Thwak thwak thwak thwak thwak!
Helicopters skimming above the trees!
Too fast. My friends were still struggling to make it to the shelter of the cave. One of the helicopters was on a straight line to them.
"Oh, man," I muttered. I still had a lot of my speed from the dive. I flapped hard, powering up to maximum speed. Straight at the helicopter.
Straight at it.
I could see the pilot. A human-Controller. Beside him sat a Hork-Bajir.
Straight at them!
The chopper was doing ninety. I was doing a little less. The distance between me and the chopper's windshield shortened very fast.
They weren't going to pull up!
62 CHAPTER 20
Thwak thwak thwak thwak thwak!
The sound of the rotors was a roar.
They were not going to pull up! We were going to hit.
But then, a flicker of the pilot's eyes, a twitch of his hand on the control stick.
I cranked right.
The helicopter cranked left.
It blew past me like a tornado. The backwash of the rotors caught me and tumbled me through the air.
I fell, upside down. I folded my wings, flared my tail, and spun around. I opened my wings and swooped neatly between two trees.
I banked left and flew over the cave. Rachel was the last one in. She was still clearly visible.
The helicopter would almost certainly have seen her.
I watched till she was safely inside.
"Okay, you guys, I don't think anyone saw you. Be cool till I tell you it's time." They couldn't answer, of course. They were still fully human, so they could hear my thought-speech, but could not respond in kind.
The Yeerks went through the familiar routine. The phony Park Rangers fanned out around the lake with automatic weapons ready. The helicopters buzzed around until they decided the area was free of witnesses.
The helicopters landed and the Hork-Bajir jumped out. They seemed extra careful. Probably Visser Three had given them all kinds of grief over the guy I had helped to escape the day before.
Visser Three was not a creature you wanted mad at you.
Then, I felt it. The emptiness in the sky. The sense of something monstrously huge moving slowly through the air.
It was above me.
Slowly it appeared, shimmering into reality like some kind of magic trick.
You could never get used to how big that thing was. It felt like someone was hanging a small moon over your head.
I flew out from under it, over closer to the cave. "It's here," I announced.
63 From behind the truck ship came the usual guard of Bug fighters. Only instead of two Bug fighters, there were four. The Yeerks were definitely nervous this time. Two of the Bug fighters remained on patrol. The other two landed in the clearing beside the helicopters.
Why? Why the extra security? Was it just because of the guy I had helped to escape?
I felt something new in the air above the hovering truck ship. Another cloaked ship!
Not as large, but from that emptiness in the sky I felt a dread that I had felt before.
The cloak shimmered out and the ship appeared.
Black within black, an outthrust spear, razor-edged - I had seen this ship before. The Blade ship! I had seen it first at the construction site where the Andalite had been murdered while we cried helplessly.
No wonder the Yeerks were nervous.
The Blade ship lowered toward the landing area. The Hork-Bajir on the ground and the Park Rangers were in a frenzy now, searching the woods as if their lives depended on it.
Tssewww!
Someone had fired a Dracon beam. I looked and saw a deer in mid-leap sizzle and disappear.
The Yeerks were shooting anything that moved.
The doors of the Blade ship opened. More Hork-Bajir poured out, Dracon beams leveled.
Behind them came a pair of Taxxons, slithering and shimmying on their needle legs, undulating their gross caterpillar bodies.
And last, he stepped out: dainty Andalite hooves. Deadly Andalite tail, like a scorpion's. The mouthless Andalite face. The two small Andalite arms with too many fingers. The two mobile eyes mounted on antlerlike stalks that turned this way and that, always searching, so that the large main eyes could focus on one thing at a time.
An Andalite body.
But not an Andalite mind. For in that Andalite body lived a Yeerk. The only Andalite-Controller. The only Yeerk ever to enslave an Andalite. And thus, the only Yeerk to have the power to morph.
I dropped down into the trees. I waited till a patrolling Hork-Bajir had walked past the cave where my friends hid.
When I was sure no one would see, I fluttered down and into the cave, scraping the bushes on either side.
"Tobias? Is that you?" Jake whispered.
"Yes."
64 "What are you doing here? That's not the plan."
"Forget the plan. He's here."
No one asked who. They all knew from the way I had said it.
He was here.
Visser Three.
65 CHAPTER 21
"What is he doing here?" Cassie asked in a low, frightened whisper.
"I guess he just came to oversee this trip. Maybe it was because they let that guy get away."
"He's here to kick butt on his boys," Marco said, trying to sound tough. "They screwed up and-now he's here to make sure they don't do it again."
"It doesn't really matter why he's here," I pointed out. "He's here. And there are extra Hork-Bajir and the whole crowd is way nervous. One of the Hork-Bajir Draconed a deer that just happened to be walking by."
"A deer?" Cassie cried. "Those stupid jerks. Deer never hurt anyone."
"The plan was for you to sneak down to the water, morph as soon as you got there, and head out for the ship's water-intake pipe," I reminded them. "It was always a dangerous plan, but now it's impossible. Four of you walking down to the water, then morphing? That's not going to happen. Not as alert as these guys are now."
"Not with Visser Three-hanging around," Marco agreed.
"I disagree." It was Rachel. "I think we should still try this. Look, if we pull this off, if we manage to get inside that ship and disable the cloaking device while they're over the city . . .
this whole thing will be over."
Jake jumped in to support her. "We've always said, if there was just some way to show the world what was happening . . . well, this is the way. This would be way too big for the Controllers to cover up. I don't care what they are. Even if the mayor and the governor and the entire police force were Controllers, they couldn't cover up something like this."
"Jake, you're not listening. I'm telling you: There is no way you four can cruise down to the lake. You'll be dead before you take five steps!"
For a while no one spoke. It was Cassie who finally broke the silence. "There may be a way,"
she said. "See, a fish can survive out of water for a couple of minutes. And the fish we're morphing is small." She looked at me. "Small enough for a red-tailed hawk to carry."
Well. That idea got everyone's attention, I can tell you.
"Excuse me?" Marco shrilled. "Are you saying you want me to not just morph into a fish, but to morph into a fish out of water and then be carried through the air by a bird?"
Cassie bit her lip. "I'm just saying it could work."
"It would work," Jake said. He and Rachel exchanged a slightly insane look that said, "Okay, let's try it!"
"No way," I said. "You guys are-crazy. No offense, but this raises the danger level way beyond what it was to start with."