Kalana and soldiers are just as confused about the matching family thing as they are but noticed it first by recognizing the famous members of the family. They really really really wanna go to space, everyone is so excited about going to space.

<Do you expect your government would hold to an agreement to fight in a war once they could conveniently betray it?>

"I think so," says Kalana. (It'd be something for the greys to do, always have to find things for the greys to do.)

<Do you think they'd end up conquering occupied planets?>

"Some people would probably find it tempting, but the Yeerk planets would keep us for a good while and by then we'll know how to make better use of the space we've got and had more chance to find more empty ones."

<Or build artificial ones. Will Anitam be the only country to want this deal? Will there be complications in extending the offer to others?>

"Everyone will want in on it. Relations aren't - perfect, but they're good enough to cooperate on something as straightforward as 'fight disgusting aliens and take their planets'."

<What are the - concerns with relations?>

"A few years ago we participated in a war against Voa, on Tapa's behalf, over Voa's contamination of their food exports. Everything's tense over red transition, too, especially with Olvala and Evalee and Biyan."

<Aliens who care at all will find the conduct towards reds awfully indefensible, you should be aware. Quarantine is one thing.>

"Maybe that will help encourage everyone to transition more like Anitam has and like Tapa is doing now."

Tail-swish. <We would be displeased to discover we've been significantly mislead about Anitam's conduct or priorities or plans for after the war.>

"...Would you rather be talking to Aitim? He'll have more of a big-picture view than I will."

<I have mixed feelings about Aitim. It'd be useful to talk to someone who'd be involved in the relevant decision-making, though.>

"I'm confident I'd know about any Anitami military action or planned military action, given my position, but I'm less equipped to describe other plans and conduct."

<Then perhaps we can talk through how you envision the military side of things, and then perhaps someone can be found to discuss other plans. What kind of resources are you willing to commit to this? How are you planning to protect against Yeerk infiltration?>

"We can field millions of troops and all their necessary support and supply on a popular cause like this one will be, easily, and it will only be more popular to expand grey child credits so there will be a boom in five years, if the timeline is such that that's a good idea. I've got some of the generals working on protocols based on what you've told us. It's not an especially onerous requirement to oblige people to be watched for three days after engagements; it's similar to decontamination protocol after melee combat, if longer, so I expect that will be easy to integrate into operations."

<It's also important they not know too much. It's plausible it'll take five years to build everything we'd need, track them down everywhere, and defend newly acquired territory. If you've instead a boom of greys and the war's over, will that be destabilizing?>

"Need-to-know ops aren't unusual, although usually on a smaller scale. We're doing some creative things with half-greys these days, I'm sure the people who handle child credits can rejigger it so the boom isn't too bad if we don't have much to do with all the grey five-year-olds. Some of them at least we could funnel into piloting more generally, it's conventionally held that space travel is a grey occupation."

<What's troop discipline like - if they need to take a city with minimal host-species casualties - are there going to be miscellaneous atrocities for which we are continually apologizing ->

"We should double-check that there aren't things that would be frowned on by the interstellar community which are more customary here, but I think we can have them distinguishing as necessary between civilian hosts and more unambiguous military targets. I think very highly of our troop discipline but it's not literally perfect, of course."

<Perfect would not be expected. Your decontamination rules, what would those look like and what is needed to abide by them ->

She can get the military handbook, there's a whole section on it.

<Andalites would object to decontaminating after melee combat, do you suppose morphing and demorphing would suffice?>

"Hm, I'd want to run that by some greens, maybe the ones who were involved in coming up with the red decontamination procedure."