Leareth will take this one, he'll have a Gate to the Andalite homeworld (not horrendously far and it doesn't need to be as big) in sixty minutes, directly above the base. Also they want to request one of the prisoners to interrogate, it's fine if they receive a Yeerk-in-fishbowl, they can figure out something better. (Several of Leareth's people are willing to have a thoroughly compulsioned Yeerk in their head, if it's temporary.)

Once that's all arranged he can do another Gate for the ship, and hand off logistics of getting a crew on it including Nayoki, and four hours after that he's rested enough to Gate their little fleet over to a random point a half-day's hyperspace travel from the Yeerk planet they're attacking. After that he wants to sleep for the next while, please. Possibly he doesn't even want to be woken for the literal battle unless they actually need him. 

They shouldn't. They've done this before and they actually have more resources, this time, more mages and more shield-talisman and a bit more training with their own morphed Gifts, and they're not trying to board most of the ships.

They come get him when it's over.

Leareth has been half-awake in his conference room bedroom for a while, which has a sound-barrier on it so he had no idea what was happening outside. He gets up, stretches, and heads out to find Matirin, morphing Andalite on the way. 

<That must have been fast. How did it go? Is Nayoki all right?> 

<She is fine; she is on one of the shuttles back up to the ship now. We captured the Pool ship. The others were destroyed. We do not have control of the planet yet and will not for some time but with control of space it does not matter very much.>

<That makes sense.> He starts to ask if they need Gates, mostly out of habit, and stops himself; they've got lots of mages who can Gate from video footage and a map, he should rest right now and not do any magic.

He paces and waits for Nayoki to get back, or for Matirin to be available, though not really because he has anything tactics-related to talk about, he just kind of wants company. 

Nayoki gets back, not in morph. She looks tired and wan, but manages a smile for Leareth. "I did it. We took the main headquarters planetside with few casualties among the Yeerks or hosts and all of the infrastructure and computers intact. The decoy ship had time to gather sensor data on the orbital resources and transmit immediately to the Andalites when they jumped in. The rest of the ground fighting will not be so clean, I think, but -" 

"But we will have to take it. The price to be paid for fighting a war so fast." Leareth wants it to be over. So badly. He wants a conversation with Matirin that isn't about the war at all. He wants six months to build a permanent Gate and put satellites around Velgarth and teach twenty other people to make starship Gates so he never has to do more than one a day ever again. 

She puts a hand on his shoulder, without speaking, and then steps away. 

They win the battle on the planet. It takes a day to have everything under control and he loses two mages, but it was a foregone conclusion from the beginning, and they manage it with fewer casualties among both the Andalites and the Yeerks and hosts than the median projection. Lots of infrastructure damage, but that can be repaired. 

Leareth spends the time reviewing the not-quite-finalized next movements, doing message-Gates, nailing down where to go next to collect more Andalite fleets - they can take them from this system, which was previously heavily guarded since it was a juicy target for the Yeerks, but the Yeerks are going to have other things on their minds and then aren't going to have ships anymore. 

Seventy-two hours after Nayoki's shuttle touched down, he Gates them out, leaving behind a single Andalite ship to guard the planet and mostly-intact Pool ship, still in orbit but without any of its Yeerk crew. Just tens of thousands of baby Yeerks in a pool, which a couple of grossed-out Andalites do the required maintenance for. 

... 

The third planet on the list, ordered by proximity to the Council base, is a nine-day hyperspace journey for the courier ship that might or might not be on its way there. They reach it after five. 

