The Assignment

Star Trek – Animorphs

You know, it should occur to me that not everyone is used to having their skeleton disappear into z-space through a metaphysical straw. But it doesn't. I almost felt sorry for my captors.

Not that I could have stopped it this time. Rubbery flesh sealed my throat shut, voice gone, too late to shout a warning. Most likely to look for an empty bucket.

Hey, they might be Yeerks, but there's war and there's cruel and unusual punishment.

I blew out like an inflatable pool. The morph refused to listen to my desperate focus on human, Cassie, normal girl, a gurgled bubble of air last to exit the backless hole behind shrinking teeth. Boneless, I sagged into the table, arms and legs growing out to pool on the floor. Human spaghetti. Hot prickles under my skin, somehow worse with all the extra surface area to irritate combined with an awful, stomach-rolling feeling of some monstrosity in my stomach.

Ugh. Like that time I'd caught Marco in dog morph eating - well. Better not spoken.

It must have been one of the ugliest transformations I've ever done.

I flopped off the table. A clump of hair, solid and writhing, fell across the doctor's boots. Eyes still human, ears somewhere close to where they should be, his shout of disgust perceived dimly through my dwindling senses. The muscles in my stomach rippled free, pulling my face into the carpet. I couldn't see anything.

«Just in case you missed Guerilla Warfare 101, try not losing it!» Tobias weighed in on my own confusion. «Human! They've already seen you, and that's not your battle morph. Don't be stupid!»

His fear stoked mine in useless twitches through a malformed nervous system.

Nose somewhere on top of my head, mouth fusing downward with a thigh in defiance of any kind of reasonable process of cause-and-effect, the only thought going through my dislocated brain took to a lighter subject. A saner one. My friend, Ax. I wondered how he was.

«Is that a fish? Dolphin? This isn't an aquarium! You'll be crushed!»

He's the one who called me some kind of morphing prodigy. An estreen. Capable of making the morphing less horrifying, even beautiful. Ax might have changed his mind to see Tobias pressed against the back of his cage, a long finger stabbing out from my hand and visibly toothed suckers dragging against the glass.

It helped to remember the good old days. I held onto the familiar blue of Ax's coat. The pale green meadows he'd run across to graze, or just for fun. A bird of prey following, playful, in the clouds.

Schloop.

Ears, gone.

«Hello? Earth to Cassie?»

Frightened. Controlled. I'd have replied if my mind hadn't totally surrendered to shutting down my frail, still-human heart.

Creeping under the skin, face slack against the hollow where my skull used to be, an air bubble deflated to concave like a used whoopee cushion. Through all of this, the churning, the familiar pop of organs disappearing and reappearing, a dribble of yellowish fluid leaked out of the sharp-lipped mouth growing out of my leg.

I could still taste it. Acid. The morph's best go at throwing up.

It didn't take long for the tentacles to click through a haze of panic. Cephalopod. Squid. Giant squid. In a dry, controlled environment. The furthest from the ocean it could possibly be. I gasped. Gills.

Air! Panic!

The giant squid isn't blind. In fact, enormous white, bulbous eyes just below the thick mantle bulged out like enormous googly eyes. The room went dark as my forehead ballooned out, eyes shrinking back into the skin. Nothing. My beaked mouth gaped in shock.

And then everything. The soft light cut agony through now-functional squid optics.

«AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!»

I screamed. But giant squids don't have vocal cords. Instead, the screams blasted from my mind. Tobias' thought-speech became background noise.

And then it stopped.

Heavy. Solid in a way no deep-sea creature wanted to be. The tiny room confined the squid like cramming on a boot three sizes too small. The best it could do was sweep across the floor. I'd wrapped around something hard, something reliable, tentacles hugging it against my squishy body.

Movement. Vibrations in the floor. Still no sight in this blazing greenhouse but even the squid's rapidly drying eyes caught simple movement. Tracking it matched senses of contact, taps on my skin.

It tickled.

It opened.

'It' being me. A door, somewhere inexplicable, the brain deep in organs I'd never had the chance to study. My screams shrivelled into whimpers.

Green. Flashes of light. Palps on my... my...

Red. No. Not red. I blinked. Orange. Yellow.

Pale cream. Pinks lined in gold, a rich, vibrant cross of molten sunlight behind the thin vapour of cloud.

I didn't wake up. I wasn't asleep.

But something inside told me that this wasn't real.

Standing alone. Conscious of very little. But that little expanded.

Transforming, like the state between girl and osprey, where my eyesight intensified and I again realized there was so much more to the world than I'd ever known.

The sky became huge. Not just the sunset, mesmerized as I had been by it, but indistinct shapes against it. I narrowed my eyes despite no pain or tears from practically looking into the sun. Blueish but closer to purple. Mountains. My face cleared. Yes, mountains.

But I'd just become a giant squid. Screaming. Terrified. Sick… a hand to my stomach touched denim. I looked down.

A normal, human chest. Hands. Hands with nails, familiar brown skin.

A girl again. In slightly poop-stained overalls.

He'd been there before the sun began to set. Solid, cool and immovable. The shadows of the sheer cliffs to his left and right stretched like great hands around us. Silhouetted against that stunning display he stood on two feet, hands behind his back. Facing me.

A man. I knew he'd be there. Somehow, it just made sense. And that frightened me.

The lean figure may have been a statue for not moving an inch. The same sense, knowing he was there, knowing that this wasn't real, said he wasn't wasting time watching me. This place… heat on my face reflexively closed my eyes. It felt good against my skin.

I should keep an eye on him. Opening them again made goosebumps run across my body despite the glorious heat.

No-one. He'd disappeared.

And, stepping closer, almost surprised that I could, revealed no footprints in the sand. Standing dead still, I thought. Hard.

Desperately.

A dream. No, a vision. Could it be a vision? The Ellimist?

The master manipulator, as the Andalites call him, had done things like this to us before. To the Animorphs. And there was always a reason.

I just wished he'd show up to tell me about it already. The memory of uncontrollably morphing hadn't evaporated in my abrupt appearance in this desert.

But that feeling, that crawl across the back of my neck, like smoke wafting between my ears. It felt like being watched. Looking behind me showed nothing. Literally, nothing. The shadows continued into a fading purple-black gradient of nothingness. The void at my back.

I turned to the light, unnerved.

Well. No point in standing so close to the darkness. I moved across the sand, my step just a little lighter and faster than usual.

A brush of cool air, refreshing, flowery, whirled a flurry of sand on the first dune. It looked as good a place as any. I swallowed, relished in the sensation and struggled up it on hand and foot.

He waited for me.

Once again, I knew he would.

I can't explain how. I've cared for so many creatures, become even more. Each with abilities and natural features a human can only dream about. Flight, for one. Echolocation's one of my favourites. This 'knowing' could only be compared to the one time my friends and I became a certain sentient species, far away from home.

Yellow, frog-like, the aquatic Leerans could feel people with their minds. Without seeing. Knowing them in a terribly intimate way.

Telepathy.

It made sense. My gut twisted to remember how it felt to see the minds of the dying, war-torn planet Leera.

So this man – sallow even in the glorious last light – could be sensed through the mind. I didn't exactly believe in ESP back in the peaceful days before the invasion. Probably still didn't. But more importantly, I'd never experienced it myself outside of inexplicable alien technology. It wasn't one of my gifts.

I wasn't the source.

This person had to be it. The only one in miles of endless desert. Turning around revealed nothing. Oh. The void had gone. So did the cliffs. It was just us.

Me and the man radiating absolute ruthless serenity in the middle of my own personal nightmare.

He had to be the one.

All of this seemed to crawl, caterpillar-pace, through my mind. But not a grain of sand moved by the stranger's place atop the dune. Blue and charcoal black uniform spotless as if he'd appeared in the desert without having to take a sweaty step. A warning. Awareness.

How long did he wait for me to think it through? Had the time limit already passed?

I didn't have the internal clock of an Andalite but the sun still hadn't dropped behind the mountains. So I must still have time. I could still demorph.

I fixed him with a glare. Hands on hips, still breathing a little hard.

Take me back. Let me go.

Help me.

What could I say?

The fingers dug a little deeper into my sides. The revelation that I wasn't making the weird feelings in this dream-place happen made him seem a little bit bigger. Darker. Stronger. How could I stand up to that?

