The answer, p.6
The Answer, page 6
“Some?”
“Yeah, some,” Tom agreed. “Sorry, but we’re not interested in hiding out in some out-of-the-way forest, some game preserve. That may be fine for the Taxxons. Me, I want something a little better than that. But then, I have even more to offer than Brother Arbron, here. You want the Pool ship? You want your mommy and daddy back, Big Jake the Yeerk Killer? You want this creature back?” He indicated his own body. “You want poor Tommy back? I can make all that happen.”
I had to rein in a powerful desire to go after him. It’s hard to conceive of the impotent rage you feel watching someone you love be reduced to a mindless puppet. “In exchange for what?”
“My people want it, too: the morphing power.”
“You said you’re already morph-capable.”
“I am. And not just this body, by the way, but me. I’ve subjected my own true Yeerk self to the cube. You want to know what’s funny? I can morph Tom. That’s right, I can morph into my own host body. Cool, huh? But there are all these other Yeerks who are never going to get the chance to be free.”
Marco snorted derisively. “Free? You don’t want to be free.”
Tom laughed. “Marco must be the one doing your thinking for you, Jake. You never were all that smart. You’re right, Marco, I want something else. I want Visser One dead. I want the Council of Thirteen off my back. I want to lose the whole Empire. They’re prisoners of their own tired old thinking. They can’t see the future. We’re a parasitic species, they can’t see past that. We have the huge vulnerability of reliance on Kandrona rays. But morphed, permanently morphed, we won’t need Kandrona rays, and we won’t be parasites anymore. We can achieve a greater destiny.”
He moved closer now. His fists were clenched at his side, his jaw seemed to tighten so that the words could barely force their way past bared teeth. I’d seen Tom this way once, just once, when he’d been wrongly accused of cheating on a test. It was as angry as Tom got, short of punching someone.
“Visser One is only capable of piling brute force on top of brute force. He’s insane, you know. You can’t rely on him! You can’t hope for career advancement, to rise as you should. I should be a sub-visser by now, and in the small numbers. What I’ve done on this planet? I’ve been carrying him for the last three years. But as long as …” He stopped himself, forced a hard smile. “Office politics. You don’t want to hear about it.”
“What do you want?” Marco asked him. “Give it to us A, B, C. What do you want?”
Tom’s Yeerk dropped the wise-guy attitude. He ignored Rachel and Marco and even Ax who still hovered close, twitching with readiness. “You take the Pool ship, Jake. You can keep it. But I get the Blade ship, and a hundred of my people, all treated with the morphing cube. And we get a free pass out of this system.”
“And you take off to some far-off, unsuspecting planet, make victims of some other species?” Cassie cried.
“Hmm. Come to think of it, yes,” Tom said. He waited. Grinned. “But …”
“Yeah?” I asked.
“But the Yeerk Empire will be gutted. Finished. I’ve told Visser One that I have information that the Andalite fleet is massing close by, using Jupiter as a shield to hide behind. So he’s ordered most of our own fleet to stay in Zero-space, ready to emerge once the Andalites are committed. Not quite true. The Andalites are much closer than that.”
That interested me. Interested me greatly, but could I believe him?
Tom’s face smirked. “Little brother, you’ve got to know by now: Wars aren’t won with clean hands.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Cassie said, but it was almost a whisper.
“What do you have to offer?” I asked Tom.
“The keys to the kingdom, kid. I can give you the access codes for every system on the Pool ship. If you can take it, Brother Jake, you and your free Hork-Bajir and your new Taxxon allies, if you can take it, I can tell you how to fly it. Not only that, I have a plan to help you get aboard the Pool ship. And by the way, your old friend Visser One has temporarily transferred his headquarters to the Pool ship. The Pool ship and Visser One — that’s game, set, and match.” He grinned at me and said, “They’ll carve your sanctimonious face up on Mount Rushmore, Jake-Boy. You’ll be the savior of the human race.”
“Thanks for the offer,” I said. “I don’t think so. Ax, take him. Rachel? Help Ax. Carefully!”
