The Predator (9 page)

T
his is not looking good,> I said. I couldn’t take the silence anymore.

Jake answered.

I asked. I looked around at the others, all crammed into a windowless steel cube. Black, dimly lit steel walls on all six sides. No door. It was like a coffin.

I said.

That got some halfhearted laughs from the
others. I don’t know why I was making jokes. I guess that’s the way I am. When bad things happen, I tell jokes. But inside I felt sick. Like I had swallowed broken glass.

Cassie said.

She knew that was dumb, of course. But when you’re scared, you start grabbing at anything. You want to believe there’s a way out.

The truth was, there were exactly two possibilities. Visser Three would kill us. Or Visser Three would turn us into Controllers. He would infest us with a Yeerk.

Jake said.

Ax said.

It was true. I knew it was true. I guess I’d known it all along. But hearing it said, it made me want to crawl into a corner.

My dad. Cassie’s parents. Rachel’s mom and her sisters. Jake’s parents. Maybe even Jake’s brother, Tom, although he was one of
them.
Their lives were at risk, too.

Suddenly, a window opened in one of the walls. It just grew, the same way the door had before. Like the steel was alive. It formed a round porthole, large enough for all of us to see—even Rachel, who could only turn her massive head enough to look with one eye.

I gasped.

Below us, blue and white and so beautiful it brought tears to your eyes, was Earth.

Sun sparkled off the ocean. Clouds swirled over the Gulf of Mexico, a big spiral, maybe a hurricane.

Cassie said simply.

We looked. Through the eyes of the animals of Earth, but with the minds of human beings, we looked down at our planet.

Our
planet.

For now, at least. For a little while longer.

Then something different came into view, as the Blade ship rotated away from Earth.

Ax said.

The mother ship.

It was a gigantic, three-legged insect. The center was a single, bloated sphere. The sphere was flatter on the bottom, and from the bottom hung a weird, mismatched series of tendrils. Like the tendrils of
a jellyfish. Each one must have been a quarter mile long.

Around the sphere were three legs, bent up, then back down, exactly like a spider’s legs.

Ax explained.

I said.

It just hung in orbit, like a predator gazing down hungrily at blue Earth below.

Rachel said.

Ax said simply.

I said.

Cassie said.

Ax said gently. and more grassland. I … I am sorry I brought you all to this. This is my fault.>

I wanted to yell, “Yes! Yes, it is your fault!”

But Cassie said what we all knew in our hearts.

It was true. But sometimes, when everything hits the fan, you don’t want the truth. You just want someone to blame. I muttered.

I could see an opening in the side of the Yeerk mother ship—a docking port. As I watched, a pair of quick Bug fighters flew in, dwarfed by the size of the opening.

A minute later, we entered the docking port and were suddenly bathed in deep red light.

Through the window, we could see Yeerk crewmen— Hork-Bajir, Taxxons, and two or three other alien species, in simple red or dark brown uniforms. And there were humans, too. My first reaction was hope. Humans!