The answer, p.3
The Answer, page 3
I roared back, launched into my nearest tormentor, and smacked his horned head with a blow that could stun an elephant. I spun and gut-slashed another. I closed my teeth on a flailing arm and worried it savagely like a mad dog with his last bone.
I was in the tiger and the tiger was in me. No time to think, only act and react. Cat speed. Cat accuracy. But the sheer weight of the attackers would defeat Ax and me, and even in the battle frenzy, I knew it.
Rachel and Tobias had joined the fight, but now, Hork-Bajir themselves, their abilities were no greater than those of their opponents.
BamBamBam!
The volume of firing increased suddenly. I caught a wild, distorted vision of troops lined up on the catwalk pouring automatic fire down on us.
I heard Doubleday’s foghorn voice bellowing, “Don’t hit the tiger or the blue thing!”
A Hork-Bajir nailed me with a sudden, unexpected blow. No pain, just a shocking numbness. My hind legs collapsed. He had severed my spine. The bottom half of the tiger’s body might as well be gone.
I would be dead in seconds. Had to demorph. No other choice.
BamBamBamBamBamBam!
Demorph, Jake, I told myself, already loopy, drifting. Demorph.
A huge Hork-Bajir stood tall above me. The tiger’s blood dripped from his wrist blade. He raised his T. Rex foot. He was going to gut me, make sure I was dead. Couldn’t move my body. My front paws batted feebly at the air. Helpless.
Half a dozen rounds caught him in the chest. He fell straight back.
I lay there, twisted halfway around, a tiger pretzel. Ax was now astride me, whipping like a mad thing, a Cuisinart making Hork-Bajir puree.
I heard a thud. Bullet in my hindquarters. I looked up, confused, unable to focus clearly. Then my vision cleared enough to see a soldier drawing careful, deliberate aim at me. A Controller. He looked just like his fellow soldiers, but he wasn’t shooting at the Hork-Bajir, he was going for a head shot on me, that’s what he was going for.
He fired. I saw the muzzle flash.
I felt the bullet hit the right side of my head. But I wasn’t dead.
Something big and brown came barreling through, sweeping Hork-Bajir before it. Ax was no longer above me, but was shoulder-to-shoulder with a grizzly bear. Cassie ran, bounded up, bounced off Rachel’s massive shoulders and took a wild, flying leap straight into the Hork-Bajir.
The Hork-Bajir were falling back.
And still, I could see that single soldier biting his lip and taking aim at me again. This time he wouldn’t miss. I was isolated, alone, defenseless. No one saw. No one could possibly see that he was aiming at me, not at the Hork-Bajir.
I could see his finger tighten on the trigger.
He was too focused to notice the gray-and-white blur as the falcon raked his face, leaving great gashes across his nose and forehead.
I was wrong: A falcon could see a man’s eyes and know where they were aimed.
Marco was over me, shaking me with big gorilla hands and yelling,
Demorph?
Oh … okay.
Doubleday listened after that. He evacuated his headquarters at top speed. The Yeerks would be back, especially now that they knew we were there. Fortunately, like a good general, he had a fallback position.
I explained about the three days, how no Yeerk can survive for more than three days without consuming Kandrona rays in a Yeerk pool.
“You need to lock down yourself and your officers and as many men as you can for three days. Whoever is left after that will be reliable.”
“I’ve got two regular army divisions and half a dozen guard units under my command. I can’t lock down and watch anything like that number of men.”
“General, better a hundred men you can trust than ten thousand you can’t.”
He agreed. Unfortunately, this meant a three-day delay before he could provide the diversion we needed to take the Pool ship. In that time the Yeerks, with all their Taxxons, might well get the new Yeerk pool up and running. It wouldn’t be finished, most likely, but if it was at all functional, if it could be used to feed the Earth-based Yeerks, I was certain that Visser One would fly his precious Pool ship back up into the safety of orbit.
So we had to make sure the new Yeerk pool wasn’t ready. Which meant two impossible missions instead of just one.
Better and better.
“At least it’ll be mostly Taxxons,” Marco said when we were all back at camp and eating a meal of dry cold cereal. “They’re easy to take down. Once they’re injured at all, they’re dead: Their brother Taxxons make sure of that.”
Taxxons are like big, nasty caterpillars or centipedes. As big around as an old oak tree. They walk on rows of needle legs, carrying the upper third of their bulk erect. They have a ring of red-jelly eyes and a lamprey mouth. And they are hungry as shrews: always hungry. Always. It’s a madness, a raging, insatiable need.
The Yeerks had bought them off and made them allies by the simple expedient of promising to feed them. Some Taxxons carried the Yeerk slug in their feverish brains, but many did not. The Yeerks hated them as host bodies, hated living with the hunger that not even a Yeerk could control.
