Obviously Mhalir 4376 is not going to ignore it, even though it's, at the moment, pretty unclear what to do about it. He can afford to take some time and think about it, though.

What does it mean? Or, rather, what are the possible things it could mean, it's far from enough information to narrow down to a single world. 

Either Andalites, or false alarms (not that unlikely, sensors throw false alarms regularly, though three of them is less likely...) Or - some third option, that he isn't seeing yet. Another species, with better technology, stepping into the war? Not impossible. 

Improved shielding. This - isn't very surprising at all, both sides are improving their technology, it doesn't do much to decrease the likelihood that this is the Enemy. 

Nothing spotted in space, though. That...makes it less likely to be Andalites, and more likely to be either false alarms or - unknown unknowns, the blind spot he can't even locate. It's not impossible an Andalite ship could have jumped here and slipped past the perimeter, but he's been on alert for that. 

If it is the Enemy, then... Three shielded transits, in two weeks, in a remote state. No interference with any of his operations, at least not yet. Not an attack in force. They would absolutely be frontally attacking if they could, so...what does that mean... Limited resources, maybe. And a subtler Andalite mind in command than what he's seen before. 

Mhalir 4376 thinks it through for some time, in bits and pieces in between other responsibilities and then in a longer block, with the lightning-quick ease of an Andalite's mind. (And tries, as always, not exactly to ignore Alloran's misery but to accept it as reality, not indicative of any error.) 

...

Later that day he goes back to one of his lieutenants. <We have no presence on the ground in Alaska as of yet, correct?>

Her host is a human in the American military; her last host was Gedd, and she keeps running her hands through her own hair though she's otherwise been very focused on her tasks. "We do not. It's sixteen hundred miles from the nearest pool, and without good transportation infrastructure. Most of it won't be worth taking even when we can act openly, not until we build some trains."

<No, it is not really feasible> Absent swish of his - Alloran's - tail. <I would like us to increase the sensor coverage of that area as much as possible, without any visible signs that an Andalite presence would detect. If any other traces are sensed, I want shuttles with cloaking and people ready to move instantly, so that we can attempt to narrow it down further, but in the meantime, their sensors may also have improved.> 

He paces, still thinking. If he were an Andalite commander hiding in Alaska, as far as he knew unnoticed but operating on a shoestring, what would he do? Look for Yeerk presence, probably, once he had his bearings and any idea of where to start - and the city they've taken the most thoroughly is the most obvious candidate, really. 

<...I want us to begin collecting data on all new rentals of houses and apartments in Washington DC in the past two weeks, and their inhabitants' background. We are looking for people who arrived suddenly and whose official existence and paper trail seems to begin in the last month. The Andalites can certainly hack the human computers but I do not think they would bother to fake high school report card records in another state> 

"Yes, Visser." She frowns. Doesn't ask whether he thinks they're really here, because it's kind of a stupid question. Gets to work on that. 

Visser 3 does not, in fact, think it's very likely. He's placing maybe one in ten odds, right now. But - the world where the Andalites arrive on Earth before they have control, is the one where they might lose. If they beat those odds, if they make it through the next year and meet all the planned targets, Mhalir 4376 thinks that it's only a matter of time. They won't win yet but, give it ten years... 

But it's not that guaranteed, yet, and so it's worth throwing some resources even at a low chance of a small Andalite presence. And, well, it's not a bad thing to keep his people paying attention and focused. Remind them that they aren't safe, here, not yet, not until they make it that way by their own efforts.

There's no point in turning it over any more without further data, though, so after pacing for another minute, he puts it out of his mind. 

It is a substantial endeavor but controlling most of the U.S. federal government and having the ability to secure additional hosts as needed makes it much less complicated. As does the phrase 'it's a national security matter'. It's true. It is a national security matter. She's looking for signs of an alien invasion.

'Rented a house in the D.C. metro area, no high school or college graduation records' turns up way too many false positives from people whose records presumably just haven't been digitized, this world is new to computing. 'Rented a house in the D.C. metro area, no credit report two weeks ago' is more promising, but the Andalites (if there are Andalites, and there probably aren't) were more careful than that. She has the idea of stopping by the headquarters of the TransUnion credit bureau to see if they keep physical backups that are a month old, which they could then re-digitize and cross-check with the credit bureau's more hackable databases' beliefs about what its records said a month ago, but they're in Illinois. She can ask Visser 3 about it if they turn up anything else concerning. Or promising. 

What else might the Andalites have been doing. They would've needed - ID cards, they could print those... bank accounts - she checks that too, but is unsurprised to find that they didn't commit incredibly obvious to the first Yeerk to look bank fraud... 

...references...

...rented a house in the D.C. metro area in the last month, listed references from Alaska? That's way more hassle to check than just pulling the records of all credit checks made for a lease, but it's possible, she can set some people on it. And if any of those don't have high school or college graduation records, or mentions in their local paper, or relatives - well, it'd be enough to bring Visser 3, at least.

There are three rentals with Alaska phone numbers included among the references - and that were findable by their search, there could be under-the-table subletting that the records won't catch, but that seems less likely what newly arrived aliens would go for. 

One of them also has a DC metro area reference listed as their sister. Another is findable in digitized Alaska records. The third has neither. 

She shivers. It's probably either nothing or some Andalites who'll be easily killed or captured.

It makes it into Visser 3's morning briefing. 

Checking TransUnion's physical records is a good idea, they should do that. And keep the house in question under discreet surveillance. With cameras from a distance, not by stationing people nearby who the Andalites could notice. (They might also notice new cameras, of course, but it's subtler and less likely to put his people at risk.) 

They dispatch some people to Illinois to pull TransUnion's physical records out of storage by saying 'national security' over and over very insistently. They install some cameras.

The man spends lots of his time in his car. Sometimes he gets groceries. Most of his activities do not merit Visser 3's notice, at least not until the records are retrieved and digitized and answer the question of whether there was Andalite interference here, but they do note the first time they are definitely able to observe him for two hours continuously and they are all spent in human form. 

Probably this is nothing and once they have the records digitized they'll feel very silly.

They have the records digitized and do not feel very silly. A hundred twenty names and credit records do not match. His is one of them.

Well. Something is definitely odd here, whether it's Andalites or not. 

Visser 3 wants them to keep watching the man. And to follow up more on the references he gave - how recently did they pop into existence? Do they, too, lack a paper trail? 

The man keeps driving around town. They think he might be following suspected Yeerks but they don't know how he would've known who to suspect - maybe he just reasonably assumed most key people in Washington would be, by now. On at least one occasion he's driven to the street block where the pool entrance is, but then kept driving. 

If he's reporting to anyone, he's not using human technology to do it. 

They track his financial history. His bank account, which the human computers think is five years old, gets regular, generous paychecks from a bank account registered to an address in New Mexico. The bank account registered to an address in New Mexico has no other activity in the last month, though it is itself eight years old and has eight plausible-looking years of transaction history,. It claims to have been sending him paychecks for three years.

The references are from phone numbers registered recently. A claimed previous landlord in Anchorage, a claimed previous roommate in Juneau. Named Matt Smith and Jennifer Anderson.

Visser 3 wants those names checked against all digitized records, and in particular he wants them checked against the list they now have from TransUnion. Either some local humans hacked the credit bureau or they're very bad at records or have internal corruption (not...impossible...given what he now knows of Earth humans), or someone is present on Earth with very good computer tech.

There isn't a Yeerk pool in the area but there are standard domestic flights that fly to Anchorage regularly. One of their agents can easily get there and back inside of three days.

Mhalir is concerned that the Andalites - if it's Andalites, if any of this is more than random chance - do have a way of locating Yeerks. Portable brain scanners? He's not sure but for planning purposes, he should assume that they potentially could catch a Yeerk agent in Anchorage even if they fly in and out and never do anything suspicious on their trip. So, minimize the exposure. 

Can they get into any security camera footage records in Anchorage, without going there in person? Presumably not of the house where the 'landlord' lives, but if they have a driver's license then they have a photo, and nearby convenience stores' cameras might have seen them. The idea isn't to actually catch them doing Andalite things on surveillance, just to get a sense of their movements, and of which locals have interacted with them. 

The ATM machines will have security footage and they can match it up with the timelines for specific transactions from suspect bank accounts, but that footage and convenience store footage is not online; they'd probably have to send someone to get it. They could send a non-Yeerked human from the FBI or NSA, with instructions to retrieve the security footage and bring it back to Washington.

Visser 3 approves. He suggests a cover story about an ongoing investigation into a suspected crime ring, just in case the maybe-Andalites have left microphones around at places they frequent. This is probably an absurd excess of caution, but better that than the opposite, and it took him two minutes to come up with said cover story so it's not exactly a costly expenditure of resources. Also this way doesn't risk trapping a Yeerk out of reach of a pool, though really an absurd number of things would have to go wrong to lead to that. 

The agent is fed the cover story and sent off to pick up surveillance footage. 

The agent comes back with surveillance footage. Some of the ATMs and convenience stores don't hold onto it for very long, but some hold onto it for long enough. The people making the suspect transactions are human-looking. They seem awfully baffled about ATMs. They move in groups and do not as far as the footage shows speak aloud to one another.

They put together a highlights reel for Visser 3. The oldest available recording associated with one of the bank accounts flagged through the comparison of TransUnion backups is a month-old video of four people entering a bank. One of them speaks. The teller asks for his account number and password. The man gives an account name. Gives '54W23Q1886WZA4' as his password. 

(Alloran has Feelings, and then tries very hard not to.)

Visser 3 watches it a few times in a row and then paces, and thinks. 

This has now risen from the level of 'probably nothing but worth training the right habits anyway' to 'definitely suspect'. It's confusing that the human in Washington is definitely not an Andalite in morph, but - well, he could be someone they hired locally, that would be the clever thing to do. Or - he could be a deliberate nothlit, in order to evade suspicion if he were ever surveilled. Which would be very ruthless and not quite in character for Andalite command, but it's what Mhalir would consider doing. 

And, right now, he doesn't think the possible Andalites have any way of knowing they're being watched. 

What's the least costly next step, here, in terms of revealing his hand? 

He asks them to watch the ATM and convenience store or public buildings footage again. This time for bystanders incidentally visible in the background, for example because they were waiting for the same ATM or loitering in a convenience store. Make a list of locals who've happened to be nearby the suspects the most, and see if they can cross-check identity information via the ATM transaction records or other human databases. 

This takes a very long time because the image quality is atrocious, this civilization has invented better cameras but storage is expensive enough to be a real constraint and they tend to store very low-resolution images. And Alaska hasn't fully digitized its drivers license records and in most cities they're not online even if they're digital and a lot of people are without legal records of any kind for innocent (or at least alien-unrelated) reasons But they can set a lot of people on it, focusing on people who appear in the background of multiple videos, and painstakingly assemble a list of faces that are probably either worn by Andalites or belonging to their allies.

Hmm. It's a useful list, it lets him put people on monitoring all of those people's interactions with computerized systems they can watch from here, but it's not enough to guess at what they're doing. 

