But mostly, I could smell. I could smell the water as I sucked it in, relentlessly sampling. And right now, I could smell blood.
I was aware of the others nearby. I knew they were sharks like me. But I didn’t care. I was on the trail of blood.
I followed the scent of the blood. No more than a few drops of blood, a thin, wispy trail diluted in billions of gallons of surging seawater, but I smelled it.
I followed the scent through the water. If the scent was stronger in my left nostril, I veered left. If it was stronger on my right, I veered right. It would lead me to prey. It would lead me to food. The blood trail had come from very close by! I could sense it, and a cold excitement seized me.
Blood! A wounded animal! Prey!
But as I turned and turned again, circling back toward more shallow water, I became frustrated. Where was it? Where was the bleeding creature? Where was my prey?
The others circled nearby. One of them brushed against me, sandpaper on sandpaper. They were seeking it, too. The bleeding prey whose scent filled our heads.
Where was it?
The shark brain was confused, uncertain. And in that moment of confusion and uncertainty, the steel mind of the shark left a slight crack. Enough of a crack. Enough for my human brain to call up the picture of a human hand, bleeding from a small cut.
My hand! My hand. The human named Marco.
The others didn’t care. They continued to turn in ever tighter circles, looking, searching, marauding for the source of the blood.
It took a few minutes before we were all back to being ourselves. Tobias dealt with it easiest. I guess that’s not a surprise. He’s a predator normally. Maybe the shark mind and the hawk mind aren’t so different.
Ax handled it well, too. Not that Andalites are sharklike. It was mostly that he’d morphed a shark already.
We were a little shaken up. We’d gotten cocky about being able to control animal morphs. But the shark was different. I think at some level, at the most basic survival level, that primitive shark brain was actually superior to our own human brain.
It knew what it wanted. And there is a terrible strength in knowing what you want and having no doubts.
We swam around the island, back toward the holographically concealed underwater facility. This time we expected to be able to pass right by the supersharks who had almost taken us out when we’d been in dolphin morph.
We swam right through what looked exactly like seabed, right up to the facility. With dead shark eyes I stared through the portholes. The one that opened onto a busy cubicle area. And the other one. The one that looked into a more private room.
The guard sharks swam right past and around us, never paying the slightest attention.
This was the point where I’d normally make a joke. But just then I saw a woman entering the private office. She was distorted by the convex glass, by the water, and by my own water-oriented shark’s eyes.
But I knew her.
And I forgot to find something funny to say.
We swam toward the middle door. From a distance it was big. Up close it was even bigger. It was obviously big enough for the submarine to enter through.
From the outside the tunnel inside looked dark, but once away from the filtered green sunlight from above, we could see that there were lights on inside the tunnel.
We swam around, taking our time and trying to look casual. The open door and short tunnel led to a rectangular pool. A boat dock, obviously. Probably used by the submarine. There were other hammerheads there, too. But still they ignored us.
I rose to the surface, letting my dorsal finslice its way into the air. I rolled to one side, and raised my left eye above the water. Shark eyes are not made for seeing through atmosphere, but I could still see well enough. I saw a wall of corrugated steel that formed the rectangular boat dock we were in. But other than that I could only look straight up at the rafters overhead.
I said.
Scr-EET! Scr-EET! Scr-EET!
Suddenly a rush of hammerheads was coming straight for us. I saw them first as dark shadows in the water. They loomed larger and larger. We turned to face them. But it was impossible. There had to be fifty of them!
On they came, whipping the water with their long tails.
Then … they swam past. They kept swimming for the far end of the dock. And now we could distinctly hear the sound of a mechanized door opening.
WHRRREEEEEEE!
We went after the sharks. We followed them to the far end of the dock. A new door had opened. There was actually a line of sharks waiting to get in. The pathway narrowed till soon we were single file.
Cassie said.
Suddenly I heard Cassie yell,
She was right in front of me. And before I could react, I knew why she had yelled. Steel claws reached out from each side and grabbed me just behind my hammer head. The claws held me tightly, but not painfully. I was drawn upward till I was vertical. I was out of the water. My gills gasped in the air. My body writhed in panic.
I saw a line of us. A conveyor belt of hammerhead sharks, all hanging vertically. There were human-Controllers and Hork-Bajir manning equipment boards and looking totally uninterested.
We turned a corner into a second room and up rose a robot arm festooned wi
th tools whose purpose I couldn’t even guess. The robot arm arced toward the shark two spaces ahead of Cassie. From out of nowhere a long, thick needle appeared. It plunged into the back of the shark’s head.
But there was no time. The conveyor belt kept moving. Too fast!
The robot arm moved with machine precision. It plunged the needle into the back of Cassie’s head.
But what came next was not okay. The robot arm hesitated. It popped out a sort of metal detector or something and moved it over Cassie’s shark head. Then it extruded a drill.
Not like a dental drill. Like a drill you’d use to make holes in wood.
The drill bit spun and it plunged.
The drill bit withdrew. But a bright steel probe lanced into the hole. In it poked, then withdrew. A wisp of smoke curled away from the hole as it was cauterized by a green laser beam.
And then it was my turn. There was a sharp prick of pain, but sharks don’t care about pain.
