My six ant legs splayed out. They pressed down on a rubbery surface - the water. It was like trying to walk on a trampoline. And my legs kept poking through the surface.
But mostly I could do it. I could walk on the water. Or at least stand. Forward movement was very difficult.
Fortunately, the water did that for me. A swell came along. I felt it well up beneath me, a vast, powerful wave that set me rocketing up and up on its crest.
I was surfing the Yeerk pool.
SPLUSH!
The wave crashed against the pylon. A steel wall loomed up before me, nothing but darkness to my ant eyes. I grabbed. I set my tiny claws grabbing wildly, grabbing at anything solid.
And then the water fell away.beneath me. I had grabbed the steel pylon!
Tiny surface irregularities, the very grain of the metal itself, were all I needed.
Up I raced. Up to escape the next swell.
It splashed. I felt the vibrations as the water hit the pylon. Felt the air move as it was displaced by the tiny, but huge-to-me, upward surge.
The top of the water swept my back feet, but I had four more legs firmly attached, and I powered them with all my human will.
I felt the ant's mindless, machine instincts. They wouldn't be any trouble. I had morphed the ant before. I was prepared. Besides, the ant was far from anything familiar. Far from the world of smell it inhabited.
Up I went, climbing and climbing. Always upward.
Ahead of me I sensed warmth. Body warmth and the smells of a living thing. Some poor creature, human or Hork-Bajir, or some foul, vile Taxxon, was being reinfested.
I raced forward, hanging upside down as I ran. Grabbing the encrustations and irregularities of the underside of the pier.
Upside down, inches from the water, I ran and ran and didn't even slow down when I found myself no longer on steel but on fabric.
Then, up and up! I felt myself flying upward at an insane speed. But still I clung to the ropes that were threads in a cotton shirt.
The host had been reinfested. I was on a Controller. I was on his shirt, scuttling for cover beneath a damp collar.
"Hah! Let's see the hunter robots find me here," I said triumphantly.
I was alive. I had escaped from the Yeerk pool itself!
But I couldn't be elated. I didn't know what had happened to my friends.
For all I knew, they had not made it.
I was riding safe and secure, clutching to twisted cotton threads the size of bridge cables.
"Cheap shirt," I muttered to no one. I could feel the roughness of the fabric.
Eventually, I was going to have to jump. Hopefully, the person I was on would go into one of the buildings. Hopefully, he was not going to head straight back out of the Yeerk pool to the outside world.
I didn't want to leave the place. Not yet. I had to find out what had happened to the others.
I felt a breeze blowing across me. I felt the fabric ripple. We were walking. How fast, how far? No way to know.
Had the quality of the light changed? Impossible to say. I had to take a shot in the dark. Had to guess.
I raced out from under the collar and headed uphill. I climbed up onto what I assumed was a shoulder.
Could I do this? Could ants jump? Only one way to find out. I ran out to the end of the shoulder. I carefully released the grip of each of my six legs. One by one. Then I crouched and pushed off.
I guess the movement of the person who'd been carrying me was enough to make it work. I didn't so much jump as I rolled off the edge.
I fell! Forever. I swear it took me ten seconds to hit the ground, and in that time I tumbled, totally out of control, mostly blind. I had no way of knowing when I would hit. And even though I knew an animal as small as an ant wouldn't be hurt by the fall, it was frightening.
POOMPF!
I hit. I rolled onto my legs. Where was I? I felt around with my antennae. A smooth surface.
Okay. Fine. I was on a floor. Where I could easily be stepped on.
Great. Now to find someplace dark where I could demorph without being seen.
I raced across the floor, totally unaware of where I might be. Then, darkness. But what did it mean? Was it a different room? Or had I just crawled under a cupboard or something?
I ran on for a while, making sure that the space I was in was large enough. Then I began to demorph.
It's a long, long way up from the ground going from ant to human. But my eyes didn't return till I was halfway demorphed. I looked around. Dark, but not the dark of the cave. There was dim, gray light here. It outlined sharp edges and right angles.
A storeroom. There were boxes piled all around me. They seemed to be made of blue plastic. I leaned against one as I finished returning to my own body.
Human again! I looked around. My eyes had had plenty of time to adjust to the gloom. There was writing on some of the boxes. But not any alphabet I'd ever seen.
There was a square pad outlined in red, just an inch on each side.
"Well, why not?" I muttered. I pressed the pad. Instantly the top of the box came loose with a sound like a vacuum seal breaking. It sounded like when someone opens a can of coffee.
I looked inside. Then I smiled. I reached in and lifted out a hand-size Dracon beam.
"Cool."
The grip was weird. Designed for Hork-Bajir hands. But that was okay.
Right by my thumb there was a slide. It went up and down. "Power settings," I decided. I had to use my middle finger to reach the trigger.
Sudden light!
A door opened. A Hork-Bajir warrior was framed there. He blinked once in the darkness.
I raised my hand and squeezed the trigger.
TSEEEWWW!
The Hork-Bajir dropped like a sack of dirty laundry.
I stepped over to him. He was still breathing. I was breathing, too, in ragged gasps.
"So, that was the low-power setting," I said.