Leareth, glancing up from his other kind of Gate-research, is suddenly intrigued. He knows you can use Gates to do weird things with momentum, if you're him and able to do creative unscaffolded ones; for example, it's possible to put two Gates flat and parallel to the ground, next to each other, and then jump into one and come bopping up through the other. 

Can you make an upside down Gate? 

He builds the origin threshold normally and then stares out through the dome, intently, and builds another unscaffolded threshold just outside, except that he very firmly holds in his mind that the "top" of it is where his feet are, right now, and the "bottom" is against the ground, which right now looks like a very disconcerting ground-ceiling. 

He tries stepping through. 

This works perfectly fine! Gravity feels normal the whole time as he walks through.

All of Leareth's people want to try walking through now! It looks so weird to an observer and they love it. 

Neat! Leareth takes it down after a couple of minutes, though, he's got urgent work to do. 

The Andalites are mostly busy finishing fixing their ship and, on breaks, practicing being normal humans. They sit cross-legged on their grass, wearing their clothes, having human conversations with their mouths. They are mostly mediocre at it, except Matirin who practices much less often but has gotten very good. 

He's getting better at reading humans, too, which is reassuring. Leareth's people mostly seem sincere about fighting the Yeerks, though they're loyal enough to Leareth that if he did decide to do something else Matirin expects they'd follow him into that, too. They're well-trained and helpful and easy to work with. 

Most planning should wait until they're on Earth and have a better picture of their situation but he thinks he can win, with this. It's a sort of overwhelming thought. 

Leareth is also getting a better read on Matirin's people. He's provided the ten shield-talismans, and so he can no longer read Matirin, or Cayaldwin except when they do concert-rapport, for which the talismans are too rigid and get in the way. Reading the less important Andalite scouts and engineers, though, lets him start to correlate body language better with their thoughts and emotions.

Andalites in general hate Yeerks. They're not comfortable revealing weakness, even fatigue from heavy work. 

Matirin, he thinks, very badly wants to win this war. And is extremely competent, leads his people very well, but he's also - not quite entirely there, or something. (Which leaves Leareth vaguely musing that if he were fully on his game then he'd be terrifying.) From what he picked up in Cayaldwin's mind, Leareth guesses that Matirin, too, is distracted by grief. Understandably. 

There's not much he can do about it, aside from make good decisions and provide good advice. On some level it feeds his motivation to win the war for them, but - not on the level of blind loyalty. He still doesn't think he knows enough to declare that the Andalites are definitely the ones who ought to win, here. 

He stays focused on his work.

Leareth's Healers make progress on figuring out Andalite bodies. There are differences on a metabolic level as well as gross anatomy, most centrally their digestion is weird compared to all living animals in Velgarth, but a lot of their Healing procedural skill can be mapped over. 

They get the ship repaired. If Leareth still thinks he can figure out interworld Gates that's better than jumping near Earth with the ship. ...if it'd help they could take him on a hyperspace jump that doesn't go anywhere near Earth or any other Yeerk worlds?

Leareth thinks he's a couple of days away, and then maybe another day to test what minimizes the detectable Gate-signature. A hyperspace jump to somewhere remote would be really helpful; in particular, he bets he has a good enough sense of the planar mapping now to find his way back via a Gate, and from there it'll just be figuring out the exact aim to get to Earth's surface when he's never been there before. 

For the first Earth Gate, which is likely to be targeted to a precision of miles rather than yards because he's aiming so blind, maybe he could do a tiny one, and an Andalite with a small morph form could fly through and check that he found the right planet? 

If he found the wrong one it'd be reasonably likely to be very dangerous to the morph but they could send a little robot, and then if it's got the right air it's probably the right planet - it's really weird that on this occasion they landed on another human-inhabited planet - and they can send a bird through to go confirm it's Earth.

Perfect. Leareth is pretty tired out for the day right now, but tomorrow morning works to do a jump to some other non-Yeerk-infested known coordinates. 

The next morning, back in Haven, Savil is for the fourth morning in a row waking up in the armchair next to Van's bed in the House of Healing, and noting with massive relief that he seems to still be asleep. 

He's physically in fine shape, at this point, and doesn't really need to be here, but it makes it easy to keep him supervised around the clock without making any one person too sleep-deprived. Not that Vanyel has...done much...for the last five days. He spends a lot of time crying and/or hiding under his blankets, and the rest of the time sleeping and constantly having nightmares. He's so miserable. 

Savil sits up, moving carefully, and stretches her aching back, and then pokes her head out to make sure a Healing-trainee can watch him while she uses the privy and hunts down some tea. 

:Savil?: There's quite a lot of urgency in Melody's mindvoice. 

Savil jumps and nearly trips on her face. :–Gods - what is it?: 

:Er, good news, I think: Long pause. :Yfandes is back: 

:You - think - it's good news...?: 

:Going by body language I don't think she's here to repudiate him, but I think I'd better ask before you wake him or anything. And Taver may want to have a chat with her first: 

Back at the ship, hundreds of miles north, Leareth wakes from another night of confused dreams about soaring through the Void surrounded by math, and tells the Andalites he's ready to try a hyperspace jump and then attempt to Gate himself back. 

All right. Anyone who doesn't want to come on the hyperspace jump should get off the ship, and then it'll head out to do that. (It can only do that from deep space; gravity wells make hyperspace jump targeting impossible, at least done their way rather than his.)

Basically all of Leareth's people want to come! Leareth has to tell some of them to stay behind and they're so disappointed.

Leareth himself watches, fascinated. With his mages-senses open fully and his mind half in the Void, so he can tell if the planar relationship changes as they leave the gravity well. 

There'll be fighting in space later, the Andalites assure the ones who have to stay behind. They will probably in fact want to take out the Yeerk ships in orbit before there are any operations on Earth.

They leave the gravity well. It does change a bunch of things about how - close the planes are, for lack of a better word for it. 

They make the hyperspace jump.