He was alive and had all his fingers with the nails still attached because he’d also known about the dead space that had appeared on the Tempest when it used its magnetic field generator in normal space. And the dead spaces like it in all the systems besides Sol. He was the one person in the whole of humanity who had—escorted by the enslaved remnants of Detective Miller—been inside the alien station and seen the fate of the protomolecule’s builders firsthand. And from the first moment they’d allowed it, he’d been shoveling everything he knew about that at them.
