The Underground Read online

  So I said, «Let's do it. That's what we came here for.»

  Sometimes it's hard to get out of a role once you've started playing the part.

  109 It was a vertical crack in solid rock. In places it was no more than eight inches wide. At its best it was a foot wide.

  With wing tips scraping the rock wall, we flew. Through a world seen only in echolocating sketches, we flew.

  «Cool! This is so Star Wars» I said, genuinely enjoying it. «Remember when they're attacking the Death Star and -»

  Suddenly, the crack plunged downward. Down ten feet and then -

  «Whoa ho!»

  We blew out into a world of light! I could see again. People think bats are. blind, but they're

  110 not. I could see a vast, open area lit with stadium lights down below us.

  We fluttered in a circle at the top of a dome. The crack we'd entered through was high up, almost at the very peak of the dome. And down below us was the Yeerk pool.

  «Well,» Jake said, «we found our way into the Yeerk pool.»

  «Yeah. Great,» Cassie said darkly. «Now what?»

  «Now we figure out how to get that oatmeal in here and feed it to a bunch of human-Controllers^ Tobias said.

  «You know . . . maybe we don't have to give it to human-Controllers,» Cassie said. «l don't know why it didn't occur to me before. But it's the Yeerk that can't resist the stuff, right? So why don't we dump it right in the Yeerk poo! itself?»

  «Would it work?» Tobias wondered. «l thought all Yeerks ate was Kandrona rays. Do they even have mouths?»

  «Yes,» Ax said. «Yeerks have mouths. Or what humans would think of as mouths. Actually, if I remember my exo-biology classes, and sadly, ! sometimes -»

  «Fell! asleep,» I said. «Yeah, we know. You didn't like exo-biology class.»

  «l didn't fall asleep,» Ax said, sounding injured. «i merely let my mind wander, and be-

  111 came very calm and restful and not completely alert.»

  «Did you snore when you got ail calm and restful and not completely alert?»

  «The point is, on occasion I would pay some attention in class. And I believe that Yeerks have something called osmosis nodes. It's what they use to absorb Kandrona rays, but they absorb other nutrients as well. They absorb from the liquid of the Yeerk pool.»

  «So if we dump enough instant maple and ginger oatmeal in this Yeerk pool, they should absorb it, right?» Jake asked.

  «Yes, Prince Jake. At least, I think so. Maybe.»

  «0h, good, I just love risking my life for a "maybe,"» Marco said.

  «Hey,» Tobias said. «l think we have company. Over there.»

  I looked around. I saw two shiny steel balls. Each was about the size of a beach ball. My echolocation confirmed their size. And they were moving toward us through the air.

  «Hunter robots!» Ax yelled. «We should leave!»

  «Why?» I asked.

  But at that very moment, I had my answer.

  TSEEEEEWWW! TSEEEEEWWW! TSEEEEEWWW!

  Three narrow Dracon beams fired from the

  112 balls. I felt a sharp pain in my right wing. I smelted something burning. And when I looked, I saw a neat, round hole the size of a quarter burned through the leather of my wing.

  «0kay, let's leave,» I said. I turned and headed for the crack, with all the others alongside me.

  TSEEEEEWWW! TSEEEEEWWW! TSEEEEEWWW!

  «Aaarrgghh!»

  Tobias! He was hit. He was falling, tumbling downward, down to the Yeerk pool below us. I had a weird flash of poor Mr. Edelman falling, and then down I went after Tobias.

  Bats aren't all that fast in flight. Fortunately, Tobias had a lot of experience flying. He managed to use his one good wing to slow his fall. I caught him and grabbed with my tiny but strong little bat feet. Ax and Jake were there in a flash and we flapped madly, hauling him upward.

  But the hunter robots were closing in on us.

  TSEEEEEWWW! TSEEEEEWWW! TSEEEEEWWW!

  «Aaahhh! I've been hit!» Ax yelled. His flying weakened. It was no longer even possible to get Tobias back up to the crack.

  «We're bats,» Tobias gasped. «l can hang.»

  I realized what he was telling me. If we could get him to the rocks, any rocks, he could latch on and hang. Not exactly a solution, but the only thing we could do.

