"Then it'll be no problem. I'll assign a flat Elf."

"Thanks."

So they park somebody in orbit to pick up any thoughts directed at them, transmit the procedure to the colony.

Cam dissolves all the planetside generators. Holly gets the suns. Joy finds the generators aboard ships.

There are some attempts to fix or replace the generators; there's a confused Taxxon riot; someone buys a junked generator off the Skrit Na only to discover that it too is completely beyond repair; one Blade ship goes for a kamikaze attack on the nearest Andalite outpost -

The Andalites see it coming out of nowhere and desperately fire up their weapons systems -

- Cam catches it (he's gonna have a lotta model ships, maybe they'll go as souvenirs or something later) -

- and Holly, who is hanging around because this is exciting and she and Crystal have nothing else scheduled for a bit, pops into place midvacuum next to the Blade ship and puts it back with its fleet. Bad Blade ship.

What the hell.

A frantic message goes out that the Yeerks might have teleportation or something.

They'll deal with the Andalites later. 

Yeerks get teleported to a habitable world Joy found in Aurum, with a Sun that Holly has made a Kandrona sun. They're badly pressed for demon time so the city for the human hosts is just an exact replica of Ambaróna with crates of nonperishable food just outside the city walls. The pools are not nearly as elaborate as the ones Yeerks build themselves but will suffice to hold all of the Yeerks now in pools anywhere in the world. 

Hork-Bajir get teleported somewhere foresty. Gedds can have the Yeerk homeworld. Taxxons can go back on the Taxxon homeworld and be told that at some point in the future they will be given the option to stop being Taxxons. Leerans go back to their own world, as do miscellaneous other species of which there are only a few members. 

They wait for the Yeerks on the manufacturing planet to starve. None of them change their minds. They teleport those Hork-Bajir and Taxxons and Gedds respectively and then fetch that planet's ambassador, a xenobiologist named Yomenië.

She does not immediately solicit a hug from Prince Nelyafinwë, that would be unprofessional, but she sort of wants to. Mass planetary suicide was not their desired outcome, and she'd asked her Yeerk for names so they could at least all been resurrected later and been laughed at. And then, a few hours after that, the Yeerk had gone quiet, and she could move again. Even more intimate than watching someone die, having them die inside your head.

He gives her a hug. "Yours is the only trouble planet, just bad luck. Everything else went cleanly, couple hundred host casualties in the confusion when they were released, but that's it and we'll get them back - you wanna go home?"

"I guess so. What's public about the operation?"

"Subject to the usual constraints about not making it easy for demons to figure out there's a multiverse. Thank you for your service. I'll have someone give you a ride home."

They drop her off just outside Ambaróna.

Her knees buckle unexpectedly. Her teleporter grabs her before she collapses. "You okay?"

"Yeah, must just not have been in the habit -" she reaches for him, clings a bit -

- leans her head ear to ear and feels/hears a slurp and has no one to lean on anymore.

Fuck -

- how -

- it'd been four days, Yeerks can't live that long - 

- she takes off for the city at a run -

- there's a bolt from behind her and she's stunned.

When she wakes she can't move. Not of her own accord.

The teleporter has enough context to know what's going on and tries the suicide trigger right away - it's been teleported out of his head, of course - and manages to only freeze up in abject horror for maybe ten seconds -

Look, he says after that, if you want to you can kill a couple billion people, but everyone who matters is indestructible and will put them back. They can conjure our surroundings to find me, they'll find me no matter where you go. If you just want a host and a nice happy life, we were fucking handing that out for free and we still will - not if you kill enough people, though, they're not vindictive per se but they wouldn't consider your life worth risking anything else over -

I'm not interested in a nice happy life subject to the whims of other species, snarls his Yeerk, doing some repairs on some tech from the manufacturing colony that was smashed up to make it look like the hosts were empty and panicking. I'm not interested in being appeased by sanctimonious assholes who'd never dream of caring about what happened to me if they couldn't cheat every tradeoff that naturally comes with the nature of my kind.

So the standard is not just that people care about you, but that they would also do so if they were weaker? No one's like that. And you're going to get back at them for being too conditionally nice by, what, wasting a few hours of their time with a merry chase?

I am not going to cooperate with people who hate me for what I am, even if they can pretend not to hate me by throwing enough magic around to ignore what I am.

We reached out to you by sending people for you to infest so that you could understand us. 

In the state of nature Yeerks do not have to negotiate about who we may have, or wait for benevolent volunteers to offer us eyes and hands, or give up precious bodies we've occupied for years to soothe their consciences. On our own world we began as helpless tiny creatures and we conquered the world and the Gedds were ours by right; and we won the Hork-Bajir and we won the Taxxons too; and they were ours. The problem is not that we do not understand you, it is that you do not understand us.

Sigh. 

How are you still alive? We thought the rule was three days -

And the notion of a Yeerk scientist is incoherent, I suppose, we're not supposed to learn or do anything, we're just supposed to be passively horrifying in the background until swept away by the conquering moralizers?

So they found a way around the three days. How many of them? Just this planet - the odd one that said it'd starve, or -

- will his people fork him to figure out what the Yeerk is doing? They might. The Prince Nelyafinwë'll say that he'd consent (he does) but Cam might hesitate anyway - depends how panicked they are - well, they can conjure for summoning circles drawn by the Yeerk controlling him, and as long as that comes up empty they can contain their panic to moderate -

- so conquest gives you the right to take hosts, but when we conquer it's wrong of us to impose our will?

Do I seem conquered to you at the moment?