The answer, p.1
The Answer,
p.1
For Scott Bremner
And for Michael and Jake
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
SNEAK PEEK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
The nearest Bug fighter swooped low and slow. It fired its Dracon beams and the two-story gym exploded into charred stucco and twisted steel beams.
It drifted almost casually above the tired old low-slung classrooms and fired again, dragging the beam end-to-end along the buildings.
We had destroyed the Yeerk pool. The Yeerk pool was now the world’s biggest sinkhole. It looked like a crater. It was a crater, with half the mall in ruins on one slope, jumbled bits of fast-food restaurants, streetlights, ripped up concrete, cars, skinny trees, all tumbled together at the bottom. The water of the Yeerk pool, looking like molten lead, soaked up through the dirt. An Exxon sign lay half-submerged in it. A couple of dozen empty one-liter soda bottles drifted around like someone’s idea of toy boats.
How many Yeerks had died? Certainly thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. How many Hork-Bajir? How many Taxxons?
Humans?
We had tried to warn people, but the devastation had been too complete, had come too suddenly.
Marco was a hundred feet higher up than me. He was in osprey morph, I was in falcon, Tobias was himself: a red-tailed hawk.
More Bug fighters than I’d ever seen in one place. Maybe fifty of the things. They blasted schools; they blasted businesses; they blasted homes and churches. The shock waves would reach us, echoes of destruction. Pillars of smoke rose high in the air. Fires, some blazing and roaring, others smoldering sullenly, created thermal updrafts that were bread and butter to three mismatched birds of prey. We soared easily, effortlessly. We had the best possible seats for the show. With raptor eyes we could see every sickening detail. We could not miss a shot, could not fail to see lovingly tended gardens, prized homes, businesses, cars, burn as quickly and brightly as match heads.
The refugees — people who had been our neighbors, friends, classmates — the shocked, scared, lost refugees fled on foot, carrying what they could, running between stalled cars. Overpasses were all down, traffic lights all off, bridges were collapsed: Nothing with four wheels was moving.
A news helicopter was perhaps five miles off, no doubt filming and sending the pictures out live. The Yeerks could easily shoot down the copter. They were letting it film. Maybe even piloting the craft themselves. They wanted the world to see the violence. They wanted humans to be afraid. The infiltration phase of the war was over, over. From now on the Yeerks would be as subtle as sledgehammers.
I caught a rush of warm air, the thermal energy released by a burning supermarket, and I soared higher, up and up. I could see what Marco and Tobias had understood: The Yeerks were creating a circle of annihilation. The collapsed Yeerk pool was the center. They were burning, blackening everything in a radius of two miles.
That would be virtually all of what had been our home town.
And I had done it. I had given the order to destroy the Yeerk pool. All of this was a result.
But why? That was what bothered me. This wasn’t the time for moaning over the destruction, or even for second-guessing myself. I was done with that. Why? Why were the Yeerks doing this?
I noticed something in the far distance, south of where we were. More smoke. And with my falcon’s eyes I could just barely make out hints of still more Bug fighters. They looked like a cloud of gnats.
Tobias yelled.
I followed the direction of his gaze, and sure enough, there they were: a flight of four F-16’s. They were racing straight toward us. Straight toward the Bug fighters.
We watched, helpless to do anything. We had spent the morning watching helplessly.
The F-16’s came straight in. Two of the Bug fighters broke off from torching civilian buildings and turned lazily to meet the attack.
Missiles flew from the F-16’s and the jets broke away. Two Dracon beams fired and the missiles were destroyed in midflight.
The Bug fighters accelerated, easily caught the jets, and fired again. Three of the four exploded. There were no parachutes. No possibility of parachutes. The fourth jet rocketed low, leveled off seeming inches from the scorched ground and hit afterburners.
The Bug fighters let him go: They had nothing to fear.
No, that wasn’t quite true. The Yeerks were scared, just not of jets. This circle of destruction was evidence of fear. They were creating a barrier of sorts: not a wall, but a desert of ash and cinder so that an enemy wouldn’t be able to get close, unseen.
It gave me a grim satisfaction. The Yeerks were scared of us. But what were they protecting? The ruins of the Yeerk pool?
The Yeerks had decided that show time was over. They torched the news copter. A twirling cinder fell to Earth.
It was as big as a sports arena. It moved slowly, cumbersome in atmosphere. It was designed for space, not, like the Bug fighters, to be comfortable in air.
The Pool ship looked like a fat, swollen, three-legged spider. I’d seen it before, up in orbit, high above planet Earth.
The Pool ship: home of the Yeerk invasion force, base of the Bug fighters. It was a space-going Yeerk pool, well-defended, dangerous, but essentially a portable barracks, a giant mess hall that served up hearty doses of Kandrona rays, the sustenance that a Yeerk must have every three days or die.
The Bug fighters rose to greet their mother, swarming around the Pool ship, bristling, daring anyone to attack.
The Pool ship waddled down out of the sky, shouldering through the clouds. And gently, delicately, ever-so-tentatively, it rested its bulk on terra firma.
My name is Jake.
My name is Jake Berenson. The days of secrecy, of lurking in the shadows are over. The Yeerks know my name. They know my height, weight, eye color, Social Security number, and favorite foods. At long last they know the word Animorph, Marco’s word for us.
My brother Tom is one of them, a human-Controller. He has been for a long time. He’s been elevated to security chief for all Yeerk forces on Earth.
My parents, my mom and dad, are Controllers now, too. Host bodies for Yeerks.
They know it all now, the Yeerks do. All our names. All our deeds.
I’ve fought them for more than three years. I was just thirteen when I started. I’m sixteen now, though that fact, like so many facts, has been deliberately obscured in the secret accounts we’ve kept.
I’m a sixteen-year-old kid named Jake Berenson, and I am the leader of the Animorphs.
In the past it’s been hard for me to say that, to take on the title of leader. In the past I’ve questioned myself. Wondered whether I was right, wondered whether what I did was good, wondered whether I had any right to make life-and-death decisions. I’ve felt sorry for myself at times. Maybe anyone would, in my spot.
But I had to put all that aside now. I had put it all aside. Not because I was suddenly convinced that I deserved the power, was worthy of it. That wasn’t it. I knew better than to get too caught up in the myth of Mighty Jake the Yeerk Killer.
I had given up soul-searching because I realized now that it was simply too late. Way past too late. The battle had become a war. And I was, for better or worse, the only leader we had.
From here on out the second-guessing, the legitimate doubts, and the self-indulgent whining, they were over. Save them for my old age in the unlikely event that I ever had an old age.
We were all still alive, Cassie, Marco, Rachel, Tobias, and me. We’d been formed into a group by accident. A chance encounter in an abandoned construction site with a dying Andalite prince named Elfangor. He had given the five of us the Andalit
e power to morph, to become any animal we could touch. Later Elfangor’s brother Ax had joined us.
We were just kids. But in some ways we were the ideal guerrilla fighters. The morphing power let us fly and dig and crawl, sense, hide, and fight with far more than human power. Our youth made us the least likely of suspects.
The Yeerks had carried on a subversive war of infiltration for more than a decade. They had first discovered our planet back at the time of the Gulf War. For various reasons their then Visser One had fashioned a plan to slowly infiltrate human society, infest hundreds, then thousands, eventually millions of humans with the Yeerk parasite, and when it was too late to stop them, seize sudden control of the planet. Only then would the Yeerks finalize an almost bloodless conquest.
But that visser moved on and was replaced in command of Earth by the evil creature we had long known as Visser Three. Visser Three was a less subtle enemy. Less adept at subversion. A brute. We had fought him, lost, won, but above all survived. And, in surviving, we had slowed his conquest, frustrated his plans, driven him to ever wilder schemes. We had forced his hand, in the end, I guess.
Now the war of subversion was over. Visser Three was promoted to Visser One and all his most brutal instincts were unleashed.
In this new, open war, we had scored some impressive victories. We had destroyed the Yeerk pool. And we helped to motivate at least partial and spotty efforts by the military to respond to the Yeerk threat. Marco’s mom was free of her Yeerk slave master, free of the violent, dangerous creature who had been the very Yeerk who launched the invasion of Earth — Visser One. That Visser One was dead and his human host now worked with us. We had used the morphing cube to make new Animorphs, to increase our numbers.
But we had taken hits, too: We had all been driven from our homes. We had lost all vestiges of a normal life. We now hid with the free Hork-Bajir in a valley deep in the mountains.
And we had lost the morphing cube. The Yeerks had it. My brother Tom had taken it, and, when I might have stopped him — Cassie had let him and it go.
With that act, Cassie had surrendered our edge, our one great advantage: that we alone had the power to morph.
The Andalite technology was now in Yeerk hands, and we had already seen that Yeerks were using it just as we had used it: to capture all the amazing powers to be found in the animal kingdom.
The six of us, Marco, Rachel, Tobias, Ax, Cassie, and I, had stayed together through impossibly bad times, through every defeat, every close call, every mind-twisting weirdness, every horror. None of us had ever turned against the others. There had never been a betrayal.
Cassie let Tom take the morphing cube. Perhaps she had done so because to her the alternative was worse: She feared for me, for my soul I guess, if I was forced to kill my own brother.
Not good enough. Not for me. All that counted now was that we win, and Cassie, maybe for the most decent of motives, had hurt us badly.
I loved Cassie. Always had. Still did. But there was this thing between us now. And I could never trust her again. She had put my personal well-being ahead of winning a war we absolutely could not lose. And, I knew, that her decision might have come in part from my own self-doubts, my own inability to throw off moral ambiguity.
If I had been stronger … if I had been as strong as I should be, maybe Cassie would not have made her fatal mistake. I saw that clearly now. Too late for either of us.
And that was the other reason why I would allow myself no more second-guessing. A leader who shows weakness invites disaster.
We flew back to the Hork-Bajir camp. And as we flew I thought. Not about how my orders to destroy the Yeerk pool had resulted in the literal obliteration of the city, but about how, how, how I could destroy the Pool ship.
And about that distant pillar of smoke away to the south.
There had to be a way to take out the Pool ship. Destroy that ship and the war might be won. It was the target I could not possibly resist.
A fact that would be known by my brother Tom, and my parents, and by their ruler, Visser One.
“It’s too dangerous.” That was Eva, Marco’s mom. The woman who had been host body to the first Visser One. “Visser One will know that you know. He’ll know you’re coming. He can’t let you destroy a Pool ship — that’s the only large-scale food supply the Yeerks have. The Blade ship can only service so many. Lose a Pool ship? The Council of Thirteen would have Visser One executed.”
Marco shook his head. “He’ll think we’re cocky after taking out the Yeerk pool. Maybe he’ll underestimate us.”
“No,” Eva said flatly. “He’ll never underestimate you again. That’s over.”
We stood around a small fire. It was chilly. Fog had a tendency to form in this deep valley, sometimes so thick we could barely see our hands in front of our faces. It wasn’t that bad now, but it was still cold.
“It’s too dangerous,” Cassie’s dad said. He was sipping a cup of what passed for coffee here in our rough-and-ready camp.
“This is a job for the military now,” Rachel’s mom argued. “You kids have done enough. The secret is out: Leave it to the people who should be protecting this country. I mean, we paid enough in taxes to support the military; well, now let’s see what we got for all that money.”
We were in a council of war. I was getting so I hated these meetings. Too many voices, too many opinions. So many opinions sometimes that it seemed the consensus would always come down on the side of doing nothing.
But we were guests among the free Hork-Bajir. This was their valley, their trees, the only home they had. We’d come running to them with our families in tow when we needed a place to hide. So at the very least I had to listen to Toby, the young female Hork-Bajir seer. And only a fool would dismiss Eva’s input: None of us knew the Yeerks half as well. And of course, there were my fellow Animorphs.
But added to all that we had Marco’s dad; Rachel’s mom; James, the representative of our new, adjunct Animorphs; Tobias’s mom; both of Cassie’s parents, who only cared about making sure no one got hurt … too many people with too many agendas. But I still didn’t know how to tell adults, my friends’ parents no less, to be quiet and let me do my job.
I tried not to show my impatience, but these days I’m not so good at that. Cassie was watching me. We’re not as close anymore, but she still knows me.
She said, “Look folks, we’re going to try. I don’t think the question is really ‘whether’ but ‘how.’”
“No one has decided any such thing,” Rachel’s mom said angrily. “My daughter is not going to be dragged into some suicidal undertaking like this.”
Rachel laughed. Rachel’s not a person who’ll be one way with her friends and another way with her family. There’s only one version of Rachel. “Mom, if we go, I go. If we don’t go, I still go. Visser One parks his Pool ship right out in the open and we’re not going to ram it down his nonexistent throat? Hah! I’m with Marco: Blow it up. Blow it up real good.”
I hid a grin. Rachel is the original Nike girl: Just do it. Just do it, and if that doesn’t work do it harder and meaner.
“It seems a waste to simply blow it up,” Toby said, speaking for the first time. The Hork-Bajir are a fearsome-looking, but basically peaceful race that, left alone, would live in the trees eating bark and caring for the forest. Toby is one of a rare Hork-Bajir mutation: a seer. A sort of Hork-Bajir intellectual and leader. She leads the free Hork-Bajir, a small but growing band of Hork-Bajir who have been liberated from their parasitic masters.
“What do you mean?” I asked Toby.
“There are hundreds of captive Hork-Bajir aboard the Pool ship,” Toby said. “If we could free at least a portion of them … and of course there are the ship’s massive weapons systems. Imagine controlling all that power.”
“Take it?” Marco yelped. “Steal the Pool ship!”
Rachel jabbed a finger at Toby. “This is my girl,” she said.
Rachel’s “girl” was nearly six and a half feet tall, and looked an awful lot like a kid’s notion of a goblin. Not to mention the fact that she was armed with razor-sharp blades growing from wrists and elbows and forehead.