  113 Down swooped Jake, just in time. He slammed into us deliberately, pushing us toward the sloping rock ceiling. Tobias scrabbled madly and managed to grab some rock with his feet.

  The hunter robots came on, almost leisurely. Maybe they had enough intelligence to realize that they had us cold.

  «Ax! Do those things have any weak points?» Marco yelled.

  Cassie and Marco had flown off through all this. I couldn't blame them. But I had wondered . . .

  «Visual aiming system,» Ax groaned. «A lens. Like a human camera lens.»

  «l see it,» Cassie yelled.

  BONK!

  BONK!

  My echolocation "saw" the tiny rocks go flying. They were like bombs dropped from dive-bombers. Cassie and Marco had each grabbed small rocks, dived toward the robots, and released them.

  One must have hit. One of the robots began to veer away like it was lost.

  But the other was just twenty feet away when it fired. I swept my good wing over Tobias, trying to shield him.

  TSEEEEEWWW! TSEEEEEWWW!

  114 The Dracon beam burned the wing off. Clear off. I had a stump of a bat arm. And I fell like a stone.

  Down, down, down through the damp air.

  Down to the Yeerk pool.

  115

  I fell.

  I saw Jake and Cassie come for me. But I knew. I knew they couldn't make it.

  «Back off, you idiots!» I screamed. And then I hit.

  SPUH-LOOSH!

  I landed on my back. It knocked the wind out of me. I gasped for air. But I was under the surface.

  I was in liquid the color of lead. But living, seething water. The Yeerks were everywhere! All around me.

  I bobbed to the surface. I tried to fire my echolocation, but the liquid kept rolling over me in sluggish little swells.

  I was in the Yeerk pool!

  116 That awful fact was like an explosion in my brain. They were everywhere! All around me! They would get me now. I couldn't escape. I flapped my single sodden wing, but all I managed to do was churn the water a little.

  I started to call out to my friends. But no. No. They would kill themselves trying to rescue me. No.

  Only . . . what if the Yeerks made me a Controller? I would betray all my friends. I wouldn't be able not to.

  They can only make you a Controller if you de-morph, I told myself. They can't do anything to a bat. Too small a brain for a Yeerk slug. Stay in morph.

  But then I began to notice something. The Yeerks didn't seem to be paying any attention to me. It was like they didn't even notice the presence of a floundering bat.

  Maybe they didn't.

  Those hunter robots weren't there specifically to kill us. They must have been programmed to attack any animal. The Yeerks were being careful. They knew we'd infiltrated the Yeerk pool before. So they had brought the Bio-scans to the entrances. And they had activated the hunter robots. But a lot of innocent animals must have been fried over time. Other bats had probably wandered in.

  117 So I was probably not the first animal to end up in the Yeerk pool with a Dracon beam wound.

  THUD.

  A Yeerk bumped into me.

  I froze. Nothing.

  SLOOOP.

  A Yeerk brushed against me. Nothing.

  It hit me then. «0h, man. They're blind. They can't see when they're in the pool. They can't see without using some host's eyes.»

  So how did they find their way back to their host when it was time? Smell? Sound? Some other sense?

  I looked up and saw the domed rock roof so high up above. I looked for my friends, but I couldn't see them. Maybe they were safe. Maybe n
ot.

  If they had been taken prisoner I had to save them. But I couldn't thought-speak. They'd probably assume I'd been badly injured. Or worse. If I called them, they might be destroyed trying to save me.

  What should I do?

  If the Yeerks couldn't see a bat, could they see a human? I could morph to shark and go rampaging through the pool, eating the vile slugs till one of the Controllers on shore saw my dorsal fin and burned me.

  There was a vaguely circular current in the pool.

  118 I was drifting around in a lazy semicircle. Coming closer and closer to that evil steel pier where they dragged the hosts and thrust their heads under the water to allow the Yeerks to re-enter.

  Under the pier! If I was going to demorph, that was the place.

  Closer, closer I drifted. Closer, and I could hear the shouts. The cries. The screams. The utter despair.

