"And might be obliged to say something?"

"Can't make them talk, can sure threaten them. And they can be tapped to let their owners see them."

"If you find this plan potentially valuable I'm inclined at this point to put you in touch with someone with more relevant expertise. 'here's a target, how do we get what we want' is a thing some people do professionally and they'll almost certainly catch things I'd miss."

"It has potential but - I think common knowledge would be dangerous -"

"I won't tell anyone until you feel comfortable with that but we're talking 'bring in an Anitami special forces team' not 'go on the news', it would not become publicly known."

"...mm."

"I know how my people work, you're entirely right that if they were on your planet and told they had to use slaves to get a new one they'd rationalize it away but they're not going to go from 'Penumbra wants her friends, who are prisoners and who might when freed be inclined to do terraforming' to 'or we could try to take the one alien hostage to get the other alien, who has a lot of magic we know nothing about, to take us to their home world where doubtless everyone will think this was brilliant of us and want to teach us how to use elemental slaves."

"I'll talk it over with her."

"Okay. I'm right across the hall if you think of any more questions."

"Any more nasty surprises like the reds?"

"One country recently transitioned away from using reds for red jobs and killed almost all the reds except the ones Anitam took in. Another country is in the middle of doing the same thing. Everything else is less obviously horrible but I'd expect you might genuinely have different sensibilities than us - Anitam executes people for serious crimes? Some places do less of that. ...we let people do sex work before their first spring if they're of age? There's some place down south that's been sanctioning us over that for the last twenty years but no one else cares. Different castes have different penalties for the same crime, by law in some cases and in practice in others. There's a province on the coast that's been experimenting with corporal punishment in place of prison."

"Those seem less like - things you could get permanently stuck in - can I fix the red thing -"

"Planets fix the red thing. Otherwise not really."

"How do planets help with deciding to kill them all?"

"Olvala didn't kill them all. They kicked them out, and there was nowhere for them to go, except the ones we could squeeze in."

"Will they wait? The ones in the middle of it?"

" - I don't think so, the situation has kind of escalated to the point where it'd be hard for them to back down. Other places will probably wait on starting."

"Escalated how?"

"They didn't offer any red credits, this spring. The reds figured that was precursor to a massacre - correctly so - and they snuck out of their district and burned a blue district to the ground and attempted the same with less success elsewhere. Government shot a lot of them and then tried to make the rest train their replacements in how to do their jobs. The reds refused. The government took their children hostage and is now holding the children to make the parents train their replacements in exchange for periodic verification that their children are alive and unmutilated."

"You think I can't fix that or you think I shouldn't?"

"I'm unclear on the limitations of your magic system but I think they won't back down on the strength of the information that the alien strongly disapproves, and if you kill a lot of people then you've got a panicked international community and panicked people are stupid."

"Penumbra can teleport."

"Where're you going to put them?"

"Aren't there lots of places you can live and just don't like, that would be fine for a little while?"

"There's unoccupied equator but it still belongs to someone, there's unoccupied poles but they're cold."