"I assume they don't like that and would rather live on our planets, so we can take those too, even if we must make some presumptions instead of waiting to be asked."

"- I don't know how that can be done without giving the Alteri the chance to kill them and without causing immediate societal collapse on most of the Alteri worlds, but, uh, getting them away from the Alteri would be. Good. Probably."

"Alteri society will collapse when all of the Liars leave? Collapse of what exactly -"

"Of not having any food, most immediately. They'll run into bottlenecks on manufacturing and childcare and sanitation and shipping and service work and stuff, but before that they're going to starve."

"Well, we can give them food, once we know what they eat."

"That's good. It won't prevent them from flying into a panic and attacking people but it's - good."

"Who will they attack if all of the Liars are gone?"

"You? Or if you're not available for attacking I guess they just - institute martial law or something and draft hastily trained suke for essential operations, in the best case - assuming you took the Thieves and Sluggards so that no work can be offloaded to the Thieves either - and then on slightly more unstable planets you get coups and countercoups and general low-level warfare as people figure out what they're going to do. Assuming the timescales involved are short enough that it doesn't mean the Carthons just take advantage of their weakened state and attempt to reconquer dozens of planets, in which case they might take some but a lot of them are going to blow themselves up to prevent the Carthons from gaining extra resources or access to the stellar network."

She sounds a little calmer now, like she's considering this as a purely academic question and not as anything that has any particular relevance to her.

"Can you summarize Thieves and Sluggards?"

"Thieves and Sluggards are the other slave races. Thieves typically live underground and are mostly used for mining and construction work, though I'd guess they could do lots of other things if they had to. Sluggards are crystalline and sedentary, so they're not good for very much and accordingly there aren't very many of them, but some of them are engineers. Or else they're kept for singing. They're good at that."

"- about how many of all these slave races in total are there?"

She bites her lip. " - not a numbers person. There are - like a hundred planets in the network, maybe, maybe twice that outside the network but those'll have lower populations, you'd have more Thieves on the planets with lots of mining and more Liars on the planets with lots of food production and lots of orbital shipyards..." She is so so so so not a numbers person. "Uh, very rough guess there've gotta be at least a couple trillion Alteri and hundreds of billions to a couple trillion Liars, maybe a couple hundred billion Thieves, and some much smaller number of billions of Sluggards? I think. Around there."

" - that's -"

"Well, that's too many to straightforwardly replace their labor.

How quickly can they talk to each other planet to planet?"

At least they don't think she's bothering them for no reason.

"As fast as they can move between them, depends on distance and whether the planets are in the network. Outside the network they're limited by the speed of light. Inside - there's some straightforward function but I don't know it. A couple weeks between directly connected stars, roughly, and months or years if you have to hop between a lot of stars. Sometimes they capture Carthon ships and decrypt their communications and learn things faster that way, since Carthon communications are instantaneous."

"Okay. So we can move faster than they can, that's something, I don't think the Valar can cover every one of those planets and people at once unless they get a new gift basket but we could outrun expected communications along the network as long as we had a quick enough per-planet handling system. If the Valar do not get a good enough gift basket for this we're probably going to need help from orcs and Dwarves just on a sheer personnel basis, I don't want trillions of freed slaves being shuffled along some totally impersonal process..."

"I could have a trillion copies. I wouldn't want them afterwards but there'll be a merging procedure someday and I can live with storing the data and waiting on it, I bet some people'll feel the same way -"

"I bet orcs will be delighted that we wish there were more of them."

"Are there any of them who've been wishing there were lots more of them?"

"No idea. Mirelótë what are our prospects of a gift basket -"

"If it helps, she writes the most tragic poetry I've ever heard."

"Well, that won't hurt. I'd guess low odds of starting with a gift basket, we probably need to plan on not having one and hope that we get one to make things easier a ways in. Won't know till we ask, it's worth asking."

"Now or once we're a ways in? For more dramatic effect?"

"Find out everything we need to know to formulate a no-gift-basket plan, then ask the Valar to ask, then if that doesn't work we start without and wait for something personally relevant to our guest to crop up and then send her to the moon with poems all by herself."

"I'm not that good," she chokes, because she has no idea how a plan can be dependent on the quality of her poetry but she's pretty sure any plan that does is a very questionable plan. "I'm like. OK."