And then, there was the danger that Marco had alluded to: Taxxons are cannibals. A wounded Taxxon is almost always set upon by his brothers, even in the middle of battle. It’s like watching sharks react to blood in the water.
“Yeah, they’re easy to kill,” I said, feeling the dark, bitter gloom that always came over me after a battle. “But they’ll be protected by Hork-Bajir and by Bug fighters. And by human-Controllers, of course.”
“We blew up one Yeerk pool,” Rachel said cockily. “So we blow up another. Badda-boom. Nothing to it.”
She knew better, of course. She was just playing her part. Not for the first time I wondered what on Earth would happen to her if this war ever ended. Off to college to study prelaw or whatever? She was the goddess of war, my cousin was. Sixteen years old and a veteran of more battles than a World War II veteran. So was I, but Rachel loved it in a way I didn’t. She needed it.
“Anyone have any useful suggestions?” I asked. It was just us, just the Animorphs. I’d had it with councils of war. “Tobias? You’ve seen the place.”
“Just for us,” Rachel said with a laugh. “It’s kind of flattering.”
“How do you hurt a hole in the ground?” Marco wondered.
“With what?” Marco said.
Cassie started to say something, stopped herself. Then, gathering her courage, she blurted, “You can’t worry about the hole, you have to destroy the digging equipment.”
I raised an eyebrow. “The equipment is Taxxons.”
She looked away.
Marco whistled softly. “Yep,” he agreed, nodding respectfully at Cassie.
Was Cassie just stating the obvious, or was she trying to reestablish herself by being as ruthless as any of us?
Either way, she was right: Forget the dirt, focus on the shovels. There was not an endless supply of Taxxons. I wished I knew how many there were, altogether. Once again I mourned the loss of access to the Chee, our most valuable sources of information.
“Okay,” I said. “So we go after the Taxxons. I better go see Toby. Cassie? Go see James and his people. We’ll need everyone we can get. We go tonight.”
“Oh, man, I’m just getting over this morning’s fun,” Marco complained.
“Eat your dry, stale granola,” Rachel said with a laugh. “You need to keep up your strength.”
At the beginning of the American Civil War both sides thought the war was about taking or holding cities and ports and rivers and mountain passes. They thought it was a chess game.
By the end of the war they’d figured out that they weren’t playing chess. Cities didn’t matter much. Ports and rivers and mountain passes, while useful, were secondary to the real game. The real game was destruction.
Lincoln had figured it out earlier than most and his generals; Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Philip Sheridan made it happen.
They burned enemy homes and farms. They burned crops in the field and slaughtered farm animals and wrapped railroad tracks around trees. They starved the enemy.
They realized that warfare was no longer about chivalry and honor, but about killing the enemy. Find the enemy, kill the enemy. Kill so many of them that those who are left alive lose their will to fight on. Do whatever it takes.
That’s the way war has been ever since.
For a long time we had fought the Yeerks reactively. We were always ten steps behind, trying to foil this plan or that plan. We’d tried to fight the war with at least some vestige of decency. And maybe that had been okay when we were fighting to stop an infiltration. Now things were different. We were down to the final stages. Either the Yeerks would prevail, or we would.
So I gave simple orders to my people, the original Animorphs, and the auxiliary Animorphs, and Toby’s free Hork-Bajir. Orders I had never given before: Kill the enemy. Kill the Taxxons.
Dress it up however you want, that’s what war is about. If there’s glory in there somewhere, I must have missed it.
We Animorphs went in first, the six of us, in bat morph. Tobias had reported that real bats were in the area during the evening hours, which would allow us to blend in naturally.
Flying as a bat is very different from flying as a bird. You never feel that the air is your natural home. You always feel that you’re airborne only by virtue of hard work, and if you let up for an instant you’ll drop like a rock. It’s not actually quite that bad, but that’s how it feels.
Bats can see just fine, contrary to what some people think. They’re not owls or hawks, but they see. But it’s the echolocation that sets them apart.
It’s like a sort of Etch-A-Sketch picture of the world. You fire off a series of ultrasonic clicks. The sound waves bounce off objects, are picked up by your ears, and are translated in your bat brain into a sort of alternate reality picture of the world around you.
You “see” things you don’t see with your eyes. You see insects in flight as tiny pinpoint meteorites. And you overlook other things. But working together, regular sight and echolocation, once you relax into it and let the bat’s brain work it out, you get a very complete picture.
We had approached within a quarter mile of the site before morphing. Then we split up and moved in from different angles, flying wild and jerky, flapping our skin wings, blasting our unheard radar sounds all around.
