Leareth nods. :I do badly need to rest. I predict I will need somewhere between three days and a week to be fully back to normal levels of emotional stability for me, though I will definitely be capable of doing things sooner than that, just more likely to need breaks or to bow out if it is unexpectedly stressful: It's inconvenient, but attempting to ignore it won't make it less inconvenient. 

:To answer your question, Melody and Nayoki are the only ones currently who can do Mindhealing set-commands, but if the Yeerks are cooperating here, then we could in fact have any mage with the skill for it lay the compulsions on them. I would vouch for about a hundred of my people possessing the requisite fine control for it. You would also want Thoughtsensers to confirm, but there is no shortage of them: 

<Thank you. I think everything else can wait.>

Nod. :Thank you for - bearing with my current state, during this. I thought it was very important to share my information, sooner rather than later: 

He sits up and pulls away from Matirin's flank - with slight reluctance, it was in fact oddly soothing, but there's no particular reason to keep Matirin here longer. 

<Yes. I feel like I have a better understanding of the situation now.>

Enough to compose another message to Visser Three. <My priority at this point is figuring out how to tell the humans what is going on. I am worried about the directions their anger over the events in D.C. will take if they don't have any way to learn what really happened, and I'm worried that as you start freeing people you enslaved they will find it retraumatizing to be in an environment where people disbelieve them about what was done to them. But it also seems fraught to announce that a Yeerk invasion of Earth was disrupted while human governments may still be in Yeerk hands. It would be helpful to be apprised of how many national governments are under your control, and whether any of them face emergency circumstances that will make the transition back to human rule a complicated one (particularly minding the period of time when the freed people are incapacitated by trauma).>

Mhalir reads the message from Matirin. 

He's mostly gotten through updating his host on the key recent events, now; it seems so valuable to have someone he can talk to, he had never realized how much he missed that until he was in Leareth's head. He may not get to keep his human host for long, but she likes knowing things and he needs her help. He's not telling her everything - and he hasn't explained Leareth - but he might as well share the things she would learn sooner or later anyway just by having access to his, well, her senses. 

<It makes sense as a proposal> he says to her. <Also we are not in much position to refuse. The answer is USA, Russia, China - only the countries with nuclear weapons, Yeerk pool logistics are prohibitive for spreading wider than we absolutely must. The US has a formal chain of command that should cover such contingencies - I will need to check on what China and Russia have, there, and whether to expect difficulties, but both of them have some major advisors who are not Controllers. I do want to ask Matirin to take other measures about the nuclear weapons, though, if I am doing this under conditions that will be this chaotic. What do you think?> 

Wow, you could've brought about world peace, his host thinks. I assume the other aliens don't want to get nuked so it seems like they'd probably go for that even if they don't care about humans having a nuclear war, do they care about that?

<I think they would find it at least politically inconvenient if their report home is that they won and the humans immediately nuked each other.>

He starts working on a reply to Matirin. Specifies that those three countries have their leaders and second-in-commands under Yeerk control. Aside from the events in D.C. and resulting panic in the USA and to a lesser extent elsewhere, he isn't aware of any recent acute political instability; he was treading carefully and they made relatively few policy changes. The US will have a formal answer to who is in charge if all of the Yeerked people are incapacitated (he provides a list), and he thinks that will stick fine and get them through the transition. Russia and China are more authoritarian systems and so this is dicier, but also they've been under less strain since there were no explosions close by. He thinks they should time it thoughtfully, but in terms of logistics they can arrange to have the leaders in all three places freed by tomorrow if they must, it doesn't take long to pass orders across the ocean. 

Mhalir is still so, so terrified. He doesn't inform his host of this, though. Eventually, after a lot of rewriting, he sends the reply. 

The Dome ship can be on the lookout for, and intercept, any nuclear weapons about to be deployed on Earth. 

In light of this he'd like political leaders freed soon, but they might want to figure out the planned spin on this whole situation first. He would like to talk to Mhalir face-to-face, for that, but expects him to refuse; they're going to need something higher bandwidth than this, though. Matirin's thinking is that the best spin for Earth is probably that there were several Yeerk factions, some of them willing to take unwilling hosts and some working towards willing ones, and the ones favoring unwilling hosts had the upper hand on Earth until the Andalites showed up, at which point the nice Yeerks who'd wanted willing hosts all along were able to negotiate a peace with them. This seems to most neatly account for everything various hosts will have experienced without burning all possibility of Earth governments having normal relations with a Yeerk government, or people on Earth being willing Yeerk hosts later. Though Matirin is going to want to see how traumatized the "voluntary" hosts seem once unYeerked before he commits to being willing to enable that.

