A Ganymede researcher presses to release an untested high-yield yeast for starving Earth and is murdered for resistance.
Karvonides works under Praxidike Meng on Ganymede's food and biological research. She believes their genetically modified Harvester yeast strain Hy1810 is safe enough to send into production immediately: it creates sugars, proteins, and micronutrients with extraordinary efficiency, and she insists it contains no actual protomolecule material. Khana and Prax refuse to skip the animal protocol despite her argument that people on Earth are starving now.
Karvonides asks Prax to attend a secret meeting of people trying to act; he declines, locks the dataset, and goes home to his daughter. Later he is called to the morgue to identify her body, shot four times in the head and neck. Her murder confirms that Ganymede's tolerated neutrality is enforced through terror.
A woman with dark eyes so deep that iris and pupil blur together; her final known appearance is as a determined laboratory researcher, not her murder scene.
Karvonides is the idealistic scientist whose attempt to turn research toward starving Earth exposes the cost of resistance on Ganymede.