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Julie is kind of losing track of all of the problems that she has. She should write them down, except putting them in the ship's computers would be beyond stupid and the shuttle's not exactly equipped with art supplies so she could put them on paper.
She recites them to herself, instead. Her voice is still gone from the days of futile yelling in the hold of the Anubis. But it beats trying to keep all of it straight inside her head.
Problem number one: She has four days of water and no more food.
Problem number two: She really, really thought this ship was on course for Eros, and if she's anything at all she is a competent pilot, but the navigation is bleeping confusedly and doesn't even have a course correction to recommend and she's not picking up any radio traffic from other ships headed to Eros. Or...from anywhere, actually.
(Maybe she's too late and humanity has already gone extinct? But surely they wouldn't be that stupid. And surely it couldn't happen that fast.)
Problem number three: There are a bunch of people with a weapon that might destroy humanity and she's the only one who knows what it is, where it is, and what it did to the crew of the Scopuli and the Anubis. And also what happened to some other ship, she doesn't know its name, and she's still not sure whether it was just in the wrong place at the wrong time or whether its destruction was part of the plan. And they're going to deploy it in the Belt and she suspects the Anubis didn't have the only sample and the Belters will be able to defend themselves if only she can communicate the situation, which she can, once she gets to Eros, assuming she's not infected, which she has no way to check.
That's possibly too many things under one problem heading. Problem number three, revision two: Weapon, destruction of humanity, etcetera. Problem number four: Only she knows what's going on and she needs to get word to Dawes. Problem number five, she might be infected. Problem number six, all her friends are dead and she's sad about it.
There, she whispers to the computer screen. I think that's all of them. There is also an agonizing cramp in her leg and she suspects three of her knuckles are broken but it feels kind of ridiculous to even list those, alongside all of the other things. And she's lightheaded but that almost definitely folds in under either 'no more food' or 'infected'. What's the joke, an engineer's ship is on fire, so he puts it out. A mathematician's dinner is on fire, so he waits until it has engulfed the whole ship, gestures at the engineer, says, 'I have reduced the problem to a problem with a known solution' -
Problem number seven, isolation is bad for people and she might be going crazy, or whatever.
She resets the sensors. There's no way that Eros just fucking went missing. Maybe she got turned around, but there's got to be something she'll recognize, out there, once she's casting a broad enough net.
, it replies, and then a sort of overlay of ...all other regular shapes, tiled; they don't lie flat in a plane, and the protomolecule seems to be gesturing at some feature of the way they lie which makes this obviously so.
