The answer, p.7
The Answer, page 7
“No.”
I glared at my friends, all of whom were looking somber. Erek had been with us, an ally, a friend, for a long time. “Does anyone have anything to say?”
No one did.
“Good. Now, Ax? In addition to keeping an eye on our friend, here, it’s time for you to phone the Andalite fleet. You tell them you succeeded in stopping our raid on the Yeerk pool. Tell them the Yeerks are all here on Earth like sitting ducks. But they can’t strike yet because you, aristh Aximili, are going to deliver a major Yeerk warship right into their laps. You’re going to hand them an entire, intact Pool ship.”
“I’m not asking you to lie to your people, Ax. I’m telling you to. We need them close enough to be of use, but we also need to give them a reason not to start blasting away at Earth. Call the Andalite fleet. Tell them what I’ve told you to tell them. I’m your prince, Ax: Do it.”
I didn’t wait to hear his answer. I knew it. Or thought I did.
James and his people came flying in, landed and demorphed. “You called?”
It’s always disturbing for me seeing the auxiliary Animorphs demorphed. When we still had the morphing cube we decided to add some members. But it’s impossibly complicated and time-consuming to make sure each and every person is Yeerk-free. So we figured out who the Yeerks would have never infested, who they would have overlooked: the handicapped. Plenty of fully functional human hosts around, why hassle with all the drawbacks of dealing with a handicap?
We knew handicapped kids would be Yeerk-free. We also knew they’d be even more willing than most people to accept a treatment that would allow them physical freedom in animal form.
We’d used them. And now they lay there rather than standing because for the most part they couldn’t stand. Or, if they could stand, they couldn’t see.
“Yeah, James. We need all your people. As you know, we’re going after the Pool ship.”
“Yes, I know.”
“It’s going to be as dangerous as it gets, and I have a very tough assignment for you.”
“Okay, well, you know I’m in. But I’ll need to talk to the others, see how they feel. I think some of them will want to sit this one out. I mean, after losing Ray … I mean, Jake, some of the young ones, you know, some of them are having —”
“James, we didn’t give them morphing power so they could have fun flying around. This is when we need them. All of them. You understand? You’ve taken on the role as their leader, so lead: I want them all. Every last one.”
“Jake, some of these kids, I mean, they’re all their families have, you know? They’re still just starting to deal with Ray’s death. It’s not like we haven’t fought. I can’t …”
“Look, if we lose this battle it’s over, you understand me?!” I raised my voice to be heard by everyone. “If we lose it’s over. This is the battle. This is the last stand. We lose and here’s what happens: The Yeerk fleet fights the Andalite fleet. If the Yeerks win they’ll be free to enslave every living human being and kill the ones they don’t want. If the Andalites win there’s a very good chance they’ll sterilize Earth: kill everything in order to end the Yeerk menace once and for all. So, you don’t like me telling you what to do, you don’t like your job, you don’t like me, period? I don’t really care. Before this night is over the casualties will be piled high and some of you standing here right now will be dead and I don’t care because we are going to win. Is that clear? We’re taking that Pool ship and before this night is over we’ll have Visser One right here.” I held up my tight-clenched fist.
I was ranting. I was trembling. I’d never done this before. Never put myself forward as some kind of Napoleon wannabe. I felt like a jerk. Like some kind of nut. My friends must have thought I’d lost my mind. But no one said so.
No one but Marco. “You know, you’re turning into Rachel.” He frowned. “Where is she, anyway?”
I was in falcon morph, floating high, high in the air, rising on the updraft of warmth that still came from the smoldering ashes of the center of town. Usually night is a bad time for a peregrine. Night air is cold air and cold air is dead air. But flying above the black destruction I had all the lift I needed.
I could see the Pool ship, still resting beside the crater that had once been the Yeerk pool. Could they see me, Visser One and his Yeerks? They could if they tried. I wasn’t invisible. But they didn’t attack, didn’t send a Bug fighter up to Dracon me.
Why not? Maybe Tom’s Yeerk wasn’t ready to kill me, yet.
Or Maybe Visser One saw me, knew what I was, and waited, like the spider in his web watching the fly. He wanted me to come to him. He wanted me as badly as I wanted him.
Careful what you wish for, Visser.
Careful what you wish for, Jake.
I had visited General Doubleday. He was as shaken up as anyone I’ve ever seen, but determined.
He’d followed our suggestion, reluctantly at first. He’d locked away as many of his men as he could. It was ten hours till the first Controller reached the point where he couldn’t hold out any longer. He made a break for it.
“What did you do?” I had asked him.
“We warned him once. Gave him a direct order. Then the MP shot him.”
“That must have been tough,” I’d said.
“The MP aimed for a leg shot, but the private slipped. Bullet caught him in the head.” The general held out an empty bottle and showed it to me. “This thing crawled out of the man’s head. Crawled out through the bullet hole.”
