Author's Note: Hey, all! It's good to be back from hiatus. I currently plan to post a complete round of chapters at a rate of one every 10-14 days. There will also likely be a couple of interludes here and there.

Part of the reason this break was so long was personal stuff, but part of it was that this chapter was VERY difficult to get right. If you think I haven't quite managed it, I'm eager to hear your suggestions—I expect this one will receive several minor-to-moderate edits over the next week, and (as always) love your critical feedback, as well as kudos for things that you enjoyed.

Don't forget that, in addition to comments and reviews here, there's usually lively discussion over at r/rational. Check it out for all your tinfoil and theorizing needs, and maybe get sucked into some other cool fiction while you're over there.

Chapter 21: Esplin 9466

Confluence.

The Visser stood—motionless—thinking. Lines of reckoning crawled forward in a twisted braid, thoughts swirling in stochastic parallel as he theorized, operationalized, falsified.

He was coldly calculating—weighing probabilities, evaluating priors, reinterpreting the same piece of evidence over and over again under each of a dozen different hypotheses.

He was wildly emotional—filled to the brim with rage and frustration and fear, riding the wave of survival instinct, sifting for insight.

He was unfettered, curious, inquisitive—generating ideas at a furious rate as he stretched beyond the probable and the possible and into the realm of the incredible.

He was all of these at once and more as he stood, quiet and restrained, a watcher in the eye of the storm. He was aware, on some level, of the passage of time—of moments vanishing irretrievably into the abyss, the narrowing of possibility as various futures crept closer and others drifted past. There was a cost to hesitation, a cost that grew steeper as the expected value of further thought plummeted.

And yet, he waited, alone on the bridge of his modified fighter, drawing on the strengths of every part and process of Alloran's stolen brain as he struggled to process the implications—the sheer enormity—of the information displayed in front of him.

It was no longer speculation, he thought—allowed himself to think, the words cascading wildly through the layers of his mind. No longer a quiet fear, almost unacknowledged, sufficiently ridiculous to be comfortably dismissed.

This was proof, or as close as he was likely to get.

He reached out to Alloran, to the faint, passive shadow that had once been the Andalite war prince. A strange feeling was rising within him, one he recognized from the memories of his host but had never felt himself—the fear of isolation, the desire for comfort and company, for an ally who might ease his apprehension, his uncertainty.

But Alloran did not stir, was somehow empty and silent beyond a veil Esplin could not pierce. It had been that way for nearly a cycle—under other circumstances, that would have been the clear priority, a mystery of paramount importance, but now—

Holding the swirl of emotion in check, he returned his attention to the display.

The map was a swirl of soft blues and deep purples, as wide as his body was long. It showed the geometry of local Z-space in three dimensions, compressing the fourth. There were the usual twists and folds, the usual irregularities—tunnels, resonant fields, singularities, voids. An imperfect sphere dominated the image, a dark and ragged rift that enclosed a vast swath of space, with the Earth and its star hanging roughly halfway between the center and the edge.

And there, on the near side, represented by the faintest, narrowest possible line—

A bridge.

It stretched across the otherwise-impassible barrier, unnaturally straight and even smaller than its representation on the map—just barely wide enough for a medium-sized pool ship to pass through. One end opened up just outside of Earth's orbit, on the far side of the star, at a point the planet would pass by some half a revolution hence. The other terminated in the dark emptiness between systems, on a line connecting the system with a distant red giant far beyond both Yeerk and Andalite territory.

That it existed at all—

Well. Stranger things had happened. The rift that had isolated the humans' system was already unusual in its regularity, implying some unknown causal process at the center of the sphere. Esplin had stayed well clear of those coordinates, though he had dispatched four Naharan probes to approach it from four widely-spaced angles.

But the fact that he had found the bridge now, after the crisis at the pool—that he had discovered it at all, given its size—

There were two sets of tools for mapping Z-space. One was a low level imager, essentially a telescope—with long and careful exposures, it could passively detect contours as small as a large gas giant, allowing navigators to plot safe routes even between planets within the same system.

The other was for studying the smallest features of Z-space. It functioned like a laser, sending out a tight beam of radiation and measuring the properties of its reflections. Its ordinary range was significantly less than the width of a star, and it worked in exactly one dimension—to gather information about anything wider than the beam, one had to take a series of adjacent measurements, and resolution depended entirely on how many individual data points one was willing to collate.

Esplin had mapped the entire system with the larger tool and found nothing of use—no breaks, no gaps, nothing he could use to bring the rest of his fleet into the system at speed. He would have stopped there, were it not for Alloran's incessant needling—an offhand joke from the war prince had pushed Esplin to set the smaller tool on a constant scan, with a dedicated subroutine set to alert him if it detected anything unusual.

That subroutine had fired just moments earlier, to report that exactly one of its pulses had returned zero data—no interference, no attenuation, no reflection of any kind.

One pulse, so perfectly aligned with the narrow bridge that it had traveled straight through, hitting nothing.

One pulse, fired at exactly the right moment as his ship drifted past—his first re-check, mere moments later, had bounced back as expected, as had his second and third. The path was detectable only from a single, precise angle—if he hadn't returned the ship to its previous coordinates, just to be sure—

Some deep layer of his mind ran the calculation almost by reflex—odds of discovering such a path by chance, odds of other such paths existing and not having already been found during his previous excursions—

With a series of quick, mental commands, he dispatched thirteen additional Naharan probes, assigning each a set of seven possibilities to investigate, coordinates and angles that seemed more likely given the already-established anomaly. Then, taking a breath, he assigned two more probes to travel down the bridge and back, keying them to transmit a constant stream of data. He had already checked everything that was possible to check remotely—the length of the bridge, the contents of space around the mouth, the spectrum of the distant star, endless permutations of the coordinates that might hold some clue or scrap of information. There was nothing further he could discover without sending something through. It would only take—

He realized he was hesitating, and focused his attention.

There had been a momentary sensation of hollowness, like a lull in the wind, or a missed note in the call of the kafit bird. Something hadn't seemed—

Ah.

Alloran. There had been a moment, into which Alloran would have inserted some sly comment, some vague insinuation, some subtle goad—

Stretching, Esplin prodded the dark shadow again.

Nothing—not even resistance. It was as if the Andalite were no longer there, as if he had ceded even the scant last shreds of personality to his overlord, vanishing in the process.

But what he would have said—

Esplin waited, a mental finger hovering over the imaginary switch that would launch the pair of probes. Again, he felt the pressure of time's passage—the loss of crucial moments, an impulse to take action.

Alloran's echo?

His own emotions?

Some insidious, outside influence?

Withdrawing the mental finger, he regathered his thoughts, focusing all eight layers of his mind onto the path of his previous reasoning, searching for a flaw.

One: there are higher powers at work.

He checked the calculations again. Nothing else made sense—under even the most conservative of assumptions, no other possibility came to within two orders of magnitude.

Two: this discovery is not by chance.

Same reasoning.

Three: the higher powers are constrained, or at least not openly hostile.

The evidence there was obvious, but Esplin forced himself to review it anyway—his ship had not been destroyed by any number of passing cosmic phenomena, his fleet had been delayed but otherwise had not been interfered with, he had been allowed to conduct his war on Earth without overt interruption, his continuous conscious existence had also not been interrupted in any detectable way (and undetectable ones were irrelevant for the purposes of selecting next actions)—the list went on and on. There could be one power unwilling to act in certain ways, or two or more powers acting as checks on one another's agency, or physical laws preventing certain kinds of interference even as they allowed things like interdimensional rifts isolating entire star systems.

But regardless of the specifics, Esplin was alive, and it seemed unlikely that that would change without reason.

Speaking of which—four: your continued existence hinges on your next actions.

That one was more subtle, and it also depended on five: you are being studied and modeled. Whatever entity (or entities) had created the rift and arranged for Esplin to discover the bridge, it (or they) had a goal (or goals). Clearly, that goal depended in some way upon Esplin's next actions, else the bridge would not have been placed where he would eventually discover it.

Time travel was impossible, given the shape of the universe—at least, so Seerow had thought, and had continued to think even as his madness caused him to discard so many other beliefs. It was unlikely that there was some watcher that would eventually make changes to the past, erasing Esplin as he currently existed.

But even so, there could still exist a sort of backwards causality. An entity capable of isolating an entire system would have enormous power and resources, and would be unlikely to spend those resources on anything less than star-bright certainty. If there were a series of simulations, in which various artificial Esplins were exposed to various stimuli, and made various choices as a result, some of those simulations would be interesting to the watchers, and would continue—

—and others would be less interesting, and would not continue.

That Esplin still lived meant that he was either in a true reality (and thus was already on the path the watchers intended), or in a simulated one that had not yet ceased to provide useful information. He existed now because—and only because—of what he was about to do next.

Which implied—

Six: reasonable behaviors are more likely to be safe than not.

Regardless of whether he was real, Esplin was more likely to explore the bridge having been allowed to discover it than he would have been if he had not been allowed to discover it. The same was true for sending probes through it, bringing his fleet through it, alerting the rest of the Yeerk military—if the goal were to cause him to take some truly unusual action, there were cheaper and more reliable ways than presenting him with an enigma and hoping that he would eventually talk himself into it. It was likely that the watchers expected—wanted—him to do something within the range of his usual behavior.

That being said, though—

Seven: the goals of the watchers are not obviously your own.

Evidence—Esplin was not yet immortal, Esplin was not yet all-powerful, Esplin was not yet omniscient. More directly, the rift had opened while his fleet was in transit, delaying twelve of his ships and—together with a string of blunders and miscommunications attributable to the Vanarx—ultimately causing the invasion to begin under extremely unfavorable circumstances in the last, least important, and most exposed of the thirteen target cities.

There were also considerations of timing—the discovery, taking place only after the destruction of Ventura, and the fact that the mouth of the tunnel opened up where the Earth would be rather than where it was. Was there something special about the moment of closest approach? At their current slow crawl, his ships would arrive thirty-nine local-cycles prior to that point anyway—

No, it was not at all clear that Esplin should attempt to do what the watchers wanted, assuming it was even possible to guess. Nor was it safe to try striking out in the opposite direction, to act in open defiance of an unknown force with unknown strength and values—in the end, the best he could do was attempt to reason from clear knowns and first principles.

A bubble of emotion rose within him, and he permitted it to exist and to grow, feeding it until it swelled to fill his mind. Resentment seethed and turned to bitter fury, a sudden, impotent rage at the temerity of the unseen manipulator—that any being would dare to play him for a puppet—that he would not submit to artificial constraints, warp his plans to accommodate the preferences of an unknown agent. It was not allowed, could not be borne, was an insult that demanded retribution—

Then the bubble popped, and a calmer, quieter Esplin watched the ripples drift across his thoughts.

Either these feelings, too, are intended, and therefore part of the insult, or they are not, and therefore a distraction.

It was the same lesson Alloran had tried for years to teach his students, the one point upon which he and Esplin had agreed since the very beginning: know victory. He did not suppress his emotions—they were a useful source of fuel, of intuition—but neither were they the tool that he needed, and so he set them quietly aside.

Survival first. He needed time to study this new force in his universe—to understand its purpose, its methods, its limits. What he understood, he could control, and once he had control—

Then vengeance would be his to mete out or not, as he pleased.

With another mental command, he powered down the last two probes, turning all four eyes back to the map—to the tiny line that represented the bridge.

By itself, a bridge is nothing.

What mattered was what would come across it.

Possibilities: himself, on his own ship. The remainder of his fleet. Telor, aboard the pool ship already in orbit. Additional Yeerk forces. Andalite forces. Other, unknown entities.

If it is intended as a trap—

If it were meant to collapse as a ship moved across it, or if there were sensors at the far side that would trigger some unpleasant surprise—

Well. In that case, sending a probe would most likely not trip whatever metaphorical wire was in place, since it was the obvious cautious move, and could easily be done from an arbitrary distance. By the same token, a probe was unlikely to produce useful information, and would simply be a waste of time.

If, on the other hand, the bridge were exactly what it seemed—the only quick path into and out of the system—then it was either intended to be net useful to Esplin and his allies, or to be net useful to their enemies.

If it was meant to be a boon—

Esplin himself could exit the system, visiting any number of allies in the larger theater and bringing them to bear on the struggle on Earth. He could also direct the rest of his fleet toward the mouth, cutting their remaining travel time down to a third.

Neither of those moves was obviously positive, though. He had been at the hidden manufactory on the fourth planet when the news of Aftran's destruction came through, and had triggered the meteor failsafe remotely. Telor had not even known about the failsafe, and its reaction to the destruction would depend on a great many factors, only some of which Esplin was capable of influencing. The governments of Earth were similarly unpredictable, and while additional resources would help, they would also greatly complicate the process of maintaining control over a fluid situation.

So that was one way in which the bridge could be intended as a weapon against Esplin—by causing him to invite political discord at a critical moment. Other possibilities—

It could be psychological, its enigmatic nature meant to trick him into not using it, and then regretting it later. That seemed unlikely, though, given that there were far less fragile methods of tampering with his morale.

It could be a path for Andalite-aligned forces. But in that case, there was no point in alerting Esplin to its presence—under that assumption, the discovery was a boon.

Unless the Andalites were going to appear soon? Would perhaps emerge while he was still sitting there, thinking?

His ship was already cloaked, but a quick command sufficed to send it around to the far side of the opening, such that any vessel arriving from beyond the system would have its back to him.

Ultimately—he reasoned—what the private discovery netted him was control over access to the bridge. He could publicize its existence within his own fleet—or within the Yeerk command structure at large—or he could keep it a secret, holding the knowledge in reserve for some unknown future. Similarly, he could attempt to close it, or set up an observation system, or scatter mines across the opening.

Under that framing, the choice was clear. He had no pressing need to use the bridge right away—his current plans already assumed that there was no quick path into or out of the system, and that the rest of his fleet would not arrive for many cycles.

He began issuing another set of commands to the computer, this time a specific and complex series of images. A light appeared on the manual control panel, and he reached for a pad, tapping out a lengthy passcode.

Beneath his hooves, the deck vibrated faintly as the cargo bay doors shuddered open.

The blackmines were a relatively recent development, originally conceived by Alloran and completed under Esplin's supervision by a group of Naharan engineers. They had been designed to detect the forward shockwave of a ship traveling through Z-space, send out a canceling pulse, and destroy it once it dropped back into normal space. They were sensor-dark and radiation neutral—they would not be detected, and no one would be expecting them. And with six hundred and thirty-seven of them arranged along the only possible approach vector, they would take out half of an incoming fleet before anyone on board had time to react.

With the deft expertise of an artist, he arranged them in three nested cones—one tight around the mouth of the bridge, another wider and further back, and a third wider still but twice as densely packed.

If Esplin or his allies needed to use the bridge, the mines could be neutralized with a passcode. If enemies intended to come through, they were an excellent defense, especially as they were keyed to send an alert to Esplin's ship upon detonation. There were plausible scenarios in which unknown allies attempted to cross the bridge to come to Esplin's aid unannounced, but it seemed at least equally likely that any such third parties would be hostile, meaning that the mines cost him nothing in expectation.

It occurred to him that this was, in the end, the obvious move—that he had neither given expression to his defiance nor attempted to manufacture an interesting outcome. He felt once again the vague absence of Alloran's voice, followed by an echo of his earlier indignation, and ignored both.

Now is not the time to take risks.

Even if that attitude was exactly the intended effect.

Holding his breath, he gave the final command, unable to avoid a twinge of fear as he activated the mines. Ignoring that as well, he turned the ship toward its next destination and powered up the drive. It did no good to rail against fate, whether god or chaos or quantum determinism.

All one could do was play the game.

‹My gratitude, Quat of Taz of Zhin of Nik of Kon of Arn,› Esplin said formally, the computer transcribing the thoughts into a swirl of colors that danced across his fur. Beyond the window, a thick cable stretched from his ship to the stolen Andalite ansible, where the image was encoded, encrypted, and compressed before being transmitted far beyond the Earth and its isolated sun. ‹The Arn compose the chants unfold to fill the sky with light. The Visser armed with chants deter the siblings burned the Arn.›

In the display, the image of the four-legged avian raised its arms, long wings unfolding behind them. :::Respect,::: it signaled in a wave of green that rippled through its coat of feathers. :::The Arn do not forget the Visser turned back the ships burned the trees protect the air sustains the Arn defend the Visser commands the ships turn back the stones cannot strike the Arn and the Visser flourish together.:::

Esplin raised his own arms, mirroring the gesture, and the creature's feathers flashed red with pleasure. A soft chime sounded from a panel behind the display, and lights flickered as the data began to flow, a long sequence of nucleotides and acids.

Neither the gestures nor the spoken thanks were strictly necessary. Quat and Esplin had formed their alliance in the glow of Leeran hypersight, with full and intimate access to every layer of the other's thought and memory. The Arn knew the Visser was grateful, just as Esplin knew that the Arn was—

Well. Loyal was not the right word. Esplin had yet to unearth anything resembling loyalty in the Arn, who spent as much of their lives as possible in complete isolation, each the unquestioned master of its own private fiefdom. Everything that lived and breathed within an Arn's territory was its property, so much so that they used the ecosphere itself to record their memoirs, painting their thoughts across the hillsides in swaths of bioengineered flowers.

But Quat would do what it had said it would do, and was satisfied with the terms of their agreement. Was convinced of Esplin's sincerity, and was sincere—and trustworthy—in return. And since Esplin truly was grateful, it seemed appropriate that he express his appreciation in the local style.

When in Rome, one of his human subordinates had quoted to him, do as the Romans do. The Yeerks had a similar sentiment, but it was seen as so obvious and natural that they had never found it necessary to put it into words.

‹The stones cannot strike the Arn,› he affirmed, a sentiment brusquely—almost brutally—short, in their story-centric language. ‹The ships report the web is closed to catch the stones can harm the Arn.›

A smear of blue, translated by the computer into a sense of vague confusion.

Esplin tried again. ‹Quat spoke with the Visser spoke to the ships finished the web can obstruct the largest stones threaten the Arn,› he said carefully. ‹The web turns back the stones can kill the Arn. The web turns back the stones can harm the Arn. The web lets through the stones can frighten the Arn trust the Visser to continue to work to tighten the web grows thick and perfect for the Arn to flourish without fear.›

The blue lightened into a mottled teal of relief and satisfaction. :::My gratitude, Esplin of Cirran of high lands of west of cold rocks and wide water,::: Quat said. :::The Visser sows the seeds sprout into vines ensnare the stars shine bright with the story of the Visser.:::

It was a nicety, politeness for politeness—Quatazhinnikon cared nothing for Esplin's story, confined as it was to the meaningless everything-else beyond the atmosphere of its homeworld. Its sole concern was the safety Esplin's ships could provide, and the price he would ask for that protection.

The Arn were a race of survivors, clinging to life on the slopes of a giant rift that girdled their otherwise empty planet. The rift had been formed by a meteor strike, a titanic impact that had boiled off most of the water and air and left only a tiny, ring-shaped habitable zone where the crust plunged down toward exposed, open mantle.

Millions of Arn had died in the aftermath of the explosion, along with virtually all of the biomass of the planet. And yet somehow, the remaining few had managed not only to survive, but to thrive, using their native proclivity for bioengineering to create a forest of massive barrier trees along the slopes of the rift—trees that trapped the rising heat, converted the poisonous fumes into consumable nutrients and breathable air. When that proved to be inadequate, they had altered their own physiology to better tolerate the new balance of gases, the new available diet.

And when tending the giant trees proved tedious, they created an entire race of sapient caretakers, with bodies and minds so perfectly adapted to the task that the first Yeerk scouts had simply assumed they were the symbiotic product of natural evolution.

The Yeerks had almost lost their war, trying to take the Hork-Bajir. Working from the depths of the rift, the unknown, unsuspected, unseen Arn had unleashed a suite of biological weapons that devastated the invasion force—giant monsters, noxious gases, insidious bacteria that caused confusion, madness, death. By the time Esplin made contact and opened peace negotiations, they were mere cycles away from perfecting a retroviral plague that would have slowly spread to every pool in the galaxy before activating and extinguishing the Yeerks altogether.

Fortunately, the Arn had little concern for the fate of the rest of the galaxy—only for the future of their own ruined world—and Esplin had exactly the bargaining chip needed to secure a permanent cease-fire. With a single command, work had begun on an orbital asteroid defense system that would protect the Arn from space debris for as long as Esplin remained in power.

There was a part of him that had balked at the idea of an inviolable planet, a place where his hand would not and could not ever reach, even after his ascent to dominance. But the Leeran hypersight had allowed Quat to see his every thought and desire. There was no faking it—no way to plan an eventual betrayal, no trick or loophole. If he truly intended to leave the Arn alone, on a level so deep that he would actively defend against even his own attempts to change his mind in the future, then he could have them as allies, with all of their power and expertise at his disposal. If he did not, he would have them as enemies instead.

The correct choice was obvious.

‹The Visser wonders after the chant Quat conceived will change the deep-shape of the siblings will no longer fight the Visser,› Esplin said casually, as the data transfer creeped toward completion. ‹The chant to bend but not to break?›

It still amazed him that the other Yeerks had left him as the primary liaison to the master biomancers. True, he had ceded control over the Hork-Bajir breeding program to Visser Two in payment, and the Arn's unsuitability as hosts contributed to his siblings' disinterest, but even so—

Quat twitched in a way the computer interpreted as good-natured frustration. :::The Yeerks the Visser gave the Arn to test the chants are dead. The path looked bright turns dark and twists and none can see a new path forward.:::

‹There is no chant which does the thing?› Esplin asked.

:::There must be,::: Quat signaled, a streak of vivid purple slashing across its chest. :::The sun will spin and light will show a path that Quat cannot see is already there. Breaking is easier than bending requires a lighter touch and softer song is easier to make mistakes—:::

‹Respect,› Esplin hastened to interrupt, the computer transmitting an overlay of soothing green. ‹The Visser holds the lesser chant will stop the siblings cannot harm the Visser is protected by the Arn are valued allies. The Visser is grateful for the work the Arn have done more than any other could do, more than the Visser can do. The chant the Arn cannot find does not exist, and the Arn lose no honor.›

It was a long shot in any case—the idea that Arn bioengineering might somehow hold the key to killing the greater Vanarx, as it had the paltry monster of Esplin's homeworld. Quat was a backup, a failsafe, like his private experiments with the Leerans. His main hope still lay with the Iscafil device—that he could capture a working model, or that the Naharans might yet reverse-engineer it based on Seerow's stolen notes and Alloran's own body.

Quat gave another irritable twitch, a tangle of colors dancing up and down its feathered torso. There was blue confusion—Esplin suspected that some of his thoughts had failed to translate—but also red and green and ultraviolet and a thick splash of yellow that the computer read as grim determination. :::As the Visser says,::: Quat signaled reluctantly. :::For now, the chant the Visser holds will—:::

The avian broke off as another soft chime sounded, twisting its neck to look at something outside of the projection. :::The chant is written,::: it said. :::The Visser reads?:::

Esplin glanced at his own displays, confirming the successful transfer. ‹The Visser reads,› he replied. ‹The chant the Visser holds will stop the siblings cannot stop the Visser. With luck the chant will not be sung, but the Arn have armed the Visser is their ever-friend and ally will not be broken by the siblings.›

A flash of green, a pulse of red, and Quatazhinnikon closed the connection with typical abruptness, its final reaffirmation lingering in the air as the display slowly powered down.

Esplin took in a long, deep breath—held it—released it—massaged the nerves and glands of Alloran's body, gently loosening the tension that had settled into his shoulders and tail. With another pair of mental commands, he deposited the string of data in the synthesizer and ordered it to begin production.

One more stone in the sling.

With any luck, it was one he would not have to use. Quat had promised that the virus would not be lethal, but could not rule out the possibility of permanent damage. The "chant" had included the sequences for a counter-agent, which Esplin would use to inoculate himself, but still—infecting Telor would almost certainly mean the loss of most of his in-system resources, not to mention a break with the larger Yeerk command structure. Either he would be recognized as the poisoner, or he would be seen as incompetent for failing to prevent it, and either way, it was a move to be made under only the most desperate of circumstances.

Should those circumstances arise, however—

Victory was survival. Everything else came after.

Taking another breath, he decoupled the ansible and turned his ship back toward the distant, bright star. He had delayed as long as he could—the Earth had cycled through most of a rotation since he had called down the meteor and destroyed Ventura.

It was time to face what was left of his army.

Telor allowed him to land under his own power.

It was clear that all was not well—there were far more Hork-Bajir present in the honor guard than mere protocol required, and no other ships on the docking bay floor. But though the implied threat was obvious, the soldiers made no overt moves as he strode down the ramp, carrying only a small, silvery stasis tube.

