I looked around at our motley group. Four humans, a red-tailed hawk, an Andalite, a Hork-Bajir, an Arn with his back to us, and, invisible but still there, the hybrid thing called Aldrea.
I must have looked worried.
Marco caught my eye and laughed his sardonic laugh. “So. Yahtzee anyone?”
ALDREA
I rolled over and realized that Dak was gone. I opened my eyes.
He was standing with his back to me. He was gazing out across the valley below. I stood up, started toward him, hesitated, then bent down to pick up the weapon I’d had within reach for every second of the last two years. I came up behind him, stepped around his curled-up tail, and put my arm around his waist.
We were at the edge of the small platform built seven hundred feet up in a crook of a Stoola tree’s branches. We were at the far end of the valley, all the way down where it narrowed so much that the branches of trees across the valley reached and touched the branches from this side.
The Yeerks had searched the area thoroughly, hunting for surviving Hork-Bajir. The searching had been done by Hork-Bajir-Controllers. And yet we had escaped detection. Dak had taken the platform apart, buried it in the ground, then, when the search had passed, we defiantly rebuilt our little home.
“I love you, Dak.”
He squeezed my arm against his chest. “Seerow is sleeping well now,” he said.
“Yes. For the last few days, since the ships stopped arriving with all that noise.”
A huge buildup had begun. The Yeerk forces, the forces we had fought, would be doubled.
“I fear for him, Aldrea.”
I couldn’t answer. My throat was choked. We had long since realized that we would not survive. We had accepted that. As well as anyone can accept the death of a loved one, or their own death.
But I could not accept it for Seerow, my son. Our son. Could not. And yet I could see no way out.
I looked to the little cradle of twigs where he lay.
“What will become of you, my sweet little one?”
He sat up. Too young to speak, and yet he spoke. Not as a Hork-Bajir, but with fluency and ease.
“The Yeerks will take me, Mother.”
“No.”
“You will not save me, Mother.”
“I … I couldn’t.”
“Where is Father?”
“What? He …” I reached, and Dak was no longer there. “He was just … what is happening?”
“Nightmare,” the small, brown creature said. She had taken my son’s place. “You’re having a nightmare.”
“Seerow!” I screamed.
The young Andalite sneered at me.
“Seerow! Dak! Come to me, come to me, let me … where are you?”
“Seerow!”
I woke. Cassie, the human, had run to plunge our face into cold water.
I looked around, through her eyes. The lights had been darkened for sleep. The Andalite stood at rest, with a single stalk eye open, watching. Jake, the leader of the humans, had awakened.
“It’s okay, Jake,” Cassie said. “She just had a nightmare.”
Seerow. Dead after a life as a Yeerk host. Dak. Dead, I knew not how. All of them, all our brave soldiers, all gone.
A nightmare. A dream of death from a person already dead.
Three days had passed. Three days of having the strange, sad, secret Andalite-turned-Hork-Bajir in my head.
Sleeping with her on the hard, cold deck. Awakened shaking, sweating, wanting to tear my head open with my bare hands as I felt the awesome grief of her nightmares.
Eating with her, if you could call the concentrated nutrient pellets food. Going to the bathroom with her.
A lot more togetherness than I’d have preferred. Bad enough figuring out how to pee in a toilet designed for Hork-Bajir. Worse doing it with an audience in your own head.
We had gotten good at sharing control of speech. I controlled everything else. I had gotten used to it. I still didn’t like it.
The Arn had stayed at the helm, ignoring us for the most part. I’d learned nothing more about him. Was this really some voyage of redemption for him? Aldrea doubted it. And she knew one hundred percent more about the Arn than I knew. Jake was talking with Quafijinivon when we translated out of the blank white nothingness of Zero-space into what now seemed to be the warm, welcoming black star field.
The Arn checked his sensors.
“Quafijinivon says we are now in Hork-Bajir space. We may pass the Yeerk defenses unnoticed. Or not,” Jake announced. “We should get ready. We don’t know what we’ll be walking into. I want everyone —”
Marco held up his hand like he was asking a question.
“Yes, Marco.”
“Do we have correct change for the tolls?”
Jake blinked. Then he grinned. He and Marco have been best friends forever. Marco knows how to knock Jake down a peg when Jake starts taking his fearless leader role too seriously.
Jake sat down on the floor across from me/Aldrea.
“I don’t see why we couldn’t have gone Z-space the whole way,” Marco whined.
Ax and Aldrea both laughed. Then they realized they were both laughing at the same thing and they both stopped laughing.
“Just say it,” Marco told them. “I am but a poor Earth man, unable to understand the ways of the superior Andalite beings.”
“Hork-Bajir,” Aldrea corrected him.
Ax began.
A flash of green streaked by.
“Shredder fire!” Aldrea yelled, and suddenly I was up and running toward the front of the ship. She had taken control of my body! It was so sudden, so effortless.
Ax reached the “bridge” first. He leaned his torso forward and looked over Quafijinivon’s shoulder.
Ax said. Then he clarified.
“Can we outrun him?” Jake demanded.
“They’re between us and the Arn planet,” Quafijinivon answered. “We’re smaller. It’s possible we could outmaneuver them. But it would place us well within their firing range.”
Tseeeeeew!
The Andalite fired again. A miss! But the cold, hard data from the computer made it clear exactly how close it had come.
“Fire back!” Rachel burst out. “Knock out one of his engines or something. Enough to keep him busy until we can land. They can’t follow us down.”
Quafijinivon’s red mouth pursed thoughtfully. “Young human, that pilot is an Andalite warrior. One of the best trained fighters in the galaxy. I cannot hope to win a battle with him.”
Ax and Aldrea both said roughly the same thing, which translated to human vernacular was,
Tobias said. He was flapping a little nervously, being tossed around as the Arn swung the ship into an evasive maneuver.
“So we let him shoot us down?” Rachel demanded. “There’s one of him, eight of us. Or nine.”
The Andalite fighter was coming back around in a tight, swift arc. In a few seconds his weapons would come to bear on us.
“Ax?” Jake asked.
Ax pleaded.
“No!” Aldrea interrupted. “If the Yeerks pick up a voice transmission, we’re dead. They’ll vector everything they have at us. We’ll all be killed and so will the Andalites.”
“Here he comes,” Toby said.
I looked — and my stomach rolled over.
The
Andalite fighter was on us. Seconds from firing.
This time he wouldn’t miss.
Ax leaped. He dragged the willing Arn out of the way and grabbed the controls.
Ax cried.
WHAM!
I flew back into Toby. We both crashed to the ground. One of her blades nicked my arm and I felt a trickle of warm blood.
Everyone who’d been standing was pinned against the left side of the ship. An invisible force pushed me, forced the air out of my lungs, squeegeed my cheeks back against my ears.
Tseeeeew! Tseeeeeew!
The Andalite fighter fired.
A jolt of electricity, my hair tingled, Rachel’s hair was standing straight out from her head, a blond halo. The air crackled blue. Then Rachel’s hair dropped back into place.
The acceleration stopped instantly. I’d been straining forward and now, released, I tripped and fell like someone who’s been tugging on a rope that snaps.
Marco landed sprawled all over me. He put his finger to his lips. “Shhh, don’t tell Jake. You know how jealous he is.”
Ax reported.
“Slow, that’s good, right?” I said. I put my hand to my lip and saw blood on my fingers. I didn’t even remember hitting anything.
“No, not good,” Aldrea said. “He’s decided we won’t or can’t shoot. He’s coming in slow to make sure of his shot.”
Ax said.
The cabin went dark except for the glow from the control panel. And then I realized my feet were no longer glued to the floor.
“Ax, can we outmaneuver him? Yes or no?” Jake asked.
Jake ignored his answer. “Aldrea?”
She knew what he was asking. I felt her ambivalence. Her hesitation.
“Yes or no!” Jake snapped.
“Yes,” she said. She seized control of my body again, pushed off from the ceiling and floated weightlessly in beside Ax.
“Cripple him if you can. If not …” Jake said.
Ax pleaded.
“My decision, Ax-man,” Jake said gently. “Aldrea, it’s your show.”
Aldrea wrapped a restraining strap over our shoulder to keep from floating away. My hands moved, taking a large, ornately designed joystick obviously constructed to accommodate Hork-Bajir fingers or Taxxon pincers. Aldrea’s eyes, my eyes, were glued not to the slowly growing image of the Andalite fighter, but to the tactical weapons readout.
“Computer, go to manual firing mode,” my voice said.
I watched the crosshairs on the screen swing across the field of stars and come to rest on the Andalite ship. Dead on the cockpit.
Ax said in thought-speak only Aldrea and I could hear.
Aldrea moved my fingers again, ever so slightly, gently, caressing the targeting crosshairs till they centered on the Andalite’s right-side engine pod.
Had she retargeted because of Ax’s threat? Or had she always intended to aim for the engine? In either case, a miss would likely mean a direct hit on the Andalite ship itself.
HMMMMMMMM …
TSEEEEEEW!
A single shot. The red Dracon beam punched through the blackness. Stabbed at the Andalite ship. Then a pale, orange explosion. The engine pod blew apart. The Andalite ship spun wildly, falling away from us.
“Yes!” Rachel cried as she drifted in midair, almost upside down. “You clipped an engine!”
Ax yelled. He swung his stalk eyes backward to look at Jake.
“Can he fly?” Jake asked.
“They won’t attack us,” Marco remarked. “They see we fired on the Andalite. We’re a bona fide Yeerk craft.”
Ax said acidly.
“We just keep flying, we’re home free,” Marco pointed out.
Quafijinivon said, “Yes, yes! Keep flying.”
One by one we looked at Jake. “Nah, I don’t think so,” he said.
Marco smiled. “I had a premonition you’d say that.”
“Ax? Aldrea? Four of them. If we fire on the Yeerks, will the Andalite figure it out? Will he join in?”
Ax said.
“Okay,” Jake said. “Wait. Wait till you can’t possibly miss your first shot. Then, boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Four shots. Hit or miss it’ll confuse the Yeerks, scare the slime off them.”
Four Bug fighters loomed up from the brilliant crescent of the planet below, racing around their orbit toward us, engines blazing.
The Andalite ship seemed to be drifting now, helpless.
“Is he really —” Marco asked.
“No,” Aldrea said. “He’s hurt but not that badly. He’s playing dead to draw the Yeerks in. He’ll take one last shot. That’s his plan. One shot and then die.”
It was Tobias, the instinctual flier who saw the possibilities.
“And the debris will shred the following ship!” Aldrea said enthusiastically.
Ax hit lateral positioning thrusters for just a second, then we drifted, seemingly without power.
The Yeerks saw us in their line of fire, split left and right, just as Tobias had …
TSEEEEEEW! TSEEEEEW!
We fired.
BOOOM!
The left-side lead Bug fighter blew apart.
Tseeeeew!
The Andalite fired. The right-side leader exploded.
The left-side leader plowed into his partner’s debris. An engine erupted. Ripped loose, sliced open the entire back end of the Bug fighter, which spun, then BOOOM!
Three Bug fighters down in less than ten seconds.
The Andalite fired his one good engine and went after the remaining Yeerk. But not before giving a slight roll to his ship. A sort of wave.
Ax said.
Everyone started cheering.
“Good shooting, Ax and Cassie!” Rachel crowed.
“Yes, good work,” Jake said much more quietly. “We may have just alerted the Yeerks, made things harder. So take five seconds to celebrate, then get ready to land. Be ready for battle morphs if needed.”
Aldrea said.
ALDREA
Down. Down through the clouds, through the atmosphere that made the hull scream. Down to my home. The planet I had never left, and yet now returned to.
“The Yeerk automated defenses appear to have accepted our codes,” Quafijinivon said.
“That would be a good thing?” Rachel asked.
“If they did not accept our identification they would have targeted us with ground-based Dracon cannon. We have another threshold to cross when we enter the valley proper.”
I hadn’t seen it from space since I first arrived with my family. My father, in disgrace, but acting as though he didn’t know that this was a dead-end, irrelevant assignment for an Andalite whose name had become a derisive joke, a synonym for “fool.”
With my mother, just happy to have new, unclassified species to study. With my brother, who felt our humiliation so much more deeply than me.
All dead, of course. I’d seen them die in the blistering Dracon beam attack from low-flying Yeerk Bug fighters.
It was not a beautiful planet,
at least not to Andalite sensibilities. An Andalite sought instinctively for the vast expanses of open grass, the delicate pastel trees, the meandering rivers and streams.
But the Hork-Bajir planet was scarred by the impact of the asteroid or moonlet that had erased its former character. The surface was barren, cracked, and fissured. The cracks were miles wide and miles deep, with shockingly steep sides. Life on the planet existed now only in those valleys.
There the giant trees soared. There the Hork-Bajir had once lived in peaceful ignorance, praising Mother Sky and Father Deep, harvesting the bark, avoiding the monsters that guarded the depths of the valleys.
We skimmed the barrens and then, suddenly, dropped into the valley. Dak’s valley. My valley.
I looked and was suddenly glad that Cassie had control of my body. If she didn’t, I may not have been able to remain standing.
The trees! The trees! So many gone. The valley walls had been scarred, stripped. The Yeerks had cut deep gashes into the valleys to make level spaces.
“You must remember that it has been years since you last saw your home,” Quafijinivon told me.
But it wasn’t the years that had ravaged the trees. It was the Yeerks. More than half of them, gone. Pieces of most of the others had been blasted away.
I said to Cassie.
Even before I … before I died, some of the trees had been destroyed. But now it was as if the planet had been massacred. For the trees were the planet.
“We appear to have been accepted and registered by the inner-defense grid,” Quafijinivon said, breathing a sigh. “This is fortunate. We pass within a hundred yards of Dracon cannon in the valley walls.”
“I can’t believe we haven’t reached the ground yet,” Jake said. “How tall are these trees?”
I knew he expected me to answer. But I couldn’t.
“The largest are two thousand feet tall,” Quafijinivon answered. “The trunks a hundred feet in diameter. They are a masterpiece of Arn bio-engineering.”
Cassie asked softly.
I begged. I hated the weakness in my voice, but I couldn’t bear to look anymore.
She did. But then, she looked again. And I looked, too. Because even now, scarred and blasted, raped and despoiled, it was my home.