Shaking that off, Visser Thirty-two tried a more diplomatic approach.
Well done, Andalite. We have thirty seconds left to activate this thing.
Elfangor switched gears in half a second, knowing instinctively what the Visser meant to do.
Go ahead, Yeerk, Elfangor snarled. Make your move.
Visser Thirty-two's eyes narrowed into vicious slits, and Elfangor knew he had read him right. One swift slash from Alloran's tail, and Elfangor would have been dead, or close enough that it would make no difference. But now they both knew it, and neither one knew which of them would win such a confrontation.
How does one turn this thing on? Elfangor mused, looking it over closely. There's no visible instrumentation. It has to use a direct mind-link through a physical interface.
Loren was trying to say something but since Elfangor was not looking directly at her, it was impossible to know what that was. She was even worse off then she had been the last time he had seen her. Her lips had changed color, till they would have almost matched his fur.
Elfangor didn't know if that was good or bad, but Loren seemed to be in pain and so Elfangor decided that it had to be the latter. The only way to save Loren, though, was to use the Time Matrix. And that meant he would have to cooperate with Visser Thirty-two, and that meant that he would have to solve the mystery of the Time Matrix.
Finally, it hit him. If there were no visible control panels, then that would imply that the Matrix was made to respond to something simple. But what?
Out of nowhere, the answer came to him. Touch, he said, not knowing where the words had come from. The Matrix responds to touch. I think if we want to, we can form a mental link simply by establishing physical contact. That should allow us to program it.
Before Elfangor had even finished speaking, Visser Thirty-two had lunged forward. Elfangor tensed, but the Visser was not moving to attack, instead he pressed his hands against the smooth surface of the Time Matrix. His intent was to establish physical and mental contact before either Elfangor or the human Loren.
His destination: the Yeerk home planet. Both Loren and Elfangor would be easily taken there, surrounded by his brother and sister Yeerks. Elfangor saw this, fortunately for both himself and Loren, and quickly pressed his own hands against the other side of the Time Matrix.
As he concentrated, seeking a way to link his thoughts to the programming mechanism of the Time Matrix, something utterly impossible happened. As they watched, awed and more than a bit overwhelmed, the entire three-dimensional universe split into thousands upon thousands of fragments. But that wasn't half of it, not even close.
Every fragment was connected to every other in ways not even the oldest Tekka- or Teknoman would have been able to make sense of. Nothing was untouched by the change, not even the relatively simple Jahar.
The Jahar had been twisted inside out, and any other way imaginable. Every part of the ship could be seen from every other. Any place the Jahar had ever been, no matter how remote in time or space, could be seen connected to the Jahar by a long strand of colorless light. But not only were the many past destinations of the Jahar connected to it by the strands of light, they were also quite visible from the cockpit.
But the spectacle of the Jahar was nothing compared to that of her crew. Visser Thirty-two, Loren, Elfangor and even Chapman were twisted and split apart in just the same ways, but the results were much more interesting. Every part of every organ was made visible from every possible vantagepoint, Elfangor could see Loren's beating heart from the inside as well as the outside.
Visser Thirty-two watched as Elfangor's lungs expanded and contracted, and could see his own doing the same. Nothing was hidden in this strange place. Looking upward, Elfangor could see an expanse of colored, glowing lines stretching away into an optical infinity.
Somehow, he could also sense who these lines belonged to. The sickly-yellow line that was Visser Thirty-two twisted around a pale-blue line that couldn't be anyone other than Alloran. But there was another line that followed the merged lines of Alloran and Visser Thirty-two, this one was the ebony shade of interstellar space and followed the Yeerk's line without ever getting close enough to merge.
Looking down, Elfangor found that his previous assumption had been incorrect. The Visser's line and the black line did merge, if only for a short time. But the black line did not immediately start to follow the Visser's line, instead it journeyed halfway across the galaxy to meet up with a dark purple line.
It stayed close to the purple line for a few minutes amid a tangle of similarly colored lines, then the black line briefly twined around a lavender-blue line before departing to follow Visser Thirty-two. Turning away from the wandering black line, Elfangor traced Alloran's pale-blue line as it threaded its way through the maze of other lines. He saw as his own line, that of his friend Arbron, and Alloran's lines converged, taking the two humans with them.
