Chapter Text
<So many species on this planet,> Temrash 114 said to himself. <So many balances and connections. Everything preying on everything else. Every power is checked by some other power. Every advantage is canceled by some disadvantage.>
<Yeah. Earth. It's a tough neighborhood.>
— The Capture p. 156
“Remind me again what I’m doing here?” I said tiredly.
Jake didn’t answer. He was staring intently out the window of the Army transport jeep, watching up ahead for whatever it was we’d been called out to look at. Cassie glanced over at me long enough to give me a small shrug.
It was Marco who twisted around from the front seat of the Humvee to grin at me. “Uncle Sam said jump, we said how high.”
“Yeah, okay, that explains you three,” I said. “But I’m not even a member of the Teen Titans, so why did I get invited along on this little expedition?”
This time Marco turned all the way around, unbuckling his seat belt to kneel up on the seat and glare at me. “Teen Titans? We are so the Avengers.”
“The Avengers are a group of educated well-funded adults with government sanctioning, day jobs, and actual uniforms,” I pointed out. “The Teen Titans are a group of idiot kids in garish spandex.”
Marco opened his mouth to argue and then shut it again, conceding the point.
The truck hit a bump and Marco almost tumbled off the seat. Jake tensed even further, which I didn’t think was possible. He’d started out the trip drumming his fingers against the armrest until Cassie had given him a pointed look and he’d cut it out. Now he was bouncing one leg in place, twitching any time there was a sudden noise like a six-year-old on a sugar high.
I was sitting very, very still. We all dealt with the tension in different ways.
Marco kept squirming in his seat and demanding to know if we were “there yet.” Cassie was watching the rest of us with uncomfortable closeness, and mostly keeping whatever it was she saw to herself. I couldn’t tell if the guy the Army had sent to drive us to the crash site (and that was the sum total of the detail we’d gotten: it was a crash site) thought we were a bunch of immature idiots or was still too intimidated by the Animorphs to be judging anyone. Then again, maybe he was just a fellow ex-host with the poker face to match.
Either way, he didn't say a word even as he pulled off the highway and onto a side road—and turned from there to a narrow dirt track. The dirt road took us through the woods (Jake watched the tree tops closely the entire time as if expecting us to be attacked at any second) and past two different sets of guards with very large guns before finally pulling up in front of a large tent strung up in a rough clearing in the woods.
It was guarded by a bored-looking young man with a pistol on his belt. The jeep pulled to a stop, and several more men in crew cuts and uniforms emerged. Most of them were armed as well.
“Interesting,” Cassie murmured as we all climbed out.
“What?” I asked.
She shook her head fractionally, glancing at the group of men in uniform who were even now shaking hands with Jake. Whatever else it was that she didn't want to say, I got that message loud and clear: she had noticed something, but she didn't trust the people who’d brought us here enough to mention it in front of them.
Interesting indeed.
“Thank you for coming,” one of the Army guys said to me, moving down the line. His handshake was rock-hard with callouses and felt like it was about half a degree shy of breaking every bone in my hand. "Second Lieutenant Seth Clearwater."
“Um, hi,” I said.
“Seriously, though,” Marco interrupted, gesturing to me. “How did he get invited along?”
“Captain Nasland felt it wouldn't be appropriate to send in a response team comprised entirely of individuals under the age of eighteen,” Lieutenant Clearwater said. “Not without at least one legal adult along to supervise.”
“You’re telling me…?” I cocked a thumb at Jake. “Am I his babysitter?”
The guy with the most uniform decorations—probably Captain Nasland—stepped forward to give me a stern once-over. “There are regulations in place for a reason, son. And since we don’t have anyone morph-capable in our unit…” He shot a glare at Jake as if Jake was the one who’d written the laws about who could and couldn’t morph. “You were the first person who was available. You have a strong history of working with law enforcement, a clean legal record, and...” He paused for a second. “We have the utmost confidence in your abilities.”
In other words, he thought I could control Jake. Which was adorable, really.
“Since we’ve been hopelessly incompetent any time in the past we’ve tried to do something without a legal adult along,” Cassie muttered.
“I understand you have to do this by the book,” Jake said. There was a hint of irony in his tone, and I could guess why. Right now they were behaving very cloak-and-dagger about whatever had crashed in the woods that they needed us to look at.
“If you’re not comfortable with leading this expedition,” Captain Nasland told me, “the alien abduction expert we have coming in has some experience with child care, so you can always opt out.”
“Child care?” Marco squawked.