This time Nayoki's gambit with the decoy Yeerk ship fails when the ground station asks for authorization codes, which Mhalir would know but she and Leareth do not. It's a touchy few minutes, Nayoki's ship is not well shielded enough to hold off the other Yeerk ships firing on her, but Leareth worked out a version of the comms spell that he and Nayoki and a handful of his other mages can use to reach each other even when one of them is in a ship in hyperspace, and so the Andalites jump early. The orbital battle is a lot messier but they win. This world doesn't even have a Pool ship in orbit, just a big pool on the ground, and all of the Yeerk ships are destroyed. They lose one of the smaller, less-well-shielded Andalite ships as well, which would have been several dozen casualties, but Leareth does a frantic last-minute Gate from the Dome ship, it's just barely within range, and they get half of the Andalite crew off before the shields go down.

A couple of courier ships get out, as the Andalite fleet is jumping in, so now Leareth has to make a second list of possible destinations and timelines to juggle. 

The fight on the ground is comparatively easy. Several of the ground bases surrender even without compulsions. 

Nayoki's Yeerk ship takes a lot of damage and they have a choice between delaying, or leaving it behind. Leareth thinks they should leave it behind; the other Andalite ship also left behind can work on repairs, and maybe he can make a trip back for it later, or maybe not. He does an extra few Gates to borrow the second jump-capable Yeerk ship from the Council planet. 

They regroup for several days and move on. 

...

Leareth pushes some of the Andalites to drill Gates hard. He probably can't teach them to do the starship-sized kind, there are just too many prereqs there, but at this point he has message-Gate thresholds and video footage of their locations on most of the worlds he needs to keep communicating with, so those don't need to be unscaffolded, and they can be accomplished on reserves and the node-generator alone, they don't require bizarre concert-work with a computer-controlled artificial channel. The only reason Nayoki and his other mages haven't mastered them is the hyperspace routing, and Leareth wonders if most humans just don't have the innate spatial skills for that. Andalites have better mathematical skills on average, though, and maybe they can get it down in time to actually help. 

...

Matirin asks Leareth if he's pacing himself enough. Leareth thinks he is. He feels tired all the time but it's not even just the Gates, those he can space widely apart so that he's never utterly exhausted, and none are as bad as the first one from Earth to the Andalite homeworld. (In hindsight it might have been better overall to do two Gates and rest for a few candlemarks at an intermediate point.) It's just draining, wrangling so many moving pieces at once, getting news from light-years away of battles that could have gone better if he'd had more time to plan or given them more resources, and so far Leareth isn't sure he's made any obvious mistakes, but that doesn't help with the bone-deep weariness. He wants the war to be over. 

... 

The fight for the Taxxon homeworld is a nightmare, half because of the orbital shipyards, half because most of the Taxxons are voluntary Controllers. Leareth just feels far worse about that. He really hopes they can just give the planet back to the alliance of Taxxons and Yeerks, afterward, but given the constraints they're under elsewhere, they can't leave it in the hands of the current Yeerk administration and risk it ending up as a supply of reinforcements. 

It's not a fight he feels particularly good about, afterward. But they win.

They garrison the planet, send messages, Gate in more Andalite ships from other frontiers, and move on. 

A month in, Nayoki insists that they stop and Leareth take a break. For a week. They've got that time to spare before the couriers can possibly reach any of the further-out worlds, and besides, the Yeerks being forewarned is not actually going to be enough for them to win, just enough to make it, well, substantially messier. And combining constant magical exhaustion with doing so much of their important planning isn't great. 

Leareth argues and eventually they compromise on five days. 

...

Five days later they're able to obtain more Andalite ships from a frontier now freed up because the Yeerks no longer have bases near enough to threaten it. Leareth sends half of those on to a lightly guarded Yeerk star system, previously uninhabited and not known to the Andalites until after the Council's computers were copied. They think is mostly used as a backup secret ship-repair yard.

Their own group is taking on a harder target. They're not sure how hard. Information on Leera, the Leeran homeworld, is somewhat out of date, possibly due to some sort of drama with Visser One that Mhalir mentioned; she is or was in command there. 