A Yeerk lay writhing in the bottle.
“There’s your enemy, General,” I’d said.
Some of the Controllers had tried to work together to rush the door. Others had waited as long as they could. Seventeen percent of the general’s men had been infested. But now he had a strike force of almost a thousand men, Yeerk-free. Yeerk-free, and, having seen the enemy close-at-hand, they were motivated.
I’d given him all the details I safely could.
“They may come after you with Bug fighters — that would be the best we could hope for. The greater likelihood is that either the Pool ship or the Blade ship will attack you directly.”
“I’ve got what amounts to a scratch battalion, a few tanks, a few helicopter gunships. I’ve seen those Bug fighters in action. My men will fight, but they can’t win.”
“That’s right, General, they can’t,” I said. “But if they’ll fight, keep up the diversion, we can win. I have about a dozen of my people coming to join you. They’ll be right out front.”
“With all due respect to your people, son, they may be great in hand-to-hand combat, but you’re guerrilla fighters by nature. Your abilities are geared for that kind of warfare. You’re asking me for a good, old-fashioned cavalry charge, here. You’re asking me for the Charge of the Light Brigade.”
“We need the diversion,” I said. “Visser One has to believe the Yeerk traitor is telling him the truth. So you have to attack, but once the Yeerks come after you all you can do is dig in and take cover. The Yeerks only have one way of fighting: Attack with everything they’ve got. They’ll go right after you. Visser One doesn’t know tactics; he fights with a sledgehammer.”
“If you’ve got a big enough sledgehammer that’s all you need, son.”
I was hearing those weary, wry words as I flew above the Pool ship. It was a monstrous thing. Bigger than an aircraft carrier. More powerful than all the forces of humankind combined and multiplied a hundredfold. The Dracon cannon on the Pool ship could burn a hole through an asteroid.
But it was a sledgehammer, a great, lumbering beast designed for war in the weightlessness of space. And, anyway, if we succeeded it would be our sledgehammer.
I saw movement below. Hork-Bajir patrols. A pair of Bug fighters flying a loose figure eight low above the desolation.
Closer in to the Pool ship the Hork-Bajir patrols increased till they formed a solid, shoulder-to-shoulder ring around the ship. Hork-Bajir and human-Controller snipers stood atop the engine pods. Visser One was taking no chances with his crown jewels.
I wondered what time it was. No way to carry a watch, obviously, and I could no longer spot bank clocks. They’d all been destroyed.
I floated and waited. Floated and waited and went over my plan again and again. I could see holes in it now. I could see nothing but holes. It would never work. It would never work.
I saw movement down below. A pair of Humvees approaching an outer ring checkpoint, headlights playing on wrecked, charred brick walls and burned out cars. Hork-Bajir- and human-Controller guards checked ID’s and passed them through.
Now I didn’t need a clock. It was go time.
I swooped down, diving faster and faster, matching speed with the Humvees. I dropped through the gaping window of a blackened home and out through the far side. That would throw off any sensors that might be tracking me.
I used all my falcon speed and aimed for the bouncing rear window of the second Humvee. I swooped through, landed hard with a bounce against the seat back.
A human-Controller I didn’t know was driving. Tom was in the passenger seat. He turned to look at me.
“Very unsettling when you do that,” he said.
Cassie appeared to be lying on the backseat, handcuffed, ankles bound, a Hork-Bajir sitting beside her with a Dracon weapon leveled at her head.
Her face was bruised. One eye swollen almost shut. There were bloody cuts on her arms. Her morphing suit was in shreds.
“Gotta hand it to your girl back there,” Tom said nonchalantly. “She takes a beating pretty well. Hope I didn’t get carried away, Jake-boy, but it isn’t every day I get a chance to pound on an Animorph. She didn’t cry, didn’t say a word. Almost took the fun out of it.”
No answer. I didn’t expect one.
“Bruised my fists,” Tom’s Yeerk said, displaying his hand.
“Whatever. Time to get small, Killer Jake. Security up ahead there.”
I demorphed, made a point of stroking the apparent wounds, made another angry remark to Tom’s Yeerk for verisimilitude, then went fly. Back in morph I used private thought-speak, audible to only one person.
I zoomed around and then headed for Cassie’s bruised, battered face.
As I approached a landing, her swollen eye opened slightly. My compound eyes saw a hundred fragmented images of an eye opening.
And of the steel-and-ivory machine beneath the hologram.
The Humvees approached the wall-to-wall line of Hork-Bajir around the Pool ship and came to a stop.
A Hork-Bajir- and a human-Controller stepped over to the window like cops getting ready to hand out tickets.
They spotted Tom, and I could hear the formal stiffness in their voices. “Sir, you understand we still need to conduct a thorough search and check your identity.”
“You’d better,” Tom snarled. “Lax security makes me cranky.”
