Tap-tap. Tapitty tap-tap-tap. Tap tap. Tap. Bored, Tallest Purple clicked his claws against the frame of the floating monitor tablet. The elevator, not really built for general public use, was cramped with just one tallest and three nervous little advisors following him around. It would have been even worse had Red not weaseled out of inspections duty that morning.

"But Puuuuuur," the ruby-eyed tallest had cooed, grinning like the cat that ate not only the canary but also the whole turkey. "My head hurts soooo much. Can't you do the inspection without me just this one time? It would mean so much to me."

Purple had narrowed his large eyes, crossing his arms across his chest as best he could with what resembled two giant marshmallows attached to each limb. "That's what you said last time. And the time before that, and before that, and…"

Red hovered up, clamping both claws onto Purple's armored shoulders. "But that just proves how much faith I have in your inspections. Besides, you're so much better at them than I am…"

Purple had, as usual, been the one to give in. When he'd left, clever Red had been using a service drone's face to polish a laser while lounging and snacking on nacho chips. "Some gratitude he gives me," Purple muttered. He was so lost in his own thoughts that he didn't notice the nervous assistants scooting as far away from him as the narrow confines of the elevator would allow. It was pretty well known in the Empire that a tallest in a bad mood was far scarier than any alien race an Invader might encounter.

Purple drew out a pen from behind his antennae, sweeping his reflective eyes over the machinery. It was all so gray and oppressive, no wonder Red didn't want to come down there. Besides, everything looked the same, and Red wasn't known for liking fine detail work. "Compression hoses fine, gear 17 fine, egg behind gear 17 fine, air valve thirteen fine…" There he paused.

"Egg behind gear 17?" swooping down in one quick movement, he wrapped two long, spindly green claws around the egg and hefted it up. "For the love of… how much do the mechanics have to BREED?" he pouted, sighing unhappily. "Now I've got to go through all the extra work of taking his egg around to the nursery. How inconsiderate of them!"

"Sir, I could…"

"Did I ASK you to speak?" Purple snapped, cutting off the would-be helpful assistant. Shaking his head violently no, he jumped back and trembled behind a fellow assistant. Half-hazardly, tallest Purple shoved the egg into the brim of his robe and continued on his inspections, the imaginary storm cloud over his head growing larger by the minute as he fumed about Red's reluctance to do his stupid job.

Now, there is something here that requires a moment of explaining. The robes themselves do not have pockets. Rather, there is an opening in the robe that leads to a pouch of skin, much like that of an earthen marsupial. Ever since the invent of cloning had made mating an item of fun that sometimes lead to reproduction instead of the basic means of reproduction, the pouches had gone unused, but were allowed to remain in the Irken genome because they provided handy-dandy sandwich storing compartments. It was into this warm, safe body pouch that Purple had deposited the newly laid egg.

It was there, in his rage over Red leaving him with all the work to do, that Purple forgot the egg.

---

"And so the importance of the Bovine treaty to the third segment of the Western Marsh empire is that…" Blah, blah, blah. Red was busy doing a crossword puzzle; Purple had fallen asleep in his chair and was leaving a little puddle of drool that traced from the edges of his thin mouth onto the carpeted floor. Red might have stopped him, but he was trying to think of a four-letter word meaning "to have intercourse."

Red leaned back and studied the room. Rows and rows of identical blue tables, plain blue walls. Boring, boring, boring. Red couldn't think of a more boring place for a boring meeting. "Hey Pur, what's a…"

"I'm in labor!" Purple suddenly shrieked, sitting bolt upright. The entire gathered congregation of ambassadors and planetary leaders suddenly seemed locked on the two of them. Red shrank down in his seat, wondering what he'd done wrong in a past life to get partnered with such a nutty companion of a ruler.

"Your tallest," the spotted leader smirked, her lips drawn back in a gruesome sneer. "Is it safe to assume that you have rejoined us after a rather pleasant nap?"

There was a long, heavy pause in which not even a fly dared break the silence. Then, shrieking like a broken fire truck, Purple bolted from the room. Red stared after him in confusion, then shrugged and returned to his crossword puzzle.

"Is something wrong, your tallest?" the speaker inquired.

"Eh? Why, no. He just… he just… forgot to take his psychiatric medication this morning! You know how those crazy schizophrenics are!"

The speaker stared at him incredulously before returning to her interrupted report. Whispers floated like butterflies on a draft of hot air through the room. Red, however, paid no attention to the nasty gossip he'd just started about his partner. After all, he'd just figured out that the word he'd been puzzling over was "Talk."

Meanwhile, a panicky Purple was curled up on the floor of the unisex bathroom, whispering "Why me?" repeatedly. The egg, lying in the folds of his robe, had several large visible cracks in it and a pair of skinny green legs extending out the back of the shell.

"Come in, central base. Central base!" he cried angrily, shaking his communicator. Damn it, he knew he shouldn't have played "Snake" on it so many times. He'd run the batteries down, and if the hatching egg didn't get a pack within moments… well, the only ending to that scenario was death.

Not that Purple particularly cared. After all, it was just some abandoned mechanic's egg, and he was an all-important tallest. One little Irken made no difference to him one way or another. He lifted the egg up, squinting one lavender eye at it.

"Now look, I'm sorry, but you brought this upon yourself. There's nothing I can do because you were stupid enough to hatch where you're going to die."

As if in response to his accusations, the top of the egg popped off and a little green head appeared, blinking against the harsh florescent lights. Round orange-red eyes, a dark tone of cured amber, peered curiously up at Purple through thick eyelashes. Bits of creamy white and red speckled egg clung to tiny but curly antennae.

The smeet looked curiously up at the larger Irken holding the remains of her egg. She blinked at him. "Mama?" she inquired curiously before falling to her side, her tiny body unable to process the air without a pack.

"Why me why me why me?" Purple whined, frantically sticking his head out the door of the bathroom. "Help! Someone help me!" Empty. The halls were as dead as a tomb. All the important people were in the meeting, and anyone unimportant had been told to stay out of sight and was doing so marvelously.

Purple was fully ready to leave the infant for dead, but as his brain had been busy searching for someone to help him, a deeper instinct had awakened in him. Crawling back from a part of his mind long given over to machines and thought dead, the corpse of maternal instinct crawled into his mechanical parts.

Before his rational mind could react, three small wires shot out of his pack and into the still infant's back, causing her tiny body to convulse as they burned their way into her body and linked up with her spine. Even as Purple was about to shriek in horror from the realization that his body had tied itself to the smeet, she opened her tiny eyes and gasped in a deep breath of air.

Purple, long legs folded under his slender body, stared at the smeet. The smeet stared back, crawling on wobbly hands and knees over towards the stunned tallest. Then up the smeet crawled into his lap, sniffing curiously at him.

"Mama!" the smeet declared joyously before eagerly separating his pouch from the rest of his body and crawling inside. A pregnant bulge jutted out of the formerly slender tallests' middle.

"Oh no you don't!" he cried, pulling open his pouch in an attempt to dislodge smeet from his middle. Smeet, however, had already curled up in a little ball and gone to sleep. He slapped his forehead hard enough to leave a slight red indentation where his gauntlets hit his head.

He'd thought the bovine treaty meeting was going to be bad, but he'd had no idea it was going to get that bad. Oh well, he might as well leave it in his pocket until he returned to the Massive and could get a technician to clip the little parasite from his body.

Now normally, there would be some questions when someone suddenly exited the room and returned looking about seven months pregnant. However, Red and Purple were pretty well known as ruthless tyrants, unashamed to kill or mutilate their own people. It didn't hurt that the bulge occasionally moved, and Irkens were known for devouring other insectoid species alive. A few smaller insect species in attendance even cast knowing, sympathetic glances toward the tallests' middle.

Red, meanwhile, noticed only his crossword puzzle.

Back on the Massive, wrapped in only a white hospital gown that left him feeling more than exposed, Purple waiting impatiently for the technician to come and cut the wires connecting him to the smeet. The smeet, meanwhile, was awake inside him and crawling around, poking at him.

"Stop it, stop it!" he snapped angrily. At least Red hadn't noticed. He didn't know if he should be offended or relieved at that fact. It really was a toss-up.

The techinician returned, hands shaking. "Your tallest?"

"Yeeeeeees?" he purred, knowing that he wasn't going to like what she was about to say if she were shaking and stammering that badly.

"I… can't just… 'cut it off.' Since you stayed at the meeting instead of rushing back for treatment, she's downloaded part of your memories, and part of your personality."

Purple blinked. "So?"

"So," the technician continued. "Babies babble. She could start giving out military and… personal… secrets of yours at any time."

Purple crossed both his arms and his legs. "Fine then, she'll simply have to be destroyed."

Pain crossed the technician's eyes. The poor smeet destroyed, simply for attaching to the wrong person in an attempt to save her life? But the poor thing had just been born! She hadn't even had a chance to crawl, or learn to speak, or taste her first meal.

Then a crafty idea slipped through the technician's mind. She knew the tallest was eager to keep the whole smeet incident hushed up, so his chances of getting a second opinion were unlikely. After all, she was the only technician in the whole Empire known for being able to keep secrets. "My tallest," the clever tech gasped. "That could kill YOU!"

Purple looked angrily over at her. "What?" he asked, his voice dripping acid.

"She's got a piece of your data inside her. If that data were simply wiped out, it would cause a critical malfunction in your pack. You'd drop dead within five minutes of her death."

"And there's nothing you can DO about this?" he shrieked, eyes increasing in size as much as his voice increased in pitch.

"I'm sorry, my tallest, I'm sorry!" she pleaded, dropping down to her knees and bowing at his feet.

Purple lifted up the wiggling smeet and stared into her bright eyes as she giggled. "So I'm stuck with her?" he hissed. The technician said nothing, feeling it was more of a rhetorical question than something she was actually supposed to say one thing or another on.

"Look on the bright side, my tallest. No one will question your… umm… actions. They wouldn't dare!"

Purple looked less than convinced that it was a good thing as he released the naked smeet, who shivered and promptly returned to the inside of his warm pouch, leaving only her curly antennae trailing out of the top.

"So, how am I supposed to… keep this thing kicking? I'm much too important to die!"

"Of course, my tallest." At that moment, both Irkens noted a rank smell drifting through the room. The tech had to bite her tongue to avoid laughing and getting thrown out an air lock. "May I suggest, first off, diapers?"

After Purple had been thoroughly cleaned out and the smeet tightly diapered and wrapped in a soft blue smeet suit, the technician swallowed down her fear and returned her attention to the tallest. "Your tallest… there's… the matter of what she's going to eat. Smeets this young can't really handle adult foods yet."

"So you're saying…?"

"How good are you at making yourself throw up?"

After a long, heavy pause, the answer came. "No. Way."

"There's not much of another choice, sir! Her body can't produce the digestive juices she needs yet, and needs to get them and her food partially pre-processed from you."

"Isn't there another way?"

The tech lifted up a needle. "There is, but you're not going to like it."

"Anything is better than having to throw up to feed her!"

A good sixty minutes or so later…

"Does she have to BITE?"

The tech cleaned her examination equipment. "You were the one that didn't want to regurgitate food for her."

Purple, his pouch held open as he stared at the smeets activities, winced. "But I didn't know you were going to turn me into… into… a moo cow!"

"Come on, and you never wondered what those little nubs inside your pouch were for before?"

"Actually, I never did, and I could have died happy not finding out."

"Hey, if you want to go the route of controlled puking…"

"I can handle the nibbling!" he sighed, throwing up his hands. "Just until she'd old enough to eat mushed smeet nibblets."

"Of course, my tallest. You wouldn't want to stunt her growth, after all, she does already have a piece of a tallest inside her."

Purple glared at the technician before dragging himself down the hallway, his swollen midsection drawing a few questioning glances, but none of them long enough to warrant a quick death for the viewer. Of course, most of them came to the conclusion that had already been drawn. The tallest, the whispers accused, was a glutton when it came to free food at business conventions.

Now came the fun part… keeping his "condition" as the technician had been calling it out of Red's attention.

Judging from the fact that, twelve hours after Purple had first swelled up, Red had still not yet noticed the addition to his companion it seemed likely that it wouldn't actually be that hard.