  "No! No! Let me go, you have no right! Let me go, I have children who -"

  The voice was cut off. The woman's head had been shoved brutally down under the surface. And seconds later, she stood up, perfectly calm. A Controller once more.

  I could see the pier clearly, although from a very low angle. Bored Hork-Bajir-Controllers dragged unwilling humans and unwilling Hork-Bajir to the end of the pier, kicked their legs out from under them, and thrust their heads into the pool.

  It was just a day's work for the Hork-Bajir. The threats and pleading meant nothing. They'd heard it all before. Hundreds of times. Thousands and thousands of times.

  The idea of morphing to a shark and laying waste through the Yeerk pool was starting to seem better and better. How I hated the foul slugs that surged and frolicked around me.

  119 But that would be a suicide mission. Maybe there was still some way to stay alive.

  The pier was coming closer. It was very low, just inches above the water surface.

  What should I do?

  Well, Rachel, I thought, you sure don't want to end your life as a one-winged bat.

  I began to demorph.

  There, floating amidst the enemy, i began to emerge back into human form.

  I was under the pier!

  I reached, hoping I had something like a hand. Rough, stubby fingers scraped along the steel underside of the pier.

  I thrust a face that was half-human and half-bat up into the three inches of air space.

  I could see up through the gaps in the steel planks. I saw Hork-Bajir feet and the short Hork-Bajir tail go by overhead.

  I saw human feet being dragged.

  "Please, no. Please, no. Please, no," the man whimpered.

  I was larger now, a lot larger, so more and more Yeerk slugs were banging into me or brushing past me.

  Oh, for my hammerhead shark's razor teeth.

  But that wasn't the way to survive.

  120 HE

  They human, I began to morph again.

  I needed to be right at the end of the pier for it to work. I was going to get very, very small. The distances had to be small, too.

  I was going to do the one morph I'd sworn never to do again.

  I shrank. As I shrank I pulled myself closer to the end of the pier. When my arms became useless, I paddled.

  I shrank and shrank till the low roof of the pier over my head seemed miles away.

  An extra set of legs extruded from my midriff.

  Antennae shot from my forehead.

  My body was severely squeezed into three segments. I was an hourglass with a head.

  121 My skin grew hard as fingernails. Just like a cockroach's exoskeleton. But I was not morphing a roach. ! was going much, much smaller. A cockroach would be visible. A cockroach would be an elephant compared to the animal I was becoming.

  ! was less than an inch long and still shrinking. Becoming the most terrifying animal I had ever become.

  I was becoming an ant.

  I fought my way continually to the surface. I couldn't afford to be trapped under the water. And soon, my natural buoyancy and small size kept me riding easily atop the swells.

  I took a last look around with my fading eyes. I knew what was coming. I knew I'd be almost blind. I needed to pick a direction and know where I was.

  A huge pillar, fifty times as big as a redwood, loomed up in front of me. Right in front of me.

  My eyes went off like someone had thrown a switch. I was nearly blind. More blind than a mole. All I could see were vague, distorted lines between dark and light. Shadows. But I knew where I was.

  My six ant legs splayed out. They pressed down on a rubbery surface - the water. It was like trying to walk on a trampoline. And my legs kept poking through the surface.

  122 But mostly I could do it. I could walk on the water. Or at least stand. Forward movement was very difficult.

  Fortunately, the water did that for me. A swell came along. I felt it well up beneath me, a vast, powerful wave that set me rocketing up and up on its crest.

  I was surfing the Yeerk pool.

  SPLUSH!

  The wave crashed against the pylon. A steel wall loomed up before me, nothing but darkness to my ant eyes. I grabbed. I set my tiny claws grabbing wildly, grabbing at anything solid.

  And then the water fell away.beneath me. I had grabbed the steel pylon! Tiny surface irregularities, the very grain of the metal itself, were all I needed.

  Up I raced. Up to escape the next swell.

  It splashed. I felt the vibrations as the water hit the pylon. Felt the air move as it was displaced by the tiny, but huge-to-me, upward surge.

  The top of the water swept my back feet, but I had four more legs firmly attached, and I powered them with all my human will.

