Emril is feeling kind of overwhelmed, right now, but she's also very well trained. 

She helps out with Leareth (and Julie's) care; they're trying to put off a lung transplant by attempting to Heal the damage done by the Proto.

And she helps coordinate some of Leareth's other staff, to keep a rotation going for eavesdropping on the scientists in the lab on Io, which they're now getting awfully close to. Less than a day left, now. 

...at some point they're going to need to make a final decision on whether to try the spell they tested in order to cloak their approach? 

Nayoki asks Holden and Naomi about this.

"We'd want to make it look like we had some kind of reasonable flight plan and only use the spell to hide our deviation from it."

"I guess I can figure out what a reasonable looking flight plan here would be. Are we - decided on spy guy -"

"You overruled me last time on spacing him and you were wrong."

"You weren't!" objects spy guy. "I helped you get the Martian comms code, and now the UN knows that something weird is going on here and they shouldn't kill you on sight, which I suspect they were otherwise planning to do. And - whatever advantage the bad guys were hoping to gain from secrecy, it's gone now, right? The UN knows they have a bioweapon. That'll make secretly deploying it on Eros harder."

Holden looks like he finds that kind of convincing.

"I say we space him," says Amos again. "Not 'cause he's a bad guy, or 'cause he deserves it, or 'cause it would've prevented the last call, 'cause he's our enemy and we evidently can't hold onto him."

Holden looks so unhappy about having to make this decision! "Let's - figure out the flight paths thing first."

Nayoki is...honestly, not very motivated to argue with the crew about this. She's so tired. 

However. Leareth is going to be SO UPSET if he wakes up and learns that the spy - who Leareth chose to use as an unknowing cog in his scheme - got tossed out an airlock. 

Nayoki takes the route of cowardice, and starts scheming a plan whereby if that happens, they'll Gate-yoink the spy into the room Leareth's staff have been sleeping in, and set-command him to silence and stuff him under a bed. Hopefully she won't actually need this plan, but it's made. 

Anyway! The spell they've tested turns out to have tenable power requirements if used on the scale of hours (not days); it's not great for invisibility, it turns out, but they can definitely make it look like the drive plume is coming out on different bearing than the actual one. 

Ten hours until Io.

The Healers are trying so hard to get Leareth in good enough shape that the autodoc thinks waking him up and getting him off the weird high tech breathing machine is a good plan. 

Alex thinks actually the smartest thing to do is appear to be heading to a station in orbit around Io, like a gas freighter might reasonably do, and then cut the drive at too high a speed, whiz by the station, and slingshot around the planet, maneuvering on thrusters, to end up near the site they want to nuke. This should be easier to conceal. 

"What do you think we should do about the spy."

Shrug. "There's a reason you're in charge."

"...that reason is literally just 'you don't want to be'."

"Ah huh."

(Nayoki considers, briefly, whether she could slip in some discreet Mindhealing to get them to not kill the spy, but she's too tired to act on this.)

She can help translate Alex's course suggestion into spell-directions for all the mages on board. 

Also she had better check in with the lab-eavesdroppers. What are the scientists up to, right now? Any word from their leader who is apparently Julie's dad? How's their human test subject doing? 

The human test subject is still apparently in good health aside from the part where he's huddled in the corner talking to himself. That's a surprise; usually only immunosuppressed subjects make it that long. They're speculating that the changes to the protomolecule's knowledge and capabilities have made it more able to disable opposition within a person while keeping them alive; any agent would have an obvious interest in not destroying its host prematurely, were it capable of that, though of course the agent's interest in keeping the host alive wouldn't extend to keeping them sane or conscious. 

(The scientists are unbothered by this). 

They feed it more livestock.

They are mostly interrogating the protomolecule about its creators and the Work. They're interested in everything about it but those seem like obviously the highest-stakes elements of the situation. The protomolecule does not have much to say about its creators, other than that it was created, and serves its creators, and was created for the Work. The protomolecule has only slightly more to say about the Work. The Work is very big, and very important, and involves about as much matter as there is on Io.

Eventually one figures out the right framing to ask about what happens after the Work is completed and the protomolecule says that then it calls home. 

The scientists are so fascinated about this.

Jules Pierre Mao, speeding in, has been oddly taciturn ever since it was communicated that some other research facility is the one that had the breakthrough. It transpires eventually that communicated via classified channels to one trusted scientist that there's only the two projects - this and Thoth - and Thoth's sample was lost when the escort of the Anubis were destroyed fighting the Donnager and the Anubis was lost. Whoever's on the other side of this, they're not a Protogen research team, and they might be whatever the Anubis was lost to. This scientist is instructed to not think this anywhere near the protomolecule but the protomolecule's Thoughtsensing range is, by now, quite large.

Nayoki keeps most of this within Leareth's team.

She does communicate to the crew of the Roci that the scientists do not, currently, seem to be at all suspecting that a ship is approaching them in order to nuke the lab. 

Leareth has been very stable for the last while and they're now less than six hours from Io - well, from the point at which they'll diverge onto Alex's course plan, it'll still take a while after that - and the Healers are now pretty determinedly going to override the autodoc and start getting Leareth awake. 

Ow. Everything hurts. Why does he feel so awful. 

Well before he's actually lucid enough to try to talk to any of the humans nearby, Leareth reaches vaguely for the Proto, and taps some prime numbers at it. 

, it agrees cheerfully.

Leareth starts to answer -

- fragments of memory are coming back to him, now. 

:Nayoki. Message?: 

Ack Nayoki is so startled! 

:If you mean the message the spy was sending to the UN, it was sent. The spy is still alive currently but the crew caught him and they are very displeased: