The Message

by K. A. Applegate

I answered.

  Ax said.

  Jake said.

 

 

  We were near the surface now, just a dozen feet from the bright barrier of sea and sky.

  Just then a larger, darker shadow swept over us. A shadow that was dark inside of dark. A shadow that touched your soul. It skimmed just above the surface of the water.

  It was shaped like a long battle-ax. Twin semicircular blades at the back, a long, diamond-headed point at the front.

  The Blade ship of Visser Three.

  Something was falling from it as it passed over us. There were a dozen splashes. I rolled over to get a better look.

  What I saw made my flesh crawl.

  Taxxons. In the water. Coming toward us.

  Marco yelled.

  But the answer was obvious. The Taxxons, ten-foot-long centipedes bristling with dozens of pairs of sharp needle legs, were racing after us. And they were very fast in the water.

  Very fast.

  From this angle we couldn’t see the several red-jelly eyes. But we could see the circular mouth at the top of each vile body.

  I had seen Taxxons straining to catch bits of Prince Elfangor as Visser Three devoured him.

  I had seen Taxxons, on orders from Visser Three, devour one of their own.

  Ax said.

  I grinned inwardly.

 

  Jake said.

  CHAPTER 21

  There were a dozen Taxxons in the water. Five of us. Swimming in a straight line, the Taxxons were faster. But, as we soon discovered, we were more maneuverable.

  Jake said tersely.

  I focused on one of the big worms. But I had to force myself into the fight. This was not a shark, and the dolphin’s instinctive dislike of sharks was not there to prod me.

  I had to find the will to fight in my own, human mind. It’s not such an easy thing. I had fought the Yeerks to preserve human freedom. Now I fought to help the entire world. Still, fighting doesn’t come naturally to me.

  And yet, I knew what I had to do. The Yeerks would show no mercy. If the Taxxons won, we would be killed. Or worse.

  I powered toward one of the Taxxons as he powered toward me. We were like two trains running on the same track. Head to head.

  At the last possible second, with the gaping red mouth of the Taxxon just a foot away, I zoomed sideways, arched my back, and rammed the Taxxon’s side.

  I expected it to be like the shark—hard, tough, unyielding. It was not. It was like hitting a soggy paper bag with a sledgehammer. The Taxxon burst like a dropped watermelon.

  I wanted to throw up. I beat the water with my tail and recoiled from the horrible scene I had created.

  All around me the battle raged. Dolphin against Taxxon. And Ax’s shark against Taxxon.

  Scientists believe that sharks are one of the oldest species of animals still in existence. Nature built them as perfect predators. Perfect killing machines. Nature hasn’t had to revise or update them much. They were built right the first time.

  Dolphins are very different. Scientists say that millions of years ago, dolphins were land animals. Sea mammals are not very different from humans and other mammals. They evolved their way back into the ocean. Part of that evolution included learning to cope with predators—with killer whales and sharks.

  I don’t know what sea the Taxxon race evolved in. I don’t know what natural predators they faced there. But they were not ready for this ocean. They were not ready to go one-on-one with the masters of Earth’s deep seas. They were no match for dolphin or shark.

  Jake ordered.

  Rachel asked, trying to sound tough herself. But she seemed shaky to me.

  I shot to the surface and filled my lungs with warm evening air. The sun was dropping toward the horizon. Two ships were close by and steaming in our direction.

  But far worse was the Blade ship, which hovered now just a hundred yards up in the air.

  Marco said.

  Jake said.

  Ax asked.

 

 

 

  Ax said.

  Marco said.

 

  I tried to think. Math was never my best subject. And it’s hard to be mathematical when you’ve just come from a battle and are scared half to death.

  BAH-LUMPH!

  I heard a huge concussion behind me. Like someone had dropped a big truck in the water.

  Marco wondered.

  I said.

  WHUMP, WHUMP, WHUMP.

  Rachel asked.

  I rose to the surface to breathe and look around. The two surface ships were still closing in, but they were not very fast, and they were not gaining on us. The Blade ship had disappeared. I scanned the sky in all directions, but I couldn’t see it.

  I asked.

