Chapter 2

I lagged behind the others a bit, giving them a head start, before I started tacking my way toward the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center – a.k.a., Cassie's barn. It was a habit I was into, making sure that all of my friends got away cleanly. Most of the time, they were too tired or disturbed to watch their backs for anyone who might follow them; they didn't ask me to, but like I said, watching their escapes for anything shady was just a habit of mine.

Once I decided the Yeerks were more concerned with putting their forces back right and covering up the signs of the raging battle, I swiftly flapped for the barn. The wind was against me and it wore me out pretty quickly, but I knew I'd have a while to rest, now that the excitement was over.

Well, the excitement was mostly over. As I skimmed through a missing slat in the barn's roof and hit my perch with practiced accuracy, I could hear Marco complaining. Not unusual.

"Come on, we don't even know what they were doing there! And I'm supposed to risk my life for this sort of crap? Attacking the Yeerks without an idea of what they want and how to stop them?"

"In this case, we didn't need to know what they were doing," Rachel pointed out aggressively. "Our job was to evict them from the pumping station. Unless they're total idiots, we did that. Case closed."

"We also got some valuable information," Cassie said mildly, and all eyes turned to look at her. "Tobias was attacked by a new Yeerk weapon we haven't seen before. At least now, we can be ready for it."

"That's another thing!" Marco crowed. I hadn't realized anyone had noticed my near-death experience; they'd all kind of had a lot going on at the time. "Now the Yeerks have fully automatic Dracon guns? I was terrified of the old ones. Now some Yeerk Rambo is going to come flying through the jungle every time we fight them, emptying his energy clip at us? Pass. I'll definitely pass."

"It is not that easy," Ax, in human morph, said. "Itiss. Noteasy." He spent a minute playing with those particular sounds, and if I had had a mouth, I would have laughed.

Ax, as I said, is our resident Andalite. Andalites are the good guys – or, at least we think they are. They're allegedly going to come and save us from the Yeerks as soon as they can. I don't know about that. I do know that Ax is one Andalite we can count on.

Andalite. Think centaur, and you're halfway there. His tail is long, muscular, and bladed; it's very obviously a weapon. His arms are weak, his hands are too long with too many fingers. He has no mouth but four eyes. It's pretty weird, trying to have a conversation with an Andalite when they keep making eye contact with different combinations of main eyes and stalk eyes, but you get used to it.

Ax is a pillar of virtue and a shining example of the ideal Andalite aristh – when he's in his own body. When he's in human morph, he's way too distracted with mouth-sounds and things to taste to be called a shining example of anything other than insanity. He's getting better about it, but you still wouldn't want to invite him to a dinner party.

Jake paid close attention when Ax spoke. Ax will often sit out of our discussions for lots of reasons, the main one being that he just doesn't understand all the nuances of human communication. In other words, he doesn't understand why we argue as much as we do, and he just stays out of it. So when he speaks up at a meeting, its usually important. Jake didn't miss that. "What's that, Ax?" he asked, and everyone quieted down their side conversations and paid attention.

Once everyone was looking at Ax, he continued. "Marco is incorrect – we will not have to face Yeerks wielding the fully automatic version of the Dracon rifle we saw this afternoon." He spoke confidently, as if he were absolutely sure of it.

(How can you know?) I asked him.

"It is simple physics," he explained, as if I were a small child. "Energy weapons, like Shredders and Dracons, are highly unstable. In fact, the most difficult part of the development by far is the stabilization of such a weapon. It is why most energy weapons are slow-firing; let out too much energy too fast, and destabilization is sure to occur." He then kind of ruined the Einstein effect by saying the word "destabilization" so fast so many times in a row it sounded like he was gargling.

"Well, the Yeerks obviously figured it out," Marco said glumly. "You saw it yourself."

Ax shook his head again. "No. What do you think happens when this destabilization I speak of takes place?" Marco shrugged. "A condition known as a Flaargaar occurs. You saw it yourself – a flaargaar is a mix between a Sario Rip and a black hole."

Jake looked confused, the way he'd gotten the one time we'd discussed time travel with Ax. "Are you saying when that weapon blew up, it took the controller through a Sario Rip. Through time?"

If it's possible to read the body language of an alien in a human morph, I could see that Ax was getting frustrated. "No. The explosion will draw anyone in the vicinity into it, and then promptly crush their mass down into the size of a quark."

We all thought about that – it was just another unpleasant fact of our new life. Okay, so now we knew the Yeerks had weapons that may explode, and if you're too close when they do, you get smashed down smaller than an atom. Awesome. Cassie asked the question we were all too distracted to ask.

"If a rapid fire energy weapon is such a bad idea, why are the Yeerks using them? And while we're at it, why is the first place we saw one at some out-of-the-way, backwater installation? You'd think if they just developed them, they'd be on the front lines."

Marco might be abrasive, but he's smart. He got there faster than anyone else and answered Cassie's question. "They put them out of the way as a field test. What happens if they pack the Pool ship full of them, and they go boom? No, this is some new Yeerk research and development, and we were a part of one of the first experiments." He turned to Ax. "The big question is this – is this something they're going to fool around with and then scrap, because they'll come to the same conclusion you Andalites did? Or is there a chance that they could actually figure out a way to make this technology work?"

I didn't even need to be Ax's shorm to know how he was going to react to that one. "Are you implying that the Yeerks will be able to develop a technology that we Andalites tried and failed? When I have repeatedly told you that Yeerk technology is just reverse-engineered Andalite technology?" His face was flushed and his words were strained; he still wasn't very good at controlling his human morph.

Marco threw up his hands. Jake argued each side against the middle. Rachel used her own attitude to keep Marco's in check, and Cassie tried unsuccessfully to chill everybody out. We all left the barn feeling pretty crappy, like we always did when we had questions without answers.

All I know is that I was almost made extra-crispy by a Yeerk machine gun, even though Ax said it wasn't possible to make one. And I hoped that Marco and Ax were right, that this was just some failed test of the Yeerks' that we'd never see again. But I had a funny feeling that this whole Dracon thing was going to get worse before it got better.