It might be a trick but he wants them alive, so badly, it's - starting to feel like it might be the only way out of this that doesn't end in the exact pileup of bodies he never wanted.

They should get medical care to them - and they should find out right away if any of them is Leareth, whose pictures they have, and if so airlift him out immediately. Also infest him, as soon as he's not actively dying. 

(He has people monitoring all the comms for anything suspicious and is absolutely ready to bomb the site if it seems like it's the really dangerous kind of trap.) 

They send people in. If it's a trick it's still not obvious. 

"Have the one in the pictures," someone says into a cell phone a couple of minutes later. There's some rustling. "Alive."

At the same moment he gets notification from the Blade ship that  twisted construct creatures that are all teeth and claws are systematically disemboweling their way across the Blade ship, advice???

...Wow. He's - not really sure what the Andalites and mages' plan was, here, do the twisted construct creatures seem able to do anything? They've presumably done the sensible thing and closed the barricade doors. If the creatures don't go down to dracon beams, or it's not possible to do that without destroying the ship itself, they should - evacuate whoever they can? 

- if they end up deciding to do that, or if they can't and are about to lose, he's assuming the Andalites have a stage two to this plan; they want the ship for themselves, not just out of commission. So if they're going to get that, he wants it rigged to self-destruct. Either an hour in the future, or, if they can manage it, ten minutes after a hyperspace-jump Gate signature is detected inside it again. 

He wants them to get Leareth medical care and transport him away from the mine, and he's on his way. 

They are throwing everything they have at getting him stable. It'd have been really great if they'd found the site twenty minutes earlier but he'll pull through. Might be able to ill-advisedly nudge him around to consciousness in another couple of minutes, should they do that.

He won't be there yet in a couple of minutes, he was starting out in orbit, he'll meet them in, oh, ten or fifteen minutes, nearest secured area, he's still not entirely sure the Andalites won't have rigged the mine to explode on a dead-man's-switch or something. As soon as he's a little more stable and it's not too ill-advised to wake him, though, he wants them to infest him with any available Yeerk, to get some preliminary information.

Visser 3 is betting he will want to do it himself, in morph, but he doesn't want to be the first person in Leareth's head.

Yes, they can have that lined up for as soon as the Yeerk will be able to get anything. Which shouldn't be too much longer, now. 

The shuttle descends.

His tail lashes. He tries to stop it, it scares his staff. Understandably. 

He tries not to dwell on how completely, utterly, bone-shakingly terrified he is. 

When the patient is near consciousness they Yeerk him. The Yeerk is going to have a bad time at first, in a brain that is out cold from damage like this, but it's better than any chance of the man becoming conscious while still free; who knows what he could do. 

Ughhhh he feels very terrible - wrong - something - where...? 

Leareth's thoughts are still fragmented and gluey but as soon as he can sense the surface distantly above him, light and motion but very far away, he starts clawing his way toward consciousness. Instinctively reaches for his Gifts. 

- can't - 

No. 

Tries to Final Strike, which he also can't do, and then tries to move and can't either, and in the moment of relaxing his efforts, which is almost but not quite shaped like giving up, he nearly passes out again - tired - maybe fine, better not to think, now... 

The Yeerk opens Leareth's mouth. "Visser three...here yet...this is very complicated...he needs to see it..."

"Five minutes," someone says. "Uh, orders were to learn what you can in the interim." 

Who's calling what complicated, Leareth is thinking, dully, none of this has seemed all that complicated to him. Messy, sure. About to get a whole lot messier, definitely. Damn it. Hopefully Matirin does the correct strategic thing, here, and finds where they've taken him and kills him. 

- wondering vaguely how they got him at all, there's a gap in his memory, but damn it Visser Three is good.

Four minutes away.

"He's immortal. Thousands of years old. Takes new bodies. There's a lot here - not sure what we need - I can't use the magic powers, they did something to block that -"

You're complicated, the Yeerk says to him. More than I expected. You don't just hate us.

...Oh, that. Well, what good would hating them do. Only makes it harder to weigh the tradeoffs. They're people too, just - he didn't know how to build a world they fit into, not starting from this disaster, and he hoped winning the war would get him a platform to build from but that might not even happen now. 

We have a plan for that. I'm not privy to any of the details obviously but that - building a world we fit into, where we're hosted by willing people - that's the idea.

Once we're not fighting for our lives.

They're making reasonable choices from their perspective, given their goals and incentives. He wishes Visser Three were less reasonable, even, unreasonable people are easier to win wars against... He didn't go off-planet to investigate or anything, but his people read a lot of Yeerk thoughts and they're pretty sure the conquering of other worlds happened about the way it was described... Gods, he's so tired and still feels terrible, he's not in the mood to hash this out right now and would rather sleep. 

He tests whether he can try to fall asleep when a Yeerk is in his brain. 

He can try but there's someone using his mouth to talk, which is very distracting. "Andalite commander is Matirin. At a different base, they evacuated to three different places and he didn't know where any of them were. He doesn't know whether the other ones were in Alaska, Matirin would've been constrained by Gate range from the first one. Gate range is hundreds not thousands of miles. We should maybe try to gas the mines in Canada, too."

(Elsewhere, word reaches Visser 3 that someone Gated into the gas-filled mine and did a Final Strike. They'd already gotten many of the bodies out, though, and they're seeing if any more are salvageable.)

(Visser 3 thanks them, tells them to keep up the good work.) 

He asks his people to make preparations for gassing mines in Canada, in order of distance from the evacuated base, but not to begin anything yet. 

The shuttle lands outside a small rural Alaska hospital, the nearest facility they could medevac Leareth too, which has now been fully taken over and secured by the Yeerk forces. He gets out, heads for the room where they have Leareth. 

<Updates?> he asks the Yeerk currently in Leareth's head. 

" - the Andalites are planning to destroy the planet if they can't stop us from taking it. He doesn't know how."

<I see> He turns to the nearest doctor. <Can we briefly put him under again to switch out Yeerks. Apparently I need to see this myself.>

"Yes, Visser." They put a patch of something on his skin. 

"Thousands of years old," the Yeerk says, "he takes over other bodies - there's a lot here -" and then the body is uncooperative with further speech. 

He morphs Yeerk, right there in the hospital room. It's a particularly gruesome morph. He asks one of them to please scoop him up and swap him out. 

...He hates the brief moment when all his senses go away and it's just him and Alloran, blind, deaf, helpless. But he knows it won't last long, and is calm about it. 

The other Yeerk comes out and they press him against Leareth's ear.

Mhalir can worry about the Andalites planning to destroy the planet later. When he's seen - whatever this is. It feels so very important. 

He spreads himself out into every corner of Leareth's brain. It's frustrating at first because the brain is half-sedated still and not giving him much in the way of thoughts or sensory input, but it's a short-acting anesthetic, he just has to wait seconds.