Andalites can get lessons from Nayoki on how to use her Mindhealing to make people STOP MOVING.

Leareth goes over Visser 3's list of relevant people on the Pool ship. It'll also be useful to have more Thoughtsensers, and Thoughtsensing is very intuitive to use, shielding is the part that's hard and presumably the Andalites are fine with mindreading Yeerks when they're fighting to take over a ship. 

He checks the Gate again. At this point he wants to take a bit of time to rest before going in even if it does work. 

They're caught up, now, skimming along behind it five hundred miles out. The Gate takes.

Perfect, that won't even be very tiring then. He'll wait for everyone else to be ready to storm through ahead of him and then do the full-size version. 

Nayoki can do the relevant set-commands on everyone as they morph, she's gotten it down to taking only a few minutes per person so it won't delay them much. 

Everybody else, in morph as Nayoki or as a Thoughtsenser, lines up to do this.

And once they're ready Leareth can slam up a Gate in about a second and send everyone through ahead of him to set-command anyone within range until they're no longer a threat. 

The Yeerks on the Pool ship were not expecting pursuit, because if it would've happened it would've already happened, Mhalir can't afford to spend more than a week away from Earth right now. They are so startled and shortly none of the ones in a host are able to move or take actions. They're terrified.

Leareth marches in wearing Amanda's face and all the Gifts he's acquired. 

He sends Mindspeech orders to everyone with Thoughtsensing, and reads the nearby minds himself, to determine who he should go interrogate about the coup attempt. 

The ship is currently in the command of sub-Visser Twelve, with sub-Visser Forty-Seven, and they and most of their close associates can be picked out from among the ship's Yeerks with enough Thoughtsensing. They're terrified, obviously, but mostly they're so confused about how he accomplished this.

Leareth is not intending to helpfully enlighten them. He does, once the ship is secured, ask some of Andalites to demorph (out of sight of any Yeerked humans, to keep it from being completely obvious what they did) and take over turning the ship around so they can start the long journey back before they cover any more distance in the wrong direction. Also he asks them to start separating out the Yeerks who don't seem to have been actively complicit; he'll want Nayoki to read them more closely to make sure, but after that he could use some people capable of moving. The leaders, he intends to toss back in the Yeerk pool host-less, but after he's questioned them. 

Which he's headed to do now. He matches his body language and overall manner to exactly how he's seen the Visser move in Amanda's body, which is pretty close to how he would move most naturally in it; it would be a lot harder to hold himself convincingly like Amanda does, he's never been in a woman's body before. He takes the real Nayoki with him, since he's not intending to reveal that he right now possesses Gifts. He's just going to mindread everyone anyway. 

"Sub-Visser Twelve. I would like an explanation of what, exactly, you were thinking here." He gestures curtly at Nayoki. "Leareth's mage will know if you are lying. I would advise against it." 

Well, he's thinking, at least the Visser doesn't have the tail anymore. (This doesn't actually make it much harder to kill someone, and also the Visser didn't tend to kill people in a host anyway, waste of a perfectly good host, but still.)

"I don't know what happened to you," he says. "I am pretty sure Leareth did it, with his mind control, but apparently killing him either didn't work or didn't fix it, so there's probably nothing to be done. But this isn't you. You cared about our people. You understood that there were compromises we could not make, if we wanted to win. You understood that we were fighting xenocidal maniacs who have wiped out whole species just so they could inconvenience us, and you think they'll hesitate to wipe us out, once they're done? Maybe Leareth found one - or mind-controlled one - willing to say nice words about how Andalites and Yeerks can work together. But unless he can get them all, it'll never happen, and we'll lose everything, trying.

Orders weren't to kill you. For what that's worth. I want you back. We need you. I know who owns you now, and it's not us, but - if it were, you'd thank us."

Sigh. 

"I understand what you are trying to do, and I - respect it, truly, it took courage. I do not expect you to believe me, I suppose, but I am not doing this because I expect the Andalites to care about our species. Only because I believe Leareth does, having been in his head, and belonging to neither species. It does not matter if Leareth mind-controlled Matirin or simply was very convincing; either way you are right, he cannot do it for everyone, and I - expect a fight, still, with the Andalites not here on Earth. I expect it will be ugly. But I was willing to match them atrocity for atrocity when our only options were to win or be annihilated, and now that there is a third option I cannot condone the likely deaths of everyone on Earth. Leareth does not like war. If we break the terms of surrender, he will join the fight against us - he has far more resources to spare in Velgarth, resources he spent a thousand years gathering - and he will win. If the Andalites refuse to make peace, he will fight them. And he will win. I would prefer the world where neither happens, of course, but - I do not think there is any scenario left here where we go against Leareth and can still expect to win." He smiles slightly. "Consider that he survived a direct orbital strike and was barely inconvenienced." 

