The insane filth creature still makes no sense. It's completely outside the realm of possibility to suggest that in universes and universes full of strange all-powerful filth creatures, none of them would find and attack civilization, even if these ones left everyone alone for insane filth creature reasons. If they really were just going to leave them alone in an empty universe, then there might still be hope for civilization as a whole - although it's inconceivable that they wouldn't eventually try to find and destroy all the filth, so the filth would have to be completely insane to do that - but this person in particular has still been extensively mind-controlled by filth creatures and should definitely be killed for the good of society, they can never trust their own thoughts again, it's horrible and they will be terrified for the rest of their life unless the all-powerful filth creatures force them not to be and that's worse.

(The Taliars glance at each other, sharing a thought. The plight of the suicidal genocide alien is horrifying, but Midnight is being very Maitimo about it, and they can each guess the other's reaction even before they share it. Elaneth-imire feels a wry fondness, an appreciation for the ways Midnight is similar to Tivarante, the shared foundations of their minds that form a substantial part of what he loves about his husband; Raika-seren feels a sharp ache of very personal love.)

(Just from the way that moment of love felt, he can tell things haven't been going well for Raika-seren lately, but Raika-seren is a Taliar and won't want that dealt with or even acknowledged beyond the level of a passing thought until this crisis has been thoroughly handled.)

Sigh. "Fine. Are there conditions under which you'd consent to be resurrected?"

They can do that???

The alien genuinely has no idea how to even think about that question. It's terrifying. The filth creatures are all-powerful and the world is so going to end.

"Okay, we don't have time for this, go get a couple more, interrogate them separately, figure out how many planets and if there's a safe angle on containing them, this one can hang out here until it gives an answer."

Raika-seren nods. He coordinates silently with Elaneth-imire and gets Nezhefena to fetch and immobilize two more aliens, out of sight of this one and each other. They'd like a recording of a fairly low-key calming song if possible, seems less intrusive than the trust song, less likely to lead to perverse paranoia - can Midnight and Macalaurë provide?

Not a problem at all.

All right. To work.

The Taliars' own osanwë is a little too privacy-respecting to make a good interrogation tool - they could probably push it in that direction but it might take time - but they can conduct their interviews within Maitimo's range, and it actually helps for their purposes if they can't hear their prisoners' thoughts because it means they can't inadvertently reveal that capability and put them on their guard. They can step away for a moment and come back and claim to have heard such-and-such information from another prisoner who was more willing to talk, although they use that tactic sparingly because these people seem really dedicated and it would be suspicious to have gotten one of them to crack that hard that fast.

Once calmed out of their panic, the prisoners still refuse to tell their captors anything, but they can be steered into thinking about lots of things. An extensive, though possibly incomplete, list of inhabited planets. Their civilization's FTL communication and transportation capabilities - pretty good except for the part where you need to aim everything very very precisely, hence the stranded fleet's inability to call home. The nature and origin of their weapons - apparently in this universe certain metals have magically resonant properties that make them usable as magic weapons if properly shaped. They also have plenty of non-magical weapons, but they prefer to use the magical ones because they're more efficient to operate, no ammunition or fuel required.

Raika-seren manages to indirectly lead his alien to think about what the trouble is with Tseiza-3 and its 'filth contagion'. Apparently there used to be filth creatures living there, some of whom had wings, and the people who fought them sometimes also sprouted wings, which obviously meant that those filth creatures were contagious somehow, and this was absolutely terrifying and they instituted strict quarantine protocols and killed all the filth they could find, and then they found out that there was a bizarre space-warping maze hidden behind a handful of portals scattered across the planet's surface, and you could catch the filth contagion by entering it.

They left a military outpost there, and sent expeditions into the maze, all volunteers who understood that they could never rejoin society again and would have to commit suicide once their purpose was fulfilled; the support structure for the military outpost eventually grew into an entire civilian colony on Tseiza-3; and just recently, they finally found the remaining filth creatures hidden deep inside the maze, and now they're trying to finish exterminating them, but it's really hard to bring ships and weapons into the maze through its doorway-sized portals, and there aren't that many people brave enough to volunteer for the job, and last this soldier heard, it sounded like it might be decades before they finish it.

What a species. I'm leaning relocate them to an empty dimension, take kids at birth and figure out whether it's innate or taught.

