| #36: The Mutation |
Detailed Plot: Cassie calls Jake in the wee hours one night and he finds out it's about Hork-Bajir being subjected to bizarre medical experiments. Apparently Visser Three has tried to mutate Hork-Bajir to be underwater creatures; he wants to have sea warriors, and the Yeerks are also running around in the ocean with their new ship the Sea Blade, designed to function in air or sea. They're looking for the Pemalite ship. Cassie is determined to destroy the Sea Blade to teach the Yeerks a lesson about messing with the poor Hork-Bajir. But they have very little information on the Yeerks' sea activities, and they have to develop a plan that begins with surveillance. While in bird morphs, Jake and Marco spot where the Sea Blade is hiding, cloaked under a hologram that isn't as strong when seen from above. They manage to catch it heading out to sea, and Jake follows it while Marco goes for reinforcements. Jake charges into the sea to stop from losing it, and morphs back to his normal form before going right into a whale morph. When the others find him, they start to follow the ship, but it turns on a cloaking device that makes it look like another whale. While they're following it, two real whales team up with them and start following them around. And unfortunately one of them is hit when the Sea Blade notices them and starts firing Dracon beams. When Jake gets hit badly, Cassie has to save him, but then he's determined to go right back into the fight. They take some very serious casualties, but manage to collectively ram the ship and cause some damage. Then they have to escape so they don't die from their wounds. After they recover, they decide to dive again because they want to make sure the ship really is sunk; they don't want to have to fight it again. They morph hammerheads and dive, and manage to find it spewing chemicals and whatnot down deep in the ocean. But then something odd happens: non-human creatures of an unidentified species step out and pull the ship into a chamber as if they're a rescue crew, and they close the stone door behind them. Following them in, the Animorphs group finds a huge cavern full of preserved ships from different eras. Morphed back to their usual bodies, they walk around inside trying to figure out why this is here and who's responsible for it . . . especially since stuffed, preserved, dead humans are populating the ships and vessels as if they're just props. While trying to decide if they should abandon looking for the Sea Blade and maybe save themselves from a very weird fate, Jake and the others--in bird morphs--get sucked through a tunnel. Inside, there is a city made mostly out of ship parts. Some kind of human-like creatures are moving around inside, but they are blue-skinned and have webbed digits and gills. They witness the Sea Blade being taken into capitivity and the Hork-Bajir crew being taken out in chains, and they decide they should demorph, remorph, and get out of there. But while they're down on the ground in a place that looks safe, a strange rubbery plant turns out to be a net, and they get captured. Jake urges them not to fight their way out of the net and just see what happens. Tobias is still free, but the rest get dragged along to an inner chamber where one of the blue-gilled creatures sits on a throne. She introduces herself as Queen Soco of the Nartec. Queen Soco seems to be fairly welcoming, and acknowledges that Jake is the leader because he speaks for the others. She's interested in Ax because she's never seen an Andalite, and she thinks he's Jake's magnificent pet. She gives them a guard named Naca to show them around and invites them to a feast. They are given raw fish and seats at the table, and all the dishware and furniture appears to have been fashioned from the cast-offs of wrecks. Jake worries that Visser Three might have been on board the Sea Blade and probably was not captured for the same reasons they are hard to capture, and he's afraid that if they morph Visser Three might see them. Since he's the one who advised his group not to fight their way out, he worries that he's trapped everyone to satisfy his own curiosity about what might be going on down here in this Atlantis-like place. Queen Soco asks Jake if he wants to know anything about their people, and he asks for a story of their origin. She responds with a folk tale about a sinking island that was eventually swallowed by the ocean, but the people became amphibious and did not die. Ax notes privately to Jake that the rocks that provide luminescence are also radioactive, which probably helped their mutation rate. The queen keeps explaining her people's history, and then explains that they keep ships and their crews as specimens to add to their "storehouse of knowledge." She tells them that she's planning on using the Sea Blade to attack surface ships and take over the world so the Nartec no longer have to be exiled from the rest of the world. But she's curious as to how this group of surface-dwellers (and the Andalite) have come to their world, as they clearly did not come inside the ship and didn't bring a ship. The queen isn't too happy when they don't offer up an answer immediately, and doesn't trust them. They're left to wander freely in the Nartec city (with their guard), but they're blocked from escaping. Jake agrees with the others that they need to find Tobias, destroy the Sea Blade so the queen can't use it to hurt humans, and