The Extreme Read online

  Once in a while, I caught a vague, alien scent.

  The Venber were still tracking us. But as long as we were hidden underground, their echolocation would fail to find us.

  "Say, Ax," I said some time in the middle of the night. "You sleeping?"

  "No, Marco," he replied from somewhere on my chest. He and Tobias had moved after Jake began complaining of some suspicious itchiness.

  "What's the deal with these Venber?" I asked.

  "Every Andalite knows the story of the Venber," Ax began. "In fact, the story of the Venber has much to do with the modern Andalite policies and methods of interstellar interactions."

  "Tell us the story, Ax," Jake said. "Obviously, none of us can sleep. And we have to demorph soon, anyway. So what do you know about the Venber?"

  88 "Just what everyone knows," he said. "I mean, what any Andalite knows. They were a primitive species with a highly unusual physiology. Unique, actually. They do not seem to have required radiant energy of any kind. Obviously they are not carbon-based."

  "Obviously," I mocked.

  "They were discovered back toward the dawn of Andalite space travel. Not by us, by some other race. The Five."

  "The five what?" Cassie asked.

  "No one knows. They just called themselves The Five. No doubt it meant something to them."

  "Maybe they lived between The Four and The Six," I suggested.

  "Anyway, The Five discovered the Venber and began to trap and export them."

  "Say what?"

  "They basically harvested the Venber. It seems that a Venber melts, burns, in any case becomes liquid at temperatures above freezing. And the resulting liquid has many uses. Particularly in the creation of superconductors for the primitive computers of that era."

  "But... But these are sentient creatures, aren't they?" Cassie asked.

  "Yes," Ax said simply. "They were. The Five extinguished them. They annihilated a sentient

  89 species to speed their computers. The Venber disappeared."

  "That's sickening," Cassie said. "That's just evil."

  "Yes," Ax agreed. "But if it is any comfort, The Five are no longer in existence, either. Soon after we encountered them for the first time they... well, no one knows for certain what happened to The Five. But Andalites in that era are not the Andalites of today."

  There was a long silence after that. You couldn't say there was a chill in the air since it was already freezing. But our already low spirits had been plowed under.

  "Good bedtime story, Ax," I joked. "If you ever have kids, they're going to need night-lights. Just one big question: If the Venber are extinct, why are they trying to kill us?"

  "I can only speculate. I suspect that because of temperatures on Venbea, the Yeerks were able to retrieve some intact genetic material from Venber corpses."

  "So they regrew them?"

  "Probably they coupled the Venber DNA with some other species. These would be a hybrid: part Venber, part something else."

  "What else?" Cassie asked.

  Ax hesitated. "You would want to use a species with the most complex DNA structure

  90 available. It would make it easier to attach new DNA."

  "And what creature would that be?" Tobias asked.

  "Of the species available to the Yeerks?" Ax said. "Humans. Those Venber may be a hybrid of Venber... and humans."

  After that we fell silent and stayed that way. We curled up against one another, four wolves and a pair of fleas, deep in a hole in the snow, lost in a frozen wilderness, thinking of faraway tragedies on dark, frozen moons.

  I'd have traded my left lung for a fire.

  91 Throughout the long, long night we demorphed and remorphed one at a time, time and again. We were so much more than exhausted.

  Ax and Tobias started freaking out after a while. It was amazing they lasted as long as they did in flea morph. They demorphed and stayed for a while in their own forms, huddling between the four of us, regaining a sense of the reality they'd lost as nearly blind, bloodsucking fleas.

  It was not a good night. It did not pass easily. I was cold, scared, hungry, cold, hungry, and also cold. We were without a plan. Without a clue. As lost as it was possible to be. And more tired than I would have thought possible.

  92 Morphing was probably the only reason we survived that night. After about an hour, the cold became so severe we thought we were going to die. The morphing process would bring us back to full health so we could start freezing to death all over again.

  Many hours and many morphs later, the sun began to creep through the hole of our lair.

  I am not known as a morning person, but I was the first to crawl out and take a look. The temperature had risen. It was probably a balmy thirty below.

  I sniffed the air and caught the scent of the Venber. "Those guys just do not give up!" I complained.

  I smelled something else, too. Very close. Out on the ice a half mile away.

  The polar bear. It took me a while to find him. I couldn't see his black nose or eyes. When I finally did spot him, I realized why his eyes and nose weren't visible.

  "Hey, guys, check this out," I said. Jake, Rachel, and Cassie crawled out of the hole and stood beside me at the lookout post. Jake was carrying Ax and Tobias again. They'd promised not to bite.

  "I smell polar bear," Cassie said. "But I can't see him."

  93 "Try a little to your right," I said. Like this helped. The horizon was nothing but a vast sheet of white paper, with a dark edge where the water began.

  "Oh, I see him," Rachel said. "What's he doing?"

  Our pal had his entire head stuck in the ice, ostrich-style. He was a giant set of four pillarlike legs with no head.

  "He must be seal hunting," Cassie said.

  We sat and watched him. The predator part of my brain was riveted.

  We hadn't eaten anything for almost twenty-four hours. The extreme cold was sapping our energy badly. If we didn't get something to eat soon, we'd die. And the nearest Taco Bell was probably a thousand miles away.

  The polar bear pulled his head out of the water, shook it, and lumbered further out on the ice. Finally, when he was about twenty yards from the water's edge, he dropped onto his stomach and slithered along a few feet at a time.

  The polar bear stopped. He'd found something.

  Suddenly he raised one of his giant paws and slammed it through the ice. I heard a desperate squealing and saw a pair of gray shapes scurry out of the hole his paw had made. The shapes

  94 scurried off and jumped back into the water a few yards away. The bear kept his paw in the hole, reaching around for the seal he'd trapped.

  Then he stuck his head through the hole. He stood up on his powerful legs. He raised his head. The seal was in his jaws. But the seal was too fat to fit through the hole.

  He pulled it out anyway. The process made for instant, shredded seal.

  "Oh my god!" Cassie cried.

  "Geez," Rachel said.

  "I could have lived without seeing that," I muttered.

  "What happened?" Tobias asked. "What did he do?"

  We watched him eat. He sat upright on his fat white hinder, holding the big seal in both paws. He bit off huge chunks and gulped them down. Once he put down the seal carcass, scooped some snow off the ice, and used it to wash the blood off his face and paws.

  It was disgusting. Even worse than some of the stuff you see in the school cafeteria. But I watched it greedily. I hoped he would leave us at least enough for a small meal.

  "I think we have a situation here," Jake said quietly. Calmly. His wolf tongue licked his wolf lips.

  95 "Yeah," Rachel said warily. "We have to eat, don't we?"

  "We haven't eaten anything for at least a day," I added.

  I looked over at Cassie. She had to be freaked by what none of us had the nerve to suggest we were suggesting. I mean, I was freaked by what we were not suggesting. But unlike Cassie, I wasn't willing to let my moral sense live while the rest of me died of starv
ation.

  "Cassie?" Rachel said.

  "What?" she replied, a hint of anger in her voice.

  "What should we do?"

  "Why are you asking me?"

  I said, "We're not equipped to hunt in this environment, in these morphs. We're freezing. If we don't eat soon we'll be too weak to plan our next move, let alone finish what we came here to do. Destroy that satellite station."

  I know this sounds weird, but I'd kind of forgotten that we had a goal. All I'd been thinking about was staying warm and fed. And alive.

  "But you're waiting for me to give my approval? Is that it?" she said.

  "Look," I began again. If I had to be the jerk in this situation, that was fine. I was used to it. I was usually the first one to state the obvious, no

  96 matter how ugly it was. Just call me Mr. Ruthless. "In case you haven't noticed, there doesn't see m to be a Mickey D's around here."

  "I noticed that," Cassie said, a little annoyed. "It's obvious what we have to do. And not just to the bear's leftovers, but to any live seal we can find. What I don't understand is why you're asking me for permission. Do you guys think I'd put an animal's life over yours? Or mine, come to think of it?"

  "I don't know," I started to say.

  "You don't know? When did you start thinking I was some kind of fanatic? We're freezing, we're starving, and I'm going to go all tree-hugging, never-eat-anything-with-a-face on you?"

  "Well, I can never tell what you'll think," I whined, taken aback and feeling like I'd insulted Cassie.

  "Here's a clue. Don't kill a sentient creature except in absolute self-defense, try not to wipe out endangered species, and if you're going to raise animals for food, treat them as well as you possibly can. But when you're a wolf, a starving wolf wandering around the frozen Arctic, and you see a meal, eat it."

  Cassie is obviously not a morning person, either. This was grumpier than I'd ever seen her. Probably, despite her tough talk, she was not looking forward to eating cute seals for breakfast.

  97 Come to think of it, I wasn't, either.

  The two seals who'd escaped the bear were visible some distance off. We looked at them with the intensity of hungry wolves.

  "Nature isn't pretty," Tobias said, reassuring us. "It isn't supposed to be."

  "Yeah, survival of the fittest ..." Rachel muttered.

  "A good philosophy," Ax said mordantly, "unless it turns out that the Venber are fitter than we are."

  98 The bear eventually dropped the seal carcass, stood up on all fours, and lumbered away. When he was out of sight we walked to the bloodstained spot. Four wolves and two fleas.

  The body was about four feet long. The bear had left us plenty. In fact, it looked like he'd just ripped off the skin and chowed on the seal's blubber, leaving most of the meat for us. It was still steaming.

  We stood there over it, looking briefly at each other and then back to the body. None of us wanted to take that first bite.

  "Ax? Tobias? What about you guys?" Jake asked. They were both stuck on my skin somewhere.

  99 "Actually," Ax replied sheepishly, "I am not hungry."

  "Uh, me neither," Tobias mumbled.

  "What?" said Rachel. "How can't you be hungry?" Then: "Oh."

  "I apologize, Marco," Ax said. "The flea's instinct was quite strong."

  "It's okay," Cassie said. "It's no worse than what we're about to do."

  "Oh, yeah?" I said. "You can have them next, Cassie. You guys could've at least asked."

  "Let's just do this," Jake said abruptly.

  He stuck his snout into the carcass and tore off a stringy piece of the seal's flesh. We joined in after that, digging our sharp wolves' teeth into the already half-frozen body, tearing off chunks and gulping them.

  "Say, Ax," I said when I'd finished gorging. "Any idea where we are?"

  "Far north," he said.

  "Northern Canada, Alaska, Greenland," Rachel offered. "Iceland?"

  "It may not be the Iceland, but it's an ice land," Tobias said. "Past that, who cares?"

  "We've got company," Jake interrupted.

  A couple of Arctic foxes were sitting on the ice a hundred yards away. They were about two feet long, with thick coats of long white fur.

  100 "They'll just have to wait until we're done," Rachel said greedily.

  "Life's going pretty well, huh?" I said. "We're down to chewing seal bones. Not that I'm complaining. Any food is better than no food."

  "It could use salt," Cassie said.

  Coming from her, it was so unexpected we all burst out laughing.

  "Salt? It could use a charcoal grill, some barbecue sauce and fries on the side," Jake said. "And coffee. Hot coffee. I don't even drink coffee and I want some."

  Cassie stuck her nose in a drift and used the snow to wash the blood off her mouth. Then she rubbed her paws in the snow to wash them off, too.

  "Now what?" Cassie asked.

  "Yeah. Now what, Dad?" I asked Jake.

  He sighed. "So far we're just getting chased. You don't win by running away. But first things first. We need to acquire some cold-weather morphs. We're barely surviving right now. We need the power to go on offense."

  "What do you think the odds are that our pal the polar bear will let us acquire him?" I asked.

  Then my sensitive nose picked up the scent of seals, very close. Live seals. I spotted the two little gray balls floating in the water. They were the baby seals who'd escaped from the polar

  101 bear. Looking right at us with those big black eyes.

  They had faces like puppy dogs. Little heads with big eyes and whiskers. No ears. I usually like to reserve the word cute for myself exclusively, but there was really no other way to describe them.

  "They're looking for their mother," Cassie said.

  Their mother? Their mother was ...

  An unexpected wave of emotion swept over me. Dumb, I know, but for two years I thought my mom was dead. Not the same, though. Was it?

  Watching those little seals floating in the water, waiting for the mother who would never return, brought all the sadness back in a rush.

  I moved between them and the horrible carcass on the ice. It wasn't our doing, killing their mother. But we'd profited from it.

  "Our cold-weather morphs," Rachel said. "Right there."

  102 Jake came up with the plan. Cassie and I volunteered.

  The job wasn't that hard, actually. While still on the ice, Cassie and I demorphed and remorphed into dolphins. We had to move fast. Dolphins are relatively warm-water animals, with no fur or blubber to help them deal with that kind of killing cold.

  Then Jake and Rachel pushed us into the freezing water. I felt like one of those clowns you see on the news occasionally. You know - the ones who like to go swimming in the freezing winter ocean. In nothing but swimming trunks. The minute I hit the water I could feel my whole

  103 dolphin body, usually so full of energy and playfulness, go stiff and numb.

  The seal pups barely even tried to escape. In any case, it was a vain try. Seals are amazingly agile, but we had the speed and the size and the intensity.

  They dodged and weaved once or twice, but they were no match for us. I tried not to think about what that meant for their future. If they were no match for a couple of chilly dolphins, they'd be no match for the first killer whale or polar bear to come along.

  Cassie and I grabbed one in a perfectly executed, acrobatic maneuver. We came up swiftly behind him and each grabbed a flipper.

  The pup struggled, but this was a case of Great Dane versus Chihuahua. He did, however, manage to scratch me on the nose a few times with his tiny teeth. It drew blood. It hurt, and it felt good. I felt like I deserved it.

  After we'd gotten a good grip on him with our mouths, being careful not to hurt him, we pulled him back to the others. They'd started to demorph when they saw us coming back.

  We nosed the little seal up onto the ice. Up at the feet of a strange little collection of unlikely creatures:
two humans dressed for an August day, a red-tailed hawk shifting from talon to frozen talon on the ice, and Ax.

  104 Jake and Rachel grabbed the pup and held him between them. First one, then the other, acquired the pup's DNA. They held him still as Ax pressed his many-fingered hand into the wet fur. Tobias fluttered up and landed on Rachel's shoulder. A painful thing for Rachel, though by then she was too cold to feel the bite of the talons.

  The seal pup looked up, mystified but amused at the winged creature who gingerly touched him with his talon.

  Cassie and I propelled ourselves up out of the water and demorphed on the ice. Not a pleasant experience. My skin froze to the ice halfway between dolphin and human. I ended up leaving an inch of Marco behind.

  "Have I mentioned that it's cold?" I shivered, human once more. I touched the seal. Wet and firm and soft. Like touching a furry water balloon.

  "Sorry," I said, for no good reason.

  "Nothing we can do," Cassie said. She set the pup back down on the ice. He scooted to the water's edge and slid in, rejoining his - or her - brother or sister.

  "They might m-m-make it," Rachel chattered.

  But Cassie shook her head. For some reason she smiled sadly at Tobias. "No, they won't make it. But they'll feed some orca or polar bear, and you can't go all mushy over these guys without

  105 realizing that orca babies and polar bear babies have an equal right to live."

  "Still, if we could ..." Tobias said.

  They were remembering the skunk litter we'd once saved. Tobias had eaten one of the skunk kits. Then he'd helped Cassie keep the rest alive.

  "Nature, huh?" Rachel said.

  "Yeah. Nature," he replied. "Guess we better morph."

  "Or we could just stand here and freeze solid while discussing survival of the fittest," I said. I was hopping from bare foot to bare foot, trying not to let either freeze to the ice.

  Rachel gave me one of her patented, insolent smiles. "You in a hurry, Marco? Has it occurred to you yet that if those little guys are some killer whale's meat, we w-w-will be, too?"

  That had not occurred to me. Now it was occurring to me in vivid color with sound effects. "That's a happy thought, Rachel."