  Jake said.

  WHUMP, WHUMP, WHUMP.

 

  I said.

  Suddenly I remembered that I was not limited to the usual human senses. I fired off a rapid series of echolocating clicks.

  The picture that came back was startling.

 

  Jake, Marco, and Rachel all echolocated.

  Rachel said.

  Marco agreed.

  WHUMP, WHUMP, WHUMP.

  I rose to breathe again and looked back. At just that moment I saw, far behind me, a huge, dark red, almost purple hump above the water. It seemed to be covered with hundreds of small fish tails, all beating frantically.

  I went under. I described it to him, at least what I had seen of it.

  Ax said.

 

 

  I asked him.

 

  WHUMP, WHUMP, WHUMP.

  Marco asked.

  Ax said. ons.>

  It almost made me laugh, the image of an Andalite classroom where Andalite students zoned out on the lesson just like we did. But it really wasn’t a good time for laughing.

  WHUMP, WHUMP, WHUMP.

  Ax said.

  Jake agreed.

  Ax seemed surprised.

  Rachel said tersely.

  That definitely surprised the Andalite.

  Marco said dryly.

  WHUMP, WHUMP, WHUMP.

  CHAPTER 22

  The creature Visser Three had become did not tire.

  We did.

  I felt like I had been swimming forever. Half an hour into the chase, I was exhausted. We had been powering through the water at panic speed. Fighting every current. Fighting the terrible urge to rest as our tails weakened. Fighting the growing hunger.

  WHUMP, WHUMP, WHUMP.

  The mardrut never tired. It never weakened. It gained on us a foot at a time, bit by bit.

  I could see it now. A huge purple and red mottled bag that undulated and oozed through the water. It was propelled by the three huge water sacs, firing one after another. Between those loud bursts, the hundreds of tiny tails that covered its entire surface thrashed and kept up momentum. WHUMP, WHUMP, WHUMP. Then he spoke. We had all heard that silent voice in our heads before. It was like hearing the most terrible curses. It was pure malice and hatred poured directly into our brains.

  Visser Three sneered.

  That voice churned my insides. I felt my own hatred flaring up to match his. The images Ax had painted—an Earth brown and empty and filled with nothing but the slaves of the Yeerks… .

  I had lived my entire life without feeling hatred. It is a sickening feeling. It burns and burns, and sometimes you think it’s a fire that will never go out.

 

  WHUMP, WHUMP, WHUMP. We had all been exposed to Visser Three. Ax had not. He seemed to shudder, even in his shark body. The dead shark eyes showed no emotion, but his swimming became erratic.

  I said to him. He did not answer.

  Ax said.

 

  But Ax’s fear was catching. He was right. We didn’t have enough time to make it to land without being trapped in our dolphin bodies. And we would never escape him, anyway. I glanced back.

  He was only five body lengths away!

  I demanded still more from my burning muscles, but there was nothing more to ask.

  This is the end, Cassie, I told myself. This is the end.

  I felt the terrible hatred surge in me again. But I didn’t want to end my life that way. I would not die with hate in my heart. That would be one victory I could deny Visser Three.

  I let my mind drift, even as my shattered body struggled to go on. I felt my mind floating back. To the barn, and all the animals there. To my father, my mother. To Jake.

  I remembered good things. Riding the high thermals with Tobias and the others with wings spread wide. Good days. Sitting at my grandmother’s feet as she told me the story of our family, of all the generations who had lived on and worked the farm.

  And then a more recent memory surfaced. The whale. I remembered his huge, gentle silence filling my mind.

  I could even hear his song.

  Wait! I could hear his song. That wasn’t memory. I was hearing his plaintive, haunting song, reverberating through the water.

  He was not far away.

  I opened my mind and let my human consciousness slip away. I let go. I invited the dolphin mind—the mind that loved to play and loved to fight and loved the feeling of soaring out of the water right up into the air like a bird—to surface in my head.

  I fired echolocating bursts, a thousand quick clicks compressed into a few seconds. And more than that, I cried for help.

  It was foolish. It was ridiculous. But I cried out in a silent plea, like a child with a nightmare calling for her mother.

