At school - now in its very last days - everyone knows that Trouble borrowed fifty dollars from Amber Jefferson and made off with it. Amber is very gossipy and can afford to lose fifty bucks; he chose well.
Bella hasn't heard from Trouble - or for that matter Aspret - yet.
Trouble still hasn't made contact. By the time school ends and the last final has been taken in and Renée is starting to formulate summer plans for what she'll be up to in the twins' absence, Bella is beginning to seriously entertain the hypothesis that he flew off with his new friend Aspret The Duck, never to return.
"Yep," says Trouble. "First interesting thing about Yeerks: they can dump whole memories on you when they feel like it. Aspret gave me a bunch. It was easier than figuring out everything we might possibly want to know and then telling me in words, but it makes it harder to just start summarizing."
<Where the pools are, how they're guarded, stuff about Yeerk tech - what they have, how to sabotage it, how to steal it - anything the Yeerks know about the likelihood or likely effectiveness of Andalite intervention, if there are any other aliens making themselves relevant out there, if there are any other strike points besides the three day cycle, odds on whether we can talk other Yeerks into becoming ducks-or-something without getting sold out, if they know anything Elfangor didn't get a chance to tell us about morphing, anything cultural or psychological useful for picking Controllers out of a crowd or spooking them.>
"Okay..." He chews on his lip. "I mean, that's most of it. They stole a lot of their shit from the Andalites - there's some history there, but Aspret wasn't around for most of it so she's kind of foggy on the details. They've got three different kinds of spaceship here. The one we saw that looked like an axe is Visser Three's Blade ship, that he usually keeps hidden on the ground somewhere, and then there's a Pool ship in orbit and a bunch of Bug fighters - those're the little guys. The Pool ship has a big Yeerk pool on board; the Blade ship has a smaller one. When they can, though, they like making pools on the ground. They name the ones on the ground when they're big enough; the one under Phoenix is called Selt Arash. Aspret was born there - she was one of the first. She got up to a host so quickly because she studied biochemistry while she was in the pool; they have computers they can access in there."
"The zap guns are called Dracon beams. At maximum power they vaporize; lower settings burn things, lower than that will stun, and the lowest just hurts like hell. They keep track of 'em, and anybody who loses one is in deep shit, but we could probably get our hands on one if we tried. If you keep asking me three questions at once, I'm gonna keep forgetting the other two by the time I'm done answering one."
"Hell if I know," says Trouble. "I mean, sure, if we can get somebody who knows how to pilot one, maybe we can steal something. But it's not like Aspret spent a lot of time analyzing their security. Oh - that guy who got shot in front of Robin was an escaped host, by the way. Aspret saw him make a break for it. Happens once in a while, but they almost never get as far as the door."
"Who the fuck knows. Blade ship, maybe. His security's top-notch. The guy's kind of a tool, though. Like, that important project Aspret was assigned to - she got kicked off and demoted because he overheard her saying that what he was asking for was impossible and made no sense. He gets into these moods where he'll kill anybody who looks at him funny."
"They don't all know each other - there's too many. And you can't tell by sight who's in somebody's brain. There's a whole bunch of entrances - one in the used bookstore, one in a McDonald's, one in our school, one behind a bus station, two more Aspret's never come in by, and then there's a tunnel going to a hangar way out of town where they keep a bunch of Bug fighters, but she's never been down it. They guard it, but they're not expecting an Andalite strike force - they're gonna think we're Andalites, even Aspret kept catching herself thinking of us as Andalites and she sure as hell knew better. We could probably get in and out pretty easy as bugs or something, until they figure out we exist."
<I don't have an actual plan contingent on us presenting through a filter that isn't installed for purposes that don't exist as three humans instead of five such that we need to figure out a configuration today. I'm just noting that the constraint is 'go in as humans, Yeerks, or other host species' and not 'go in as humans' - come to think of it, unless Visser Three likes having equipment around that can zap him, Andalite morphs would probably be safe too.> (Write, write.)
"There's a Council of Thirteen back on the home planet, and they're the big bosses. Then there's Vissers - no idea how many - the lower the number, the more important they are, and a bunch more Sub-Vissers with the same deal. The rest of them have numbers too - Aspret is Aspret 112 - but that just means they're the umptieth Yeerk born with that name."
"...When I say they wouldn't even think of it, I mean it like... that almost doesn't make sense as a question. Like, imagine you went up to a random person on the street and offered them twenty bucks to shoot the President. I bet you can guess most people wouldn't take it, but I sure couldn't tell you exactly what about it would put people off, except, you know, some kid just offered them twenty bucks to assassinate the President? Maybe some people wouldn't go for it because they believe in democracy, and some people wouldn't go for it because they don't want to kill anybody, and some people wouldn't go for it because it'd be dangerous, and some people wouldn't go for it because they wouldn't even know how, and some people wouldn't go for it because twenty bucks is too low, or a bunch of those reasons or a bunch of completely different reasons or just because there's no room in their head to even take an idea like that seriously."
Trouble shrugs. "It was a good deal for Aspret because she was already on the outs with the boss and she probably couldn't have survived any other way - even if she had sold us out, he could've killed her anyway, he does that sometimes when somebody pisses him off and then tries to make it up to him too fast. Most Yeerks we catch won't already be in deep shit like that."
<Perhaps we could get you a clock to stash in whatever hideout you will be using most often. Certainly we can feed you, at least in morph, even if human-amounts of food going missing would be suspicious. Is there anything else we can do to make it less hard for you to let us know that we do not all have to panic and melt into the desert on some reasonable schedule?>
"I'm not really gonna have a place to stash a clock. I'm not really gonna have a place," he says. "I can't be that pinned down. Anytime somebody in Phoenix sees my face, they might kill me or drag me off to a Yeerk pool. And I have to sleep at least a few hours a day. So every day, I have to find somewhere to sleep where I'll be safe for a few hours. But the best places aren't always going to be the same, and the best times aren't always going to be the same either. Keeping to a routine isn't just hard anymore, it's dangerous."
"Yeah. Find some small bug we can carry with us and take to the bathroom after an hour and a half, acquire it, figure out how it works so you don't become obsessed with whatever obsesses bugs and bother someone and get squished. Housefly is probably a good all-purpose choice - flea might work if you can get one, though, probably easier to hide and harder to squish."