Cassie slowly wakes up to realize that everyone has been knocked unconscious, and also Ax is there pointing a gun at them.  Well, the alien version of a gun.

And now I’m just randomly wondering…why do they never steal guns from the Yeerks?  Ax has one here, and they’re visually similar enough that Cassie makes the automatic association, so it doesn’t appear that he’s opposed to them.  Tobias used one last book, and it sliced through the hull of a space ship.  They could totally steal a few of those bad boys, sit in the abandoned construction site, and take pot-shots at the Blade Ship every time V3 lands there for inexplicable reasons.  Granted, I’m sure not every pickle they get into could be solved with firepower…but a lot of them could.  As I’ve mentioned multiple times in these reviews, ranged weapons are awesome.  The further the range, the further away you are from getting chopped in half and eaten by a Taxxon.  (And they can find something with fingers to morph, since the Yeerks…somehow keep forgetting that they’re human.  Aw, how cute would be to have a monkey pop out of the trees and shoot you in the face?)

Anyway, Ax is understandably weirded out by these strange aliens that have come to find him when he thought that only his own kind could hear him, so he’s more than a little jumpy as the kids try to convince him that they’re friends.  They explain that they got his call and also knew about Elfangor.

And then…it’s pretty much just straight info dump.  I guess it’s not a bad info dump, it’s just sort of bland.  They explain that Earth is fucked, Ax tells them what kind of ship he’s in.  (Admittedly, not a fair trade of information, but whatever.)  He also explains that he was too young to fight and that he’s the only surviving Andalite…but he doesn’t bother to explain what the fuck he was doing on a war ship headed into war with the war and war and WAR if he’s too young to even participate.  I mean, Elfangor probably had some strings to pull, but this goes way beyond string-pulling.  If it were legal to bring cadets into A WAR ZONE, then I’d expect Ax to be one of a select group.  If he’s the only one, then pretty much every standard got broken to bring him along.  Unless they only take one cadet per ship?  That doesn’t seem very useful.

And really, Ax was the only non-combatant?  In a while ship full of people (a deep-space ship, which would by necessity be a floating city, since you can’t get any input for months at a time) there weren’t any, I don’t know, cooks or paper pushers or analysts?

In the army, in theory, every in a soldier first and an “insert MOS here” second.  In reality, no, cooks do not fight battles unless everyone else has been fucked.  Because fighting takes practice, and it takes endless, mindless, boring drills, and it takes working as a unit, and it takes everyone knowing their place and how to work alongside everyone else so that you don’t accidently shoot your buddy because the two of you crossed paths at the wrong moment.  There’s a reason we have several whole job classifications that basically boil down to “these dudes here to the fighting.” The people who do support jobs?  They don’t have time to do their jobs and all that practice.  So when a big fight comes down, they sit back and pray to god that they don’t need to join in, because if that’s the case then the guy in charge is down to just chucking warm bodies at the enemy. 

So why isn’t the rest of the support staff in the Dome with Ax?  Why was there only one person on the entire ship who couldn’t fight for one reason or another?  Were there, perhaps, more people there originally, but as the battle started going to shit, they got called away?  We’ll never know!

After…frankly, a very basic exchange of facts, and absolutely no amount of any proof that what the kids are saying is true (except for the ‘we can morph’ part), Ax swears loyalty to Jake.  Just…boom, just like that.  I guess Andalites aren’t very big on verification. 

Ax gives them a tour of the Dome while they rest up for the swim back (do they have a plan for getting back?  Since they needed a ship to get here and can’t figure out how to reset their morph clock…did no one think about this?), and he explains that they have specific words for specific landscaping shapes.  That’s neat.  I wish we’d gotten to learn more about the Andalites. 

Cassie finds out that they Yeerks like to turn each taken-over planet into a copy of their planet by killing all the native species, and this gets Cassie all worked up because OMG THINK OF ALL THE ANIMALS YOU GUYS.

Cassie, shut up.  Yeah, that’s a horrible thing to have happen to the earth and would suck major donkey ass, but don’t go gasping about it like you’ve just now figured out that the Yeerks are bad news.  Like, oh, enslave humanity, that’s bad I guess, and WHAT, THEY WANT TO KILL PUPPIES, TOO?  OMG YOU GUYS, THEY’RE SO TOTALLY EEEEEEEEVIL!

Ax said proudly.

1) Who are the other two races?

2) Why don’t we see more cool aliens besides jus the Taxxons and Hork-Bajir (and that one really fast guy)?