I'm mildly worried about those poor Tseiza-3 people but it sounds like they're not in danger of succumbing to genocide in the next week, says Raika-seren. Do we have any empty dimensions on hand?

No, but plenty with just one inhabited planet, do you think you could get a power for stabilizing the teleport so we can move whole star systems - practice on empty ones first obviously - make sure they land smoothly for the inhabitants? 

Yeah, bet I could. Although that does leave us hoping their civilization doesn't collapse in panic over the next three days.

I could see about branching it from landshaping, says Elaneth-imire, seems like it might conceivably work and it'd be faster than having Raika-seren grow it from scratch...

Go for it. Hopefully the whole civilization doesn't collapse over a single missing fleet?

It's hard to say from just the three soldiers, but - the way they go into that spiral of terror when they start thinking about the implications of teleporting aliens with immobilization powers, even when they don't know we can read and affect minds...

Another fleet appears overhead - he catches their arrival in Elaneth-imire's thoughts - the obvious thing to do is put them in a nearby dimension, maybe even the same one as the other fleet, but a few hundred light-years away so they don't get a chance to coordinate - he waits a moment to see if Maitimo has a better idea.

No, do that.

He does that.

That was a worryingly fast response to losing communications with fleet number one. I hope they dither for a while longer about the fate of fleet number two.

You'd expect at some point they'd assume it's dangerous and be more careful - we should grab someone off fleet two and check what they learned from one's disappearance -

On it.

He sends Nezhefena, gets the new prisoner set up in yet another location mutually out of sight of the rest but within ten miles of Maitimo, and skillfully pretends to be frustrated by his inability to procure any answers while in fact getting the prisoner to think about everything they need to know.

When the first fleet disappeared, the people in charge were worried. They couldn't tell the difference between 'communications equipment failure' and 'ran into superior firepower and died' without going and checking, but in case it was the second thing they sent a bigger, better-armed fleet to investigate. They were not prepared for teleporting aliens. Whatever the commanders come up with next, they definitely won't be prepared for teleporting aliens.

They're going to freak out about the fact that the second fleet didn't have time to send a single message before vanishing, but the freaking out is likely to be confined to purity-keepers and the military for the time being. It's hard to say what the outcome of the freaking-out might be. One thing they might try to do is hack together some kind of weapon that can be launched on an FTL trajectory and detonate on arrival with sufficient force to destroy a solar system - the prisoner doesn't know if that's actually possible, but it's the sort of thing they themselves would try in that situation.

Just to be safe, let's move Independence a hop - not to the same dimension we're keeping the fleets in. Purity-keepers?

Yes, moving Independence a hop sounds like a fine idea.

The Taliars prod their prisoners about the concept of purity-keepers. They seem like some sort of combination religious caste and secret police. Their job is to make sure that everything is right according to the same set of standards that declares filth creatures to be wrong. They are respected but not generally feared, even though they will certainly kill anyone who does a sufficiently wrong thing - reading between the lines a little, it seems like these aliens' innate drive to follow their bizarre moral code is strong enough that most people just wouldn't do anything worth being killed over, and can't conceive of themselves as being the sort of person who would, and if they did end up on the wrong side of a purity-keeper somehow they'd agree that this meant they should die.

...even if these prisoners are unusually zealous aliens, which they probably are... wow.

(Independence gets hopped.)

Yeah. How do they feel about just turning off their innate drive to follow their bizarre moral code, have there ever been revelations about the things their bizarre moral code obliges them to do...

It is also the purity-keepers' job - as an organization, rather than as individuals - to make decisions about what is right when confronted with new situations. It was the purity-keepers who decided, thousands of years ago when it first came up, that filth creatures are abominations that need to die. The prisoners assume they knew what they were doing when they made that decision; they're purity-keepers.

(That first alien, with nothing else to do, has finally managed to think their way through the puzzle of under what conditions they'd be willing to be resurrected. It goes something like: if it was generally agreed that having them alive again would be safe, and if there was some trustworthy and widely accepted means of making sure that none of the filth creatures' mind control lingered in their thoughts, then it would be okay for them to not be dead. But 'generally agreed' and 'widely accepted' both refer to the aliens' own civilization and definitely not to any other ones, so it still seems absolutely insane to think that might ever happen.)

"Okay! Perfectly reasonable, and I actually expect your civilization'll be fine with that, songs don't have lasting mind-altering effects and once they learn our magic they'll be able to verify that. Do you want me to kill you or just give you a knife?"