Chapter 12

--How do you guys usually do this then?-- asked Sam. We were flying over to Marco's house in bird of prey morph, partly to save time, and partly because I wanted us all to finally morph together as a group.

--How do we do what?-- I asked.

--Make plans, go on a mission, that sort of thing.--

--Uh, I guess pretty much how you just saw it,-- I said. --We sit around in Cassie's barn, lay out our ideas, and come up with something. We've done it enough times now, so I guess we don't really bother to think about it much anymore. Why? How do you guys do it?--

--Same, I suppose. We decide what needs to be done, work out how we're going to do it, and then just go for, like a military exercise. Philip does the thinking, I do the planning, and Maggie and Ferdie put in their suggestions.--

--Kinda like us then,-- said Rachel. --Jake does the yelling, Ax does the eating, and Marco comes up with the stupid jokes.--

--Yeah, and Rachel comes up with the ways to kill ourselves,-- Marco added casually. --By the way, we're almost there.--

--Where do we demorph?-- asked Maggie. --We have a thing for roofs.--

--Oh, we have a thing for smelly alleyways, and Dumpsters,-- said Marco. --In fact, there's an extra dirty one down there, which I'm sure Jake will like.--

--It certainly looks the safest,-- I said reluctantly. --But ten birds of prey all swooping down together will look suspicious. I suggest we fly in one at a time, or better still, five of us could take that alley to the right of the apartment block.--

--Ok,-- said Sam. --Philip, Ferdie and Maggie? On me. Jake? Could you get one of your guys to come down with us to show us the way to Marco's?--

--Sure,-- I said. --Marco, you can go. I know the way up to yours. We'll meet you outside the entrance in a few minutes.--

I pulled back my wings and sailed down into the alley, checking the place was clear before I began to demorph. Soon, I was joined by Rachel, Cassie, Tobias and Ax. Tobias immediately began to morph into his human form, and Ax had to go through his Andalite body before morphing to human.

We stepped out of the alleyway, looking rather silly in just our morphing outfits. Tobias was complaining about feeling blind in his human form.

"All right?" said Ferdie, as we met up with them. "Um…who's that?"

I realized that the four new Animorphs were all staring, confused, at Tobias. It suddenly occurred to me that this was the first time they'd seen him in his human form. Tobias cocked his head - a very hawk-like movement.

"Oh! Don't worry," I said. "It's just Tobias. You did know he was a guy, right?" I said hastily.

"Um," said Sam uncertainly. "Sorry, Tobias, we knew you had been trapped, but that you could still morph, so I guess we should have expected to see you in your human body."

"That's ok," said Tobias, his face totally blank. "I don't really spend too much time in this body."

Sam nodded, and we look the elevator up to Marco's apartment.

"My dad might be around, but just act friendly, he'll be ok," he said, opening the door. Marco's dad was in the living room, trying to program the video recorder.

"Hey, dad," said Marco casually. "I, er, got some friends round." He indicated to the big group of us.

"Hey, guys," said Marco's dad, looking at ten of us in bewilderment. "Marco never said he was having a party! You didn't want to let your old man know?" he laughed.

Marco gave him a friendly slap on the back. "Just have to go over some group project for school," he said. "You don't mind if we use the computer, do you?"

"Go ahead," he said, throwing down the video instruction manual. "If you guys want anything to eat or drink, there's some cookies and shakes in the kitchen. Try not to finish everything off. I'm just popping out to the mall. Be back a bit later. Hey, No," he said, as he passed Ax.

"Yes," Ax replied. Marco's dad looked at him, puzzled for a second, then grabbed his coat and left.

"Hey, no, yes? What was that about?" asked Sam.

"Oh, the last time I left Ax alone with my dad, I told him to say nothing except the words 'yes' and 'no'. He took it to heart," Marco replied, leading us into the study. It was pretty cramped in there, with all ten of us. I sat down on the desk beside the monitor. Philip stood behind Marco as he took the main chair. Rachel went and helped herself to some of the cookies in the kitchen.

