At school - now in its very last days - everyone knows that Trouble borrowed fifty dollars from Amber Jefferson and made off with it. Amber is very gossipy and can afford to lose fifty bucks; he chose well.
Bella hasn't heard from Trouble - or for that matter Aspret - yet.
"It'd just about have to be humans," he says. "The other host types almost never poke their noses out, 'cause of secrecy, and a Yeerk slurping along the floor would be out of place as hell."
<Well, yes, but we could go in stacked Yeerks-in-humans if that were a good idea for some reason, and if we ever acquired Hork-Bajir such a filter probably wouldn't zap us, though it'd still be risky.>
<I don't have an actual plan contingent on us presenting through a filter that isn't installed for purposes that don't exist as three humans instead of five such that we need to figure out a configuration today. I'm just noting that the constraint is 'go in as humans, Yeerks, or other host species' and not 'go in as humans' - come to think of it, unless Visser Three likes having equipment around that can zap him, Andalite morphs would probably be safe too.> (Write, write.)
<Anyway. How - unified, I guess, is the Yeerk population? Are the ones on Earth generally on board with the infiltration effort or is there a chance of dividing them against themselves?>
<Okay. Other aliens besides Yeerks, Andalites, Hork-Bajir, and Taxxons who might be relevant at all?>
He shrugs. "There was that one ship that Elfangor came off of, but nobody acts like they're expecting another one."
"Down in flames," Trouble confirms. "That's the story. So if he was lying, he lied to his own side too."
"Good question. I'm not sure," says Trouble. "He got the job from Visser One, and that's pretty much all I know about Visser One, so maybe Visser One will come back or maybe somebody'll get promoted."
"There's a Council of Thirteen back on the home planet, and they're the big bosses. Then there's Vissers - no idea how many - the lower the number, the more important they are, and a bunch more Sub-Vissers with the same deal. The rest of them have numbers too - Aspret is Aspret 112 - but that just means they're the umptieth Yeerk born with that name."
"Well, Aspret sure wasn't. If anybody else was, she didn't hear about it or it didn't seem important."
"What, are these ones in contact with them, you mean? No. The higher-ups might be; the grunts aren't."
<Interstellar communication is expensive? No one thinks it's important? They're on radio silence for security reasons?>