- Narrator: Marco
A mission to get rid of a Kandrona generator takes the Animorphs to the Arctic Circle.
Tropes:
- Auto Cannibalism: A Taxxon that Ax cuts in half starts eating its other half.
- Bad Date: Marco spends the first chapter gushing about how a cute girl gave him the time of day. When the second chapter begins, he's already blown it by falling asleep at the classical music concert she took him to. She doesn't call him back.
- Bears Are Bad News: The Animorphs manage to acquire a wild polar bear named Nanook after having Rachel in grizzly bear morph and Marco in gorilla morph fight him to a standstill. Having Earth's largest living land predator at their disposal proves beneficial for the Animorphs.
- Devious Dolphins: A pair of wild orcas show up to try and prey on the Animorphs in baby seal morph. Luckily, the orcas get weirded out when the seals demorph into humans, a hawk, and an Andalite.
- Either "World Domination", or Something About Bananas: Ax has a hard time understanding Taxxon-ese while in fly morph.Ax: <He’s welcoming the Visser back aboard the Blade ship. Or he may be telling him his brother is a meteor fragment. I understand Galard, but this morph’s hearing is very uncertain.>
- Flea Episode: As Ax and Tobias don't have wolf morphs, they're forced to survive by morphing into fleas and hiding on the others. When asked if they want to have some seal, they admit they're not hungry.
- Fossil Revival: The Venber were wiped out by the Five, who used melted Venber to power their supercomputers. The Yeerks somehow managed to clone some Venber to have manpower up in the Arctic.
- Go into the Light: Marco nearly freezes to death while in gorilla morph, seeing a light he doesn't need wings to reach. He's awoken by Rachel smashing his face with a grizzly paw.
- Good Thing You Can Heal: It's been prevalent for the whole series that morphing can heal lethal injuries. This adventure gets it the worst with the Animorphs constantly morphing and demorphing to get rid of frostbite.
- Grim Up North: The Kandrona satellite is in the Arctic where it is presumably difficult for the Andalite bandits to reach it. The Yeerks have managed to recreate the Venber as winter shock troops because all the host bodies they have don't fare well in the endless winter.
- Hypocritical Humor: Visser Three screams <Cursed parasites!> when the Animorphs in fly morph annoy him, without even a hint of irony.
- I'm Melting!: The Venber can't survive above freezing. They'll literally melt if they enter an area above zero degrees Celcius.
- "Instant Death" Radius: The tanks that hold the Venber have supercooled air, so much that breaking the tanks causes the Animorphs and several Hork-Bajir Controllers to lose limbs from contact with the mist.
- Nature Is Not Nice: Touched upon again when the Animorphs realize that the seal Nanook killed had two pups. Cassie is now mature enough to accept that the team needs to survive more than the pups do.
- Preferable Impersonator: Much to Marco's annoyance, Erek actually did his chores while filling in for him, and Peter expects it to become a regular thing.
- Shower of Angst: Marco spends hours in a warm shower after coming back from the mission. When Peter suggests getting ice cream, he goes right back in.
- Sweet Seal: Deconstructed. The Animorphs acquire the adorable seal pups whose mother they'd just scavenged, and while they have fun at first, it soon becomes apparent that baby seals have a pretty dangerous life, especially once the orcas show up.
- Torture Cellar: Visser Three's private quarters have human instruments of torture from all of history as decoration.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Marco wonders about the fate of the two Venber sent to hunt the Andalite bandits, ultimately suspecting that they're still roaming the glaciers looking for them.
- Would Be Rude to Say "Genocide": Ax finishes the story of the Venber and the Five by saying that the early spacefaring Andalites had contact with the Five, and the Five are now extinct. He emphasizes that the Andalites of back then were not the Andalites of today.
