Well, now he feels less smug and more sympathetic.

I love you. Dawn-shining will resurrect everyone and then you can send as many people as you like into somebody's Sphere and have them think about their proudest accomplishments.

I know. Trust me, without him I would have reacted by teleporting all thirty-four planets of aliens into the nearest star. Are they still stable, incidentally?

Yeah.

...he envisions the consequences to Suranse if Tseiza-3 had been teleported into its sun with the portals still attached. Ouch.

Happier thoughts: here's what the weapons development people are up to (not getting anywhere), here's what the military hierarchy is up to (arguing about the weapons development progress), here's what the galactic media is up to (no word whatsoever about any vanished fleets), here's what the cultists are up to (collecting the information they're getting from their spies in the military and debating what to do if this turns out to be the beginning of various possible end-of-the-world scenarios).

What a useful power you've manifested. Okay. Let's pick out a place to teleport them if we do get a stabilizing power or if Taliar's landshaping can handle it.

Yeah, let's.

He delegates the search to Dawn-shining, whose Sphere still connects this world to Nuime for world-spanning osanwe purposes. Find me a compatible star in a nearby world - or a non-nearby world you can teleport-link with your Sphere, he says. In case we can do the planet but not the star, I feel like including the star would be much easier to fuck up.

Also he wraps himself in his wings. They're so soft. His wings are the best.

He wants some. Once none of his people are dead.

Soon, Elaneth-imire has some candidate stars in mind. He passes on his suggestions.

Raika-seren thinks this particular one is the best fit for the observed characteristics of Ityen, although maybe Elaneth-imire should go use his sensory power on Ityen for a better comparison, can he do that safely?

He can. He does. Raika-seren was right.

Try it now, or wait to see if any of our upcoming powers come in - what do you think? he asks Maitimo.

Wait, since nothing's falling apart yet.

All right.

He continues eavesdropping. The military decides to send another expedition to somewhere near the site of the previous two disappearances. They're hesitant to risk another fleet the size of the first two, so they make it a covert scouting mission, one small stealthy ship with good sensors and fast engines.

Should I vanish the scout or let it report back? he asks, focusing his attention on it.

...whatever seems likelier to delay their next action - probably vanishing it.

He listens closely to see if there's any evidence that changes that prediction.

The scout prepares to jump. Nobody's thinking about what they'll do if they find no evidence of either fleet or the planet they were attacking. The crew of the scout ship are mostly terrified, but determined to do their duty. They're definitely going to put their absolute best effort into communicating as much information back home as possible. Not much time left to make a final decision—

—although if they manage to enact some kind of subtle sabotage on the scout's communication equipment, he'll have more time to see them react to the situation without any information getting back to their commanders. He transmits this idea to Elaneth-imire; the sensory power makes him the obvious person for the job.

So Elaneth-imire hides himself near where the scout is going to emerge, and extends his sensory power, and ever so carefully uses precisely applied landshaping to introduce a small flaw in the communicator's alignment apparatus that will have it directing its messages uselessly into interstellar space. With how finicky these communicators are, it won't be any more than circumstantially suspicious; this could absolutely have happened by accident.

The scout sends back continuous reports, unaware that none of them are reaching home base. They cautiously examine the area where the planet is supposed to be.

...the planet isn't there.

They run an alignment check on their jump system. It comes out clean; they're in the right place. They run another one, incredulously. There are no fleets and no planets in evidence. Not even any debris. Just. Nothing. Nothing at all.

Someone thinks to run an alignment check on their communicator, and that fails. They start tinkering with it, urgently trying to get it working again.

Raika-seren judges that Maitimo's guess was right; vanishing the scout will help more than letting it report in - it'll keep them on the distant ominous fear of the unknown they've got going on now, rather than the more urgently bewildered and alarmed fear of the unknown that the scouts are feeling. He tells Elaneth-imire to get it done.

Back at headquarters, everyone's getting increasingly nervous as there continues to be no word from the scout. He predicted their reaction correctly.

Okay. Test teleporting a planet with an uninhabited one.

Elaneth-imire finds a bunch of uninhabited planets.

It takes really good timing and placement to move a planet between one star and another in a way that sensibly preserves its orbit and rotation. He uses his sensory power to check his work, and then conjures computers to run analyses, and then does not allow himself to get distracted trying to figure out how the analysis software works, and finally after all ten uninhabited test planets have been flawlessly-as-far-as-he-can-tell restored to their original placements, he declares that he could definitely kidnap a planet without fucking anything up. He can even include moons, which is good because Ityen-6 has two, and artifical satellites, because of course he conjured and launched a bunch of those to test that, it would've been silly to go to all this trouble and then find out at the last second that his precision wasn't quite good enough and oops sorry about that hail of debris.

Okay. Let's not do it until they seem on the verge of something worse than paralysis - actually, let's do the 'accidental' tamper with communications equipment somewhere and let them get it back up and running, so their first hypothesis when the planet goes dark is just that we're causing communications glitches -

Sure. On it.

He sneaks up to a planet. He glitches their communicators.

Raika-seren listens for reactions.

Some people are mildly alarmed. (A cultist hears about it and gets excited.) The planet has one of its communicators back online in five minutes, and they start notifying everyone that they're fine and it was just bad luck. (The cultist is disappointed, but glad they didn't pass on the exciting news immediately, they would've looked silly.) News of the incident makes its way into the military, where a few people hypothesize that it might have to do with the vanishing fleets, but after the followup reports come in, consensus is that it was just a coincidence.

Two more false alarms, then the real thing -

He eavesdrops and considers and plans and tells Elaneth-imire which planet to hit next and when. It's incredibly fulfilling work and he's having the time of his life, in an intensely focused, high-energy high-stress sort of way.

He's so tired of war but it's nice at least to have a concrete advantage, in this one.

He has a Taliar. You couldn't ask for a better advantage than that.

After the second planetary sabotage, people are starting to wonder if the problem is with specific models of communicator, or maybe radiation damage, or, or, or... He listens to the technicians' investigations and advises Elaneth-imire on how to conduct the next sabotage to make all three of the top theories more plausible.

The question of whether this is related to the fleet disappearances comes up again among people who know about the fleet disappearances. They argue about it. No definitive conclusions are reached.

Raika-seren decides they should wait an hour or so before the third false alarm. He suggests to Elaneth-imire and Midnight that Elaneth-imire could go fix Independence's internet in the meantime - his restoration of the planet's surface didn't put their satellites back, but he could easily do that now, and with landshaping and conjuration he could trivially lay fiber optic cable under the whole continent without having to so much as pry up a cobblestone, so they could have even better internet than the satellites alone were giving them.