I was weakening.
It couldn’t be!
No, I begged. No, it couldn’t happen!
But the squid’s grip tightened, tightened, relentless, like a python, imprisoning my tail, paralyzing me.
CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK!
Whale clicks. But not from me!
The squid convulsed. I felt its spasm of pain. Its arms fell away from me.
I wanted to stay. I should have stayed.
If the squid killed Tobias …
No choice!
I went. I had no choice. The whale’s brain was screaming.
I rose fast, but still it was forever and forever.
The whale was weakening. Faltering. Its senses were cloudy, unsure. Confused.
Cassie’s voice. Close, so close.
Swim, I told myself, forcing my aching body to move. Swim!
This time I didn’t explode into the air. I rose, half-unconscious, too exhausted even to appreciate the air that was filling my lungs.
Another dolphin shot up alongside me.
Now, by the light of the stars and moon, I could see the squid’s huge, black eyes the size of hubcaps, the largest eyes on Earth, looking straight into mine.
It slapped me with a grasping whip tentacle.
I bit it off.
Thick, green blood gushed from the stump.
I clamped my powerful mouth down on several squid arms and held on. Tobias did the same.
Two against one. We had the squid outnumbered.
I kept the now-helpless squid on the surface as Jake, Cassie, Marco, Ax, and finally Tobias acquired it. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t exactly a party, as human and Andalite and hawk wallowed in the waves, pressing hands and talons against the rubbery creature.
Fortunately the squid responded normally to being acquired. It grew calm and peaceful.
I demorphed, shrinking from building size to human size. The demorph was a bit more normal than the morph. I shrank in proportion for most of it.
Then, at last, I was just a very out-of-place girl, up to my neck in cold saltwater stained with squid ink and blood. I treaded water to stay near the cephalopod’s big arrow head. I needed to touch the creature. I ended up swallowing about a gallon of inky seawater. I had to extend the acquiring phase to hold the squid still for Tobias.
Like I said. Not exactly a party.
When we were done I morphed back to whale to haul the squid away to a safe distance. Once released the poor squid took off, jetting down into the relative safety of the water beneath us.
“Well, this should be bleah” — Marco spit saltwater out of his mouth — “should be interesting.”
Ax said.
“Let’s just get it over with,” I said, having resumed my human form. “It’s a long, long way down. And we don’t have a lot of time.”
“Ax, they are everyone’s hours and everyone’s minutes,” Marco said. “My hours are your hours. This is Earth. A minute is a minute!”
“Tobias? Can you get us back to where you found the ship?” Jake asked.
Tobias was being held more or less up out of the water by Jake and Cassie. He was not a happy bird.
he said.
“Okay. Everyone morph. Let’s get this done.”
I have experienced many unusual morphs. I have been more different animals than most people ever see. I thought I was ready for anything.
But this was weird.
I focused my mind and felt the changes begin.
You don’t actually “feel” the things that happen during a morph. You sort of feel them from a distance. The way you might feel the dentist’s drill, even through the Novocain.
It’s not exactly pain. But not exactly normal, either.
I could hear a squishing sound coming from inside me, from my guts. And then I reached down and felt my stomach sinking inward.
My internal organs were slithering away to hang in Zero-space until I returned to claim them. I was being scooped out!
My arms and legs began to stretch. Out and out, farther and farther, absurdly, idiotically far. My arms formed the clubbed ends that marked them as tentacles. My legs were two of the eight normal arms.
Normal. Right.
Sploot! Sploot!
More arms were poking out of me, writhing out of my chest and back and sides, six new arms, like snakes crawling out through my flesh and growing as they emerged.
I had the horrific image of being an egg, hatching snakes. I was all writhing arms.
And now, all down the bizarrely extended arms, hundreds of saucer-sized, needle-toothed bumps, popped up like sores.
Flimp!
My head imploded. Just suddenly sagged, as my skull melted away. My eyes spread wide and the top of my head started growing out and out, like some cartoon of an out-of-control zit. And my insides seemed to percolate up into that head area.
My skin turned brown. It hung from me like a sweatshirt ten sizes too big. It was like wearing a cape. A cape of powerful muscle.
My eyes became huge, circular pools of darkness. I had sunk down into the water, maybe fifty, eighty feet, not counting my arms, which extended farther still. But I could still see. The squid’s eyes were as good as an owl’s at seeing in low light. Maybe better.
Then, as I slowly tested my arms, as the hundreds of suction cups tensed and released, I felt the squid mind rise up beneath my own.
Other squid! All around me.
And I was hungry.
So hungry.
Someone was turned away from me. Another giant squid, floating, arms extended like some vile flower. I saw the mantle.
My meat.
I drew in water and expelled it like a jet blowing exhaust.
I jetted forward! I drew my long arms up from the depths, coiling them and extending them toward my prey, moving them in what felt to the human part of me like slow motion.
The other squid was unaware!
Cassie? Was it Cassie?
Who cared? Cassie would feed my hunger just as well as —
She jerked at my touch. Her own arms whipped back toward me.
Cassie sniffed.
Easy to say. Almost impossible to do. People think diving is like taking an elevator down. But we were talking about three miles of water. Three miles of currents and crosscurrents. In darkness so total that after the first mile or so even the squid’s specially adapted eye could see nothing. Not to mention the fact that there was nothing to see!
There were two clocks ticking in our heads: a little over two hours till the nuclear vault opened and a paralyzed Chee was discovered.
And just two hours till we were trapped in morph.
And one major complication: If we demorphed, we’d be crushed, our bodies squeezed flat till the bones would stick out of us like pins in a pincushion, our heads popped like overripe cantaloupes.
Which meant there was a third clock: the point of no return. The point beyond which we’d no longer have time to get back to the surface. Beyond that point we either found the Pemalite ship or …
But Tobias was not finding the ship. The ship was huge. Maybe three hundred feet long, according to the Chee. But imagine that you know where a three-hundred-foot-long building is. Then you leave the building and walk three miles through darkness.
Now imagine finding your way back. Blindfolded.
We reached the ocean floor and Tobias led us this way and that. Back and forth, skimming like mushy torpedoes across dead desert wastes, our jets kicking up clouds of sand and tiny rocks and the decayed remains of everything that had ever died in the three miles of water above us.
Now and then, a flash of phosphorescence. And then, darkness again.
Tobias said.
It was impossible to tell distance in the blank, black sea, but yes, there were lights! A string of them, descending in a downhill line.
Marco made a snorting sound in our heads.
Ax said with cool understatement.
We hauled. Suck in water … blow it out … draw it in … blow it out …
We jetted along the ocean floor, heading for the place where the string of lights pointed. Were we closer? Were they? Impossible to say.
Then …
Not a human ship.
It was, as the Chee had said, about three hundred feet long. They had not told us what it looked like. But the faint green outline was strikingly clear: The Pemalite ship was shaped like a sort of clownish version of one of them. Like someone had done a cartoon of a Pemalite, exaggerating the vaguely canine head, making the slender hind legs stubby, the belly chubby.
It did. Kind of. Like a huge, prone, faint green Snoopy.
I looked up. The line of Yeerk ships was still above us. Maybe a mile. Maybe a hundred feet.
We jetted over. The outer hull access panel was clearly, conveniently lit.
A glowing yellow light flashed twice, to our eyes as blindingly bright as a flashbulb.
Jake drew back his long squid arm, and using just the tip, daintily punched the number six.
Immediately, the side of the ship slid open, exposing a decompression chamber big enough to accommodate six giant squid.
I glanced back as the decompression door began to close on a stew of giant tentacles and arms. The lights outside were larger now. Closer.
The entire ship began to brighten, like a lightbulb on a dimmer switch.
It illuminated the rock shelf. It illuminated a pair of hideous fish. And it illuminated the closest of what looked very much like eight Bug fighters.
The outer door shut.
An inner door began to open.
We were gently extruded through the door into the ship. The interior lights came up, slowly. And Erek was right. There was an environment waiting for us.
We were still swimming. Still in water. Sort of.
We were each suspended above the floor in a personal, floating bubble of water. Like a water blimp.
I jetted. The bubble moved. I reached a hand through the water bubble into the air beyond. I felt dryness. The bubble did not collapse.
Beyond the bubble was a world of magic.
Lush green-and-purple grass carpeted the floor, forming patterns: swirls, checkerboards, Picasso-like abstracts and Van Gogh flowers. Trees and bushes in Crayola colors grew in thickets and hushed groves. A sparkling river meandered through the center of the ship, cascading down into a gentle waterfall and a rippling lake below.
Everywhere there were inexplicable, brightly colored, gaily lit machines that could only be toys of some sort. Beside us, wafting through the air, were things like long, feathered snakes. Projected on the arched ceiling, far overhead, were patterns of clouds and skies like nothing on Earth.
After all the thousands of years, it was all still working. Only the dead silence lay as a grim reminder of a species lost.
We jetted, contained within our water balloons, and came to the tree. Sure enough, a series of fairly businesslike panels were fitted into the trunk
.
On one panel a red light blinked. Below it was a button.
Ax’s water bubble slowly pushed aside Marco’s.
A cheerful thought-speak voice sang out in our heads.
Ax punched in the number six.
Ax began communing with the control panel. It didn’t take long.
And then …
Ax admitted.
And then, quite suddenly, the black ocean was all around us.
The parklike world was all still there. But the projected sky was gone, replaced by ink water. The outer hull was now like glass. And through that glass I saw the line of Bug fighters. Eight. Lined up outside the decompression chamber.
We could see them.
They could see us.
Through transparent bulkheads, through the transparent hull, through the front viewport of the lead Bug fighter, I saw a hard, cold-eyed Andalite face.
An Andalite face. But the light of malice that shone through the two large eyes, through the twin stalk eyes, was not Andalite.
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