He moves on to questioning sub-Visser Twelve and the others working with him about any co-conspirators back on Earth. 

They tried to keep their planning to a pretty tight circle; there was the crew waiting to ambush him at the safe house, and then a shuttle for their getaway, which  - their best guess is - would've returned to DC and tried to blend in once the mission failed. They know the two Yeerks flying it. Other than that it was all people on the Pool ship. 

They faked the message from a courier ship after the hyperspace jump. They received no real communications from the ship, and don't know who jumped in.

He's not that surprised. It's on net good news, he thinks. Unfortunate that there's no way to get a message to Earth sooner than five days from now, unless he can figure out how to route the communications-spell to cross that distance sooner. 

He asks all the questions he can think of, while Nayoki takes notes, and then asks for the Yeerks identified as conspirators in the coup to be compelled to leave their hosts and not to reenter anyone's ear and then chucked back into the Yeerk pool while Nayoki digs extremely sloppy set-commands off the poor hosts so they can move and walk around. They don't have a Mindhealer whose experience is actually with traumatized people, but they do have a lot of Healer-Thoughtsensers who are at least used to being reassuring and calming, and can lead the freed hosts back across another Gate to the Andalite ship. 

Leareth stays on the Yeerk ship, since he's supposed to be Mhalir. He goes around with Nayoki, speaking to the Yeerks not involved in the original coup and confirming whether their loyalties are still to him now that he's known to be alive and in charge again. (He has to eventually go hide in a room alone to demorph and re-morph Amanda, though his morph limit is a bit longer than Andalites given his lower body mass.)

They fly back as fast as possible in the direction of Earth. It's still going to take a while. 

With Thoughtsensing it's easy to tell which Yeerks are loyal and which aren't; most of them are at least resigned to having to make the alliance with Leareth's people work.

The Andalites can reassure the freed hosts (they were not voluntary hosts) and practice composite morphs with Gifts, and practice with the Gifts themselves. Most of them can manage some very basic mage techniques once they've had a couple of days to practice. 

Leareth asks Cayaldwin if it's possible to acquire himself, so that he can do a composite morph of himself but with Mindhealing and Healing (and Fetching and Farsight, the other Gifts represented on the ship right now.) 

- huh. The way Cayaldwin would do that is by morphing someone else and then demorphing incompletely. It'll be even harder than a composite morph, many people can never control the order in which morphs or demorphs come in with much precision, but if he gets it right and then spends lots of times in the mostly-demorphed state where he also has Mindhealing and Healing and Fetching and Farsight, the morphing technology will recognize it the same way it learns specific composite morphs, and then he might be able to target it directly. 

Well, they've got five days of travel time and he doesn't need to spend that much time impersonating Mhalir to keep an eye on the Pool ship, so he can practice that. Over and over and over again. While Nayoki watches with Mindhealing Sight so she can help him try it different ways. He's really determined.  

It takes all five days to get it reliably but after a while he can composite-morph Nayoki plus Fetching plus Healing plus Farsight and then demorph to himself while retaining the Gifts.

It's annoying that he can only stay that way for two and a half candlemarks or so (and prefers not to push the morph time limit), but he's never had this many Gifts at once. And can't wait to acquire Vanyel and see if he can get all the additional ones. 

He spends enough time practicing that that he doesn't have time to work much on getting the comms spell through to Earth, so they won't be able to provide an update until they arrive. At which point, he hopes, it'll be redundant, because it's been ten days and surely the ship has by now identified itself, one way or another. 

When they jump back into orbit there is no other jump-capable ship orbiting, or if there is it's well-shielded.

Leareth asks Cayaldwin if they can get a message out to Matirin on Earth, confirming that they're back with the Pool ship, though that's also obvious from the jump signature, and asking for updates. 

Cayaldwin sends it. 

<Leareth> he says a couple minutes later, <things seem...complicated.>

Leareth goes still. :Yes?: