The Assignment

Star Trek – Animorphs


BrrrrEEEEET! BrrrrEEEEET! BrrrrEEEEET!

"Unauthorized life-form detected."

Spastic laughter cut through searing immediacy.

The Yeerks never quite finished converting tech from Andalite to parasite. The Biofilter kept that inflexible tendency for politeness while aiming deadly laser beams at you.

Maybe Ax'd have something to say about natural superiority trumping underhanded tactics.

No warnings left.

Zap!

Grabbing air in the webbed-finger way of this particular morph, a shout turned into whoops as I banked, twice.

Left. Right.

Down in a half-controlled barrel roll.

«AAAHH!»

Hard green buds slapped my short nose. A leaf sliced the edge of an ear.

Blast of echolocation. It told me how close I'd come to breaking bones.

BrrrrEEEEET! Flash!

Brilliant!

I closed my eyes. Didn't need them.

Trusting to instinct, I tucked around a solid metal column. Knew the shallow trench behind it by a split second before diving, twisting into it.

Left the Gleet Biofilter behind on its pedestal.

Mind a million miles an hour, hard stone and broken twigs marked deadly route this small body navigated with ease. Like taking candy from a baby. Like asking Rachel to come to a mall sale.

Black and white echoes translated into picture-perfect flight, mad as a bat out of hell.

"Unauthorized..."

The warning faded into rushing wind.

I flicked my feathery ears. If I couldn't hear it, it couldn't get me.

I hoped.

The not-exactly-a-trench travelled to a close.

Passing from close quarters into open air, tucked low to the ground, I noted several more across the plain. Cracks deep enough to trip over.

Not intentional, not dug by hand. Not a trap.

Erosion, I guessed. Lucky for me. Eirin didn't handle terraforming nicely.

Over no-man's land. Spire grasses sprouted here and there but the forest and jungle lay past my entry-point. None in the compound itself. No convenient tree for cover.

Hard edges rose from a detailed picture of an empty field. My eyes stung to open and I blinked, angling to the rising outline of a hut. A house.

Closed off and I sure didn't want to go in there. No roof overhang.

Down. Through a metal x of supporting piers, an open foundation that enveloped a panting bat in darkness.

I skidded to a stop.

Cool air unchanged since nightfall, fangs glistened wetly around my tongue. I breathed hard. Turned on the spot, facing the forest that I couldn't see.

«There's automatic defenses!» I called out. «Don't try coming in after me, you'll be blasted to smithereens!»

Watching didn't make thought-speak travel. A perked ear may have caught a distant hoot.

I was alone.

Just as planned. Mostly as planned.

On pesticide-tainted gravel the bat sensed a line between absolute darkness and just sort-of darkness. I crawled to the edge.

Bat eyes aren't so bad as people believe. In the twilight of dawn or dusk, the bat can see better, further, in more detail than humans. Unfortunately my eyes seeped with a clear fluid and spots danced under a gentle rub from my clawed wing-joint.

The Biofilter strikes again. At least my eyes weren't totally destroyed.

I poked my head out and trusted the smallness of my morph to keep me unnoticed. I squeaked.

No.

Heart a-drum in its thumb-sized ribcage, my shoulder quivered against the inside of a support beam.

Long serrated Dracon emitters sliced through the air. Its horned beak of a nose drifted, pointing at the jungle. A Bug fighter.

One of the Yeerk's smaller and no-less-deadly advantages against lowly ground-bound tooth-and-claw Animorphs.

And it bristled just metres overhead.

Hard blinks showed the spotlight shining from its underbelly. Directly on the gully. My escape route from the Biofilter.

A working Bug fighter. Not the disassembled wreck we'd pillaged and hung up like the trophy of a mighty victory. Defence towers armed with genetically keyed Biofilters.

What else? A Blade ship? Visser Three?

There's no way. A crippled Animorph and some unarmed natives were Dracon-fodder against fully fledged Yeerk defenses. I couldn't do this. We couldn't do this.

What was I going to tell Moorguenn?

The ship hung cowled and poised to pounce.

Straggled lines of an unfamiliar ivy-like tendril came under the spacecraft's deadly scrutiny. Cast black and grey, spines of Eirine grass stood in sharp relief under the spotlight.

It focused on a polished reflection. Could have been the tower.

I waited.

Engines at a hum easily picked up by overlarge ears, the pilot hovered his fighter for long minutes. It could have been five. Could have been ten. He didn't want to give up.

A patient Yeerk.

Shivering from nerves and the cold, I waited. Had to outwait him. Couldn't risk flying so close to the ship. Not on my own, without backup, without a better plan.

If that thing turned and saw me, shone a spotlight on a helpless brown bat, I'd be Taxxon-bait.

So I buried the knuckles of my wings in dirt and wished for a watch to count down the seconds.

Eventually the shivering worsened.

Slowly. Gratingly.

Dragging its heels and grinding a nerve I didn't know I still had, the black silhouette drifted ever so slightly to the right. And further.