All too easy to slip into daydreaming. What hurried me back to 'reality' this time was the definite sense of being watched. His dark eyes bored into my head.

I shuddered.

I hadn't just demorphed and remorphed in front of two likely human-Controllers. I'd done it near an imitation-human telepath.

That stink. The inhuman scent. Could my wolf morph have picked up a human-Leeran hybrid? Could that explain the horror, the aversion to crossing the silent figure in the desert?

Blurting things without context had become a habit. "What will you do with me and my friend?"

"Teddy."

Good Lord, he could speak. I didn't know if that made me feel better or worse.

No hint of inflection. I heard something else, like static, behind the crackling voice over radio. Like emotional static. Amusement. A definite levity. It transferred between us in the space of a thought.

"I believe this answers one of my queries; it is not a true bird."

"Well, you knew that already," I said. Queasy. "Right?"

The being moved. I flinched. The line of his shoulders almost slumped, at ease, a yet-angular shape between me and the distant mountains.

Oh. He'd relaxed. Observing, now. Despite the shadow over his face I could still see his expression. It didn't give me much. He could have been carved from marble if not for those surprisingly bright eyes.

Eyes so dark they could be black yet lit with curiosity. Interest. "No," he said. "But you have confirmed a theory. There are two of you."

Gulp.

"And another hypothesis; that this attempt at duplicity in the midst of true desperation," an inclined head in what must be condescending faux respect, "marks an ineptitude for deception."

Ouch. Fists tightened against the tough denim of my jeans. We weren't inept. We couldn't be. I'd had to lie, steal, make up stories about sleepovers or getting lost in the forest or recovering from bruises seemingly overnight…

It wasn't something to be proud of.

"Of course, you are children." Didn't he find the heart of my problems with the trained ruthlessness of a Yeerk commander. "It cannot be expected of you to competently lie in my presence. Not as we currently stand, in the process of a mind meld."

Mind… meld. Ugh. Images of brains soaking in Yeerks like sponges played across my mind.

The focus of his gaze tightened somewhere over my right ear.

It seemed best not to add fuel to the fire and run my mouth again. But the telepath, Spock, according to the other Controller, he could read my mind. Melded with it. I was melded with him. He knew it all.

I'd already lost.

"Madam." Icy and flat, better suited to the Arctic ice sheets than the flowing form of the desert, the apparent hybrid offered an arm. Like a real gentleman.

What could I do? I took it.

We began to walk together. And as we did, not stumbling despite the cloying depths of silky sand sometimes up to the knee, he spoke.

"I do not wish you harm. Believe in what I say; this space does not permit untruth."

A breath stirred particles in the air. Imagined, I supposed. Or perhaps my real body in the last stages of suffocation. The scent of flowers from the mouth of the canyon, the starting-place, danced in a sudden gust of wind. Beads of sweat dried on my forehead.

At some point our linked arms became linked hands. They swung between us, fingers intertwined. It made this all seem less real, somehow. The clear sky, cloudless, paled on the horizon. No sunset.

I blinked at the beige skies. Huh.

Our feet scuffed through the desert. Spock moved through it in lean strides, graceful against a graceless land.

"Are we going to be infested, or killed?"

I almost staggered the word. One syllable made two thick rests under my dry tongue. Killed. Not in battle, but as helpless prisoners.

Polite interest. Holding hands, it suddenly made sense. The feelings I'd had about him came through that physical point.

It was as if our minds, our spirits, merged through interlinked fingers. An amazing combination. Familiar to an Animorph, if reversed - the animal looking back and making its own judgements behind my eyes.

The nakedness of infestation, of having no secrets or way of hiding them.

Spock allowed the harsh wring of my hand to be free, to step away.

A chill swept goosebumps up my arms despite the harsh sun cooking through my overalls. I tucked hands into my armpits. A delicate pause of intent let the shiver run all the way down my spine and into the sand before he continued. Very faint wrinkles on his forehead marked the thought, the care to speak well.

