B30C28/29 - Take Dracon Beam

Visser One fired.

Visser Three sliced.

<Aaaarrgghh!>

A sizzling hole appeared in Visser Three's color-shifting shell.

My mother screamed. She staggered and fell. Her clothes were stained red.

<NOOOO!> I cried. I leaped. Leaped at Visser Three, head down, horns ready.

<Marco! Stop!> Rachel cried. <It's the plan! It has to happen! It has to happen! She has to->

<NOOOOOO!> I slammed into the chameleon morph. It jerked back. Visser Three staggered. Three legs crumpled.

Visser One fired.

The shot missed Visser Three. It hit me.

Searing pain. There was a neat semicircle of flesh gone from my haunch. I staggered, blinded and disoriented by the pain.

"Destroy the colony! The colony!" my mother screamed into her communicator. "Don't fire on Visser Three's ships! The colony! Kill them all! Kill them all!"

<Pathetic attempt. You can't hope to conceal your treason,> Visser Three said.

TSEEEEEEW! TSEEEEEEW!

Dracon cannon were firing from the sky above. The Empire ship was blasting the ground. Firing at what they thought was a colony of free Hork-Bajir.

A hologram.

Erek the Chee had created the illusion. And now, as the Yeerks fired, he created the illusion of Hork-Bajir burning, falling, dying.

But the laws of physics could not be denied.

The massive Dracon energies were not descending deep into a valley. They were hitting the mountain peak, only a hundred feet from us.

CRRRRRRR-ACK!

The ground shuddered.

And suddenly, the ground was falling away. A crack in the very rock itself.

A huge fissure opened up.

I staggered to my feet, crippled by the pain of my wound.

The fissure had separated us. Visser Three, and now an army of rushing, eager Hork-Bajir-Controllers on one side. Rachel and Tobias trapped there with them.

I was on the other side of the fissure. So was Visser One. My mother. We were alone.

She stood with her back to the cliff, raging.

"Too late, Visser Three! Too late to stop me!" Then, calling into her communicator, "Detach a fighter to get me off this rock!"

Rachel and Tobias were back against their own dead drop. Hork-Bajir hemmed them in, attacking relentlessly.

In seconds, it would be over.

All over. My plan. Done. Failed. Rachel and Tobias would die. Visser Three would live. And Visser One?

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a Bug fighter roaring out of the sky, rocketing down toward us.

I turned to face her. Visser One. The leader of the initial invasion of Earth.

She stared at me. She moved to aim the weapon at me.

I lowered my head and felt the power in my legs.

It would be a hundred-foot drop.

<I love you,> I whispered. And then, I lunged.

"The boy!" she whispered, amazed. "It's the boy!"

(...)

I lunged.

The Dracon beam moved. Her finger tightened.

Too slow. She was too slow. I would hit her a split second before she could fire. I would hit her with all the power I possessed and she would fly backward into emptiness and -

RRRRROOOOOAAAARRR!

A flash of orange and black. It appeared over the lip of the cliff.

So fast!