There is, unsurprisingly, no security camera that happens to look directly at the house and its driveway. There is, according to the maps, a pawn shop across the street. Probably they can either send another FBI agent, or make a request to the local police department, and have a security camera put there to watch suspected criminal deals their lead says are happening out front at night, and a camera placed to cover the door and sideway will happen to catch images of the house and its driveway. Hopefully without that fact being at all notable to the Andalites, though this is taking more of a risk if they're bugging everything nearby. 

...What he wants next, Visser 3 decides, is to get someone from Anchorage and slip a Yeerk into their head, but - temporarily, and without causing suspicion. There are a few different storefronts and restaurants near the house being rented, and they have employees. It's very possible said employees are local allies, but - the Andalites are likely somewhat picky about that, try to only recruit trustworthy humans and such. Can he get a list of store employees from the establishments, and then narrow it down to people who are in debt or have very bad credit scores? (Since they have those records anyway...) 

Once they have that, he would like to call one of them up and offer them an all-expenses-paid vacation to a tourist destination near DC, which they "won" by [pick something related to a car they've purchased or something.] This is a thing human companies do sometimes for advertising, for some reason, and a human without a lot of money in a dead-end job will be less likely to question it. 

If they get any takers, they can book them a flight and make plans. The humans on Earth have drugs used for surgeries that reliably cause amnesia. A Yeerk can still get information from a human brain if they're under sedation, as long as they're not totally out. They can stage an 'accident', or maybe just have the lucky winner be very drunk first, by including a free bar with their vacation. And then, even if they are reporting to the Andalites, he can send them back afterward without much grounds for suspicion. (And maybe bug them, at that point, with Yeerk recording equipment which is much harder to detect, but he'll need to decide whether to risk that.) 

It's roundabout and not the best way of getting information, and it's a bigger expenditure of resources, but it hopefully won't give his investigation away. 

Some humans in Anchorage are offered all-expenses paid trips to DC, and several of them delightedly accept. Yeerks get busy arranging sightseeing and bar nights. 

Visser 3 will do this himself, he decides. He trusts himself the most, to know what to look for, and he doesn't even need to leave Alloran's body for it. Alloran now has a Yeerk morph, and doing it that way lets Mhalir retain better and more accessible recall of everything he gleans from a brain, since he has access to Alloran's as well. 

(Alloran hates this so much.) 

Visser 3 focuses mostly on other work while everything is being arranged, it's not helpful for him to hover and it makes his personnel stressed, but it's on his mind a great deal and he checks back frequently to review if there's anything new. 

Tracing the other identifies inserted into the TransUnion records, they are fairly confident there were also apartments rented recently (using the same contacts in Alaska, or using one another as contacts) in New York and Boston and Miami and Dallas and Houston and San Antonio and Chicago and Los Angeles and San Francisco and Seattle and Portland and Denver. 

They fly in the lucky contest winners and take them on a whirlwind tour of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Monument and the Smithsonian and the Capitol and then out for drinks, which are maybe a bit more alcoholic than advertised. They supplement the drunkenness with drugs. They restrain the sleeping contest winners in a nearby government building. 

He has a doctor on hand to make sure the humans are medically stable, it's important they be sent home alive. They'll wake up the next morning with nasty hangovers and apologetic guides. 

He morphs Alloran's body into a different Yeerk. Slips into one of their ears, spreads himself out, reaches into their memories. 

His name is Walter Kennis and he's thirty-one and moved to Anchorage out of high school, there was nothing in his hometown worth staying for especially not his mother, an angry drunk, and his father, who never argued with her, and he tried a semester of college but dropped out because he wasn't any good at it and two years ago he optimistically tried to start his own business as a mechanic, but it went under and left him ten thousand dollars in debt, which he should file for bankruptcy about but he doesn't know how, and is kind of hoping it happens automatically if you just don't have any money for long enough.

He works retail. He knows the faces that Visser 3 is searching for, they come into the store sometimes. Their tastes are eclectic. Sometimes they get fourteen cans of salsa and nothing else. They pay with a credit card. The one time they were buying alcohol and he asked for ID the guy dug it out of his backpack and it was an Iowa or Indiana ID, he doesn't remember, something like that. 

Visser 3 goes in deeper on just the memories of those faces. And of the house nearby across the street, and any occasion that Walter Kennis has glanced over there while on shift, and anything at all notable that's happened. Yeerks are pretty good at digging up memory-traces even of things that a human wasn't paying that much attention to, and Visser 3 especially so. 

Sometimes they came in to the store with some other faces that their scan of video records didn't find. The girl with one leg, her boyfriend the blind guy. One of the people who lives in the house is an appallingly bad driver, sometimes he hears brakes grinding and engines shrieking and he's pretty sure the mailbox has a few new dents. They mostly don't talk to each other, though they're big on meaningful glances. 

One of his coworkers asked one of the guys out, once, got brushed off. She'd been bitter afterwards, but she wasn't that hot so he didn't think it was weird.

Visser 3 memorizes those faces perfectly in Alloran's mind, to look into later, and all the small unusual facts about them. The blind and one-legged ones are...not the sort of thing Andalites would go for, as disguises. And make them stand out. Huh. 

When he's gleaned all he can from this human, he retreats from their ear, demorphs and re-morphs quickly, and en-Yeerks the other contestant. 

Tara Graeber lives next door. She doesn't like the neighbors. One of them is black and, like, probably not that kind of black because she dresses real nice and speaks English properly but it still makes you wonder what's going to happen to the neighborhood, you know? They don't go to church. (Tara Graeber does not, herself, go to church much.) Once she headed over to tell them that they weren't allowed to park where they were parked with a storm coming in, because the snowplows need clearance, and she was doing them a goddamned favor but she wasn't very surprised to find a guy in his twenties, probably high, asked her what a snowplow was.

At least they don't litter or make a lot of noise. 

There is one other interaction in her memory, which is that once she saw them lugging in a ridiculous amount of clothing, like, just carrying this mountain of sweaters and jeans, and she thought about going out to help but it's not like they ever offered to help her so she didn't. 

Once again he scrapes through for every possible memory of every interaction. Has she seen them leave on errands much? Does she recall what stores they've come home with bags of merchandise from, or what she's seen them leaving the house with? He's not expecting anything on this, but has she ever watched any of them for more than two hours at a stretch? 

She hasn't watched them for two hours at a stretch. They go to Goodwill and to the supermarket and the bank and the... library? Maybe a bookstore. They're definitely sometimes carrying stacks of books or magazines or newspapers. They don't have an antenna or a satellite dish for TV. They tend not to leave alone.

He can get a few more faces out of her memories. There must be a lot of people living in this house, like at least ten.

Once he's gleaned everything he can, he leaves her head. Instructs the doctors to administer a final dose of amnesia-causing twilight sedation, monitor the humans' health, and arrange for them to wake up hungover back in their hotel room beds.

He goes and thinks for a while. There is definitely something going on here. What he doesn't understand, yet, is what the probably-Andalites (he's putting more than even odds on it by now, this would be a lot of weird coincidences) are hoping to achieve here. 

He wants camera surveillance on the housefronts and driveways of all the various rented houses in cities that they've now got listed, but arranged via standard criminal-investigation routes, and without involving Yeerks in cities that don't otherwise have them? 

Do any of the houses have telephone lines, or have any of the suspects made purchases of cellular or satellite phones? If so, can they, by saying 'national security' loudly, get them wiretapped without doing anything obvious and visible in their neighbourhoods? 

There are phones they can tap, and they can also get call records of past incoming and outgoing calls from those phones for as long as the telecom company keeps them.

They answer phone calls from numbers all over the country; landlords doing reference checks, when they chase them down. They make a few outgoing phone calls to various people in Alaska and Canada. What the calls are about is unclear but they will have them monitored going forwards.

...presumably the reason they're not storming in in force is that the Andalites will commit suicide but is there a reason they're not waylaying one, the next time they leave the house alone, it seems like that'd be a much faster way to get to the bottom of this?

Because he has to assume that once one of them knows, they'll all know, and then they're going to go further underground. Visser 3 wants at least a better chance of tracking them when they do that. 

He's - confused. They've now identified a lot of people in this operation, and he's putting nine of ten odds that many of them aren't from Earth. How did they get here unseen? Also, their current activities might indicate capabilities that aren't obvious, because as seen so far they don't seem that productive. 

But, yes, they should make plans to waylay one of them, maybe with a mugging and drugs, they next time their surveillance captures them leaving the house alone. Ideally they choose one of the humans who's been observed continuously for more than two hours, because anyone who might be an Andalite in morph could have thoughtspeak, in which case they could get out an alarm rather than giving the Yeerks a while until their disappearance is noted (during which they can find out if there are Yeerk-sensing precautions, and if not send them back in with a Yeerk.) 

Preparations begin for this. They take over a building a block from the ATM that the probable-Andalites seem to use, and prepare a tactical team with drugs. They could do a mugging, or hit someone with a car, the next time they see one of these faces out unaccompanied.

The next day the New York team calls in. One of their verified-humans is out alone. Go?

He takes five seconds to pace. No going back from here. 

Yes, go. 

He does not hear back from his strike team.

...Shit. This is not optimal. 

It shouldn't have taken them longer than thirty seconds to do the actual kidnapping, and their orders were to report in as soon as they had the subject, or if anything unexpected happened and they required backup. So when it's been five minutes, he snaps to someone to start trying to contact them. 

They have phone numbers for everyone on that team. They start calling them. 

Some of the phones ring unanswered. Some of the calls don't go through at all, like the phone is off (or has been destroyed). 

They start checking who is nearby, in case they want to send people to go look what happened, though - this was a well-equipped strike team of eight people -

"- also Visser we've got - a sensor reading from that location like - I don't - like a spaceship -"

"...like a hyperspace jump," someone else says slowly. 

- what. But that's– Stop. Don't think 'impossible', it's not known to be possible to jump from a gravity well but they just observed what they observed - those missing phones... 

<Get people on site. Whoever's close, go for> he's tabbing through for the map, <the corner store, first, pull their security footage> It won't cover the building itself but it gets the sidewalk right in front of the suspects' house. <Break into the house once you have> pause <two dozen people, they took down eight no trouble. You are authorized to use lethal force, if you find anyone, do not let them escape. If they are still there at all. I doubt it>

Running would be the smart thing to do once they realized they'd been spotted, it's what he would do, and could explain whatever technology they used to give off that signature. 

They make phone calls and pass these instructions along. They get estimates. They think they can get two dozen people there in ten more minutes, maybe less. 

"Looking back through logs for anything else that looked like a hyperspace jump on the surface," his lieutenant tells him. "We might've dismissed it as noise - since, you know, it's impossible -"

<Excellent thinking> He tries to praise his subordinates when they have good ideas, it should help them have more of them and not be nervous to bring them up. 

He paces. 

<Do we have groups on site anywhere else. I think we should attempt a higher-force kidnapping at some of the other locations, in case they are all about to go to ground. Presumably we have people nearby at the Washington sites?> There are a couple of those, at opposite ends of the city, DC is big. 

