<- I can see why you'd assume that but actually it varies a lot? I was friends with my last host.>

Wow. What does 'friends' even mean, when it's talking about the person who is permanently locked up in their own head and can't make any decisions? The Andalites think compulsions are pretty bad but you absolutely couldn't do this to someone with compulsions. 

<Uh, it means we'd watch TV together and argue about which of the characters should kiss, and I kept up with her laundry even though that was kind of out of character because she didn't really like never having her favorite dress clean, and I got her through family holidays without letting her yell at her bigoted grandfather stuff she didn't want to say out loud, and stuff. I know a lot of people don't want to be friends with their Yeerks but I think it works out well for people who give it a shot even if you don't get off to a great start.>

...Huh. Well, there was that girl who said she thought Yeerking someone was kind of sexy and she wished the Andalites would give her morph so she could morph Yeerk and control her boyfriend - and there was the Yeerk tests, people weren't alarmed about that, because the Yeerk was harmless for them, or was a morphed Andalite before that. But, well, how is she supposed to be friends with someone on the opposite side of the war from her. She was stupid and got captured and now it's going to kill a lot of her friends and be her fault and this is really awful actually. 

<Wars are bad! I don't think they get... more bad if you make friends? I think that's normally how they get less bad. It's just, you know - you'd put up a hell of a fight if someone was trying to put out your eyes and chop off your hands and cut away your voice - and if you win, we don't have those, same as if you had a knife. We don't have much we don't get from somebody else. But if we're friends we can share.>

She does feel sort of bad for the Yeerks. That their lives must be not really lives at all, without hosts. Seems unfair. Someone said they heard Leareth talking about a way to fix that with technology, someday, if they could win the war and then get on good terms with the Yeerks again and talk it out, but it seemed very implausible to her that would happen. 

<Not while the Andalites are running things, I bet. They hate us, so much, even the idea that we might go find people who didn't hate us as much and work something out with them was enough to make Seerow start killing people, and Seerow mostly seemed to hate us less than the other ones!>

...What? That's not what they were told at all, Seerow went and gave the Yeerks technology, let them go to the stars, and then they betrayed and murdered him in a surprise attack. 

<Wow, is that what the Andalites really think? Honestly I just assumed Andalites were so racist that "Yeerks said 'thanks for the spaceships, we'll go find hosts besides Gedds', Seerow opened fire" would sound totally reasonable to them. And, I mean. If we betrayed Seerow. Don't you think we'd have kept him around?>

That is definitely what the Andalites think! And what Leareth thinks, and she remembers her friend saying he was less hopeful for a, well, satisfyingly okay resolution to this war, because of that - because he didn't know how he could work with that - but if it wasn't...

<...so, uh, possibly your friends are allying with Andalites under false pretenses? Should we maybe talk to my boss about how he can offer terms or something?>

Emril had not in a million years thought this would be what came out of being Yeerked and talking to the Yeerk, but - maybe? She doesn't know if it's too late, or if it would even make a difference to Leareth, but she's pretty sure he wants to know true things. Assuming the Yeerks can prove this is true. He's pretty suspicious. 

<He can read minds!>

Yes, well, he read all the Andalites' minds and they believed their side of things, people can be wrong about what happened. Probably if there are Yeerks who were actually there and remember it, he would trust that higher than the Andalites who weren't personally there, though. 

<I think Visser Three was there.>

Then maybe it is worth talking to him about that. The Healer wonders vaguely what Visser Three is like. She's heard people speculating he's competent. Well, complaining, mostly. 

<He's really smart and cautious and clever and he wants great things for the Yeerk people.> "It may be possible for Visser Three to talk terms with Leareth," she says aloud in English.

This is passed on, but apparently Visser Three is really busy right now, some new emergency or threat just happened, he may not be able to come take her report and find out why she believes this for a while. 

"...do I have the go-ahead to do this unilaterally if it looks strategic from my position?" asks Enstat.

"Give us a moment." 

There's a pause. 

"The Visser isn't sure why it would, uh, come up, for you to have the opportunity to unilaterally talk terms with Leareth, but if that arises and it seems strategic, then you have the go-ahead." 

"I don't expect it to but they're magic, anything could happen. Thank you."

Visser 3 is busy because he is currently getting the hell off the Blade ship and - well, just elsewhere, for now, because the situation is happening at him too fast and he doesn't know where is safe. 

He urgently reaches the people he delegated the Alaska search to. It's their only lead and they might not even be there anymore, but he wants every abandoned mine they've found to be gassed. Whatever resources it takes to do it as fast as possible, they don't need to worry about being subtle at this point. 

Every abandoned mine in....all of Alaska? Alaska is big, there are hundreds of abandoned mines... the person making this argument stops making it and runs off to do exactly what they were asked to.

That is exactly what he wants them to do. 

He stays in the shuttle, far away from the other ships because that's clearly where the Andalites are going next, he moved first and now they're both escalating fast and hard. He doesn't know what they're going to do but he knows the resources they have, now. 

Even with the maximum resources the parts of the United States controlled by Yeerks can throw at it, it's going to take hours to get every mine in Alaska, and they might not even be there anymore, if they're smart... 

He muses about this 'Leareth', their human leader. Whether Enstat is right that it might be worth talking to him. He - certainly doesn't, right now, feel in a position to open communications without immediately having something terrible happen to him. (Can they follow a comms signal and do a Gate directly to his shuttle... How did they get to the ship...) 

He checks in on all the other news. Nothing much is happening in the rest of the cities, now, unsurprisingly. He asks for Enstat's written report, gets it, reads it. Considers whether it is worth sending him a radio message...but there's no way to talk to him, right now, without reaching the Andalites too...

He waits. 

They're pretty sure that this mine, here, was an Andalite base, they dropped robots down once the gas had had long enough that no one would be moving (unless they have magic countermeasures, but they chose the gas reasonably carefully, works on both humans and Andalites and affects metacognition first, so ideally you don't notice you need to panic until too late...)

- the robots didn't find any Andalites or mages but the site had been hastily evacuated. Probably that's all they are going to find but they have the combined resources of the Yeerk invading force and the entire U.S. government and they will get every one of these hundreds of abandoned mines. 

...and then at one of them the robots report - it could be a trick, of course -

sixty dying mages and Andalites -