"Right, what do you need?" asked Marco, switching on the computer.

"First, Ax will need to create a program or some kind of code or whatever to stop anyone tracing the computer's IP address," said Philip. "We're going to be checking out the Yeerk's data, and we don't want them to know that we've been snooping around."

Marco stood up and let Ax take the seat.

"You pronounce data 'day-tah' he said. "Do you all say that in England?"

"I'm not English, I'm Scottish," said Maggie hotly. But yeah, we say it 'day-tah'.

"English, Scottish…all the same to me," said Marco.

"It's so not!" Maggie protested. "How about if we started calling you guys Canadian or Australian?"

"I am Canadese," said Ax, unnecessarily.

"Then I will fly to Buckingham Palace and personally demand to your Queen that she alter the dictionaries," Marco remarked, ignoring Ax's last comment.

Maggie looked at him blankly for a second. "We have a better accent," she said simply.

"Guys, can we try and keep on track here?" I said, as Ax tapped away on the computer, muttering stuff about how slow and primitive it was. "We've got a lot to get through. Philip, what do you need us to do?"

"Have you got a printer?" he asked. "And some pens and highlighters as well, plus somewhere we can pin some stuff up on a wall."

"Yeah, we have all that stuff," Marco replied, rummaging through a drawer. "You can use that notice board by the window. It's just a load of junk on it."

Just then, Rachel came into the study, carrying a jar of cookies.

"I really shouldn't be eating these," she said, "as it ruins my figure. But these are so tasty. Chocolate chip!" She put the jar on the desk, and Sam reached over to grab one.

"Mmm," she said. "God, it's been ages since I've had some chocolate! Marco, your dad is a great bloke."

"My dad is a what?" Marco asked suspiciously.

"She means a nice guy," translated Philip.

"I have secured this primitive machine," said Ax stonily, getting up from the seat and letting Philip sit down. "Tive. Ive."

"Uh oh," said Tobias, watching Ax with interest. "You'd better hide those cookies, Rachel, and quickly!"

"Oh!" Rachel yelped, moving towards the jar.

But Ax was too fast for her. He saw the jar, and his eyes lit up with unrestrained excitement.

"Cookies!" he gasped, stuffing his hand into the jar and cramming three at a time into his mouth. "Oh! Oh! Chocolate! Choc-lut! Cook-eeeesh!"

"At least swallow your food before you talk," sniffed Marco, dodging the crumbs that were spraying from Ax's mouth.

"What is he doing?" asked Maggie, looking at Ax in shock. "Does he do that around all food, or just biscuits?"

"He does it around all food," I sighed. "Andalites don't have mouths, and no taste buds, so Ax gets a bit difficult to control when he's in his human morph and around food. Just don't let him near a cinnamon bun."

"Bun-zuh!" squealed Ax in delight.

"Right, well," said Philip, turning away from the rumpus. "The first thing we need is to pull up a map of the city." He opened the Internet Explorer, and quickly located a decent online map.

"Did you want to print that out?" I asked.

"Not yet," he said, tapping away. "Just need to do a little something first. "Might need Ax again to bypass the system…nope…I think we're ok."

I leant over the chair, peering at the screen. Philip was looking at another map, but one which seemed to show a load of straight lined and right-angles rather than roads.

"What's that you have there?" I asked.

"This is a plan of the pipeline system for this city," he explained. "I pulled it off the website for the main water supplier of this place. It's available for anyone to look at."

"How do we know where each of those pipes lead to?"

"I hope someone else can give me a hand on that one," Philip said. "Anyone good with graphics?"

"I'll have a go," said Sam. "I took that subject for my GCSEs. Have you got a graphics program on here, Marco?"

"Yeah, I think PhotoShop on there," he replied. "What are GCSEs by the way?"

"Oh, the main exams we sit in year eleven. When we're sixteen. Not fun."

Philip explained to Sam what he wanted, and I sat back and chatted to Tobias while they worked things out.

"Do you know what morphs they have?" Tobias asked, referring to the new guys.

