The Assignment

Star Trek – Animorphs

In deep forest below branch and stem, currents of warm air cut through the natural lime green gearr root-baskets. The fronds wove cages around their tuber-like root systems. Exposed, the gearr roots make for an easy feast. Hidden, they stand a chance to bury and propagate for another season.

Gimlets shone beneath one such basket. Unblinking.

Not so far away, close enough to be heard above the close slump of slow-moving water, a figure bowed to cupped hands.

"No, it's quite impossible. You'll simply have to contain her up there."

The gimlets narrowed to specks. Movement. Shadows of a body hunched beneath the vines.

Chattering over the radio, tinny and twanging with an unfamiliar touch of heather wastes and highlands, a voice replied. Impossible to interpret at a distance.

Yet listening to the one nearby suggested an answer unwelcome.

"I forbid it!"

The humanoid swivelled on the spot, rounding on no-one to snarl through bared teeth. "Isn't there some way of protecting the ship? The brig has forcefields."

Shuffling. Dirt moved aside. For a moment, a brief second, the smooth curve of yellowish keratin showed through a finger-wide gap in the vines. One big eye glared at the outside world. It disappeared quickly as it came.

"...No. No, I can't... Look, Scotty." Click.

Frustration. A shouted "Damn these contemptible fools!"

Another click. "You said McCoy's gotten close to her. Does he know of anything that might keep this whole situation from setting off?"

A quietness stable in the absence of creeping insects or singing birds beneath the trees.

The other speaker, thick tongued, yelped. Excitable.

"Mr. Spock. You're sure?"

Crunch.

Schlurp. Spwat, spwat. Sprooooot...

In stillness of the grove, those noises beneath the gearr would turn any stomach. Like something being murdered. Like torture. Wet, impossible sounds, without pulling someone's teeth from the bleeding gums.

A long, clawed leg thrust from the gearr basket.

Extensive and gusty, the speaker sighed. He breathed loud enough to fill a jungle.

Click.

"Alright, Scotty. I'll send Spock to beam up to you. But wait for my signal. We're doing delicate work down here. And under no circumstances," turned low, soft, a truly dangerous bend of wrist and hand to mime what he left unsaid, "is anyone else to use the transporter without my permission. Kirk out."

Pierced by clawed feet, a small feathered body emerged from the torn hole to balance on absurdly large legs.

Black ankle joints arched in a faux M behind it. Using a beak the size and shape of perfectly round fingernails, it nibbled the primary feathers tucked at its sides.

The bird, head cocked to the side, seemed to listen.

Patience rewarded by a curse and distant, stomping footsteps. They faded into rising murmurs of fresh rain.

The little bird fluttered to an overhead perch. Legs strung out behind it, the limbs lashed forward to seize passing stems. as its wings whirred feathered afterimages.

Pausing to look up - to peer, an interest in the common underside of the canopy - it sat still.

In a rapid shake of its body, the bird lunged after voices long gone.

"Suit up, Mr. Spock."

Xenylon. Algae-based culture vats synthesized for environmental control and distinction between colour and form. Controlled and deployed by Starfleet.

Reported to a linear format. By rote. Clinical as the memory of hundreds, carefully counted minutes to the thousand in service bearing Sky Blue Mark III.

Most informative. Unfortunately useless data outside of context.

A fresh uniform. Unspoiled by pool fluids, altered to display the rank of Commander.

The vulcan ignored his superior's tone.

Remarkable, this host's sense of hearing. At times it seemed capable of locating the Sub-Visser host's very heartbeat.

At times it neared driving him to practice the murderous arts perfected by his new alien body.

Baring teeth in the human fashion, those glittering green eyes came close to an intimacy. "They'll be expecting you shortly."

A controlled shiver. Chilled winds coasted the mountainside, combing dark abdominal hairs. Herun 332 slipped into the foreign uniform, used to the strange contentedness of a stranger's clothes.

«Abor thinks to hide. Without witnesses, a coward.» And a fool.

Fooled by the very intention of climbing over Herun's impending failures. Becoming the image of loyalty required obeisance to ignorance. Acknowledgement of the undeserving.

Pride in the Empire should come before self-serving quivering. A dog to pretend otherwise in the presence of other loyal yeerks.

Despite seniority Herun had no option to refuse accompaniment to the crashed human vessel. Abor 1292's right to observe the recapture of escaped hosts, this 'Federation' clan of humans, gainsaid those not blessed by Sub-Visser Four-hundred-three.

An edge to his lip curled into a sneer, ghost to a slave not long abandoned. Taken possession of by some lesser yeerk. This host did not smile, Herun realized.

Impressions. Chain links. Icy and volcanic, the depths of a skull frozen into submission. The Galileo disincludes active visual records. Her security systems have proven inadequate.»

