Leareth drifts in and out, through confused hazy dreams of strange otherworldly fractals and inside-out Gates that glow blue and crystalline... 

Nayoki wastes five minutes watching him doze, tense and worried, and then heads back to the surface. Calls together some of Leareth's other staff for a meeting, delegates plans - 

Someone interrupts, informs her that the Valdemaran Healer wants to talk to her. 

...Sure, fine. She can do that. 

Shavri is wearing her baby in a cozy sling-wrap against her chest. (It was a present from one of Leareth's other staff and she's so delighted with it.) 

She squares her shoulders. It's taken her candlemarks to pull together the courage for this. 

"I need to go home. You have lots of other Healers here, right, and it's been days - I have a family... I've tried to explain everything I figured out to them. And maybe you can - send messages, if they have questions? Or I could come back if there's a real emergency. But I can't stay any longer. I'm sorry." 

...Well, it's not like they can take the foreign Healer with her baby to the Moon with them. Also the fact that they're going there at all is - plausibly sensitive strategic information? She would ask Leareth if he were awake, but since he's not, she's going to assume it needs to be kept secret. 

"All right. We can arrange a Gate back for you, then." She'll...track down a mage who can Gate from memories, that'll work and then she won't have to worry about it any more. She has more than enough to worry about already. 

"Thank you. I - good luck." This feels like a very stupid thing to say but she has to say something. 

Nayoki works on assembling a team of volunteers. Mages who are willing to help carry Leareth and Julie across a Gate on litters, and then come with them to the Moon, on a ship full of Proto, and gamble their lives that Leareth is right and the alien entity is possible to work with... 

The Farseers keep watching the Proto as it eats rock and grows. 

It eats a lot of rock, hollows out a big crystalline cavern in which strands of glowing blue are draped against the walls and ceiling like weird alien ivy. The air is full of blue motes.

And then it makes a Gate. A tiny Gate, too tiny to see, though mages can sense it. The other end opens on the reactor of Julie's ship. The Gate expands, and draws the protomolecule into it, and contracts, leaving only a little bit of protomolecule behind.

It's beautiful. And horrifyingly. 

Nayoki Gates back down to the sickroom and wakes Leareth. :It is time to go: 

:Mmm: Leareth has a headache, plausibly because he's twice in a row, without entirely waking up from his confused dreams, told the Healers to leave him alone when they tried to bother him to eat and drink. 

He manages to roll onto the stretcher unaided, though. 

Another of the Healers prods Julie awake and asks her to do the same. 

:...Shavri gives her regards: he adds. :She's going home to Valdemar, rather than coming with us: 

Yeah? Uh, tell her good luck - and penicillin! Tell her about penicillin!

:...Uh, you're going to need to explain that slightly more?: 

...I don't know much more than that. I'm sorry. It's an antibiotic, it fights bacteria, I think it grows on...bread? Possibly your magic healing is just better.

The Healer smiles at her. :Seems worth passing on to her, anyway, I bet she'd be delighted to try studying it: 

And the Moon-team assembles, and carries the two of them through into the ship, which has been very, very carefully shifted so that it's in approximately the orientation it's supposed to land in. 

One of the mages unfolds a large sheet of canvas, showing Leareth their structural diagrams of the damage. :Can you ask the Proto if it's possible to fix the crack, here -?: 

He can do that. 

:Ship damaged. Need to check it is safe to fly, repairs if needed, can you...?: 

Confusion!!

...Well, that's disappointing. Not entirely surprising, though it would have been convenient if the ship were one of the things that the Proto understood instantly.

He'll keep trying different mental formulations of it, including asking one of the Farseers who's been studying the ship and has Mindspeech to share their Othersenses directly with the Proto. 

The mage tries showing Julie the structural diagrams instead. :We're pretty sure this and this aren't essential, for the trip we're making -we're bringing a separate supply of water - but this crack could be bad, what do you think?: 

I mean, it's not great but we can wear a suit when we go near the reactor. Or, uh, just not go near the reactor since the proto lives there now. It looks like some of the thrusters are broken but that won't matter as long as you get some of the ones that aren't broken facing down. The really important thing is the drive, can you tell if anything got out of alignment there - 

She is also checking the computer for this information, but some of the systems that monitor for problems are themselves offline.

They have a sketchy diagram of what they checked in that area, and can get the Farseers to check again; if the ship has any records of how it's supposed to be aligned, that can be brought up as images or diagrams on a screen or something, that would help a lot. 

The ship does have that! It's really important it's aligned perfectly because all the waste heat needs to go out the back of the ship, not into it, or it'll fry them. Or alternatively it might just fail to ignite, which is a less catastrophic problem normally but pretty bad right now because the thrusters do not have that much fuel left.

What kind of fuel do the thrusters need? They're wondering if it's possible to make out of materials they have on Velgarth - or maybe ask the Proto, Leareth suspects it can learn almost arbitrary materials-processing techniques if they can figure out how to explain what they want it to do. 

- it's liquid oxygen - uh, air is made of a couple of different things, oxygen is the one people breathe, I don't know how to separate them at your tech level. Uh. It's that and ...some byproduct of lamp oil but I don't know which one... 

:I'll ask Leareth about it: 

Leareth is on approximately his dozenth attempt at conveying to the Proto that this ship is a mechanical system for moving through space, to the Moon, which has lots of nice rock that the Proto can eat, but in order to move through space they need the ship to be fully working and not broken...