"Sovereign, are non-sapient humans the most desirable hosts we could offer under the circumstances? Is there something the Yeerks will rather be?"

"I imagine if you make an open-ended offer you'll have plenty who prefer Andalites, Hork-Bajir, Leerans, or possibly other species they've run into that haven't come into common use. If they sufficiently understand the non-sapient stipulation and anticipate that means it doesn't matter if the species is sapient either they may solicit more variety."

"I'm not vetoing offering them Andalites but the Andalites will never, ever trust us again," he says to T'Mir. "And Andalites and Hork-Bajir have the most 'kill the hundred people around me' potential if someone decides to play along until they have some natural weapons to enforce their 'suicide is better than capture' opinions on the other surrendering Yeerks -"

"I actually do not expect very much of that," Ristrell says. "Not in that context. That would be some sub-Visser deciding to blow up a lot of people at once, if they opted to make a group decision; sudden personal violence would be unlikely, especially absent the ability to tell who is who."

"What is the exact nature of the Andalite objection to providing basement dweller hosts resembling them?" inquires T'Mir. "Will this continue to be an obstacle even after the surrender has been completely secured?"

"Once the surrender is secured you can make sure the Andalites do not find out about it, but - no Andalite would consent to being a Yeerk host if braindead, and wearing someone's semblance is a fraught thing with a lot of associated cultural baggage and expectations and mores, and Andalites trust other Andalites, more or less unconditionally, and would have to stop doing that if there were impersonators, and also everybody would just be horrified on a level they could not justify."

"Sovereign, do you expect some substantial number of people to surrender conditional on being offered the opportunity to resemble Andalites?"

"No," says Ristrell, "but if you take any actions which are obviously intended to placate Andalites, you lose credibility as merciful captors."

"If the Elves are doing the public interfacing and just offer Elf basement-dweller hosts with no explanation, and communicate that more options will be provided later, they can just assume that the Elves found it most natural to do hosts of their own species."

"That would work better," agrees Ristrell. "When are you expecting to know if you can add and subtract Kandrona radiation to suns?"

"Later this evening," says T'Mir.

"Sovereign, do you think offering other hosts will be sufficient to stop people from taking hostages? If not, do you think sending in some people who know how we operate will help? Is there any chance that on learning what we're planning the Empire will just cooperate with us?"

"Some Yeerks become extremely attached to their individual hosts past the point of rationality, even if the hosts are involuntary or not comfortable to occupy. There is a Council member who occupies a Taxxon, albeit a very well fed one. You will certainly not get everyone happily into replacements however appealing you contrive to make the replacements. Cooperation is unlikely as well unless someone like me manages a coup the way I did, largely because it will signal weakness in people motivated to save face. Having it generally credibly known how you operate will make it less likely that you will face disorganized opposition."

He leans back and looks at Bella.

"What about having it credibly known that we can if necessary find and then via teleportation remove from their hosts the Council of Thirteen? Doing it for enormous numbers would be hard, but thirteen is tractable," says Butterfly.

"I would still expect fair odds of a Visser or two trying some stunt," says Ristrell. "Visser Three would have done it; he was not the only raving lunatic to make rank."

"Is there anything you anticipate successfully averts that?"

"I lack a complete list of the contents of your bag of tricks, but I imagine if you could cause Yeerks to peaceably leave their hosts en masse without having to convince them to do so in some way, that would be your plan regardless," says Ristrell. "Convincing them to do so will involve confronting deficits in apparent legitimacy - as comfortable people to be captured by, as threats to be reckoned with in the absence of surrender. Some people will believe you are lying about your motives, that your magical accomplishments of sabotage are faked or can be countered, or that they will be able to make a break for it and find refuge somewhere without your notice. Convincing them will involve dealing with Visser Three-like idiots and those they command, who will not necessarily respond to any rational presentation of evidence. Convincing them will involve making sure they can believe that they will fare better than dead under your care, and that is not merely a matter of making it emphatically clear that you will not be torturing them or making sure they can never have any host of any kind ever again, there is certainly a certain sort of Yeerk who would rather be dead than see their host operating independently of them. It certainly sounds like you can defeat the Empire sometime this week. I doubt very much that you can do it with the absolutely sterile cleanliness you had in mind."

"Are there ways of doing it that make it likelier we'd know the names of anyone who dies."

"Hosts bred in captivity often do not have names," Ristrell says.

"Identification numbers of some kind would do," says T'Mir.

"Those they have. Making generous estimates of your ability to process whoever you capture alive and correctly identify them, any strategy which gets you the Council's records and those of Vissers Nine, Seventeen, Twenty, and Twenty-Six should - unless there are breeding programs of which I am unaware or they are sloppier recordkeepers than I expect - get you complete lists from which to cross off whoever you found alive."

"Oh. Well, we can check how good they are at record-keeping now, so we know how careful we need to be -"

"Can you," says Ristrell.

"Not instantaneously, but before engaging the Empire," amends T'Mir.

"Deficits in the records won't necessarily be obvious."

"Are people bred as hosts - present at all, if they've had a Yeerk in their whole life -"

"Infants of any species are unsuitable hosts even in situations of extreme host shortage," says Ristrell. "Gedds can be taken as young as three, but it's arguable how much even Gedds captured as adults before Yeerks had the entire species yoked were 'present'."

"What kind of numbers are we looking at here? How many hosts and how many Yeerks will we be processing?"

"Yeerk populations can fluctuate enormously," says Ristrell. "Someone with a windfall of hosts and enough pool space can and will dectuple the population of Yeerks under their command almost overnight; Andalites with opportunities to destroy a handful of pools can and will slaughter millions at a stroke. My guess is that three billion Yeerks is correct to within an order of magnitude depending on the success or failure of various operations I knew about, likely existence of operations I didn't know about, etcetera. Host occupancy rate is usually five to twenty percent, kept low to encourage competition for spots."

<So we can process them all but we'll owe Ambaróna some favors> he says to Butterfly.

She inclines her head. How quickly?

Osanwë: another nice thing about being morphed Elf instead of human. <At short notice they can put about four hundred thousand people on it. Worst case of twenty billion Yeerks and two billion hosts, that's six, seven months, if it's really three billion Yeerks then inside two.>