Until it circled to the edge of earshot and that spotlight blazed detailed maps of bark and a further glinting defence tower. The Bug fighter's smaller lamps dimmed at the distance.

My long, gusty sigh streamed mist beneath the shack.

The muscles in my back needed a little extra pumping. No problem. I took to the air in a leather-winged scramble.

Ground take-offs. They don't suit anyone.

No, we hadn't expected this level of development.

A scant six days, trapped on an alien world. Come to think of it, Yeerks might have the leg up on basic humans when it came to alien survival. A Yeerk wouldn't second-guess itself.

But the bad guys always do seem especially good at ruthless efficiency. Our own home-grown dictators didn't need a long-term working economy to try out conquering the world.

Yeerks didn't need a fleet or constant supply lines to keep up their little Eirine invasion.

The thought depressed me enough to snap jaws at transluscent insect wings. A bug. I missed.

Shook myself and dove down. I'd flapped too high.

Trusting the pitch of night for cover, a sketch of tilled land filled my mind through a series of long-range squeaks.

Crumbled earth and jutting rocks, torn-up holes still hairy with roots and dead foliage. The graves of absent trees smoothed in typical haphazard fashion of a creatively-stunted parasite. Not a bush. Not another ditch. No cover for the few hundred metres of open space surrounding the centre.

And completely, totally not a village anymore. Not the one I'd witnessed, where I'd left Spock to his fate.

Fate. Right.

Maudlin thinking didn't lend well to infiltration.

The sensitive hairs on my wings tingled at a whisper of wind. Not cold as the strange currents above the trees, but soft. Buoying.

Warm air spilled from the broken green mouths of the jungle. It breathed life beneath my wings. Not having to pump for height let me coast just a little, over the hut and patrolling human-Controllers.

They remained oblivious to echolocation. I felt like a stealth bomber, flying noiselessly over enemy lines.

One man looked up. I saw his face, his eyes completely normal and at ease. He didn't see me.

I followed the tracks of what must be a familiar patrol route. Worn beneath shod and webbed feet, it led to the centre. To the Hill.

A rush of information, fine-grained dirt, bleared movement across detailed feedback, a soft spot. The texture came back rounded. A sort of shifting blob on the side of a dirt pile. Something about that caught my attention.

I flew close over the far side.

Focused on that blur and hoping to avoid any curious spotlights, I didn't react in time to stop it. I even saw it with naked eyes before echolocation told me about the second moving object.

Something soft struck my wing.

I didn't crash. One webbed limb outstretched, hard flaps and tail deployed under me to catch air kept my hairy body aloft.

Clicks. Dry and horribly familiar. A wet, dribbling noise. Careening to hover, moving way too slowly, I realized what that second sound reminded me of.

Slavering. Like a hungry dog.

Then hot, burning! Pain!

«AAAAHHH!»

My foot! Bitten through!

Gone!

I flinched beneath a sticky whip across my back. A tongue.

Madly flapping, bleeding, I took a steep incline. Absolutely powered up, up, refusing to stall, agonised.

The wet tongue slipped from my fur. My stump of a leg seared against a sharp bank to the left, my clicks warning me to stay up. Higher.

A hungry centipede slobbered up a long trickle of blood and stared into the sky, hoping for more. The Taxxon. The Yeerks had Taxxons.

Pain wracked my entire body. I dipped, aware of the increasing draw in my wings, desperate to land. For a safe place. I watched the Taxxon follow my splattered trail with a numbness approaching irritation.

No, couldn't land here. Cursing my luck, I kept going.

«Taxxons. Why did it have to be Taxxons?»

But it wasn't alone.

They burst from the ground. One, two, a dozen, they wriggled in stop-start flashes of echolocation.

«They can dig?» I blurted, horrified.

Spaghettified dirt alive with wriggling cannibalistic centipedes. A mounded plate of Italian fine dining with angry noodles spurting out of the sauce.

And all of them wanted me. I took a deep, deep fortifying breath.

«Okay, Tobias. Don't lose it. Don't lose control,» I told myself. Kept blasting up the hillside, watching Taxxons crawl over each other without having to actually look.

Had to land. The edges of my squeaking dimmed as I kept on flying hard, pouring reserves into gaining altitude.

Where could a lonely bat find a roost in a Yeerk compound?

I aimed for the roof.

Fresh bursts of high frequencies brought a sense of how very blind a Tobias-bat could be.

The Taxxons really could dig. Tunnels wormed in the ravenous horde's wake made an anthill of the mounted fortress. I hadn't seen a single one on approach, and why?

Because Taxxons can dig just like they can swim; way too well for disgusting centipedes.

My bat morph took air and gasped sad little noises with each wingbeat. Dracula returning to his home away from home.

Yeerk bases tend towards the practical. This one didn't disappoint. Brick and mortar walls, seamless as a contractor's bottom line. Rachel might have disagreed. She'd call it out for a complete lack of style, of class. Of a certain je ne sais quios.

I'm a simple bird. I like to know what I'm up against. Floor-to-ceiling windows or mood lighting didn't fit that category.

