Nayoki is picking up all of this. 

:- Leareth? What should we do?: 

:Of course: Leareth tells Mao. He closes his eyes. 

:He wants to keep his daughter alive: he says to Nayoki. :We use that:

A long hesitation.

:And - perhaps we consider telling Holden's crew to go ahead and send that transmission. But - not quite yet: 

Pause. 

:I assume you have everyone on this ship under compulsions by now?: 

:- Still working on it. There are a lot of crew. I think that I have everyone in important leadership positions: 

Leareth, eyes still closed, waits and skims Jules Pierre Mao's surface thoughts. 

If the uploading can be verified, the simplest thing to do at this point might be to go public - since other people already have the information - get out in front of the story - and convince some dying people to let the proto eat them and upload them, so that they can be retrieved when humans know what they're doing. It's going to be a tough sell but - maybe with good marketing? Maybe if he convinces his own mother to do it. She would, for Julie. 

What else. There's another world. Maybe it can be a source for people to feed the protomolecule without dealing with the suddenly-complicated local situation? Its locals will take the suggestion badly.

He could go to Mars. Trade what he knows for a sample and medical care for Julie and hospiced volunteers to get uploaded - Mars would have more people who'd volunteer - unless anyone involved has pieced together the role of the Anubis in the destruction of the Donnager, which would make things difficult but probably not intractable -

Julie's of course going to be undermining him at every turn. Maybe he can have the doctors induce a coma. Maybe he can buy off Fred Johnson and Anderson Dawes and convince Errinwright that his spy's report is wrong on some key points and then - have the same room to maneuver he did a week ago -

....This has to be some kind of leverage, but Leareth's head feels full of cotton and he's not seeing how to use it, yet. 

:Nayoki?: 

:What?: 

:You are getting all this? ....Relay it to Julie, via the Proto. She - should know what he is thinking. Tell her that - that I could use help, and her local context, on - on figuring out how to use this: 

....Sure. She can do that. 

:Julie? We are on the ship talking to your father, and -: 

She has no idea how to summarize so she just pushes the Thoughtsensing-impression across directly. 

Uh, okay, are you asking for...advice on what to do now?

:Leareth is wondering if we can - use this, convince him to cooperate with our plans?: 

Plans which they don't, currently, in fact HAVE, which is a substantial downside. 

:...Or we could tell Holden to send his transmission to the whole star system. I am not sure if that will help or make things worse, at this point: 

I think you should, uh, arrest him. Because he committed murder, which is a crime. And you should drag him back to Earth where there'll be a trial. And then he'll go to jail. 

Nayoki has very little context on how Earth's legal system works. She...somehow suspects it won't be that simple. 

:Hmm. I - do not think we actually have the resources to take this ship by force and transport it to Earth, mind-controlling people is kind of terrible for having them perform finicky tasks. I suppose if Leareth agrees, I could...ask Holden to fly the Roci past within Gate-range, and drop your father in there, and have them leave with him? And then they could bring him to Earth, or wherever: 

Nayoki only just thought of this plan right now on the spot and it's probably a terrible plan in a dozen different ways, but also she REALLY wants to be done here so she can get Leareth back to the actual medical facilities down on the surface. 

Sure, if you can't just mind-control him to turn himself in.

:Leareth? What do you think: 

...Leareth's first, instinctive reaction is that NO of COURSE NOT, this is a terrible idea, Jules Pierre Mao is someone they can work with - possibly the best candidate for that so far - 

Then again, Mao is clearly not trying that hard to operate in good faith, given that he just reflexively considered feeding Velgarth to the protomolecule.

Because he's desperate to save his daughter. Which is sympathetic from one angle, and...kind of a massive failure at doing math, on another level. 

Not to mention there's the entire political mess between Earth and Mars, which he's pretty sure Mao actively nudged into place. Which - well, there are situations where Leareth would consider that - he's done worse, before - but he is not, currently, getting the feeling that Jules Pierre Mao is anywhere close to careful enough, about those sorts of decisions. 

He spends a few more moments skimming the man's thoughts. 

:Listen to me: he interrupts, finally. :I - did not come into this situation much inclined to trust you. And, right now, it seems to me that it would simplify matters vastly if I sent a transmission to both Earth and Mars clarifying the current situation, and then brought you to Earth. At which point you could make your case to them, for what resources you need and why: 

:Do you have a counterargument: 

That seems - like a decision that requires more than five minutes of thought - no, that's rude, the man's dying - complicated. I think Earth and Mars would both react badly to the possibility the other had the protomolecule while they didn't. I suspect they could contain it, but I don't want to bet the fate of the human race on it. It would be much better for it to be studied out here on Io, where there'd be time to react to a containment breach, except that if it uploads people we should get dying volunteers and most of them are on the inner planets. If you send a transmission to Earth and Mars then a likely outcome is that they try to intercept your ship, and a nearly certain outcome is that we're subsequently in for months and months of wrangling over the protomolecule and who has access to it on what terms, and by then you're dead.