He imagines that Yeerks are quite distraught at the losing their hosts and he wants to emphasize that he recognizes he is assuming responsibility for getting surrendered Yeerks who haven't done war crimes sensory access to the universe, somehow, and hopefully not taking a decade about it. He's going to also try to take a not-very-expansive understanding of which Yeerks did war crimes in a culpable way, he knows many of them are less than a year old. He can at minimum have his people morph Yeerk and then force morph-capable animals into various other forms Yeerks can then infest, though his people hate doing this, so he would like something that scales better than that, and is considering his options.

It feels like it's four o'clock in the morning.

Marian is pretty sure it's not, it's - evening, probably? Sometime. It felt like four o'clock in the morning when it actually was four o'clock in the morning, which is about the time she went to 'bed', if three hours of sleep counts as that, and it still felt like four o'clock in the morning at, what was it, late morning or early afternoon or something in that vicinity, time zones are confusing. Anyway the time when they successfully got the prisoners back and everyone was delighted and she finally conceded that she probably needed more sleep. It still feels like four o'clock in the morning now and this seems unfair. 

She's back in the medical bay, though, currently sitting with her thermos of coffee after checking on the injured human, and hoping Cayaldwin wakes up soonish, because she really hates having to wake people but also she's due to check again if he's now alert enough to morph. He was awake a bit at four o'clock in the morning sometime after the point when it became permanently four o'clock in the morning according to her brain, it'll be in the notes, but he still couldn't concentrate enough. (Marian isn't sure that, at the time, she was doing much better.) 

Cayaldwin's father is dead. The universe should have stopped, when that happened, but it inconsiderately continued, and Cayaldwin thought it was finally going to stop that yesterday. But it didn't. The universe is not very like the universe before his father died. That universe was big and bright and full of life and everything wrong with it could be fixed, eventually, if they were clever enough. The universe now is cold and dark and no amount of cleverness will ever reintroduce to it anything that matters. 

Also it's very blurry, and it frequently sends stabbing pain up his eye stalks, and the air is low-quality compared to the air he remembers breathing, breathing it doesn't fix the feeling of needing-to-breathe, but this is honestly a minor complaint next to the thing where there is no reason to bother continuing to indulge the universe in its pretense of continuing past the end of the story. 

Why can't he move? Is he Yeerked? He tries to do something about this but his tail isn't responding to him. <My family will destroy you and every one of your kind, whatever it costs us> he informs everyone who can hear him, which is presumably just the Yeerk.

Great. Marian puts away her thermos. "Not a Yeerk. It's still me, Marian, do you remember when I was here earlier? You're in the medical bay, you've been here for–" damn it why has time stopped existing, "for about a day, since you got hurt after the Blade Ship exploded."

She wonders if he remembers her earlier attempts to keep him company by trying to coax him into telling her math things, he was really out of it at that point and she wasn't going to follow it anyway but it helped her stay awake. 

Oh. Yes. It's not even the head injury, it's just hard to remember things that happened after the end of the story. <I should try to morph again.>

"You should. I was about to wake you anyway for that." 

<I don't expect it to work.> He tries it. It does not work.

"Thank you for trying. You'll get there." She slides her chair over so she can sit down again closer. "Are you feeling any better, though?" 

<I have less access to my health status than you because I cannot read any of the machines.>

That was not the question. "Machines think you're doing about the same as as at," four o'clock in the morning, "uh, early afternoon, when you were last awake. Which is lots better than last night. If you want to know what the machines say I can read it out to you, but I mostly wanted to know if you're in pain or anything." 

<Oh. Yes, I'm in pain.>

"Do you want some of the pain medicine? Uh, same warning as before, it'll probably make you too out of it to morph until it wears off, but that's just a few hours and then you can try again."

<I don't remember what I thought the relevant considerations were before but unless any of them have changed I will make the decision I made before.>

"Before, uh, we talked about it, and I thought you would probably get better rest if you were in less pain which would mean you would be more clearheaded after, and I tried to help you think of other considerations, and then you decided you wanted to take it. I'll give you more now, okay?" 

<I think that follows, yes.>

Marian goes quiet and concentrates while she does so rather than keep talking to him, because she's still new to the Andalite drug-administration protocols and has to pay attention. 

"...Should be less pain any minute," she says. 

This is what happens, so he doesn't say anything; communication is only important when the expected thing is not what is happening. 

Fortunately Marian now knows this fact about Cayaldwin's reasoning, having had that interaction with him several times, so she lets it slide. 

"If you're up for it, you could tell me more about how Leareth invented hyperspace Gates?" she says hopefully. "I'm really curious about the part where he accidentally went to space." She asked before and he sort of tried and then said it was making his headache worse and then fell asleep, and if he can say something coherent now (whether or not she actually follows it) she can note that down as an improvement of some kind.