then get the heck out of there. In the Nartec library, they start looking up interesting facts about the Nartec, and discover that though the quick mutation rate helped save their species, it also helped rack up destructive mutations, and they've been on the brink of extinction for a while. Cassie thinks they may want to mate with them to introduce new genes to avoid extreme inbreeding, or at least extract their DNA if they have that technology. Jake decides a good way to get out of there would be to steal the Sea Blade and escape in it. Ax reminds Jake that Visser Three might be hiding on board. He's aware of that. As their Nartec guard leads them toward a hospital to show them the medical facilities, Jake gets the willies, and soon he sees why: they get ambushed by Nartec hiding in the water, and when they wake up they're strapped to operating tables inside the medical building. A Nartec voice explains to Jake that they're all going to be shot up with a chemical that makes them compliant, and then they'll be gutted and stuffed, with their insides used to concoct usable material for genetic engineering. Of course, he isn't very interested in fighting once the drug takes effect, and they all have to get saved by the missing Tobias, who morphed a Nartec and blended in. After they recover, Tobias tells them not all of the Nartec are very good out of the water, and they find Ax having been put away in a refrigerator. They morph to birds and get out using a porthole, then find the Sea Blade and board it. Ax works on getting through the encryption for the controls, and the others have to use their battle morphs to fight off attacking Nartec. They have various weapons, mostly crude, but even though they're not very good fighters and aren't very strong, there are a lot of them and they're unrelenting. The Animorphs take some damage while Ax works on the system. But finally, Ax has to accept that he can't hack into the controls, and Visser Three shows up in a morph called the Luminar. It's a creature that is extremely hot and can fry other creatures with blowtorch-like jets. However, they have to make a deal because the Animorphs need the visser's passwords to open the controls and the visser needs a crew to pilot the ship and the Hork-Bajir who were slated to do so were captured and stuffed. Jake decides to accept Visser Three's offer. Instructing them on battle, Visser Three allows Ax to pilot and allows Rachel to do the weapons, and Rachel gets private thought-speak lessons on how to work the controls so she can pass as if she were an Andalite. But Jake has a plan: once they've fought off the worst of the Nartec attacks, they notice torpedos coming and Marco releases a hatch so water pours into the ship. The visser's morph is extinguished of its heat, and he can't use his incinerating attack. They all escape and let the ship get hit by the torpedoes, reassured that it is destroyed. As a tiger, Jake morphs to human and is able to breathe because they're still inside the Nartec territory, and he morphs to a hammerhead shark. They notice that Visser Three got away as a giant squid. As they're escaping, they think about the Nartec being down there wanting to take over the surface world, and Rachel says after the whole Yeerk war is over they ought to bring the Nartec to the attention of the authorities. Cassie wonders whether Rachel means to start a new war, and she says she doesn't want that. She wants to bury, not kill. Cassie agrees with her on that. Narrator: Jake New known controllers:
New morphs acquired:
Cassie: Whale (orca) Marco: Whale (orca) Rachel: Whale (orca) Ax: Whale (orca) Tobias: Whale (orca), Nartec Notable: This book is ghostwritten by Erica Bobone. The experimented-upon Hork-Bajir, Hahn Tunad, is dying on Cassie's dad's stainless steel operation table when the narration describes him. But then a couple pages later when Jake tries to pull an oxygen tank over to him, Hahn is described as being stretched out on a makeshift bed of hay bales. This is clearly an inconsistency since they did not move him. Interesting that Jake notes that many prey animals include "wanting to find mates" in their instincts, but no mating instincts have been discussed in any of the Animorphs' morphing experiences. The Pemalite ship should not be accessible to living creatures if Erek hid it "where only an android can reach it" in a previous book. Rachel saves Jake from drowning in this book, and the narration specifies that she is an orca at the time. However, when Jake takes a survey of who else is there, he counts "two sperm whales and three orca." It's not clear who's who if that's the case. Rachel has to still be an orca, but Tobias is the only other person besides Rachel who ever acquired the sperm whale. (Cassie sure had a chance to, but didn't.) This is most likely just an author mistake. There's a typo: Ax says "On my commnad" instead of "command." Another typo involves a thought-speak tag pointing the wrong way on Jake asking about "the visser." Best lines: Jake: At any given point, on any given mission, maybe half the team was going to be difficult in one way or another. Including me, of course. Maybe especially me. Ax: "This is so irrational and strange that I assume it must involve humans." Jake: "The weapons they used on us? Human weapons. We want to hate them for what they do? Maybe we should stop helping them do it."
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