Chapter Text
My name is Eva. The Yeerk in my head is named Edriss.
We used the scanner to learn more about the computer Don Alddak left behind. It was barely larger than an Earth laptop. As I hoped, it was also a communicator. It was all set up and ready to send a transmission to some other machine many light-years away. All we had to do was switch it on and start talking.
The woods were still getting darker.
I set the device on the grass. I made a sign of the cross and thought a silent prayer for the unnamed Venber who was sacrificed to make it.
"All right. Let's see who answers."
And then, I turned it on.
The communicator was specifically an interociter - it showed a three-dimensional hologram of whom you're talking to. Edriss had never heard of an interociter that was this small. This must be incredibly advanced technology despite being as old as Chapman said it was.
The hologram appeared hovering over the device. The shape was tall and thin like a human, but completely covered by a cloak. A large hood draped over what could have been a head. I couldn't see any part of their body, not even the number of limbs. It seemed weird that they would talk through a hologram if they were just going to hide what they looked like anyway. But then again, this allowed them to see a hologram of me on their end.
The cloak was gray, like an old statue. The hologram shone so brightly that the dark forest seemed even darker in contrast. It looked almost as though that figure and I were the only two people in a black void.
"I was hoping you'd call." The voice was calm, confident, and vaguely feminine.
She spoke in English. And it sounded completely natural, not like an automatic translation from a computer. She even had an American accent.
"You know English?" I said.
"I taught myself several of Earth's languages. We've been studying Earth for a long while. I thought it'd be polite to have this conversation in the local tongue. O puedo hablar en español, si quieres."
She was smug. I didn't like smug.
"Who are you?" I demanded.
"My name is Pamaclees of Light."
I looked the hologram up and down. "That's a rather dark and mysterious look, Miss Light."
Covered by the robes, a limb reached up and moved up her hood, revealing her face. Two dark eyes and a mouth, but no nose. Her skin was the same dark gray as the cloak, but I had no way of knowing if that was its real color or the effect of the hologram.
She smiled at me. It was even a human smile - the edges of her mouth pointed upwards.
"You're a representative of the Yeerks, yes?" she asked. "I was watching you through the camera Don wore. She thought she turned it off before her 'secret' meeting. But she didn't realize we can turn it on remotely. Bless her heart."
"My name is Eva. Am I correct in thinking you're a representative of The Five?"
"Oh, you've heard of us. That makes this simpler."
"I haven't heard anything good. I was told that a race called the Venber is extinct because of you. The computer I'm using to talk to you right now was built out of a dead person's remains. You wiped out an entire species - sentient people - just to improve your technology. Is that true?!"
"That was not my fault. That was before my time," she said firmly. "What The Five did to the Venber was a mistake."
I looked at her warily. "You're not just saying that? You really mean it?"
"A Venber's body was unique in the universe and had countless uses. But they were hunted to extinction because the old Five were greedy and short-sighted. If I was around back then, I would have kept some Venber alive for breeding stock. We could be harvesting their biological material to this day, instead of going through all this expense to preserve and upgrade these old computers. The Venber never would have died out on my watch."
"Yes, you're a real saint," I said. "Is the entire Five species like you?"
"Species?" Pamaclees chuckled a little.
"Is that funny?"
"The Five isn't my species," she said. "The Five is an organization, or a movement."
"Oh . . . Only five members?"
"We have many members from different species all over the universe. The name 'Five' refers to our five core principles. The five things that make us, us."
"Which are?"
"The first is that only we get to know the other four."
"I see . . . That's how you survived the war with the Andalites. They couldn't find all of you, because they had no way of knowing who was a member and who wasn't."
She smiled again. "The Andalites can kill our members, but they can't kill an idea."
"But Don Alddak isn't an official member, is she? You're just using each other." A picture was forming in Edriss' mind and mine. "You're not on Earth, because this signal is going across light-years. Which means you met Don when she was still in space. You gave her a camera and a computer, and you've been sending her secret instructions ever since. She joined Toby's colony as your spy. She does your dirty work while you stay safe at home. And when she's done, you'll swoop in and take the rewards for yourself. Am I close?"
"Positively toasty."
"Don wants the Yeerks because she thinks they'll make her smart enough so she won't need you anymore. But what are you after? Are you going to melt the Yeerks down to make more computers?"
Pamaclees answered, "That's the last thing I want to do. You Yeerks are so rare. So wonderful. We want you just as you are."
I stared at her suspiciously. ". . . What do you mean?"
"The Five are scientists. We're always on the hunt for more knowledge. We infiltrate planets secretly and collect all the information they have to offer. Yeerks would be invaluable to that process. You can sneak into other races completely unnoticed. You can connect directly to another creature's brain and learn everything they know. You would be the perfect spies for The Five. The ultimate assimilators of knowledge."
I blinked. "So you're saying you don't want to hurt the Yeerks . . . You want to recruit them."
"The Hork-Bajir army. Don's threats to take Yeerks away from the Kandrona. That's just insurance. We would much rather you join us willingly, Kandrona and all."
<Yeerks were universally hated. Now suddenly everybody wants us,> Edriss thought in amazement.
<Wish it was this easy to get volunteers in The Sharing,> I thought.
I looked back at the hologram of Pamaclees. "Harvesting Venber. Manipulating Hork-Bajir. Why should we help someone like you?"
"We can help each other. The Five are masters of genetic engineering. If we had a few Yeerk bodies to experiment on, we could breed new Yeerks. I understand that you've lost the strength to control a host that resists you. We can give you that strength back. If you join us, we can make you conquerors again. You could enslave entire planets to your will!"
"You're really not selling it . . ."
"All right, something peaceful then. Your dependence on Kandrona rays, perhaps. We could potentially create new Yeerks who can survive outside the pool for up to ten days - or thirty - or forever! Imagine, immortal Yeerks who don't need the Kandrona at all."
Edriss thought this over. <That is tempting . . . But no.>
I repeated this out loud, and added, "We just don't trust you."
"Have it your way. If you won't come with us willingly, we'll just have to take you by force. We'll get help from Don and her Hork-Bajir friends . . ." She grinned, showing sharp, pointed teeth. "And the Andalite."
A chill started in Edriss and spread out to my human skin. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"The other day, you heard a distress signal on a Yeerk frequency, right? The Andalite soldier was trying to set a trap for you. Well, we heard it too. We've been watching Earth ever since Don arrived, and we paid attention to even the tiniest z-space signal. But unlike you, we were able to hack their transmitter. And we sent messages back to him."
<Don also said something about working with Andalites,> Edriss remembered.
"You talked to the Andalite? You're working with him?!"
"A single Andalite soldier, stranded on a strange world. So desperate to get a new ship that he set the most obvious trap in the universe. We were sure he'd be happy to work with us. Especially when we offered to help him track down his hated Yeerk enemies."
"But the Andalites are your enemies too," I said, perplexed. "They almost wiped out The Five, didn't they? I figured you'd want revenge."
"None of us care about revenge. We just want to use them."
"Why?"
Pamaclees of Light smiled and said, "The Five uses everyone and everything. All species, all the universe is raw material for our experiments. Besides, the Andalites have morphing technology. We would love, love, love to get our hands on that."
"No, you can't trust someone from the Andalite military. They look down on all other species. And they're so violent."
"Yes, violent," she said eagerly. "That's exactly what we're counting on. The Andalite soldier is going to lead the Hork-Bajir in an attack on your human city."
"An attack?!"
"Don's not going to sneak around the city like last night again. I've told her to be more aggressive tonight. They're going to raid the streets and break into every building, block by block, until they find the Yeerk pool."
"You can't do that!"
"It's already done," Pamaclees said, horrifyingly calmly. "I've told Don my plan. She's regrouping with her followers as we speak. And I've also sent a message to the Andalite's z-space transponder. The Andalite will rendezvous with Don's group at seven P.M. tonight at the edge of the woods. I'm sending the exact coordinates to this computer."
A quick beep came from the device.
"From there, they'll march into your city and tear everything apart until they find your base. And I've told them to kill any human who gets in their way. You already know how Don feels about aliens; she's not gonna mind."
"That's insane," I cried. "You'll reveal the existence of aliens to humans in a way that's impossible to cover up. The whole world will panic - And for what?! This plan work even work! Twelve Hork-Bajir can't defeat the entire human population. The police will show up - with guns! - long before they find the pool. It's going to be a bloodbath for humans and aliens! Everyone will lose!"
"That's right," Pamaclees said. "A siege like this will have very little chance of success. But Andalites are too arrogant and Hork-Bajir are too stupid to realize that. It's going to be a disaster. But it's still going to happen."
She looked at me expectantly. "UNLESS . . . you would like to make us a better offer?" She smiled again.
I stared at her.
Then I took a step forward and said, "We're not offering you anything. We're gonna stop Don without your help. And then, we're gonna stop you. That's a promise."
Her expression hadn't changed at all. Pamaclees just said, "See you soon."
And then the hologram disappeared. The transmission was over.
.
The attack would begin at 7. That was less than half an hour away.
We hadn't left the meadow yet. Alison, Tidwell, Tom, and I stood next to the ship in the dark. We now knew where Don's base was, but what could we do if we went there?
Alison frantically spoke into the communicator. "Right dear, what's your plan?"
"Who said I have a plan?" Chapman's voice replied.
"You better have a plan 'cause I don't," Alison said.
"Actually, I may have something after all," Chapman said slowly. "Half a plan . . . Two-thirds of a plan . . . All right. Question: What do we have that neither Don's Hork-Bajir nor the Andalites do? Answer: A ship! That's the biggest advantage we have. What if we flew the refugee ship to their base?"
"Well that would be lovely, but we can't fly the ship," I said. "We still don't have a replacement for the broken engine. If we turn on that piece of junk, it'll become radioactive again." Edriss spoke through my mouth, "I refuse to have another host die of radiation sickness, not even to save the city."
"Short-term exposure won't be a problem," he replied. "We turn on the engine. Five minutes to get there, five minutes to scare them off, five minutes to fly back. Then we shut the engine down again. That's not enough time for it to become lethal. At the very worst, we'll feel queasy for maybe half a day."
Tom quietly muttered to Alison, "I love how he says 'we', like he won't be safe at home while we're doing this." Alison rolled her eyes and nodded.
If Chapman heard this over the communicator, he ignored it. "Think about it. They're expecting a fight against primitive humans. They can't fight back against a ship hovering over their heads. If we threaten to shoot them from above, they have no choice but to surrender. Fight's over before they even leave the woods."
Tidwell hesitantly said, "It could work."
.
It wasn't working.
We four hosts were crowded in the pilot room inside the refugee ship. Alison shone a flashlight over my shoulder as I tried to work the control panel. The ship didn't have working lights at the moment. Besides the faulty engine, pretty much the only thing we hadn't moved to the new cavern was a first-aid kit with some potassium iodine pills. We found the pills a minute ago and swallowed the last of them. It was a way to give ourselves a little extra protection against the radiation.
But it might have been for nothing, because the engine wouldn't activate.
"What's wrong?" Tom asked.
"It's the ship's safety protocols," I answered. "Because the engine's so damaged, the system won't let it turn on again."
Alison pointed her flashlight to her watch for a second. "It's fifteen to seven," she said with some panic.
The Andalite was probably meeting with Don right now, preparing the plan of attack.
"Can't we just override the safety?!" Tom asked.
"It can't be done manually," Tidwell explained. "We need to tell the computer it's okay. But we need power to turn on the computer. And with the auxilary generator at the cavern, the only power source left is the engine."
"So we can't use the computer until we turn on the engine, and we can't turn on the engine without the computer," Alison said.
"Yes," Tidwell said.
"Wait a sec," Tom said suddenly. "We have another computer."
"We do?" I asked. But he was already running out the door.
Tom came back a moment later. He grinned triumphantly and held up the Venber device.
"That?"
He stepped around me and pulled a connector cable from the control panel. "It sent a transmission across light-years. It must have some kind of power source." As he fumbled under the sparse light to connect the Venber device to the ship, he said, "The Five started this whole mess. It's only right we use their tech to stop 'em."
"I don't really like the idea of attaching that evil thing to our ship," I said. "A person was murdered to make that."
"Well it's no use to him now, is it?!" he snapped. And then he snapped the cable into place.
Both the Venber device and the control panel lit up.
The screen read: VORTEX FILTERING COIL IS DAMAGED/NOT FOUND. PLEASE REPLACE COIL BEFORE ACTIVATING MONAD ENGINE.
OVERRIDE? YES/NO
I hit "yes", but it just said: ERROR. VORTEX FILTERING COIL IS DAMAGED/NOT FOUND. I typed a more complicated way to turn off the safety features, but all I got were more error messages. Then, with a feeling of guilt in my stomach, I took the Venber device from Tom and began typing on that screen. I tried to have the new device completely override the ship's operating system.
UPDATING PROTOCOLS . . . ERROR. ERROR CODE: 2735164
REBOOTING SYSTEM . . .
UPDATING PROTOCOLS . . . ERROR. ERROR CODE: 2735164
REBOOTING SYSTEM . . .
UPDATING PROTOCOLS . . . ERROR. ERROR CODE: 2735164
I groaned loudly and looked upwards. "¡Dios mio! Please, give us some help!"
The very instant after I said that: SYSTEM READY. INITIALIZING MONAD ENGINE. A loud rumble came from below decks. The engine was on again. All the lights of the ship lit up.
The other three humans looked around in impressed surprise. I looked upwards again and said, "Thank you!" I wondered if Edriss still needed convincing that God was real after that.
<That's not proof. It's just a coincidence,> she insisted.
<We'll talk about it later,> I replied.
Together, Edriss and I began piloting the ship.
It had no generator, no Kandrona, no digital encyclopedia. Only a faulty engine for propulsion and the bare bones of an operating system. It was like a rusted old van scrapped for parts and held together with duct tape. But we had just kicked it off its cinder blocks. It was moving again.
We aimed upwards. The room rumbled and shook harshly. Outside the ship, dirt and leaves slid off the roof. After a few moments, the entire ship slowly began pulling itself out of the hole it buried itself into.
Our refugee ship was airborne. We all looked at the view screen in front of us. Our view rose higher and higher, hovering above the treetops.
I glanced around the room. I had Edriss' memories of piloting, but this was the first time any of us humans were in a flying spaceship. Alison and Tidwell were both amazed. Tom was practically shaking with excitement; he looked like a little kid at Christmas.
I turned back to the view screen and braced myself. "All right. Let's go stop a war."
.
We flew low. The hull of the ship almost brushed the the tops of the trees. We didn't want to attract any attention from the city.
The coordinates Pamaclees gave us were for another clearing close to the edge of the woods. Even flying slowly, it took less than a minute to arrive. This was the place where the Andalites were supposed to rendezvous with the Hork-Bajir before they stormed the city together.
When we got there, the scene we saw on the view screen . . . was not what we expected.
"The . . . hell . . . ?" Alison whispered in horror.
We couldn't believe what we saw on the screen. Without a discussion, I landed the ship. We quickly opened the door, and we four humans stepped out of the ship and onto the grass. The four Yeerks looked around the area through our eyes.
The Hork-Bajir were dead. Or at least, dying.
It was dark, but the headlights from the ship let us see most of the battlefield. We saw red blood and blue-green blood splattered all over the ground and the trees. Several trees had been broken and slashed at. And the Hork-Bajir, normally terrifying and covered with weapons, lay broken on the ground. I tried counting the victims, to see if all twelve were here, but it was hard to tell . . . They weren't all in one piece . . .
It was a scene of carnage.
Even worse, it wasn't silent. I could hear moaning. Crying. And I could hear someone trying to breathe, but it was mixed with a wet, gargling sound. It came from people whose torsos had been ripped open. People whose guts were lying outside their bodies on the ground. People who were missing part of their head. They weren't all completely dead yet. But I knew, they wouldn't last much longer.
A Hork-Bajir can survive a lot of damage. It takes a lot to kill one of them . . . This was a lot.
We humans and Yeerks stared at the battlefield in silence for several long moments. Suddenly, Tom turned and stepped away. He dropped to his hands and knees. And he vomited.
I studied the area. I didn't see any Andalite bodies.
Of course I didn't. Andalites can morph. If one of them got injured like this, they could just turn into a bird and fly away.
I saw movement.
One Hork-Bajir was lying on her back, and she tried pushing herself up on her elbow blades. I quickly went to her. There was a major stab wound in her chest - she was probably impaled by an Andalite's tail blade. Her face was slashed up, and the camera she once wore was in broken pieces on the ground, but I recognized her.
"Don Alddak," I said. The name wasn't funny anymore. "What happened?"
