Before shipping us off to the house of horrors, aboard the Jaluxtransport, Erek suggested an interesting idea. The Chee had played us before, but not usually in access of a week. The Androids claim that humans are easily fooled, seeing what they want to see. However, they only can go on fooling themselves for so long before they start asking questions. At first I thought he was insinuating something about Tom, Jake's brother. But as it turns out, this would be the second time we discussed the greedy salesmen known as the Iskroot. Erek explained how he reverse engineered the memory transfer software, while they were downloading his memories or something like that. He wanted to take a snapshot of our memory so they could better play us Animorphs. Most of our human behavior was easily mimicked, what he basically said he would obtain is a glance of the memories we held the strongest grasp on. Jake jumped right the just of what Erek was getting at.

"So basically, you'd just get a bunch of names and dates, along with what we were feeling at the time?"

Erek explained that, what Jake had suggested was essentially what we'd be able to grasp of his program. The four of us, 'volunteered' our minds to be scanned.

"I don't know about you guys but, I for one am always willing to help illuminate the deeper intricacies of Marco." I said.

Rachel looked like she was about to say a snide comment then thought the better of it. We then all loaded into Animorph One, as we dubbed it.

((I still don't get why you keep calling it Animorph One,)) Tobias said, ((Just because you call it that, doesn't make it so. Besides if you were going to name it, I think it should be a cool name like Intrepid, Magnanimous, or Enterprise))

"Yeah whatever you say, Captain Kirk."

Tobias and I continued to discuss the importance of naming the ship, as we launched off into space. Going into space is probably one of the coolest things ever. The feel of acceleration as you pull away from mommy Earth, and head out towards the void. However being in space is probably the most boring thing known to man. Especially in advanced alien space craft. You just walk around looking at endless black, peppered with white dots. I take that back, space actually is exciting to what comes next. After we pass far enough away from the moon's influence of gravity, we jump to Z-space. Z-Space actually makes normal space look exciting, all you see in Z-space is white. Which is why Tobias and I were discussing names for Animorph One. Usually Tobias is more reserved, so once I got him going on the name of the ship, I couldn't stop myself. Talking to Bird-boy beat out listening to Ax ramble on about what Z-space did, and what it was made of. On the plus side, Erek had told us they had loaded quite a bit of data into the memory banks of the ship, so if there was anything we wanted to read, watch, or play chances were it was aboard. But there is just something about being crammed aboard a small space ship, surrounded by blinding white, with the same five people, for a week that really gets on a person's nerves, and for the life of me, I just can't put my finger on it.

So naturally we spend a lot of time bickering about pointless stuff. Cassie wants nothing more than to interfere with my fun, obviously.

"Do you ever think about what they are doing, while we're gone?"

"You know, I never really thought about it," I said

* * *

What felt like months of traveling in Z-space finally came to a close. I was happy to finally get out of the ship and on to land. Even if it was a Yeerk occupied planet, in which they were waging open warfare against a small army of Hork-Bajir. Just goes to show you how much fun space travel can be.

((What do we do now?)) Tobias asked.

Everyone was probably thinking the same thing. How were we supposed to land our transport ship and get to the hidden laboratory without being spotted? Jake being the ever cunning leader, came up with the idea of having us land the ship in the ship yard and just walk out through the front door.

"I like it." Rachel, of course.

"Personally I wouldn't mind turning the ship around and heading home, I mean I still haven't watched Two Towers for the nth time this trip."

I don't think any of them heard me since I didn't hear a chorus of laughter. I was about to repeat my retort when Tobias pointed out a problem with the plan.

((Don't we need a reason to be here?)) He asked. ((It's not like we're carrying anything, despite this being a transport, or that our logs show we came from Earth, which makes no sense at all.))

It's at times like this that I am reminded that somebody isn't a morning person, though who can tell when you have perpetual white light blaring through all the view ports. Nonetheless his point was a valid one. We couldn't just land at Yeerk Central, and we couldn't pretend we were damaged. They would know the damage wasn't real, and if it was real, I don't know how we would get back home.

((The Hork-Bajir planet is one of the strong holds of the Yeerk Empire, traffic through these parts should be quite dense. An extra ship popping in unexpected shouldn't be too much to deal with.)) Ax explained. ((It won't give us anonymity eternally though. And any abrupt changes in our flight path after exiting Z-Space would flag us as a ship of interest.))

"Well this just keeps getting better and better." Jake mumbled.

"I take it that no one else read the manual during the trip?" Cassie mused. "The ship was given some slight modifications by the Chee. Erek says that the ship has a cloaking ability that should shield us from Yeerk sensors."

"Should, my favorite word, well that and suicide mission."

((Yes,)) Ax continued ((I think I did see that in the manual, but like all cloaking equipment it is non-functioning in Z-Space. When we immerge we will be visible, we will have to dip behind a cruiser or another large vessel before we engage our cloak. Preferably in an area were traffic is high in volume, that way they won't notice a ship that has disappeared. Again this won't conceal us completely, but it will buy us time to land. They will know someone has arrived, but they won't know who or where.))

We all agreed that Ax had a decent plan, and if everything went according to plan, this should be a nice and easy trip. We emerged from Z-space though we were still far away from the Hork-Bajir home planet there still was a lot of space traffic in the area. I suppose this made sense; the ships couldn't hop into Z-space too close to the planet, so where we were was like the Yeerk equivalent of an on-ramp to the freeway.

((Whoa,) Tobias exclaimed. ((I think I just found our vessel.))

"That can't be right…" Jake started. "That's not possible."