He will work out the logistics for them to depart immediately for the first world on the list, and draft an explanation for the people on Earth about what's going on in the war elsewhere. It's incredibly vague and strategically useless but it'll be good for them to have some idea that the Andalites leaving reflects good news elsewhere rather than bad news elsewhere.

Leareth is glad Matirin thought of that because he didn't. 

The current question on his mind is whether Mhalir should actually come along for this. On the one hand, he's clever and good at tactics and knows many of the Yeerks in leadership positions on the various planets. On the other hand, so do the Yeerk Council, who can now be questioned whenever Leareth feels like doing a message-Gate for it, and Leareth himself is, for the most part, equally good or better at all of Mhalir's skills. (And he can even morph Yeerk, if for some reason that comes up.) And it's politically suboptimal, for Mhalir to be gone from Earth for so long; he's doing a lot to hold together the Yeerks' morale and cooperative feelings toward the Andalites. Also there's his research with Cayaldwin, and several months could well be the time they need to figure out the morph-limit problem or the multiple tethers one. 

Leareth asks Matirin what he thinks, in Mindspeech because he's on the other side of the base preparing a packing list of mage-artifacts that he wants to hastily assemble in Velgarth and have Gated over. 

<I think he should stay. We can take some of the prisoners along and get what we need from them.>

Leareth relates this to Mhalir, who agrees. 

By early afternoon Leareth has everything he wanted from Velgarth, and is packing up his various artifacts and generators. He has sixty of his people assembled, forty-five mages and fifteen Healers, if they can manage to accommodate that many; otherwise, it'll be whoever does fit. He's preferentially selected mages with additional Gifts and teaching experience, so they can continue training with the Andalites who can morph Gifts while the mission is in progress. 

Nerefir confirms they can accommodate sixty. He and Matirin have a long meeting to hand off the remaining things Matirin has been managing on Earth and on the Andalite homeworld, and then they can be ready to go.

Leareth vaguely wishes he'd had time to personally visit Velgarth and tell Alloran about the initial success, but it really doesn't seem worth delaying for that, and getting the Gate from Haven arranged makes the logistics more complicated. (Stupid Heartstone and gods.)

He's ready to go when Matirin is, checking the Gate-routing for their first destination and figuring out how large a Gate they'll need for the ship they're taking. 

It will have to be one of the Dome ships if they're taking this many people.

That calls for a pretty enormous Gate, Dome ships have a very wide cross-section at the dome part, Andalites need space to move around and graze, but since he's powering it mostly from the generator, it'll only be somewhat more tiring than his previous Gates. 

He reviews the plan while they get everyone onto the Dome ship - they're taking the one that actually has weapons - and relocate to Saturn's orbit. The first stop is the Andalite homeworld, to collect a batch of other ships there, which will then need to be assigned mages, organized, and sent on via several different Gates so they can get to the nearer Yeerk-held worlds in time; Leareth will still be dropping them far out enough that the Yeerks have no hope of detecting them before the jumps in. Meanwhile he'll need to find out if any of the Yeerk ships captured are in shape for hyperspace jumps, in which case he can Gate to the secret Council planet and then catch those ships up with the Andalite fleets so they can jump from hyperspace first and be decoys. The later plans after that are a lot more up-in-the-air, and likely to involve collecting Andalite fleets from other parts of the galaxy and moving them, or stealing back some of the initial ships once their planets are successfully conquered and under control.

It's such an intimidating number of Gates and Leareth isn't particularly looking forward to it. 

<Is there any way we can teach someone else to do it so you don't have to do it all personally?>

"I am going to work on that! All the mages who are closest to mastering it are here and I will make what time I can for training them. Nayoki and a few others can do inter-world Gates between Velgarth and Earth, but it tires them much more, they are less efficient, and they need to have personally been to both sides. Part of the issue is that I am the only one who has put in the time to understand your hyperspace notation and the modeling software well enough to aim from that alone and do unscaffolded Gates to somewhere I have never been. And most of these Gates will, by necessity, be from one unknown location to another." 

Tail-swish. <That makes sense. I am sorry that it is so much work for you but - I think this is the best it could possibly go.>

"I think so too. I apologize, though, I will probably often be tired and cranky and difficult to get along with." 