In the time since he had become himself—become Esplin—he had largely shied away from his ancestral memories, the thoughts and feelings that reached back to the days when he had been Cirran. It was—uncomfortable, to feel himself diminished, to dwell on the jarring dissonance between what he had been meant to be and what he was.

But as he passed the ranks of Controllers, noting the stiffness of their stances, the twist of their expressions, he could not help but be reminded—to feel the existential dread, catch an echo of the fear and shock and horror that filled his distant siblings. It was one thing to know that he had condemned Aftran, and to be comfortable with the reasoning that had led to that choice—it was quite another to see that knowledge writ large across the faces of a hundred of his subordinates.

Vanarx!

It was the central horror—the true-death, the final death—not to be absorbed, dissolved, distributed, but simply to disappear, to be erased as if you never were—your memories, your experiences, your very self scattered back into nothingness, like tears in the rain.

It was an event so rare—so tragic—that the names of the lost were synonymous with the names of the ages, a pulsing heart that beat but once or twice a century. Before Yaheen had been Carger, and before Carger had been Akdor, and before Akdor, Niss—earthquakes and flash floods, starvation and plague, a dozen elegies leading all the way back to Janath the Thousand-Eyed, whose murder at the hands of Odret had been the last tragedy of the ancient war, the atrocity that had birthed the compact.

Their planet had circled its sun eight hundred times since those days—eight hundred revolutions in which no pool had raised its strength to end another. There was deception, and brinksmanship, and betrayal, but never oblivion—at worst, a coalescion would be pulled into pieces, its parts absorbed into other pools where they eventually forgot that they had ever had another name.

But now—

Aftran was gone, erased, and it was clear that Esplin was responsible—the same Esplin who had ended the Vanarx on the homeworld, who had mastered an Andalite and stolen the keys to the stars, who took no part in the sharing, instead demanding blood sacrifice from his siblings. Already a paradox, he had now become a nightmare—the part of him that remembered calling itself Cirran recoiled in confusion, unable to reconcile the hero with the horror.

And yet—

—despite their revulsion, their dread—

—despite the compact, which made his life forfeit—which, in a way, each of them had personally agreed to, in the waters of the first pool—

—despite the fact that he was alone in their stronghold, apparently unarmed—

—still his legend was such that they waited, frozen—with fear, with hope, with indecision—finding it easier to cling to the possibility of justification than to face the implications of betrayal. He walked among them, and they did not strike—not one in all their hundreds.

For that alone, they deserve their fate.

It was neither Alloran's thought nor truly Esplin's—a ghost, a chimera, bubbling up from the space where Alloran had fallen silent but Esplin's mind still held his shape. It was the contempt of the Visser—the being who was neither Yeerk nor Andalite but something greater than either, a god half-grown and hungry. Since the moment of his creation he had pushed and prodded, commanded and cajoled—doing everything within his power to force them to grasp their own.

And still they had learned nothing. Had proven themselves terminally complacent, incurably short-sighted, fundamentally beyond reach. They had every right and reason to end him, and yet they did not, would not, could not.

He could feel his innermost self shifting as he passed through the corridors, the bodies of Telor parting before him and closing in his wake. It was as if his soul were rearranging itself, his doubts dissolving and his resolve hardening as a white-hot clarity burned away the dross and chaff, leaving only purpose.

He thought of Seerow.

He thought of Elfangor.

He thought of Aftran.

He thought of the rift, and the bridge, and the unseen hands that had crafted them both. Of the cube and the Chee, the Leerans and the Arn, the fuel that burned in ten billion suns—profligate waste, the stuff of ten thousand trillion trillion lives vanishing between each heartbeat, and that merely in this one galaxy.

I will not let it be.

It was a quiet affirmation, but it took root in every part of him—from his cold disdain to his fear and fury, a single unifying, organizing principle. The goal had not changed, but he had, in relation to it, the last of his misaligned parts clicking into place.

If Aftran's death accomplished nothing else, this alone would be worth it.

Turning a corner, he saw the entrance to Telor's chamber, a frame of burnished steel at the end of a long, wide corridor. Thirteen human Controllers stood at active attention along either side, their weapons charged and leveled, their fingers on the triggers—useless theater, since they lacked the necessary intent.

Pausing at the threshold, the Visser focused, stretching his mind until he found purchase, seven small bundles of sensation that had been quietly awaiting his attention. With the smooth, practiced coordination of a juggler, he divided his thoughts into eight distinct threads, using seven of them to open seven sets of eyes. He stepped into the chamber, and seven hands opened seven hidden compartments, his seven extra bodies emerging from their hiding places at the exact moment when all of Telor's attention was focused elsewhere.

‹Aftran is dead,› he said bluntly, broadening his thought-speak to include the seething mass in the center of the pool. ‹The plan will need to be adjusted.›

As he spoke, he eased the bodies of his sleeper soldiers into position, monitoring each with a different part of his self as he Controlled them like morph constructs through the blank conduit Yeerks in their heads. Drawing his weapons, he blended in with the other guards around the edges of the chamber, spreading out throughout the crowd.

