"I did basic training! It's not a job requirement but I thought it'd make me better at it so I got permission to join a cohort. I think it helped - not because I needed experience being yelled at by drill sergeants who thought it was funny to have a blue in their batch but because I made friends and got a better understanding of grey cultural habits."

Nod. "The cultural stuff and the - actual constraints on unit discipline under fire and the - it would be intolerable to send people to their deaths without knowing their names -"

"That seems - cumbersome, the names -"

"Not especially. I know the people under my command - if we had to kill everyone on Earth I was not going to learn five billion, that's different, but if they're mine it's straightforward -"

"Kill everyone on Earth?"

"We can't let the Yeerks have it."

"Goodness."

"It was not the first resort. But we were equipped for the possibility."

Nod.

"Would you -"

" - if asked to kill everyone in Tapa just so we could live there I'd resign. But the invading parasites is a - different sort of problem, isn't it - can the weapons on the ships destroy planets, that would take an extraordinary amount of energy wouldn't it -"

"And leave it uninhabitable that can't be the best way -"

"Interesting thing to admit to outright. Wouldn't say it if you expected people might be bothered -"

"Would the planet be uninhabitable, after -?"

"Last place we had to do that we used bioweapons. Nice and tidy, you can leave all the rest of the ecosystems intact. If we couldn't get to the surface the ship's weapon systems can do it but - less elegantly."

"So the Yeerks having a planet isn't the problem, it's Yeerks having the inhabitants."

"Five billion more hosts would represent a substantial increase in their capabilities and humans can have four children in one of your years, it'd be more than five billion very quickly."

"...they can? They can't actually, right, not habitually, there'd be more than five billion as soon as they had the technology to support even that many. Unless the planet's huge."

"Lower tech level than you, starvation might've been keeping the population down until very recently in their history. As far as I know nowhere on Earth has population controls but I think they usually prefer to space them more than that. The Yeerks would breed them as quickly as possible, that doesn't mean it's their default."

Nod.

(At the capital: "There's people who'd make that trade. Fifteen children and helpful parasites to find places to put them and all you have to do...")

("He's not wrong that they'd take us inside the space of a month if they found us.")

"Ajoril does anywhere on Earth have population controls -"

     "Yeah, biggest country does, one kid per family, don't recall how they enforce it."

"Oh, all right."

("A month?")

("If it's as described, where you get all the skills and knowledge of the hosts, yes. We are utterly unprepared for our housekeepers having alien parasites in their heads and then the council could have essential people called in for interviews -")

"One kid per family? Why would you aim below replacement -"