The Bug fighters swooped overhead, oblivious to us. Huge spotlights shone down from the lip of the hole. Heavily armed men and Hork-Bajir patrolled. They were very much on guard. No one was napping.
And down inside, just like Tobias had said, like worms after a heavy rain, the Taxxons worked.
There were pieces of heavy equipment down there as well: earthmovers, cranes, graders, and so on. But the Taxxons were digging up the dirt, squirming their way into walls of gravel and dirt and rock with amazing speed.
As we watched a large section of slope collapsed inward. The Taxxons had tunneled beneath it, loosened the structure and allowed it to fall in on them. They seemed to suffer no permanent damage as they wormed free. Taxxons are easy to cut, not easy to squash, perfectly adapted to their own ecological niche.
No one said anything. I was braced for something from Cassie. Surely she would raise some sort of moral objection to this straightforward slaughter. But she remained silent. Hard to know what she would object to. It was always a question of balance for her, I guess. She was committed to winning, believed in our cause, understood that there would be terrible things to be done. But she found some things, and not other things, to be over the line. Me, I barely knew where the line was anymore. I’d come to depend on Cassie to keep me from going too far.
Nothing from Cassie.
We swooped silently down, down through the hazy lights and into the deep cleft that, to our bat senses, was well defined and perfectly clear.
With Ax ready I began to demorph. As my weight returned I had to grab exposed roots with unformed hands to keep from sliding down the cleft. Then, morphing to tiger, I lost my hold and slid, tumbling down.
I rolled to a stop by Ax who waited calmly just within the shadow. A pair of Taxxons toiled not ten feet away, out in the hazy light. They hadn’t seen or smelled us.
My acute tiger senses told me even without looking that the others were morphed behind me.
It must have been a terrifying sight for the Taxxons. An Andalite warrior and five wild beasts suddenly roaring out of a crack in the dirt wall. The nearest Taxxons had no chance to react. We hit them, slashed, cut, and moved on, knowing that a wounded Taxxon is a dead Taxxon.
I moved at breakneck speed. Slashed the nearest Taxxon, leaped atop him, propelled myself away, digging my hind claws into him for good measure.
I hit the ground, took two loping steps, and was ripping the next Taxxon before he could scream.
But now the Taxxon voices were crying out in their shrill, sibilant language.
“Sreeeeya! Ansacaleees!”
I caught a glimpse of a wild African elephant burying ivory tusks in a Taxxon’s raised chest. Rachel tossed her head and the tusks nearly removed the top third of her victim.
Marco in cheetah morph and Ax fought most logically. They each understood that a mere wound was enough, as long as live Taxxons were left undamaged to take care of the finishing off. Marco would accelerate to forty mph, dig his less-than-deadly claws into a victim, leave bloody scratches behind, and prance away far too quickly for a Taxxon to respond.
Ax wielded his tail with the precision of a surgeon. Tobias wheeled and dove at the red jelly eyes. And Cassie was there, too, in wolf morph, tearing into sausage-casing flesh, ripping and jumping back.
It was a sheer, one-sided massacre.
Now the security forces, human-Controller and Hork-Bajir, were getting into the game. They came running around the lip of the crater to get close enough to fire down into us without hitting the Taxxons.
But we were faster than the Taxxons, and, with the exception of Rachel, smaller. Excited Hork-Bajir firing wildly were doing almost as much damage as we were.
“Don’t stand up here shooting, get down there!” a human voice bawled. “Get down there, you cowards!”
Clear across the crater, James and seven of his people in morph erupted amid the Taxxons. That would keep the security forces from concentrating.
Taxxons were running away, turning and running, confused, terrified. Others lacked even that much self-control: They fell upon their wounded brothers and slammed their teeth-lined round mouths down again and again, reared up high, and with a “Sreee!” of delight tore chunks from their still-living fellow Taxxons.
I saw two wounded Taxxons devouring each other. Both screamed in rage and hate; both must have known, somewhere, deep in their fevered minds, that this was madness, but neither could stop.
Unnecessary, of course: An Andalite sees in all directions at once.
But now the easy part was definitely over: Hork-Bajir were piling into the melee. It was the difference between fighting big, nasty but vulnerable worms and fighting walking razor blades.
A Hork-Bajir leaped over a fallen Taxxon and landed right in front of me. Just that morning I’d let a Hork-Bajir cut me down.
I broke free and yelled,
The battle had drawn every Yeerk eye down to the pit. The swift, running approach of sixty free Hork-Bajir warriors had gone unnoticed, even by the buzzing, frustrated Bug fighters overhead.
The Yeerks were uncoordinated, thrown off by our successive waves. Our plan was working. But sooner or later someone was going to take charge of the shocked and off-balance Yeerks.