“I’m sure I can keep them from putting forks in wall sockets,” I said dryly.
Jake was wearing one of those long-suffering expressions our mom always got when she thought her kids were behaving like idiots but knew she’d only make the situation worse by saying anything. “Can you please just show us what we’re here to respond to?” he asked.
Captain Nasland nodded sharply. “Of course, sir. This way, please. Do you understand that you are not to tell anyone else, human or otherwise, about what you’re going to see here?”
“We already signed the nondisclosure agreements in the car on the way over,” Cassie said. “We understand.”
We all followed Captain Nasland through the huge tent where there were dozens of people running around looking at computing equipment that ran the whole range from PCs to yeerk technology scanners. Most of the screens were showing numbers or squiggly lines that meant nothing to me, but there was one in the corner that showed a satellite readout of the entire area, with a large area in the middle marked in red: “No Fly Zone. No Satellite Photography.” There were also a lot of hastily-thrown drop cloths covering shapes of what looked like yeerk scanners and weapons, doubtless repurposed off downed Bug fighters.
As we walked through the room, most of the soldiers straightened up, either shooting glances at our little group or outright slipping into parade rest. It was easy to forget, given how much time they spent bickering about which Nintendo console was the best and whether Trent Reznor was a better singer than Dexter Holland, but I was currently walking between the two most-decorated veterans in the history of the United States and just behind the girl projected to become the next U.N. ambassador to the nation. If you actually counted their honorary titles—not that Jake ever did—then they were probably the three highest-ranked people in the room.
Captain Nasland walked clear through the tent without stopping or looking around. When he held open the cloth opening on the other side, Cassie whistled softly.
I understood why: there was an entire building through there. It had plastic walls and a few temporary generators hooked up to the outside visible through its windows, but it also had a floor and ceiling and electricity. If this was all a temporary installation, it was a very elaborate one.
And the tent, as Cassie had probably already guessed, was an illusion. Designed to make this whole operation look more haphazard than it actually was from the outside.
“Day before yesterday?” Cassie asked Jake in an undertone.
“Yesterday afternoon, maybe,” Jake whispered back. “If they worked all night. Since I’m guessing this is a priority, it’s probably a safe bet to say they did.”
It wasn’t hard to figure out what they were talking about: they were trying to determine when the crash had occurred, if the military had had time to put something like this structure in place. The phone call that had summoned Jake and I to the Santa Barbara Municipal Airport where we’d met the military transport had made it sound as though the crash had arisen suddenly, at some point in the past hour, and as though Jake was the first call they’d made.
Captain Nasland gestured, holding open a second door, and we walked through one by one. As we passed under the doorway it let out a cheerful little beep. I flinched. We’d just walked through a concealed Gleet BioFilter.
We walked down a long hallway, hung a left, and passed several more doors. Jake was chewing his lip, gaze scanning over every surface and repeatedly peering through the translucent ceiling. Probably trying to calculate how big the building was.
“And that’s another thing,” Marco said, as if picking up in the middle of a conversation. “What alien abduction expert are they calling? How are we not experts in alien abductions already? I’ve been abducted by yeerks, I’ve been abducted by helmacrons, I don’t know if that whole incident on Leeran counts as being abducted by andalites, but if it does—”
Captain Nasland pulled open the door to the outside, and Marco abruptly stopped talking.
Cassie became the first one to step into the clearing on the far side, but the rest of us weren’t far behind.
I kind of thought I’d seen it all by this point. Assumed that the part of me left over from that kid who’d watched Star Wars so many times our VHS tapes wore out was far too jaded to find a crashed alien ship at all impressive.
I was wrong.
The ship was lying on its side in the dirt, partially flattened by the impact but still more than large enough to loom over us. Like a spinning top with a nearly hundred-foot diameter, it had come to rest on one rounded edge with the far end tilted toward the sky. It was an eerie shade of silver-grey, reflective and distorting in a way that no Earth metal ever would be.
Once we were out in the open, it was obvious that the clearing we were standing in had not been a clearing before the impact. Trees had exploded outward in every direction from the crash site as if there had been an enormous blast of force—one that had left the ship itself strangely untouched.
And then there was the fact that it was unmistakably a flying saucer.
Not just saucer-shaped. Encircled by the same rows of multicolored lights the fighter pilots described in the old reports. Atmosphere-scarred from where not too long ago it had been moving at incredible speeds just over the ground. Equipped with tractor beams and a ramp that folded outward from the bottom like some old World War II battle ship. It looked like a UFO straight out of a science fiction story in a way that the dozens of alien ships I’d actually been on never had.
In the low light of the forest and the temporary base's generators, the apparition towered over the lower structures around. The edge far above our heads formed a curving ceiling; the far end had dug into the dirt and kicked up black-burned grass all around.
“Then again,” Marco said, “Maybe you should’ve skipped the Animorphs and called Agent Scully instead.” His voice was hushed. He must have felt the same uneasy sense of simultaneous familiarity and wrongness that I did.
“Agent Mulder,” Jake corrected absently. He didn’t look away from the flying saucer. “Scully’s the cynic who keeps ignoring the evidence of aliens in favor of sticking to her outdated superstitions.”
“Skrit Na,” Cassie said.
Jake finally looked away from the ship to shoot her a questioning glance.
Cassie gestured to the saucer. “They’re the only species I know of that uses ships like this. Most of the ones who make it to other worlds are either scavengers or scientists, looking to see without being seen themselves. There was an incident that the U.N. had to deal with where Skrit Na tried to kidnap a hork-bajir and Toby called me to help the whole community get protection under the law. I only know what was in the official report, which… wasn’t much.”
It was more than I knew. I’d heard the name before—or, well, Essa 412 had heard the name before—and that was about it.
“So they might be hostile to American interests?” Captain Nasland said.
Marco shot him a withering look. “If they know what American interests are I’ll be impressed.”
We stared at the ship for another long moment.
“Judging from the satellite photography of the area, it crashed late yesterday morning.” It was a different soldier who spoke this time. He was shorter than average but had more than enough muscle mass to make up for it. “Simon Grace,” he added. “Staff Sergeant.”
Cassie was the one who took the initiative to shake his hand. “Cassie Day. Clueless civilian.”
“I’m sure that’s not true, ma’am,” the sergeant said, smiling shyly. “You’ve, uh, certainly clocked more field time than I have.”
She laughed, glancing away. “It’s not as though I’ve been trained or anything.”
"Still, alien ships have to be old hat for you," he said.
Cassie shrugged. "Yeah, I've seen a few."
“Has anyone tried to talk to them yet?” I asked loudly, mostly for the purpose of interrupting them. I could practically see Jake’s eyes turning green, and wanted to make sure he didn’t have time to say something he’d regret.
“We tried talking over the loudspeaker,” Sergeant Grace said. “But…” He gave me an apologetic smile.
But they probably didn't have any equipment capable of producing thought speech. Or a Galard-English translator. And they probably knew enough to realize that without those things any attempt at communication was essentially useless. There was even an off chance that the Skrit Na inside the ship could hear and understand spoken English, but just had no way of responding in any way humans could pick up.
“Our scanners initially reported two, maybe three complex life forms inside,” the sergeant continued.
That didn't necessarily tell us anything. “Life form scanners are crappy and unreliable,” I pointed out.
At least, the ones that humans would have been able to inherit or reverse-engineer from yeerks would be. The andalites had far better scanners, but they weren’t sharing.
Marco gave Sergeant Grace a sharp look. “Initially reported two or three life forms?"
Sergeant Grace moistened his lips, glancing over to the door of the complex. The officer standing there, a severe-looking woman with hard cheekbones and black hair caged in an unforgiving bun, frowned at him. Finally, after looking Marco over carefully, she nodded once, and Sergeant Grace turned back around.
“That number dropped from three to two in the first ten minutes while we were trying to calibrate a reliable reading,” Sergeant Grace admitted. “We wanted to try and overcome the design problems, so we kept taking readings over the next twelve hours..."
“And the number dropped from two to one to zero?” Marco said coldly.
Sergeant Grace's mouth flattened. He glanced away.
Marco snorted. “And meanwhile you guys, what? Sat outside and banged your sensors against the wall and chalked it up to reading errors? Twiddled your thumbs and debated whether to call your mommies and ask for permission to look inside?”
“At the time we had no reason to believe the pattern wasn’t from an equipment error.” The dark-haired officer stepped forward from the doorway, her mouth set in a stiff frown. “As Mr. Berenson said, life form scanners are notoriously subject to misreadings.”
“What have you been doing for the past twelve hours, then?” I said.
The woman leveled a cold look at me, expression hard enough that I regretted my insolence. Unlike everyone else here she was wearing a business suit, not a uniform. Still, there was no doubt that she was the one with rank around here; she had the posture of a soldier and the military people kept glancing at her for approval.
“That’s classified,” Sergeant Grace said, after a long enough pause to get awkward.
“Okay, since you've had a look around, what else do we know so far?” Jake asked, staring hard at the ship.
Sergeant Grace cleared his throat. “Well, sir—“
Jake held up a hand, turning to give him a small smile. “Sorry, I wasn't actually talking to you.”
<Engine’s still on.> The red-tailed hawk perched on the edge of the clearing took off, fluttering in to land on top of the ship. <Sounds like it’s working fine, from what little I know about how z-space engines are supposed to sound.>
“You’re saying that it probably didn’t crash because of a malfunction,” Cassie said. If she was as surprised by Tobias’s presence as I was, she didn't show it.
Tobias flared his feathers, a human shrug in bird form. <Not one that I can detect. It looks like it’s just been sitting here idling since yesterday. Lights are on, life support’s going. No sign of damage that didn't come from the crash itself, and even that’s not much.>
“So maybe it was just a shitty landing?” I said. There wasn’t much hope in my voice. If something—or some one—had caused everyone on board that ship to be suddenly unable to pilot it, and now was loose here on Earth...
Three detectable complex life forms, then two, then one, then zero. That didn't sound like a parking accident.
<There’s a dead Na visible through the cockpit window,> Tobias said flatly. <No other signs of life. No sound of anyone moving around inside that I can hear.>
I gave up on that hope. “So we’re back to assuming that everyone on board is dead.”
“Good of you to join us, by the way,” Marco said to Tobias. So at least everyone except me hadn’t been expecting him.
<There was nothing on pay-per-view, and I was in the area anyway,> he said.
“Do you normally hang around No-One-to-Hear-You-Scream, Nevada?” Marco asked, squinting up at him. “Because I for one am getting hives being this far from civilization.”
<So I was rubbernecking ‘cause I saw the ship go down,> Tobias admitted. <Sue me. I should have figured they’d bring you lot in.>
“What time?” Jake said.
Tobias looked over, fixing him with a laser stare.
“You said you saw it crash,” Cassie clarified. “What time did it happen?”
<Oh, uh, a little before noon yesterday. It’s been a tent city of twitchy dudes with guns around here ever since.> Tobias shifted in place, looking down at the ship. <No signs of life from inside the whole time.>
“Okay. That’s bad, but…” Jake walked away toward the side of the ship that was ground into the dirt, looking up at the still-sealed exit ramp. “If it’s designed to travel through space it has to be airtight. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to breathe, right?”
“Your grasp of physics is just downright uncanny, Big Jake,” Marco drawled.
Jake ignored him. “So that means that at least nothing has gone in or come… oh.”
I walked quickly down to where he was standing. Cassie and Marco weren’t far behind. The hull of the ship had been split open on impact; the jagged crack was maybe two inches wide in the middle and a good four feet long.
“So now we’re all really hoping that there wasn’t a killer virus on board,” I said dryly.
Marco shrugged. “Nobody here has died yet."
“Incubation periods can last for weeks,” Cassie pointed out. She was leaning toward the crack, examining the edges closely.
“Oh,” Jake said again.
Cassie was running her fingers along the jagged edges where the metal had broken. She sniffed the air and grimaced.
“Careful,” I said. “Assuming that’s standard atmosphere-vacuum coating, if you cut yourself on it you’ll get the nastiest case of heavy metal poisoning.” I’d seen it happen with more than one human-controller cut by a broken piece of Bug fighter: the injured limb would swell and blacken, and the host would be dead within days. The yeerk, too, if the visser in charge at the time determined that the accident could have been prevented.
“Yeah.” Cassie was peering into the hole now, but at least she wasn’t touching the broken edge anymore.
“Um, maybe we should all be standing back more?” Jake was watching her nervously.
“If we do end up infected—either by the metal or by some virus—we can probably just morph it off.” Cassie turned enough to give him a reassuring smile. “And at least then we’d know that there is an infection, for the sake of everyone else here.”
“Okay, new theory,” I said. “Sudden cabin depressurization caused the crash. The crack came first, then everyone suffocated. With no one to keep it in the air…” I gestured to the ship’s current state.
“Skrit Na can breathe Earth’s atmosphere.”
At the new voice Jake, Cassie, and Marco all spun around so quickly it was kinda hilarious to watch. Cassie, still crouched next to the ship, almost fell over.
I turned around a lot more slowly. Vice Principal Chapman showed no sign of having noticed everyone else’s reactions, but then that’s zombies for you.