There were problems here for me, as the leader of this bunch of tired, stressed-out misfits. Tobias hated going into the water. Marco wasn’t convinced it was necessary. Cassie was taking it all personally.
Rachel and Ax were their usual selves. I sighed. Fairly typical: At any given point, on any given mission, maybe half the team was going to be difficult in one way or another. Including me, of course. Maybe especially me.
”Echolocation,” Cassie mused. ”We’ve all got dolphin morphs.”
16 «Rachel and I have sperm whale morphs,» Tobias reminded us.
”And we all do giant squid,” Rachel said.
”Not sure we want to deal with those guys again,” Marco mumbled. ”Creepy.”
”Whales are good. We need a morph we can control. Something intelligent. That can dive deep and do some serious damage to the Sea Blade,” I said. ”But let’s face it. The chances of another sperm whale beaching itself just for the rest of us to acquire are pretty slim.”
”Of course!” Cassie snapped her fingers. ”There’s an orca - a killer whale - at The Gardens’ SeaTown. They’re calling him Swoosh.”
”Swoosh?” Marco repeated incredulously. ”Who names these animals?”
Cassie looked embarrassed. ”Nike. They sponsored the exhibit. So they got to name the whale.”
”Okay,” I said. ”We need to get going. A) I contact the Chee and alert them to be ready to take our places. B) we carry out round-the-clock surveillance on the vicinity of the Yeerk pool. Try and spot any sign of this Sea Blade launching. C) we acquire the killer whale.”
”Easy,” Marco mocked. ”ABC. Just don’t mention, D) we chase a super sub into the ocean, and E) try to destroy it before, F) they reach an alien
17 spacecraft in the middle of, G) a bunch of unexploded bombs and shells that may get set off when the Yeerks try to, H) fry us with their Dracon beams.”
Rachel laughed and gave Marco a playful shove. ”You’re always so negative. Look on the bright side: Maybe the unexploded shells will, I) blow up the Yeerks, not us.”
Cassie wasn’t joining in the graveyard humor. ”Fifty Hork-Bajir subjected to horrible medical experiments,” she said. ”That’swhat this is about.”
CHAPTER 4
«We’ve got a math test on Friday, Big Jake.»
«Since when are you so concerned about school?» I asked. It didn’t matter. We were just making conversation. Killing the boring two hours of our shift.
I was at about fifty feet. Marco was another twenty-five feet or so higher, and two or three blocks to the east. We were two birds of prey, a falcon and an osprey, riding the thermals, floating on the cushions of warm air.
«Since the math teacher married my dad. It’s a crime, that’s what it is. Had to be math. Couldn’t have been some subject I can fake my way through. No. Has to be math. The answer is either the square root of pi or it isn’t, dude, there’s
19
no bull factor. I can’t say, ”Well, I felt what the writer really meant was . . .”»
«The Chee who plays you will take the test.»
«Exactly. And he’ll get the grade I would have gotten. I don’t want the grade I would have gotten. I want an A. But not a perfect A. A just barely there, A. She’d buy that. Maybe.»
«You’re assuming you won’t be there for the test,» I said. «Way things are going ... I mean, we got nothing.»
Marco and I had been on patrol for an hour and a half. Our third day of floating in bird-ofprey morph, high above the area that concealed the Yeerk pool.
The Yeerk pool is a huge, underground cornplex. A central dome bigger than a football stadium, plus tunnels and satellite areas. It stretches beneath part of the mall, and all the way over to the school, with a bunch of fast-food restaurants and car lots and streets in between.
We knew the Sea Blade was in the Yeerk pool complex. Which meant, sooner or later, that it would emerge. How? When? Where? We didn’t have a clue. And I was awfully sick and tired of getting a peregrine falcon’s up close and incredibly personal view of roofs and trash and people in cars.
In a few minutes Ax and Tobias would show up so Marco and I could demorph, remorph, and
20 fly home. I was counting the minutes. I wanted to veg out and watch some TV. With weak human eyes.
