Chapter 26

It took only a few minutes to drive the last mile and park in the same lot we'd seen Chapman use Monday. Granted, I probably should've taken a bit more time to acclimate to wearing the glasses, and suffice it to say I heard a lot of car horns the first few blocks.

And carrying the briefcase full of Andalite explosives and flying squirrels - wait, seriously? You know, seeing that in print, it's really clicking just how stupid this plan was from the get-go. But whatever, that's how it happened. I carried a briefcase full of bombs and live squirrels into the front entrance of an alien stronghold.

And it worked, if you can fucking believe it.

From the time I'd met Elfangor, I'd swallowed a spider, been trapped in a lint trap, and bitten by a tiger, and yet, memorizing a four-digit PIN and having a key card was all I needed to get past the stern, secretary-looking woman at the desk. If she was suspicious that Chapman was back for a second time in the same night, it didn't show.

Sometimes the things you think will be the hardest turn out to be some of the easiest.

*We're in?* Rachel asked.

*We're in,* I answered. Thankfully, even though I was still human, a morph is still a morph, and I was able to thought-speak to the bag of squirrels.

I made my way through the same paths that Chapman had made last time. Well, at least as well as I could. Perspective makes a huge difference in your visual landmarks, and I'd only been a few inches tall the last time I'd been through here. I think I got lost for a bit before I found the office area. The cubicles were still occupied, even at this hour, and I suddenly had a bad feeling about the next stage of this plan.

I needed to find a place for the others to demorph, and the first thought was that the Yeerk offices might be empty at night, but that wasn't the case. Dozens of Controllers were diligently working in the cubicles. I wondered again exactly what the hell they were doing, but I didn't have time to ponder such quandaries.

*What's going on out there?* Tobias asked.

*Night shift,* I answered.

*God, the Yeerks are worse to work for than Wal-Mart,* Rachel said. *So where can we demorph?*

*Working on it,* I said wearily.

I knew people were living down here so our best option at this stage was to find some kind of open barracks and demorph there.

I walked carefully but deliberately to the housing areas. I'm fairly certain that I took two or three wrong turns getting there, but in my defense, the sections of corridor looked very similar. But I did eventually come to the open rows of doors to the living quarters.

"Inspection, sir?" a Controller asked, as I looked into the room. She was middle-aged, a little older than my mom, probably, with Asian features. Filipino perhaps? She looked like she'd been homeless for years before she came down here.

"Inventory," I answered quickly. I was trying to channel as much of my manager at the cinema as I could, but I wasn't used to being in any position of authority.

She nodded and went about her business, no longer concerned for my - Chapman's - presence. She laced up her boots and left, leaving me and my sack of squirrels alone in the barracks.

If it sounds like I was really, overly focused on the fact I was carrying all my friends in a bag, I was. Take morphing technology out of this equation. Go to a pet store, put a few hamsters in a backpack, and go on a job interview and see what that does for your concentration and nerves.

Once the Controller was gone, I shut and locked the door. I opened the briefcase on one of the bunks and one by one, squirrel after squirrel waddled out. While they were demorphing, I started rifling through the room. The row of lockers on the wall yielded a number of jumpsuits, complete with facemasks. I began checking sizes and tossed them on the other bunk.

I was shocked to see two Tobiases when I turned around. Apparently, with no call to pass for human beyond walking around, Elfangor had decided being an Andalite wasn't going to be particularly expedient at this stage.

"Oh, yeah," one Tobias said, noticing my expression, "When I was practicing my elephant morph, Elfangor was practicing human."

Cassie and Rachel looked up and seemed to mirror my own shock, but Marco, who had been with Tobias and Elfangor at the time, just shrugged like it was no big thing.

Four of them out of morph. Me and Elfangor in human morphs. "How long have I been in morph?" I asked.

Elfangor turned his head quizzically. *Oh, I have neglected to explain. The genetic similarities between humans is such that I do not believe the Escafil technology will discern individual genomes.*

"And that means… what, exactly?" I asked.

*While in human morph, you should not be constrained by the time limit or morph restrictions.*

It took a little bit for the implications to set in. I could - all of us could - be other people, and remain so as long as we wanted. I mean, I couldn't see how that could possibly help us in any tangible way in the moment, but it was like a discovering a new cheat code in a video game. Human morphs were different. That had to matter somehow, even if it didn't make much difference to us right in the moment.