He could also see Alloran's past, not only as a collection of intersecting lines, but as an actual progression of events. Elfangor saw what had happened on the Hork-Bajir planet, saw the high rocky plateaus the Andalite forces on the planet were forced to stay in to avoid the Yeerks that were in control of most of the planet. Then the scene skipped forward, and Elfangor saw the same rocky plateaus heaped with slaughtered Andalites and Hork-Bajir.
A Blade ship was flying through the canyon bordered by the plateaus, firing at the fleeing Andalites and Hork-Bajir. Elfangor was certain that this Blade ship belonged to Visser Thirty-two. He could see Alloran's desperate decision to release the Quantum virus, even as he knew that Alloran knew that this action would make him an outcast among his own kind.
And, as even that last desperate measure failed, Elfangor could feel Alloran's rage as what remained of the Andalites sent to the planet retreated and the last free Hork-Bajir were enslaved by the Yeerks. As his eyes were drawn back to the black line, Elfangor wondered who it could belong to. Looking at the point just before they merged, Elfangor was surprised to see a black-haired human being held by two Hork-Bajir.
But, when the human raised his head, Elfangor caught sight of his blazing red eyes. Staring into their depths, Elfangor could feel an evil and a power even more potent than that of Visser Thirty-two. What Visser Thirty-two saw was just the same, and yet very different.
***
Through Alloran's eyes, Visser Thirty-two a montage of scenes all focused around his old host. In the first, his former host was walking beside another of his species. Then, he was glaring at a wiry female with bright green hair and light brown stripes.
In the next, he had been thrown across the expanse of room whose walls, ceiling and floor all appeared to be made from some sort of black-green vines. In fact, all of the Visser's glimpses of his previous host took place in this particular environment. Alloran could see everything that the Visser saw, since Visser Thirty-two was too preoccupied with what was happening in front of his eyes to bother with monitoring Alloran's thoughts.
Alloran, at the same time, was not about to jeopardize his newfound and probably short-lived freedom by commenting on or questioning the presence of the black-haired human. Visser Thirty-two willed the images to disappear, and stared for a moment at the wandering black line. Focusing all his willpower on the unassuming white sphere before him, he pictured his intended destination.
The details were mostly secondhand, since he hadn't been born on the planet that he now intended to go, but he had been told many times about how it looked. He could call to mind in vivid detail the green lightning-streaked skies of the planet, the masses of worn rocks and the many Yeerk pools. As the images became clearer, he could feel the Time Matrix responding to his thoughts.
Elfangor felt this as well, and he moved quickly to halt the Yeerk's progress. In the strange place that they now inhabited, Elfangor could see his own mind as it brought more and yet more mental energy to bear. He tried to bring the same kind of focus to his thoughts that the Visser had displayed, but for him it was a futile effort.
His thoughts were not the ordered images that he saw in Visser Thirty-two's thoughts, but a jumble of combined pictures. Not all of them concrete memories of a place, some of them were memories of the magazine ads he had paged through while in the hold of a downed Skrit-Na freighter. And, as hard as he tried, he could not push back the Visser's own mind.
Even as Elfangor attempted to gain more ground in his mental war, he was watching his own body freeze. He could see the blood in his veins slowing to a crawl, as his hearts gave out from lack of oxygen. Another mind joined his struggle, just as his own was shutting down from both asphyxiation and cold.
It was Loren, there could be no doubting that, he knew she would help him no matter what he was facing. She pushed the Visser back with her strong mental presence, but did not contribute to the tide of images flowing between Yeerk and Andalite. Elfangor could now feel the balance shifting to favor him.
Suddenly, Elfangor noticed that their surroundings had changed drastically. Everything, the black hole, the Jahar, even the outside universe was all moving away at an increasing rate of speed. He knew that they had succeeded then, they had chosen their destination, and now the Time Matrix was taking them there.
But none of their pictures had been whole, save for the Visser's, so where would the Time Matrix take them? The cosmos, which had grown considerably farther away since Elfangor had last looked, was now fading from sight. Just before he lost consciousness, he was sure he could hear someone's laughter, and then all he saw was a flash of brilliant light.
Then the darkness of his mind engulfed him…