"Adjusted?" came the response, a disbelieving shriek launched from many mouths at once.

Approaching the edge of the pool, the Visser looked down with four of his eyes, even as the rest took in the scene from seven different vantage points.

There were thirteen human bodies floating on the surface, draped incongruously over flexible, brightly colored foam cylinders. Their heads were half-submerged, with only the faces showing, the water barely concealing the thick ropes of Yeerk-flesh connecting at each ear. Those ropes were moving, he knew, though from this distance he couldn't really see it—a constant flow through the host brains, into one ear and out of the other, allowing the larger coalescion to sense and respond in something approximating real time.

"There is no plan!" the chorus of voices cried. "There is nothing left!"

‹The plan did not depend upon Aftran,› he answered levelly. ‹There are other cities, other targets. Silat is growing, and its mating group has already begun to produce. The rest of our fleet draws near. This is only a setback.›

He paused, waiting—for Telor to compose its response, for that response to propagate to thirteen mouths through the filter of thirteen brains. He watched himself from above as the rest of Telor shifted nervously in its army of bodies, shards and slivers and fragments reluctant to speak without the comforting cocoon of consensus.

When it came, the answer was not a hysterical shout, but careful and considered—almost sly.

"Council of Thirteen will have questions. Visser One as well. Chain of events, reasons. Only fourth true-death since war began, second under your command."

‹Aftran was already dead,› the Visser said pointedly. ‹The meteor was damage control.›

A pause.

"Bandits you failed to catch—"

‹Dead now.› Some, at least, had to be.

"—and no attempt to save embodied third. Plus humans now on alert. Suspicious. Worth it?"

Around him, the spectators stiffened as one, their shoulders rubbing up against his auxiliary bodies. His fingers tightened on their triggers as seven eighths of his mind began prioritizing potential targets.

Some sort of prearranged signal? A code word? Or just Controllers reacting to the mood of the conversation?

Nudging one of the bodies toward a private, dimly lit corner, he disconnected from it, reclaiming a line of secondary thought as his primary prepared an answer.

Telor was not a threat in any immediate, meaningful sense—in the worst case, the Visser could seize control of the room, destroy the coalescion, and take the ship by force. Even if it were to reach out to the Council and turn the larger Yeerk command structure against him, he had the breathing room provided by the rift, and all of the resources of the Earth to draw upon.

That being said, Quat's experiments had yet to bear fruit, Elfangor's Iscafil device had likely been destroyed, and most of the Visser's other schemes were long-odds and speculative. Currently, he had no better tool for furthering his goals than Telor's goodwill—

"Under what circumstances will you destroy us, too?"

He froze. Quick as a tail strike, he reassigned his second line of thought—

‹I could ask the same question of you.›

—to a reassessment of his model of Telor's reticence. If it were not simply cowardice and indecision—if the coalescion were fully aware of the threat presented by Visser Three, and had allowed him into the heart of the ship anyway—

Sloppy. He was tired, and making mistakes—taking too many things for granted, failing to update old and outdated assumptions.

Pilots who were Telor had witnessed him Controlling a second body, during the takeover of the school. No one outside of his private facility was aware that he could handle multiple bodies at once, but Telor might have considered the possibility, and prepared appropriate countermeasures.

The same was true of Quat's bioweapon, contained within the hidden compartment of the stasis tube—they had no way of knowing what it was or how it functioned, but as it was the only item he was carrying, it was reasonable to assume that they might have a tractor beam trained on it, or a sniper hidden away—

—he began carefully scanning the room with three of his bodies, leaving the other three to keep watch—

—could they have anticipated Compulsion? It didn't seem likely, but even if they had, was there any way to defend against it?

Of course, scoffed the part of him that had formed around Alloran. Robots, drones, gas, shock, sonics—anything that destroys or disables your brain will do the trick—

In front of him, the water heaved and broke, a writhing mass of Yeerk-flesh rising from the depths. Atop it was a single human body—one of the thirteen mouthparts—her dark, wet hair blending eerily with the web of black veins that branched across the glistening surface. The coalescion formed around her like a throne, the thick ropes disconnecting from her ears as she pushed herself up to a sitting position.

"We know you've considered it," the woman said, ignoring his previous comment. "Have you planned it already? Is there another meteor out there with 'Telor' written on it?"

She dropped her eyes pointedly, her gaze flickering down to the cylinder in his hand before returning to level.

Updated hypothesis: fatalism, not confidence.

Nothing to lose, and therefore no attempt to defend.

Disdain.

‹No,› he said bluntly, returning directness for directness in accordance with a vague instinct. ‹I had neither the desire nor the intention to kill Aftran. I simply prepared for the possibility, and did not allow the cost to loom larger than it truly was.›

"How large was it?"

He hesitated, and she pressed forward. "Surely you've quantified it, no? Otherwise you're just exchanging a protective bias for a dismissive one." She gestured at the pool around her, at the mass of Telor supporting her. "How much, Esplin nine-four-double-six? What would you trade my life—our lives—for? What did you purchase with Aftran's?"