"We could take each location with fifty people in five minutes," someone says, pulling up a map full of red dots.

<Go for both. Please. And someone should stay back to observe and report in realtime, in case - something like that happens again>

They storm the apartment in Capitol Heights with fifty people and one hanging back to report live. He reports that the apartment is totally empty.

The storm the apartment at Dupont Circle with fifty people and one hanging back to report live. He - is abruptly cut off. A redial suggests that the phone has been destroyed. The sensors are detecting a massive surge of energy, not like someone hyperspace Gated like someone fired a ship weapon on the ground -

- they try to get nearby people on the phone but actually the first reports of what happened are on the national news.

Dupont Circle is levelled. No buildings are standing between M Street and Q Street and 19th-23rd Northwest. 

What. 

- okay, send teams to storm other houses, they're likely to find them empty at this point (how are they getting out? they didn't sense another hyperspace-jump-like signature, could be morph but they know not all of them have it) but they can at least search them, if it was a hurried evacuation they might've left something behind. 

They're doing that. 

About ten minutes later there's the news that one of the humans previously identified as living at the Dupont Circle Andalite house got out alive and is still in the city.  (They sent pictures to every Yeerk for several miles around when coordinating the doomed raid, and one of them saw her at a traffic light just now.)

Emril, Healer and Mindspeaker, is driving way over the speed limit toward Dupont Circle when she gets the fragmentary Mindspeech warning from Lasvat, :helicopter incoming–: and he drops it to focus on something else. 

She wrenches the steering wheel around and drives even faster in the opposite direction, maybe she can still reach the crew at Capitol Heights - it's a slim hope but the alternative is awful so she's going to try. She can't reach ahead with Mindspeech, yet, her range is a couple miles and the other crew are nine miles away, but she's going to try - she can't even tell them to wait for her, not with the warning - damn it, why did she and Lasvat get so complacent about solo trips...

She makes it almost to Constitution Ave before the world goes white behind her and she nearly crashes the goddamned car. Lasvat. 

Keep. Driving. She's not giving up yet. 

No one seems to be pursuing her although a lot of drivers are very angry with her and she narrowly missed being hit by a semi, half past seven in the morning is a bad time for a car chase in DC and now everyone is gawking about the giant explosion behind her. 

They should grab her, obviously. But apparently it's really important to catch these people by surprise, whoever the hell they are. She might not have her hands on whatever weapon just went off at Dupont Circle, more things will fit in a house than be portable in a car, but they can't be sure. 

(He takes three seconds to feel pain for the lives snuffed out, and then puts it aside for later.) 

He wants the Capitol Heights team headed as fast as they can in that direction. And - can the nearest Yeerk deliberately crash into her car? They should try to make it a nonfatal car crash, ideally, but she needs to have no warning before she's knocked unconscious. 

The nearest Yeerk veers out of oncoming traffic and right into her.

Aaaaaaaaaah Emril has time for an instant of red-hot fury, hey you asshole what the hell do you think you're doing - and then panic - and then they hit head-on and she slams forward, there's a brief flash of pain before everything goes away. 

Visser 3's staff does not need to be told to get the best available medical care right there right away. 

He wants her brought to one of their hospitals, obviously. This shouldn't be hard because most of the ambulance crews are theirs, and the fire department and police department - important infrastructure, they see a lot of people in the privacy of their own homes. Search the car's wreckage thoroughly, and her body, though probably if she did have a similar weapon on her the crash would have set it off. As soon as she's medically stable, have her infested so he can find out what the hell these people are doing and how. 

He paces. Waits to hear back from that team, and from the various operations now happening in a number of other cities. 

Reports trickle in over the course of the next hour. The operations in a number of other cities find empty apartments and houses. They have clothes for a handful of people, food in the fridge or the cupboards. Eclectic collections of toiletries in the bathrooms. In a couple cases they find fake ID cards and passports, and in a couple cases they find handwritten notes in an unfamiliar language or maybe in code (they are working on cracking it). 

In Miami there was another hyperspace-jump-like thing. At the point of origin there is a car, with the front door open, parked atrociously badly on the side of the road. 

The captured enemy is medically stable. They're sending someone in. 

Enstat slips in through her ear and settles in.

Emril is confused and drowsy-half-awake with drugs - something hurts but it's very far away and everything is all floaty, which makes it sort of hard to care about tracing down what happened and where she could be now. 

She tries anyway, blearily. Seems important. Car from oncoming traffic, swerving into her - the white-hot explosion behind her–

Oh no, it's not at all a good thing that she's awake is it - she tries frantically to sit up and she can't and she tries to open her Thoughtsensing and - can't do that either - reaches to stop her own heart but her Healing no longer obeys her, which is what's supposed to happen but gah she's mad about it now. 

"- this might be urgent enough that I should report from here and not after I leave," says Enstat in Spanish. "She doesn't speak Spanish."

"Yes, of course." And under a minute later someone has the Visser on the phone, in human morph. 

"Go on." 

"They have literal actual magic. There's another planet with humans on it and some of the humans there have magic and the Andalites formed an alliance with an entire army's worth of them and some of them can explode at will and most of those ones can also make magical doors point to point and some of them can do mind control or mindreading and the one I've got now has the mindreading and also what they call 'healing' but would be better understood as general biokinesis."

He breathes in a little but otherwise doesn't react much. "I see. Thank you for making the call to report immediately. Is the 'exploding at will' what happened at Dupont Circle earlier? It would have been her colleague." 

Emril doesn't understand the question because it's in Spanish. She's also trying to lean into the drugged grogginess and not have any thoughts. 

"She thought so at the time, yes."

"How many of these humans are on Earth currently, to her knowledge, and who is in command of them?" 

"She expects there are a few hundred magical humans here, reporting to a commander called Leareth who she knows to have the gates-exploding-and-generalized-spellcasting ability, the mindreading ability, and the thoughtspeak ability. There are also one or more magic horses because they have brought in some allies from a different command structure that involves magic horses."

He has so many questions but, priorities. "Does she know the location of their base, that the small groups stationed in various cities would have evacuated to." 

"Alaska. She couldn't point it out on a map but it's an abandoned mine."

"One moment." This isn't especially surprising but it lets him make his earlier orders a little more informative - get the location of every abandoned mine in Alaska, especially near Juneau and Anchorage, review sensor coverage for minor blips not previously noted as relevant but that may be close to one of the candidate mines, make plans to move agents to Alaska but do not engage yet. "Thank you. What other kinds of capabilities do their forces have as a result of the generalized spellcasting ability - uses in combat, defence, spying...?" 

"...a lot. They can tell whether there's a Yeerk in someone with mindreading from a variety of ranges, blocks to up to miles, those of them with that ability, and pick up surface thoughts from us and the host alike. Generalized spellcasting has offense including lightning and fireballs and demon summoning, assorted defensive shields, trap spells. Some spells can be applied to artifacts and carried by other people but need recharging. Their strongest thoughtspeakers have a range of a few hundred miles; there's a longer-range spell the casters can use. There's a separate ability that can telekinese or teleport things, increasing in difficulty if they're going far or the thing is heavy. There's an especially rare ability that is called 'mind healing' but like the biokinesis healing is better understood as fairly general mind editing; there aren't many of those but Leareth's second in command has that and the general spellcasting one and my host is terrified of her. - in a general sense; they have good unit discipline. Both the casters and mind healers can force people to do things, including Yeerks separately from hosts and vice versa, possibly in ways that persist on a host after infestation but fortunately mine right now can't explode."

"What does she know about the Andalites involved and the resources they are bringing in here?" 

"They have a Dome ship and some shuttles. She's heard the names Matirin and Cayaldwin and Rilem, there are more but she can't tell them apart well enough to guess how many and hasn't seen them in very large groups. At least twelve."

"Noted. I assume she was deployed to do reconnaissance in Washington and made reports back to their base. What has she observed of our operations here?" 

"They know about the president. This one knows the location of the northwest pool. She wouldn't expect to be receiving a lot of intel, they probably know a lot more."

The Visser starts to ask another question, and then there's a loud alarm in the background, and he cuts off. "–Written report," he says, very fast, and then the call ends with a click. 

Enstat starts writing. (In Spanish.)

<Hi Emril,> she remarks while jotting down estimates of the prevalence of various Gifts.

Why is the brain slug talking to her. She didn't think they cared at all about the people who used to own the bodies they were wearing. 

<- 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 -

It might be a trick but he wants them alive, so badly, it's - starting to feel like it might be the only way out of this that doesn't end in the exact pileup of bodies he never wanted.

They should get medical care to them - and they should find out right away if any of them is Leareth, whose pictures they have, and if so airlift him out immediately. Also infest him, as soon as he's not actively dying. 

(He has people monitoring all the comms for anything suspicious and is absolutely ready to bomb the site if it seems like it's the really dangerous kind of trap.) 

They send people in. If it's a trick it's still not obvious. 

"Have the one in the pictures," someone says into a cell phone a couple of minutes later. There's some rustling. "Alive."

At the same moment he gets notification from the Blade ship that  twisted construct creatures that are all teeth and claws are systematically disemboweling their way across the Blade ship, advice???

...Wow. He's - not really sure what the Andalites and mages' plan was, here, do the twisted construct creatures seem able to do anything? They've presumably done the sensible thing and closed the barricade doors. If the creatures don't go down to dracon beams, or it's not possible to do that without destroying the ship itself, they should - evacuate whoever they can? 

- if they end up deciding to do that, or if they can't and are about to lose, he's assuming the Andalites have a stage two to this plan; they want the ship for themselves, not just out of commission. So if they're going to get that, he wants it rigged to self-destruct. Either an hour in the future, or, if they can manage it, ten minutes after a hyperspace-jump Gate signature is detected inside it again. 

He wants them to get Leareth medical care and transport him away from the mine, and he's on his way. 

They are throwing everything they have at getting him stable. It'd have been really great if they'd found the site twenty minutes earlier but he'll pull through. Might be able to ill-advisedly nudge him around to consciousness in another couple of minutes, should they do that.

He won't be there yet in a couple of minutes, he was starting out in orbit, he'll meet them in, oh, ten or fifteen minutes, nearest secured area, he's still not entirely sure the Andalites won't have rigged the mine to explode on a dead-man's-switch or something. As soon as he's a little more stable and it's not too ill-advised to wake him, though, he wants them to infest him with any available Yeerk, to get some preliminary information.

Visser 3 is betting he will want to do it himself, in morph, but he doesn't want to be the first person in Leareth's head.

Yes, they can have that lined up for as soon as the Yeerk will be able to get anything. Which shouldn't be too much longer, now. 

The shuttle descends.

His tail lashes. He tries to stop it, it scares his staff. Understandably. 

He tries not to dwell on how completely, utterly, bone-shakingly terrified he is. 

When the patient is near consciousness they Yeerk him. The Yeerk is going to have a bad time at first, in a brain that is out cold from damage like this, but it's better than any chance of the man becoming conscious while still free; who knows what he could do. 

Ughhhh he feels very terrible - wrong - something - where...? 