The drill withdrew. And seconds later, I was dropped into saltwater. In fact, I quickly realized, I was back in the same boat dock I’d been in before. There were other hammerheads all around me. My friends were being dropped practically on top of me.
It hit me a few seconds later. How can I describe the pain? You know how I said sharks don’t care about pain? Well, this wasn’t any pain that any shark had endured. I felt my brain exploding. Like some mad animal was trapped inside my head and trying to claw its way out.
I screamed.
And then, through the water, a sound reverberated. Like a WHOOO-WHOOO-WHOOO.
The pain stopped. In its place came a wave of pleasure. It was like the taste of prey in my shark mouth: the ultimate shark pleasure.
Then, the weirdest thing … I felt the shark mind, that simple killing-machine mind, seem to open up. The shark mind looked out through its eyes, and for the first time ever, noticed things that had nothing to do with finding prey.
The shark eyes noticed the pattern of the corrugated steel that formed the dock. The shark sense of smell took note of scents like oil and rust and seaweed that had nothing to do with killing and eating.
Cassie answered.
Ax said,
I said.
It was going to be hard and dangerous. We had to return to human form. Then morph again. All in the water. Without being seen, or drowning.
I was relieved to be getting out of the shark morph. I hated sharks, I’d decided. I didn’t want to be one anymore. Let alone a sort of super, self-aware, thinking shark.
I was happy when my legs reappeared. When my fins became hands, when my teeth ground and itched away and became the tiny, blunt, pitifully weak human teeth.
But I knew I’d never hold my breath clear into a new morph. I poked my head above the surface and looked around with human eyes for the first time. The others popped up nearby. Tobias looked like a drowned rat. He stood on Rachel’s head.
There was a dark ceiling high overhead. And I could hear machinery. But I saw no humans or Hork-Bajir or Taxxons standing around the dock. Maybe they were all busy back in that office room we’d seen through the portholes.
“Looks kind of empty,” I whispered to Jake.
“Yeah. We’d better be careful, though. Morph here in the water. It won’t be any problem for the fly, I don’t think.”
He was right. The water didn’t bother the fly morph. Something else did.
I focused on the fly DNA within me, and I began to shrink. I had done the fly morph several times before, so I was prepared for the way the spiky legs grew out of my chest. The way all my internal organs melted away, replaced by simpler insect organs. The way my mouth and nose sprouted out to become a horrible, long proboscis.
I was in the water, breathing air from a bubble, when it began. I realized my head was exploding. And that was not just an expression.
I stared around me with eyes more fly than human. The watery world was a shattered mirror of images. The fly’s compound eyes saw with a thousand tiny, irregular, bewildering TV sets, each tuned to a slightly different channel. And because we were underwater, I saw even less than usual.
But then, by luck, Rachel drifted near. Just within range.
Seeing a morph is always horrifying. I mean, we get used to it, but it never stops being creepy beyond belief. And nothing is creepier than watching a human being turn into a fly. Trust me, that is enough fuel to keep you in nightmares the rest of your life.
But what I had just seen, floating past me in the water, was worse.
I surfaced again, human once more. “I couldn’t tell. I just saw Rachel’s head being all twisted and bulging from trying to shrink with this thing inside it!”
“Some kind of control device,” Jake said. “I should have realized! That’s why we got drilled when the other sharks didn’t. We didn’t have the control device in our heads. The Yeerks are using it to control the sharks until all the treatments are done.”
“So what do we do?” I asked.
“We get these things out of our heads!” Rachel yelled. “If we have to stomp every Yeerk in this facility!”
“Oh, good, the subtle approach,” I sneered.
“Rachel may be right,” Jake said. “We can’t have this. Period. We cannot have Yeerk control devices in our heads. We’re underwater, with implants in our brains, and psychic Leeran aliens running around. This is seriously not cool.”
“There may be hundreds of Controllers here,” I pointed out. “We can’t just get crazy and get away with it.”
“No,” Jake agreed. “But we need a distraction. Two teams: one to get to the controls of this place. The other to, as Marco said, get crazy and keep the Yeerks busy. Ax, Marco, and Tobias in the first group. Rachel, Cassie, and me to cause a distraction.”
“Finally. We get to do something.”
That was Rachel, of course.
Me, Ax, and Tobias. We couldn’t morph anything small with the Yeerk control devices still implanted in our heads. Not bugs, anyway. So how we were supposed to go wandering around the underwater facility without being noticed?
“I think someone might notice a pair of wolves running around,” I said. “We need to go airborne. The bird heads are obviously big enough to allow for the control chips. After all, Tobias returned to his normal hawk body okay. Besides, people have a tendency not to look up.”
A few minutes later, I was in osprey morph. Ax was a northern harrier. Tobias was Tobias. And we were all wet.
A wet bird is not a happy bird, I can tell you that.
We flapped, unseen, up to the roof of the facility. It was made with open steel beams. You know: like the inside of a Toys “R” Us store. There was a slight curvature to the roof, probably to help carry the load of water pressure.
From up near the ceiling we could perch and look down at the entire facility. There were three identical dock slips like the one we’d been in. One housed the transparent sub. There was no one aboard but a couple of Taxxons doing maintenance work.
The Escape Page 7