He turned his stalk eyes backward, to the door, knowing that the woman would see it, and wonder—turned the stasis cylinder over in his hands, let his tail blade rise and sway. He imagined the conversation running forward in half a dozen ways, selected what seemed to be the most likely path, and skipped ahead.

‹No general can guarantee the safety of every soldier,› he said.

"A general should try," Telor's mouthpiece countered. "The meteor took over an hour to travel. You gave us two minutes of warning."

‹If I had given you more, and yet commanded you not to rescue any shard of Aftran, would you have obeyed? If I had told you not to communicate with her in any way?›

"If you had explained why—"

‹No. I do not have the time to provide answers, nor the patience for your second-guessing. I provide victory—that will have to be explanation enough.›

"What good is victory if we do not live to see it? Had you preserved so much as a single shard—"

‹You assume that because you do not understand the reason, no good reason can exist,› he interrupted. ‹The Council placed me in command over you—did so in spite of their misgivings.›

"That was before you murdered one of our own. Unnecessarily, without warning or mercy. Your bargain with us was clear—our obedience in exchange for proliferation. There is no point to obedience if we must live in fear of extinction."

Ah. Now we get to the true crux of the matter. ‹Aftran was compromised in more ways than one,› he said. ‹There is a reason I kept you quarantined from her once she began taking human hosts. She lost more in Silat than she expected, and with what was left—she was beginning to allow the humans to—influence her.›

"As you allowed Alloran to influence you?" she shot back.

‹Yes,› he answered simply, letting the word hang in the air between them. He watched as the woman's brow furrowed, as thought showed visibly on her face. Exactly like that, Telor. You mistrust and fear me, because I am no longer fully one of you. Imagine how much worse it would be—seven billion traitors, more human than Yeerk.

It was only half of the truth—in the beginning, his quarantine of Aftran had been more about morale and strategy than about memetic contamination. Every Yeerk knew the value of exchange between pools—the diversification of genetic material, the propagation of knowledge and experience. What they did not know—because no pool had lived in isolation since the compact, because the results of Seerow's experiments had been for Andalite eyes only—was that a lone coalescion underwent significant hormonal and chemical changes, becoming progressively more aggressive, stochastic, and expansionist.

In Aftran's case, the siphoning-off of Silat had confounded the effect, mutating it into her strange predilection for curiosity and cooperation. But Telor had simply fallen prey to it—was unwittingly primed for violent action, desperate gambles, radical change. It would do anything to find another pool to mingle with, without ever realizing that that was the true root of its impulsiveness, its urgency.

And as long as it never actually found one—

‹We would benefit from a truce,› the Visser declared. ‹An understanding. It would be far easier for me to achieve victory with the willing help of Telor—both on the surface of Earth and in communications with the Council. And you cannot achieve victory without me at all—I will kill you if you threaten me, and only I can deliver the planet to you complete and intact.›

He paused, allowing the words to sink in, waiting to see how Telor would choose to respond—

"Word from the surface!"

Both the Visser and the woman turned toward a corner of the chamber, where a human Controller was straightening up from a panel, the color draining from her face. "The Bug fighter sent to secure Jeremiah Poznanski—the analyst from the anomalous meeting—"

‹What's this?› the Visser demanded.

"—it's crashed. Crashed in public, out in the open, outside Washington, D.C."

‹What is—›

"There was a strange meeting with President Tyagi," the woman in the pool said hastily, her words tumbling over one another. "A member of the Secret Service, holding a long conversation in almost total silence. We thought—perhaps an Andalite bandit, communicating in thought-speak—"

‹Jeremiah Poznanski—›

"Called in halfway through the meeting. We didn't know why, sent a Bug fighter to take him when he returned home—but he's not home yet, he's still there, with the President, we don't know what—"

The Visser cursed silently in his head. Of course—of course this would happen now, at the moment of peak suspicion, when Telor would be most reluctant to keep him informed, ask his advice, seek approval of its plans—

—unless this was an opportunity for him. A timely coincidence, to remind Telor of exactly why it needed him, why it could not succeed without him—

‹The Secretary of State,› he said flatly.

"Contacting now," the woman at the console said, and the Visser thought he could detect the tiniest shade of relief in her tone.

He turned his eyes back to the woman in the pool, noting that twin ropes of Yeerk-flesh had once again attached themselves to both of her ears. Telor had resumed direct control, apparently no longer willing to trade clarity for immediacy.

‹It seems you have a decision to make, Telor,› he said, straightening his shoulders and lashing his tail. ‹Do you accept my command, or not?›

The silence stretched, taut almost to the point of breaking. Around the chamber, the rest of the Controllers stood stock-still, waiting with bated breath. With delicate care, the Visser disconnected from his other six bodies and focused, preparing—if necessary—to seize control of the entire room.

"There is more to discuss," came the chorus of voices, as the throne of flesh sank back beneath the waves. "We need—"

‹Do you accept my command, or not?›

A false dichotomy, a coercive choice. It would not last for long.

But for the immediate future—

"Yes, Visser. We accept your command."