Julie would try to cheer them up but she's honestly not totally sure this ship won't explode on them all. Thirty seconds.

Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. 

There's a deafening roar. There's a perfectly standard amount of turbulence. There's a lot of gs. She maybe passes out, but if so it's very brief. 

We seem to not be dead, she observed tiredly, once the acceleration stops sitting on her chest quite so badly. Gonna tell this thing to go to the moon.

The rest of Leareth’s people relax, but only a little. 

Leareth drowsily thinks prime numbers at the Proto, as a sort of apology.

The proto is very happy. There are lots of resources in this reactor core. 

Julie has her shuttle cruise to the moon and then disables all the beeping warnings because maybe they'll kill her and maybe they won't but if they don't they're going to drive her insane. 

You don't have to be strapped in now. Halfway through we'll flip, but I can warn you when it's coming up.

Nayoki wasn’t going to ask, but she’s very relieved about this. 

They leave Leareth’s mage-force restraints in place, since he has neither the physical strength nor spare magic to catch himself if something happens, and also he’s drifted back to sleep again.

They wait.

Julie puts on a Belter home-directed-and-edited romantic comedy supposedly set aboard the generation ship the Mormons commissioned at Tycho. Hopefully it will be too incomprehensible to the locals for them to judge her taste in media.

Nayoki is captivated! She slips in closer and watches intently the entire way. She has no idea what any of the characters are saying, of course, but if anything this makes it more intriguing.

(Most of Leareth’s other staff think they have more important things to do, like the ongoing Healing-and-monitoring of their two patients, or watching the outside of the ship and the behavior of the drive - and the Proto, of course, they don’t quite trust it not to start eating the ship they’re in before they even reach the moon…)

Well, it's not going to eat the reactor core, if it did then the reactor core would stop feeding it and that would slow down its growth a lot! It might eat some of the other unnecessary matter around here.

The patients are stable aside from their ongoing opportunistic infections problems and their periodic more worrying problems with organs getting overwhelmed by all of the things that have happened to them recently and dying tissue releasing things into the bloodstream and stressed hearts contemplating taking a day off. 

The protomolecule has made Leareth's whole hand glowy.

The Healers can stop the problems from spiralling into life-threatening problems, but this job is getting very tedious. 

After a while Leareth wakes up, slightly less foggy than before. He spends a while just lying on his back and looking at his glowy hand, trying to figure out if he has normal sensation and motor control in it - it's sort of hard to tell because he's feeling weak and shaky in general. 

He has motor control! He does not really have sensation.

That's irritating. Leareth muses vaguely on what the Proto is getting wrong, here - as far as he knows from Healing-research he's read, these are both done by the body via nerve fibres - if Shavri were still here he would be more sure she could track down the problem and communicate it to the Proto, but it doesn't seem like the most urgent thing. 

:How much further until we reach the Moon?: he asks Julie, rolling over to try to get a look at her screens. 

We're gonna flip in ten minutes, at the halfway point.

:- Is there a way to view outside the ship? I have never seen the stars from outside the atmosphere, before...: 

Awwww. Yeah, for sure.

And she turns the windows transparent.

Leareth stares out. 

After a minute, he dredges up the energy to haul himself into a sitting position and get a better angle, even though it makes his head swim. Or maybe the slight blur to his vision is more related to the way his eyes are prickling a little, with some emotion that's oddly hard to name. 

They're on a ship in space. Really and truly. Despite all the frazzled planning that went into this, in a way it's only hitting him now. 

Not even the gods can reach them, here. 

He stares out at a million points of light, and knows that they aren't within reach, not yet, but they could be - they were, for whatever civilization once built the Proto and, presumably, sent it out toward alien stars... 

Eventually he turns his head - 

Inspires a lot of poetry. Before we'd settled any other planets people used to believe all kinds of optimistic things about how seeing how small and fragile the world is would make us defend it. But then, well, people had to be people.

Sigh. 

After a minute Leareth lies down again, but keeps watching the sky. 

They reach the halfway point. All right, strap back in, we're going to flip.

Nayoki absently makes sure that Leareth and all the Healers who aren't mage-gifted themselves are secured, while not taking her eyes off the romantic comedy she's still watching intently. 

The drive cuts out. The gravity cuts out. Julie stretches, relaxes, wiggles her toes. Then hits the thrusters, pinning everyone unpleasantly to their seats again while the ship rotates.