That rocked him for a second or two. Then he nodded. “I see: The Andalite’s told you he can break security.” He nodded. “He probably can, the Andalites are very good with computers. He’d have an hour before the codes shift. He would. Except that I’ve changed the code cycle to fifteen minutes.” He glared at Ax. “Can you beat fifteen minutes, Andalite? Can you do that?”
The keys were in my hands.
I could win. We could win.
If General Doubleday would provide the diversion. If the Taxxons would rally to us. If Tom’s Yeerk provided us with the access codes. If Tom really could get us aboard the Pool ship and we could overpower the Yeerks still aboard. And if Ax could (and would) find a way to convince his people to ratify the promises we’d made to the Taxxons and Tom’s dissident Yeerk faction.
Five “ifs.” A lot. But at least now the number of “ifs” was a finite number.
A sixth “if”: If Tom’s Yeerk was telling the truth.
He had asked for no guarantees. Did he trust me to keep my word? Would he risk everything on my word? True, he knew me through my brother’s memories. And yet … and yet …
As we flew home, flew home impossibly free and alive after spending an hour with a few hundred Taxxons plus one of the highest ranking Yeerks, my mind was full of the details. Cassie left me alone for a while, but I knew she’d have something to say. I knew it. And I knew I had ignored her in the past at my own peril. I knew I should listen to her, trust her.
But I also knew what she’d say, and I didn’t want to hear it. Just the same, after a while, as we flew in the dead night air above the wrecked town below, the waiting got to me.
She sounded bitter. I wasn’t surprised. I was surprised by what came next.
she said.
I took a moment to digest that. She was actually blaming herself.
Of course Tom’s Yeerk was lying in part. I was sure he was not interested in turning nothlit, that was a joke. The morphing cube was almost surely on board the Blade ship, and the Blade ship had its own small Yeerk pool facility. So of course he was lying about that.
But just as surely, he was telling the truth about wanting to seize the Blade ship and go into business for himself.
Tom. The Yeerk in his head. Had to believe him, after all, he’d known where we were, he obviously knew about Arbron, he could very easily have called in every Hork-Bajir-Controller on the planet and taken us down.
He’d had us right in the palm of his hand, and let us go. Had to trust that. Didn’t I?
Yeah. But why did he trust me? Why did he trust me?
Trust breeds trust, right? Tom’s Yeerk had shown he could be trusted, so he trusted us in return? Trusted me to get him all he wanted, all I’d agreed to?
No. No, that wasn’t it. Tom’s Yeerk wanted us to believe we could trust him. He didn’t ask for assurances or cross-examine me because he didn’t want me doing the same to him.
Then I saw it: Of course. I’d been looking at nothing but tactics; I’d overlooked emotion. The emotion of a vengeful Yeerk. He despised Visser One for being a failure, for being a brute, for refusing to promote him. “As long as …” Tom had started to say.
Yes. Visser One was not the only person Tom’s Yeerk hated. Someone else was to blame for forcing this choice on an ambitious Yeerk.
Me. My friends. We were responsible for forcing this choice on Tom’s Yeerk. In frustrating Visser One we had doomed Tom’s Yeerk.
That was why Tom’s Yeerk didn’t ask for reassurances from us. He expected us to be dead. He would kill Visser One and us and sail off across the galaxy in the Blade ship with the morphing cube in his hands.
It came to me all at once that I could beat him. Use him and beat him.
One of those rare, perfect moments when a dozen nagging questions, an infinity of details, simply fall perfectly into place and form a single clear picture.
It took my breath away. The perfection of it. The pure, ruthless perfection of it.
All I had to do was send my friends to die.
Cassie was still talking to me, but I didn’t hear her words. I had seen the vision. I could see the pure, straight line from point A to point Z.
I said,
What chance was there that Marco would succeed? What chance that he would survive?
And worse in store for Rachel. I needed Tobias, and could not risk losing Ax. Cassie? No. It had to be Rachel. Only she would do it, could do it.
I had a few small changes to make to Tom’s plan. The orders came easily, automatically as I dispatched my friends, one after the other. Only Rachel remained.
I explained what I wanted her to do.
Still she hesitated.
I said.
Rachel said,
She angled her eagle’s wings to take the wind, and flew away.