Let’s see. What night was it? Was there anything on? I couldn’t even remember what day of the - «Marco! I’m seeing something!»
«You mean that girl in the bathing suit driving that Mazda?»
«The vacant lot next to the Walgreen’s, man!»
I glanced up and saw Marco wheel around to come closer. I focused back on the empty lot. There was a fence around it. A fairly new chainlink fence armed with razor wire at the top.
I cursed my own stupidity. Why hadn’t I thought about that? Who would protect an empty lot with a new fence? It made no sense. Unless the lot wasn’t so empty.
«Shimmering? Is that what you mean?» Marco asked.
«lt’s a hologram,» I yelled. «The sides are maintaining, but the top is breaking up.»
It was the kind of thing that would have seemed so weird to me a while back. Before. Back when I lived a normal life. Now Marco yelled «hologram!» and I thought, Well, duh. Of course it’s a hologram.
The hologram showed the field. The empty field. Seen from any angle you’d see an empty, scruffy-looking rectangle of weeds and bare, tan
21
dirt, rusty soda cans, and shredded McDonald’s trash.
But looking straight down from above, something else began to appear.
Enormous! Two scimitar-shaped wings. A sleek body, built for speed. Not the elongated teardrop shape of a human sub. More like a Yeerk Blade ship, but with pustulelike pods extruding here and there around the hull.
It was blacker than black. Like something carved out of anthracite. In the brief moments it was visible it seemed to drain the light from the sky. To absorb all color into its endless black depths.
It rested on a rising platform. Like one of those hydraulic car lifts at a gas station. It was being lifted up through the roof of the Yeerk pool, up through an oblong tunnel cut through packed dirt and rock.
And then it began to shimmer and fade, just as the hologram had done. A hum grew into a low roar that even passersby would have heard, except that the only traffic was cars rushing past.
«lt’s going, man!»
«Yeah. It’ll head for the water.»
«l’m on it,» I said.
Marco didn’t argue. Ospreys are fast. Peregrines are faster.
«Get the others. Ax and Tobias should be here
22 soon, you’ll probably pass them. Send them after me. You get Rachel and Cassie.»
I took off, heading for the sea. I’d need all the head start I could get.
«How are we going to find you?» Marco said, his voice tense. He was already banking away toward home.
«l don’t know. Just get to the ocean as fast as you can. I’ll . . . »
SWOOOOZZSH!
Straight up! The Sea Blade lifted up off the ground, rose like it was a Styrofoam stage prop being lifted by cables and strings. And all the while it was fading. It was an outline. A watercolor in faded colors.
And then it was gone! Cloaked, invisible to the naked human eye.
But not entirely hidden from the keen eyesight of the falcon. I couldn’t see the ship itself. But I could make out a disturbance of the air.
Like the waves rising off hot concrete on a brutally hot day. A caloric wave or something. And then the shimmering began to move off.
I was already moving at full speed.
«Jake! Remember. Less than a half hour in this morph!»
No time to answer. I strained to gain a lead. But then it blew past, swirling me around, turnbling me through the air. I righted myself and fol-
23
lowed in the wake of the Sea Blade. Followed the blasts of hot air being expelled by the engines. Followed the occasional shimmering waves
of air. The brief glances of - something.
I flapped harder. Faster. Still I was falling behind. We had calculated that a seaborne craft wouldn’t be very fast through the air. It wasn’t. But it was fast enough.
Already I was fading. Stupid! I should have gotten more altitude. I should have stayed as high up as I could be. How many times had Tobias told me: Altitude equals speed. I could have been using gravity to speed me. Instead gravity was my enemy.
A falcon struggling through the cool evening air was no match for the Sea Blade. The engines would not tire.
But as long as I could keep it in sight . . .
It traveled in a straight line. No tricks. No evasions. It flew straight for the beach. Suddenly it was over the sand and dunes. I was still flying hard and fast and way too low over beach bungalows and cheap motels.
