The Andalite Chronicles, page 9
Till that moment I’d been too busy trying to stay alive to really think about what had happened to Arbron. Maybe we’d never exactly been best friends, but it was still horrible to look at his foul Taxxon body and think that this was how he would remain. To look into those emotionless red jelly eyes and realize that he was in there, looking back at me.
And I knew what he was feeling, now that the battle was done. The terror. The despair. The awful Taxxon hunger.
I turned the Skrit Na ship around and headed back toward the rushing line of daylight.
I said.
I turned my main eyes toward Arbron. I knew that inside there was a scared Andalite aristh. But what I actually saw was the nightmare worm. What I saw was the sloppy red eyes, the round, gasping, eternally hungry mouth.
For a moment that seemed to stretch and stretch, we stared at each other. I don’t know what was going through Arbron’s mind right then. I don’t know what conclusions he’d reached. I only know what he did.
“Sssrrrreeeeyyyyyaaahhh!” he screamed in his slithering, high-pitched Taxxon voice. He reared back, practically laying the upper third of his body horizontal. And then he slammed down on me.
Slammed his upper body down, red mouth open wide.
I could have killed him. He knew that, of course. He knew that no Taxxon could hope to outfight an Andalite. But I could not kill him. Not even if that’s what he wanted.
I dodged to my right.
He slammed hard into the instrument panel. Sparks erupted!
He swept his upper body toward me, hoping to slam me against the bulkhead and stun me.
I leaped inside his reach and struck!
SLASH! Two of his needle legs went rolling across the floor.
SLASH! And two more legs were gone.
Arbron sagged. The front part of his body could no longer be held up. He lay, fully prone, a huge, helpless worm.
But I was busy. The control panel had been half-wrecked. The ship was bucking and yawing. It was unstable. I reduced power. We had shot across the line into twilight. But I couldn’t see into the deep shadows between the mountain peaks.
I didn’t want to hear anymore. I couldn’t. I had to focus. I had to land the ship or we’d both die. I had to shut Arbron up.
I swept my stalk eyes around the bridge. Where would the Skrit Na keep weapons? There. A green panel marked with Skrit Na script.
I stretched my left arm to reach the panel. Popped it open. Yes. A handheld Dracon beam. Old and dusty and probably badly maintained, like most Skrit Na things.
I found the power setting. I set it at the lowest intensity.
Suddenly, I knew what Arbron would do. He couldn’t rise up, but he could still scuttle forward. He came straight for me, rushing and slithering, as if he were aiming his round red mouth at me.
He was trying to force me to shoot him. To shoot him with the Dracon beam set on maximum! But I was too fast for him. I twisted the dial to ten. I fired.
And just as my finger was tightening on the trigger … I realized Arbron had outsmarted me. He’d lied, and I’d fallen for it. Arbron had always been a better student than me. He was a qualified exodatologist. He knew alien systems far better than me.
I tried to stop. But my finger squeezed. The Dracon beam fired. On maximum power.
But by chance, or maybe by some desperate, too-late twitch of my finger, the beam missed Arbron by a millimeter.
Instead, it blew a two-foot hole through the hull of the ship.
After that, everything was noise and spinning and pain and confusion.
I woke up.
I was on my side, lying in the dirt.
I looked up at a night sky. Stars, galaxies, three tiny moons.
Where was I?
I stood up. Every muscle in my body ached. Muscles I didn’t even know I had ached. My hooves tasted nothing but bare dirt. My stalk eyes swiveled quickly to look around, but I realized one eye was blinded.
Then I saw the ship, the Skrit Na transport. It was still more or less in one piece. I must have been able to land it. Somehow. I couldn’t remember much of those last few minutes. It was all chaos in my brain.
I forced myself to go over the facts. I was on the Taxxon home world. I was approximately four hundred miles from the spaceport. Loren and Chapman were in the hands of the Yeerks. Alloran … no one knew.
Arbron had tried to trick me into killing him. That’s what I remembered best.
No answer. I trudged wearily over to the Skrit Na ship. I saw the two-foot hole made by the Dracon beam. And then I saw the way the engines had been ripped half off. The ship would never fly again.
I climbed into the wreckage. My second stalk eye was starting to clear a little. I felt it and realized it had just been covered with mud.
Inside the ship I called again.
Something was missing.
Of course! The two Skrit cocoons. They must have been knocked loose.
The door to the freight hold was blown open. I went in. The same green emergency lighting illuminated a bizarre scene. In the hold were boxes and crates piled in wild disarray. Many had broken open on impact. They spilled an amazing mass of alien-looking objects. Frozen, preserved animals; bundles of the artificial skin that Loren and Chapman wore; glass objects that seemed to contain liquids; odd, antiquated electronic equipment; small objects that looked like hundreds of rectangular sheets of paper glued together on one side; and a long crate of what I could almost swear were primitive weapons.
All things that the Skrit Na had looted from Earth. Loren would know what they were, no doubt.
But in addition to all the small objects, there were two much larger things. One was a shiny yellow-painted creation with four black wheels.
The other object was the most powerful thing in the history of the galaxy.
It looked like nothing more than a smooth, off-white sphere. It was perhaps ten feet in diameter. Perfectly smooth. Unmarked. You would never know what it was if you hadn’t seen the power readings. Invisible to the eye, it spread its grid down through the very fabric of time-space.
The Time Matrix.
I found I had stopped breathing. I could barely imagine the power I was staring at. To move a ship into Zero-space took more power than a medium-sized star. To move anything through time took ten times that power. The power of ten suns. All somehow contained in that off-white sphere.
But I knew he wasn’t there. He must have been thrown clear of the ship, just as I had been. Only I hadn’t seen him outside. And now it occurred to me that something else was missing, too. The active Skrit.
Both Skrit cocoons and the active Skrit were gone. Along with Arbron.
I turned slowly away from the Time Matrix. It had a hold over me. It drew my stalk eyes back to it, even as I walked away.
I went back outside.
The light of the moons and stars was too dim to see clearly. But I had the impression I was in a narrow valley between tall, almost clifflike mountains. Where could Arbron have gotten to? Had he fallen from the doomed Skrit Na ship earlier? He could have ended up slamming into one of the mountainsides.
I hated to even imagine that.
I went back inside the cargo hold and picked up a handful of paper sheaves. Some were larger and had pictures. By the dim green light I instantly recognized that the pictures were of humans.
I flipped through pictures of humans doing things I could not understand. But then there was one picture I understood immediately. It showed a marvelously tall waterfall. The waterfall crashed into a pool surrounded by trees, all of them green. Overhead was a blue sky.
Two humans were smiling and sticking tiny white cylinders into their mouths.
There was human writing beneath the picture. I don’t read human very well. But I was sure it was a poem to the beauty revealed in the picture.
The grass there looked sweet.
It would be a fine thing to run there. To run with Loren and forget everything that had happened. Forget that I was alone on a planet of evil, my only companion probably dead, my prince lost.
I turned to other pictures. I saw small, strange pictures of humans doing nothing but smiling. And there were pictures of human technology. A flying machine of some sort. Humans holding long rods that spit fire. What seemed to be hideous cities. And then, to my delight, a picture of an actual human spacecraft.
It took me a few seconds to understand what it was. It seemed to be a chemical rocket. An actual chemical rocket!
But the pictures that drew my gaze were the ones of beautiful beaches beside blue seas. And mountains topped with white. And rushing white-water streams surrounded by tall green trees.
The trees were all very similar. Not as beautiful as the trees I knew. Still, the pictures spoke of a lovely world, filled with delicious green grass and cool water.
That alien landscape of Earth took me away from the drab horror of the Taxxon world. I wondered if Chapman might be from the jagged human cities. Was that why he was so much harsher than Loren? Was Loren from the beautiful green country where smiling humans stuck white cylinders in their mouths?
I guess I fell asleep looking at that picture. I awoke with lingering traces of awful dreams chasing through my brain.
There was light … natural light from the Taxxon sun.
I ran outside. As I had guessed, I was in an incredibly steep valley. And now I could see tracks in the orange dirt. The marks of dozens of needle-sharp legs. Taxxon tracks!
The tracks came right up to the ship. Had they come while I was asleep? No. I could see my own tracks from the night before. My tracks were over the Taxxon tracks.
Arbron! They were his tracks. Had to be. And yet … No, there had been more than one Taxxon. Three … four others. Five sets altogether.
And then I saw two additional signs. A set of wandering, insectlike tracks, and the evidence of something large being dragged away.
I glanced at the spot where I’d been lying unconscious. They had to have seen me, smelled me. And yet I was still alive.
I reeled back and fell down. The Taxxons had taken Arbron. I knew what Taxxons did with prisoners.
And yet why hadn’t they taken me? And the Time Matrix? Surely Taxxon-Controllers would not have done that.
I recalled Sub-Visser Seven’s reference to Mountain Taxxons — Taxxons who refused to submit to Yeerk control. And I felt just the faintest glimmer of hope. If these had been Yeerk-controlled Taxxons, they’d have taken the Time Matrix. And me.
Should I try to follow the tracks to Arbron? No. I had to be logical. Whatever type of Taxxon he’d fallen in with, their hunger would almost certainly seal his doom. And the doom of the poor Skrit Na, too.
Alloran might still be alive. He was my prince. My duty was to get back to him. Tell him about the Time Matrix and Arbron. Somehow. But the Taxxon spaceport was hundreds of miles away, across burning sands.
Then … one of the human pictures I’d seen came back to me. It had shown two smiling humans sitting in something very much like the bright yellow machine in the cargo hold.
I went back to the ship. Yes, this bright yellow machine had four wheels. And you could easily see how humans might sit in it. It had a name in chrome letters: “Mustang.” Naturally, I had no idea what that meant.
I set to work enlarging the hole in the side of the cargo hold. Then I removed the chairs in the machine. I discovered that I could fit inside the machine if I removed the flimsy cloth top. I stared long and hard at the control panel. The computer was tiny and had knobs you could twist. But at first all it did was make static noises.
Then I discovered an actual tape drive! Astoundingly primitive. I pushed the buttons on the small keypad and twisted the knobs again, and to my utter amazement, the computer began to play music.
“I can’t get no … satisfaction!” it screamed.
I quickly turned it down. What kind of race would use a computer to play screaming sounds?
It took twenty minutes more for me to realize that a notched brass insert could be twisted. And when I twisted it …
RRRR RRRRR RRRRRRRR PUH PUH PUH VROOOOM!
The noise was amazing!
It was an actual chemical engine! Something from a thousand years ago! Ridiculously primitive, and yet I found when I pressed my forehoof on a pedal in the floor, the engine roared.
VVVRRRRROOOOM! VVVRROOOOOM! VVVROOOOOOM!
It was primitive, all right. But it vibrated in a most satisfying way. And I liked it.
I have run mag-hover trucks.
I have flown Bug fighters.
I have flown Skrit Na raiders at three thousand miles per hour in atmosphere.
But I had never experienced anything more exhilarating than racing down the valley and out across the open Taxxon desert in my Mustang. It only went a hundred miles per hour, but with the wind in your face, whipping your fur, bending your stalk eyes back, it was certainly a wild ride.
But everything was going wrong.
I was racing across the Taxxon desert in a human vehicle toward probable doom. But with the wind in my face, and the music in my ears mingling with the loud roar of the engine, I didn’t feel so badly.
I had gathered up some of the other human objects the Skrit Na had taken. The writing sheets with pictures. Some of the machines that looked like weapons. And some of the glass bottles containing liquid.
I broke several of the bottles before I figured out how to open them. After that, I quickly determined that they contained water-based liquids. I poured the liquids into a shallow pan, and was able to stick in one hoof to drink as I drove.
DR. PEPPER, the bottles had said. I figured that was human writing for “bubbling brown water.”
For a while I just put Arbron out of my mind. I put Alloran out of my mind. And I pictured myself with Loren, driving in my Mustang across the green grass of Earth. Wind in my face. Bubbling brown water running up my hoof.
As I drove, I tried to come up with a plan. One thing was for sure: An Andalite in a Mustang was going to be just slightly obvious. I would need stealth. But I would not morph to Taxxon again.
Not ever.
That’s when the ground beneath my wheels simply opened up.
FFFFWWWUUUMMPPP!
BOOM! BOOM! RUMBLERUMBLERUMBLE!
The Mustang tumbled and rattled down a steep, rough slope. A dirt ramp that led straight down into darkness.
I took my hoof off the accelerator pedal. I tried to reach the key to turn off the engine. But the vibration was too severe.
I slid and rattled and rolled in my human machine, down, down, down into the ground. Down and down. And then I slid a halt.
SCRRUUMMPPFFF!
The only sound was the noise of the engine and the weird human moaning that passed for music.
“… gimme, gimme, gimme the honky-tonk blues!”
I turned off the music.
I was in darkness, but not the absolute darkness I expected. This darkness still afforded sight. There was light enough for my main eyes to see, after they’d had a few seconds to adjust.
I was in a vast underground cavern. Dominating the center of the cavern was a sort of hill or small mountain. It was this mountain that glowed. It glowed a dim but unmistakable red.