Leareth's thoughts are still fragmented and gluey but as soon as he can sense the surface distantly above him, light and motion but very far away, he starts clawing his way toward consciousness. Instinctively reaches for his Gifts. 

- can't - 

No. 

Tries to Final Strike, which he also can't do, and then tries to move and can't either, and in the moment of relaxing his efforts, which is almost but not quite shaped like giving up, he nearly passes out again - tired - maybe fine, better not to think, now... 

The Yeerk opens Leareth's mouth. "Visser three...here yet...this is very complicated...he needs to see it..."

"Five minutes," someone says. "Uh, orders were to learn what you can in the interim." 

Who's calling what complicated, Leareth is thinking, dully, none of this has seemed all that complicated to him. Messy, sure. About to get a whole lot messier, definitely. Damn it. Hopefully Matirin does the correct strategic thing, here, and finds where they've taken him and kills him. 

- wondering vaguely how they got him at all, there's a gap in his memory, but damn it Visser Three is good.

Four minutes away.

"He's immortal. Thousands of years old. Takes new bodies. There's a lot here - not sure what we need - I can't use the magic powers, they did something to block that -"

You're complicated, the Yeerk says to him. More than I expected. You don't just hate us.

...Oh, that. Well, what good would hating them do. Only makes it harder to weigh the tradeoffs. They're people too, just - he didn't know how to build a world they fit into, not starting from this disaster, and he hoped winning the war would get him a platform to build from but that might not even happen now. 

We have a plan for that. I'm not privy to any of the details obviously but that - building a world we fit into, where we're hosted by willing people - that's the idea.

Once we're not fighting for our lives.

They're making reasonable choices from their perspective, given their goals and incentives. He wishes Visser Three were less reasonable, even, unreasonable people are easier to win wars against... He didn't go off-planet to investigate or anything, but his people read a lot of Yeerk thoughts and they're pretty sure the conquering of other worlds happened about the way it was described... Gods, he's so tired and still feels terrible, he's not in the mood to hash this out right now and would rather sleep. 

He tests whether he can try to fall asleep when a Yeerk is in his brain. 

He can try but there's someone using his mouth to talk, which is very distracting. "Andalite commander is Matirin. At a different base, they evacuated to three different places and he didn't know where any of them were. He doesn't know whether the other ones were in Alaska, Matirin would've been constrained by Gate range from the first one. Gate range is hundreds not thousands of miles. We should maybe try to gas the mines in Canada, too."

(Elsewhere, word reaches Visser 3 that someone Gated into the gas-filled mine and did a Final Strike. They'd already gotten many of the bodies out, though, and they're seeing if any more are salvageable.)

(Visser 3 thanks them, tells them to keep up the good work.) 

He asks his people to make preparations for gassing mines in Canada, in order of distance from the evacuated base, but not to begin anything yet. 

The shuttle lands outside a small rural Alaska hospital, the nearest facility they could medevac Leareth too, which has now been fully taken over and secured by the Yeerk forces. He gets out, heads for the room where they have Leareth. 

<Updates?> he asks the Yeerk currently in Leareth's head. 

" - the Andalites are planning to destroy the planet if they can't stop us from taking it. He doesn't know how."

<I see> He turns to the nearest doctor. <Can we briefly put him under again to switch out Yeerks. Apparently I need to see this myself.>

"Yes, Visser." They put a patch of something on his skin. 

"Thousands of years old," the Yeerk says, "he takes over other bodies - there's a lot here -" and then the body is uncooperative with further speech. 

He morphs Yeerk, right there in the hospital room. It's a particularly gruesome morph. He asks one of them to please scoop him up and swap him out. 

...He hates the brief moment when all his senses go away and it's just him and Alloran, blind, deaf, helpless. But he knows it won't last long, and is calm about it. 

The other Yeerk comes out and they press him against Leareth's ear.

Mhalir can worry about the Andalites planning to destroy the planet later. When he's seen - whatever this is. It feels so very important. 

He spreads himself out into every corner of Leareth's brain. It's frustrating at first because the brain is half-sedated still and not giving him much in the way of thoughts or sensory input, but it's a short-acting anesthetic, he just has to wait seconds. 

The world comes back in layers, and once he can feel his body at all, Leareth isn't at all surprised to find that he can't move. 

He wonders if this is it - if Matirin is (maybe correctly) going to determine it's too late, and destroy Earth. He feels - grief, regret. Wondering what he missed, replaying bits of the past weeks, though he's still too groggy to really hold onto it. Maybe he just got complacent. Didn't expect someone on the other side to be as good as him, to be able to piece together a picture from what must have been very few hints, and stay a step ahead - how - they must have gotten the Healer, the one in Washington, what was her name, he can't recall... 

There is, in fact, so much here. Mhalir should be prioritizing, hard, they're running short on time, but - there's so much, and - well, all minds are beautiful, in their own way, to Yeerks. Hopes and dreams and childhood memories, love and hate, plans and regrets. But this one is - more - it's like drinking from a cold spring and only realizing then just how thirsty he is. 

He dives deeper - 

- a tower silhouetted against the stars - a man whose face he no longer remembers - recognition, relief, hope - to build something better - never to give up never to die never to leave - to win to fix it no matter what as long as it takes - 

What. 

Alloran hates the Yeerk morph, even more than he hates every minute of their shared existence, he's been mostly shifting quietly in the back of Mhalir's thoughts, gleeful at the thought of the Yeerk's prize being snatched away, even if in ashes - and he doesn't want to help Mhalir notice anything important, so he's not really looking -

- but this human has less of the tragic smallness of the humans they've seized before, and he's curious, paying attention despite himself -

Thousands of years old. It's so - organized - it reminds Mhalir obscurely of his own note-keeping, he started doing it as soon as he had hands and the ability to write - it's somewhat redundant now with Alloran, his quick Andalite mind and brain chip, but he doesn't know that he'll have Alloran's body forever. 

...He's done so many things. So many of them awful. Lives burned for fuel - a ledger of numbers, from a very long time ago, his careful calculations of how this many deaths worth of power could increase crop yields this amount, with this likelihood - and always the same question, matter-of-fact, unemotional save for the inevitable background current of determination, is it worth it. 

Less crisp but more recent memories - reading about Hitler, about Hiroshima, pacing in the dark and hurting, a painful update, absorbing something that was already true before he knew it, this is reality - vague recall of nightmares, not real but echoes of a reality, a tower going up in flames, a man - 

<Who was Urtho> 

This feels like an almost offensively personal question from his enemy! Of course, he can't help but drift to it anyway, not that the Yeerk even needs that. 

His first teacher. The person who showed him, with fifty years of work, that something better could be had. Who wrote letters to him. 

- who betrayed him, and killed himself in a fiery conflagration to deny Ma'ar his resources, and then...something, he still doesn't know what, a weapon, an assassination team, probably, but all records were lost - and he awoke in a world in shambles. 

<You miss him> 

Of course. 

<He betrayed you. He killed you, destroyed everything you had worked for> 

He was spooked. Ma'ar's mistakes were at fault, there, Leareth knows that now, he was so young and confused and trying so, so, hard, but trying isn't enough, and he make missteps, and what happened might have been disproportionate but that's how the world is, right, it's not fair. And Urtho wanted a better world. They had - goals in common, even if they weren't aligned, not really... And if he'd understood more, maybe, if he hadn't been so young and so rushed, if he'd had patience, maybe it wouldn't have ended up such a stupid pointless waste...

Alloran is confused, but - catching up, sort of, to why Mhalir cares about this, to what connections he's drawing -

You're nothing like him, he thinks, bitterly. Even to people who think they're monsters, you're a monster. The only way for you to make the world a better place is to let it be one that doesn't have you in it.

Mhalir lets that slide. Not productive to argue, right now. 

<Leareth, I - do not expect you to believe me, but please hear me out. I...want the same things that you do> 

- Well, that is the kind of argument best suited to convincing a Leareth, he feels a flicker of respect for that, for how fast this Yeerk figured it out. Implausible, though. Actions speak louder than words, right, and he can guess it's not as perfectly clear-cut as the Andalites would like to claim, but he knows enough. 

Search, riffling through memories–

<The Andalites told you that we betrayed Seerow> 

Yes, they did. He read their minds about it, too. He can guess that, too, is probably messier than presented, reality generally is, but. Still. That wasn't really a loadbearing part of his choosing his side; it was a piece, but he knows more than enough about what the Yeerks have done since then, and their activities on Earth so far - his people read a lot of Yeerk thoughts about it - and that's enough. 

<Seerow betrayed us> 

Oh really. 

<He could have spoken with me! He - did not - caught us entirely by surprise...> 

Alloran is pretty sure that is bullshit, in the transmissions he has read from the last few years before the betrayal, Seerow was nervous about the Yeerks and their sudden ambitions for galactic conquest, I've warned them, he said, that they must not pursue this...stupid of him, to have warned them, it just taught them to be more secretive about their plans...

<...He thought we were greedy. That we - ought to stay small - not wish for better things, not - try to use our strength to help the rest of the universe grow, as he helped us... Did you know anything about what state the Taxxons lived in before we came? The Hork-Bajir? And the Andalites did not care. Seerow - cared, enough to work with us - but he was the only one> 

Mhalir is not normally this emotional when he's trying to interrogate a host in Yeerk morph. It's odd. 

Leareth doesn't know much about the Taxxons or Hork-Bajir, actually. Mostly just that they're very handy for war. The Taxxons...eat people? 

<Very rarely, now! We have vat meat to feed them, now, on their home world, and are working on other engineered-medicine solutions to their constant hunger> 

Maybe the Andalites would care about more species if the one time they tried they hadn't unleashed an army of fast-spawning nightmare slug-conquerers destroying lives throughout the galaxy. That may have perhaps influenced the Andalite attitude towards trying to technologically uplift people in need. The best thing the Yeerks could've done for all those other peoples is to have never existed been a success story.

That - genuinely hurts. They were trying. Well, at least he was trying, and he had a substantial faction very loyal to him. Mhalir was never the leader of the Yeerks, and, well, he had quite a lot of influence but not infinite influence. There were some who from the start didn't care about consensual hosts. Mhalir fought back hard, and - damn it, he would have won that round if not for the surprise attack. Which was a surprise, even if there had been some warning mutters, before, it escalated so quickly and it was the first war in his species' history and how...was he supposed to know... 

But it doesn't matter in the end whose fault it was, or how unfair. Or how much he misses Seerow and wanted him to be proud. This is the reality they have now. One where the Andalites tried to pre-emptively take out everything the Yeerks had built so that they could grow, and Mhalir wouldn't have made the choice to start that war, he never wanted a war, but he wasn't going to just give up. And once you're in a war anyway, the thing to be done is win it, and figure out terms from there. 

Except that the Andalites have a weapon to destroy Earth, and might be scared enough to do that...

<You are being very reasonable in doubting me> he says to Leareth. <I cannot ask you to do otherwise; I am the one who must prove things to you, here. But - start with the premise that I am telling the truth, and I - we are so alike, I never thought to...> Focus. <If you were in my position, and wanted this to go well and not disastrously, what would you do> 

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. 