"Kind of," I replied. "Sam's told me about a million times, but I'm still trying to remember them all. I think Sam has a leopard morph for battle, and one of them has an ox or something, but I'm not sure about the others."

"Are you talking about us?" Ferdie asked, grinning.

"Just trying to remember what morphs you guys have," I said. "Who is it who has an ox?"

"Philip," he replied. "He's also got a wolverine for battle. I've got a lynx, Sam has a leopard and Maggie and Philip both have wolves."

"That's a good selection," I said. "Did you get them all from a zoo?"

"Yeah, my uncle owns an estate," Ferdie explained. "It's got a zoo and this mini-safari park thing."

"He owns an estate?" asked Tobias. "You mean like a country mansion?"

"Yar," Ferdie replied, shrugging. I guess the guy didn't really bother with being impressed by his family's fortunes.

"Ok, people," said Sam after a few minutes. "We're just about done here." She handed me a printout of something, and I pinned it up on the notice board.

"What am I looking at?" I asked.

"You're looking at a map of the city," said Philip. "Over which Sam has superimposed the plan of the city's pipeline. Both maps are to the same scale, so you can see whereabouts the hospital is, where the different treatment plants and reservoirs are, and where the pipes lead."

"Ok," I said, impressed. "That's a good start, but how do we know which plant the Yeerks have control of?"

"We're just on that one now," Sam said. "Ax? I might need you over here again."

"Of course," he said, still licking his lips from the cookies.

They sat down and opened up the web page to the city hospital.

"This is going to require all of your hacking skills, Ax," Sam said.

"I don't believe I shall need to try particularly hard," he replied. "This should not be a complicated task. Your security systems are laughable."

See what I mean about Andalites being arrogant?

"Ax, just got on with it," I sighed.

"Yes, Prince Jake."

"I have reminded you that you don't need to call me Prince, haven't I?"

"Yes, Prince Jake. Ake," he added for good measure.

"What do you Andalites call a female warrior?" asked Maggie, as Ax tapped away. "Princess? Lady? Ma'am? "

"I do not believe we have ever had a female warrior," Ax replied. "Therefore, that question has never been addressed."

"That's a bit sexist, isn't it?" she went on. "Ok, what about female politicians and leaders?"

"Again, that event has yet to occur."

"Right," said Maggie, a little downhearted.

I opened a window, as the room was getting pretty stuffy with all ten of us crowded into it. Cassie and Rachel wandered out into the living room; there wasn't much for them to do in here. Ferdie followed them and threw himself onto the couch.

"Are you really a lord?" Cassie asked him.

"Well, I suppose you could say that," he said casually. "Why? Do you have a thing for lords?" he grinned.

"He's not a lord!" Philip called. "And Flawless? Stop showing off. They're taken. And so are you."

I left the three of them to their discussions about the brothers' considerable wealth, and turned back to Sam and Ax.

"How are you getting on?" I asked.

"Very well, Prince Jake," Ax answered. "As I imagined, the security system was not a challenge to by-pass."

"So, what have you got for us?"

"A list of all the people who have been admitted to the city hospital in the last week," Sam replied. "Now, we just need to sort out which patients are most likely to have been made into Controllers. You got your highlighters ready?"

I grabbed the markers and passed them to Sam. "How are we going to do that?"

"Ok, I'm going to print out several copies," she said. "I need someone to go through and highlight all the names of the people who have been admitted to the pharmacology lab as outpatients. As well as anyone who have had the same symptoms, and anyone who received the same drug. From that, we should be able to work out by a process of elimination which of the patients were probably taken by the Yeerks. We can then look up their addresses on the database, and plot them on the map. This will give us an idea of where the patients live in relation to the pipelines, and from there it should be possible to work out which plant provides their water, and hence, which plant the Yeerks have control of."

I looked at her and Philip, slightly shocked. "Brilliant," I said, nodding. Talk about getting down to business. "Lets get started then."

