"Yeah."

"I think it's too late for that," someone else says. "The Enemy knows you and knew you'd come after him and must now know you're here. He's going to escalate anyway."

"There's degrees. He picked a tech level at which the locals were able to retaliate in kind with a little scrambling. If you go out in those bulletproof outfits I made and do not make satisfying noises when shot at with the state of the art machine guns he moves up to explosive rounds and heavier artillery, maybe, but it doesn't call for city-obliterating or biowarfare. If I blow Angband to smithereens and he sits up in the rubble and looks around and goes 'well then'..."

"How does Melian propose you communicate with the Enemy's servants that we'd spare them in exchange for locations of backups?"

"Didn't really specify. Brithombar and Doriath both know how to write me letters if the same gap in the conversation occurs to them."

"Alright," says the King, "assignments will be sent to you within twenty minutes, I think Maitimo's already picked the people he's taking with him to Brithombar -"

"They're ready to go," Maitimo says, standing. "Unless we all want suicide triggers first."

"I don't have those designed yet."

"Then we shall cope without, as everyone else here is stuck doing. Let's go."

"It shouldn't take me that long - unless it turns out you can't use my variety of cyborg implant -"

"How long?"

"Depends on how recklessly you want to go from basement dweller tests to live volunteers."

"...Brithombar might have more people ready to volunteer, since the Valar haven't announced they won't reembody them..."

"Maybe, yeah."

"I'd be reluctant to ask until they've spent a week in a mindless body without it spontaneously dying, except the medical team think Elven mindless bodies might in fact spontaneously die."

"Maybe they've got released prisoners of the Enemy on hand who will be interested to die for science."

"How does that even work, if uploading is destructive? Does he also keep prisoners conventionally? Why?"

"I don't know, gratuitous evil? Psychological warfare?"

"We do not get less effective when we are really really angry."

"I haven't read the transcripts yet. Want them? They should be in the complete works of Doriath -" He relays the title.

And he looks them up. 

"This is in fact fairly effective as psychological warfare, I think that's a plausible explanation."

Cam makes some and has them translated for an idea.

There are more orcs on this planet than Elves. There are a lot more orcs on this planet than Elves. And now Cam can have lots of detail on the Enemy's process for making them. 

...okay.

"We don't know," Maitimo says, "why they listen to him. They're people. They apparently had nice developed mid-industrial civilizations. There's - ancient distrust, but that's it. I suppose if he has copies of all their heads he can just filter for loyalty."

"...I mean, maybe there is an obvious reason he's not forcing them all to give him oaths?"