<All right. I wish you luck.> He would offer to Gate her somewhere, but he doesn't exactly have energy to spare, and presumably Andalites have reasonable transport options available. 

He goes back to the room where the others are assembled and picks the next person, Mindspeaking Cayaldwin to let him know he's ready. 

He will watch again.

Leareth can squeeze in two more that day, and six or seven the next day, and the rest the day after. By the second day of doing it, the process itself feels very routine and un-fraught, and he's got it down to forty minutes or so. Keeping very disconcerted and embarrassed Andalites company and ignoring his instincts screaming about the badwronggross is actually more draining, enough of it leaves him feeling drained in a completely different way, but no one else is going to stay with them and non-judgmentally help them figure it out, and it seems important they not be facing the first few candlemarks entirely alone.

After all of that, he's going to want a day off before moving on to whatever politics Matirin scheduled for him. 

The politics is actually not scheduled for a couple more days, they weren't sure how fast he could finish all the demorphing.

Great. 

He can Gate Cayaldwin back to Earth, well, to Saturn, if Cayaldwin is impatient to get back to research rather than sticking around. 

Cayaldwin can continue his research here. He doesn't exactly like it, they left on bad terms, but no one gets in his way and there are more resources here than on Earth.

(Leareth wants more context on that, he decides, but from Matirin. Not Cayaldwin, who is probably very biased about it.) 

Anyway, in that case he's happy to work with Cayaldwin on that. His mage-reserves are replenished a lot faster than his eagerness to have fraught conversations with aliens, and he has two morph-tether artifacts and lots of leftover worms with morph, so they can play around with various ways of linking that up and testing what happens. 

Cayaldwin is happy to catch Leareth up on his current tether-related research and its various complications. They are making progress, but it's still going to be a lot of work to come up with something safe and jump-capable.

Well, they can get some hands-on observations of what happens to works with jury-rigged additional tethers to other worms if one of the worms is taken through a miniature Gate - while not in morph, because worms cannot actually morph. They won't be able to do live tests of taking the morph-construct through a Gate until Leareth can do it with rabbits which he can Yeerk. One assumes very messy things will happen, but they might be informative ones.

When politics time arrives, Leareth switches to that with good grace. He's not good at being personable, the way Matirin is, but he can do impressive and clever and definitely-worthy-of-respect, and he's hoping that his success with the nothlit project will buy him some goodwill with the Andalite leaders. 

They seem very impressed with him. They want progress updates on the plan to pursue the war, mostly. When is that going to happen? What resources are needed from the Andalites for it?

They're just about ready to move, actually, Leareth had mainly been waiting on taking care of the nothlit demorphing, since he's the only one who can do that and the plans for taking out the Yeerk leadership involve nonzero risk to him. 

He talked it through extensively with Matirin before his departure, and they agreed the best way to address it, if there's a chance they'll want to argue for pardoning Mhalir later, is to be upfront about the plan. So he is. He couches it in a lot of assurances about how thoroughly mind-controlled Mhalir will be, he'll be able to speak and move since he needs to convincingly distract the Yeerks, but Leareth can override him in an instant, and he won't be able to access Leareth's Gifts at all. They stress-tested the compulsions, just in case, even though there's no known way even in theory for an un-Gifted person to resist them; he describes how they convinced Mhalir he was going to be killed and gave him every incentive to break free of the control, and he failed and was helpless. And, Leareth hints, he's also capable of compulsions on a higher level of abstraction, that will prevent Mhalir from even forming the intention to betray him and warn the Yeerks. (Mhalir has, in fact, agreed to this, since in his mind it's not changing anything so why would it matter.) That one isn't impossible to work around, but Leareth will also be able to read Mhalir's mind, and he's absolutely certain he'll be able to catch any hint of resistance and take over. Which would be mildly awkward, he would have to impersonate Mhalir himself, but he's done that successfully before to Mhalir's subordinates, when he recaptured the fleeing Pool ship after the attempted coup. 