“How did these Yeerks get this far?” Rachel demanded. “How did this happen? If you Andalites are so tough, why didn’t you stop them a long time ago? How did a bunch of slugs who live in dirty ponds manage to become so powerful?”

And then Ax acts cagey and won’t tell them, so Rachel tries to push it.  On the one hand, yeah, if they’ve got a secret weapon that let them get break-out powerful, that would be nice to know.  On the other hand, wow, that is some painful foreshadowing right there.  I mean, Rachel’s already seen how insidious the Yeerks are and how they can totally sneak anywhere and use hosts against their own race.  And she thinks they need another secret reason for being so threatening?

They get ready to go just in time, because a ship is overhead and sonar-ing them.  The kids go dolphin again, and Ax shows off that he has a shark morph.  They make a bee-line for the surface (got to breathe and all) and realize once they get there that V3 has shown up and is dropping Taxxons in the water like they’re evil pool toys. 

The kids decide to go into a fight and figure out that the Taxxons basically burst like an overripe fruit at the slightest pressure.  Ew.  And also, dafuq?  Why even send them in to begin with if they can’t do anything?  The Yeerks would be better off with a net than with these guys.  In fact, they’re so shit at fighting that Cassie doesn’t even describe the battle, she just muses for a bit about how dolphins and sharks are awesome.  Apparently while she was sitting still and thinking about evolution, the rest of the Taxxons spontaneously combusted or something.

They high-tail it out of there, only to wind up with a new V3 morph in the water with them.  Ax explains that this new morph came from one of the Andalite moons, like that has any bearing on the fact that it’s chasing them at the moment.  In fact…there’s a lot of extraneous talk here.  Mostly due, I think, to the fact that Ax takes forever to get around to stuff.  He doesn’t say “That’s V3,” he says “do you know that’s not a true mardrut?”  Come on, boy, you’re in the military.  They should teach you how to spit out the important information fast in the middle of battle, not get stymied on formalities. 

And thus we get…a chase.  In the water.  It’s just dolphins swimming until they get tired.  At least most of it is skipped.  V3 gets close enough to taunt them, and apparenly this sends Ax into conniptions, because V3 is still able to send out evil-fear thoughts.  Somehow.  I mean, it’s fine to be scared of the guy, but it makes no sense to freak out at his bad banter but not at his ‘om nom nom eat you’ morph. 

They the whale from before shows up as the ultimate deus ex machina and whomps the shit out of V3.  Now, I have no problem with this guy getting the beatdown from some normal animals, and whales are awesome, but…really, it popped right the fuck out of nowhere.  Cassie could have, I don’t know, thought “hey, we need some larger allies” and been looking for a whale throughout this chase.  Or been leading V3 to the last place they saw the whale, hoping that whales are still around that territory.  (I don’t know if whales work that way or not, but neither does she.)  Instead, we get none of that.  No agency, no planning, no nothing, just magic whales popping up at the most convenient moment.

Thanks, magic whales!

The magic whales even psychically tell Cassie that it’s okay to sit on their backs and get a free ride to shore.

“You know something? You were right. You trusted your feelings and we followed you and we’re all safe.”

Yeah, but her plan only worked because magic whales showed up, and also it took her several days to get this shit organized.  If they’d headed out and found Ax earlier, V3 and his crew wouldn’t have been right overhead, they would have been off searching whatever quadrant of the oceans they were looking through three days ago. 

Basically, Cassie only avoided killing people by dumb luck, and I vote she never be put in charge of anything again.  Or at least not until she learns how to actually form plans.  It’s fine if she never gets that skill.  Not everyone has it, and she doesn’t need it to be a good person.  But she does need it to lead missions. 

Also, she’s still not sure if it’s morally right to morph dolphins, because…fuck if I know.  God, she’s annoying.

They get back on dry land and decide Ax should go live on Cassie’s farm, since it’s not really a farm, it’s just big, wasted space.

“It’s not so different from the dome ship. Fields, meadows, woods, all the way into the national forest land.

See?  Who includes ‘woods’ and ‘meadows’ in their definition of ‘farm’?

Ax does that cool mix-DNA thing and becomes a new human.  And, somehow, the kids have an extra t-shirt and boxers for him.  Uh, which of the boys is going without underwear?  They only have the clothes they wore before morphing, so…  Whatever, Ax is a funny human now who stutters.

And then we end the book when Cassie goes back to the Gardens a few nights later just to play in the tank with the other dolphins.  Well, why not?  We opened the book with pointless morphing, I guess it’s a bit of symmetry to end the same way.

I’m so glad to be done with Cassie.  And that we have Ax now!