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The Zeegrotz Hegemony was spread over the magnificent South Continent and Southeast Firefalls of Zeta Orionis IV and the crown jewel of the Hegemony was her capital city, Withyladle.
It was a walled city, ancient and gothic in its buttressed, winged and spiraling towers and yet, within her bosom rested a civilization known to be the epitome of culture, mathematics, space technology and games of chance. Her citizens were humanoid and of three ethnic groups: the Eizou -- dark of tendril and willowy of thigh -- a musical, whimsical people, given to bursts of spontaneous doggerel; the Almacko - deathly of visage and cold in demeanour, yet sharp of intellect - technicians and engineers beyond compare and lastly, and - in unhappy retrospect, least, the Belbecki - they of the muttered curses, squatty legs and generally poor hygiene, whose reputation for gambling establishments of high integrity had apparently been exaggerated by previously reliable sources.
It was for this reason that the Lieutenant found himself running as fast as his current body's squatty legs could carry him and trying not to lose track of the High Commander as they ducked and wove through the winding Withyladle alleys.
From disturbingly close behind him, the Lieutenant could hear the angelic voices of the party of Eizou echoing through the night:
"Before the suns set in violets and reds, we'll find the Belbecki, and chop off their HEADS"
The last line was recited with such bell-like clarity that the Lieutenant was moved to sprint a little, ducking down into the tunnel where the High Commander had disappeared moments before. Well, moved by the bell-like clarity and the indelible memory of what the Eizou had done to their slow-moving Transmitter. The Lieutenant shuddered. Then he came to a breathless, gasping halt and looked around. The tunnel was dank, mossy and ended rather surprisingly in a stone wall.
The High Commander was nowhere to be seen.
"I don't believe this," the Lieutenant panted. The Belbecki phenotype was designed for neither speed nor stealth, and although the High Commander had, as usual, secured for himself the best of the available forms it seemed unlikely that even a Belbecki demi-god would be capable of vanishing into thin air. "Come out here you miserable little-- "
"I don't believe this," the Information Officer wheezed as he came slapping and grunting into the tunnel on large, flat Belbecki feet. Having lost the Draw he'd been given the third best form, which in this case had turned out to be a particularly old and exceptionally squatty Belbecki which, considering his own advanced years shouldn't have been cause for the tantrum that had followed. Nevertheless...
"You don't believe that we're going to end our lives here in this dank cavern on the most high tech planet under three suns because our glorious leader is gorple-brained legacy who can't count to ten in base 27?"
"No," the Information Officer, said wiping greasy sweat out of his bulging pink eyes. "That I can believe."
"What then?" the Lieutenant asked, tugging his lank eyebrows out of his air-hole.
"That!" The Information Officer pointed back at the mob of torch-bearing citizens passing the mouth of the tunnel without so much as a glance in their direction.
"Hunh," the Lieutenant said after the legion had trooped by. "They really aren't very bright, are they?"
"Lucky for us," said the Information Officer. "Considering what happened to the Transmitter." They both shuddered at the gruesome recollection. Eventually the angry mob moved out of earshot.
"What now?" the Information Officer asked.
The Lieutenant thought for a moment. He was now, he realized, fully in charge. This could be the break he'd been dreaming of. The plan came to him in a flash.
"Okay," he said."First, we double back toward the city center disguising ourselves as Vervetian moss creatures. Then we find our way into the sewers, crawling like maggots through the sludge until we find our way out under the city walls. After that it's a simple matter of wandering in the desert without food or water, while the radiation makes our skins bubble and peel, in the vague hope that we'll come across the spaceship where we left it among the fast-growing toxicin vines of the grotzgroves. By then we're a hop, skip and a hyperjump from the Home Planet. Easy as pie."
"Hmm," the Information Officer said.
"You have a better plan?" the Lieutenant asked, archly.
The Information Officer shrugged a warty shoulder and pointed.
"I was thinking we could go through that hole."
The Lieutenant turned his head all the way around to look. There in the far wall, the familiar red-orange glow of the ship's stix-plasma beam cutting through solid rock. A large, circular section of the wall disappeared, revealing the ship itself and the High Commander in the pilot's seat, waving jauntily.
"Well, that's just perfect," the Lieutenant said, slapping a foot in the dirt. "How does he do that?"
"I don't know," the information Officer said. "But even a broken chronosticator is right twelve times a sequence."
They waited until they were nearly at the Cepheus-Draco border before they shed their humanoid forms.
"Ohhh," the High Commander groaned, spreading his aristocratically violet pseudopods across the only comfortable recliner in the officer's compartment. "That feels wonderful."
"Well, hang on to that feeling," the Information Officer groused. "Because it's probably the last time you'll spread comfortably once we report to the Big Giant Head."
"Now, now," the High Commander said. "It won't be that bad. Well report in, we'll share a trough of nutrigel, the Big Giant Head will give us a little slap on the pseudowrists, and we'll be off on our next assignment before you know it.
"I think we need to get our story straight, Sir," the Lieutenant said.
"What story?" the High Commander asked. "We shall simply tell the Big Giant Head the truth, that our preliminary information was... inadequate."
"Now just hold on there," the Information Officer said, swiveling his head around, his long mauve pseudo-tongue slurping wetly back into his pseudo-mouth. "I am not taking the blame for this one."
"Come on, old man," the High Commander cajoled. "At your age, such slips are to be expected. The Big Giant Head will understand."
"Slips?!?" the Information Officer rose to his full, undulating tube-height. "If anything `slipped', my friend, it was the cog in that rusty klorpa-roller you call a neural net. What were you thinking, offering the Almacko prime minister twenty to one odds on that gelderswarm!"
The High Commander rippled with wounded innocence.
"I can only work with the material I'm given," he began.
"Hey," the Lieutenant broke in. "Your fault. My fault. His fault. None of it's going to matter when the Big Giant Head finds out we've lost our thirteenth Transmitter this cycle."
There was a moment of silence as the three of them shuddered at the grisly recall.
"It's true," the High Commander said, slumping miserably. "We're doomed."
"Not necessarily," the Lieutenant said. "We just have to come up with a plausible reason for the Transmitter's discorporation that doesn't make us look like a bunch of incompetent knarpaks."
"Right, right," the High Commander said. His cranial ridges curled in concentration. There was a moment of silence. It stretched into two, fissioned and became four more moments.
"I have it!" the High Commander suddenly exclaimed. "We tell the Giant Head that we needed the parts to fix--"
"We already used that one," the Information Officer said, glumly. "Fourth Transmitter on Deneb II."
"Mm, we did, didn't we," said the High Commander. They thought a"Ooh! I've got one," the Lieutenant said. "How about we say that it caught fire during-"
"Nope," said the Information Officer. "That was how we explained the mishap on 17 Eridani."
"How about...?"
"Used it," the Information Officer said.
"Even with..."
"Twice. The Head didn't buy it either time, remember?"
"Oh right," the Lieutenant said. He ran through every other excuse he could think of. They'd used them all. "Maybe we are doomed."
"No, wait!" The High Commander said. "There's one excuse we haven't used."
"We--oh no, no, no," the Information Officer said, whipping his head around violently.
"You don't mean..." The Lieutenant said, shocked to his liquid lilac center. "We'll be the laughingstock of the entire barred galaxy!"
"It's the only way," said the High Commander. He turned to the Information Officer. "Old man?"
The information officer quivered with disgust, but finally he nodded, his cranial ridges wobbling unhappily.
"Okay,' he said. "But if anybody asks, I was the one in the back with my eyes closed." The High Commander clapped him on the back, setting up a convivial wavefront.
"Who would believe anything else?"
The meeting with the Big Giant Head took nearly 3/8ths of a planar phase and by the end their auricles were ringing with the Big Giant Head's booming voice and all three of them were flushed nearly fuchsia with embarrassment.
It did not help that there were audible chuckles from the Council balconies and the occasional shout of 'Chip chasers!' as they oozed across the floor, trying not to make orb contact with anyone they knew. It's not like they could afford to deny the insult. That way lay bankruptcy and possibly being squeezed through small buckets with a many tiny holes in them. In slumped and silent misery, they slithered along the crowded canals of Capital City, until they came to the spaceport.
Their usual haunts were out of the question. Instead they settled on the seediest establishment they could find - a dry depression at the very farthest arm of the port spiral, with only a flapping wheeka-skin tent for a roof.
They took a corner booth and ordered fizzy drinks.
"Well," the High Commander said. "The could have gone--"
"Worse?" the Information Officer groaned, licking despondently at his shoulder. "I don't think that's possible."
"Really?" The High Commander said. "I didn't think it was that bad."
"What could be bad?" the Lieutenant said. "We're demoted from a High Level TechnoCulture Penultimate Absorption Team to a Preliminary Scout Mission on the least important planet in the least important solar system in the, what was it? Oh yes, the Milky Way! We're lucky there's not a galaxy called `Ass End of Nowhere', because that's where we would be headed."
"Okay, that might be a bit of a set back, career-wise" the High Commander allowed, sipping his fizzy drink. "But at least we're off the hook for the loss of the Transmitter!"
The Information Officer slipped further under the table, clutching his head and moaning: "The shame! The indelible stain on my family's genetic material!"
"Oh come on," the High Commander said. "It's just a little public humiliation on a planetary scale. Who hasn't experienced that before?"
"No one who's ever partnered with you, Sir," the Lieutenant said, smartly.
"Exactly," said the High Commander. "Now this... Earth assignment. It may be small borbotubers, but we're going to treat it as the opportunity it is. I have the dossier right here, so let's get started. Let's see... Unh-hunh.... Unh-hunh... unh-hunnnnh. Well, that looks simple enough. We have to take the Terrestrial form, pose as something called a `family', participate in Earth culture and report back on what it means to be `human'."
"Great," the Lieutenant said. "So these humans - do they at least have basic technology? Space ships? Matter transmission? Anything?"
"Well," the High Commander said, perusing the dossier. "They have electricity! And... something called Fast Food. That sounds pretty advanced."
There was a muffled moan from under the table.
"I'm too old for this," the Information Officer whimpered piteously. The Lieutenant extended a pseudopod and nudged him ungently until he resolidified in an upright position.
"At least the forms are more aesthetically pleasing than the last set," the High Commander said. "Look! There's something called a `woman'." They looked. The dossier showed four models of Terrestrial physiognomy, one of which seemed to be in the process of budding through its upper torso.
"Looks... lumpy," the Lieutenant said.
"And what's that stringy stuff on top of its cranium?" the Information Officer said, squinting. "I don't like it."
"Me neither," said the Lieutenant.
"Well, I'm certainly not going to be odd man out," the High Commander said. "That's what the Draw is for."
"Hmph," the Information Officer said. "The Draw you always manage to win, somehow..."
"Well, we all can't be hatched with a lucky piece of curved metal lodged deep in our cloacae, can we?"
"Good point," said the Information Officer, wincing.
"True enough," said the Lieutenant with a pained grimace. "Let's draw."
"Very well," the High Commander said. He produced a small green boodlesac and extracted the three Indispensible Pipettes - two long, one short. The High Commander drew first.
Long pipette.
"I claim this one," he said, pointing to the tall willowy creature with the nearly fuzz-free cranium.
"Of course you do," the Lieutenant groused. The Information Officer drew next.
"Aha!" he exclaimed. "Long pipette! At last!" He leaned over to peruse the forms in the dossier.
"There's something wrong with that one's orbs," he said, pointing to the middle sized humanoid. "I'll take the compact model."
"Good choice," said the High Commander. "And you, Lieutenant?"
"Well I'm not taking the squinty one," he said. "At least the woman looks... healthy. Maybe once it's finished budding it'll smooth out a little."
"Of course it will," the High Commander burbled soothingly. "And that only leaves us with one small problem." He held up the Transmitter chip the Big Giant Head had grudgingly allowed them to have. It was an old model, tarnished and slightly bent.
"Right," the Lieutenant said, slumping in defeat. "Like anybody in their right mind is going to let us put that in their cranial vault now."
"Face it," the Information Officer said. "The only way we're going to be able to find a new Transmitter is to convince some poor sucker to get on our ship with us, take him out into space, drug him unconscious and do the insertion manually."
The moody silence that followed was broken only by the entrance of a tall, athletic, firm-tubed youth with orbs the deep mauve of the ocean and long, curling cranial ridges. He had a noble mein and his tongue flicked easily across his broad, gelatinous back.
"Friends," the youth announced to the bar at large. His voice was musical and pleasant. "Fellow Homeworlders. My name is Parsifur and I am a first ranked scholar, poet and artist." He bowed slightly although no one had done anything more than stare. "My works have been shown in the finest galleries, my poems published in the finest tomes - which as you can see, rhymes perfectly - and my studies have been published in only the top ranked journals. And yet, with all my repute and renown, I suffer. Yes, suffer I say - from the purest and most jaded ennui. This planet, this world, this galaxy - I have explored it all from the confines of my mind, squeezed its juice and sucked it dry. I seek... " He paused dramatically to emulate seeking amongst the grimy tables. "I seek adventure. I seek novelty and excitement, conquest and renewal. I seek a suitable vessel to carry me to my glorious adventure! Er, preferably cheap."
The Lieutenant and the Information Officer glanced at each other and then at the High Commander.
"It would be wrong, of course," the High Commander said.
"Definitely immoral," said the Information Officer. "Probably illegal, too."
"Strangely," the Lieutenant said. "I'm okay with that."
The others bobbled their cranial vaults in silent agreement. The High Commander lifted his fizzy drink.
"To Earth," he said. The others answered the toast. Then the High Commander rose.
"Excuse me, young sir," he said, sidling to the scholar/poet/artist/adventurer. "By great fortune we have such a vessel, and it just happens to have an extra seat..."
(end)