I think that instead you should not tell anyone anything more than you've already told them, and that leaves a lot more doors open, including going public if it seems like a good idea. 

With all due respect, you're completely new here, there's very basic context on our world you're missing. You shouldn't just - randomly do things. A lot of them can make everything worse.

:...Yes, I am aware that I am missing context. That is why I asked you rather than doing anything unilaterally. To be clear, though, I was not considering giving either Earth or Mars the protomolecule, or your scientists or my Healers. Just you: 

Although, now he's actually picturing how it would go, sending Holden to drop Mao in front of the UN or something, and...he is not very enthused about that mental image. 

:Mainly, at this point, I am worried about Earth and Mars actually ending up at war. On false premises. Your organization was responsible for the decoy transmitter left on the Scopuli, no? And the destruction of the Canterbury?: 

Yes. I don't want a war, and there won't be one. He's pretty confident about this. There are people working for him high up in both governments.

....That's actually a huge relief. Leareth had NOT been taking this for granted, and it - shows some forethought?

Though, of course, Mao could still be wrong. 

:Nayoki?: he checks. 

:Done. We could take over this ship if we had to: Pause. :- I would very much prefer we did not have to: 

Leareth wants, with an intensity that rivals anything else he's ever wanted, to lie down and take a nap. 

:All right. We are - not currently friends, and you ought assume I am not on your side. However. You want your daughter to survive, and I would also rather survive, and our respect personnel have some different areas of expertise that could, perhaps, be combined. I - suggest you take a few hours to think, and propose a plan for what we should do next: 

Which will hopefully give him some time to SLEEP and then try to think and see if his mind can come up with anything better. 

All right. I'll work on that. He would be annoyed if the man weren't obviously dying but it's hard to be annoyed with dying people. 

Julie must be dying too.

- not the time. 

He stands and leaves.

If they go back to the surface then she won’t be able to read his mind. Short of sneaking a Proto-sample onto the ship, which would be going a bit far even for Leareth. 

Also Nayoki kind of desperately wants to lock herself in a bathroom and cry. On top of the entire messy complicated situation here, she’s homesick. It’s starting to sink in that they have no way of reaching Velgarth again, short of letting the Proto here get big enough to risk it eating Earth, and - probably they’ll be okay, they can still talk to the Proto and theirs is smarter, but she doesn’t know and probably never will and she’s never going to see her apartment again.

Not the time. 

She sits with Leareth in the ship’s limited-facilities medbay, and reads Jules Pierre Mao’s mind. 

Jules Pierre Mao is thinking through what to do. This is, aside from being incredibly confusing, really good news. If the result of the Eros experiment had been this level of ability to communicate with the protomolecule, he would have been delighted, considered it well worth the cost. 

But the really confusing is sort of overshadowing the good news. Another world? Which Julie accidentally landed on? That's just - not the sort of thing that should happen, not the way the protomolecule making wormholes isn't the sort of thing that should happen, in a more profound way than that. It's bizarre even as a lie to tell, and if it's a lie he has no idea what the underlying truth is. And these people who are maybe lying or maybe from another world in a way that makes no sense and can't possibly have been an accident are the interface with the protomolecule - they're the people claiming it can upload people, they're the people claiming they can talk to it -

- no, his scientists also talked to it. For about two days, before their lab was stormed and they were taken prisoner. Was that about something they were on the verge of discovering? It can't have been about control of the protomolecule, if the strangers already had a sample. He would really really like more context on the strangers and their motives but the man is clearly dying and the woman's clearly not competent to take over for him and probably it's not worth delaying to try to drag more context out of people who likely won't even be involved in a week.

That suggests that the priority is to stop them from fucking everything up in the next week. Taking seriously that they're not from this world - (maybe the protomolecule made them? maybe the protomolecule made an entire other world for Julie to interact with? can it do that?), who are they hearing about it from? Julie, obviously. Julie's take on all this will be - that murder is wrong and only bad people would even consider it - no, maybe that's assigning her too little nuance, she likes her OPA friends and they're murderers - that murdering oppressed people is wrong? He never tried to develop a deep working model of how Julie would try to do geopolitics because by the time she was invested in that, they weren't speaking....the decision to tell Fred Johnson and Anderson Dawes everything feels like Julie, the rest of the suggestions don't particularly. Who else are they learning about this world from. His scientists, who have the suite of empathy impairments that let them do the protomolecule work, which would make them awfully ill-suited to this. Was there other staff at the lab? One human subject, a total unknown. 

This feels important but after ten minutes of thinking about it he's not getting anywhere.

If he didn't have to work with the confusing bizarre dying possibly-lying people what would he do at this point. Call off Eros (or rather, decline to reauthorize it); there are too many unknowns right now. Reach out to Errinwright and see if Earth will forgive all and offer up a research hospital in exchange for a protomolecule sample. (There's still the containment issue, why he preferred not to bring it to Earth in the first place - maybe Luna'd be better?) Reach out to Mars, see about the same thing, figure out who is going to do a better job. Maybe there's some way to spin the Cant and Donnager situations; maybe people will just forget about them in the thrill of contact with aliens.