Jake
"Jake! Phone for you," Tom yelled.
I suppressed the urge to wince. Honestly, these days I barely felt it. Marco said we had the best poker faces in school.
I went into the living room and took the phone from my older brother. He gave me the thumbs up.
"Sounds like you're becoming quite the player," he remarked. "First Cassie, now this girl."
Then he walked away.
Bastard Yeerk.
I couldn't follow him to correct him or his remark with a scathing comment since the phone was in my hands now. It wasn't as if Cassie and I weren't in a relationship, kinda. I didn't have friends with anyone anymore. So who was calling if it wasn't one of "us?"
I put the phone to my ear. "Hello? This is Jake."
"Listen, human, and say very little. Or a lot of things can go wrong for you and your friends. Speak, and say hello Alex, if you understand."
"Hi Alex." I replied.
Inside I was dead.
In the months since Prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul – just because we couldn't say it properly with our human tongue didn't mean I didn't know how to think it – all of us had learned a great deal. Not just about PTSD. With not a quite few insignificant breaking and entering practices into the library and with Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill help from what he knew of his own military training we'd learned quite a bit about combat and how to deal with the "issues."
Like the morphing technique that had become second nature to us all, I slipped into a meditative mind to control my reactions, deaden my emotions to think logically. My fear was controlled. My heart did not speed up, nor did excess adrenalin feed the need for fight or flight and make my muscles twitch and my hands sweat as it had done in the first few months of our secret war. I simply accepted the fact that yet another alien knew of us. Internalized it, started planning on how to deal with it, how my comrades and I might respond to this new situation as we'd planned for when things went bad.
On the outside I was the same old Jake everybody knew.
"Wow, you're a good actor. My voice-stress analyzer hardly twitched, and your facial expression is the perfect image of a happy teenager." It said, for now I could detect the faint voice modulations of a computer's voice. It was probably intentional. "So, don't worry about this conversation. I'm tapping into your house's phone directly and using encryption, tech not even the Andalites know about. Not even your brother in the next room can hear us. I want you to talk to the others. Meet up at the barn at Cassie's place late tonight. One o'clock. Bring the cube. Also Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill and his new girlfriend. The Andalites aren't here to save you, I am. But I don't work for free. I want that alien tech, Jake. Not to keep it, but I do want to study the heck out of it and replicate it for my own use. That's my payment. Do that for me, help me help you, I can get rid of the Yeerks in a week."
I nearly dropped the phone.
It was everything we'd ever wanted. But . . .
I quickly darted my eyes over to the kitchen where my brother was listening in. I put my hand over the phone and whispered anyway, "How can I trust you?"
"You can't," the voice on the other side said. "Talk to your Chee friends. We've met. They have some very thick files on you guys. Wrote papers and everything. Personally, I think it's a great accomplishment that you kids could do all that and give yourselves a name. The Animorphs is a good name."
My mind crashed.
Like literally. I stopped breathing too.
If this guy somehow got access to the Chee, he would know everything about us, the Yeerks and the Earth. We were never sure exactly how much they knew but it was probably more than all the information written down in all of our books.
We were screwed.
"How?" I asked, dreading the answer.
"The Ellimist sent me. And let me say, the Yeerks aren't the biggest boys on the block. Be there Jake."
If the Ellimist was involved nothing was as it seemed. on the other hand he said he was going to help. He could be lying. But what if it were true? Could it finally be happening? After all this time?
I took that little smidgen of hope and locked it away in a box.
I said the words in something less than a daze. "Okay." I was committed now.
"Your brother will be free of his parasite in less than a day. See you soon."
Click.
My heart was thudding so fast, I could hardly breathe.
Damnit.
-000-
Boy, that kid was under a lot of stress. Dude was going to have heart problems.
As soon as the kid left the house Jake's brother Tom also disappeared, thanks to a little Smoots Drive teleportation. In his place I put one of my Transformers bots, who did the Zeta Project thing and took his place inside the kids house.
The cage he appeared inside of was a nice steel box with a pot and a cot. And a light bulb. The bed was nice. But I'd obeyed strict rules from the masters who kept disobedient prisoners of war from dying on them.
He yelled a lot.
I ignored him otherwise, focusing on what my scanners were telling me.
It's a good thing I already knew that Crayak and the Ellimist liked to dabble with the creation of sentient organisms, otherwise I would call shenanigans on the Yeerks for breaking the laws of biology and issue them a ticket.
Bullshit parasites!
I mean, they were in a complete liquid state all mixed up inside of the brain of this here human! There was no prior medical art to guide my hand to get the bugger out. I could use the Smoots drive to start removing the alien invader's body one cell at a time, but that would take too long. This wasn't like what I was doing with mining. This was a living being here, which was a dynamic process that required all kinds of things to keep doing that living thing organics need. If I went fast enough to get the creature out it would happen fast enough to cause a little implosion. If I went slow enough to avoid that the animal would realize it was under attack and it might do something stupid, like scramble a few neurons and . . . . well, best avoid that all together, right?
There was a creature on the Yeerk homeworld that preyed on them by sucking the parasites out of the head directly, but it didn't seem as if the Gedd hosts survived the process.
There were about five thousand Yeerks on this planet occupying involuntary bodies around the clock. Another thousand of them were human volunteers who joined for a variety of reasons. Another five hundred were put into animal bodies because the Animorphs had shown the Yeerks it was a good idea. Mostly guard dogs, a few apes and monkeys, some tigers, horses, sharks, and a few of the larger birds too. There was a pack of wolves that circulated around Visser 3's feeding grounds that were also under Yeerk control.
The Pool a mile under the town's lowest basement had about 10,000+ Yeerks in it. As far as I could tell the only reason they hadn't yet given everyone an ear exam at the doctors was because they were all young. They'd been born into those pools.
Oh, how do the Yeerks reproduce you ask?
Simple. When a Yeerk becomes old it dies. When it reproduces it merges with other Yeerks and then breaks apart into a bunch of new Yeerks. In essence, death and birth and reproduction is the same thing for a Yeerk. So they try to avoid that as much as possible to live as long as possible. Which means staying in hosts and avoiding others of their kind when they weren't. For population growth the Yeerks on earth use artificial pools and feed them chemicals that allow them to grow fast, merge and then break up into dozens of baby Yeerks ready to be educated for perpetuation of the new empire. Easy as breeding frogs and mice.
I could see it all now.
Give the young ones a decent education. Then one by one give them a "taste" of what it's like to have a body. A fifteen minute experience never to be repeated until you were deemed "worthy." Then the young ones go back into the pool, completely different creatures in terms of motivation. Only the most willful and educated and ruthless will be selected. Only of the right "type" to be useful for the enslavement of an entire race. The useless returned to the breeding pools to try again.
Then when they were ready it'll be just like the Faculty in the movie. Start out with some kids, teenagers, kindergarteners. Give them a few Yeerks to take home with them when school's over. When everyone's asleep, "BAM!" and the next day it's a quick phone call to headquarters for new orders.
People unconscious at the hospital: a nurse Controller could probably hit up 200 people in a night.
Ambulance driver, one new customer per response.
Policeman asks you to get out of the car, drops you down onto the asphalt, then his partner opens up his extra thermos and you walk away without a ticket while calling your girlfriend over for a little get together.
Like I said before: a most efficient alien invasion.
While I was busy with Tom and a few other projects in preparation for Slug-stomping Day a part of me watched as Cassie, Rachel and Marko left their houses and got lost. With a professionalism and a slight of hand you usually only imagine in dime store novels they slipped out of sight long enough to morph and disappear.
I saw Marko go to the dump and hunker down between some junk and morph into a fly. Even with my tech once he joined with the crowd I couldn't distinguish him from the other 324,053,971 insects floating around the place.
The readings I got from that were very interesting.
Rachel went into a woman's bathroom where my drone couldn't follow without bumping into something or someone. Fortunately, thanks to a an artifact the Chee were keeping on ice, my new drones had something like X-RAY vision. My new Pemalite-upgraded Ball-Scouts observed as she came out as someone else with a complete change of clothes. I followed her to the mall. Then I lost her when she went into a back room behind a doctors office where the lead lining for the X-ray machine blocked my scans.
Smart girl.
Cassie turned into a falcon, went into the woods, de-morphed at a river, became a fish, and went out to sea.
I don't know where Tobias was, nor did I know where Ax the alien was. I assumed that Estrid-Corill-Darrath was with him. The Chee knew her ship hadn't taken off yet. Yet when I looked for it I couldn't find the damn thing.
Probably hidden in a cave somewhere unpowered.
No doubt Ax and Estrid were about to join Jake and tell him and the other Animorphs about the Chee's ship theft and it was all going to be coming to a head. I needed the tech in that ship to complete my knowledge of Andalite technology and develop countermeasures to their bioweapons. Also to find their homeworld so I can steal/copy their stuff.
I didn't consider figuring out how to defeat the Yeerks a War.
War involved two mostly equal groups battling it out with each other. Like chess. This was more like pest control. Once you understand the nature of the thing you can put together a plan to destroy it. If all goes well not a single human being should die because of my effort. That was the goal I was going for.
I have the best plan ever!
First step: annoy Visser 3. . . .
-000-
Danny Carmichael hated his life.
Or his current circumstances. Whatever. He hated the Yeerks more.
It was a burning pashon in his gut that would have rivaled his greatest ulcer if the Yeerk bastard hadn't been controlling his body.
Not even when he'd been in the trenches in Vietnam had he ever hated anything more in his life than he hated the Yeerks. If given the choice he'd take a yellow Commi and kiss him on the face and march to German's tune crying "Hail Hitler!" if it meant getting the evil alien parasite out of his head. Better to live and die under the yolk of a human tyrant than as a meat puppet.
The Yeerk in his head let them lean back from the computer screen even as he attempted to snort and grin at what was on it. He and Zeerze 1253 had been together long enough that he could sense when the Yeerk was emotional, it was as amused as he was.
