I tried to think. Time was running out. Arbat might already have struck. How to spot an Andalite in human morph?
What was different? Two legs, not four. No tail. Two eyes, not four.
“Estrid! Look for humans who turn their heads frequently.”
“What?”
“We are accustomed to seeing in all directions at once. Humans are used to not knowing what is behind them. Look for —”
I froze. A middle-aged man. Walking down the length of the crowded pier, escorted by a nonchalant Hork-Bajir.
The man turned as a Taxxon passed behind him. Turned again. Turned.
No proof. Not enough to be sure. A feeling …
“There!” I started to run toward the pier. Estrid raced alongside me.
“Must be late for a feeding,” a Controller laughed as I brushed past him.
The middle-aged man knelt. Placed his head into the collar beside a kneeling Hork-Bajir.
The Hork-Bajir guard leaned down to fasten the collar. The man reached into his pocket.
Too far away!
“Arbat! No!” Estrid yelled.
The man jerked his head up. His movement was quick and unexpected. The Hork-Bajir guard was knocked off balance, teetered almost comically.
Arbat reached to grab the Hork-Bajir. Or so the Hork-Bajir thought. Arbat grabbed the guard’s Dracon beam from his holster with one hand and shoved the off balance Hork-Bajir off the pier.
Arbat spun, raised his weapon, and aimed.
I dove forward. Tackled Estrid. We fell behind a large, lumbering Taxxon.
Arbat fired.
Tseeewww!
The bloated Taxxon broke open. The foul contents of its stomach spewed in every direction. Blood. Bile. Entrails.
“Estrid!” I dragged her to her feet, slipping in the gore.
Another Taxxon was rushing in our direction, eager to eat what was left of his former comrade.
Hork-Bajir guards pounded along the steel pier, trying to locate the source of the trouble. There was chaos but in seconds the Hork-Bajir might restore order.
Then Estrid and I would be dead.
“Andalites! Andalites!” I shouted. I yelled and waved my hands, pointing always down the pier. “Andalite bandits in Hork-Bajir morph! The Hork-Bajir are Andalites!”
Estrid joined in. “Help! Help! Security! Andalites have morphed the Hork-Bajir!”
Chaos would reign a while longer.
But Arbat, too, took advantage of the confusion. I spotted him running.
Rachel yelled back.
I had lost sight of Arbat. And I could not see Rachel. But I got a grim satisfaction from the thought of what the intelligence agent slash professor would see when next he turned around to look.
Estrid and I lurched, slipping and sliding, off the pier. Back onto packed dirt. We shoved our way through the crush of human-Controllers.
“Cowards!” someone yelled at us.
Then, Rachel yelled in frustration.
I had to get Arbat. He could demorph, remorph, and we would lose him permanently. And possibly lose much of the human species.
I yanked Estrid around behind a large wooden crate, pulled her down, dragged her after me as I crawled into the space between the crate and the side of the human-Controllers’ cafeteria.
“Estrid, demorph!”
“They will kill us!” She was frightened. Frightened deep down inside. Frightened in a way that was erasing any thought but the screaming, desperate need to live.
I knew the feeling.
“We have to stop Arbat and we need firepower,” I said.
“Why? To save these filthy Yeerks? Look what they do. Look at what they are! They are going to do that to us, Aximili! They will drag us down that pier, they will force us … NO! Kill them all!”
“Estrid, you said the virus may mutate. You said it might affect humans as well.”
“Might. Maybe. But maybe I fixed it. Maybe my last adjustments eliminated the random flux. I do not care! They are not our people. I am not going to let the filthy slugs do that to me!”
I was half demorphed.
“Do not leave me!”
I took a deep breath. Tried to steady my nerves. Impossible.
I leaped out.
Fwapp! Hit a Hork-Bajir.
The cages. The nearest was a hundred feet away.
“Andalite!” a human-Controller screamed in my face.
I ran for the cages.
Pandemonium! Dracon fire from three different locations. Screams. Shouts. The roar of furious Hork-Bajir. The slithery squeaks of ravenous Taxxons.
I ran.
Tseeew!
The shot missed, the human-Controller had been in too much of a hurry.
Fwapp! Now he could take his time.
A Taxxon blocked my way. I leaped.
Ahead, a battle. A tiger, a wolf, a bear, a gorilla, surrounded, backs against a row of cages. Marco held a middle-aged human by the neck with one hand and fought with the other hand.
Their backs were to the cages. It would have been child’s play for the Yeerks to simply shoot them through the bars. Shoot them in the back.
But the human hosts in that cage, slaves of the Yeerks temporarily free of those Yeerks, stood there, arms linked, blocking the shot. A human shield.
The Hork-Bajir could have burned them down. Those humans knew that. They were putting themselves between the supposed Andalites and the Yeerks, ready to face Dracon fire.