«A battle waged just outside,» Herun mused. She may prove our undoing.»

He watched with some vitriol as Spock, his most recent unwilling landlord, engaged basic levels of Herun 332's new and magnificent brain.

Lower levels. Not essential to motorlogical function, certainly not a threat to a capable yeerk's control.

Without permission.

The barest hint of curiosity, an innocence humble to a vicious encounter with its new master.

Enough.

Nerve endings seized in outstretched vestiges of flesh, Herun 332 flooded that annoyance in blood.

He cut through that lack of guile.

«Halt in your efforts, slave,» crept the whisper between isolated rings of agonised squeezing.

Crushing.

«Or you will beg. Does the proud Commander Spock truly wish to grovel? Do I need to waste time on a feeble rebellion?»

To escape, he had no doubt. They always tried to escape.

Amusing. Exasperating.

«Did I not agree, Herun 332, with your own thoughts?» Spock replied. «Attempting to torture me is illogical. It is,» clipped to absolutes, Herun on his heel, «as I might quote, 'dividing the house against itself'. A house divided cannot stand.»

The previous host, a human, never ceased to try. A game. It soured for him. Playing seemed so pointlessly trivial. So uninspired.

So very bourgeois.

Rifling through veritable treasures of memorised fineries may seem a relished task to a yeerk derived of immediate purpose. Herun 332 instead focused his gaze on their disfigured shuttlecraft.

Spock knew Abor 1292 lingered. Herun required a quick glance to ensure that, yes, his instincts again proved reliable.

The others ignored Herun's quickened attentions aside from some odd looks, his bowlcut head on a swivel throughout their quick march through the jungle.

A wonder to capture this body in the first place. Herun suspected an assassin would have quite the problem with his vulcan.

Spock's near-indiscernable activity did not abate. A grinding distraction on the somewhat patient yeerk's last nerve as Abor's dimwitted Federation soldier act continued in the same vein.

Long burns on the outer shuttle walls, he told himself. Brought considerable focusing power on the importance of locating every marr, any unexplained sign of unfriendly fire. Marked twice by differentiated aerated metallics.

It felt rough beneath his palm, if cool. Not dracon fire. Herun didn't recognize the source.

Supplied, in short. Phaser fire.

Another likely long-winded offering thrust aside, his elongated stature cast three Starfleet-Controllers in his wake to stalk alongside tritanium ship walls.

The shuttlecraft - the Galileo, ignoring a rich history in human designations - combined economy and practicality in a way he would consider peculiar among space-faring species. Herun must admit, running long fingers on white engine covers, to appreciate the attitude.

Far removed from greenish-black insectoid craft or enormous, monstrously expensive andalite ships. Yes. Most enjoyable.

And yet an appalling, impractical, blazing white.

Crumbled mud in the short and brilliant sunlight gleamed by Esplin 6603's crushed innards.

If Harun looked closely, he imagined, his comrade may lie exposed to the open air. Compound fractures in a skull broken apart to pulp grey matter, to spray a crystallized congealment of blood. Esplin 6603 exterminated as if the host did not exist at all. A deceptively helpless corpse.

Harun did not look closely.

Three-toed trenches in flesh left by the Empire's most fearsome weaponised host body, meaning treachery or worse.

Harun allowed his gaze to trickle on past the dusty walls. Filth imperfectly concealing at least three criss-crossing lines of blood spray.

Fascinating.

«Eirine would appear to possess pressurized pockets of blood within the cranial cavity.»

Reactive blood pockets. Perhaps violently reactive.

«I should report this.»

He blinked. That voice sounded nothing like him.

A reset. Herun shook himself and ran a hand over too-smooth hair.

If Herun, the yeerk, took an eirin host body and began to physically explore the brain structure... could this be a natural defence against infestation? One deadly to both the host and the yeerk?

No. It couldn't be. Not so far from home, behind enemy lines, without a supply of bodies or back-up Kandrona generators. Not another hurdle.

A small band of capable yeerk warriors. Displaced. Unearthed. Thrust from the Empire. Every decision or mistake making turns for the future of their very race.

Victory, or the end of all things.

And here lay another undocumented danger. He could taste that sour note already.

And of course, being the messenger of ill omen, the cursed biological minefields may well be named after his executed, presumably incompetent corpse.

A piece of the ship snapped clear away.

Herun stared, unthinking, at his hands. A tremor played across a green-tinged cheek frozen to the west-bound wind.

Strength. Vulcan strength. He'd barely called upon the horrifying power of this very human-like alien. It actually disfigured the shuttlecraft further.

Herun thrust it back. Shuttle plate alloy clattered on the rocks.

