Minutes? I laughed. Who cared about minutes?
"Look, guys? I know you think the dolphin mind hasn't affected you, but it has. You need to get a grip. You have a reason for being here."
Reason? What was that?
"You're supposed to be looking for ... well, for something," Tobias said. "Something unusual. An Andalite spaceship or something."
Yes, he was right. He was definitely right. But would it be fun? Would it be a game?
"Find the spaceship. Cool," Rachel said. "l bet I can find it first!"
"No way!" Jake said instantly. "l'll find it."
"Where is it? Let's go look!" Marco said.
"Good grief," Tobias said. "You're like a bunch of five-year-olds." But I was too distracted to care. "Hey. Can you guys do this?" I concentrated, and suddenly, from someplace in my forehead, came a series of loud, very rapid clicks, almost like loud static.
"Whoa! What was that?"
Then, to my total surprise, I heard something in those clicks. It was weird. It was kind of like hearing, only not. The clicking noises had hit something, far off in deeper water. I sort of felt the sounds as they came back to me, like scattered echoes.
There was a universe of information in that echo. Some of that information made me uneasy.
"You guys?" I said. "l know this is crazy, but I feel like there's something out there.
Something ... I don't know. But I don't like it."
The others immediately began firing off the clicking noise that is the dolphin's underwater radar. It's called echolocation.
"Yeah," Marco said. "Now I see it. I mean, I don't see it, but you know what I mean." I searched in my dolphin mind, deep down in the places where instinct had been hidden be neath layers of intelligence.
34 Then a picture just popped into my consciousness.
"l know!" I cried, as if I had just won a contest. " It's a shark!" Suddenly we weren't playing anymore. The others had all found the same instinct in themselves. The echolocation indicated that there was a large shark nearby.
And we knew one thing for sure. We didn't like sharks.
35 Chapter 10
"You know, I hate to sound like the only sensible person - so to speak - " Tobias said, "but you aren't here to fight sharks!"
"He's right," I agreed. "Dolphins don't attack sharks unless the sharks attack first."
"Wait ... I'm getting more echoes," Rachel interrupted. "There's more than one shark. And there's something bigger, too."
I reached out with my echolocation sense and "felt" the sea ahead of me. "You're right," I said. "Several sharks. And a great one."
"A what?" Tobias asked.
I was confused. What did I mean? The words great one had just popped into my mind. "l mean there's a whale. A whale. Being attacked by sharks."
"A great one being attacked?" Marco asked. He sounded upset. It was strange, because we were all upset. More than we should have been.
"You guys do what you want," Rachel said. " I'm going in."
" Oh , there's a big surprise," Tobias said with weary affection.
The four of us lanced forward, faster than ever, toward the whale in distress.
"l see them," Tobias reported from the sky above. "Straight ahead of you. Looks like four, maybe five sharks and a big - really, really big - whale. Did I mention big? Wow. Big." We were steaming through the water when I caught sight of my first shark. He was bigger than me, maybe twelve feet long, with faint vertical stripes.
He was too excited by the hunt to notice me. Until it was too late. With every bit of speed and power I could get from my tail, I rammed the tiger shark in his gill slits.
WHOOOOMP!
It was like hitting a brick wall. My beak was strong, but the shark was made of steel or some thing.
I fell back, dazed. But as I tried to collect myself I saw that a trail of blood was billowing from the shark's gills.
I swam beneath him, and then I saw the huge shape of the whale. He was a humpback, more than forty feet long. Each of his long, barnacle-encrusted flukes was bigger than me.
He was trying to surface to breathe, but sharks were attacking, tearing at the soft, vulnerable flesh of his mouth.
It made me angry. Very angry.
36 Suddenly, from the murky depths, Jake and Rachel zoomed upward, like missiles aimed at the sharks.
WHOOMP! Rachel hit her target.
Jake's shark twisted just in time. Jake scraped across the shark's sandpaper skin, and before he could get clear, the shark was after him.
"Jake! He's on your tail!"
"l got him!"
"Look out! Conning up on your left, Marco!"
They were as fast as we were, as maneuver-able as we were, and the sharks had one terrifying advantage - they did not know fear.
"He's on me! He's on me!"
"Aaaaarrrrggghh!"
"Marco!"
"l can't see! Where is he?"
"Cassie! Below you, lookout! Look out!"
It was no longer a game. I had gone rushing into a fight full of confidence and determined to help the whale. But now I was in a war. The sharks were killing machines. They seemed to be nothing but armored skin and razor-sharp fins and wide jaws with row after row of serrated teeth.
The water was boiling with twisting, turning, speeding sharks and us dolphins, locked in a high-speed battle to the death.
It suddenly occurred to me that we might lose. We might be killed.
I might be killed.
The water was dark with blood, still billowing from the shark I had hammered.
Suddenly two of the sharks turned away. They just turned and swam away. At first, I didn't know why.
Then I saw that they were following the shark I had wounded.
They were following the trail of blood.
They were at the limits of my sight when they struck. They ripped into the injured shark with wild, uncontrolled fury.
37 The last shark turned from the battle and went after them. Robbed of his meal of whale meat, he would feast on his brother instead.
"Everyone okay?" Jake asked.
"l have some cuts, but I'm okay," I said.
"Same here," Rachel said. She sounded tired. I guess I did, too. I felt exhausted and drained.
The fight had probably only lasted two minutes from beginning to end. But it had been a long two minutes.
"Marco?"
" I...I think I'm hurt," he said.
I looked for him. He was drifting in the water, almost motionless, twenty yards away. We all swam over, crowding around him.
Then I saw the wound. I think I would have screamed, if I could have. His tail had almost been bitten off. It was hanging by a few jagged threads. It was useless.
We were miles out in the ocean. And Marco could not hope to swim back.
38 Chapter 11
"He's going to die if we don't do something," Rachel cried.
"Cassie?" Jake asked. "What do we do?"
" I...I don't know!"
"Cassie, you're the closest thing we have to an animal expert," Jake said urgently.
But I wasn't feeling at all like an expert. I was feeling like a fool. This was all my fault. It had been my decision to go ahead. I was the one.