"...you're suggesting we decentralize our leadership somehow?"

<Have someone in a bunker somewhere who can countermand sufficiently suspicious directions, keep live streaming video to the bunker. Yeerks cannot survive more than three days without feeding - they have to leave the host and spend several hours in a pool. If you have someone under continual observation from enough people they're safe. Train your soldiers in how to handle the possibility of impersonation in their chain of command - Andalite procedures give the topic a great deal of emphasis. Maybe decentralize the specific forms of authority that would enable swift mass enslavement, if that can be done without impeding your leadership under more usual circumstances.>

"I'll pass that along."

<Once I have more information about your society I can describe to you how I expect a Yeerk would arrange its conquest and you can take any protective measures that seem suitable. I emphasize again that it is unlikely they will find you.>

"That's good."

<Very.>

"How many species of sapients are there?"

<I have no reason to believe it's finite.>

"How many are you in contact with?"

<Andalites have diplomatic relations with thirty or forty and are aware of hundreds more.>

"Are most of them spacefaring?"

<It's not typical for anyone to bother with one until they become spacefaring or get conquered by someone who is - and most conquerors except Yeerks don't leave survivors - so most of the ones known to us are spacefaring.>

"What are the other species we might need to worry about if any came here?"

<- truth be told there are not many it would help to worry about.>

"...That's ominous."

<I do apologize. If you ran across - a lovely spacious island that satellites had somehow failed to discover, where the inhabitants were living off migratory birds they shot with bow and arrow, and they asked you how they could protect themselves against all the other cultures you know of, would it help to tell them about specific distinct ones ->

"We'd probably tell them to make a powerful friend, honestly."

<All Andalite interstellar forces at this point are deployed towards the war effort. If we get found once that is over - and it ends well - we could of course arrange something.>

"You don't think if we got your ship running again we might be helpful?"

<In the war effort? - maybe. There are a lot of you and you have the industrial base, but you're easy to subvert. We'd work with it if it came up but it would not be an uncomplicated advantage.>

"If jumps are impossible to trace, it seems like it might be possible to have an asset no one could learn to find."

<Only if no one who jumps knows how to get back.>

"I'm not sure how to work around that, but I wouldn't rule it out in principle. I'd want to talk to some greens about the details of the cryptography or the multi-key system or what have you, of course, I wouldn't go so far as to propose a complete plan myself."

<We have an arrangement like that - partial keys where four people are required to give the computer enough information to decrypt the jump coordinates - but it primarily works because it is so hard to take an Andalite alive. If you are stranded should anyone die, your strategy helps you very little, and if the capture of one of your ships dooms the secret then the secret is doomed.>

Nod, nod.