Mhalir, honestly, has no idea what he's doing here. Twenty-four hours ago everything still made sense and he was in control of the world and they were a long way from victory but they were on the path to it, and now...

Now he's reading the mind of someone who is...uncannily like him except better, and that person is very confidently thinking at him that he should surrender. Leareth - wishes he had surrendered to Urtho, two thousand years ago. Even though he would likely have died (and maybe not come back, his methods had been untested at the time, just as Mhalir's are now.) Even though it would have cost him all the progress he had made, everything he had built at such effort and cost... 

Do the math. 

Five billion people. 

He feels almost dizzy, and it's not because Leareth's body is still suffering pretty hard from the ill effects of being gassed. He feels like he was sailing down and river and didn't see the waterfall until he was already past the edge. 

He's looking into Leareth's mind and his memories of Matirin and he's wishing he had known any of that yesterday. Wishing he had listened to Enstat and done something about it sooner - he hadn't felt like he had the leeway to act, but in hindsight, maybe what he lacked was the leeway not to act on that information...

<Any updates?> he asks. <Are they still not firing> 

"No response. Haven't opened fire yet. 

- oh, now they've opened fire. And - we've got another hyperspace jump-signature -"

Alloran is delighted. The Andalites might get out and take down the Pool ship, it's perfect -

There's no point in repeating his order to have all the other ships protect the pool ship and keep returning fire. The only good news, here, is that the Andalite force can't have more than one, maybe one and a half minutes left. 

He waits.

The Visser should surrender he should do it now just goddamned broadcast it at all of Canada and - do something really costly - it may already be past the point of no return here but Leareth is pretty sure there's no path out of this, other than the Yeerks surrendering, that doesn't lead to a massive pileup of bodies. 

Leareth thinks of the Pool ship. Innocent baby Yeerks who haven't even done anything. He would be crying, right now, if he had any control of his body to do it. He thinks of Seerow, who sounds a little like Urtho, and aches for it. Immutable past that he can't undo, repeated across another world - an echo of confusion, there, it's weird that he feels so much recognition...

It's not weird because Mhalir is now coming to the conclusion that they are, in some baffling metaphysical sense, literally the same person. Separated by thousands of years and different species and worlds. Which is ridiculous, he can't think of any explanation for why that would be a thing that could happen, he must be missing some normal explanation... 

- or he could be missing something else, unknown unknowns, blank places off the edge of his map - doesn't matter now anyway. 

He sucks a heaving breath into Leareth's lungs. <Order the pool ship to signal surrender> 

This order is less confusing because they're assuming it's a ruse of some kind. They pass it along.

<And> point of no return but they already passed it <broadcast the same signal to Canada again do it NOW> 

- sure, okay -

And now there's really nothing else to do but wait, he's dealt all his cards. 

Mhalir doesn't think he's ever been this scared. 

Leareth is daring to hope now, and that almost hurts more. 

Also he's very confused, and starting to tug at it, why is the Visser appears to be actually listening to him and implementing his suggestions. 

"- Andalites blew up," Visser 3's staffer reports, thirty seconds later. "Pool ship's badly damaged but intact, Blade ship's gone -"

<Direct everyone available in space to repair the Pool ship> If it even matters. The Andalites have a Dome ship. It's on Velgarth, right now, but they have communications, Leareth confirmed that. 

It's...probably too late, now, Leareth's best guess here is that Matirin interpreted the communications as a trick - so reasonable of him, really - and now that the ship's blown up, with Matirin's people on it, Leareth finds it really unlikely he'll - be in a headspace to consider de-escalating right this second. 

...Was the ship firing until it blew up because that seems like relevant information actually, Matirin won't risk replying to the surrender broadcast if it could give away his location but he might, just might, have tried to get his people off the ship... 

Mhalir thinks someone would have said something, surely, but...

<Review all the sensor logs. Find out if there was any length of interval before the explosion when the ship was not firing. Do it now> 

It takes a few minutes; the best timestamped records are on the Pool ship and they need corroborating with the other ships and several of the timestamps don't match because there's a lot of damage to every ship involved. 

"Uh - looks like seven, eight tenths of a second before the explosion they stopped firing. Or paused firing, we don't know if they actually meant to stop..."

...It could be a fluke. But it could also mean that Matirin listened, to the second message claiming surrender, and they got the people - or some of the people - or tried and failed to get the people out...

It's hard to model Matirin's current state of information and the inferences he's made, but Leareth thinks it's probably worth talking to them more. 

<What would you say, if you were in my position> 

Hmm. It's a pretty difficult spot! The only thing that might, repeat, might change Matirin's mind, here, is if the Visser is telling the truth to Leareth - Leareth can't tell at all, his Thoughtsensing isn't working - and is in fact willing to make some really heavy concessions.

<Concessions such as what> 

Leareth really doesn't know what would do it! Maybe if the Visser agreed to stay in Leareth's head, in a body they know to be crippled of its Gifts, and go alone to a neutral location, and allow himself to be knocked out by a Healer, and then Nayoki can set-command both of them and read the Visser's thoughts...

<I am absolutely not doing that> 

Leareth wasn't really expecting him to. It's a gamble and the Andalites might, at this point, straight-up murder him anyway. Both of them, technically; Leareth can't manage much emotion about that, right now. He's died before anyway. Been murdered by people he thought were his allies, even. Lots of times. 

They could...offer to get their ships out of orbit around the planet, hand Earth over to the Andalites while getting the poor baby Yeerks out of danger. Can the Pool ship do a hyperspace jump? 

<I doubt it can right now, it was heavily damaged> 

Sigh. Well, can they...turn off all its shields or something? In an externally visible way? 

<Why would we do that> 

Because the Andalites might have sensor coverage to pick up on it, and do not currently have anything they could use to take it out anyway, Leareth is the only mage who could plausibly have Gated directly there to Final Strike and they...don't have him. And it'll put a bit more oomph behind the surrender message. 

Mhalir thinks, hard. 

- Alloran is also confused by Mhalir, at this point. Presumably this is not the first time it occurred to him that Andalites would destroy Earth rather than let him have it? A similar thing played out on the Hork-Bajir world, after all - a bioweapon - 

No, that's not the new information, Mhalir thinks absently.

- What is the new information? It's a little hard to name it. That Leareth - endorses surrendering in conditions like these, despite, as far as he can tell, thinking exactly the way Mhalir does? That Leareth, despite being - who he is - was able to get Andalites on his side, well, join their side, but same difference, Matirin trusted him with so much... 

<Broadcast another message> he tells his people. <Tell them that Visser Three will consider returning Leareth, verifiably not infested, as an offer of good faith. However, we will likely need some assistance from them on this front, since I worry that if we leave him free for any length of time he will be forced by the mind-editing precautions he took to explode and kill himself> 

"...Visser," says his staff member. "Uh, I am ...concerned about the possibility that the host's magic powers are...affecting you."

Perfect. It's so reasonable of them to be concerned about that. Gah. So close. 

Mhalir draws in a deep breath and lets it out. <I understand your concern. I am fairly sure his mind-powers are blocked, but> He thinks for a moment. <...The Healer, who we gave to Enstat. Can she be brought over here, immediately>

She has Thoughtsensing - well, would have it, if she wasn't Yeerked right now, but they can worry about that hurdle when they get to it. And she doesn't have mind-control. Or the ability to explode. She could...kill herself, probably, if set free? But maybe reversibly, and she's no longer their only hostage or even an especially well-informed one. 

" - yeah, I can arrange that, one second." She looks relieved. 

He waits. 

Daring to hope again only makes it hurt more. 

They get the Yeerked Healer on the fastest shuttle over. "It'll be fifteen minutes."

<Hoo boy,> remarks Enstat. <I think the way this has to work probably is that I have to leave you and then you tell them that Leareth's magic powers definitely can't be affecting the Visser right now? Instead of killing yourself. Or me. Or Leareth. Or all of us. As soon as your Gifts are back. Can we figure out as fast as possible if I can get you to do that somehow? We could get my old host on the phone and she could vouch for me - I guess you can't tell over the phone if there's somebody else in there - we could get her on a shuttle too and you could agree not to kill anybody till you've checked if she's alone, she is, she's being treated for cancer - can you fix cancer ->

Emril is surprised and confused for a moment and then starts trying to actually think. 

...Well, she can't kill anyone but herself as long as they don't leave her touching anyone. She could kill herself, of course. ...She might have to, this isn't a briefing they got or anything but it would be very like Leareth to stick compulsions on his people for that. In which case it's probably based on expectations? If she expects she's about to be Yeerked, but isn't currently, she might literally have to stop her own heart. (Although it occurs to her that with Earth medical tech that could be reversible, and it probably wouldn't force her to give herself a stroke or something more permanent...)

And she thinks the set-command blocking her Gifts is based on expectations, too, it - probably depends on her believing she's free? In the tests they did, it sometimes flipped back on its own and sometimes didn't. 

She's not sure how to work with that because right now she super does not trust Enstat and cannot read Enstat's thoughts even though Enstat can read all of hers, so there's a pretty big asymmetry there. 

<We can ask the Visser if Leareth ordered a compulsion like that and if he did we're... kind of in trouble... so let's assume he didn't. Would getting Aileen on the phone help at all. You'll be able to read my mind once I'm out if you don't kill anybody and I can convince you I'm not going straight back in and neither is anybody else, I can be okay in a fishbowl for a minute or two - Aileen realized one time she didn't know what I looked like and I didn't either, we're blind, and it was technically not in-protocol but she put me in with her goldfish and had a look and put me back ->

This isn't the main point, but that's both hilarious and adorable. Sure, Emril can't think of any other way forward from here, so might as well talk to Aileen, it'll be hard to take any of it at face value but she is curious. 

Enstat places the call from in the shuttle, after the annoying security rigmarole for dialing an outside line, hospital number and extension and "Hello?"

"It's Enstat."

"- prove it."

Enstat sighs and sings, "You are my snailshell, my only snailshell -"

"- okay! Okay! Who are you embarrassing me in front of -"

"It is so complicated. Can you - can you tell her about me - uh, in English, she doesn't have Spanish and if I have to translate that doesn't help -"

"What, just - you know it's kind of rude to ask your ex for references for the newcomer -"

"I told you you're not my ex, we're on a break, and once you're not having poison for lunch every day - actually uh - fuck, that's probably not need to know."

"I hate your need to know protocols," says Aileen.

"Yeah they're sometimes annoying."

"I'm doing fine, by the way, thanks for asking."

"I wrote you a letter three days ago."

"That used to be how long we'd go between not hanging out."

"What do you want me to do, borrow a hospital janitor and bring you flowers, think of the janitor, swapping hosts around all the time is awful for relationship-building - I'm only doing this now because, uh - need to know, but -"

"Uh-huh. You, whoever you are, she has awful taste in telenovela opinions. She got my son talking to me again - I mean, before I had to fake my death, which I'm still mad about -"

"That wasn't up to me, we'll figure something out once you're better."

"He just started talking to me again and then whoops I can't have a Yeerk if I'm getting chemo and your security protocols -"

"Aileen hon I'm kind of in a hurry."

