The Assignment
Star Trek – Animorphs
My name is Jake. I think you know by now how far we're out of Kansas.
Reading Tobias comes from trial and error. Years of practice. Staring down pigeons and parrots doesn't come close to his red-tailed hawk. Raptors are next-level blank walls. Arched eye ridges and an intense yellow gaze tends to cut small talk into splinters.
Not that he likes to be ignored, but we'd had to practice. Had to learn. It's simple as that.
Jara Hamee, Tobias' hork-bajir morph, flinched in a most un-Tobias-like way.
I didn't know how to end it. «Are you...»
My words trailed off in the owl's gentle swooping wings. Their warm weight balanced at my sides in another gust of explosive heat. His gnarled skin shone in grim relief from the blasting dracon cannons.
«Jake.» Tobias finally acknowledged me. Thick, ropy tendons flexed in that serpentine neck. His fierce beaked face glared like his hawk always did. «Cassie needs help.»
«That's not - that's...»
Cassie. Cassie!
«What?! She's alive, too?»
He was silent for a moment. And then, blessed relief, it came on the edge of hearing.
A whisper in the back of my mind.
«Jake...!»
I wheeled to the dark edges of the jungle. Over a battle I had no business witnessing so far from home. With the great horned owl's terrific sight I could see the absence of any living thing beyond the crazed alien battle below. Nothing moved or waited in the trees and bowl-like roots of some strange local undergrowth.
«Cassie! Where are you?»
«I'm underground.» Across the space that strained communication to the limit, sheer joy in her voice could have burst my heart into pieces. «It's you! Jake, I need help!»
I settled into the Jake she needed. The most helpful I could be meant dropping feathers for stripes and a couple hundred pounds of ambush predator.
«Tell me.»
«Is Tobias-»
«I'm here,» Tobias said. He gave me a look. And in private thought-speak, «she could be infested. Don't trust everything she says.»
Taloned feet stopped running together. Hypersensitive toes twinged under frozen drops of molten Jake. No.
He had to be wrong. He certainly wasn't joking.
Those ideas. My strategies, how important could they be? An Animorph, my - my more-than-friend - not infested. Not Cassie.
«How do you know?» I managed to say.
«She got teleported,» he said. «From an infested ship. Been in observation but if that's Cassie then she left early.»
«And she could still be infested, or never was in the first place.»
But I knew the chances didn't matter. Five percent of a Yeerk wrapped around her brain meant five percent past both feet in the grave. For her, and for all of us.
She knew too much.
«I know it's hard.» He almost choked on it. «There's more important things than, uh.»
«Than saving her life.» I stared at him. «That's what you're trying to say.»
Tobias didn't answer. He might have been gathering his thoughts. Who knew what a forest hermit dog-eat-dog eye-in-the-sky might be thinking.
Behind him, one of the blubbery white-blue bipeds waddled on top of an enormous human-Controller. It collapsed. The tattooed man went down screaming.
«Guys?» Cassie sounded scared. «Hello?»
And wasn't that a sour kick in the teeth to realize I'd passed worrying about the abrupt spacing-out and delayed morphing to save his own life in the face of saving another one of my friends.
I turned to the hole Tobias crawled out of.
Two lone taxxons wound out of the soil. In the pitch of night their pallid flesh showed clear as newborn maggots.
«I'm coming. Tobias?»
The mighty spine curved. Tension made a near right angle of his vaguely triangular head and collarbone. Tobias surveyed the battlefield.
Controllers working together like a strange reflection of science fiction and military pop culture didn't bother me. Believe it or not, humans and aliens mixing did eventually get old.
The fight hadn't abated one inch.
«They're dying,» Tobias said.
«They?» In that moment a dawning dread dredged my growing feet in ice. «The aliens. The white ones?»
«I'll catch up, Jake.»
Arms scissoring the air, the long blades slimmed to a razor's edge. His raptor-like gaze pinned me to the spot. No compromise, his red eyes said.
«No Yeerks for either of us,» I ordered. Almost human. Before the right tongue and vocal chords grew from a missing beak I focused hard on familiar jagged tiger stripes. "Hhhhaaauuunddd noohhn forr Cashhie. You owe me that story, don't get yourself killed."
Because if I was going off to help an infested Cassie then Tobias splitting off to do something stupidly heroic played to my own example. No-one to blame but myself.
«Keep your head up. And that's don't get yourself killed, General.»
With a salute Tobias bounded off, leaving me crouched like a miniature freak of a child, peering through stupid human eyes.
It didn't matter. I hated myself to know that.
Just another red flag in Tobias' rosy boquet. Hated looking away to grow yellow three-inch fangs despite the new power of pounding heart muscle.
Greenish fluid on the dirt must have given those taxxons something else to think about because my finished morph stepped down into shouting, muggy hell without a fight.
The stench hit before the noise.
Metallic. Mild tang on my protruding tongue. Damp air that prickled beneath my hide and drew a scrape of claws on rocks imbedded in the dirt walls. Hole collapsing beneath my bulk, my eyes bulged as I literally fell into what smelled exactly like the Yeerk Pool.
Sounds. Screaming. Loud enough in an enclosed room to flatten my ears, the voices were human and the guttural barks of hork-bajir.
A high-pitched shrill rang to the deep bass of the seal aliens. The attackers, Tobias' friends.
Briefly blinded by darkness shifting to soft peach light, I shouted with my mind. No time to wonder at the change to typical Yeerk preferences for downright medieval decor.
«Here!»
Cassie replied immediately. «Run! He's got a phaser!»
The tiger reacted before I could. Almost not in time.
Jump-started by what felt like a lightning bolt, my entire body leapt into the air.
Flash! Pzshshshshsht!
I ran. Rock melted beneath my paws. Red light lasered behind me.
Jaws wide and tail lashing, six hundred pounds of tiger made berth on slow human-Controller flesh. Too slow to defend against claws lashed faster than the eye could see. Her bones cracked beneath me as I kicked up and away for another leap.
Water lapped at the shore of a perfectly circular basin. Stinking Yeerks roiled the surface into a boil.
Their scent flew up my nose as teeth met in a green, muscular arm. The blades of a hork-bajir warrior hissed too close to my head.
Phaser. Cassie said phaser.
Letting go to find her took too much time and I yanked, chunks coming with me so I could spit it out and seize my opponent by the throat. It gurgled on its last breaths and I staggered back to take some of my own.
«He's got a WHAT?» I managed.
Cassie, bless her heart, replied calmly. «A phaser. But he's got something else to worry about!»
Hoots! Bellowing from deep in its nose, a seal alien surged across the floor like a living torpedo!
Humans bowled left and right before the slide ran into a very solid line of blades. The seal alien blubbered and writhed before falling still.
I jerked forward. An aborted strike. The man closest to me wailed in terror.
«CASSIE!»
The hork-bajir waited for its victim to stop twitching. It yanked the blades free. The beak gaped in a terrible grin.
Before flying hard and fast to the right!
Crack!
A shard of its beak bounced across the floor. The hork-bajir collapsed, eyes rolling in its head as it groaned half-baked galard.
Another seal-biped stood over the stunned Yeerk shocktrooper. It paused to look me in the eye. Opalescent and bulbous, recognition squeezed its eyelids into happy arcs. «Jake, I can't believe it's you!»
That butterfly wing of a flipper must've been made of something else. She brandished it like a staff.
Her eyes widened into full blue moons. «Quick - back!»
I saw it before she struck.
Lightning fast and very ready to hit back I caught the descending arm at the elbow with tiger fangs. Crunch. The second hork-bajir Controller howled.
Slap! Cassie's flipper shattered the two wrist blades, her bones flopping ludicrously in her drawback.
The tiger's reflexes shifted me back out from under another two angry Yeerks. Yowling and bare-fisted but for lumps of rock, I dodged the desperate attack easily. A heavy snarl shook the humans' advance and I padded around them to growl viciously at Cassie's side.
They didn't follow.
Instead, the humans and an obese taxxon-Controller gathered in front of a central point of unarmed hork-bajir fighters. Not that walking salad shooters need the extra firepower. I rumbled deep in my throat, haunches ready to pounce.
The four remaining hork-bajir stood facing outwards. The four points of a compass. A bizarre urge to laugh passed without my giving an inch.
The last time I'd seen hork-bajir like this...
Cassie nudged me. The free colony and their rather simple-minded approach to subtlety died with a surge of ill-feeling.
Cassie.
«Am I getting answers? What's the plan?» I said tersely.
Soft, wet skin brushed my tail. I flinched away and further into Cassie's shadow.
Aliens. The white waddling ones stood around us and peered down at me. A small grunt of exertion scared the closest one back, my shoulders bunched for lunging at any sign of aggression. The gaggle became a crowd.
Cassie's morph blended in perfectly. Only her stance drew my glance as just off. Too straight-backed. Too awkward on splayed flipper-feet.
Waddling to a strange rhythm, the true seal-aliens stole to our left and right.
Tension prickled up my spine.
«Plan?» Her mouth opened in a nervous froggy grin. «Oh, Jake.»
Without thinking I rubbed a whiskered cheek on her side.
"Ghafrash," a hork-bajir snarled. Bereft of dracon beams, their talons clenched periodically on air. Their hands balanced over their hips as if wishing for a gun holster. It was a stand-off.
Me and my horde of potential allies. Four mouthbreathing trained shocktroopers and a few human lackeys. One taxxon, ready to eat anything that died first.
All of the hork-bajir's heads turned to stare at me. Unmoving. Arrayed around a small space.
«Protecting something,» I realized.
Between gaps made by hips and chests as they jostled to stand without stabbing each other, I saw it. Fingers. Wrapped around a black rectangular device.
"Andalite," hissed a human-Controller.
My mind raced faster. Two humans. Four hork-bajir. Taxxon.
No. Three humans. That hand belonged to another one, hiding behind the big guys.
Eight of them against Cassie, my tiger morph and a group of deceptively tough aliens. But that hand. It pointed that device unerringly at me. My snarl turned into a low roar and my spittle coated smooth stone.
"No... not Andalite."
Almost jovial despite the crackling tension, the last human-Controller spoke above the muffling closeness of his protectors. His lackeys.
The leader. He had to be the leader.
Suited for lower light levels, my gaze caught nothing but the eight Yeerks. A cornered Visser. A Visser without an army.
Unconcerned, the Yeerk kept his voice light. "Just like its friend, a rebellious human out of its depth."
Silence was my answer. I shared a look with Cassie. I hoped it seemed confused enough.
"A fine Earth form for battle. So distinctive!" The slug turned sly. "Yet... rather loud. Flashy. Not a choice my host would have made, and you are no ignorant Andalite."
Human. It had to be a guess. «He's trying to rattle us,» I said privately. «Don't respond. Don't give him anything.»
She didn't answer.
The tiger panted. Dirt scritched under claws as they flexed in and out. In and out.
«Jake,» Cassie said.
The Yeerk laughed. It was a terribly familiar sound.
"Convincing! Why defend yourself when there's nothing to say? But I do wonder what you had planned for coming down here - without that team, that wonderful back-up squad at your side."
He couldn't know. I puffed my chest out. Channel your inner Aximilli, Jake.
«This form can be louder, Yeerk,» I said calmly. «According to our... tests... proximity to the Earth tiger has proven hazardous to human health.» A chuff. «I do not require physical contact to cause damage. The inner ear is fragile.»
A moment of bright eyes and golden hair. A face between the hulking guards.
Cold familiarity seized my lashing tail. I knew that face.
The Yeerk drawled on. "Quite. I'd be completely taken in I assure you. If not for Ms. Co-Bandit. Cindy, was it? Cindy Crawford?"
Alien barking woke me to my own approach. The massive paw stilled mid-air. When had I started moving forward?
The glee. Cassie stared straight ahead. My stomach turned, eating itself alive.
It may have passed the seal people by, his next whisper. But this morph came with perks and white-spotted ears unhappily focused on dark joy and too familiar, I know that voice, where have I heard this all before?
"She told us everything. I know all about you, Berenson."
Cassie lurched. «No. No, how does he-»
"So why not return the favour? Take the time to know me - my gifts, my connections. All of it simply pales... in comparison with yours."
«I didn't - Jake, I didn't tell him,» she said, frantic. «I promise! I didn't tell him!»
Quite the performance.
My yellow eyes turned up to look into her empty blues. Pads raw on alien soil, the shift of weight to an opposite shoulder drew her waddling after me. Choked and stammering, thoughts frayed, Cassie said nothing intelligible.
I had to do something. «Quite convincing. Yeerk.»
A hushed breath blew over the poised fighters. Even the taxxon seemed focused on our conversation, its pincers clicking as if in thought.
Every speck of hatred. Every fight and decision. Each regretful consequence flowed between us and suddenly I understood. Because I'd been there.
«I never wanted this for you,» I told her. Told Cassie. My brother was still there. «I wish...»
His own slug had taken my mind and bound it tight to the back of my skull.
Broadcast for all to hear, I let my gaze drift across the scene. It was quite the performance. I'd have loved to know the next part of the script; but the barest slackening of the left-side hork-bajir's arms and knees drew my tiger's attention.
I held my breath and glanced up to the ceiling. Waited. Turned back to Cassie.
Winked.
«I wish it had been me,» I continued.
I understood just fine. She didn't deserve this. I had to act now.
Before those pale things had a chance to mess up our escape and that slimy Visser figured a way out.
«It's a good thing we're not in this alone.» Wise to the rising tension, the smallest white alien gibbered and waved the others to encircle the opposite side of the room. Vein-like nasal tubes flushed orange over its narrowed eyes - fixed, again, on me. «Cassie?»
My throat rumbled.
«NOW!» I roared. Raw might crossed the distance in a lunge faster than the hork-bajir could move.
A whiplash slice caught the middle across its rhino-hide chest. I ducked and rammed the monster back with a hard skull.
Searing pain! Shouts of surprise and rage all around me! I merely snarled past bared teeth and sank them into the startled throat of that left-hand hork-bajir.
Startled whoops and bellows were my only warning.
Expecting cuts and winding like an orange snake around collapsing guards, I met the boss Yeerk eye-to-eye. His face widened around a scream of terror.
Just as another push let me inside the guard and I tasted human-Controller blood, I yelped.
A heavy blow landed right between my shoulder blades.
A heavy-weight myself, the strike barely shifted me. But I landed a useless foot from the Visser and didn't breathe as three blades sank to the hilt in my side.
I bellowed. "RrRRRAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHHH!"
Pain! Furious energy! My claws landed in meaty arms still held over my head and I nearly fainted. The world went dark in a stomach-twisting purge of my own gut fluids.
Eerie howls and pounding feet I both heard and felt through stone provoked startled gibberish from above.
Wham. Thump.
Half-turned from an impact on my shoulder, I dug claws in to keep from falling over. Felt sick.
Hoped my stomach hadn't fallen out. I was still awake. So, likely.
Cool flesh touched my nose. An unidentifiable smell and the stench of waterweeds raised hairs on the tiger's nape. Like nothing it had ever smelled. Un-Earthlike.
It shook. Pressed into my face. Apparenty frustrated, the thing whapped my muzzle and I snagged it with my teeth. The thing writhed. I bit down harder.
«Hold on, Jake!»
Squeals like tortured bubblewrap increased to a razor-sharp pitch. With a strength to nearly push my teeth out from around bone the limb flexed and pulled me along.
I resisted all the way.
Cassie - her voice - gave a terrific lunge and bowled me over, paws over tail. My belly flexed. Pained flashed, terrible and white.
If the Yeerks knew, like this Visser did - he knew my name, our secret was out, it was over - if they understood what it meant to fight a team of human kids out to defend everything we'd ever known - we'd be taxxon-bait.
A real tiger would have the sense to die after being eviscerated. No. The so-called Andalite Bandits were human.
And humans don't have the sense to know when they're dead.
I staggered to my paws. A slippery something tangled around my leg. An inhuman yowl ripped from my chest as I took one step and the tangled thing pulled.
The sense of tugging from deep inside came at some distance. My tiger dry heaved.
Terrible screeching barely lifted my head. From the ground. Belatedly I huffed from a nose resting in foul-smelling blood. Had to get up. Had to... crawl away. Demorph. Keep the... secret. Another sharp tug left me panting in shock.
Grey billowed like death. Like blindness. Disemboweled and tasting my own blood, a slam down on my shoulder cracked something deep inside. I barely felt it.
Thick talons slid through my fur to score flesh. A hork-bajir foot.
Didn't even feel the cuts. Another short burst of panic did nothing. My paws felt cold. No, they felt nothing.
I couldn't move.
So far. So far away. Nowhere close to me, to Cassie and I. It didn't matter. A part of me knew it didn't matter that I was dying.
Jake the leader, Jake the Animorph. He's made up of parts. Parts that work better at some times - better at others.
The other parts knew my heart was still beating.
I took a breath.
Neck tensed to curl my head from the floor, a rippling snarl came with sprays of bright red blood. It dusted the thorny ankle holding me down.
The tiger hissed. Terrible knowing of what the growing darkness meant for me, for us, chilled me senseless. I had nothing else left. My mind clamped down on that.
I shouted. Help me. Where are you. I need to tell you Cassie.
«Hel...p.»
Heat flooded in.
Immediate. Pictures. Broken muscles and an instinct for avoiding large hypodermic needles in the wide black eyes of a deer. Its leg had been shattered. It knew it was going to die.
The face of its killer shone from those empty eyes.
She screamed. «DEMORPH! Jake, it doesn't matter anymore!»
Don't want to. Too many to save. «Can't...»
Weight shoved my musclemass down. Not the localised pressure of a foot. Not the pillar of a Yeerk warrior cutting up a corpse with its feet. My shoulder rolled easily.
Startled, I blinked. Blue eyes barely glimmered through the gloom. Just the corners, the peripherals of Cassie's alien eyeballs.
She lay over me. Belly-down, hollering earth-shattering honks.
Slap. She spared a flipper for my sore nose.
«NOW, JAKE!» She cried. «Please. Please, please.»
Don't cry. My head thumped back down, entirely spent. Too many to save. Right. Like I could save anyone.
There's a thousand things I love about our Cassie. She's one of a kind. The sort any injured animal would be lucky to meet. Her thought-speak, inches from a wordless cry, cooled into very sudden calm.
«Just think. Think about being human. Think about - your toes. Your shoes. Shoes, those new ones your mom bought, remember?»
Toes. Cramped into new Nikes I had to wear every morning or I'd never break them in. School became an exercise in sitting down or switching to gym sneakers to play some ball.
When was the last time I'd played? Tom never had time for me anymore. If I could have frowned, I would have done. I never had the time for me either.
Toes. The tiger couldn't fit into shoes.
«When was that last game?» Cassie proved she had some kind of reverse thought-speak talent, or Marco was right, and girls could read minds. «Remember? Marco didn't kick you in the shin like Rachel said, right?»
No. Marco sliced open my knee.
His ridiculously short haircut came with unfair reflexes and I'd missed taking a real swipe at him. Couldn't afford to lose a knee, I said. That's before he reminded me in a supernaturally lucky noogie that all I had to do was morph Homer and I'd be back in the game without a scratch on me.
Wasn't fair that the unabashed geek of nerd culture could get me, the closest Animorph to a jock, in a headlock.
Bright pain. I gasped.
Feeling flooded up. Tiny flares of pain dulled into wonderment as I swear I felt the channeling of my nervous system coming all the way back. It wove around my spine and down to my toes.
They wriggled in a most un-cat-like way.
Screamed galard rang my head with the noise.
A breath whooshed out between my fangs. Relief in the form of novacaine numbness finally reached into spilled intestines. Which, I realized with a wave of queasy horror, scattered a good three meters in every direction.
Like a preschooler's macaroni art. Blood fingerpainting.
Cassie didn't waver. Her weight felt warm against the shock of waking to my own murder scene.
Before my thought-speak disappeared with the last of my battle-morph I sent a whisper to Cassie. Weariness dulled the forcefulness of my words. «Remorphing. Did he see me?»
«No, Jake.» Relief. «Don't remorph.»
I frowned. «But-»
«You almost died.»
I almost die every other day, I wanted to say. Low groans slurped up a twisted esophagus and sounded nothing like English.
Black-orange fur shivered down into bland skin. Human.
I rubbed a hand down my face and tested my feet. My hands. Fingers and toes. The icy cold was gone. In fact - my palm on the floor felt gentle warmth radiating through the stone. Through my skintight morphing suit.
Throat cleared with a cough, I tapped Cassie on the flipper and scooted back, out of sight.
She followed me. I abruptly ran out of room.
«Let me do this. Go small,» she urged. Those expressionless eyes didn't suit her, I realized. This morph didn't suit her. «You can stay on me. I'll blend in.»
"They saw you. They know your name. We're not doing this," I hissed. "Give me some room!"
Despite not moving the hard edges of her thought-speak cut like an Andalite tail blade. «I've been here longer than you. I know what I'm doing.»
"Cass - Cindy."
«You were going to kill him and mess this all up!»
"The Visser? Look, I know he's human, but-"
«Doctor McCoy asked me to keep him safe. That includes not being tiger chow.»
"McCoy?"
Why did that sound so familiar? Tingling in my chest ran down my spine. I straightened, squinting out from under Cassie. She shifted a little.
«A friend. Now morph before-»
Manic and completely alone, the Visser whooped. "There you are!"
He aimed the black device at me.
Flash! Pzshshshshshsht!
A beam of brilliant green light lanced under Cassie's chest - and straight into mine.
Friends, loyal readers, patient followers. Thank you for coming back with me.
It's been some time. If you're curious as to why it's taken so long for another installment, read the list below for an update on what's been going on behind-the-scenes. If the circumstances don't matter to you, fair enough, and I hope this extra-long chapter finds you enjoying our continued adventure together.
This story will continue until the end. I'm glad to be back.
_
1. I was commissioned for an artwork just after posting chapter 30. (See: deviantartDOTcom slash brumbyofsteel slash art slash Commission-One-Tough-Cloaca-862826861) for the finished artwork!
2. COVID declared my position in fast-food hospitality and management an 'essential service'.
3. Writing this story in a short space of time let me keep momentum.
Having to choose between paid work and this story, I didn't feel right to focus on The Assignment and ignore my responsibilities to my commissioner. Working psuedo full-time with no sick days at a very physical job left me exhausted and with just enough energy to focus on a single task; the art commission. At this point I had written so far into the story that I knew how it was going to end.
I may have mentioned before how I detest updates to a story that don't update the story. It went against what I felt comfortable with to update this story with an explanation and no new chapter. I resolved to wait until it was written to bring this to your attention, and though I worried about its reception, I do hope you all enjoy Chapter 31.
Now we can focus on and finish this. Thank you for waiting for so long.
