It was nuts. But the truth is, in a weird way, it was fun, too. Minneapolis Max was running. And when he was running, he felt fine.
Every nerve in my big horse body was tingling. I was incredibly alive with fear and excitement and the lust for competition. I wasn't some plow horse! I was a running fool. I was a born and bred champion! A big, tough, dominant stallion!
Yee hah!
"HREEE-HEEE-He-he!" I screamed for no reason, scaring a woman in a lab coat into dropping her open yogurt on the floor.
We thundered by, our weird herd of real horses, Yeerk-infested horses, and Animorphs in horse morphs.
And then we came to the room. You could tell it was the center, the nexus, the reason for all the security.
"lt's gonna work," Marco exulted. "We're in! We're in!"
It was glass on all sides. Glass that looked like it could be a foot thick.
Through that glass we saw a pedestal of shining steel. And all around that pedestal were cameras, sensors, wires, lights, glowing screens, and rows of massive computers.
Bathed in the light, high on the pedestal, was something not from this planet.
It was about eight feet across. The shape was like a cube with the corners rounded off. The entire surface was covered with tubing and painted symbols.
At one end was an opening, large enough for a person to walk inside. I could just barely get a glimpse of the inside. It was smooth, a lovely green in color, with soft lighting. There was some sort of instrumentation on one wall.
"That's it! That's it! The most closely guarded secret in all of history!" I've never heard Marco sound happier.
Jake and Ax and Marco and I, along with three or four horse-Controllers, all stared transfixed at what Marco had called "the most closely guarded secret in all of history."
"Cullem fallat?"one of the horse-Controllers asked.
"He wants to know what it is," Ax translated.
"Jahalan fornella,"another horse-Controller said.
I didn't even need Ax's translation to understand: The Yeerks had no idea what it was.
They had succeeded. They had busted in.
They had laid eyes on the big secret. But they had no clue as to what it was.
"SERGEANT! GET those HORSES out of my facility! NOW!" a colonel bellowed.
"Yes, sir!" the sergeant yelled. "Horses! About face!"
It must have surprised the poor sergeant when, amazingly, we all complied. Animorphs and Yeerks, we turned and walked away.
Chapter 20
It was getting dark by the time we walked away, none the wiser, from the Most Secret Place On Earth.
The horse-Controllers walked glumly away into the Dry Lands. We shadowed them, keeping just a little distance. We'd been in morph for more than an hour. But Jake decided we should stay a while longer.
"l don't get this," Marco complained. "l don't get this at all. It was a success! The Yeerks did it. They broke into the hangar. They saw . . . we all saw what was in there. So why are they de-pressed?"
"Ax says they don't know what it is they saw," Jake pointed out.
"lt didn't look like a spaceships Rachel said. "But it was definitely something alien."
"Yeah, but what?" I said. "lf the Yeerks don't know, and we don't know, and probably the scientists back at the base don't know, then what's the point?"
""lt is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Shakespeare," Tobias said. "Every conspiracy nut in the world is obsessed by what's back there in that hangar. We saw it, and we don't even know what it is."
"Actually . . ." Ax began. Then he stopped.
"Actually, what?"Rachel pressed.
"Oh, well ... I sort of know what it is. It's kind of—"
"Look!" I yelled. Something was swooping in fast across the darkening desert. It flew along the ground, just inches above the scattered scruffy trees. It churned up the dust as it came. It was smallish, no bigger than a large human fighter plane. But it was shaped like a streamlined, headless beetle. There were long, serrated points aimed straight forward on either side.
"Bugfighter!"
I had to resist the urge to run. That was only natural. But what was strange was that once more I smelled fear from the horse-Controllers.
They were scared of that Bug fighter. More scared than they'd been in rushing the hangar.
Or, more likely, scared of who was inthat Bug fighter.
The Bug fighter swooped overhead, circled, and came to land in a pile of rocks.
"l can't believe the radar back at the base doesn't pick that up," Tobias said.
"Radar. Is that the human tool that bounces radio beams off objects? I don't mean to offend, but any Andalite child could build a radar-cloak from the pieces of his toys."
"Somehow you are grinding my nerves, Ax," Rachel said grumpily.
"And that's supposed to be Marco's job."
We followed the horse-Controllers around the back of the rocks. The Bug fighter was waiting there, already on the ground. But the door didn't open until the horse-Controllers were assembled before it. Fear was radiating from them.
So much fear. It gave me a pretty good idea who was in that Bug fighter.
The door of the Bug fighter opened.
Out stepped a Hork-Bajir warrior. Seven feet of razor-bladed death. The Hork-Bajir swung his horned snakehead left and right, all the while holding a portable Dracon beam weapon.
Then, when it looked safe, the other occupant of the Bug fighter stepped out into the rapidly cooling air.
He was an Andalite. At least, he had an Andalite body. But of course he was no true Andalite.
"Visser Three," I said. It was not a surprise.
"Yeah," Jake said grimly. "Suddenly all this just got more serious." Visser Three: leader of the Yeerk forces on Earth. Leader of the invasion.
The only Yeerk in all of history to successfully seize control of an Andalite body. The only Yeerk in all history to gain the Andalite morphing power and Andalite thought-speak abilities.
Our greatest enemy. The human race's greatest enemy.
"Report," he said in a tone of complete casual ness.
The lead horse-Controller began to reply in Galard."Visser, gahallum fillak—"
"Don't waste my time. Did you succeed? Or did you fail?"
"Visser, kir fillan—"
FWAPPPP!
The visser's Andalite tail moved so swiftly it cracked the air. The deadly blade stopped a millimeter from the horse-Controller's throat. A twitch would send his head rolling.
"Did you penetrate the facility, yes or no?"
According to Ax, the horse-Controller answered yes.
"Did you see the object the humans are hiding in there? The object we know is constructed of nonhuman alloys?"
Again, he answered yes.
"And can you now tell me what it is?"
The horse-Controller hesitated. And that's when the visser twitched his Andalite tail.
"Fools! Idiots! lncompetents!" the visser screamed in enraged thought-speak. "Weeks have been wasted setting up this effort. First we lose that clumsy fool, Korin Five-Four-Seven, when he was bitten by a snake. And now we've lost poor Jillay Nine-Two-Six!"