He thinks that the government is...well, a government? It has competent people, it has idiot strivers. It is definitely more competent than the random bunch of haulers who managed to find their way in the middle of this and almost instantly start an interplanetary war.  He expects Earth to be reasonably graceful about a stolen Martian warship showing up with the architects of the whole mess? They'll probably do their best to coerce whatever public statements ease the political situation but, well, that's pretty reasonable given that the political situation could explode into a war. And they're not going to want public statements from the bizarre comms tech people, who no one knows are involved (and who are more of an asset if no one knows they're involved.)

She bows her head, briefly. :Thank you. I - will think on your advice: 

She pauses, then gives him a level look. :We are currently, however, headed for Ceres. One of our people has a contact there: 

Nayoki is paying SO MUCH attention to his reaction to this. 

It's not as good as going to Earth, in terms of his odds of surviving, but it's better than being trapped on a spaceship with hostile idiots. And he can arrange an extraction once he gets there. "All right."

Nayoki nods, in both thanks and clear dismissal, and gets up. :I will tell you if anything else significant comes up. In the meantime, I think you had best stay put here. The crew of the ship are - not very happy about your presence: 

She tries to convey in her mindvoice - and with a teensy push of Mindhealing - that she is less hostile and more sympathetic to his cause than the crew of the Roci, and he shouldn't necessarily trust her, he's not naive, but she's worth working with. 

Well, he doesn't exactly have a lot of other options until they get to Ceres.

Nayoki passes this on via Mindspeech to everyone else on Leareth's staff here - they need as much redundancy as possible, in this situation - and finds a quiet corner of the ship, and settles herself in to get some rest. 

She needs to talk to Leareth. And she needs a lot more information on the various factions here. So far she has three different perspectives - Julie, the crew, the spy for the 'UN' - and she doesn't really trust any of them.

But probably, hopefully, that can wait until she's gotten some sleep. 

One of the other mages is now on mindreading-the-crew duty for the next eight candlemarks while Nayoki is asleep. 

"Anyone know anything about Anderson Dawes?"

He's looking at Naomi but she doesn't answer him. She's thinking mostly that she wants nothing to do with the OPA.

"That he's OPA on Ceres. But we already knew that."

"Is Julie awake, we should ask her some more questions - and Alex, you should take a sleep shift, we woke you up in the middle of yours -"

"I trust these people about as far as I could throw them, and I probably couldn't."

Amos is pretty sure he could shoot them.

"I don't trust them either but that doesn't mean we shouldn't sleep."

"Yeah, okay. Just don't let them paw at her while I'm out."

"We'll do our best."

"What'd you think of them?"

"They're obviously listening to us right now."

"Obviously. What'd you think of them?"

"I think they're - incredibly bizarre? But they don't want the goo deployed on Eros, and we are rather short on allies."

Well, it's not like the mage listening in on them can disagree on the 'incredibly bizarre'. Leareth is incredibly bizarre as a person, even to most people native to Velgarth; from the perspective of this crew, it's got to be even more absurd. 

...

The Healers trade off on sleeping, and try to take the opportunity offered by the life-support machines to focus on actually repairing damage rather than just playing catch-up at keeping their patients from dying. 

Leareth drifts. Occasionally thinks some math at the Proto, when he can muster the concentration for it. He's mostly convinced himself not to panic about Velgarth, at this point; it's not like it'll help. 

Julie is on transplant-related painkillers and drifts hazily for a while, too, but she's healing remarkably fast (presumably due to the magic) and the machine tapers her off pretty aggressively, at which point she is unpleasantly conscious and not quite in pain but in quite a lot of sensation. 

She's alive.

She's going home.

She's being slowly eaten.

She starts crying, at one point, and the autodoc doses her for it. 

Eventually, the autodoc seems to decide that Leareth is either stable enough, or at least calmed down enough, and starts tapering his dose.

He wakes up enough to ask Nayoki for a report on what's been happening and everything she's learned so far, which is way less than what he wishes he knew. This is still enough to wear him out, but for the first time in - however many days it's even been, now - he's reasonably comfortable, not feverish or nauseated or headachy from dehydration, and he sleeps surprisingly well. 

He wakes up feeling almost clearheaded. ...And, for the first time, with enough mental space to let it soak in that, no really, they're in another star system. One with starships; one where humans left their home planet and moved in on others. 

Mulling on Nayoki's report, he's...actually a lot more worried about the various local complications than he is about the Proto. All the Proto needs is for him to get it a few hundred tons of biomass and then a Moon-sized chunk of rock, and it'll be happy. And hopefully smart enough to work with. Now that he can THINK again he has quite a lot of ideas about how to build up its concept base; he could even try to load it up with a simplified version of the infrastructure for letting a Velgarth god communicate in human-legible ways. The Proto is - plausibly less alien than that, after all. 

He has a suspicion that getting this to happen is going to be very bottlenecked on the fact that several powerful groups seem to be on the edge of going to war with each other. Oh, and the part where their main allies right now are, as far as he can tell, four random transport logistics-specialized crew with none of the qualifications or experience they would need to handle something this big. And they hate the OPA. 

Think. What are his options - no, back up, what are his questions... 

Leareth chews on this for a while. 

Eventually he checks if Julie is awake. 

Julie is wistfully contemplating cheesecake and fuzzy socks and nice things that are hard to obtain when working for freedom fighters in the Belt. Mmmm?