"- sir I just check badges and take phone calls."

He leaves.

He goes back to the university and assigns everyone new reading and paces. He shows Findekáno the message to Tyelcormo.

" - what exactly would it have cost you to reply 'yeah, some of them are' instead of 'fine' -"

"Then he'd know, he can't know."

" - Maitimo his first reaction to your planning a - coup or whatever you're planning - was that you were going to rip apart their families, maybe arrest them all -"

"So he very nobly told me not to. I'm - planning a coup is the wrong word. We are going to leave and go find some nation that can keep its commitments, and before we do that we're going to tell some people in Calado why, and if they see fit to do something about it -"

"Lotta people die."

"It will be the worst crime an Elf has ever orchestrated. - I don't think a lot of people. I think - maybe a hundred people."

"Gone forever."

"Yup. I don't know what to do."

Sigh. "I'm not sure if it's the sort of thing you ought to be very sure of or the sort of thing where it'd be worrying if you were very sure."

"I think - it's the sort of thing where you ought to be very sure of what the worst-case scenario is, it'd be worrying if you thought it couldn't go wrong, but - you can have mixed feelings about the rest."

"What's the worst-case scenario -"

"Military splits over it and fights themselves."

"Do we have a plan for that."

"Huan offered to zip around biting everyone's guns out of their hands but I'm not counting that as a fallback plan because it's a stupid one. I'm going to have to talk to the people who we need and be sure of them and call it off if I'm only mostly sure of them, that's all."

- nod.

Maitimo looks up generals. 

Maitimo drops by to talk to some of them.

The generals aren't sure they are supposed to talk to the aliens? They were not told to expect an alien? One of them goes to make a phone call.

"Please don't," he says. "I don't want it known I'm here. The government broke the terms of the lightleaper project, lied about it, and killed people covering it up. We cannot work with them further. My people are contemplating leaving for Tapa or somewhere. I'm speaking to you first."

"...why, you want us to try to convince them not to attack Tapa? Tapa's huge, they won't touch it."

"No. We can't work with Calado's government. We've no complaints with your people. We will leave, if you think that's best. But if you'd rather, we are interested in instead dropping the whole blue caste off on a colony planet of ours and giving you lightleapers without betrayal at every turn."

"What terms did they break?" asks a different general. It is sure convenient that the generals all play cards together every week.

"We sent them four conditions to do the ships here; one was that the university take foreign students. They had local greens pretend to be our foreign students. We asked if perhaps there'd been a mistake and they shot someone on the university board and said they were so sorry about those traitors. I will build lightleapers somewhere that doesn't treat me like an idiot. But I'd like it to be here."

"Can you alienify all the blues away or are you saying you want us to hold a coup," says a general.