Anyway, they don't need any Andalite resources for the first step, but once the leadership is out of commission, they'll want to secure the planet they're based on, so Leareth would appreciate being able to Gate in a large number of Andalite soldiers. He gives them coordinates for a star system they could stage in, which he's already checked is a very feasible interplanar-Gate distance. (Leareth doesn't offer the actual location of the Yeerk Council, which is secret, even from most of the Yeerks. He doesn't think this would happen, but he absolutely doesn't want any Andalites getting ideas about attacking first.)

Then he can describe their less-finalized plans of attack for the other Yeerk-held worlds. It won't be as clean, the Yeerks are very likely to get a courier out in time to warn the Yeerks in control of the other conquered planets, but they have a lot of resources and the Yeerks still won't know much about Leareth's capabilities and he hopes they can do it without too many casualties, Andalite or human, and hopefully minimal Yeerk-and-host deaths as well. 

They approve. They're worried Mhalir will betray him, of course, but it sounds like he's taking that appropriately seriously, and can use his peoples' mind-control to make it much harder. (Some of them are uncomfortable about that kind of power being used, even on Yeerks, but they don't voice this in front of him; they think about how best to indirectly raise it later with their colleagues.)

Mostly they want the war to be over.

(Leareth reads their thoughts, of course, and notes all of their worries, to inform Matirin later so he has relevant information for finessing politics here.) 

He understands. He understands so, so much. He wants the war to be over too. He thinks he sees the route to it, now, and it might take months but it probably won't take years.

When they've been over everything, Leareth can give them a tentative timeline. He promises to do a miniature message-Gate when the time comes - both to the Andalite homeworld, for their departure, and to the staging-area star system on the day of the infiltration. 

The Andalite forces will be ready.

With great relief that he carefully conceals, Leareth collects Cayaldwin and all of his demorphing-related equipment, does a tiny message-Gate and requests a ship be sent to Saturn for them, and at the appropriate time Gates them back to it. 

A ship is sent to Saturn for them, and picks them up to return to Earth. 

Leareth spends the return flight resting, and by the time they arrive back, he's ready to debrief with Matirin on how everything went. And find out if anything relevant happened on Earth during his absence. 

<It has not been very eventful. Someone offered Vanyel ten million dollars to be a sperm donor at their clinic and he accepted. A Yeerk and host in France committed a bank robbery and are blaming each other. The Americans have a pending court case about Yeerk birthright citizenship. Some really insistent missionaries showed up here. I told them I am looking into what species Jesus Christ was and where he went but don't have grounds to extradite him here even if I find him. They left.>

Leareth is in Andalite morph again, walking with him. <Someone offered Vanyel... Amazing. - Was the Yeerk in France under the standard compulsions? If so, the host should have been able to override anytime they wanted, which makes it more questionable that only the Yeerk is to blame.> 

<Yes, he was. The host claims he didn't realize they were robbing the bank and not just withdrawing money from it until they were in the middle of the robbery. I think he's lying, but -> Tail-shrug. <We have to let the human legal system sort things out itself at least sometimes.>

<Yes, that makes sense.> Leareth paces, tail waving. <Anyway. I am still thinking about transport, for the infiltration of the Yeerk command base.> It's on a random, previously-uninhabited planet in a minor star system, not any of the known Yeerk-held worlds. And, like goddamned everything else, it's very far away from Earth.

<I do not especially want to travel through hyperspace for months, but we do need to arrive via hyperspace jump, in a non-suspicious Yeerk ship, and the only Yeerk ships we have in our possession are here on Earth. I...suppose I could attempt a very large Gate that a ship could fly through, but the power requirement is not one I could meet alone, I would need to figure out a version of the Gate-spell that can mostly rely on the artificial channel.> 

Tail-nod. <That is still probably faster than spending months in transit, and would have the advantage that we can beat a courier-ship to other locations, and maybe try the same thing again anytime we're confident we're ahead of the fastest possible message.>

<That is a very good point! I will work on that, then. It will not take nearly as long as a true permanent Gate, I think - perhaps a week or two.> Tail-swish. <I would like that. If we could finish this faster.> 

<I would like that too.>

He walks in silence for a bit. 

<I think that was everything I had to discuss. Tail-fight?> Leareth found some Andalites willing to spar with him on his trip, but he missed sparring with Matirin in particular.