"Sorry - what does she want to know -"

Emril wants reasons why she should trust Enstat, like, at all. Ideally reasons that - are hard to fake by just hearing someone who could be an actor on script say something over the telephone, but that's a hard ask.

What would Leareth do, here? 

She...wants information about Enstat's goals? What sorts of actions she took, what she was trying to accomplish, what drives her decisions. 

"She wants to know what I'm about, what I'm trying to do and why -"

Aileen snorts. "Enstat wants everybody to be friends. Her job's called 'host relations coordinator' at least when she's not doing whatever she's doing with you now which does not sound very host relations coordinated, she comes up with a million and one ways to make hosting a Yeerk a value-add so they're not having to fight for every minute, they'll get you to buckle down and write your thesis just the way you'd write it if you were able to concentrate or - she did my laundry, she kept doing my laundry even when my brother said 'who are you and what did you do with Aileen', I mean, he was joking but that has to be scary if you're a secret bodysnatching alien -"

"Ugh, my soul left my body," says Enstat.

"There you go, but the laundry got done, the dishes got done, she did counseling sessions, she was working on some psychometrics to try to match people better, and I told her 'this is a lot of effort when you could just have no mean no' and she said 'I would love that but everything's hush hush right now, the other aliens hate us, I have to prove that it's not true we can't do better than Gedds, I have to prove that it's possible we can find what we want and there's people who'll want it with us' - Gedds are the ones they evolved with back home but apparently they're, uh, they really need Yeerks, that's why they kept coming back to the pools for 'em on an evolutionary scale, and they aren't very good company? - she's lonely."

"We're all lonely."

"She's lonelier. She wants all the Yeerks to never have to be lonely again. That's what she's about. I miss her," Aileen adds, softly.

<Can you fix her?> Enstat wonders silently.

Depends what kind of cancer, Velgarth Healing can get some better than others, but she remembers her direct boss on the Healers' team being pretty sure that if they got more access to Andalite medicine, they'd be able to combine it really well. So - maybe to probably? 

<It's breast cancer.>

"You still there?" Aileen asks.

"Yeah -" <What else should I ask her?>

Ummm wow this is really high pressure. Aileen...misses her Yeerk?

She wants Enstat to ask, if Aileen had her back, and Enstat needed her help to do something that was - possibly very dangerous, but might help a lot of people - would she do it. 

"She wants to know, if you had me back, and I needed your help to do something dangerous that might help a lot of people, would -"

"Oh god are you on a suicide mission, if you tell me that's not need to know I'll -"

"Aileen!"

"- I'll cancel my cable and be really rude about it so it's a huge hassle to get it back later - don't you get Enstat hurt, whoever you are - I mean I know you're not driving but -"

"Aileen," begs Enstat.

"Yes, goddammit."

She would take a deep breath except she can't because Enstat is controlling her body. 

Obviously she can't take any of that at face value, but...it's not outside the realms of plausibility that it's true. And she has no idea what's been going on in the war since she was taken but they have Leareth so it's bad. And it's not like Enstat leaving her head actually makes her any worse off. Either she won't have her Gifts back, or she'll mandatorily kill herself, or she - won't do either, but she'll still have a chance to kill herself if they backstab her... Oh, but they could knock her out again. 

It seems like the options here are: one, Enstat is telling the truth, and things are very bad but maybe salvageable and possibly she could make the difference. Or, two, Enstat is lying, in which case probably nothing Emril does makes any difference. Well, she could kill Leareth. (The thought is awful.) They - should probably restrain her first so she can't? She doesn't need physical contact to read his mind, just to stop his heart. 

Of course, reading Leareth's thoughts helps the Yeerks. But - only if they're telling the truth, probably? They can get her to read him but they can't put fake thoughts in his head. 

Can Enstat promise they won't knock her out again and re-Yeerk her against her will? She - isn't sure how much weight she could put on that, as a promise, when she can't read Enstat's mind. She could read Enstat first, before she agrees to read Leareth and help them? 

<Yeah, you can read me. I - am not sure of my current authority to make promises - also I will probably not leave if you'll have to kill yourself if I do but we'll ask the Visser about that - I can ask about making a promise like that and if we make it it'll be legit, though, Visser Three's very good about that.> "Love you," she tells Aileen.

"Be safe."

"Beat cancer."

"Like a redheaded stepchild," says Aileen.

Enstat hangs up.

They can ask the Visser about that when they arrive, then. What's the redheaded stepchild reference about, she doesn't get it. 

<You know, I'm not sure where it comes from, it's just an expression for some reason.>

Huh. Emril figures Velgarth has expressions like that too, maybe it's just a thing about languages. 

The Visser is good about promises, huh. Does Enstat have examples of that? (Not that she can trust those either, but it'll be informative whether Enstat can list some on the spot.) 

He never shoots the messenger - apparently some Vissers are much worse about that, Enstat has heard from her older friends - and if he says achieving some objective will be rewarded it will, and he has the whole fake-your-death-and-go-into-a-Yeerk-run-hospital setup for hosts that their Yeerks are attached to even if there's no particular reason to be optimistic that the host will ever be usable again.

Huh. Sounds a bit like Leareth's leadership style - he's very ruthless in battle conditions and in terms of what plans he's willing to use, but in peacetime during the lead-up to the invasion, he was a great boss to have. Really good benefits. He's willing to employ really dubious people as external contractors, sometimes - or whatever Highjorune was, she doesn't know the full story there but she heard it involved demons being summoned - but the important people in his organization are really well vetted and they're mostly great to work with. Everything's well organized, too, it's so much better than the original Healers' house she joined in Rethwellan where the senior Healer used to disappear for two candlemarks on lunch break and come back tipsy. 

It sounds really nice, Enstat agrees.

They're here.

"I need to know if she's compulsioned to kill herself if I come out," Enstat tells Visser Three. "She isn't sure."

Oh, hey, that's - Emril, right. Well, Emril as a passenger to the Yeerk in her head, presumably, and Leareth is also a passenger and can't do anything to acknowledge her. 

All his people were compulsioned to kill themselves if a Yeerk was being stuffed into their ear or if they thought this was about to happen. Leareth - suspects the compulsion shouldn't actually apply the other way around? If she thinks the Yeerk is about to re-enter her head it'll probably kick in. Or if she thinks they're about to knock her out in order to do that. Possibly just if she gets spooked in general, it's expectations-based, but he's pretty sure if the Yeerk is getting further away from her rather than closer then she'll be fine. 

Visser 3 passes this on. 

Can Enstat promise not to go back into her head? And then be verifiably thinking that promise when Emril has her Gifts back? Emril thinks that'd be enough, but presumably Enstat needs to be in someone's head again soon or she'll have a bad time. 

<I can do that. I can make do in water for a while.> "I need a bowl of water - or a Pool or something, I don't know how long water alone will cut it - or a spare host. So I can promise not to go back to Emril and she can read my mind about it."

Leareth thinks that plus no sudden moves should do it. Probably. (He's so proud of Emril right now, she's - trying so hard to reason about what to do, she must be terrified...) 

<We can promise that> To the others in the room: <Do we have any spare hosts for Enstat on site> 

They haven't actually Yeerked all the captured Andalites yet, there weren't that many Yeerks around and then suddenly major operation, she could have one of those?

Leareth is thinking that if any of the Andalites they got out are high up in the command structure - or related to Matirin, like, what's his name, Talik - it might be really valuable to keep them un-Yeerked. Offer to return them unharmed. Good faith effort. 

<Do you have Talik alive? I would like to keep him not infested for now, assuming you have a way of securing him in the interim> 

"We, uh, can't tell Andalites apart. If you can and want to pick them out for us we could show you pictures. We're keeping them unconscious."

<I can tell Andalites apart. Please do that. Enstat can have one of the others if she wishes although if - this goes the way Leareth is hoping it might - it could be a temporary situation. I apologize for that, Enstat> 

"I want the Healers to cure Aileen so I can have her back if this goes well."

<Emril thinks it is possible they can do that?>

"Yeah, especially if there's Andalite medical tech floating around."

Obviously he should do that if they can? Leareth isn't sure how to reason about how likely it is, that they'll have circumstances where they can pull it off, but.

<If Emril wishes to help then yes, I can commit to trying it. I do not wish to commit to keeping any Healers as Controllers, right now, when there are so many unknowns about our negotiating position with Leareth's people or the Andalites> 

Of course she'll help. If they pull this off, if this works - also she's a Healer, what else is she going to do. And she hates cancer's face. 

"She says she will. Where's an Andalite I can borrow?"

They can take her to the Andalites and get the Visser pictures so he can approve or reject captured Andalites as hosts. They got eight and have only hosted four so far.

Enstat slips into a fifth, settling in only shallowly in case they're ever in a position to verify she did that.

And now Emril is free and has her body back and - yes, it seems like her Gifts are her own too, and now she can read Enstat. Carefully and politely trying not to read the Andalite too although she can't help picking up fragments. 

Is Enstat sincere about everything she said? 

Yup. She's trying to think that nice and clearly. Also she's very worried about Aileen who in her letters complains about being sick and miserable and bald and gets ambiguous test results.

Oh no. That's really tragic and it makes Emril blink and dab at her eyes, although maybe she's just emotional and shaky from the aftereffects of being mind-controlled by a brain slug - although she's a lot less ughh about the entire concept, now, for some reason. Poor Aileen. Poor Enstat, losing a friend, bumped around from one head to another. 

"I'm going to do my best to help her," she says, levelly. "Please don't put another Yeerk in my head, I meant that." 

And she turns to the other Controllers. "I, er, have Thoughtsensing back and I want to help, I can read both of them. Should I do that now?" 

"- yeah. I guess so. I don't know what checks the Visser had in mind - I guess if he proposes them, then they're not as credible -"

They confer anxiously for a moment speaking a language she doesn't. "Can you read them and just describe what is going on. Please."

Emril takes a deep breath. She can do that. 

Leareth's Gifts are blocked. Very blocked. He feels very helpless, and scared and sad and frustrated, there's still no particular tactical reason to fold away his emotions so he hasn't bothered. It's vaguely upsetting him that he doesn't know more of the strategic picture. He's very confused about Visser 3's decision process, right now, but he's also feeling almost painfully hopeful. They've lost a lot - it's going to hurt for a long time - but maybe they can stop the body count here. Maybe. He still feels trapped and out of options, and terrified, but - it's reassuring, seeing Emril there, calm and trying her best to help. 

Wow she did not know Leareth was capable of being that scared and upset, it's really weird! 

Emril reports what she's reading in a toneless voice. "He can't be mind-controlling the Visser," she finishes. "He doesn't have Gifts and he's terrified about it. He's just - thinking about what he would do in your situation. Um, should I read the Visser next." For some reason she's even more scared to do that. 

"Yes, please." They also look nervous about this but the Visser has never yet executed a subordinate for being paranoid when it was inconvenient.

She does so. 

Visser 3 is also very scared, and feeling grief and anger about all the deaths, though he's trying much harder and mostly succeeding at keeping that at bay. 

