For a moment Leareth is too startled and confused by the question to even have any thoughts. 

Give up and die, Alloran suggests helpfully.

What would he do. 

Not ending up in a position of being at war with the Andalites plus Velgarth humans in the first place? Due to not trying to enslave five billion people? This is, however, a stupid answer. And - it would be good, right, if they could somehow manage to de-escalate this and not kill five billion people. They're not dead yet. Still salvageable. 

Compel a mage to evacuate people? But they can't, Leareth took all the necessary precautions against it. 

- oh, of course. 

He learned this lesson. It's not even one of the slow, painful, hammered-in-over-centuries ones. He learned it in one blaze of destruction. He learned it when he realized that, if he had known what Urtho had, he would have judged the war to be so, so much less worth it. Wars seem a lot more justified when you expect to win. 

When your enemy has a goddamned superweapon, the thing that you do is surrender. 

What. 

- Alloran does not, usually, try to be strategic, it has been several decades since it felt worthwhile to think any thought that was about how he might get anything he wanted, but -

- but he thinks that chanting 'yes! give up! die!' would not help, here, so he's trying very hard not to -

<If we surrender the Andalites will kill us> 

Actually, Leareth thinks, the Andalite he spoke to wanted to try to give them morph. When Leareth brought up the fact that it's a horrifying tragedy, that they have so little unless they enslave someone else and take what's theirs. He's - not sure that's possible from this starting point, when everything is so close to the point of no return where five billion people die. 

(Leareth is trying not to dwell on how painful that loss is to look at, but he's not trying that hard, it's not like he's the one in the driver's seat right now...) 

If they surrendered there would be war crimes trials for sure, and executions of important commanders, and they would probably be expected to give back the conquered planets and their space tech, but he's pretty sure the Andalites wouldn't slaughter every Yeerk, or even most of them, the ones who were following orders or didn't even know what they were involved in. And - can he do math - but five billion humans wouldn't be dead–

Mhalir can do math. 

It's just - he thinks frantically of his contingency-plans, the sealed backup on another planet, that they don't have the computing tech yet to do anything with - the morph-sourced infrastructure in z-space - but none of it is tested and if it doesn't work, then when they inevitably execute the Yeerk commander on Earth for his war crimes, he'll be gone. 

He's so scared. 

If they surrender, Leareth points out, that actually gives Matirin a lot more incentive to try to make the terms generous, right, whereas in the other scenarios, either the Andalites win and impose much worse terms, or the Earth is destroyed, or the Yeerks win but - at such a price, in lives and infrastructure and trust that could have been built - because if the Yeerks win by force, here, the Andalites are never, ever going to work with them. Leareth is pretty sure of that. 

There's a hypothetical world where they build that trust and they get morph and so many new doors open, and maybe that world is almost unreachable from this one, but it's worth reaching for, surely, trust is expensive and scarce, and working in good faith when your enemies may not be is risky, and so many attempts lead to frustration and failure, but it's worth it, for what it buys you in the worlds where you win, it's not something you should just - ever give up on getting to have - even if it seems inevitable...

(He thinks of Vanyel for a moment, and a decade of slow careful conversations in an icy wasteland with an army at his back. An attempt that almost certainly wasn't going to work, and came at a significant cost to his primary plan, and yet. Worth it. Gods, he hopes the Andalites end up getting Vanyel over here. They need him.) 

"Visser," someone says, "hyperspace jump to the Blade ship. Just now. Should the other ships...run...or..."

<Circle to protect the pool ship. They will be going for that> And it can't run, not fast enough. He wonders if the mages have a plan for their demon-construct creatures; all the internal sensors on the Blade ship are shot, they don't know what's going on in there, but it's presumably a slaughter. <They should open fire on it> None of the other ships guns' really match the Blade ships defences, but probably the Andalites will need at least a couple of minutes before they can shoot back. 

<Keep me updated. I am going to keep talking to the prisoner> 

Leareth hears the spoken announcement, of course, and the Visser includes him on the thoughtspeak reply. Clever, he thinks dully. And going to end in slaughter, one way or another. He wishes there were a way out but he has so few levers, here, he can't even kill himself and if he could he wouldn't come back fast enough for it to make any goddamned difference. 

He's lost, before, dozens of times, but he's never lost something so huge. 

He wishes Mhalir would stop and think instead of escalating constantly, over and over. 

He really hopes Matirin isn't on the Blade ship right now. He likes Matirin. Matirin - seems to kind of understand, there was that one conversation they had, about things that ought to hurt... 

Mhalir wishes things would stop happening for - it wouldn't even need to be very many minutes but he's trying to think here. 