The plan was a fragile thing in my mind, a construct of if-then possibilities, of hopes, optimism, and cynicism in equal measure.
I would use everyone, put everyone in harm’s way. And I knew — knew beyond any doubt — that someone, and maybe more than someone, I loved was going to die.
It took all day to get my chess pieces in place. The hardest one was Erek the Chee.
Marco found him. He found him after twice being spotted and shot by Yeerk forces. But it’s hard to kill an Animorph. A wounded morph has only to demorph to be reconstituted as a whole human.
Of course a dead morph is a dead Animorph, and Marco came very close to not making it.
He was not happy by the time he dragged into camp late in the day. I had almost given up hope.
Erek is a Chee, one of a race of sentient robots created millennia ago by the Pemalites. The Pemalites were gentle, wise, intelligent creatures who were obliterated by the Howlers long, long ago. The Pemalites believed in peace. And the Chee they created, despite being unimaginably powerful and equipped with formidable holographic technology, were incapable of violence.
This was not to say that the Chee didn’t have a side in the war. They were our allies. They were the ultimate spies, able to pass as humans, as they had since arriving on Earth as refugees back in the days of the pharaohs of Egypt.
The Chee had spied for us, hoped we would win, but they would not help us kill. They couldn’t help or cause anyone to kill or even to be hurt. I counted on that.
Erek smiled at me with a human face that should belong to a guy my own age. Of course beneath the hologram was a machine that looked as though it was built of stainless steel and ivory, like a stylized dog walking erect.
“Jake, I’m pleased to see you still alive,” Erek said. “Pleased to see all of you.”
“And we’re relieved to see you, Erek. How are the Chee doing?”
He shrugged. “Well, our house is gone. But the underground facility is intact. All our people are safe. We’ve been through worse in five thousand years among your lovely people. I mean, I survived the Huns and they were quite unpleasant. The dogs are safe at least.”
The Chee carried on their master’s love of canine forms. They took in stray or lost dogs whenever they could.
“Erek, we need your help.”
“Always glad to help, within the limits of my programming,” he answered cautiously.
“We’re taking the Pool ship,” I said.
He hesitated, thought that over. “I don’t see how I’m going to be able to help you. We don’t have a lot of data on the Pool ship. Nothing you don’t already know.”
“It’s not information we need,” I said. “We need your skills. We need your active participation. We need you there.”
His eyes grew dark, a holographic but very real-seeming reaction. “I can’t do that, Jake. We both know there’ll be fighting. I can’t be part of that.”
I took a deep breath, not wanting to say what I was about to say. “Here’s the thing, Erek, I know what you can and can’t do. So I’m going to use that to force your hand. I’m sorry. But we’re down to it, now. We’re right down to it.”
“What are you planning?” He switched off the “Erek” holographic facade and revealed his true self. Maybe that was to intimidate me. Maybe it was just a way of conveying anger.
“We know you can’t fight us. So we’re going to take you, carry you if we have to, put you in a position where you’ll cooperate because refusing to cooperate will force us to take lives. Your refusal to cooperate would be the trigger for killing.
“Ax? Bring your prisoner.”
I had dispatched Ax and Cassie to take a prisoner, a known Controller, a human-Controller. Chapman.
And he was not happy.
“Ax, if I tell you to kill this Controller, will you do it?” I asked him.
“This is low,” Erek grated. “This is so far beneath you, Jake.”
Weird blackmailing a creature you know is physically capable of obliterating you down to your individual molecules. Weird trusting that he won’t, can’t, do any such thing.
“Sorry,” I said again. “But we’ll keep you in a position where every time you refuse to help, we take a life. And I’ll make you this promise: Your help will minimize the casualties.”
Erek said a long string of words I didn’t understand.
“What?”
“I was offering you my opinion of your morals and your ethics and your sense of decency,” Erek spat. “I was speaking an ancient Mesopotamian dialect known for its wide variety of curse words.”
I nodded. “Tell you the truth, Erek, your being mad at me is the least of my problems. Marco? Erek is your property. He tries to leave, stop him. If he succeeds in leaving, Ax, you’ll execute this Controller.”
I shot a challenging, defensive look at Cassie. “Any comment?”