Most of his thoughts are on the fact that Leareth is basically him, except a couple thousand years older and wiser, and correspondingly more wily and paranoid - he keeps noticing parallels, it's not just Seerow and Urtho, the entire way they think - the way they relate to their emotions, to their goals, to people, to the world - is similar. Except Leareth is better. Visser 3 still doesn't even have a hypothesis for why this is a thing but it's pretty undeniable. 

Leareth lost. In his version of their story, whatever the hell that means, he didn't have the information he needed, he failed to de-escalate, and Urtho's superweapon nearly destroyed the world. Millions of people died, not billions, because Velgarth is smaller, but still. Leareth still regrets it. Leareth said instantly that he would have surrendered, even if it lost him his empire and everything he had built, because he can do math and that wasn't worth the risk of what ended up happening. 

Five billion people. 

And - Leareth's thoughts on the upside of trust, and what he's giving up by closing all those doors. Leareth's years of talking to Vanyel. Matirin wanted to persuade the Andalites to give the Yeerks morph, if they won. 

He doesn't know that it's the right gamble, but he's in Leareth's head and he is, at this point, pretty convinced that Leareth knows what he's doing more than Mhalir does. He's had so much more time. 

Emril reports this, slowly, in a shakier but mostly level voice. 

What. 

That doesn't make any sense. 

But - there's no way she made it up, most people aren't that good at lying and her Yeerk didn't think she was a stunning exception, and -

- it's not mind control. It's just - 

- how can different people be the same person, how can a Yeerk and a human be the same person - that's a very interesting question but they don't have to answer it, right, they just have to answer whether Visser 3 is still trying to do the best thing for the Yeerks - and he is, right -

"Okay," the subordinate who raised the complaint in the first place says shakily. "Thanks. Uh, please go on not killing yourself. I guess we're surrendering. To the Andalites. Who are going to kill us all but - maybe give the babies morph. In fifty years. Or something."

This is the first Leareth is hearing about Mhalir's thoughts! What! That makes no sense! ...It's probably a good thing? Whatever it even means, metaphysically speaking, it - seems to result in Mhalir trusting him? 

<Yes. It does> 

And to everyone else present: <Please broadcast the message again. ...To Andalite frequencies but to everywhere on Earth, this time, their other locations may be elsewhere. Tell them we are committing to returning Talik and Leareth unharmed and arranging a way to verify that they are not infested, and we are very willing to negotiate on returning all of their people who we have captive> 

They do this. 

There is not an immediate reply.

Emril is kind of shaking. Also she wants to hug Enstat, like, a lot? Unfortunately Enstat is currently in an Andalite who probably hates Yeerks, they all do. 

:Thank you: she says to her in Mindspeech instead, fervently. 

<You're welcome.

You know how to pay me back.>

She does. She just really, really hopes all the other players in this game will let her keep that promise. 

Mardic is with Donni and Rasha in the echoing emptiness of a base that was hastily evacuated in both directions. Watching a radio and the surface sensors and the human television and some tapped phone lines that don't have anything on them right now. They're very willing and ready to Final Strike at the slightest hint of trouble, they have a Companion who would catch something like the gas happening, and Nayoki figured someone ought to stay on Earth. 

Donni is taking apart some piece of technology the Andalites left behind, because of course she is.

:–Donni. Donni, come here right now: 

Donni comes. 

They don't know what to do about the radio broadcast claiming that the Yeerks are surrendering. It's...good news probably? Leareth is maybe alive? Unless it's a trap?

They spend the next candlemark talking about whether or not to reply. Decide against, it's too irreversible and this is so far above their pay grade. 

They try the inter-world version of the comms spell a few times, to get through to someone in Velgarth - they try for Vanyel and another mage - but they're not really strong enough and they only sort-of-learned it, very quickly, and it doesn't work. 

They pace. Wait. Watch the television. Eventually take shifts to get some sleep. 

...Eventually Visser 3 is going to have to get out of Leareth's head, he's running out of morph time. 

<Are we going to have a problem with the compulsion forcing you to explode?> he asks Leareth. 

...No, Leareth doesn't think so, actually. He's more paranoid than Emril and - concerned that means they're going to have to be really careful about not even looking like they might put a Yeerk near him. But he provisionally trusts Mhalir to order his people not to do that. 

<I can leave his head and he will be fine, but we need to be very very careful about not startling him or his mind control precautions might force him to explode> the Visser tells his staff. 

-- they will do their best to be really careful not to startle him. Is that what happened to Dupont Circle.

Leareth, as soon as he has his mouth back, can confirm that he's pretty sure that's exactly what happened at Dupont Circle. Though having your safehouse stormed by dozens of Controllers is a little more than 'startling'. 

...He doesn't have his Gifts back. That's really frustrating. It makes sense that Nayoki's conditional set-command functions differently from the compulsion, and - well, he doesn't feel safe, right now, he feels terrified and helpless and not having magic is really not helping but, well, it seems he can't think his way out of that paradox although he spends a while trying. 

Leareth doesn't mention that this might leave him unable to explode. It's possible the compulsion would override the set-command with less pressure on it, they did not extensively test the interactions under extreme circumstances. 

He's also so, so tired, and still feels awful, much more noticeably so now that he's the one driving his body. "Was I injured badly?" he asks the person in medical-looking clothing. "I feel very terrible right now." 

"You spent a while not breathing much oxygen. I don't think there's going to be long-term damage, your Yeerk would've noticed, but I'm not surprised you don't feel great. You can put the mask back on, if you want." There's one next to his bedside.

He does feel mostly capable of having thoughts, which is at least indicative he didn't rack up actual brain damage. (If he did, maybe Matirin will give him morph about it?) 

Leareth puts the oxygen mask on, and then asks Emril if she can please stay here and, as the non-Yeerked person there, make sure nobody sticks a Yeerk on him. He's exhausted but doesn't think he can sleep otherwise. 

Yes, of course. (Poor Leareth. She can tell that he doesn't have his Gifts back, though she also hasn't mentioned it.) Emril drags a chair over to the hospital bed and sits next to him. It's...weird, seeing the commander of the army she worked for like this, but of course he's a person too, who can be injured and tired. 

...Eventually, once he's asleep, she reaches out and takes his hand. So she can do a bit of Healing while she's here anyway, she thinks, and he'll wake up feeling better. Also he's had such a bad day, an even worse day than hers, and he did such an impressive thing, convincing the Visser to surrender, and it feels unfair if he doesn't, in exchange, get someone to sit with him and hold his hand. 

The Visser's people keep him updated. No one has answered. They may have jumped off planet, or just not be sure what secure communications look like. 

(Is he sure they have to surrender. The Andalites are going to murder them all or at best lock them in pools forever while they debate whether Yeerks ought to be allowed to exist.)

Maybe. Although Leareth is, he thinks, on their side. The bigger consideration is that he's pretty sure the alternatives are all worse. Either the Andalites are going to win, with the resources they still have, or they're going to use their weapon to kill everyone on Earth. Leareth is pretty sure that plan was already laid. 

Mhalir is not, when in possession of all the facts, willing to gamble on a (slim, he thinks) chance of winning outright, when losing means that billions of people die, even if the Pool ship gets away. All the Yeerks locked in pools for fifty years is still better than that. 

It feels so unfair, for Yeerks, who are too decent to kill five billion people, to lose precisely because Andalites are that evil and willing to stoop that low. 

(Alloran is so baffled.)

Mhalir paces in Alloran's body, and tries not to fret unproductively. Eventually manages to pull himself away from watching the computers. Tells his staff to wake him for anything Andalite-related, and gets some sleep. 

In the morning they alert him of a hyperspace jump. About a hundred million miles out. Presumably the Andalites but they won't be able to tell until they get closer.

<Could we broadcast a message to them now, if we wanted to> It would be awkward if it was someone else but how much worse can that really make things.  

They could. The latency on responses will be considerable but messages will work fine.

<Please transmit a short, straightforward message repeating the offer of surrender and asking to discuss terms while the Andalites approach Earth.>

This is done. 

The reply comes about sixteen minutes later, almost exactly as long as the necessary delay imposed by the latency. It reads 'This is Ashul-Isfalet-Corril, commanding the TailStrike. We request the immediate return of all prisoners taken in the course of operations on Earth yesterday, and await your proposal to end the possession of unwilling hosts on Earth within thirty days."

<We will immediately begin preparations to return all prisoners in a way that allows verification they are Yeerk-free. Would appreciate your input on what precautions you wish to take here. We will begin work on the specified proposal.>

(Which notably does not say they'll implement one.)

Visser would like his people to start work on planning that, though, if it's the best that ends up being possible. They should have fairly good records, at this point, of which hosts are voluntary, but he wants all of that re-checked. (Because, thanks to people like Enstat, there may be more now than before.) He of course expects the Thoughtsensers will want to check this themselves, for any humans opting to stick with their Yeerks. 

Mostly, Mhalir is at this point placing all his hopes for a better outcome than "exiled to pools on their home planet" on Leareth, and Leareth's existing rapport with Matirin. He doesn't say this, though. 

- it's somewhat worrying that he's not talking to Matirin. The commander could be dead. Or just injured. Or still on Earth, in hiding somewhere. He won't know for a while. 

<Leave the prisoners in an outdoor area without Yeerk or allied forces supervising, unconscious if their precautions do not permit them to wake up safely having been in your custody. Do not interfere with shuttle access to pick them up. We will be prepared for pickup at 13:00 GMT.>

He is willing to do that. Asks his people to select an appropriate outdoor area, and then goes to check if Leareth is up. 

Leareth is up and feeling less like he might be dying, although he still hasn't gotten out of bed. Emril is sitting with him. 

The Visser stops in the doorway, not coming any closer. He's in Andalite form again. <We are making arrangements to return prisoners this afternoon. I wished to ask if you could help convey to your people, or perhaps assess them yourself, to determine whether we can afford to keep them conscious while we remove their Yeerks> 

Leareth spends a moment blearily trying to determine if that means they probably believed Vanyel, or not. 

"I think the compulsions should not trigger in any cases if they did not for either of us," he says, tiredly. "Emril can check them with Thoughtsensing though. I am still feeling unwell and do not wish to go anywhere until I must." 

Emril is happy to help. The fact that she can Mindspeak and Heal is in itself a decent indicator she's free, to the Yeerked people, and once they have more with Gifts back they can check each other. 

Mhalir thanks Leareth and takes Emril with him, twisting one of his stalks to watch Leareth with a worried backward glance. He looks a little better, but he must have really taken a hit from the gas exposure and hypoxia. Mhalir tries not to fret about him, it's not productive. 

He explains the suggestions for handling the Velgarth compulsions and provides them Emril. He's less sure what to do about the Andalites. Hopefully their Yeerks can just tell him if they're convinced enough of the rescue not to immediately kill themselves when freed? 

The Andalites' Yeerks can answer that. The Andalites believe it and are willing to provisionally not kill themselves though most of them are very determined to kill their Yeerk if they get any opportunity. 

Alloran feels this way too, not that anyone asked him.

