...Shit. This is not optimal. 

It shouldn't have taken them longer than thirty seconds to do the actual kidnapping, and their orders were to report in as soon as they had the subject, or if anything unexpected happened and they required backup. So when it's been five minutes, he snaps to someone to start trying to contact them. 

They have phone numbers for everyone on that team. They start calling them. 

Some of the phones ring unanswered. Some of the calls don't go through at all, like the phone is off (or has been destroyed). 

They start checking who is nearby, in case they want to send people to go look what happened, though - this was a well-equipped strike team of eight people -

"- also Visser we've got - a sensor reading from that location like - I don't - like a spaceship -"

"...like a hyperspace jump," someone else says slowly. 

- what. But that's– Stop. Don't think 'impossible', it's not known to be possible to jump from a gravity well but they just observed what they observed - those missing phones... 

<Get people on site. Whoever's close, go for> he's tabbing through for the map, <the corner store, first, pull their security footage> It won't cover the building itself but it gets the sidewalk right in front of the suspects' house. <Break into the house once you have> pause <two dozen people, they took down eight no trouble. You are authorized to use lethal force, if you find anyone, do not let them escape. If they are still there at all. I doubt it>

Running would be the smart thing to do once they realized they'd been spotted, it's what he would do, and could explain whatever technology they used to give off that signature. 

They make phone calls and pass these instructions along. They get estimates. They think they can get two dozen people there in ten more minutes, maybe less. 

"Looking back through logs for anything else that looked like a hyperspace jump on the surface," his lieutenant tells him. "We might've dismissed it as noise - since, you know, it's impossible -"

<Excellent thinking> He tries to praise his subordinates when they have good ideas, it should help them have more of them and not be nervous to bring them up. 

He paces. 

<Do we have groups on site anywhere else. I think we should attempt a higher-force kidnapping at some of the other locations, in case they are all about to go to ground. Presumably we have people nearby at the Washington sites?> There are a couple of those, at opposite ends of the city, DC is big. 

"We could take each location with fifty people in five minutes," someone says, pulling up a map full of red dots.

<Go for both. Please. And someone should stay back to observe and report in realtime, in case - something like that happens again>

They storm the apartment in Capitol Heights with fifty people and one hanging back to report live. He reports that the apartment is totally empty.

The storm the apartment at Dupont Circle with fifty people and one hanging back to report live. He - is abruptly cut off. A redial suggests that the phone has been destroyed. The sensors are detecting a massive surge of energy, not like someone hyperspace Gated like someone fired a ship weapon on the ground -

- they try to get nearby people on the phone but actually the first reports of what happened are on the national news.

Dupont Circle is levelled. No buildings are standing between M Street and Q Street and 19th-23rd Northwest. 

What. 

- okay, send teams to storm other houses, they're likely to find them empty at this point (how are they getting out? they didn't sense another hyperspace-jump-like signature, could be morph but they know not all of them have it) but they can at least search them, if it was a hurried evacuation they might've left something behind. 

They're doing that. 

About ten minutes later there's the news that one of the humans previously identified as living at the Dupont Circle Andalite house got out alive and is still in the city.  (They sent pictures to every Yeerk for several miles around when coordinating the doomed raid, and one of them saw her at a traffic light just now.)

Emril, Healer and Mindspeaker, is driving way over the speed limit toward Dupont Circle when she gets the fragmentary Mindspeech warning from Lasvat, :helicopter incoming–: and he drops it to focus on something else. 

She wrenches the steering wheel around and drives even faster in the opposite direction, maybe she can still reach the crew at Capitol Heights - it's a slim hope but the alternative is awful so she's going to try. She can't reach ahead with Mindspeech, yet, her range is a couple miles and the other crew are nine miles away, but she's going to try - she can't even tell them to wait for her, not with the warning - damn it, why did she and Lasvat get so complacent about solo trips...

She makes it almost to Constitution Ave before the world goes white behind her and she nearly crashes the goddamned car. Lasvat. 

Keep. Driving. She's not giving up yet. 

No one seems to be pursuing her although a lot of drivers are very angry with her and she narrowly missed being hit by a semi, half past seven in the morning is a bad time for a car chase in DC and now everyone is gawking about the giant explosion behind her. 

They should grab her, obviously. But apparently it's really important to catch these people by surprise, whoever the hell they are. She might not have her hands on whatever weapon just went off at Dupont Circle, more things will fit in a house than be portable in a car, but they can't be sure. 

(He takes three seconds to feel pain for the lives snuffed out, and then puts it aside for later.) 

He wants the Capitol Heights team headed as fast as they can in that direction. And - can the nearest Yeerk deliberately crash into her car? They should try to make it a nonfatal car crash, ideally, but she needs to have no warning before she's knocked unconscious. 

The nearest Yeerk veers out of oncoming traffic and right into her.

Aaaaaaaaaah Emril has time for an instant of red-hot fury, hey you asshole what the hell do you think you're doing - and then panic - and then they hit head-on and she slams forward, there's a brief flash of pain before everything goes away. 

Visser 3's staff does not need to be told to get the best available medical care right there right away. 

He wants her brought to one of their hospitals, obviously. This shouldn't be hard because most of the ambulance crews are theirs, and the fire department and police department - important infrastructure, they see a lot of people in the privacy of their own homes. Search the car's wreckage thoroughly, and her body, though probably if she did have a similar weapon on her the crash would have set it off. As soon as she's medically stable, have her infested so he can find out what the hell these people are doing and how. 

He paces. Waits to hear back from that team, and from the various operations now happening in a number of other cities. 

Reports trickle in over the course of the next hour. The operations in a number of other cities find empty apartments and houses. They have clothes for a handful of people, food in the fridge or the cupboards. Eclectic collections of toiletries in the bathrooms. In a couple cases they find fake ID cards and passports, and in a couple cases they find handwritten notes in an unfamiliar language or maybe in code (they are working on cracking it). 

In Miami there was another hyperspace-jump-like thing. At the point of origin there is a car, with the front door open, parked atrociously badly on the side of the road. 

The captured enemy is medically stable. They're sending someone in. 

Enstat slips in through her ear and settles in.

Emril is confused and drowsy-half-awake with drugs - something hurts but it's very far away and everything is all floaty, which makes it sort of hard to care about tracing down what happened and where she could be now. 

She tries anyway, blearily. Seems important. Car from oncoming traffic, swerving into her - the white-hot explosion behind her–

Oh no, it's not at all a good thing that she's awake is it - she tries frantically to sit up and she can't and she tries to open her Thoughtsensing and - can't do that either - reaches to stop her own heart but her Healing no longer obeys her, which is what's supposed to happen but gah she's mad about it now. 

"- this might be urgent enough that I should report from here and not after I leave," says Enstat in Spanish. "She doesn't speak Spanish."

"Yes, of course." And under a minute later someone has the Visser on the phone, in human morph. 

"Go on." 

"They have literal actual magic. There's another planet with humans on it and some of the humans there have magic and the Andalites formed an alliance with an entire army's worth of them and some of them can explode at will and most of those ones can also make magical doors point to point and some of them can do mind control or mindreading and the one I've got now has the mindreading and also what they call 'healing' but would be better understood as general biokinesis."

He breathes in a little but otherwise doesn't react much. "I see. Thank you for making the call to report immediately. Is the 'exploding at will' what happened at Dupont Circle earlier? It would have been her colleague." 

Emril doesn't understand the question because it's in Spanish. She's also trying to lean into the drugged grogginess and not have any thoughts.