I caught a last strong gust of wind up to the roof and finally, finally dropped to land on my belly.

Dracula's let it go a little. Leaf litter trapped in a very human gutter system crinkled under my small body. Propped at an awkward angle, my stump's silent screams dulled to a bone ache.

The bat moaned.

I peered over the edge.

Blobs of eye jelly wavered on the lead Taxxon's eyestalks. Not a drop of blood remained on its cylindrical mouth, the proboscis from hell.

Chomping, drooling, that mouth ringed with sawblades straight up. It scrambled on a dozen skinny legs on dirt made loose by constant motion. Up toward me. Slipping away. Climbing back.

But it couldn't eat through solid rock.

The Taxxon slammed into the castle wall. It squealed like a toddler.

I cut myself off from a well-deserved laugh. A shame. According to Ax, not every Taxxon is infested. This could be the perfect time to gloat over my narrow escape.

But enough of them are. I couldn't risk them noticing a thought-speak-capable flying morsel.

I'd have to tell Moorguenn about it later. Or Cassie. I should tell Cassie. Should have thought of her first.

«Okay, Tobias. Not much farther,» I told myself. Stressed it like it mattered. «Find the leaders and get out. That's all you need to do. Just get out.»

A few minutes later, long talons of a red-tailed hawk curved over the masonry.

Balanced on scaly feet, I hunched against a cold breeze, feathers puffed. I steeled my mind to concentrate.

Familiar burning in one shoulder intensified. It made for great morphing motivation.

Small. Think small.

I thought small.

Hard body. Hairy and particularly sensitive to that delightful stench of rotten fruit, the smell of unwashed bodies and an intriguing combination that I simply had to investigate.

It came faster than the bat. Even than demorphing to hawk.

Not trusting the wind to die down, I gripped pinhead-sized fragments of rock and crawled, over and down, until warmth and light flowed through chinks in my buggy armour. Heat soothed the joints of my segmented legs.

Invisible against dark stone walls, a swift run of forelegs over my eyes cleaned the nerves straight out of me.

I'm a fly. I could do this. Just like the bat, there's no way I'd be seen.

I paused.

Took off.

WHAM.

"An insect!"

Angry and thudding, like helicopter blades right in front of my beak. 360 degrees of vision let me spin, tumbling in the wake of a pink blur. A hand. Fingers the size of greyhound buses combed past, wind currents tossing me down, straight down, faster than I could fly!

«Aaaaah!»

"A Bandit! It escaped the Biofilter!"

"Where? Where is it? What form did it take?"

"Filthy human!"

Every extremity cooled to a deep freeze.

Human. They knew. And I knew how they knew.

Cassie.

I'd left her with them. With the Eirin. Their village! Was it compromised?

WHAM.

Not close, but I bounced on stone in the thrust of changing air pressure. Thrown like dirty laundry in a tornado.

Panicked, the buzz of wings rattled my dry, hard body to its squishy core. I flew up.

Left. Right. Corkscrewed up towards the light. A fire? What was it, a brazier?

Constant and unflickering, so no. Powered by technology more advanced than burning coals. The Yeerks never followed through with their aesthetic.

"Get out of the way!"

Tseeeeeeeeeew!

Heat on my back. A blast of hot air pulled me up. Into the beam!

"Fool, watch where you're shooting!"

Melted!

I dropped. Blind.

Fly. Had to fly. Tried to. The connecting hinges to my wings pulled on slagged chitin. Four working legs waved helplessly, a foot stuck in molten wing. Three legs, then.

I tucked the remaining three in under my thorax and prepared for landing.

Whistling wind! Tumbling, uncontrolled, a massive fist of floor came up to meet me. Contact.

The fly didn't bounce this time. It landed on its back. And stuck.

It hurt, in a distant way. But worse - worse than losing flight, again, was a pinch of whorled human fingers. Pressed, still blind, I could do nothing but roll between their hands. Dark. Hot.

Trapped.

Anyone unfortunate enough to be in my shoes might have panicked. But I've been squashed before. I'd survive this. I had to hold on.

Rumbling through the finger pads. The Controllers. Wondering whether to kill me or take a half-dead insect to their boss. After all, this planet might be infested by Terran-similar houseflies. Who wanted to risk their neck with a dud bug?

Being delivered to the head honcho I'd been tasked to find? Let's just say that I'd prefer to meet him in a less delicate position. And I wasn't dead yet.

Just then, just as my human-Controller captive said, "But it was I to capture the Bandit, and I to take the glory," my tiny buggy body split into a million pieces.

Tight pressure, so tight the air couldn't pass through my spiracles. Tighter.

My eyes crushed in silence. Guts burst from a popped abdomen.

And that distant pain became immediate agony.

In that state of squashed, of death, of realizing I wouldn't make it out of this one, an incredible boom quaked every particle in my body.

«Tobias!»

Fading. Fading away. Goo on a finger. And the sound...

The wordless, terrifying mammalian roar that couldn't come from anyone else.