The Hork-Bajir had no orders to massacre hosts. Visser Three was not in the pool. No one else would dare give the order.
I attacked the force that hemmed in my friends. Struck left and right, took them by surprise. But all for nothing. We could fight, but we could not win.
I saw Cassie knocked unconscious.
Saw Prince Jake slashing with one paw, the other front paw gone, a stump.
Tseeew!
A beam caught Marco full in the belly. A hole appeared in his rough black fur. He fell. Released his grip on Arbat.
Arbat ran. No one stopped him. Why would they? He was a human-Controller being held by the Andalites.
He ran, pushed through the attackers. Ran toward the reinfestation pier. I saw the green vial in his hand.
I hesitated. How could I leave my friends? They were dying.
I turned, ran, raced after Arbat.
He made the pier. No one guarded it. All the Hork-Bajir had gone to the fight. Three Taxxons shuffled along its length. Voluntary hosts awaiting reinfestation.
Arbat raced to the end of the pier. He was panting, wheezing. The middle-aged human morph was not athletic.
He fumbled, hastening to open the vial.
“You!”
One of the Taxxons noticed us at last. The red jelly eyes jiggled. But I was not concerned with the Taxxon. No Taxxon would attack an Andalite.
“You are very fast, Aristh Aximili. But you are not fast enough to cover fifty feet before I can open my fist.”
“It is war, Aristh Aximili.”
He smiled at me. And he began to open his hand.
Tseeew!
The beam passed so close to me that I felt it singe my stalk eyes.
The beam hit Arbat’s human hand.
The hand, and the vial it held, sizzled and burne
d and disappeared in a wisp of smoke.
I turned one stalk eye back to see Estrid. She lowered the Dracon beam.
Blood pumped from Arbat’s stump. It didn’t matter. Arbat had only to demorph to end the pain of the wound.
I nodded toward the shore where part of the force besieging my friends peeled off to come roaring after us.
A wave of Hork-Bajir rushed at us. I braced for the attack. Estrid beside me.
Arbat chose not to join us.
“Andalites!” he screamed, pointing at us with his remaining hand. “Andalites! Look what they did to me!”
And then the Yeerk pool just to our left began to boil. There was a red circle, fifty feet in diameter, projected on the roiling liquid and everything within that circle was boiling, steaming, hissing.
I stared, transfixed. Estrid, always the physicist, saw what I had missed.
I raised my main eyes to the domed roof of the Yeerk pool. There, at the highest point, a hole! Stars! I saw stars!
The red beam stopped suddenly. The wide-angle shredder beam on the Ralek River must have taken five minutes to slowly burn its way through the earthen dome.
Through the hole, into the Yeerk pool flew the old ship, the tired, out-of-date relic named the Ralek River.
TSEEEW! TSEEEW!
The ship’s shredders would never be a match for Bug fighters let alone the Blade ship, but they were more than enough to stop the onrushing Hork-Bajir.
Ten feet of pier between us and the Yeerks sizzled and evaporated.
TSEEEW! TSEEEW!
A line of destruction burned between the half-dead Animorphs and their attackers.
The ship flew low and slow, hovered directly above us.
Tseew! Tseeew! Hork-Bajir were firing back with handheld Dracon weapons. Like trying to kill an elephant by throwing rocks.
A ramp lowered. I pushed Estrid toward it and leaped aboard myself.
“Wait!” Arbat yelled.
I hesitated.
“I am an Andalite, too! I am one of your own people!”
He reached up toward me with his one human hand and his one bloody stump.
The ship lifted and slid toward the cages.
If Arbat had thought to demorph instantly he might have lived a while longer. He stood there, raging, trapped on a segment of pier, alone.
Alone but for the Taxxons whose eternal hunger would not let them ignore the smell of his blood.
Rachel and Cassie went to the mall to buy Estrid a cinnamon bun. I gave it to her as a going-away present. Told her to enjoy it on the long trip home to Andalite space.
Gonrod had flown the ship back to its berth beside The Gardens. It made sense. After the daring assault on the Yeerk pool, every Yeerk ship in Earth space was on high alert. A day spent waiting would make escape easier.
It might have been no great loss if the Ralek River were destroyed, but a pilot like Gonrod, insufferable as he might be, was a treasure.
I thought of the human hosts who had made a shield of their bodies to protect my friends. Thought of the many, many, uncountable times Prince Jake or Rachel or Cassie or Marco or Tobias had risked death to help me.
I shook my head.
I nodded. I said.
I left the ship. Walked away from my chance to be home again. I rejoined my friends.
The Ralek River took off. Did it escape Visser Three’s dragnet? Did it make it safely into Zero-space?
I do not know.
I walked away and did not look back.
I morphed to human as we six walked together. Even Tobias became human, I think to be near me, to “hang” as the humans say.
Cassie put her arm around my shoulder. It is a human gesture of comfort. “You okay?” she asked.