Yeerks didn't execute their enemies cleanly or painlessly. It could be via dracon beam – horribly aware of my every cell being slowly forced apart before exploding into gas and steam – or being sliced up one limb at a time at the blades of a hork-bajir – or eaten alive by taxxons – or beheaded by the swift tail blade of Visser 3 –

His hand in mine stopped the rising panic. My throat clenched and I couldn't breathe. The touch, cool and distant as it was, helped centre me. I wasn't dead yet.

Spock allowed a moment more to collect myself.

"Infestation." Polite interest showed in the short eye contact as we crested another dune. "I do not concur with the vernacular. However, it is not unheard of for alien races across the galactic expanse to interpret such concepts differently." A long pause. He seemed to gather his thoughts, a distant gaze on the greyed peaks that we presumably intended to reach.

Listening to him had a strange texture, a feel to it. A warmth. Not that he sounded warm. I'd heard computers talk more kindly, more warmly than Spock.

It's the big words. I felt like I was curled up in Ax's scoop, or in my barn, listening to him go on about some scientific concept or other that we weren't supposed to hear. Being primitive humans and all. Z-space this, Escafil device that. Princes and abominations. A living textbook with a loyal, beating heart.

Spock decided. "Please be assured that the Federation does not 'infest' any sapient race. Nor does it attempt to do so to more primitive beings, semi-sapient nor animal."

Hah. Animal. The touch of our hands intensified the connection, I think. The 'meld'. It went both ways. And despite letting go, that closeness remained.

"Neither is the death penalty legal in our policed space." The hybrid arched his neck, a proud stance compared to his normal standard of imitating a cardboard cut-out soldier at parade rest. "Even if you were to accrue such criminal charges as to warrant that sentence."

Federation. I tried the word out loud.

It sounded big. Unified. Even democratic. Very un-Yeerk.

"This space… 'does not permit untruth'. Right?" A nod. "Well, what's the Federation? Are you saying that – that you're part of it? Are you human, like the doctor guy? And how do you have laser weapons? Humans don't have that level of technology."

If it went both ways, maybe I could squeeze something out of him. This couldn't be real. He had to be lying, somehow. If it went both ways…

I had the sense he was smiling. Spock continued to remind me, somewhat painfully, of a certain mouthless centaur likely worried to death about me and Tobias. How the hybrid managed an eye-smile without eyestalks remained a mystery.

"I am not human, madam Crawford." A hint of remembered pain echoed to the far places of our lonely wilderness. "Our Federation is a united government, representing and assisting a multitude of willing members retaining sovereignty despite their commitment to galactic peace and stability," he said, bowing his head.

And a very slight quirk of the mouth. "You will find many among our number to bear non-human life that is nevertheless sapient."

A whisper. Broken. Tired. Alright. No, not alright. I'd felt a pressure on my chest throughout this whole episode. Despite the vista of a desert on the verge of a dust storm, the reality of imminent death demanded attention.

"Why haven't you killed us yet?"

Why?

No Animorph had been so helpless as the two of us. Right now, unless this really was all a dream I'd wake up from, I was a squid out of water. A hawk in a cage. Minds open for the taking, even a human body to infest and seize to force a return to Andalite form, if they'd still believe that lie despite the evidence to the contrary.

I felt sick. I just wanted to sleep. To not wake up.

And despite my best efforts, the tiniest, smallest part of me – the one noticing gentle humour in predatory black eyes – wondered.

Can't let myself go soft. Can't make the same mistake of trusting a Yeerk with our secrets, our lives, our sacred mission. But crushing ruthlessness just wasn't me. I needed Marco. He'd tell me the smart thing to do. Rachel'd snap me out of childlike wondering.

It's that whisper. The one I listened to, voiced when our choices didn't make sense, when we toed the line between fighting and killing. I trusted it. It's kept me sane. Kept me in the fight, oddly enough.

You know what it said? Why I felt so tired, my eyes scratchy, feet tender in my sneakers, mind slowly shutting down? Why I couldn't listen, this one time?

Were these people really Yeerks?

Yeah. It dropped that little bombshell on my very fragile hold on the situation.

And could I trust them, trust them to let us live?

It's madness. Insane. An Animorph doesn't think this way. She doesn't let a question destabilize herself into starting to cry. So maybe I wasn't an Animorph right then.

Maybe I'm Cassie. Just Cassie.