  The monster is after me! The destroyer! The evil one!

  Help me.

  Ax managed to say.

  Marco gasped.

  Rachel admitted.

  WHUMP, WHUMP, WHUMP. Ax said. Jake said. Ax said.

  Jake said.

 

 

 

  We stopped. We turned to face the mardrut. I said. he said. WHUMP, WHUMP, WHUMP. The red and purple behemoth rushed at us. I shook with terror. But I was too tired to swim away.

  Help me! I cried one last time. But I knew there was no one to help.

  And then I let it all go …

  … and said good-bye.

  CHAPTER 23

  I’ve made up my mind what to do with you, Visser Three said.

  He rushed at us.

  We rushed at him.

  Something dark came hurtling up from the ocean floor.

  Something dark and long and bigger even than the mardrut.

  FWOOOMP!

  Visser Three shuddered and stopped dead in the water.

  A second dark shape, as fast as the first.

  FWOOOMP!

  I whispered.

  Marco yelled.

  There were five of them in the water.

  The two big males who had struck first had heads like sledgehammers. Sperm whales. Sixty feet long. Forty-five tons. The weight of twenty cars.

  They had dived deep and come tearing up at awesome velocity to slam into the creature from another world’s ocean.

  The mardrut was big. The mardrut was strong. But nothing living can survive for long, being slammed by creatures weighing a hundred and thirty thousand pounds.

  Then, the whale—my whale, because that’s how I thought of him — began to lash the mardrut with his tail. Hammer blows. Hits that could have knocked walls down. Again and again, as two smaller females joined in and the two sperm whales circled back for another attack.

  Visser Three’s cry of pain and fury echoed in my brain.

  Jake crowed.

  Rachel said.

  Marco yelled.

  The whales chased him for a while, but they let him go in the end.

  Whales are not very good at killing. They don’t really have much of a talent for hating and destroying.

  My whale, the big humpback, returned in a few minutes and rested in the water beside me.

  I wanted to thank him, but, as I said, whales don’t think in human words or human thoughts. Still, I tried, anyway.

  Thanks, big guy.

  People who argue about how smart whales are, or whether they are as smart as humans, kind of miss the point. Whales will never read books or build rockets or do algebra. In all those areas, humans are smarter. Humans are the great b
rains of planet Earth.

  But it isn’t necessary to believe whales are as smart as humans to believe that they are great. They don’t have to know words to sing songs. They don’t have to be anything but what they are to be magnificent. And even though I don’t really know what a soul is, I know this—if humans have them, then so do whales.

  I wanted to thank him for responding to my call for help. But I had a strange feeling, as he opened his great heart to the dolphin mind that was in my own, that he hadn’t just come in response to me.

  I had the feeling — and that’s all it was, a feeling—that in some way the sea itself had called him to respond to the presence of an abomination.

  Of course I never told that to Jake or any of the others. They would have laughed. At least, Marco would have.

  Ax said.

  I said.

  So we morphed back to our human bodies, and Ax morphed to his Andalite body, and we crawled up on the whale’s huge back.

  I fell asleep. I know that sounds pretty incredible, but I did. I was exhausted. Physically. Emotionally. In every way you can be tired, I was tired.

  When I woke up, it was sunset. We were near shore. I could see the beach, and just a little farther down the shore, the mouth of the river.

  We were wet, of course, covered with splashing water and the spray from the whale’s blowhole. It was a little cold, especially now that the sun was going down.

  But then again, I wasn’t Visser Three’s lunch, so I wasn’t going to complain.

  Jake was sitting cross-legged on the whale’s back, smiling at me.

  “Some day, huh?” he said.

  I smiled. “Yeah.”

  “We did it. We saved the Andalite. And we got out alive.”

  “Barely,” I said.

  “You know something? You were right. You trusted your feelings and we followed you and we’re all safe.”

  I nodded. “Yes, I guess so. Only … as Marco would say, let’s not do this again any time soon, okay?”

  Jake smiled his slow smile. “It’s fun being a dolphin, though, isn’t it? I know you were worried about it. You know, thinking maybe it wasn’t right and all.”