He could tell them to - hold fire? That's stupid. 

<They should fire on the ship but also try to open comms with it> he snaps. Who knows if any are intact, or what kind of communicators the Andalites have, someone else who isn't him can figure out the implementation. <Tell them that we may be interested in negotiating a truce, if they back off from the Pool ship and wait for us to move it out of range> 

" - yes, Visser -" the person says confusedly, and turns to relay this. 

You rigged the ship to explode, Alloran points out, not sure he should, but the thought's in his mind now already so that's already lost. You tell them to back off and then a couple minutes later they die of it. That'll make it clear what negotiating with Yeerks is worth.

He knows the exact time, of course, it's in Alloran's brain. The Gate signature was two and a half minutes ago - three minutes, accounting for time for the message to reach him. <They have seven minutes. If they answer our comms I will tell them to Gate off the ship immediately and they will be able to do so. I am not giving them that warning unless they show signs of wishing to cooperate> 

This is agonizing to watch - damn it, Leareth is thinking, it would actually be a pretty good costly signal of good faith if he started yelling radio warnings to them now. Say that conditions have changed and he has new information, which is apparently true even if Leareth wasn't exactly sure what the update is - that his enemies are people too who make decisions for reasons and can be negotiated with? 

(He can't stop thinking about whether or not Matirin is on that ship. Or Cayaldwin. Talik was in his base, he's presumably dead or a prisoner.) 

Mhalir thinks, while a minute slowly ticks by. The Blade ship isn't firing yet - because the enemy could only Gate to that one room, and has to reach the Bridge? - oh, perfect, the answer is right there in Leareth's brain, not that it helps him much with the decision right now. 

Probably it's already predetermined that whoever just went to that ship is going to die. He doesn't have to like it but now isn't the time to grieve for it, not yet. 

Five minutes. Halfway. 

"They're not answering comms."

The obvious explanation, Leareth thinks dully, is that they don't have comms. Either are locked out of the ship's systems, or the ship is damaged from the demons summoned, or they deliberately shut down the computers to prevent hacking from the outside. Doesn't really matter, just, this isn't exactly a high-effort attempt at communications. 

Six minutes since the hyperspace-jump signature. Four to go.

<Leareth, if you were making a 'high effort attempt' to reach them, what would you do> 

He's still pretty confused why the Visser keeps, what, asking him for advice? Maybe that's just what Yeerks do, it is the thing Matirin said, turn all the host's hard-earned capabilities and resources toward destroying what they care about. And, of course, the Yeerk is protecting what he cares about too - maybe it did all happen the way he said, and this is just the most epic, pointless, wasteful tragedy he's ever seen...

If Leareth wasn't currently Yeerked, he would try for someone with the communication spell. He doesn't know who's on the ship, but someone must, they can relay a warning. However, his Gifts are locked out, and whether the conditional set-command undoes itself automatically or not when the Yeerk leaves their head, one, seems to depend on the person, maybe their state of mind or framing around it (Nayoki was so annoyed about this, she hates inconsistency), and, two, if it does unblock his Gifts, he's compulsioned to Final Strike and this isn't the situation it was meant for but he's not sure whether he could avoid it. 

...He would try a radio broadcast at Earth, he thinks. Just blast it at Alaska, maybe Canada - he doesn't know where Matirin is, that was the point... And there might be time for a mage to get a message through. And maybe try a really low-tech method from space, if they don't have sensors working they probably still have windows, can the Pool ship...flash its lights or something...do humans have codes... 

They're not going to be persuaded to stop firing on the Pool ship by Yeerks saying they have reconsidered their worldview, Alloran thinks. He's proud of them for it. 

No, probably not. Leareth is so sad about it, and since he's not steering anyway, he doesn't try to fold that away. But - there's still a principle here, right, of - when you do learn something new, and reconsider your worldview, generally it makes sense to act on it. And in many, even most, worlds it means nothing, but - that's what gambles are... And, well, it hardly leaves him in a worse position than before, since he really doubts the Visser would have rigged a detonator that the Andalites could find and deactivate in a couple of minutes. There are a lot of scenarios where Leareth is very, very cagey about information - until yesterday he still would have been, in the Yeerks' position - but their war is in the open, now, that changes things. 

Seven minutes.

...Damn it, there are no good choices here, are there. 

<Transmit a radio broadcast across Alaska and Canada, directed at the Andalites, warning them the ship is unsafe and to leave immediately, and telling them we wish to open talks. Please. And - figure out if the Pool ship can use any Andalite visual codes to communicate the same message without radio> 

His people are all about to look at him like he's crazy, aren't they. 

They in fact look at him like he's crazy! They do what he told them, though.