Fortunately their face was that of an expert poker player.
It was also terrified.
Not him of course. If it meant suicide or time in the hospital that meant more time away from his controlling bastard Yeerk.
The Yeerk raised his hand to signal their supervisor.
Brian Yante marched over to their work desk with a pompous gait that bellied his thin frame, swinging his cybernetic arm.
Poor bastard had been brought in off the streets. Drugged out of his mind on who knows what, the hard detox under alien care cracked his mind like a rotten egg. The gimp arm had been replaced as part of a series of experiments to make better hosts. Meanwhile one Danny Carmichael, retired veteran and the victim of an uncaring system for the elderly, was passed around from Yeerk host to Yeerk host to increase the Yeerk's knowledge of combat in the field and give the younger generations of alien invaders practice. In the cages he and his fellow inmates talked. It was the only freedom they had now.
Now he was just one hand of a team of IT professionals maintaining their human corporations and stocks in business. Buying toilet paper, renting vehicles, shipping chemicals, maintaining the computers and website to The Sharing. Routine crap.
On the one hand their alien medicine was literally lightyears ahead of anything earth had to offer. With good treatment and care he could look forwards to another fifty years in good health without any pain at all. He'd give it up in a second if it meant he could go back in time to prevent his family from becoming more Controllers. Ungrateful bastards that they were for taking him away from his home on the edge of town and putting with those old farting bastards and making him another victim of a secret war.
On the other hand he'd probably live long enough to see the human race fall. That is if the Andalite Bandits didn't stop them. Maybe he'll get lucky in one of their guerilla strikes and they'll take his head off.
"What is it?" Yeerk Zigger 2543 demanded through Brian Yante's mouth as it rested the cybernetic hand on his shoulder and leaned forwards.
The hand nearly crushed his right side.
The Yeerk in his head answered, "Someone has altered the Sharing Website. There is a new icon, and I cannot seem to remove it. It is also playing a song every time I bring up the website, I can't seem to get rid of that either."
"Show me."
Danny refreshed the page and The Song started over again.
It was pretty funny actually. If they ever got out from under the Yeerk's control and the earth became aware of the threat it would probably become the new rally song of the next generation.
Right in the corner of the Sharing Website was an icon that looked like a slug with big cartoon eyes. Every time you clicked on it you got another comment.
Zigger 2543 clicked on the link.
A short video appeared of a number of animals, rodents mostly, feasting on slugs.
Zigger 2543 clicked on the link again.
"Vissor 3 says to human: Surrender or be destroyed! Human stops fighting and thinks about it: Okay, but what do you have to offer? I'd like a convertible, my own island, a starship would be nice too . . . "
Zigger 2543 clicks on the link again.
… To reveal a recipe for escargot.
Zigger 2543 clicks on the link again.
"Vissor 3 hangs out with Helmacrons."
Zigger 2543 clicks on the link again.
Another video, this time of Blue Aliens, with a caption underneath saying, "After the skunk incident with the tomato paste, Visser 3 needed this movie to get back into the groove of things."
Zigger 2543 clicks on the link again.
"Purple is soo your color."
-000-
Watching from the background of one of the side rooms of the Yeerk pool as Visser 3 reflectively, almost without thought, take the head off one of the Gedd aliens as it reads my long list of insults, is not as satisfying as I thought it would be. Visser 3 didn't even seem to be angry, more's the pity. He'd killed the Gedd with his tailblade with no more thought than a man would slam his hand onto a table and say "Damn it."
True, the Gedd was almost mindless. But it was still a death I regretted.
A Taxxon came over a moment later. Giant cannibalistic centipedes with a dozen eyes surrounding a mouth that was just lined with teeth. It made quick work of the body. Only the quick actions of a human on janitorial duty saved the head and got it out of the room before the Taxxon could come after him. The Yeerk crawled out of the alien's head into the man's hand as he ran away with the Taxxon in hot pursuit. He threw the head behind him, which bounced and was chased after by the Taxxon like a soccer player or football star. Another Taxxon saw the bouncing ball of meat and bone and intercepted it, the two aliens fighting over the last morsel. The human threw the Yeerk into the pool as it ran for the break room and barricaded himself behind the armored door.
The man's friends quickly disposed of the blood soaked clothes and got him washed and changed. Then his comrades went back to mop up the blood stain while the head-catching janitor had a shot of scotch.
I don't know what to say about that.
Going back to my starship design I can't help but think I'm missing something. But what? I've got the guns, the bombs, the missiles, lots of creature comforts, navigation computer, food, sensors, engineering, different types of factories for the manufacturing of T1 T2 and T3 stuff. The only thing I didn't really have was a teleporter and I came close to that with the Smoots Drive installed on a wheel-less transporter vehicle.
Oh, a name.
I need a name.
I look up a bunch of names, but nothing really seems to fit.
I felt the need for something French.
OH! I know!
I'll call thee, "Appetizer."
Yeah, that'll do.
Viva la resistance!