"That's cool. But, uh, we're using this star system. If someone wants to put it on a ship and send it off to Alpha Centauri at 15g, they can be my guest. - they can't have this ship, we're using this ship."

:- Do you not want to see your civilization colonize the stars? ...And so much else, the protomolecule is - not a general intelligence, it is incredibly specific, but there is - just barely enough there, it can learn. It uploads minds - if we teach it how, it could solve death. I suspect energy production is a less key bottleneck in your world than in Velgarth, but it can do that as well: 

Sigh. :...Also, teaching it Mindspeech is the only reason we know the location of the lab at all. It is the only way that Julie made it back to this star system alive. I - am not sure what your crew's plan was, before we came, but I am certain you would not have succeeded at stopping the massacre on Eros: 

"I think - those all sound great. I - suspect it won't be that easy, right. And it seems like the kind of thing where, if it goes wrong, it goes really, really wrong. Worse than Eros. There are 33billion of us. We are colonizing the stars, the Mormons have a ship almost ready to go and once the tech's less new everyone else will be right behind. 

It's sort of like nukes, right, you can use it for energy but the first thing we used it for was war, and we could easily have destroyed the world, and they're not even intelligent in their own right - I'm not saying I definitely think you're wrong, here. I think you should make your case to people."

:...To be deeply uncharitable for a moment, I feel much more hopeful of convincing the Proto not to let itself be used as a weapon, than stopping the various political factions in your world from trying to use it as one: 

He closes his eyes. :Sorry. You - are not wrong, that the downside risk here is also very high, and - I am not sure I can convey all of the reasons why I think we can avoid that. They mostly boil down to 'the Proto listens, when we tell it to stop.' ...If it in fact manages not to kill the scientists' human test subject, which my Healer is working very hard with it on, I think that is substantial evidence: 

"So the argument is, we should - feed it? Let it get bigger? Meet whoever sent it?"

:I want to let it get bigger up to a certain point, and then - once it has enough mind to follow, I want to - hmm, to partially reprogram it, is one way of putting this. To teach it human concepts. ...I am not sure if we want to let it complete its wormhole. Preferably we would find a way to do that starting from an uninhabited star system, in case its creators are hostile: 

"Hmm. Okay. The Roci has a good transmitter. We've been lying low because we're the only survivors of the Cant and the Donnager and we probably have a lot of enemies at this point, but - this is important - I think we should tell everyone that there are aliens, and explain how you know all of this stuff about what the proto can and can't do, and warn them about the possible planned attack on Eros so Eros can take precautions against it, and then figure out whether to grow the proto bigger. And not destroy it in the meantime, I guess, though I still think we should bomb the lab since this thing seems very bad in bad hands."

:Yes, good!: 

After a moment:

:We obviously need to think longer before making a final plan. The fate of your world is at stake. You need to discuss it with all of your crew - honestly, probably include the spy as well, who by the way reports to the UN - and figure out exactly what to transmit. And we can consider whether our magic offers a way to make it less clear where the transmission is coming from:

:...Also, the conversation I had initially wanted to have was regarding your enemies. I am trying to piece together a clear timeline of events and infer which factions are aiming toward what goals, here, and I am still very confused. Can you start at the very beginning of your involvement here, and go through what, exactly, you saw - not your theories, just your concrete observations: 

"That's all I said to anybody," he mutters irritably. "They can decide for themselves what to conclude. The Cant was two days out from Ceres when we picked up a distress call from a ship identifying itself as the Scopuli.  We went to check it out. It looked like there was no one around for a couple million klicks. The ship was dead in the water with a hole blown in the side, drifting near an asteroid. Empty, inside. No bodies. Powered down. Data cores gone. A portable transponder on the bridge had been sending the distress signal, rather than the ship actually sending the distress signal in its own right. We scooped it up.

Then, we got word from the Cant that there was a ship right near us. We figured at first it'd been hiding behind the asteroid. We started heading back to the Cant. The ship fired torpedos. Not at us, at the Cant. They - usually pirates aim for the drive. Disable the ship, steal its stuff, ransom its crew. They didn't do that. They nuked it. Killed everyone aboard. We got a glimpse of the ship. It was a stealth design. Of the known powers in the system only Mars has stealth tech.

There were five of us on the shuttle. We took damage from the debris field but we repaired the shuttle, called for help. The MCRN Donnager answered. While it was on the way to pick us up Naomi took the beacon apart. The beacon was MCRN tech. We figured - Mars had lured the Cant in, and then nuked it. And then they were coming to pick us up. So I sent out a transmission to the whole system, telling them what'd happened, telling them that if we disappeared - that'd be additional evidence -"

:Reasonable enough: Leareth makes a few mental notes. Stealth tech. The Scopuli. Who else might be able to buy or steal a Martian beacon. 

