Visser, p.1
Visser, page 1
Dedicated to Maxx Leach and all the students at
Roosevelt School in Lubbock, Texas.
And to Michael and Jake
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
SNEAK PEEK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
“Honey?”
No answer. My husband was watching a game on television. He was preoccupied.
“Honey?” I repeated, adding more urgency to my tone of voice.
He looked over. Smiled sheepishly. “What’s up?”
“Marco’s fever is down. I think he’s basically over this thing. He’s asleep. Anyway, I was thinking of getting some fresh air.”
He muted the television. “Good idea. It’s tough when they’re sick, huh? Kids. He’s okay, though, huh?”
“It’s just a virus.”
“Yeah, well, take some time, you’ve been carrying the load. And if you’re going to the store —”
“Actually, I think I’ll go down to the marina.”
He laughed and shook his head. “Ever since you bought that boat … I think Marco has some competition as the favorite child in this household.” He frowned. “You’re not taking it out, are you? Looks kind of gloomy out.”
I made a smile. “Just want to make sure it’s well secured, check the ropes and all.”
He was back with the game. He winced at some error made by his preferred team. “Uh-huh. Okay.”
I stepped back, turned, and walked down the hall. The door to Marco’s room was ajar. I paused to look inside. I almost couldn’t do otherwise because the other voice in my head, the beaten-down, repressed human voice, was alive and screaming and screaming at me, begging me, pleading
Marco was still asleep. Or pretending to be. A good-looking kid, but small. Already, in his early adolescence, the stamp of failure was on him. He was too sweet-natured and trusting ever to make it very far in a hard world. A world that would only grow harder for humans.
Much harder, if I had my way.
I looked at him, one last time, as the voice in my head kept begging and begging.
But that was only a voice. The voice of someone who no longer had a say in what I did with this body, this life.
I left the house. I drove the car to the marina.
The wind was coming up. Earth really does have fascinating weather. So many different permutations. Blazing heat and brain-numbing cold; storms that bring violent winds or driving snows or rains so heavy they blot out all light.
I climbed out of the car and sauntered jauntily along to the boat, a small sailboat tied up halfway down the pier. Much bigger boats were tied up on either side. That was okay. I had all the boat I needed.
I climbed aboard and cast off the lines. I winched up the mainsail and took the tiller. I didn’t use the engine, not even for getting out of the marina. Anyone could guide a powerboat. It took skill to sail.
Sailing was one of the best things about being in a human. It was such a perfect blend of power and subtlety, bending to the inevitable and yet resisting great forces. Dangerous and exhilarating. You skimmed along between sea and sky, a part of each, trusting neither.
I raised more sail than was prudent and stood out toward the open sea. I would be seen sailing. And seen to be carrying too much sail. That was important. Humans need someone to blame for every mishap. There is no room for random chance in the limited human cosmology. So I was providing them with the culprit: Me.
“She went out in bad weather,” they would say. “Carried too much sail. Amateur sailor. Weekend sailor. No respect for the sea.” That’s what they would say, and they’d blame the victim and move on.
In an hour or so, once I was out of sight of land, I would lower my sails and wait for a Bug fighter to come lift me off the deck. The engine backwash of the Bug fighter would capsize the boat. Or I might put the Taxxon pilot to the test and see if he could ram the low-slung boat. That would puzzle the humans.
Either way, my body would never be found.
The husband, the son who belonged to the voice inside my head, they would think I had died.
The human woman named Eva, the husk, the human shell I lived in, would cease to exist as far as any human knew. I would be given the inevitable superstitious send-off. A ceremony, but there’d be no body to put in the grave.
Eva’s human mind would still be with me, of course. Still blubbering and weeping and begging, no doubt. But I had written the book on human infestation. I would have no difficulty controlling this woman.
I understood her, this mother-human. Understood her in ways neither she, nor anyone else, would ever be allowed to know.
The family had served me well, for a time, as I completed my knowledge of humans. But now I would have greater duties. Duties that would take me far from the dull life I’d accepted as a way to learn about our next conquest.
My time of lying low was over. The notice had at last come: I was promoted, leaping over so many desperately ambitious competitors to take the most powerful position short of membership on the Council of Thirteen.
I would spearhead the invasion of Earth. I would take charge of our greatest conquest. I would stand alone atop the Yeerk military hierarchy.
I was to become Visser One.
VISSER ONE
“Honored members of the Council of Thirteen, I am present at this trial under protest. I do not deny your right to hold me for trial. You are entitled to know anything and everything about my loyal service to the Empire. But that my inquisitor should be none other than my most relentless enemy, himself a traitor, is intolerable!”