<I will manage.>

They reach Saturn. The routing for the Andalite-homeworld Gate is almost familiar now, though it's still complicated enough that Leareth checks the planar modelling program to refresh himself on it. 

Nayoki watches him do it, in rapport, like he requested, but she's dubious of Leareth's claim that she can learn to understand that if she spends enough time looking at it. It makes her head hurt. 

 The threshold, normally almost effortless, takes Leareth a while, just because it has to be so huge, and it'll still be a tight fit for the ship to slip through. The search isn't any harder than usual, though holding the threshold is, it's bleeding energy constantly to the Void and to the vacuum of physical space, and the time taken to cast it and then search means that a lot of total power was wasted. The generator hums steadily, though, giving him more. 

Then he has to build a giant threshold all over again on the other side, by feel rather than sight, and finally it goes up and it takes all his strength just to hold it together. The Andalites know they need to make the crossing efficiently, though, snapping at people about it won't help and will just waste energy. 

The ship goes through and a buzzer sounds as soon as it's through.

Normally the correct protocol for taking down Gates is to unweave the other end and then the near end, reabsorbing the energies. But for one, there's actually more energy in there than Leareth can contain, it's liable to destabilize and collapse on his face and just make the backlash worse. Also he does not feel like spending another two minutes on this. His head hurts. The previous ship Gates weren't this bad, but he hasn't done a ship Gate as far as the Andalite homeworld, the Council planet is closer, and the ship-to-surface Gates for this distance were smaller. 

Leareth severs the connection between him and the Gate, so it collapses in a rush of sparks-in-vacuum, the energy dissipating harmlessly into the Void. Only a little of it backlashes on him. He sits down on the grass and puts his forehead down on his knees, suddenly very dizzy. 

It's so suboptimal to have two legs! He suggests someone get Leareth a glass of water, and someone does this.

Leareth's initial impulse is to tell whoever's approaching him to go away, but instead he accepts the water, sips it slowly for a while and waits for his head to stop spinning. It eventually does, but he's not in any less pain. 

"I think," he says vaguely to no one in particular, "that possibly - humans are not meant - to Gate starships that many lightyears." He wonders if it would have been easier in morph with Vanyel's mage-gift - and whether in that case demorphing would get rid of the backlash - but he's still hesitant to use Vanyel's Gift for anything really complicated, it's great for very big fireballs but it still throws his control slightly off. "Need to lie down. Somewhere dark. Could use painkillers." Hopefully Matirin is on top of whatever logistics need to happen in the next twelve hours before he's supposed to do more Gates. 

Matirin can handle logistics while someone gets Leareth a dark room and painkillers.

Twelve hours of rest, mostly sleeping, and a good meal later, Leareth is ready to attempt another Gate. This one is a lot easier; they're sending several ships through, but smaller ones, and it's not nearly as far, it only routes through one additional plane. After that he thinks he can space them six hours apart. 

The Andalites train with their mage-gifts and review the plans for the planet they're visiting next.

Leareth's plan was for them to join the other ships headed through the second Gate out, after he's gotten a captured Yeerk decoy ship over if they're going to get that; he does the message-Gate to the secret planet right before the first big Gate, which is to a world that's closer to the Council planet and thus a likely courier destination but is otherwise pretty uncomplicated based on his and Mhalir's assessment.

They've got Nayoki, who also has an Alloran-morph and knows Leareth himself well enough that she thinks she can pull off a brief Mhalir impersonation, just enough to land a shuttle, and then she can set-command so many people at the same time, everyone within half a mile, while someone on the shuttle tells the Yeerk ship to jump back to hyperspace and signal the rest of the Andalites for the orbital battle part; they've got human mages with shield-talismans who can Gate to the Pool ship and compulsion everyone on it to take it without killing all the baby Yeerks, there'll be casualties but hopefully a manageable number. Leareth isn't delighted about risking Nayoki, but it's not that much of a risk and it's arguably better than risking himself, even if he weren't going to be exhausted. If they can't get a Yeerk ship they'll be going with a much more straightforward space-battle. 

What's their answer on the Yeerk ships? 

There are some repaired-and jump-capable ones available, which does he want.