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Summoned by Free Navy security over the Hy1810 leak, Prax prepares for martyrdom, confesses by implication, and is bafflingly released with a warning.
Praxidike Meng is a Ganymede botanist who helped recover his daughter Mei in an earlier crisis and now lives with Djuna and their family under the station's tightening Free Navy presence. Fearing the occupation's effect on research and ordinary life, he sent the promising Hy1810 yeast data outward after Quiana Karvonides was murdered for resisting its suppression.
Free Navy and Pinkwater security take Prax from his hydroponics lab and question him in a cold monitored room about Karvonides, the yeast, and the partition through which the data reached Earth. Convinced he is already dead, he abandons denial and delivers an impassioned biological argument that every invasive power is changed by the resistance it tries to erase. His interrogators, distracted by breaking war news, apparently fail to understand his confession; they frame the episode as a lab-security warning and release him. He comes home stunned to Djuna, who had been seeking a lawyer and sent the girls away, and can only say that he told them everything and they let him go.
A slight, anxious middle-aged Belter man with thinning dark hair, expressive eyes, and a scholar's distracted manner; he wears lab clothes and light-blue nitrile gloves at work.
Prax is a civilian scientist whose small act of intellectual defiance has already helped Earth and now leaves him exposed inside an occupied Ganymede.