I wasn’t going to make it. I was exhausted. My muscles screamed in pain.
How many minutes did I have left in morph?
I didn’t know. Almost didn’t care.
I had to keep the Sea Blade in sight. Had to
24 see which way it went once it went in. Had to at least know the general direction.
Then . . . where was the heat? Had I lost the trail? Had the Sea Blade turned away at the last minute?
No. It was powering down its air-breathing engines. Preparing to submerge. So close to shore?
The ship suddenly stopped. The shimmering wave was all in one place. No longer moving. The ship was still cloaked, invisible, as it hovered over the evening ocean.
Hit the water! I prayed.
I was minutes from being a falcon forever. It might already be too late.
For a split second a vague outline of the dark ship was visible on the ocean’s surface. And then it was gone.
Exhausted, I fell to the icy water and concentrated.
And began to demorph.
Morphing is never pretty. And when you’re exhausted and freezing and wet, it’s seriously less than fun. Strange sounds. Disturbing sensations. Not pain exactly - but not pleasure either. You know things are happening to your body that would not happen in the normal world. That should not happen.
The demorph was fast. The falcon’s natural
25 buoyancy was suddenly replaced by my very human mass. Twenty, thirty, forty pounds of torso, legs and arms.
Still growing!
I slipped under the water. Kicked back to the surface. Choked and spluttered and breathed.
I was Jake. But not for long.
26
•
CHAPTER 5
The contours of my body stretched! Shot out in every direction - up, down, forward and back, right and left.
My forehead poured out in front of me like gravel from a dump truck. My eyes migrated to the sides of my head. My ears were swallowed up in blubber.
Couldn’t breathe! For a moment my throat closed. Then I felt cool, clean air again. Sucked in through the blowhole in the back of my neck.
My legs twisted around each other like a fat stick of raspberry licorice. A twenty-five-foot-long stick of licorice!
Just behind my blowhole a dorsal fin grew out of my spine and shot six and a half feet into the
27 air. An enormous jet-black triangle, taller than my human self.
My belly was a vast expanse of smooth white. My back was as black as a wet tire. My mouth filled with teeth the size of a hammer’s claw head.
I was sure I was going to fill the entire ocean before the morph was complete. For a panicked second my human brain wondered how something this big could float.
And then I felt the stirrings of the orca’s mind. Instincts were activated. Senses alerted brain centers.
Threats? No. There were no threats. Threats could not exist. They were an impossibility. What could challenge my power?
But prey? Ah, yes, prey could exist. Anything in the vast, endless, unmeasured ocean could be my prey. Anything bathed in seawater was my meat.
I was bigger, faster, smarter, more dangerous than anything in the ocean. I was deadly, but not with the random, malevolent violence of the shark. I could plan. I could cooperate. I could think.
In my mind were the templates, like schematics drawn with echo images. I saw the patterns of a pod of orcas moving together, communicating, working together to snare the swift sea lions, to
shove the seals off their ice floes, to leap clear up onto the beach to drag a walrus to its doom.
I saw all this, I the human. And I felt the shock of seeing the familiar in a strange place. Wolves work together, like the orcas. But the closest analogy to orca behavior was found much closer to home, among my own species.
There was something very human about the killer whale’s mind. Individualized, yet capable of becoming a part of a group. Capable, unlike so many creatures, of remembering a past, imagining a future.
I sensed, deep within the orca mind, the images of my prey. The rubbery, swift-moving penguins and sea otters and sea lions and walruses. Even the dolphins. And, when they grew weak, when they had lost their force and their speed, the great whales themselves.
I have inhabited many animal minds. The prey animals want to stay alive, to hide, to run, to find food, to find mates. The predators look for prey, for the weak and vulnerable. They mark and defend territories. They seek mates.
Always they are simple, compared to humans. Almost always their minds are black and white, coded with simple behaviors for simple situations.