  I felt the ant's mindless, machine instincts. They wouldn't be any trouble. I had morphed the ant before. I was prepared. Besides, the ant was

  123 far from anything familiar. Far from the world of smell it inhabited.

  Up I went, climbing and climbing. Always upward.

  Ahead of me I sensed warmth. Body warmth and the smells of a living thing. Some poor creature, human or Hork-Bajir, or some foul, vile Taxxon, was being reinfested.

  I raced forward, hanging upside down as I ran. Grabbing the encrustations and irregularities of the underside of the pier.

  Upside down, inches from the water, I ran and ran and didn't even slow down when I found myself no longer on steel but on fabric.

  Then, up and up! I felt myself flying upward at an insane speed. But still I clung to the ropes that were threads in a cotton shirt.

  The host had been reinfested. I was on a Controller. I was on his shirt, scuttling for cover beneath a damp collar.

  «Hah! Let's see the hunter robots find me here,» I said triumphantly.

  124 I was alive. I had escaped from the Yeerk pool itself!

  But I couldn't be elated. I didn't know what had happened to my friends. For all I knew, they had not made it.

  I was riding safe and secure, clutching to twisted cotton threads the size of bridge cables.

  «Cheap shirt,» I muttered to no one. I could feel the roughness of the fabric.

  Eventually, I was going to have to jump. Hopefully, the person I was on would go into one of the buildings. Hopefully, he was not going to head straight back out of the Yeerk pool to the outside world.

  125 I didn't want to leave the place. Not yet. I had to find out what had happened to the others.

  I felt a breeze blowing across me. I felt the fabric ripple. We were walking. How fast, how far? No way to know.

  Had the quality of the light changed? Impossible to say. I had to take a shot in the dark. Had to guess.

  I raced out from under the collar and headed uphill. I climbed up onto what I assumed was a shoulder.

  Could I do this? Could ants jump? Only one way to find out. I ran out to the end of the shoulder. I carefully released the grip of each of my six legs. One by one. Then I crouched and pushed off.

  I guess the movement of the person who'd been carrying me was enough to make it work. I didn'
t so much jump as I rolled off the edge.

  I fell! Forever. I swear it took me ten seconds to hit the ground, and in that time I tumbled, totally out of control, mostly blind. I had no way of knowing when I would hit. And even though I knew an animal as small as an ant wouldn't be hurt by the fall, it was frightening.

  POOMPF!

  i hit. I rolled onto my legs. Where was I? I felt around with my antennae. A smooth surface.

  126 Okay. Fine. I was on a floor. Where I could easily be stepped on. Great. Now to find someplace dark where I could demorph without being seen.

  I raced across the floor, totally unaware of where I might be. Then, darkness. But what did it mean? Was it a different room? Or had I just crawled under a cupboard or something?

  I ran on for a while, making sure that the space I was in was large enough. Then I began to demorph.

  It's a long, long way up from the ground going from ant to human. But my eyes didn't return till I was halfway demorphed. I looked around. Dark, but not the dark of the cave. There was dim, gray light here. It outlined sharp edges and right angles.

  A storeroom. There were boxes piled all around me. They seemed to be made of blue plastic. I leaned against one as I finished returning to my own body.

  Human again! I looked around. My eyes had had plenty of time to adjust to the gloom. There was writing on some of the boxes. But not any alphabet I'd ever seen.

  There was a square pad outlined in red, just an inch on each side. "Well, why not?" I muttered. I pressed the pad. Instantly the top of the box came loose with a sound like a vacuum seal

  127 breaking. It sounded like when someone opens a can of coffee.

  I looked inside. Then I smiled. I reached in and lifted out a hand-size Dracon beam.

  "Cool."

  The grip was weird. Designed for Hork-Bajir hands. But that was okay. Right by my thumb there was a slide. It went up and down. "Power settings," I decided. I had to use my middle finger to reach the trigger.

  Sudden light!

  A door opened. A Hork-Bajir warrior was framed there. He blinked once in the darkness.

  I. raised my hand and squeezed the trigger.

  TSEEEWWW!

  The Hork-Bajir dropped like a sack of dirty laundry.

  I stepped over to him. He was still breathing. I was breathing, too, in ragged gasps.