands not responding to what she was telling them to do. She could hear them moving around her, efficient, the click of the knee servos. Someone lifted her by the shoulders and pulled a hood down over her head, cinching it at the throat.

She did not hear Veyne get up from the table.

By the time they had her through the door and across the yard she was starting to get sensation back in her fingers, but there was nothing to see. She could feel the change from grass to packed dirt under her feet as they moved toward the carrier, and she could smell the fuel and the hot metal of the rotors and then, beneath it, something else.

Something that hadn’t been there before.

She was in the carrier when the hood registered the warmth of it through the fabric. By the time the door closed she could feel the heat change in the air.

Veyne was the last one out of the house.

He paused on the porch. He was looking at something on the bulletin board beside the door — the one where she kept the flagging tape and the seed packets and the things she tacked up because she wanted to be able to see them from the garden.

He stood there for a moment.

Then he stepped off the porch and walked toward the carrier without turning back. As he passed the unit nearest to him he spoke a single word to the sergeant — the one with the red shoulder stripe — and kept walking.

The quadrotor lifted.

On the bulletin board that was now burning, in a house that was now burning, there had been a polaroid photograph. Two people in a bar somewhere warm, both of them wearing paper sombreros, both of them squinting against a flash that had gone off too close. She was laughing at something he’d just said. He had his arm around her shoulder and was looking at the camera with the specific expression of a man who had not expected to be happy and had found himself, in this moment, wrong about that.

Veyne looked at it through the porthole until the tree line took the property from view.