"I suppose I'm not going to my planet right this minute anyway -" He cuts into his forearm without apparent discomfort, tucks the chip in, waits a moment while it heals.

He shakes his head with amazement. "Thank you."

"You're welcome."

He is half-expecting Ossiriand to be in ruins, but it looks the same as they left it.

"Suppose I should just go tell the contents of the bunker the tale in person or text it?"

"Don't know, what's your next step?"

"Don't know. Tempted to try evacuating Mithrim, the poor bastards, with a non-oath filtration mechanism, but - I should probably save it."

"For people who don't have backups?"

"No, he specified Elves. I should probably save it for a better organized and hopefully larger population, who are not rigged to explode, who I can load onto ships and get out of here before he realizes what happened."

"How many are you thinking you could get in one wave?"

"Depends on whether they're set up in such a way that I can run my check at a leisurely pace in advance and then load them up confident there were no substitutions, and on whether any of them know how to pilot or on how hard it is to scale up the lightleaper design."

"King's got people on the latter problem, and we have VR pilot training programs that are pretty good...you could insert a chip the Enemy can't duplicate in everyone's fingertips, if chips persist in not being dangerous for us although drugs don't work very well."

"If," Cam agrees. "Although the brain chips are secure for reasons I can't duplicate in one in somebody's finger."

"Could also take an unverified load of people off planet, take them somewhere other than our refugee planet, screen them there, and then take them on."

"Yeah, that'd work. Depending on how constrained the ship design has to be I could possibly lift off a whole city if it was fairly compact and not built on top of particularly rocky soil."

"Maybe you should stop by the bunker, then, and ask the engineering team if that can be done and/or if planetary surface takeoff can be done and which one they can achieve faster."

"Yeah." Notes notes.

"Good skill. I'd apologize for dragging you into this mess except I do not have any regrets there."

"Long as I don't actually make things worse, me either."

And he rejoins his people in Ossiriand.

And Cam flies to the bunker and checks his correspondence.

Angband's biological weapons program charts and notes are mostly encrypted but Cam is welcome to see if there's anything he can do, perhaps they were unencrypted at some point and can be pulled? Medical has a promising progress report on drugs that work on Elves. The mindless test subjects for suicide triggers are still alive. 

Cam checks for unencrypted history of the bioweapons program. It's really hard to hedge demons out of this sort of thing if you weren't trying expressly to do that and value convenience at all.

Yup, he's got it. 

Cool.

When he turns up at the bunker he goes looking for the King.