Hands in the air as if disgusted, Herun bore hard eyes into an unhelpfully present Abor 1292.

"A pathetic ship. Even for the humans," Herun huffed. An unpleasant burn of hatred pulsed through the arm touching Abor's shoulder as the Controller brushed past.

Heat prickled the sensitive ends to his audial receptors. Ears.

Herun discovered a healthy green flush to this body's extremities mere minutes into initial infestation. It bled the colour of Earth grass.

A poor joke on the choice of vegetation over the consumption of flesh could be made here, but Herun 332 held himself above such vulgarities.

Avoiding what the vulcan so helpfully described as an illogical reaction to workplace-related social encounters, he accommodated himself to the Galileo's decreased internal lighting from what Spock's memories informed him to be the chair designed for Command personnel.

Snapped commands sent his crew into the next step of their mission.

Hiding visible signs of damage. Repairing necessary components for travel. Concealing weapons.

One Controller, a heavyset host better meant for labour, sweated over swirling designs set into a casing meant to protect their brothers and sisters. To hide their true purpose.

Artful work dragged the eye away from an object's true purpose. To be visible is to be invisible.

A few moments spare. To wait and plan for the inevitable screw-up. Herun 332 collected himself.

For the circumstance he may turn to his advantage.

Climbing the ranks, gaining power, took every means necessary. Herun 332 was not a Sub-Visser. Working beneath those more ambitious than himself, ambition requiring a worthiness to lead, left him the wiser for the art of survival.

Every yeerk had a talent of use to the Empire. Herun knew adaptation.

Claiming chance as a weapon, a tool, kept the Visser's taxxons at bay. It kept Herun one step ahead of lesser yeerks.

It kept him alive.

A graceful arch of steepled hands framed the narrow window. Herun raised his chin to observe them. His own fingers.

So natural. Easy, to slip into a host's natural habit. To claim them as his own.

Dangerous.

The voice banished to a dark corner of its own cranium stirred.

«Fear is not a logical response,» it whispered.

Herun 332 laughed. It was a dark, spiny thing.

The host persisted. Now a dwindling sound, water dripping from a cave wall, it could not avoid a wheedling capitulation to its own captivity.

«This posture has proven worthwhile to aid in clear thought. As an added benefit, humans appreciate the visual cue to allow my privacy. They would not disturb you.»

«If only to remind you of your situation, little calculator,» Herun 332 dribbled, «I shall choose to repose with my fingers. I am not lacking in compassion. After all... it is not as though you could do it yourself.»

Silence.

Locked from every function, the body did not respond to concealed stress as Herun had experienced in his cross-section of several human hosts. No excess of bile. His heart, apparently somewhere within the abdomen, did not even quiver.

Herun 332 retained perfect control.

If only as in a perfect world, he could silence that incessant buzzing...

"Abor 1292." Crisp without requiring to actually face the blithering twit hovering over Herun's subordinates. "The Sub-Visser will be expecting you."

"Of course, Herun 332. Safe travels."

«Over my dead body, fool,» Herun damned him.

The void answered. It should remain silent. «An illogical premise. A dead body would not hinder him beyond creating a tripping hazard.»

«If not for your Federation's pathetic crisis protocol, I could be punishing Esplin 6603's murderers even now,» Herun lamented. «Though I suppose it serves our cause well. In short time, the starship will belong to us, and that personal log of yours destroyed. No warnings to Starfleet, no information taken from meddling little girls.»

And hadn't that been an awakening, to realize the fearsome Andalite Bandits to be nothing more than a clique of human children!

«No chance to stop our glorious march!»

«You do not recognize the inevitability of your failure.»

Homeworld help him, the Spock creature spoke as if to another of its kind. With sympathy.

He listened. Cautious. The beginnings of glee, experiential precognition of good sport with foolish, futile prey.

«Pray tell.»

«Every moment of my service aboard the Enterprise is recorded for your own perusal, Yeerk.»

Chilly. Departing warmth and coming in for assault. An interesting tactic.

«A request, then. To observe memories and see an 'inevitability'.» Herun poured his natural scepticism behind unseeing eyes.

«You are but one among many. And we have defeated them all.»

Coming from one already defeated. Herun 332 tasted blood.

Well. He had the time. His crew could handle the clean-up without him, given the few commands to authorise it. And Herun hadn't indulged in giving a host false hope for such a very long time.

«I will allow it,» he decided. A grip on the leather hand rest encouraged the sense of a coming drop. A sense of vertigo, anticipation.

Herun 332 sat that way for some time. He sat through the rewelded alloy plates. The application of quick-set materials to hide burns and clawed sections where the murderer stole from several ship compartments before fleeing with a valuable host.

Eyes wide, Herun saw the stars.