Mhalir would, at some point, really like to be in someone's head who doesn't detest him with every fibre of their soul, and if they're not frantically trying to win a war anymore, and are instead doing something else... Well, it changes things. He leaves that alone, for now. 

They can take the precaution of briefly sedating the Andalites while the Yeerks actually remove themselves, so they can be taken away safely without risk of murder. 

Still a while until arrival. He paces and worries and asks that they send an update to the ship once they've chosen a location. 

Leareth dozes, drifts through vague confused nightmares again, half-panics and possibly almost triggers his compulsion when someone's footsteps toward the door wake him. He doesn't know how close that was, but since Emril is gone for good reasons, he forces himself to stay miserably awake from then on. 

A couple of hours before the scheduled pickup, Visser 3 is back. <Leareth> 

"Mmm? ...Is something wrong?" 

<No. I came because we are organizing transport for returning prisoners and you are one of the people we are returning> 

"Right." He glances around. Tries to ignore the undercurrent of scaredscaredscared, it's not helping right now. "I - think I need no one to touch me, right now, who I know could have a Yeerk in their head. I can walk to a car or something." 

<Of course> 

Leareth lifts his head. Takes a deep breath. "I...wanted to ask you about something. Which I think could help a great deal, for - improving the starting point of these talks." 

Visser 3 goes very still. He can't at all tell what Leareth is thinking, now, of course, but - does he need to, he can guess, he saw enough. <Go on> 

"They did not ask that all prisoners be returned, only those taken during operations on Earth. Which I assume was deliberate, not pressing too far. However. I think - that if you were to voluntarily return Alloran with the others, this - would be a much better starting point for me to build a case that you and your people can be cooperated with." 

He freezes. 

He can't. Alloran has seen every monstrous thing he's ever done - well, for the last twenty years - and Alloran wants him dead - he knows how intensely Alloran wants him dead - he knows how far Alloran would be motivated to pursue him, to destroy him -

- and obviously when they do make him give up this host - if they manage, if he doesn't manage to flee, Alloran will 'commit suicide' as the Yeerk leaves his ear and no one will have any way to know -

(He does not wholly believe this but he tries not to hope for things, he tries so hard not to hope for things...)

He can't talk to Mhalir privately, without Alloran there, and he desperately wishes he could. 

"If you pull this off," he says, quietly, "you will have in expectation saved five billion lives. I owe you that. I am not going to let them execute you - and you know that they owe me a great deal as well. I will do everything I can, here - I would offer you sanctuary in Velgarth... That being said, it - would make it easier, the more indications I have that - us meeting will result in the future being different from the past." 

...He's not quite sure he follows. It's a lot harder when it's just words he's hearing from the man's mouth, not the entire stack of his thoughts, there are many different stacks of thoughts that could produce that utterance and some of them are hostile...

But are any of those compatible with the shape-of-mind he saw, yesterday, in all its beautiful detail and depth? 

<I will consider it> he says. <Thank you for raising this matter to my attention> 

And he paces and tries to think. 

Alloran hates him, mostly wordlessly.

On the one hand, it's such a valuable host body and brain. It's a huge thing to give up. 

...On the other hand, he's just given away far more than that. From here, having Alloran or not isn't going to be a deciding factor in anything. 

There's the part where probably he would have to give Alloran back within thirty days anyway, if 'voluntary hosts only' is the proposal they reached, or sooner, part of some other agreement. 

Alloran hates him and will try to sabotage everything. 

...Alloran is an Andalite, and a competent one, but he's not Leareth. He's nowhere near Leareth. And - the gamble he's already made, here, is that Leareth is on his side. 

Eventually he goes back in. <I will do it. I - would like you to be present, so that the Andalites will know the conditions of it. We will need to sedate him briefly for it because otherwise he will definitely kill me, but he will be unharmed> 

Nod. "Then I suppose we can prepare to go over." He starts the process of getting his legs over the side of the bed. Walking is unappealing, still, but he's not going to literally collapse at this point. 

And Visser 3 passes on this decision and its considerations to his staff. 

...they're taken a bit aback but they guess that makes sense? What does he want next, a human? They don't have that many cooperative human hosts going spare, he'll be evicting someone, but they can figure it out - decision criteria?

Intelligent, someone with good numeracy skills so he can piggyback on that, he hates not being able to do math in his head. He'll understand if he can't be very fussy, though. 

(He already misses Leareth's brain a lot.) 

Frantic phone calls are made. Eventually they can find someone and stuff her on a shuttle, FBI agent, formerly belonging to a Yeerk who figures it's safest to be anonymous in a pool right now. She'll be here in twenty minutes. - he didn't mention a gender preference and hopefully doesn't have one, it was hard to meet his criteria even stretching them. 

That's fine (he absolutely doesn't have a preference, it barely registers.) He thanks them. Apologizes for the inconvenience. 

He and Leareth, walking a distance apart that doesn't make Leareth tense up too badly, can head out to the staging area where they're knocking out and de-Yeerking Andalites to join the other prisoners for their pickup. 

Somehow it's almost more stressful, when they're this close but so many things could still go wrong. Also he still doesn't have magic and it's terrible. Leareth is kind of shaking, although it could be mostly that he's getting out of bed for the first time since nearly dying. 

Alloran is slowly coming around to the realization that he means to do this. He - doesn't know what to do with it. At all. He doesn't think he has, anymore, the capacities that people use to react to things like that. He settles for wordlessly hating him some more. 

It hurts. He - hopes someone can help put it right, somehow. Mostly. Can't give him back twenty years. Cost he accepted... Worth it, maybe, hard to ever know. 

(Alloran might have made a difference in how things went here on Earth, and if that had gone differently he would never have met Leareth, but that's a post-facto justification, it'd have been a stupid thing to predict.) 

He lays Alloran's body down for him, and after only a moment's hesitation, asks the medics to sedate him. Waits for the fog to close in so he can slip out of his ear. 

Emril's there, she was helping supervise the humans before and she's sort of been hanging around waiting for Leareth. She wants to offer him a hug, he looks really miserable right now, but maybe that's weird with your military commander. 

She can, at least, read Mhalir and Alloran's thoughts, as a later source of verification that everything here happened as Mhalir said it would. 

Alloran is thinking that what if he's too broken to go home. He probably is. He should - give it a try, though. He owes his children that. If they're still alive, they're old enough to have enlisted.

It's windy and hopefully she can blame that for the tears in her eyes. 

Visser 3 exits Alloran's ear as soon as he's out, and is scooped and taken away. 

...It's weird to think that's Mhalir, all of that, all of him, contained in a little wet slug. Leareth watches his staff take him away, and then turns back and waits at Emril's side for Alloran to wake up so they can cross to the pickup area. 

Alloran wakes up. Goes with them, without saying anything.

Leareth doesn't say anything either. He finds a spot to sit on the grass as soon as they stop moving. Nods to some of his people he recognizes but doesn't speak to anyone, he's too tired right now. 

They wait. 

He is blind and mostly-deaf and there are sensations but so much more limited - thoughts, still, but less, constrained, penned in - and then - 

They keep him in a tank because they're not sure when the shuttle's getting here, but it's not long. Maybe ten minutes. The woman is handcuffed because that's the rules for barely-vetted voluntary controllers in sensitive installations, last Yeerk said she wasn't hard to get along with but it'd be stupid to take chances. They raise Visser 3 to her ear.

He senses that much. Slips in, spreads out, feels himself expand and be more again - not as much as before, but enough. 

<I apologize for the very sudden change of plan> he tells her as soon as he has that acces. <Today has been rather like that> 

She became a detective because she wanted to solve mysteries and learn everyone's secrets and know a million things no one else did, and when the question was put to her - as a hypothetical, by a coworker - she said she'd absolutely want to be kidnapped by aliens because you'd get to learn about aliens and it has for the most part been fairly dry and boring and clerical, being kidnapped by aliens (detective work is also that way) but from the snatches of conversation she caught from her Yeerk, new Yeerk is an important alien. So that seems - promising. 

She's feeling vaguely self-conscious, now. It's the one-sided intimacy. It took her months to puzzle out her last Yeerk, what he wanted, how he worked. <No problem> she says. <Uh, nice to meet you?>

<Nice to meet you. I am Visser Three but if you wish to refer to me by name> Alloran mostly hadn't wished to do that, <I prefer Mhalir. I will answer questions about myself if you wish, but I need to take care of something else first> 

And he opens her eyes and - doesn't have thoughtspeak anymore, damn, he misses it a lot. He gets the attention of the nearest staff. "I meant to ask and did not - can we send a message to the Andalite ship informing them that I voluntarily returned Alloran? I worry they are going to be very confused." 

"Oh! Yes, of course, I'll message them now, if they haven't already figured it out, they Gated them all out just now. We didn't detect to where."

Smile. It feels odd to smile with human lips. "Sensible of them." Leareth would approve. 

His staff nods sort of despairingly at him. Their body language is a little easier to read, when he's in a human; they're all terrified.

He wishes he could tell them everything is going to be all right, but he can't, because he doesn't know either. That's how gambles work. 

"I suppose we wait," he says. "And see what Leareth is able to do."

He asks a couple more questions about the other orders he gave, for the hypothetical proposal to free all involuntary hosts, and paces a bit in his new body to get used to it.

<So?> he says to his new host. <It seems I have a little bit of time. Questions?>

There are additional aliens?? What do they want, what do they look like, do they have different advanced technology. (Do all advanced societies invent electricity? Computing? The wheel?)

Aww, he really likes curious humans. Curiosity is, in Mhalir's opinion, one of the better emotions, and humans have such a nice flavour of it. 

He can push a mental image of an Andalite to her, tell her the name of their species. They have electricity and computing and are actually the ones who gave both to the Yeerks, but - well, it's complicated, and he doesn't know the Andalites' side of the story and hopes he'll find out soon. Short version is they ended up at war. 

Oh and also there are other humans! On a world that has magic! He expects she'll find that very intriguing. 

....that makes so little sense! Did the other humans evolve? Why would the same species evolve in two places? Or are they a forgotten space colony or something? The Soviets - couldn't have done that, they could barely keep their astronauts alive on trips to low earth orbit, if they tried a generation ship and she wouldn't be surprised to hear they tried it then she'd expect it to be found drifting in space with everyone dead - 

- do they have all of the same animals, too?

- what does he mean by magic. 

Mhalir also thinks that this makes no sense, but he's observed it directly, so. He describes the things he mean by 'magic'; some of it, like the Gates that imitate hyperspace jumps, might be explainable as some evolved innate ability to do things that here, only advanced tech can manage. But a lot of the rest is just baffling to him. 

Mhalir can't actually spend the next several hours explaining everything about Velgarth to his curious host, there's a lot to do, but he comes back to it in snippets whenever he can. It's actually really helpful, talking it through with another person when he can see all of her thoughts, notice where she's confused. See it again from fresh eyes, and...her perspective is objective, sort of, in a way his can't be, because she's not trying to win, here, she's not invested in her plans working. Just curious. 

And it helps pass the very uncomfortable period of waiting and not knowing.