She glared up at me as blood pumped out of her chest. "An . . . da . . . lites . . ." She struggled to talk. "The Five . . . called them . . . The Five wanted us . . . to work together . . . Andalites . . . didn't want that . . . I knew . . . we couldn't trust The Five . . ."
Don slumped on the ground, clutching her wound. There wasn't any sadness or fear of death on her face. Only anger. "Why couldn't you just give me what I wanted?"
That was the last thing she ever said. She looked away from me and up at the night sky. She died looking at the stars that were not flowers.
.
We moved the refugee ship back to its old hiding place. We turned off the engine.
We called Toby Hamee and told her everything we knew. She didn't cry or scream at us, she kept composed as always. I was grateful that she didn't blame what happened on us - at least, not out loud. We gave her the coordinates. She insisted we not touch the bodies. She and the other Hork-Bajir would come down to the place and handle it themselves.
We lingered inside the refugee ship for a bit.
Tom said, "I miss the Quantum Kindred."
Alison looked at him. "You miss the Quantum Kindred?"
"I miss winning," he said. "I miss when we actually stopped the bad guys."
"The city's safe," Tidwell pointed out. "The pool's safe."
"Is it though?" Tom asked.
The Venber device suddenly started beeping.
Before we could do anything about it, a transmission started. A hologram appeared inside the room. Pamaclees of Light looked at me. This time, she didn't seem smug like before.
"I saw some of what happened through Don's camera," Pamaclees said. She spoke without any energy. She sounded hollowed out, like the rest of us. "When I sent the message to the Andalite bandit's transmitter, I assumed there was only one or two of them. But six of them arrived at the meeting ground."
"Six?"
"Yes. I don't understand it either. But there were six of them. Most of them were morphed as Earth animals. A tiger. A gorilla. A bear. A wolf. Some type of bird. I heard the stories of what the Andalites did to The Five in the past, but they were so much worse than I realized."
"What happened?"
"I told them, we would use the Hork-Bajir to attack the human city. But they attacked the Hork-Bajir instead. They stopped my plan before it could even start . . . I thought I could control the Andalites. I thought that if I offered a way to hunt down their hated Yeerk enemies, they would agree to anything I told them. I didn't think they would care what happened to humans. I was wrong. So wrong . . . They didn't even say anything, you know that? They made no demands. Don and I had no chance to bribe them, or threaten them. They just fought and fought. They were completely beyond my control."
After a moment, Pamaclees said, "You'll be glad to know, The Five is going to stay away from Earth for a while. We're cutting our losses. And we need to reconsider how to approach Andalites in the future . . . You were right, Eva. This was a fight I should not have started."
And then she said, "But it's your problem now."
The hologram switched off.
A moment later, sparks came out of the Venber device. Then the casing broke open. All the lights and sounds died down, and something liquid oozed out of the self-destructed machine.
.
Edriss and I were in a daze for most of the next day.
Tom was right about missing the feeling of winning. The pool was secure. Life went on in the human city like normal. But nothing felt victorious about last night.
We had thought there were three Andalites at most hiding on Earth. Now we knew there were six.
Where did they come from?
I finished work. I lay down on the sofa in my small apartment.
My head was swimming. My thoughts kept drifting to Alison and Melissa. And to Ket and Toby.
Poor, brave, selfless Ket Halpak never got to say goodbye to her daughter before she died.
I wasn't sure what the right thing to do was, but I knew what I wanted to do.
I called my son.
"Marco," I spoke into the telephone, "I'm sorry about cancelling our weekend together again." As if mere words would let him know how honest I felt.
As Marco got older, his words got better at masking his feelings. But he didn't sound upset. "It's okay. I was pretty busy with other stuff anyway."
"Are you busy with your friends again tonight?"
"Why?" he asked.
"I thought, as long as your dad's fine with it, you and I could go out to a movie tonight. If you want."
"Yes," Marco said immediately. Then he tried to salvage his coolness with, "I-I mean, okay, I guess." So he wasn't quite flawless at hiding his feelings. "What movie?"
"I dunno," I said with a smile. "Something funny."
This wasn't out of guilt or fear I was a bad mother. I was seeing him because I honestly missed him.
In these trying times, I would hold on to little bits of happiness wherever I could.