Though, it did suddenly dawn on me that I could morph to tiger or Andalite directly from my Chapman morph, which would probably be a plus.

I was thinking that the playback on security of me morphing into Elfangor would look the same as Elfangor demorphing, but it occurred to me that I hadn't seen, either as a human or a lizard, any security cameras once we passed the lobby.

Then again, I had spent a lot of time in the vents and lighting arrays, and this was an alien facility, so who was I to say they didn't have cameras I just hadn't noticed?

The Yeerk facility had been busier the last time I'd been here, and thankfully we didn't see many other Controllers. I had the impression that we were somehow out of place - like the few Controllers we did pass seemed to look at us like we weren't supposed to be there. Elfangor said Chapman had rank, though, and if we were out of place, no one questioned it.

We were less than a hundred feet from the tank room when we hit our first major snag.

"Hey!" a voice called. "Just where the hell do you think you guys are going?"

Behind us was another Controller in a grey jumpsuit. He was younger than Chapman, maybe in his late twenties or early thirties, with pale skin, freckles and bright red hair. Without even thinking about it, I named him Weasley in my head.

Weasley looked at us like something was wrong, but when he saw me, his expression shifted to confusion. I tried not to mirror that. Whoever this was, Weasley seemed to recognize Chapman.

"Sir?"

"Is there a problem?" I said, trying to sound annoyed more than worried.

"Sir, you are aware that the Taxxon feeding crew does not have clearance for the pool maintenance area."

In our haste to get through the facility, I had forgotten about the color tape on the floor. Orange was the color for the Taxxon crew, and apparently the Yeerks took that color-coded staff zoning very seriously. All of the jumpsuits in the barracks were orange.

I didn't have time to stammer or we were dead, and like I've said, I'm really not a good liar.

Weasley didn't see the right hook coming.

I said I knocked out Braden Stewart. What I may have omitted from that story is that Braden was captain of the wrestling team. I should probably mention that I am not a small kid. If you saw me, you wouldn't take me for a basketball player, like my brother, you'd think I played football. And did. I wasn't a star player or anything, but I played for the JV team, till I started working. Even in Chapman's body, with his taller frame and middle-aged wear and tear, I knew how to throw a punch. And Chapman may have been in his forties, but he wasn't decrepit.

"Fuck, Jake, you knocked the shit out of this guy," Marco said.

"Meh, who cares?" Rachel sniped. "It was either knock him out here or he was going to get mauled inside."

"Guys, hurry up and morph. We're probably going to be deep in shit about thirty seconds after I open this door."

There was no preamble for any of us about the clothing. I would have to buy my dad a new suit, but no one gave a flying fuck about the Yeerk jumpsuits, and if the pool did have cameras, no one wanted to take off their masks. All of them seemed to be about the same. Torn orange fabric ripping at the seams, exposing different colors of fur. The way the jumpsuit exploded as the Andalite body erupted within the fabric… some things you just can't capture in words.

Only Tobias and I were abstaining from morphing.

Elfangor shook off the remnants of Yeerk jumpsuit that had followed him through morphing and I handed him the briefcase full of bombs. He was the only one that knew how to plant them, after all.

Tobias stayed close behind me, still in the only intact jumpsuit. There simply wasn't enough room for him to morph to elephant in the corridor. A wolf, a bear, a gorilla, and an alien stood behind us.

I took a breath and pressed Chapman's stolen card to the reader. The light turned green and the doors opened. The staff inside didn't scream. That would have been a human reaction. The Controllers weren't afraid. Oh, you bet your ass they were surprised, I mean, alien slugs or not, a bunch of large, exotic animals show up at your work, you're going to be surprised. One of them hit a button on the console, and another picked up some kind of weapon, like a heat lamp mixed with a handgun.

A flash of green light blinded me for a moment and a perfect circle the size of a plum was burned through the Controller's chest.

She was maybe twenty years old at best. Kind of pretty, actually. Black hair, soft features. She had something of a Snow White look. And I will never forget the face she made as the realization that she was no longer alive flashed across her face before dimming like a snuffed candle. She fell to the floor like someone had cut the strings on a marionette.

The other Controller froze. We all did.

I turned to see Elfangor holding a similar-looking weapon. It was sleeker in design, and you'd probably mistake it for a water gun if you didn't know what it was. I still didn't.

Elfangor covered the distance to the console in a heartbeat. Those powerful Andalite legs made him incredibly nimble, even more so than the deer he resembled. I couldn't follow the sweep of his tail with my eyes. That bladed tail was apparently retractable to some degree. As he swung the appendage, the tissue seemed to stretch, almost like a chameleon's tongue or something. In a split second, the blade swished through the air and the second Controller was down.

Questions raced through my mind. What are you doing? Where did you get that? I knew it wasn't in the briefcase. But the one thought that echoed over and over like a bad clip show wasn't a question. You killed her. You killed her.

You killed her!

But those weren't the words to come out when I found my voice. "What the hell is that thing?" I asked.

*Answers later,* Elfangor said. *Morph, now. We have little time.*

Cassie sniffed at the second Controller. Another woman, about my mom's age. *She's breathing,* Cassie said.

*Jake, morph,* Elfangor said again.

Tobias and Rachel moved the unconscious Controller to the corner. Marco gingerly moved the dead woman. She had aimed a weapon. She meant to kill us. I had no delusions otherwise. But that was the Yeerk in her brain. She had been a human being, she probably had a family. Were they Controllers too? Would they ever know what happened to their daughter, their sister, their girlfriend?

Their mother?

As much as those thoughts intruded, what bothered me most is how quickly I tuned them out. She was dead. We were alive for the moment, but the alarm had been sounded, and the flashing lights did nothing for my already-shattered concentration.

I was distantly aware that I was morphing. Somehow I was able to initiate the morph subconsciously. I felt dizzy and I just wanted the room to stop spinning. But as I got further into the change, as the tiger instincts bubbled to the surface, I found a sense of calm.

Tobias hit the buttons on the console and the door for the second elevator opened.

It was only about fifteen feet down. I'm not sure what the point of having the intake room was, unless it was a security choke point or something. I suppose it made transporting the unconscious bodies easier or something.

It was a transport elevator, and it could handle a number of gurneys, as evidenced by the wheel-locks set into the floor. But just me, Rachel, and Marco were about a ton, easily the weight of ten people.

Rachel took a direct approach to the problem.

I'm sure the Yeerks are trained for all kinds of eventualities. The two Controllers in the booth had barely hesitated before reaching for the alarm and a weapon. They seemed to expect that an Andalite attack was always an outside possibility. But there are some things no one can ever be prepared for.

Like a full-grown bull grizzly barreling through the safety glass of an elevator and charging through.

From what I could see, the fifteen foot drop to the floor didn't even faze her. She just charged the glass and was running into the tank facility. The Yeerk technicians in their oh-so-special green uniforms panicked. Rachel smacked one of them with a paw the size of a frying pan. He did not get back up. Rachel kept going and I lost track of the bear among the various gurneys.

A ray of light lanced through the open space, and a section of concrete wall simply evaporated. That was the weapon that had been aimed at us in the mezzanine control room. Some kind of disintegration weapon.

*Dracon beams,* Elfangor said as though swearing. *I'd hoped they wouldn't have Dracon beams this close to the tanks.*

"So fucking shoot the tanks!" Tobias yelled.

Two flashes of light, and I heard screams over the blaring alarm.

I rushed through the broken glass. Marco picked up Cassie with one arm and jumped, following close behind. Elfangor leapt after us, seeming to land effortlessly. I hadn't really seen him cut loose and run before. I've seen deer run, and while Elfangor may look like one in some ways, Andalites are far more agile. And he had a weapon. He was aiming at the tanks, as Tobias had suggested. He fired a few more times before a door I hadn't noticed earlier opened and more human-Controllers entered the room. They wore black jumpsuits, what looked like motorcycle helmets, and they were all carrying more of those disintegrator guns.

The noise was unbelievable. The sound of broken glass and crushed metal was deafening. It was like a car crash right behind us. The Controllers froze in surprise, and I whirled around to see the elephant standing in what remained of the elevator. A male African bush elephant is six and a half tons. Twenty times bigger than a grizzly. And Tobias had overloaded the machinery of the elevator just by morphing.

Tobias was a juggernaut. It made sense, in retrospect. He was a bullied kid. Not just by kids at school, but tormented by his aunt for years and then neglected by his worthless uncle. He wanted to be the biggest and strongest in the room. He wanted to feel powerful, and an elephant is nothing if not powerful.

*Elevator's broken,* he said casually.

He charged into the row of Controllers. Red light flashed, and I saw linear burn lines appear on Tobias's thick, grey hide, but that didn't stop him. They hadn't gotten better than two glancing hit; the rest had missed. One swing of his trunk sent three Controllers flying. They had immediately scattered and broken rank.

The Controllers took cover behind the docking stations, some of which were occupied.

*Elfangor, place the bombs,* I roared. He nodded and galloped off. Andalites were nimble sons of bitches.

Marco, Cassie, and I went after the Controllers. Tobias offered Elfangor cover - and extra destruction - as they made their way to the row of tanks. Cassie caught a Controller by the ankle and dragged him to the floor. Marco ripped up one of the gurney docking stations and threw it into the nearest acrylic tank. The acrylic was strong enough that it didn't break, but it did spider-web with stress fractures. Marco tapped the Controller that had been hiding behind it and the dude was down.

One of them leveled a Dracon beam at Cassie. I lept. Being a tiger felt like I was made of molten steel, and the liquid strength flowed effortlessly as I sailed the ten feet over an empty gurney and into the Controller. The forearm that had been holding the weapon was now between my jaws. I felt the Controller's heartbeat beneath my paws. I read somewhere that human bone is stronger than concrete. I snapped both bones of the Controller's forearm like I was biting through a candy cane.

I felt a sudden sting across my flank.

I looked up and snarled. One of the Controllers had shot me. Not with a Dracon beam. They seemed to realize very quickly that their tank room wasn't a great place for disintegration beams. No, I'd been shot by a handgun.

I said before that tigers are big into apathy. They conserve energy for when they need it, so they're just full to the brim of fuck it. Yeah, well, when a tiger is pissed, that changes.

I wasn't trying to kill him. Or her. It wasn't easy to tell in their uniforms. But I felt my claws catch flesh as I sliced across the Controller's chest. I could smell blood, and tigers really like the smell of blood. I struggled to keep the tiger from eating the human host. I focused on moving to another target.

Cassie's muzzle was stained dark with blood when I caught up with her. Marco was carrying an unconscious body and - I really wish I was exaggerating - using the limp body as a weapon. There's something really demoralizing about being bitch slapped in general, and it's an order of magnitude more degrading to be smacked in the face with the body of your fallen comrade. There was the unmistakable sound of two helmets colliding.

All of us were breathing hard. But none of us were really tired yet. Wolves are persistence hunters, they run their prey down. They're built for endurance. I was built as a mix of speed and power. A tiger my size could bring down a one ton ox and drag it for a mile if need be. Marco seemed to be a bit more winded. Gorillas are incomprehensibly strong, but their explosive bursts of strength tend to be limited to dominance displays. They're not predators. But Marco wasn't out by any stretch.

He swung his ragdoll again, the legs of the unconscious Controller smacking another in the chest. He then threw his toy into another Controller. I roared, a sound louder than a thunderclap, and a noise that triggered a primordial fear in the human hosts rushing at us.

I felt another sting as I took another bullet. I moved between the gurneys to keep cover. I heard the gunfire as he popped off a few more shots, but I couldn't tell if he actually was aiming for us or if he was just trying to pin us down.

Suddenly a giant paw, with claws bigger than my fingers, smacked the shooting Controller in the head. He flew across the room sideways. If not for the helmet, I think Rachel would have killed him instantly. As it was, I couldn't swear she hadn't. She was dotted with blood, and it was immediately apparent that they'd put a number of bullets into her. I could hear the non-stop destruction of the rampaging elephant behind me.

*Guys,* I said. *This way.*

*Why are we running?* Rachel asked. *We're winning, aren't we?*

She wasn't wrong. *Yeah, we are,* I answered. *For now.*

But we were also bleeding, and there was going to be a limit to how long we could keep up this level of assault. Cassie had been hit at least once right behind her shoulder, Rachel was peppered with shots, I knew I'd taken two, and I couldn't see the blood in Marco's pitch black fur, but I could smell it on him. The longer we stayed and fought, the more fatigued we were going to be and the more humans we were going to have to hurt. That wasn't the mission. The bombs were the mission. The tanks were the mission. *We're not here to fight* I said. *Marco, focus on breaking everything you can break. Rachel, Cassie, with me. We need to keep Tobias and Elfangor covered.*

That's when the Taxxons showed up.