The human-Controller shined a powerful light around the inside of the vehicle. He introduced a sensor probe that to my fly senses registered as a fantastical wizard’s wand. I could see energy radiating in wild colors, invisible most likely to human eyes.
“I only read two complex life-forms,” the guard said. “I’m showing several insect readings, but only two complex life-forms: yours, sir, and the driver’s. The prisoner is not registering as a life-form.”
It was already going bad. What was this new sensor? We’d never seen this instrument before. I tensed, ready to leap free and demorph. But in the enclosed space of the Humvee we were trapped, helpless. We wouldn’t be able to bring our force to bear.
Tom said, “Well, as much as I respect your new toy there, I count three: one, two, three.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You can count to three, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know what that prisoner is? That’s an Animorph. You think maybe Visser One would like to see her just as soon as possible?”
“Yes, sir!”
“As for the insect life-forms, they’re endemic to this planet. But I’ll be sure to use the Gleet BioFilter before I enter the ship.”
The guard must have been satisfied because moments later we were on the move. I rested calmly on a titanium rod that, to me, seemed as thick as an oak tree.
No one said anything for a while, and I could see very little with my limited fly senses.
Then, in a calm, low-pitched voice, Tom said, “How’s it going, little brother? You still there?”
“Good, glad to hear it. And all your little friends are there with you?”
Tom’s Yeerk laughed. “Oh, you’re a surly bunch, aren’t you? No one talks to me. No one but Rachel, who told me to … well, you can guess what Rachel told me to do.”
“Surly and unpleasant. Oh, well. Time to go see the visser. My plan is working perfectly, don’t you think?”
Tom thought Cassie was real. And he thought all of us were hiding out somewhere on her body. His plan was working fine. Ours was working even better.
Another delay. And then, at last, I heard that thought-speak voice.
Visser One.
“One of the Animorphs, Visser. My people captured her and questioned her. Questioned her … forcefully.”
“Yes, Visser, of course,” Tom’s Yeerk lied. The Gleet BioFilter detects and eliminates nonprimary life-forms — anything “riding” on a human or Hork-Bajir body.
Now I could see him, a mosaic of him, in my compound eyes. He loomed close, leering down with his mouthless Andalite face, stalk eyes widening out.
Suddenly his tail whipped around and delivered a slapping blow. Fast. So fast that even my fly reflexes would not have saved me. But of course the blow never reached me. It was stopped by force fields that overlapped the hologram. Just as Tom’s torturing blows had been.
Visser One grated.
“Perhaps not just yet, Visser,” Tom demurred. “She may still be useful as bait. Why not hold her and hand her over to some worthy, loyal Yeerk as a host body?”
“Cassie” said nothing.
Tom clasped his hands behind his back and assumed a respectful but casual stance. “The Animorphs’ leader has made contact with human military forces. A combined force of human soldiers and Animorphs will attack very soon. The goal will be to use the attack as a diversion, to allow the Animorphs to infiltrate this ship.”
Visser One laughed.
“Don’t forget, they have an Andalite among them. They would use his skills to break our security codes. And there is more, Visser.”
“I … I’m not certain, Visser, but I believe my people may have penetrated a second conspiracy, every bit as dangerous.”
“Visser!” A new voice. Human. I vaguely perceived a human-Controller, a woman.
“With your permission, Visser, this may be the report I’ve been waiting for,” Tom said smoothly.
“Visser … I apologize for interrupting,” the woman said, “but a party of Hork-Bajir have arrived at the perimeter with a Taxxon prisoner.”
Tom intervened again. “I believe this is a very special Taxxon, Visser. You may choose to hear what he has to say.”
Moments later the Taxxon, accompanied by Hork-Bajir guards, shuffled and writhed into the room. He was a hundred great worms in my compound eyes. But the colors were different. I saw the red jelly eyes as an almost psychedelic violet.
Tom proceeded to explain his penetration of a Taxxon alliance with the Animorphs. The Taxxon, straining to form coherent speech with its inadequate mouthparts, confirmed the tale.
“In a matter of moments now, Visser, this three-part attack will take place. Human soldiers will attack, the Taxxons will destroy the unfinished Yeerk pool, and the Animorphs themselves will use the confusion to attempt to penetrate this ship.”
Visser One nodded. But was there hesitation in his bleary-looking Andalite eyes? No genius, maybe, Visser One, but he had an instinct for survival. He was moving back and forth, pacing, hooves clicking on the deck, stalk eyes wandering randomly.
Tom said, “If we move swiftly, we will destroy all our foes in one swoop. The Pool ship and its Bug fighters can quickly eliminate the human soldiers, and simply by lifting off we can doom the Animorph attempt at infiltration.”
“They must be stopped quickly but carefully: We don’t want to damage the new Yeerk pool. I respectfully suggest, Visser, that I take temporary command of your Blade ship and deal with the Taxxons personally. Never fear: I will kill only as many as I need to, and drive the rest back to their labor.”
