Well, if the ship were working it could get to your moon in a couple of hours. I don't remember how near your nearest planet is but it'd be longer, days but probably not weeks? ...this is at 1g, I'm a little worried anything else would kill me right now.

Julie's world presumably has much more advanced astronomical sciences. :How badly would it affect Velgarth, if the Proto ate our moon?: Hopefully it wouldn't need to eat all of it but Leareth wouldn't want to bet on that. 

...good question. Have you got tides.

:- Well, on the coastline, yes: 

Those would stop. Otherwise I think you'd be fine? Earth'd be fine and I think our moon is bigger. I didn't get a great look at yours, though. Uh, weird stuff will happen to your rotation eventually but that'll take hundreds of thousands of years, we can leave it to our grandkids to figure out.

:...All right. We...should relocate to the ship, I suppose. Figure out the damage. My people were assessing it earlier, they made diagrams...actually it seems plausible the Proto can help repair it...:

Leareth closes his eyes. Tries to gather his strength.

And then Mindtouches the Proto again. :We need to travel elsewhere, in the ship: He pushes across a mental sense of Julie's shuttle. :There will be resources there. Can you - move yourself into it...?: 

Leareth does his best to picture the blue crystals doing this, but he's getting increasingly bleary. 

Elsewhere, the proto starts chewing on the rock again.

Nayoki gets word of this about ten seconds later. 

:Leareth! It is growing again!: 

Leareth manages not to mentally snarl at Nayoki. He almost snarls at the Proto instead, but catches himself. 

:- Are you eating more resources and growing so that you can reach the ship?: he asks. :What is your plan, show me -: 

It shows him -

a Gate, but not exactly a kind of Gate he's ever cast, tiny and round and thresholdless, hanging in the air, blossoming outward from its starting point to engulf the protomolecule in its underground locker and then inverting on itself to drape its contents around the reactor core of Julie's ship -

Leareth's breath catches on a note of awe. And fear. 

...There's no going back after that point, is there. Assuming it hasn't already been too late for the last however many candlemarks. 

More than anything, he wants more time to think. About a hundred times as long as he has, and with his mind actually working. 

He's not even sure whether this scenario is one of the things he thought through in the Shadow-Lover's realm. There are vague flickers in his memory but nothing solid. He could try asking the Proto to buy him thirty seconds of mental clarity again, but one, the Healers would stop him, and two, in fact he can't afford to give himself a seizure right now, it was already kind of stupid the first time... 

Leareth reaches out toward Nayoki and Julie's minds, mercifully nearby. He pushes across his blurry sense of the Proto's plan. 

:- Would work. But - point of no return - letting it become too powerful for...us to stop it... I, I think it will cooperate. To the extent it understands how. So, better if it is stronger. But. Could be wrong. And, no going back: 

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. 

:- I trust your read on it more than my own: Nayoki admits.

:It is very alien. But. Not made to be a weapon, not - for destroying things... And, possible to talk to, to cooperate with -: At least, he thinks so. Hopes so. 

What's, uh, the alternative. To trusting it. At this point.

:...Destroying it with your ship. Killing both of us. It - is not a very good alternative. And would leave no way of reaching your world to pass on a warning: 

(That isn't necessarily, entirely, true, if Leareth comes back - but he's suddenly uncertain, something is off, it doesn't fit that the Shadow-Lover could grab his soul at all - he doesn't understand why, what changed, whether it would change back, in the confused fog he isn't sure whether he understands anything anymore.) 

And there's some proto there, too, isn't it.

I guess let's go to the moon. How did you even break my spaceship with medieval technology, did you launch a trebuchet at it?

:I am not sure how! We did not intend to - we were being careful... We moved it through a Gate. And then - were unlucky, somehow - looking back I am fairly sure the gods who dislike me were involved: 

He hopes Julie doesn't ask for clarification on that, because he's way too exhausted to explain it. 

In Julie's culture asking questions about someone's religion is about as rude as asking questions about their miscarriage. Also she's very tired. Okay. Well, I'm not an engineer but we'll see if I can fix it. Or if the proto can.

Come to think of it, Leareth has SO little idea what the gods would have been hoping to accomplish with this particular piece of meddling. Surely, if there's anything worse from Their perspective than Him, it's the strange alien intelligence that can grow anywhere and eat anything and builds wormholes to other stars. 

:All right: 

To Nayoki:

:Let it proceed:

:And - can you arrange to move both of us to the ship as well, by Gate, without contaminating anybody else - and select a team to accompany us, we will need some volunteer Healers, mages -: 

:I am coming with you: 

Leareth considers trying to argue that someone needs to stay on the ground and take charge of his organization while - while something, he still isn't sure how this ends - but it sounds like far too much effort, so instead he just closes his eyes, and waits. 

It takes the protomolecule a long time. It's trying to do something entirely new, and it's still kind of confused about what its creators keep asking of it. But it eats away at the rock, and at more rock, and at more rock, building tiny tunnels, turning the rock into an odd kind of cheesecloth through which tiny crystals can bloom, and it shifts and quivers and fills the air in its holding-cells with twinkling little motes.

(Julie falls asleep again).