Leera is mostly ocean. It has one continent, tiny by Earth or Velgarth standards, and a handful of island ranges. The Leerans are an aquatic, technically amphibious species - and also telepaths, apparently, though only at very short range, a couple of yards. (Leareth thinks, dully, that he would normally be curious to study them and work with them afterward, see if the two kinds of mindreading share any similarities, but he can't muster much energy for curiosity even after his break.) This made a covert invasion like the one on Earth infeasible, though, so instead the Yeerks - genetically modified hammerhead sharks from Earth? For some reason? Made their skulls large enough for their brains to fit Yeerks, used them as shock troops, took the planet by force. The conquest was a few years ago, and few Leeran Controllers have been seen off Leera. (It would, of course, be inconvenient to transport them in space given that they need to live mostly in water and quickly dehydrate on land.)

While they travel in hyperspace, Leareth goes through the reports on their orbital infrastructure. The planet has two moons, both smaller than Earth's or Velgarth's moon; one of them has a repair-yard and some stationary weapons on it. There's likely to be a Pool ship and one Blade ship in orbit, probably a courier or two. They have Leeran beam weapons, captured intact during the invasion, but those are mainly built on the Leerans' underwater capital city and not a threat on the surface. Visser One had another 'secret plan' for planetary defence but, as of eighteen months ago, it hadn't been implemented. 

:We should be four days ahead of the earliest courier that could arrive here: Nayoki says. :Given the defences, I suspect I should try to land on their one land base, which has the ground Yeerk pool, and secure that first. That way we can also get sensor coverage of the system while they are not yet suspicious, and figure out if their secret plan has been completed by now: 

Matirin relays this to the Andalite command here and gets approval. <There's the one Yeerk pool for the whole planet?>

Leareth is, as usual, in Andalite morph. <One with a location recorded in the database, and then the Pool ship. I am suspicious there might be other pools in underwater cities, perhaps deliberately concealed ones. There is not exactly much land to build on.>

:If I take the land base and get into their computers, I can find out: Nayoki points out. 

Unhappy tail-lash. <The underwater portion of this is going to be - inconvenient, to say the least. However, few of the underwater defensive systems can actually threaten us, either on land or in orbit, so I suppose it might be acceptable for it to take a long time.> 

:I think we have already talked about this well past the point of diminishing returns and should just go obtain more recent information on the planet: 

<I agree. Do the two of you have morphs that can operate in water, in case it comes up ->

<I have an orca morph. Nayoki, did you get that one...?> 

:Dolphin. There was one at a human zoo on Earth, it was very cute. - Also intelligent enough to almost be legible to Thoughtsensing, which is a little uncanny, given that the humans keep them in zoos: 

<I did not try to Thoughtsense the orca so I have no idea if it does! I can also morph a goldfish but that is less useful.> 

Snort. <All right. I will tell everyone to expect to hear from you, Visser> he says to Nayoki.

Nayoki would roll her eyes, but since she's halfway through her Alloran morph, this is complicated. 

<Leareth, can you Gate me over to the Yeerk ship, it is right there.> Barely a mile away in hyperspace. 

'In z-space' makes it a harder Gate than one at a mile's distance would normally be, but he's very familiar with both ships' interiors and can use doorways, so on net it's not a very hard Gate and Leareth does it with only the slightest sigh. The rest of Nayoki's crew is already on the decoy ship. 

Nayoki is so tired of pretending to be Visser Three and worrying over whether she's convincing enough. They've extracted more authorization codes from one of the captive Council members, though, so that should go over all right this time. If they're lucky. 

Her ship winks out of z-space, and reappears in the Leeran system. She broadcasts the usual message. 

Authentication codes are exchanged as they approach orbit. She seems to know all the expected ones. Has to talk her way through some conversation with someone on comms duty who's apparently worked with the Visser before, but clearly doesn't know him all that well. 

Shortly after they make orbit, a shuttle separates from the Yeerk ship and heads toward the jewel-blue expanse of ocean, and the indeed-rather-small, lonely continent. It's not even as big as Australia back on Earth.