:Anyway. So what happened when the Donnager picked you up? Did you - confront or ask them about destroying the Cant?: 

"They cut the shuttle open with a dozen guns trained on us and interrogated us separately. They wanted me to make a statement recanting. They said Naomi had probably done it, that she was probably OPA. I - said I'd make a statement that got all of us home safely. But not the one they wanted. We were arguing about it, then the Donnager spotted an approaching ship refusing to change course, and switched to a battle footing. It was a tiny ship. They figured it wasn't a threat. Even when it split into four ships. But the ships had remarkably good weaponry, and got off a couple lucky shots, and suddenly it was a close thing. - I recognized the make of one of the ships, when they got an image of it. It looked like the one that nuked the Cant. So the captain directed her people to get me off the ship, to testify to that, and we evacuated under fire, and all her soldiers died along the way - so did one of my people - and then the Donnager self-destructed, presumably because they'd been boarded and navies don't let their warships get captured, no matter what -

- we could've gone to Mars but we weren't sure they'd let us out of prison before we were old and grey - and at the moment, no one knew we were alive, right, which is a pretty big advantage when you're in the middle of everything -"

Leareth is confused. He's trying to pin the confusion down, to stare at it, but it's slippery and won't stay put... 

Fine, start with the most random-feeling part. :Do you have any reason to actually believe either that Naomi is OPA, or that the OPA would have had a reason to blow up your ship?: 

"Their claim was that she was a Belter - which is true - wildly overqualified to run engineering on a dump like the Cant - also true - doesn't talk about her past - none of us do - and was hiding something during her interrogation. They could've been lying, though. People are - racist - against Belters, could've just been that. And they needed to pin it on someone, and pinning it on me or Amos or Shed wouldn't have avoided an incident with Earth.

The OPA does terrorism sometimes. Not blowing up random ice haulers, usually, but - it could've been nonrandom, if someone aboard the Cant was - a rival, or smuggling, or something -"

:Who else was on board the Cant? Anyone who would have been - relevant in any way, to either the OPA or Mars or the company studying the protomolecule, or any other faction?: 

"I don't think so! I'd known more of them for years, and they were - good people - but not - I wouldn't have expected them to be involved in anything -"

Nod. 

:Sorry, to clarify an earlier point - I thought I had remembered that you investigated on Fred Johnson's request. Did you ask him after seeing the beacon? If so, why?: 

"No, no, we investigated the Scopuli because I just didn't want to leave someone out there to die. Wish I had. Fred Johnson came in later."

:Right. So, up to that point: someone destroyed the Scopuli and - most likely someone, perhaps not the same someone, left a Martian-made distress beacon which you found. That is one mystery. A stealth ship of unknown origin - but the tech is possessed only by Mars, to your knowledge - destroyed your main ship after you found it. A second, though perhaps related, mystery. The Donnager's arrival is not mysterious, since they were responding to your own call for help. Their response was - reasonable, if the crew did not think Mars had done it, which is plausible even if Mars was responsible, it could have been highly classified: 

He frowns, thinks. :- And then the same stealth ship destroyed the Martian ship. I suppose it is not impossible that the leader of a classified Martian program would do this to maintain secrecy, but - it is still a point against our unknown ship being Martian, I think: 

After a pause, :All right. You are on the Roci now, lying low. What happened next?: 

 "Fred Johnson reached out. He'd seen the Donnager fight from his station, Tycho, and offered us a port. It didn't seem like a great idea but we didn't have a lot of options, and he was being friendly. We went. He helped us, uh, disguise the ship. Alter the reactor and the exterior so it'd look like a gas tanker, not a Martian gunship. And he told us that he'd intercepted a distress call from the middle of nowhere, and could use someone who could go check it out. We went. 

We found the Anubis. There was - that thing - in it. Dormant, at first, but once we powered up the reactor, it started moving."

Leareth bows his head. :That must have been terrifying. I am glad none of you were infected: 

After a few beats, :- to clarify, this is the same ship where Julie was kidnapped and kept captive? And she had presumably already escaped it in the shuttle by the time you found it:

And somehow ended up in Velgarth, thus setting off this entire bizarre chain of events. 

"Yeah. She presumably sent the distress call Fred Johnson was responding to, and then hid the ship, powered it down, left on a shuttle. When she wasn't there we figured she'd taken a shuttle - and you can see a drive from anywhere in the system, so she hadn't used it - and the only place you can get on thrusters from there is Eros. So that's where we were headed. But she wasn't on Eros, she was - apparently - with you lot."

:Right. At which point she landed on Velgarth, I was infected -: he's going to skim over how, :and, after some discussion and studying the Proto, we took it to our Moon in order to grow it enough that it could transport us back. Julie thought she was the only one who had a chance of warning Eros: 

He closes his eyes. :I think I have the timeline solid, now. What I am not clear on is, one, who destroyed the Scopuli - and who then made sure it would be found, were they the same actor - two, whose stealth ship it was, and three, how the Anubis managed to get itself taken over by the protomolecule: 

"I don't think we know those things either."

The Anubis destroyed the Scopuli, Julie thinks from across the room. The autodoc now thinks she should have a lung transplant as well as the kidney but other than that she's doing all right. Well. She's conscious about half the time and doesn't hate it too much.