“Why wouldn’t he be?” Marco said. “You heard him. He didn’t even like her.”
Cassie said nothing but squeezed me a bit tighter. Cassie is not easily deceived.
“Let’s get something to eat, man, I’m starved,” Rachel said.
“Anything but McDonald’s,” Tobias said.
“What, the mouse hunter is getting picky about burgers?” Marco said.
“No, that’s not it.”
Prince Jake raised an eyebrow. “Tobias? Is there something you need to tell me?”
Tobias shrugged. “Well, you know, I saw Yeerk reinforcements pouring into the Community Center so I knew you guys were in trouble, right?”
“Right. So you went for Gonrod.”
“Exactly. I asked him if we could burn through into the Yeerk pool. He said, “Maybe, but only at the thinnest point.” Anyway, late as it was, even the night cleanup crew was gone …”
“No,” Prince Jake said. “You didn’t. You did not obliterate a McDonald’s.”
“Like it was never there,” Tobias said with a laugh. “The Yeerks will fill the hole before anyone realizes what’s down there underneath the ground, but if we want burgers, I’m thinking Burger King.”
“I would like a burger,” I said. “Burrr-ger.”
We walked along the dark streets, my friends and I. My more-than-friends. We laughed, so relieved to simply be alive. We joked.
Cassie held my hand, and in the darkness where no one could see, I cried.
The author wishes to thank Kim Morris for her help in preparing this manuscript.
My name is Cassie.
And you wouldn’t know it to look at me but I’m in the middle of a violent war to save Earth from an alien, parasitic species called the Yeerks.
Well, most of the time I am. Right now I was kneeling in the barn, waiting for an injured mouse’s curiosity to get the better of him. And when it did, when he crept out from beneath the cage he’d scurried under, I was going to scoop him up and take a look at his crooked, back leg.
I guess that’s just me. It’s who I am. I don’t like seeing an animal in pain if there’s something I can do about it. And I usually am doing something about it, because my parents are vets and I guess you could say I’m following in their footsteps.
Except that in one way, I’m already way ahead of them.
I’m an Animorph. An animal morpher.
My friends and I were given the ability to acquire the DNA of other creatures and morph them. This power is the only real weapon we have in our fight to save humanity.
But it’s more than that. For me, at least.
Every time I morph an animal, I experience the world as that animal does, sensing it, sharing its instincts. That’s knowledge my parents will never have. And I’m not sure not having it is such a bad thing.
I mean, it’s one thing knowing that a humpback whale can weigh thirty tons but it’s a whole other story to actually weigh that much. To cruise the ocean with the certainty that you actually are that animal. The only way to really understand is to become that creature, and they can’t teach that in vet school.
But this isn’t just about becoming an animal. It isn’t just about the morphing. See, we use our morphs to fight this war. To divert and ba
ttle the Yeerks. That’s why Jake, our leader, doesn’t like us using the morphs for our own purposes. I can’t say I never have — there’s nothing like frolicking as a sleek playful dolphin, and being a horse has certainly come in handy on occasion — but I like Jake a lot — okay, maybe I feel even stronger than “like” — and what he says makes sense, so I try not to do anything that would put us at risk.
But the risk isn’t the worst of it. This is a war and people die. And using this power to destroy others is hard to get used to. But as much as I hate inflicting pain and sometimes death on the other Yeerk-infested species, I can’t just sit back and allow their evil to consume us, the human race, too.
The Yeerks are like a disease, except they spread with malice and intent. A Yeerk will squirm into your ear canal, flatten out its blind, deaf, sluglike body, and weave into the crannies of your brain. Tap into your thoughts. See through your eyes, speak with your voice. You are a hostage, trapped inside yourself. Screaming for help but no one can hear you.
We call people infested by Yeerks Controllers, and there are more of them every day. Like I said, the Yeerks have taken over other species, too, and they’re using some of them to wage this poisonous war on Earth.
We, the Animorphs, are the only active resistance. Me. My best friend Rachel. Jake. His friend Marco. Tobias, who stayed in his red-tailed hawk morph longer than the two-hour limit and now lives as a bird of prey. A nothlit, as Ax would say.
Ax is an aristh, an Andalite warrior-cadet, and it was his brother Elfangor who gave us the blue morphing cube before Visser Three murdered him, so that we could continue the battle.
That’s pretty much it on our side. Well, unless you count the Chee, a nonviolent race of androids, who help us by spying on the Yeerks and infiltrating their cover organization called The Sharing. But when it comes right down to it, we’re the only ones out there aggressively defending our species.
So you can see why I need to work with wounded animals. To help heal them. And in some way, I think they help heal me, too.
Movement.
A tiny, twitching nose poked out from under the cage.
The barn turned Wildlife Rehab Clinic was quiet today. We had only three patients and all were on the mend.
The Arrival Page 8