We spent the next hour or so in the study and living room, going through the lists of patients, marking the appropriate names and crossing out others. It was a long and tedious process, but one which had to be done.

"Guys, I gotta go demorph," Tobias said after a while. "Ax? You coming?"

The two of them stepped out into the living room where there was more room, and de- and remorphed.

Eventually, we had a list of around fifty names, which we suspected to be the Controllers. They all had been admitted to the same department of the hospital, had the same symptoms, and were given the same treatment. Cassie worked on the lists regarding the drugs used, since she was the only one who was at all familiar with any of the names.

"Wow. Have I just walked into CID?" exclaimed Ferdie, walking into the study and throwing down his marker.

Sam laughed. The whole of the main wall was covered in several copies of the double map. On each of the maps, we'd used different colored drawings pins to mark the addresses of the suspected Controllers. Sam was scribbling notes around each of the main areas, and had highlighting the main pipelines which lay under the neighborhoods where there were the most pins. Marco was bustling about, reading out addresses and postcodes to Philip, who was efficiently locating the addresses on the map, and placing more pins. Finally, we were done. Sam ushered everyone to sit down and moved towards the wall-maps.

"Right," she said, standing to one side and grabbing a ruler and using it to point at the maps.

"Excuse me, miss, but will this be on the mid-term?" asked Marco innocently.

Sam rolled her eyes and continued. "You can see here that we have a far greater number of patients who live in this block than any of the others. This gives us the impression that most of the Controllers came from the same area."

She paused, making sure we were all following.

"So, if we look at the plan of the pipe system, we can see that this block here is fed by three main lines. Each of these three lines connects to one big line, which starts that this facility to the north of the city."

"That must be where the Yeerks are adding the chemical, right?" asked Tobias, who was now fully human again.

"That's what we hope," Philip said. "It certainly makes the most sense."

"What about those people who don't live anywhere near that block?" asked Marco. "There's a pin there that's miles away from the cluster."

"We thought that was probably because someone was visiting a neighbor or whatever away from home. They would have drunk the water in a different neighborhood, but given the hospital their own address," Philip replied.

"How about that small cluster to the south of the main one?"

"That's a school," Philip went on. "If you look carefully, you can see that its' pipe system is actually connected to the same one that feeds the neighborhood where most of the patients live."

I nodded, smiling. "That's good work, guys," I said, looking around at everyone. "That's really cleared things up for us, and given us a lot more information to play around with. We now know which plant the Yeerks have control of, and which neighborhoods are those most likely to be affected."

"So if anyone goes to visit anyone in any of those blocks, don't ask them for tap water," Maggie said.

"Right then, what do we do now?" asked Philip, looking at Sam and I.

"We check out the facility," I said. "Fly over there at night sometime soon. Work out where the chemical is being added, and find a way to stop this."

"Have you guys all got owl morphs?" Cassie asked Sam and the others.

"Yeah, we have some," she replied.

"Good," I said looking around at everyone. "I think we should leave that until tomorrow night. What does everyone think?"

"Um, I've got an early morning test on Monday, buddy." Marco said. "So have you. We shouldn't be out working all night."

"So school comes before saving the world?" asked Ferdie, raising his eyebrows.

"Look, I'd much rather-" started Marco.

"It will have to be tonight then," I interrupted. "Everyone? Meet at Cassie's barn at ten this evening in your morphing suits only. We'll take it from there."

"Ok, sure," said Sam. "We'd better go find somewhere to grab something to eat."

"You can stay at mine if you like," Cassie said. "My parents are out this evening at some veterinary conference, so I'm sure I'll be able to cook something up. Do you want to join us, Jake?"

"I gotta go home for a bit and spring another load of lies of my parents, but sure, I'd love that."

"I can cook, if you like," said Ferdie. "Among my many talents, I'm also a chef."

"Thanks very much, Cassie," replied Philip.

"Well, I hope you enjoy your last supper," said Marco sarcastically, wandering into his bedroom and pulling on some clothes. "See you guys at execution time."

"Later," I said, as we morphed to raptors and took off through the open window.