I spoke to the holographic representation of the Council. Thirteen Yeerks in various host bodies: Nine Hork-Bajir, two Taxxons, and two whose bodies were so concealed that I could not guess at their form.
They were dressed in dark red robes, so dark they were almost black. They stood, motionless, held in place, suspended by gravity-neutral fields, fed by a continuous refined current of Kandrona rays.
The Hork-Bajir-Controllers wore a lightweight mesh beneath their robes to keep the wrist and arm blades from slicing through the robe’s fabric.
The two Taxxon-Controllers were bloated, monstrously inflated versions of the great centipedes. Both were attended by Gedds, ready with freshly killed meat to feed the eternal hunger that not even a Yeerk inside that feverish brain can control. Their ceremonial robes were as large as sails, wrapped around the raised front third of their bodies.
They were light-years away, of course. They would see me, my host face and body in three dimensions. They could also watch my vital signs, translated into universal equivalents. Blood pressure, heart rate, hormone production, all reduced to digital readouts a billion miles away. And they could, with a thought, call up whatever data had been compiled on specific events or locations or individuals.
They could also hear and see my inquisitor. They would hear his thought-speak voice — his host body’s normal mode of communication. His host body was the envy of the Yeerk Empire. For he alone, of all Yeerks, possessed an Andalite host.
He rested comfortably on four almost dainty hooves. His body was standard quadruped grazer: like an Earth deer or horse, or a Desbadeen limner.
He had an upper body similar to many species, but most similar, perhaps, to that of a human, with the symmetrical shoulders and hanging arms ending in multi-digit hands.
The face was mouthless, an Andalite oddity. Andalites eat by crushing and absorbing grasses through their hooves as they run. They communicate mind-to-mind.
There were three things that made the Andalites inherently formidable as enemies: their agile intelligence, their ability to shape thought-speak to either wide-band or private communication, and, of course, their faster-than-the-eye-can-see tails.
Many a careless Yeerk has died from the blade of an Andalite tail.
Beyond their impressive physical makeup there is the matter of Andalite technology. Specifically the morphing technology that allows them to absorb DNA from any animal source and then painlessly, and almost effortlessly, become that animal.
Visser Three remained silent as I complained. He was a fool, but not so great a fool that he would provoke the Council by trying to cut me off.
His eyes wore an alien smirk. He waited patiently. He had already won. I was his prisoner. This was his great moment.
“You will have plenty of time to make statements, Visser One,” a Council member said. I did not know who.
Visser Three, straining to sound obsequious, said,
“That was a temporary reduction in rank. This trial will determine whether that reduction is permanent. Or whether, indeed, Visser One is allowed to live. For now she will be referred to by her formal rank.”
Garoff? Was it Garoff speaking for the Council? I couldn’t tell. Nor could I be sure whether it was good news or bad that my mentor would be taking a leading role.
“Computer: the charges.”
In the Council’s chamber the computer read the charges against me. “The Yeerk, Edriss-Five-Six-Two, holding the rank of Visser One is charged with the following crimes: treason by incompetence, which carries a sentence of death by Dracon beam; treason by violation of established procedure, which carries a sentence of death by Dracon beam; treason by sympathy with a subject species, which carries a sentence of death by Kandrona starvation; treason by contact with the foul Andalite race, which carries a sentence of death by torture; treason by murder of subordinate Yeerks, which carries a sentence of exile to punishment duty.”
Five charges of treason. Four death sentences. My greatest fear was death by Kandrona starvation. And it was my most likely prospect. Unless I could outwit Visser Three.
“I’ll tell the truth,” I snapped.
“I deny. The charges are lies. Not only lies, but unintelligent lies. Typical of you, Visser Three.”
He smirked, patient, in no hurry, enjoying this beyond measure. His large main eyes — Andalite eyes — watched me. The two stalk eyes roamed here and there, checking the equipment, watching the ceremonial thirteen Hork-Bajir guards that stood at attention around our small, secure room.
I knew that even now Visser Three felt a measure of fear. But not of me. We were on Earth, and Earth has not been kind to Visser Three. A small guerilla band has bedeviled his efforts to follow through on the great conquest begun by me. Visser Three believes these guerillas to be Andalite survivors of their destroyed Dome ship.
I know differently. Yes, the group no doubt contains one or more Andalites. But it also contains humans. Humans who have, somehow, acquired morphing technology.
I showed nothing on my human face. I was no longer able to show much emotion on my human face. The left side of my head was burned almost beyond recognition, red and black and raw. My mouth was twisted from blows delivered while imprisoned.
I had been badly injured in a fall. A final, terrible battle between Visser Three and me. A battle that had been engineered, I later realized, by the so-called Andalite bandits, in a rather clever and ambitious attempt to have Visser Three and I kill each other.
The Visser’s threat was real. I knew that if the Council found against me, Visser Three would keep me in agony until I lost my sanity. But it could not be much worse than the last month of captivity. My broken bones, right leg, left arm and shoulder, ribs, and my burned flesh had been left untreated. All could be easily repaired. None had been.
I could not cut myself off entirely from the pain my host felt. Not without releasing my host altogether. She felt the pain, and so did I. But she did not share the deepest pain: Visser Three had kept me on the edge of Kandrona starvation. I was weak. Wracked with pain. Already in the bare, early stages of Kandrona starvation. Only a Yeerk can know that feeling.
My host, the human, Eva, had been emboldened by my weakness. I no longer had the strength to silence her voice inside my head. She taunted me. Distracted me. She hates me, of course.
I tried to ignore the voice. I had greater problems than a jeering host.
Liar. He knew I was within half a day of needing Kandrona rays. But he would not defeat me. No, not even now. I would tell my tale. Most of it.
I looked into the hologram, looked at each member of the Council in turn. And I began.
My name is Edriss-Five-Six-Two, of the Sulp Niar pool.
I will begin this story at a time in my career when I controlled a Hork-Bajir host body and held the rank of Sub-Visser Four-hundred-nine. My area of specialization was intelligence. Current assignment? Target acquisition.
I was part of a team that analyzed data from a wide variety of sources. Data that would, we hoped, lead us to what we all longed for so desperately: a Class-Five subject race.
I was young. Young to be a sub-visser, but already impatient to be more. And this job was surely not the path to greater things.
I was third in command at Olgin base, a dusty, irrelevant backwater of bare-bones buildings on the day–night line of a moon we’d actually purchased from the Skrit Na.
As the Council knows, the Skrit Na are useless as hosts, and not terribly threatening as foes. But there was no point in starting unprofitable wars, so rather than seize the base, we bought it. The price? A captured Andalite drone ship.
Cheap. And still we overpaid.
Olgin base was good for only one thing: Its Zero-space transit point made it convenient for quick data transmission from the widespread elements of the fleet, and from our two main planets: the Taxxon home world, and the Hork-Bajir home world.
Our own planet was then, as now, surrounded by orbiting Andalite warships. The day would come when we would retake our world and the pools that spawned us. But not yet. The Andalites were still too strong for us to risk a head-to-head, all-out conflict.
Before we could face the Andalites we needed a more numerous, more agile, more adaptable host. Gedds were clumsy and weak, with senses that were distorting and unreliable. The Taxxons were allies more than true hosts, and in any event, not even the most strong-willed Yeerk could control the insane, cannibalistic hunger of a Taxxon.
The Hork-Bajir had done well for us. They were naturally strong and dangerous. Clumsy for detail work, but the other strengths compensated.
As the Council knows, the problem with the Hork-Bajir was that there simply weren’t enough of them. The Andalites, those moral paragons, had exterminated most of the Hork-Bajir race rather than let it fall into our hands.
We had thousands of Hork-Bajir. We needed millions of hosts. My task — which seemed futile at the time — was to find those hosts.
Anyone at Olgin base with the slightest influence, the most tenuous connection to a highly placed officer, managed to get reassigned. Yeerks were leaving all the time. And replacements, poor, unwanted trash for the most part, were being sent to us.
One of my duties was to indoctrinate the new recruits. I started as they de-shipped. The ship berths were not a pleasant environment. Cargo was constantly in motion, by puller and pusher, by strap, and even carried on the backs of Gedds.
“There are five classes of alien,” I said, eyeing the dozen Gedds, Hork-Bajir, and Taxxons lined up before me. “Who can name the five?”
Several started to answer, but I held up my hand, indicating they should remain silent.
“I should say … who can name them if I mention that the mangling of a single word, or the misstatement of a single fact will result in your being fed to Taxxons?”
This was my little joke, of course. It is nearly impossible to get a coherent sentence out of a Gedd mouth. And flatly impossible with a Taxxon who can, at best, hiss and sputter in its own language. Meaning no disrespect to the Council members who hold Taxxon hosts.
Hork-Bajir are the best communicators, of course, despite their brains’ innate quirk of confusing various languages.