In only a few have I encountered that strange mutation: intelligence. The capacity to see be-
29 yond fight or flee, yes or no, run or stand, kill or be killed. Only a very few species can think ”If. . .then?”
The orca was one. As smart as a dolphin. As smart as a chimpanzee. It occupied that highest, most narrow rung, just below Homo sapiens.
I had encountered intelligence in a morph before. But there was something new here. New for me, at least. The orca was aware. Of me. Of something, someone directing its behavior.
It knew, in some incomplete, simplistic way, that it was being controlled.
«Let’s go, big boy,» I said.
No answer from the orca, of course. But that cool, appraising intelligence, though it was devoid of memory of learning, empty of all knowledge except the knowledge encoded as instinct, that intelligence watched me.
I felt a shiver of fear. Ludicrous, of course. I was the orca, the orca could not hurt me. And yet, I felt the fear of any prey animal who finds himself under the gaze of the killer whale.
I had a mission. I fired an echolocating burst of clicks.
And suddenly there was a picture in my brain. Almost like an X ray. More like an Etch-A-Sketch drawing.
Lines and contours representing the underwa-
30 ter world around me. The ocean floor, smooth, sloping away. A school of fish, too small to interest me.
Then the picture was gone.
I clicked again and it was back. But now the picture included the Sea Blade.
Beneath me and further out to sea. Motionless. Almost as if it were waiting for me.
I filled my massive lungs and dove. Deeper. Deeper.
I clicked again.
The Sea Blade had to know I was here. Its sensors would have heard the echolocating clicks. Its version of sonar would have painted me. And, unlike any human crew, the Yeerks knew enough to pay attention to strange animals.
I could go after the Sea Blade myself. It was no more than a quarter mile away. But I doubted I could do much damage to the ship by myself. Let alone destroy it. If Marco and the others didn’t catch up, though, I’d have no choice.
We had no plan beyond trying to keep up with the ship, try and damage it. The hardest part had seemed to be merely keeping up. But the Sea Blade just sat there. Sat, unmoving, almost silent.
How long till the others could catch up?
I surfaced for a breath. And then I saw a swift shadow moving across the water. I rolled onto my
31
&n
bsp; side and looked up at the sky. There was a plane, a four-engine prop plane flying low, parallel to the beach. Flat gray. A military plane.
As I watched, a cylinder slid out of the back of the plane and parachuted into the sea. Seconds later I heard the splash. And then a loud pinging.
Of course! This was the Sea Blade’s maiden voyage. The Yeerks were testing their new toy. The plane was a navy submarine surveillance plane dropping sonar buoys and relaying what they found down to the commander of the Sea Blade.
Depressing to realize that the Yeerks could control a navy plane. But it had worked out well for me. The test had delayed the Sea Blade.
I submerged and fired another round of echolocating clicks.
I saw the outline of the Sea Blade. Clear and unmistakable. I fired another round, looking for. . .
Wait! Something wrong. A whale?
The Sea Blade was gone, and in its place the Etch-A-Sketch diagram of a large whale. It was huge. A humpback. Maybe even a blue whale. Precisely where the Sea Blade should have been.
What was going on?
A low hum. The sound of engines. The ship was moving away. But then, as I listened intently the engine sound became the slow whoosh,
32 whoosh, whoosh of a whale’s flukes, driving the beast through the sea.
Then . . . behind me!
Something big, fast! More than one.
Something my orca brain recognized at once: a pod of killer whales.
«Hey, Shamu! It’s me.»
Marco.
«is everyone here?» I said.
«Yeah. Can’t believe we found you.»
«Where’s the Sea Blade?» Rachel asked.
«lf you echolocate you’ll sense a large whale moving away from us. You’ll hear it, too. That, boys and girls, is the visser’s new ship.»
«Yes, that would be sensible,» Ax said. «They not only hide, they create a false picture for anyone who does happen to notice them. They have adjusted the energy absorption field to reflect the picture of a whale. Generating the sound signature is easy, of course.»
The Mutation Page 2
