Animorphs Andalite 4 - Visser by K. A. Applegate

Author:K. A. Applegate
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2009-11-17T06:00:00+00:00

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Chapter 19

I was thrilled with the new host. What a revelation! Living in Jenny’s mind had been like living in a shipboard pool with none of the detail, the sensory appeal of a true Yeerk pool. Allison fought me. What a glorious fight she made of it! I used to toy with her, withdraw some small bit of my control, just to see how long it would take her to find the weakness and attempt to exploit it.

Once I surrendered control of a single eye. Just my left eye, nothing more. Allison discovered that she could change the direction of that one eye. And here was her genius: She hid this ability, realized within a millisecond that to use it would be to betray it to me. She waited. Waited. She knew she could do only one thing with that eye: Close it and eliminate my ability to perceive depth. She waited a week, till I was driving a car on a busy road, going at a high speed. I was driving behind a truck with defective brake lights. Then, at the perfect moment, she closed her eye. Suddenly I could no longer be sure of the interval between me and the truck that was braking in front of me. I didn’t know if it was stopping or maintaining speed.

I missed a fatal collision by milliseconds. She had been trying to kill herself, and me. Better dead than a Controller.

I was caught by surprise. I had not known that humans would do that. Die rather than accept defeat. Oh, I knew they said they’d do it, but not that they would actually mean it. It was a depressing insight. Victory always involves a certain amount of bluff. The weaker party must realize that he is weaker and be prepared to submit. A species that will not submit is useless. There was no profit in simply killing humans. We needed them alive. We are not predators, after all.

Fortunately, few humans are Allison Kim.

<You see that she does not even attempt to conceal her sympathies!> Visser Three’s hated voice interrupted my memories. <She admires this human host.>

“Yes,” I admitted, shaken back to the present. The present, in all its hopelessness. “You see, Visser Three, I intended to take humans and make them our slaves. It was a large objective. It was worth spending time to understand, to assess. I did not doubt that we could slaughter humans; the question was, could we make them ours?”

<Humans possess simple projectile weapons armed with explosives, ranging from chemical ordnance to fusion weapons,> Visser Three lectured pedantically. <They do not have energy beam weapons, Quantum viruses, sensor shield technology, Zero-space travel…their fastest craft fly at speeds measured in multiples of the speed of sound. Their so-called spacecraft are devoid of weapons.>

“There are more than five billion of them, Visser,” I shot back. “And you may deride their projectile weapons, but a nine-millimeter bullet will kill a Hork-Bajir host body quite effectively. And Taxxons or Gedds? A

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