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he told a Controller he'd seen humans morphing, it would be trouble. But
it occurred to us that an Inuit village in the middle of absolute
nowhere was probably not high on the Yeerks' list of places to take over.
We had morphed the polar bear, giving Derek one last bizarre
performance. Star Trek? Hah! He wouldn't be seeing this kind of thing on
his satellite dish any time soon.
Now we were feeling pretty good. Better than we had since arriving here
in Popsicle World.
We had the morph for this place. Like being a
tiger in the jungle or a crocodile in a swamp, we owned this place now.
Owned it!
I've been a gorilla. I've been a rhinoceros. I've felt power before. But
this was new.
I stood nearly ten feet tall, reared up. I weighed maybe fifteen hundred
pounds. And if those numbers don't mean anything to you, think about it
this way. I was three feet taller than Shaquille O'Neal. I weighed five
times as much as him.
I could have dribbled Shaq the length of the court and stuffed him. I
was mighty. I was seriously mighty.
My front paws were a foot wide. Each had five webbed toes with long,
black claws. My powerful front legs could have flipped over a pickup truck.
And the cold?
What cold? If the thick layer of blubber underneath my skin wasn't
enough, my body had made other adaptations for warmth.
My fur looked white, but it wasn't. It was transparent. Transparent and
hollow. Every bristle was like a little greenhouse, turning sunlight
into warmth, which was absorbed by my black skin.
I could see just as well as I did as a human, maybe a little better. Far
better than poor Rachel in her grizzly morph. My hearing was only
average, but my sense of smell was awesome. I could smell seals all
over the place.
Not much else to smell, when you think about it.
The bear mind that lay just beneath my human consciousness was no
bubbling stew of emotions, no panic, no fanatic hunger. Nanook was calm.
Completely without fear. What was there to fear?
He could go for weeks without eating. Hunting was more about play than
survival. He actually spent more time lounging around than he did
looking for food.
We sauntered back toward the Yeerk base with the cockiness of Clint
Eastwood going into the town saloon.
It was a long walk, punctuated by refreshing plunges into the icy water.
We ended up having to demorph, of course, and that was no fun at all.
But then it was back to being Lords of the Ice.
"Guess Derek was right about the storm," Tobias said.
The wind was pretty bad by the time we came in sight of the Yeerk base.
No new snow was falling, but the drifts were being whipped up and thrown
around. Visibility was dropping fast.
"It may be helpful to us," Ax suggested.
Jake was surveying the half mile of scenery ahead between us and the
base. "I'm thinking
we approach from the water. Last direction they'd expect an attack
to come from."
The base came to within a hundred yards or so of the water at one point.
It was a collection of corrugated steel buildings, an unattractive bunch
of structures placed seemingly at random. There were vehicles - Sno-Cats
and big trucks and motorized cranes. Nothing alien to the casual
observer. Unless you happened to notice the big silver Venber, bending
steel with their bare hands as they built the main satellite dish.
"What do we do about them?" Cassie wondered.
"Try and stay out of their way," Tobias suggested.
"How about afterward?"
"Take them home and make them pets?" I suggested.
"They are a unique species," Ax said. "They may not be pure Venber, but
I would dislike being the latest to exploit and destroy them."
I said, "You know, fearless leader, it occurs to me we're big tough
bears and all, but just exactly how are we supposed to destroy that
base? Maybe we better focus on that first."
Night was falling. Gloom spread slowly over the lake, turning the
ice a ghostly blue. At the base, the lights came on. The Venber didn't
need them, but the human-Controllers in their Michelin Man parkas did.
We came with the night. Moving as silently as we could, single file so
that at a casual glance a person might only see one bear.
We had a plan. The four fateful words that usually end up meaning a lot
of yelling, screaming, mayhem, and madness.
One thing we knew. Or hoped we knew: Visser Three was not at the base.
Not even the big hangar building could have contained his Blade ship.
That was some relief. Unfortunately, the
Venber were there. They worked on, oblivious to changing light.
Heedless of the plummeting temperature.
They knew we were out there on the ice. Knew at least that a bear was
out there. We kept our line straight. Would their echolocation show more
than one shape? Would they have the wit to sound an alarm?
There was no way to know, as we crunched across the ice, staring at one
another's big bear butts. Jake in the lead. Tobias behind him. Then me,
Cassie, Ax, and Rachel.
Closer and closer, in slow motion. No running. No sudden charge. Just
that slow, steady, lumbering walk.
We were totally exposed. No cover. Nothing at all between us and a
well-aimed Dracon blast. The Venber we saw weren't armed. They were
wielding tools, carrying, shaping, twisting. But the Dracon cannon
couldn't be too far off.
It was like one of those Civil War battles. Walk, walk, walk, standing
upright, no dodging and weaving, just walking steadily toward death.
Nothing you could do about the bullet that blows a hole in your heart.
Nothing.
Closer and closer. We could hear their heavy footsteps. We could smell
their strange, chemical smell. I could see the effortless power as they
worked.
One of them swung his big hammerhead around and seemed to look right
at us. But that was it. Just a look.
And now we were practically among them. Venber to the left. Venber to
the right. I had stopped breathing. Our little single-file subterfuge
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