"I want to talk to my crew. Not more than half an hour, though."

Nod. :I'll keep, er, spying here, and relay anything else helpful that I find out: 

" - sounds good."

And he consults his crew. Composes a video message explaining what they know that doesn't involve psychic people from another planet.

Leareth wakes up enough to ask to review the message. He approves it fairly quickly, though. Mostly Julie has a lot more context than he does, here, and he's apparently pushed himself too hard, he can barely keep his eyes open or hold a train of thought right now. He immediately goes back to sleep. 

Nayoki paces and works with the other mages on devising a technique to do something ridiculous with the visible light being emitted from the drive so that they can avoid detection on their approach to the lab. 

She does a lot of ambient mindreading. Especially when the crew are talking to each other or reading and writing text. She's starting to make some headway on picking up the language - she can recognize the ten most frequent words or symbols found on control panels and screens, now - but it's not fast enough. 

... 

Whenever Naomi ends up making the final transmission, she's going to hover out of sight, but not out of range of her Othersenses, and throw her full attention at following exactly what Naomi's doing and exactly what she's thinking as she does it. She liberally uses Mindhealing to make it stick, which will give her incredibly weird dreams tonight but it seems worth it this once. 

Leareth wakes up, eventually, still headachy and brainfogged but he's rested enough to hold a train of thought again. 

Two messages out, or will be out soon. But - that doesn't, actually, solve the problem, because none of the factions around here trust each other at ALL, and it's very possible that neither Earth nor Mars will find out anything from the OPA. 

He doesn't have much of a lead on getting a message out to Mars, and the crew will be especially reluctant. And, as Holden pointed out, they are using this ship right now. Having it repossessed suddenly would be inconvenient. 

He does have a lead on reaching the UN. One that's somewhat awkward to use, either he has to convince Holden it's worth it or - what, do it behind his back? Pretend his people screwed up and let the spy they were guarding sneak past and access the computers? 

...On reflection, that might actually work. And if they plan it really well, then the spy won't know it was the deliberate kind of accident, and - maybe he can even finagle it so the crew don't find out, at least not right away... 

Leareth chews on this multi-headed problem for a while. Decides he's too groggy for it. Mindspeaks Nayoki, asks her to sort something out. 

She's been mindreading the crew constantly; at this point she knows most of what they do about the ship layout and logistics, if not the fiddly tech details. 

:Sure. We would need some sort of distraction, I think? To justify pulling your staff away: 

Staging a Proto near-contamination incident is a terrible idea given his ongoing dispute with Holden. 

:- I could have a medical emergency? I am sure there is something I could override on the autodoc that would cause significant problems, if I did it when I 'meant' to do something else...: 

:Leareth: 

:I will check it with the Healers first! I am not going to do anything actually-life-threatening: 

Nayoki grumbles something at him and heads off. 

...The spy doesn't know nearly enough about the Proto or about the message sent to the OPA, and the context in those. Maybe she...can arrange for him to access that too, somehow, on his excursion - it'll be tight, getting it to pass unnoticed, though probably she can understaff the ship, if Leareth wants to talk to Holden again and then she frantically demands Naomi come help them with the autodoc again...

Leareth can do that. And talk to Healers.

It seems worth waiting for a time when as many people as possible are on sleep shifts. He bides his time. They won't reach Io for days. 

Usually one of the crew is sleeping; sometimes two are. The rest of them cluster nervously in the bridge, whispering to each other; they've taken to communicating mostly in references to sitcoms from ten years ago because it'll confound the intruders. 

The spy listens at his door when there are conversations outside it, which is helpful for causing him to know things.

(Communicating in sitcom references is still costly to them, but it's less confounding than the crew might hope when most of Leareth's staff can READ MINDS, including from halfway across the ship.) 

Another eighteen hours pass before they both see a good opportunity and have a PLAN that literally anyone else on Leareth's staff approves of. 

Nayoki, after her own sleep shift, does some quiet preparations while illusioned by one of the other mages. She doesn't think they've mentioned illusions much. 

Then she goes to Holden. :We have a version of the spell-prototype to hide the ship's drive signature from all bearings except one. We would like to test it: 

"Sure, go ahead. - assuming it's definitely not going to, like, prevent the reactor from dissipating heat, or reflect the drive plume back at us, then we will die."

:It should definitely not do that! It is meant to capture the visible-light radiation from the drive-plume, across many layers, and reflect it between the spell-layers so that it ends up released in a different direction, but without affecting the actual force that the drive is applying to the ship. This is going to be a brief preliminary test, to see if the concept works at all at scale, and whether the power requirements are tractable for longer periods: 

"Let's do it while Naomi's awake so she can notice if you're fucking anything up. If she says stop, you stop, got it?"

"All right." Naomi being awake is fine; they can also keep her busy by yelling for help in the medbay, once the actual spell-test part of the plan is done. 

They'll wait. 

Leareth's Healers are DISPLEASED but he's in fact a lot more stable now and this should be recoverable. 

Naomi will come supervise their spell test.

Leareth is obviously not going to be personally involved in casting the spell, but there's been discussion - and Nayoki's mentioned to Naomi - that he needs to at least be alert so he can help them troubleshoot any problems that come up. 

He gets the help of the Healers and some translation from Julie to override some settings on the autodoc so he can be as clearheaded as possible; he's pretty sure the stupid anticonvulsant drug it's administering does, in fact, make him kind of fuzzy. He just needs to be able to think for the next thirty minutes or so and then the autodoc can do what it wants again. 

Nayoki explains the specs of the spell and what it should look like to the ship's sensors. 

(All of this information is, in fact, accurate.) 

It's a huge working; ships are big and put out a LOT of light as well as radiation in many other frequencies, so the redirecting barrier needs to be very large and also tough. They're already, at this point, pulling in every mage except for Leareth himself and the mage currently on-shift guarding the spy.

(And they've made sure to mention this and the test planned, out loud and in the local language since Leareth gave them orders to learn the language and practice it as much as possible.) 

When they get the go-ahead from Naomi, Nayoki Mindtouches Leareth. :Ready?: 

:Ready: 

Leareth does, in fact, want to get a good look at the spell in action; there's a dual purpose to this plan, they really do need to run this test. He's been painstakingly attempting to convey to the Proto how he wants it to help him boost his mage-sight; he's still not sure if this will work but it was worth a try. 

:On my go: 

:Now: