Merlin

People moved through the bazaar at the south end of the asteroid station like a river. Sapients of many dozens of species crowded it, shouting and pushing, bartering and sometimes singing. Dayang and Iskoort and Arns. Kuratua-kani in mobile fluid tanks and Errits looking down from hanging wires crossing above. On a busy day like this, as many as four thousand voices filled the glass-roofed central enclosure with sound, reverberating from the metal structure to form a single, impenetrable din. Most in universal Galard, but woven through with the native tongues of a hundred worlds.

In all the clamor, amidst all the pushing and shouted negotiations, no one noticed when one marketgoer, a Raasthian, suddenly dropped to the floor, unconscious. The Raasthian lay inert for several seconds, jostled by the passing feet and hooves and boots, before awaking, confused but unhurt. Seeing no sign of an attacker, they patted the pockets of their spaceflight suit, found nothing missing, and stood, wondering if they had even really fallen, to return to their errands.

Amidst the same forest of legs and other limbs, there was a mouse, much like the other ones that hid in corners and nested in the walls all around the station. Had anyone noticed it, they might have been struck by its path: practiced, expert, with no pauses and a clear destination. Not fearfully dodging the giant footfalls that shook the concrete around it, but navigating between them with purpose and aplomb. Much like the other mice—-but not exactly.

Within a minute, the mouse had crossed the crowded bazaar and disappeared into an open vent on its northern end. The Raasthian would question nothing about their blackout, and the discarded robe near where they had collapsed would be only one of many pieces of detritus left at the end of the day, kicked and trampled far from where it landed. There was no sign Merlin had even been there.

Merlin began to demorph as soon as the vent leading to his hideout was in view. By the time he dropped out of the open grate, the mouse body had already begun to retract its hairs, and its bone structure to shift. He was starting to grow when he hit the mattress, the matter of his body flowing back to him from zerospace. Moments later, he was human again.

At least, as much as ever.

He went eagerly to his mirror as soon as the demorph was complete. Leaning forward with his hands on the sink, he scanned his reflection: the narrow face, stubbly jaw, the small scar on his eyebrow. He kept it all in sight as he calmed himself and focused on his newly acquired morph.

The Raasthian began to emerge at the bridge of his nose, which widened to form the characteristic axeblade ridge that ran from crown to chin. Flesh shifted and melted, solidified as armored scutes. The morphing nanites repurposed his human hair to form the thumb-length quills at the back of the alien neck. This form wasn't much bigger than his human frame, so there was no need to shift his clothes into z-space, though the fabric grew tight as his bones adjusted to the steeper slope of the Raasthian's shoulders.

He held his eyes back for last, though they sank far back from the head-blade. He didn't know what Raasthian vision was like, if he would miss anything by allowing the new eyes to emerge. Finally, nestled deep in protective, scaled eyelids, he let the change reach them, too. A few seconds of near-blindness, only a shifting, foggy blur, before the alien eyes were complete and delivered their crisp, strange-colored vision.

Well, now he had a Raasthian. One of the last sentient species that frequented the asteroid, of which Merlin hadn't yet acquired a morph. He admired this new form in the mirror, tested the head-blade with his stubby thumb, practiced extending and retracting the needle teeth.

He tried his weight while morphed, experimenting with the muscles that were similar to a human’s but not exactly. Did a quick mile on his treadmill, seeing how the feet felt on the ground, what the lungs and bloodflow were like. The differences were subtle, but noticeable. Such as the immense power in the muscles bunched in his new neck and lower back, the ones that made the axe-blade face a lethal chopping weapon.

Satisfied, he slipped back out of the morph. That was another for his collection. He came back to the sink to splash water on his face, riding high on endorphins.

The human face in the mirror smirked slyly at him. His face, his original one. The one that the morphing nanites disassembled and stored in zerospace, to retrieve when he demorphed. He had seen this face for years, but it had never been his. No more than the Raasthian face, nor the Errit’s, nor the mouse’s. It was something that came from somewhere else: not from his home, which was and would always be the asteroid, but from a distant world, somewhere far away in the Yeerk-controlled galaxy.

He made himself look, though. He made himself smile his human smile. Whatever he could become, that was the form he could always return to. It was his baseline.

Winking to the earthling in the mirror, Merlin turned back away. All this morphing was making him hungry.

Kordriss 57

"Shouldn't you be working?"

The question came from one of the human pleasure-hosts curled up at the end of the coffee table, playfully needling Kordriss 57. Smiling wryly, the officer drew the bill of his hat down, rested his heels on the table and sent one of his servitor Arns for another carafe. He picked up his discarded tablet and brought up the feeds from the security sensor array, flicked through them with an eye on the pleasure-host. He tapped a Dayang in the bazaar and flagged it for questioning. Hidden occipital port, he chose as the reason, though the Dayang faced the camera.

"You keep your asteroid so clean," the pleasure-host moaned with exaggerated sensuality.

She shook her loose hair back over her shoulders so she could lean forward and sniff another line of whichever powder she had brought from the tray. Kordriss hadn't asked what drug it was, he liked to watch his company as drugs took effect, be surprised. He'd employed most of the pleasure workers on the asteroid before, they knew how he liked it. He'd only had to dispose of a few. Most knew that ambition wasn't their purview.

The security chief called her over and set his tablet aside. She brought the tray, and he scraped what was left off onto the hollow of her neck, above the clavicle, to sniff himself. Her hair swung away from the port in her occipital bone, giving him a brief glimpse of the transparent plate, the human brain beyond it, the pulsing Yeerk flesh wrapped around it. He drew the hair back over the port as he turned away. The reminder that the body was being piloted always risked killing the illusion.

The zombie Arn loped back with a new carafe from Kordriss's cabinet. It filled its master's snifter without a word.

"You're starting to smell," the security chief reminded it as he quaffed.

"Yes, sir," it croaked. The Yeerk struggled to produce the apology with its decomposing vocal cords, and backed away.

The tablet blinked with a message. Kordriss nudged the pleasure-host aside and checked it. As he expected, one of his officers had questioned the charge against the Dayang, whose port had not, in fact, been obscured. He dictated a curt instruction to be creative, but was interrupted by another alert before he could get back to the task at hand.

Kether 19 was en route. Administration, be prepared to receive in t-minus-27 hours.

The burning of the liquor in Kordriss's host throat instantly became hot and unpleasant. His mind raced, trying to remember any failures or laxity that could have brought him to the attention of the Intraimperial Security Office. There was none. None. The starport was secure, and he kept the token resistance cells carefully monitored. Besides, his asteroid was a backwater, there could be no major security threat here. It must be a routine inspection. Kordriss took another sip and put it out of his mind.

He looked to the pleasure-host at his side, whose body was beginning to twitch with the effects of the stimulant.

"Don't just sit there," he said. He eyed the dracon switch on the table, and one of the other pleasure-hosts lounging in his lobby. The human—human, not Yeerk, he asserted—nodded and picked the switch up.

Merlin

By noon the next day, Merlin had put in sixteen miles on his treadmill and a hundred pull-ups. His skull buzzed with the need for more, but he didn't want to waste the energy, knowing the workout would only have a few hours to take before he morphed in the evening.

Getting the treadmill in here had been a feat in itself. His hideout was on the old half of the asteroid station, officially abandoned and only connected to the ventilation system because he kept the ducts open himself. Anything large he wanted had to be brought in piece by piece, dragged along in rat or flyfish or gateslug morph, and reassembled inside.

When he'd found it, the hideout had housed two long rows of bunks, formerly used by miners before the mine had been shut down centuries ago. Its ceiling was caved in on one end, cutting the length in half but safely sealing it in from the vacuum beyond. In the guise of an Ulerran shock snake (whose original had passed through the starport on its way to some wealthy herpetologist's collection or other), Merlin had welded the frames of the extra beds together into a messy but stable support to hold the ceiling up on that end. Since then he had fixed up the walls and decorated, rewired the ancient lighting and plumbing, stolen and rebuilt an entertainment system and a private terminal connected to the station's computers.

That last had been a boon for his collection.

It was how he knew about his next prize.

There were a number of earth species present on the asteroid already, such as the mice and sparrows that occupied the periphery of the bazaar, some domestic dogs and cats and a few kinds of worm and insect. Maybe a quarter of non-sentient species there originated from Earth. Most were distant descendants of animals that had been taken along with the humans brought to work the mines, as were the asteroid's native humans, the “Ductees”. Others had hitched along on freighters and passenger ships in the starport, or had been abandoned as pets or livestock, and made their way into the station's limited ecosystem. But it was a paltry selection compared to the diversity Merlin knew had been produced by his species's lost homeworld.

He had acquired all of the non-sentient macrofauna on the asteroid, everything with DNA at least. When something came from offworld, he jumped at it. And something from Earth was the highest priority. He spent many of his evenings at his terminal, scrolling through the manifests of ships and drones coming and going, looking for anything of interest. Components for his gym, knickknacks for his hideout, but especially species. More animals passed through the starport than one might think; most freighters and starliners had at least a few aboard. Livestock changed hands across the galaxy, travelers had pets, and of course rich Imperial Yeerks liked their menageries. As soon as he saw the code for Earth fauna in the manifest, he had been bristling to take it.

The ship had met the asteroid’s orbit early this morning, and would make its final descent soon. It would be here all night, refueling and receiving basic maintenance. Some of its passengers might spend an evening or morning in the bazaar, or maybe someone aboard needed a face-to-face with one of the station’s Imperial officers. Either way, Merlin had plenty of time to get in.

He chose a dock worker’s uniform from the rack of clothes he had smuggled in, a set of bright yellow coveralls with a simple balloon helmet and rebreather, and thick boots that he may or may not need, depending which morph he used. He’d been morphing for years before he’d learned to instruct the nanites to store clothes, and especially footwear, in zerospace with the rest of him. Shorquorel, the poor old Arn who had explained the talent to him, had never discovered the trick to clothes and shoes himself. Though few species were as reliant on either as were humans.

Dressed, Merlin became a moth, and slipped into the vent.

Interlude

You must be invisible, Shorquorel says, waving long fingers in front of his gigantic eyes to illustrate the point. You can never be caught. Being caught means being taken by the Yeerks, there is nothing else.

He commands Merlin to try again. Skulking across the room, he is human at the start, but an insect at the opposite wall. The Arn makes him practice the morph in motion, over and over. It is exhausting, the young earthling is always sweating and breathing hard when he demorphs. At times he rages, at times he hates the older morpher’s tutelage, but, truth be told, he is getting faster. He can shed his human form, becoming the cockroach quickly and gracefully, guiding the morph so that his body hardens and shrinks but he never drops noisily to the floor or loses control of his steps. They have done this same exercise with many species: ant, hawk, goose; starting with the ones more biologically similar to the Earth boy.

The Yeerks need only see you once, Shorquorel says. And they will stop at nothing to take you.

When the Arn is satisfied with Merlin's practice, he works with the boy on fighting. Shorquorel takes the form of a human today, a muscular earth man he acquired before the time of his own servitude to the Yeerks.

Amidst blows Merlin complains: Why won't you morph Hork-Bajir, or Karaicen? If I can fight one of them, I can fight a human, easy.

Shorquorel responds with a precise jab to Merlin's shoulder that causes a disproportionate explosion of pain, and leaves the arm numb, though it was delivered only with meaty, clawless human fingertips. Maybe a Hork-Bajir blade would have severed the arm entirely with that force, but to Merlin, on the floor in pain, unable to move his arm and with an opponent standing over him—the human-fingered jab was just as good.

No opponent is easy, the disguised Arn chides. Anyone you fight brings a lifetime of learning and an evolutionary history with them, and you may know neither. Besides, fighting a human will teach you the weaknesses of your own anatomy.

They spar for hours, until Merlin can hardly stand. Afterward they both rest, as the asteroid's artificial star reaches the horizon and the station darkens.

The two of them share a section of disused hallway in the labyrinthine network behind the closed shops at the station's north end, which Merlin found and settled in before Shorquorel's arrival, and which the Arn protects from incursion by thieves and other urchins. It is safe enough, and near enough the active public sectors that the Arn can go every few days, in one morph or another, to barter for food and supplies. They heat packaged protein meals over a heated data node and eat with stolen utensils.

When I'm good enough, we can morph a couple aliens and just walk in and rent a pod, Merlin muses. It'll have a stove and a fabricator and everything.

We will, someday, Shorquorel agrees, darkly.

It won 't be too long; I 'm getting good.

That isn 't the matter. The Yeerks are still looking for me in this system. They have to think I am long gone.

Merlin pokes at his food, a little sobered.

It's been years, he says, thinking he is being helpful.

I am that valuable to them. And so are you. I am as precious to them as the mass of five stars in pure gold. You, a dozen times that.

The boy nods. He has heard it before. The morphing ability is a power the Yeerks desire more than anything. They held his guardian for decades, since they could not risk trying to infest him, and it would be much, much worse if they ever took Merlin.

Everything was the Yeerks. Hiding from them, learning to lie to them and resist them. Before Shorquorel had taken him in, Merlin had been aware of the conquerors, of the danger of breaking their rules, and of the possibility that one could be hiding behind any pair of eyes—but it hadn’t been until the old morpher had come that he’d learned the real danger, and the real extent of their tyranny.

Tell me something, the boy insists. He demands this often; Shorquorel is close-lipped and tentative, and has to be reminded to inform his human protégé of the dire circumstances that have brought them together.

What? Shorquorel rolls to his side, dismayed but acquiescent.

Something about your world.

In his natural state—his baseline, he calls it—he is small, not much larger than the human child, and about as different from him as any sentient visitor to the asteroid. His body is like that of a quadruped, his arms and hands are long and he walks with them as much as he does his legs. The wing membranes between them and his smaller secondary arms are tattered and scarred, useless for flight. His eyes are huge, each bigger than Merlin’s fists side by side. They become watery and distant when he thinks about his home.

On my world we lived in the walls of an equatorial trench that divided the planet in half. We were cave-dwellers, night creatures. Millennia ago there was a disaster, an asteroid strike that almost erased life from the world, but we retreated to the trench and rebuilt. It was a haven, a nature reserve. We modified the surviving trees to provide us with rich air and soil, and we created our children to care for them.

The Hork-Bajir.

The giant eyes waver, and the Arn draws a pained sigh.

Many of us were cold, unfeeling towards them. When the Yeerks came, it was decided that we would hide. We thought: they would take our children and leave the world, and we would replace them and our peace would continue. I won ’t talk more on it. It is not our world anymore. It is a place of death, just another engine by which the Yeerks power their empire.

Is that what Earth is?

Shorquorel softens a little.

I know nothing of Earth, he admits. It could be. The story is that the Yeerks had no use for it once they had taken your species, and they walked away from it.

If they left any humans there, they might still be alive.

They would be very, very old if so. Maybe there are, and maybe they continued to procreate. But you should not think of it; the Yeerks were thorough in their conquest. It is best to forget your kind 's home. The safest thing for any place is to be undiscovered, forever.

Shorquorel reaches to take one of Merlin's hands. His own long paws are gnarled, fingers tipped with fine, hollow, needle-sharp claws that carry the DNA-altering venom with which his species had controlled the evolution of their world; at the backs of his wrists are mounds of ropy scar tissue where the venom sacs had been removed. In them, the human child's thin-skinned and broad-nailed hands seem weak and useless.

Your kind is like mine now, the Arn says. We are creatures of the stars. We are scattered and enslaved, but we are also unbound to the worlds that shaped us. Like the humans native to this asteroid: they have already begun to become unlike the humans of Earth. They have lost this smallest finger, and a dozen other features. You think you are unrooted, as I am. But you are young; your roots are in the future. You have no need for Earth, because you are shaped by what happens now.

And by Sadon's Gift, Merlin puts in.

Shorquorel nods, sadly.

And by Sadon 's Gift.

Kordriss 57

With the ISO en route, Kordriss 57 stepped up security zealously. The day before Kether 19's arrival he oversaw four interrogations and Consequence Sessions, for petty infractions with which he would not normally waste his staff's time. A Shoru burgled a civilian home: Kordriss confiscated the items they stole and ordered them Dracon-stunned on the dais in the bazaar. An anonymous tip came in about a human who had not kept her occipital infestation port clean enough for use, so she was sentenced to thirty days of hard labor in the power station.

Then there was the Errit.

Sensors had caught the flighted sentient lurking near the intake vents above the administrative sector, not suspicious but certainly out of place enough to warrant a second look. The monitoring officer had called Kordriss in to verify something she suspected. The way the Errit hung, its clear occipital plate was hidden behind one of its wings, but when it stretched, the camera very briefly had a glimpse of a Yeerk wrapped around its brain. There was no record of that Yeerk aboard the station, and the Errit was not listed as currently being infested. Kordriss ordered it brought in.

A pair of flighted security officers brought it in, its fangs bared but putting up no resistance otherwise. Kordriss waited in his office while the Errit was booked and documented. After half an hour, he received a message:

Proceeding with preliminary infestation.

He waited a moment longer, then made his way to the interrogation theater. The winged officers at the door saluted him and let him in. Below the viewing area, one of his interrogators held the struggling Errit against the table, preparing to extract the undocumented Yeerk. 

“No need,” Kordriss called over the railing. He came down the steps to relieve the interrogators. “Allow me to handle it.”

The two human-controllers saluted and backed away.

Kordriss circled the alien that still lay on the table though it had been released. Its bulbous eyes were full of anger and fear, its fanged jaws worked silently.

“Ekessar Six Thousand Seventy-One,” the security chief addressed the Yeerk piloting it. He made a show of consulting his tablet, though he knew everything it said. “That’s your name, yes?”

“That’s my name,” the Errit’s scratchy voice made it sound aggressive, but there wasn’t really much fight in it.

"You're an Imperial, yes?" Kordriss continued. "Low-level, very low, but an Imperial nonetheless. Yet you didn't avail yourself of the many amenities we have for our brothers and sisters here. Such as premium housing and host bodies, and food. And registration."

The Errit was quiet. It breathed heavily, as if expecting to be attacked. Ekessar had poor control over her host body's autonomic responses.

"You were born to two males and one female. That produces...interesting offspring. Born planetside, middling student. What brings you to my asteroid?"

He gave her time to respond, knowing she wouldn't. She knew she was caught. After letting her seethe, he leaned against the table casually, affected friendliness.

"It's been a while since I took an Errit. I quite enjoyed flying—and the precision of those eyes, it's fantastic. Though, like anyone will tell you, there's nothing like a human host. Errits fight you, but they have a parasite like us on their world, they know on a genetic level what's happening. Have you ever taken a human? The human hindbrain can't conceive of infestation, but intellectually they know exactly what's happening. It gives a flavor to their resistance. What it feels like to suppress one. It makes up for the physical weakness, the poor senses. Have you ever felt that?"

Of course she hadn't. It was right there in her file.

"Once you've felt it, it's hard not to want it all the time," Kordriss folded his hands, giving up the pretense of referring to the tablet. "Just as much as the first time you're given a Gedd, and you can see and hear. You know, there are those of our kind who think it's injustice for brain-bearing species to have that. They see how humans, and Errits, and Leerans, and all the others waste what they have. Living lives of luxury, making shallow and meaningless art, taking the beauty of the galaxy for granted. They see that, and they say, 'That's wrong, that's proof that evolution is imperfect.' But do you know what I think? I think it's exactly how it should be. Because it behoves us, it obliges us to be what we are, to take what nature didn't give us, and to use it to experience the universe to its fullest. We begin in our pools without sight, without spines or limbs, and we become more than nature. We set out from a home nature never intended us to even perceive, beyond some faint electromagnetic pulses, and we perceive every other world, too. We leave our sun behind. We leave Kandrona."

The magma in Ekessar's Errit's eyes, the white-hot contempt with which the alien glared at its captor's captor, was delicious.

"A week ago you were on Calcos Nineteen. A few days before that you were aboard a decommissioned starliner in the Exxis Cloud. Before that, on Pearl Moon. Always unregistered, but always seen, and documented, for anyone who was looking. If I alert my opposite in any of those locations, what will they find?"

He didn't need to answer, but he gave her time in case she did. It was always more entertaining when they thought they could help their cases, but Ekessar 6071 knew better. Ah, well.

"You're weak, Sister Ekessar. You've been following the Sun Web, but you didn't know we'd shut down the unlicensed Kandrona device here. It's been three days now, hasn't it? You're starting to feel the strain. You know we're beyond the need for our home sun."

"Cannibal," the Errit spat.

"A cannibal is someone who eats their own kind," Kordriss reminded her. "Anti-Imperials, rebels, and suppressors are not our kind." He stood up and gave her a last smile before turning away. "I would offer you a meal to ease the starvation, but that would be a waste. Goodbye, Sister."

She shouted something as he left, but he paid her no mind. He instructed the officers waiting at the door to make sure to perform a memory dump before sending the Yeerk to the sludge farms; Kether 19 would be pleased to see that he had rooted out a rogue Kandrona network. The Errit could be released. No reason to destroy a good host body. He left that at the discretion of his underlings, though, in case they wanted some sport.

Merlin

There were asteroid-born humans in the starport crew, so Merlin selected one of his Ductee morphs. It was a convenient one, because he could shift to it within his clothes—a stolen dock worker uniform—without having to shunt them to zerospace. Once he was back in the main station, he only had to get out of the view of any onlookers or cameras and make the change. Most of the changes were internal, but he could watch his little fingers wither and be absorbed into his hands, while the bones adjusted to space the remaining ones out further.

The scanner at the employee entrance let him in without a fuss. He had hacked this Ductee's biometrics into the starport's database years ago, and the computer didn't notice that the sometime crew member never aged a day. Putting on a sullen, disaffected face, he infiltrated the locker room and pretended to be getting ready like any other dock worker. From there it was a long, packed tram ride through the enclosed tunnel that connected the station proper to the starport.

It was a VTOL-only port, since the asteroid's surface didn't allow enough flat land for an airstrip or zerospace pop-in pad. The dock itself, then, was a wide-open space with room for a hundred small-to-medium ships to land, with no roof but a pressure field to preserve the breathable atmosphere and artificially enhanced gravity for the crews. Hundreds of dock workers hurried between landing zones, waving marshaling wands and carrying equipment between several dozen passenger and cargo ships.

Merlin dismounted the tram at the end of its track and followed holo signs to a cart carrying crew to the sector of the airfield at which his target ship would be landing. It took him close, and he ran the rest of the way, stealing a length of fuel tubing to make sure he looked busy.

He kept an eye out for Controller officers overseeing the landing zones. There wasn’t one assigned to his ship, but that didn’t mean he was invisible to them. They were piloting all different species, but mostly human. Tight, bold-colored uniforms with sharply angled hats, they gave off an aura of authority that a lowly asteroid denizen could detect from a hundred yards away.

The crew he infiltrated unloaded a gaggle of Iskoort from the passenger ship that occupied his target’s landing zone, sent them off on a pair of carts headed for the tunnels, and then prepared that ship for liftoff. The cylindrical passenger vessel rumbled and lifted away from the ground on countergrav suspensors, passing through the pressure field and into the airless night beyond. Merlin made himself busy sweeping up the scuff marks it left, in the half hour before the next ship was due.

He passed the two-hour mark in morph while he waited. That was the factory limit for holding a morph, before the nanites’ hold on the morpher’s original shape decayed too far in zerospace to morph back. Shorquorel had urged Merlin not to try pushing that limit, but the human had been intrigued by the challenge. His record was ten hours.

Finally a klaxon sounded an alert to clear the landing zone. Far above, a bright speck appeared in the sky, the cargo ship emerging from zerospace. Voices chattered over the landing crew’s intercoms, giving rushed instructions as the speck expanded. It became a roughly cubic shape, colorless metal and ceramic in utilitarian panels and nodes. The precision with which it descended was unnatural in a way that made the mindless Ductee morph’s brain anxious to look at. Merlin stood aside as it slowly lowered itself to the surface, became a wall of impenetrable machinery. Once it was down and the thrum of its suspensors eased, the crew hustled to attach fuel and waste hoses, open its vents, move the precautionary pressure tent into place.

Around the opposite side from the airlock, the cargo bay opened. The great slab of a door swung slowly downward to become a ramp, while several layers of inner hatches slid open to reveal several stories packed with crates and shipping containers, loose objects of all kinds between them.

Only a fraction of the ship's cargo was to be unloaded at this port, which was just one of many stops on its current route. Merlin helped load a few pallets onto suspensor carts, for the sake of his cover. Offworld goods for the bazaar, maintenance supplies for the station. Several large tanks of the mysterious food Yeerks ate—every ship brought some of that. While the last of those tanks was being emptied into the subterranean supply tubes, the morpher took the opportunity to slip back inside.

Most of the time, the only disguise one needed to get anywhere in an imperial facility was a species and a tablet. There was nothing less suspicious than a Ductee strolling the corridors surrounding a ship's cargo bay, tapping on a tablet as though working down a list. Merlin noted security cameras as he went, poking his head into the secure, private, and climate-controlled holds he passed. There was no rush. His only concern about capture was that he might not have been as steady with the morph's coccyxless spine and four-toed feet than a natural-born asteroid human, and the vacant brain's autonomic functions masked that weakness well enough.

Steam rolled out of the climate-controlled hold he was looking for when he focused his eyes on the biometric scanner beside it. The change in heat and humidity immediately made Merlin's Ductee head ache. The intense, animal smell that came with the steam didn't help.

Most of this hold was reserved specifically for the animals owned by the rich Yeerk, stacked from floor to ceiling in biocrates of bluish polymer. The crates were opaque, buckled to the floor and to each other with thick metal joins, labeled with serial numbers and scan-codes. Though there were dozens, and they carried wildlife from every corner of the galaxy, there was only one that could have held Merlin's target.

At the center of the hold was a single crate as tall and wide as Merlin's hideout. The Ductee approached it cautiously, eyes on the security and information panel on its broad side. Once the scanner on the panel confirmed that he was authorized, the ship's computer would log his intrusion, which meant that his time would be limited and this morph would be lost to him, at least as far as the starport went.

Eggs and omelettes. Merlin locked eyes with the scanner.

A green check-mark appeared on the panel, and the side of the crate facing him became transparent, revealing Merlin's quarry. Inside, listless on a grassy hillside half submerged in water and surrounded by a virtual savannah, waited the hippopotamus.

The Earth creature lolled sadly against the slope that led down into its wallow, probably woken by touchdown. Its great head was mere inches from Merlin's, a broad-faced ungulate dragon. The inside of the crate projected a vast, lively setting, much like the few visual records there were available of Earth, though the physical mound and pool suggested the animal could not move around its environment. It could only wait dejectedly, until it reached its destination.

Merlin set to looking for a way in. He’d stolen many things from the holds of cargo ships in this port, but he didn’t know this particular model of crate. He certainly couldn’t just let the animal loose—granted, that could provide him cover for his escape, but it would also probably get this rare specimen of Earth megafauna killed.

Exploring the options on the security panel, he found what looked to be a button that would open a feeding hatch. With a deep breath, he pressed it.

A small opening appeared in the false sky above the hippo. About nine feet up.

He had been hoping for a panel in the side, but enough to reach through from ground level. He had any number of morphs that could reach that opening; moth, flywing, Centauri lapjack. But morphing to get in would require demorphing on the inside to acquire the animal.

Unless…

Merlin paced for a few precious moments. In the end, he put the urgent decision off. Making sure he wasn’t in view of any cameras, he released the Ductee morph and allowed his Earth-human anatomy to ripple back into place under his uniform. It was possible to go directly from one morph to another, but taxing enough that he only did it when necessary. From his baseline form, he selected the body of a moth and let the nanites do their work.

His flesh melted, withdrew out of positive space, while the little that remained in this dimension was sculpted into the soft insect body. A shuddering, tingling sensation, muted to make the process survivable. Somewhere in zerospace, the rest of his biomass was strung out, extruded into microscopic threads, organized and catalogued by a trillion cell-sized computers, only a shapeless blob with no resemblance to the body he was born with, but fully functioning and ready to be reassembled once he was finished with the moth form.

That was how Shorquorel had described it, anyway.

Tiny, hairy, and flighted now, Merlin flexed the muscles of his back to drag himself into the air. His vision was limited, but the moth’s ganglia knew how to parse the nearly spherical shadow patterns provided by his ommatidia, in concert with the totally different input from his simple eyes. He followed the looming shape of the crate almost to the ceiling, and dropped daintily into the hippopotamus’s enclosure.

Inside, he was immediately disoriented. The displays that created the virtual environment weren’t suited for the moth’s vision; there was no image, only impossibly bright and strobing lights. Merlin concentrated, though he was dizzy and nauseous. He let just a hint of human anatomy slip back in to the compound eyes, enough that they ceased to function. The simple eyes fared better: he recognized the continent-sized animal below him, just before he landed upon it.

He had to decide now. To morph a species, he had to acquire its genetic structure through physical contact. The morphing technology only allowed that in baseline form—but, like anything, Merlin had spent years striving to sidestep that limitation.

He had managed to acquire a few small animals while morphed. Those animals, however, had died soon after.

That was the point of practice, though. To get better. And Merlin was sure he knew how to avoid harming the target animal. Pretty sure.

Now he was inside the crate, astride a dangerous and frustrated animal. With a huff through the spiracles along his abdomen, he decided he had to demorph. The tiny moth body swelled and stretched as the morphing nanites drew his baseline mass back to it from outside the universe. He directed them to give him back his human eyes and visual cortex early in the process, for relief from the strobing. What he saw made him roll off the animal’s back and into the water.

Peering into the hippo’s artificial savannah was a metallic face, with large LED eyes above a permanent quizzical grimace. It was a helper bot, investigating the open crate through the security panel.

“Oh dear,” the robot said. It was one of those types. “I don’t know what I’m looking at. Oh dear.”

There was no way it hadn’t seen the amorphous homunculus rolling off the hippopotamus’s back. Merlin held himself in mid-morph, human-eyed and useless half-insect bodied, clinging to one of the enormous legs for cover.

“Is someone there? I thought there was someone there. Oh my.”

Holding the morph halfway was like tensing a muscle; Merlin couldn’t stay that way for long. The hippo kicked lightly at the fuzzy thing against its leg, no doubt drawing the robot’s attention. Those circular eyes scanned the waterline with deep concern. Merlin had to return to the moth morph.

Grudgingly, furiously, he fluttered back up to the hole in the nauseating ceiling. There was just enough clearance atop the crate for him to shift to his Ductee morph, replete with uniform, and shimmy to the side opposite the robot to drop down. He put on a smile that he really didn’t feel, and stepped out from behind the crate.

“Oh dear,” the robot said when it saw him. It was little more than a tube on wheels, four feet tall and topped with the alert but consternated face that had been projected into the savannah. “I thought I saw someone in the enclosure. That’s a dangerous place to be.”

“You’re just imagining things,” Merlin patted the robot atop its curved head, gently nudging it in the direction of the door. “You just caught me resting my bad back for a minute.”

“Do you need First Aid? Oh my.”

Merlin insisted that he was fine, but the helper bot wouldn’t listen. It swiveled and blinked, kept offering tools and supplies from its hollow trunk.

Ah, it was a bust. Merlin wanted to morph the hippo right now and smash the thing into shrapnel.

Which he could have done, if he’d had time to acquire it. Now he had to get out before his intrusion was noticed.

“I’m gonna get back to work,” he assured the helper bot. “You should stay here. Right here.”

“Are you sure you don’t need an adrenaline shot?”

“One hundred percent. You know what, maybe you were right, you’d better see if there’s someone in there with that hippo.”

“Oh my.”

That was enough to take its attention off him, at least. Merlin shut the helper bot in and locked the climate-controlled hold. He walked away from the ship, hippoless and unable to suppress a scowl.

Heading for a cart going back to the tunnel, he heard someone call out, “You.” He knew without looking that it was one of the human-controlling Yeerk officers. In his frustration he had stormed incautiously right past one.

“Yes, sir,” he stopped and masked his wariness with a show of contrition.

The imperial squared on him. His host body was tall but unimpressive, made far more intimidating by the uniform than by his own presence. He glowered, businesslike and contemptuous.

“Wig off,” the imperial gestured.

Merlin froze. An OIP check? The Yeerks never enforced their exposed port policies.

“Wig?” he delayed.

“Let me see your occipital port,” the imperial stepped forward. He tapped the tip of his dracon prod against his own.

Of course Merlin’s Ductee skull was intact, even though that of the man he’d copied it from had been fitted with a port and transparent plate. Every legal citizen of the Yeerk Empire had one, given the appropriate anatomy. The morphing technology constructed a fresh body based with each on its phenotype; it could produce some amount of muscle build, skin wear, and callous, but it couldn’t reproduce a modification like that.

Merlin raised his hands as though to lift a wig from his head, but jabbed quickly at the Imperial’s throat with the side of his hand. The blow shocked the controller long enough that he couldn’t bring the dracon prod to bear before the Ductee ran.

Cursing under his breath, Merlin darted behind a cart dragging a pallet of crates and into another landing zone. The Imperial, clutching his bruised throat and unable to shout, waved his free arm wildly and tried to pursue. Other officers only looked on in confusion, but they would understand soon enough.

Scattering packages off pallets and shoving disembarked passengers to the ground, Merlin put as many obstacles between himself and his pursuer as he could. Whenever possible, he released his hold on the Ductee morph bit by bit, allowing his baseline features to return. Finally he ducked behind the landing gear of a starliner and demorphed entirely. Moments later the Imperial, flanked by two others, rounded the ship’s leg after him. Merlin threw up his hands in feigned surprise. The officer shouted something too crude for Galard, and turned away.

Merlin took the return tram in his own baseline form. Feeling as good as naked, he kept his head down and watched sidelong for any officers riding along. Naturally he had no occipital port in this form either. He was anything but a legal citizen.

Back in the main station, he immediately noticed increased Imperial police presence. They patrolled in bright white uniforms and piloting various species, highly visible. That couldn't be about Merlin. One worker evading an OIP check in the starport wouldn't be enough to scramble police across the station. Still, they had to be in communication with the guards he'd just escaped.

From the atrium it was only a couple corridors to reach the bazaar, which would be the best place to duck below the crowd and emerge unrecognizable. Merlin's plan was to morph his Anati, a drab-colored and browbeaten species that was common to see throughout the empire. He realized, though, that his own biometrics weren't in the station's computers as those of starport staff, which meant that he couldn't bypass the civilian checkpoints surrounding the atrium. And even if the guards at the checkpoints were as lax as usual—which was unlikely with the extra police around—his uniform would give him away.

It would've been a welcome challenge if he'd at least gotten his damn hippopotamus.

He lingered in the atrium and pretended to be on a stimstick break, travelers and workers brushing past him to and from the tram lines. His eyes were on the exits and the police nearest them. The white-uniformed Imperials mostly stood in place or repeated short patrol routes, dracon prods and pistols out but not in hand, watching subjects who visibly shrank from them. Now and then they stopped someone, apparently at random, to demand a document from them, or for an OIP check.

Why this heightened security? Had Merlin missed chatter about a security breach? Or resistance activities elsewhere in the Empire? It would be disastrous for the morpher if the police were going to be enforcing the exposed port policy from now on.

He should have had an OIP installed long ago. It took extra work, but it was possible to train the nanites to store the port along with his body, just like clothes or pre-existing scars. But it had always been a point of pride not to have one…

At one of the northernmost exits, a soldier-caste Iskoort brushed the posted policeyeerk gruffly with its shoulder. Altercations between Yeerks and the innately aggressive caste of their subjugated relatives were frequent. Enough so that it was with annoyance rather than alarm that the human-hosted officer left his post to punish his assailant. Merlin took the opportunity to toss his stimstick away and hurry for the newly unguarded exit.

It took him to the southwestern quarter of the civilian district, the wide and sprawling network of corridors and open spaces where most of the station’s population lived. Including himself in his youth, with Shorquorel. He hadn't spent much time in the knotted expanse since the Arn's death. It was less well-guarded than the starport and the bazaar, but it was much more heavily patrolled. Moreso than usual now, he imagined. Still, it was sure to offer more secluded corners to morph in than the atrium. Most importantly, there was no checkpoint, only a camera whose view Merlin could easily avoid. Once past it, it was a short foot-tunnel to the civilian quarter.

Whereas the bazaar was open, planned, and carefully watched, the civilian quarter was something of a random jumble. In the nearly thousand years this asteroid had been occupied, sections had been added to it when population increased, were renovated when the resources were available, or had collapsed and been replaced, with little regard for the style of the surrounding areas. The result was a winding web of mismatched corridors with few open spaces and numerous alleys and tunnels. Merlin used to know all of those around his shelter, but that had been years ago. The street onto which he emerged from the foot-tunnel had a high ceiling slung with exposed ducts and cables, below which were two rows of unruly structures built somewhat in imitation of terrestrial city buildings. There was laundry hung from windows and flyers plastered over rough fiberglass walls, people of all species lingering in doorways or walking with downcast eyes, Errits and Ayungars talking hushedly while hanging from above. And white-uniformed Imperial police pacing watchfully up and down the narrow path inbetween it all.

Merlin kept his head down. The police really were everywhere, and to avoid their attention the civilians were keeping to the out-of-the-way spaces the morpher needed. His baseline form itched with all these eyes on it, and with no occipital port he felt especially naked. He needed a vent, a service tunnel, even a restroom, anywhere no one would notice a human enter and seemingly vanish.

At the end of the block was a junction, which took him to a similar one that was equally unhelpful. After that another junction sent him down a long and tight hallway with apartment doors on either side, just as active as the citylike blocks but with nowhere at all to hide.

"Hey," someone called after Merlin shoved through a loose knot of standers-by. He didn't know if it was directed at him, if it was a civilian he had passed or a police officer. He kept moving, struggling not to pick up his pace or look agitated.

There were several police in the next city-style block. They were gathered around an Iskoort one of them had restrained, speaking into their intercoms. Merlin halted in the middle of the street, just as an officer looked up. There was recognition in the controlled human's eyes.

Then Merlin noticed the sign on one of the buildings.

Earth Museum.

The sign was hand-painted and hung over a plain gray storefront with taped-up windows. The telescoping door was transparent, and though it was also draped with a sheet of newsprint, there was movement visible beyond it.

Overcome by interest as much as urgency, Merlin strode purposefully to the door. The cop who had noticed him broke away from the group and watched suspiciously, but by the time he made a move, Merlin was already just a patron of the small civilian business.

It was immediately clear that the museum was new: the little lobby at the front was undecorated, its walls lined with display cases that had not yet been moved fully into place. A human woman was working at a welcome desk, directing two Anati workers who were moving a heavy plinth. A digital bell rang when Merlin entered, and attracted her attention.

"Hello!" she came around the desk to greet him. She was thin and somewhat tall, beige-skinned and brown-haired. Her clasped hands had only four fingers, marking her as mostly-if-not-all Ductee. "I'm sorry for the mess, we are open."

"An Earth museum," Merlin offered his hand, struggling to look casual and not watch the door for police. "I saw the sign and I just had to check it out."

"We're the asteroid's first. Maybe the sector's. Do you have Earth ties?"

"Asteroid-born, through-and-through," he retracted his five-fingered hand after shaking. "Post-Imperial, that is. But I love to learn about the homeworld..."

"Absolutely," the woman stepped out of his way and gestured to the curtain in the frame of the inner door. "Be my guest. We don't charge for humans. I'm Arimena, by the way."

"Merlin."

He didn't know why he gave his real name, but there it was.

The collection was humble, but exciting nonetheless. In a single room only a few meters across, a number of earth artifacts had been set up on similar plinths, some in lasglass cases and others unprotected. The walls had been hung with antique posters and textiles, though judging by the wide gaps between them Merlin thought there were a lot more to unpack still. There was a vase with the temporary hand-written label, Victorian England, 18c (3rd c pre-Empire), a vial of what looked to be water with no date yet, a scrap of plant matter, real Earth grass, behind lasglass. Stacks of paper books that his hands longed to grab and riffle. Postcards showing buildings, beaches, forests, smiling humans with banners of bright text in one of the pre-invasion human languages.

"It isn't much," Arimena lamented. "But it's all authentic. Eventually we hope to have information on every item, but it's very hard to research."

She saw him intently studying an enormous bone in one display, and stepped in to lift the lasglass box away from it.

"Go ahead," she winked. "I'll call it your privilege as one of the first humans to visit."

Delighted, Merlin lifted the heavy bone off its cradle. It was about the size of his forearm. It was also a fossil: there was no DNA in it for him to acquire. Still, it was the remains of something that had walked his species's homeworld.

"We think that's a tarsus from a reptile that lived on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago," Arimena grinned widely. "Though it could also be from livestock. We really aren't sure."

"It's not from a cow," Merlin was certain. He set the fossil back in its cradle. "Where do you find these?"

"The bazaar. I stay away from it myself, but I have contacts there who let me know they think something that comes through is from Earth. Though most of what we have is a private collection."

"Oh?" For all Merlin had in his hideout, this must have come from someone who had been at it much longer than he had. Or had much farther reach.

"I convinced our donor to let me start this museum to share his collection, it took a long time, he's very private."

"I'm sure."

"Do you work in the starport?"

She gestured to his jumpsuit.

"I got this used in the bazaar," Merlin shook his head pointedly. "It will probably get me in trouble, but it's very warm."

Alimena went back to directing the workers in the lobby for a minute, leaving Merlin alone with the collection. The morpher eagerly examined each item again. Even if the collection fit in a small space, to him it was enormous. He hadn't suspected any collection like this existed, outside the personal starliners of high-ranking Yeerks who had been directly involved in the conquest. He wanted to pore over everything, to handle all of it, to absorb it.

The museum's director was talking animatedly with the Amati workers and a merchant-caste Iskoort when Merlin stepped back through the curtains, most of an hour later. Mind racing, he did not say goodbye, but wove around them for the exit. He paused briefly at the door, protected by the newsprint covering it, and selected the form of an Amati. Outside, the police had dispersed and were back on their patrol routes. None of them paid any mind to him as he made his escape.

Kordriss 57

Kordriss 57 was present to receive Kether 13 at the starport when the ISO officer arrived. He met her in his standard host, with a detail of security personnel all in clean and pressed uniforms in full ceremony. Kether stepped down from the landing shuttle with a smaller retinue of five operatives and two attendants. Aside from the cape over her Dayang host's shoulders, they wore no decorative regalia.

"Imperial Security Chief Kordriss Fifty-Seven," she greeted him flatly. Her host's bluegreen, armored features were a mask of businesslike sternness.

"Intraimperial Security Executor Kether Nineteen," Kordriss greeted her in kind but added with a small smile, "Welcome to my asteroid."

In his office, Kether dismissed most of her retinue aside from two operatives, one in a human host and one of a species Kordriss didn’t know. She and the security chief sat across his desk, a pitcher of Moiean coffee between them.

“You’ll find that my operation here is impeccable,” Kordriss opened. “I keep Imperial business orderly and efficient, and the rabble quiet.”

“Without a formal governor.”

Kordriss poured himself a mug and smiled.

“Security is governance, when it’s the right people in charge.”

Kether gave a small but approving nod to that.

“This isn’t an inspection,” she said.

“No?”

The human-hosted agent handed her a tablet, which she set on the table without operating. It’s surface caught the reflection of the tapeta in her four Dayang eyes.

“I’m here to conduct an operation,” she shrugged her cape off onto the back of her chair. “And assisting me will be your primary concern for the duration.”

Kordriss set his mug down.

“Oh?”

Kether woke the tablet up and pulled up several images, mostly of crowds in his station with some waveform analyses. Kordriss thumbed through them, but they meant nothing to him on their own.

“We believe there is one of Sadon’s Hundred on this asteroid,” Kether explained.

Kordriss suppressed a scowl.

“That’s impossible.”

The ISO officer indicated two images with long and bony fingers, thumbnails of security camera footage. In one, a slender asteroid-native human was visible in a gap in the bazaar crowd, dressed in an unremarkable jacket with a distinctive tear in the fabric behind one shoulder. He crouched so that the camera couldn't see him for a moment, and what stood up was an Amati. The other video was cropped tightly from a wide angle that captured a full quarter of the crowded market, a circle drawn around the interaction that interested Kether. An alien of some kind, just one of many in the sea of heads and shoulders, was approached from behind by a figure in a body-obscuring cloak. As soon as they came in contact, the alien's head lolled to its blurry chest, and...Kordriss couldn't quite see what happened to the cloaked assailant. It looked as though the body beneath the fabric simply vanished. Deflated, leaving the cloth to crumple and flutter out of view.

There were several other videos, as well as other kinds of evidence. Kordriss didn't bother with any of it for now. Teeth set, he looked back to Kether.

"It's no referendum on your security," the ISO officer said. "Your operation is adequate for the population and its strategic use to the Empire. Sadon's Hundred are characterized by stealth. Moreover, it's been years since any were found. There's been no reason to watch for this kind of pattern."

Her eyes, the expressive pair, were bright with excitement. Kordriss tried to match it.

"One of Sadon's Hundred on my asteroid," he mused. "That's a gift I never thought I could give back to the Empire."

"We'll make short work of finding and taking him," Kether said. "He could be the last."

"Finding him will be easy, but they don't usually allow themselves to be taken."

"Don't worry about that," Kether finally hefted her mug. "For a matter like this, I was able to requisition one of my own."

She gestured to the nonhuman operative behind her. She had her own morpher.

Kordriss raised his mug in a toast.

When he had finished granting Kether 19 access to every sector and database that required his personal biometrics to allow, Kordriss sent the ISO officer to her quarters with an attendant. Finally alone, he sank back in his chair. Adequate for the population and its strategic use, indeed.

After calling for a whiskey from a zombie servitor, he brought out his tablet and pulled up Kether's evidence. There were numerous videos and stills, thoroughly analyzed by dozens of computers and Yeerks between here and the ISO's headquarters lightyears away. Transcripts of civilian communications, in which one or more parties mentioned sightings of aliens with shifting features, unexplained blackouts, doppelgangers. The most recent was months old; Kordriss could likely ask his analysts to look for similar chatter and find it leading straight up to the present. It was happening right in front of his palps, as if he weren't even hosted. Blind and deaf.

When he was young, even before being given a practice body to infest, the Andalites' morphing technology had been the most coveted prize the Empire had not yet seized. For one, it had the potential to allow a Yeerk to infest an Andalite body by altering its incompatible brain—powerful, nearly unstoppable fighters, yes, but more importantly the symbol of resistance movements galaxy-wide. For another, the ability to harmlessly transform a host body into virtually any organism while maintaining full control...that was power that the Empire was entitled to, so everyone said.

As such, once they knew they had been beaten, the Andalites tried first to hide and then destroy the technology. They had burned their own laboratories and universities, dismantled and vaporized every escafil, the medical device with which they implanted their psychically controlled nanites, as well as the tools and components needed to make them. Even murdered any engineers capable of understanding the technology. Warriors already gifted with the morphing ability committed ritual suicide, often en masse and where the Yeerks would see. Those who refused were hunted down by bands of zealots bent on denying the Empire its due.

The loss of the technology was bitter, but oh, was it sweet to watch the Andalites, the Empire's nemeses, destroy themselves.

It was in that time, when Kordriss was a young cadet helping mop up resistance cells a few decades after the Empire’s incorporation, that word of Sadon the renegade Andalite began to spread. A diplomat with ties among scientists and warriors both, Sadon had stolen the last remaining escafil before it could be destroyed, and vanished. The possibility of the morphing technology coming into Yeerk hands was real again, and the hunt for Sadon began. Years later, it was announced that he had been found, on a remote planet far from either the Empire’s capital or the Andalites’ home. The ISO detail that found him had been unable to stop him from destroying the escafil, but there was another hope. Weary and weakened, he had not even survived long enough to be properly interrogated, but he revealed how he had spent the years leading up to his capture. Running, flying, hitching anonymously from planet to planet, he had seeded morphers wherever he went. With little order or pattern, selecting a stranger on each world and using the escafil to grant them the gift; explaining to some, leaving others to discover for themselves. When asked how many he had created, he had spat: A hundred.

Sadon had expected his “hundred” to become powerful rebels on their worlds, to push against the Empire with their coveted power. In reality he had given his enemy the greatest gift he could have: many, many morph-capable bodies to infest and turn to the Empire’s service. They were not hard to find. Sadon’s path could be traced, and the alien morphers were far from experts with their new skills.

It became clear, though, that a hundred had been a false number. Sadon had been busy: there were several thousand.

That didn’t mean several thousand invincible agents for the Empire, though. Many, if not most, got themselves killed before even being found. Others died fighting when pursued. But plenty were found and infested, some even turned themselves in willingly, overwhelmed by the pressure of staying hidden. Those that were taken vanished from any record Kordriss would ever hold a rank high enough to access. A few were paraded as symbols of victory and glory, or were used as luxury hosts for the Empire’s innermost circles— the rest became infiltrators, assassins, the most secret of secret commandos. Kordriss had never encountered one before today.

Not that he was aware of.

A shot or two in on his bottle, he brought his feeding tank out of its cabinet. With it on his desk he faced away from it and fit the back of his—his host's—neck into its brace, lining the occipital port up with the tank's entry canal.

He hated leaving a host body. Shifting focus from the host's nervous system to that of the organism that had been given the name Kordriss, the rapid withdrawal of the powerful senses, the muscle memory and autonomic processes that filled his being with color and wonder. The moments spent in the distended, nearly fluid state before he collected the matter of his slug-body to exit the skull. The Yeerk body was hideous, it was unclean and shameful. That was what young Imperial nymphs learned in their early education. Seizing a host was necessary, was the only way to endure that filthy, holy existence.

His last sensation from the host body was of it going limp. The body was fully lobotomized, of course. He longed for the challenge of a resistant host, the mind's endless chatter and delicious distress, but that was the price of rising to this rank; there could be no risk of disruption or rebellion. That didn't stop him from infesting a pleasure host from time to time, though.

He was his original self again, a few inches of brainless muscle and slime, suffocating in the canal. He flexed his underside to carry himself down—there was an uncomfortable immediacy to the perceptions and movements of the Yeerk body, without the microsecond delay of the host brain interface—until he found himself in the warm pool.

Feeding was like being home, aboard the spawnship where he had been born. In his early days he had swum freely, nourished by the sludge and unaware of the universe's sights and sounds and smells, to which he had no access. Only the slug-body's proprioception and the unique electromagnetic sense that now seemed strange to him.

He didn't swim now. He dropped to the floor of the tank, letting his skin absorb the liquefied remains of other Yeerks. He had never felt Kandrona, the sun of his homeworld on whose radiation his ancestors had fed. It was a testament to the ingenuity and endurance of the conquerors, who had taken much of the galaxy before even learning that Yeerk matter could replace the rays of their portable artificial suns.

He wondered if someday he would absorb some particle of the remains of Ekessar 6071. Unlikely. The sludge farms had a vast Empire to fuel.

The floor of his feeding tank was a hostless interface, which allowed him to access his computers when out of his host. It was similar to controlling a brain—the technology was one of few sanctioned offshoots from the illicit artificial brain programs of the late conquest days—he linked with the computer as he would with neural tissue, and received information from it just the same.

He looked up the others who had been found of Sadon's Hundred. Starting with the one whom Kether had brought.

Merlin

Merlin tried to stay in hiding after the disastrous outing, but he simply couldn't stop thinking about the Earth museum. He put in some hours on the treadmill, pushed his high score up a little on his pinball table, tried to sleep—he was too antsy to stay in hiding. The hippopotamus was all but forgotten.

He saw nothing in any public network explaining the increased police presence, nor in the official communications he was able to get. No Imperial pronouncements, no alarming galactic news. Nothing any nearer to this backwater than usual, at least. There were always starport arrivals that were marked as confidential, and none of those looked more suspicious to him than any others.

Maybe that was just how it was going to be from now on.

Either way, he was prepared for it when he went out next. He planned a route to the museum that maximized his time in morphed in vents and ducts and that wouldn’t put him in front of too many bored policeyeerks who might ask to see his OIP. He went with an armload of gifts.

"I think you could use these better than me," he smiled when Alimena raised an eyebrow at the box he held.

He set it on one of the empty glass cases and began to produce his treasures.

A plastic bag containing fragments of smooth ceramics. He had taken the intact vase from a wealthy Yeerk's private quarters in the guise of a Gedd porter and promptly dropped it on the way to his hideout.

"Late second-century-pre-Empire Europe," he introduced it.

A handful of musket shot, cracked with age. All he'd gotten out of a crate of Earth miscellany that had passed through the starport a few years ago on its way to an Imperial historical cataloguer.

"Fifth century pre-Empire North America."

The skull of an Earth carnivoran. Dug, in the form of an Ardessian raccoon, from the refuse of a starliner's kitchen that had served exotic and rare meat to elite passengers.

"Something called a 'badger'."

A thumb-sized device that had probably been used for storage on some ancient Earth computer. A stone that had been carved for use as a tool. A scrap of cardboard that seemed to be a piece of commercial packaging, only a little legible text remaining: ...a wizard, a true star.

And his favorite, which he presented with a small flourish.

"A rock," the Ductee noted.

"This," Merlin drew his hands away from it reverently. "Is a piece of Earth's moon."

Alimena had been appreciative, but now she was wide-eyed.

"You're going to have to tell me where you got all this," she said.

Across the small square in the block that housed the Earth museum was a humble restaurant, nothing like the busy and lavish ones that circled the bazaar, but nice enough and not currently being watched by anyone in a white uniform.

"I've just been at it for a while," Merlin gave his most vague, if true, answer. And the lie: "I find things in the bazaar, mostly."

"It's very impressive," Alimena turned the bag of broken pottery over in her hands, the only piece they had brought with them to the restaurant. "And you're giving it all to us?"

"I held a little back." The pieces that could easily be traced to a theft, anyway.

"That's very generous."

The staff bot, little more than a waist-high tube on wheels with a platter clipped to its top, rolled by with their food. A huge plate of spaghetti for Merlin, and a small nutrient loaf for Alimena. The morpher dug in.

"I like to think I'm something of an Earth museum myself," he said idly, a little too loudly. He was unused to real conversation. "Um, afficionado, I mean."

"You're much closer to it than I am," Alimena's eyes were distant though she smiled. She didn't touch her loaf. "Every human in the galaxy carries some amount of the Earth with them. It's just been a few generations since the Yeerks took you off the planet; some of your cells still contain Earth carbon, Earth nitrogen. Except here, us."

"Ductees are still human," Merlin assured her.

"Oh, we're human, but we're not Earthers. There hasn't been an Earth atom in us in five hundred years."

Ductees and Empire humans had been interbreeding since the asteroid had been brought under Yeerk control. Though any homeworld grounding that brought about wouldn't last long either; after a generation or two of hybrids, they'd be pure star-stuff, too.

Shorquorel had insisted that Merlin must not lament such things. Merlin did a lot of things Shorquorel had warned him not to do.

By the time he finished his meal, Alimena had only taken the first small bite of her nutrient loaf. The spongy, yellow block was what food dispensaries spat out for street children; effective and palatable, but Merlin avoided them when anything else was available. He certainly couldn't imagine being satisfied with one, like a Ductee could.

"I haven't known many Ductees," he said.

"And you say you're asteroid born and bred?" She teased. "No, we keep to ourselves. Most of us don't even think we should want to have any ties with Earthers. And most don't like the word 'Ductee', you know."

"Oh."

"I do. I think it gets across the rootless feeling. A lot of us say, 'We've been on this asteroid for eight hundred years, these are our roots now.' Eight hundred years isn't roots. Eight hundred years is barely back to the trunk of the tree."

"I've heard people say maybe the Venkar brought another species here too and you interbred at the start," Merlin put in. "No one believes that though. But it'd explain..." he raised his hand, little finger out.

Alimena put her hands under the table reflexively, eyes suddenly tense. When she saw Merlin's shock at the thought he'd offended her, though, she drew them back out.

"Sorry," she said. It's nothing.

She reached across the small table to touch his hand in conciliation. Her slender fingers rested on the backs of his for just a moment.

He could have acquired her. It was always wise to take in more disguises.

But he didn't.

"Well," she sat back. "Let's talk provenance."

Interlude

Shorquorel was already aged when he came to the asteroid, fleeing Imperial pursuit. Hopping planets, hiding in dark corners, stealing the forms of other travelers. He had been running for years, and had never intended to stay here until he discovered one of Sadon’s Hundred, young and vulnerable and in need of protection.

That is why the secrecy, the endless hiding and caution: for the first years, there are frequently controllers aboard the station in search of him. While this decreases over time, the Arn is never confident of his safety.

Merlin only has a few years with Shorquorel, but to him it is a lifetime.

As he approaches his fifteenth year, as humans track their ages, Merlin is dissatisfied and lonely. He and Shorquorel still live in isolation, stealing to survive and practicing with the morphing gift for hours every day. As Merlin grows older, the Arn tries to expand his training to education and ideology. The boy develops romantic ideas about the uses of his power, imagines setting out to fight oppression across the galaxy: Shorquorel quashes this notion. Warriorship and chivalry are illusions of the scions of dominant powers, he insists. Look at the Andalites.

Which they often do.  There are Andalites living on this asteroid, and Shorquorel takes Merlin on occasion to spy on them, to acquire them, to observe.  Merlin sees only stoic discipline in them.  What the Arn is trying to teach him, he is unsure.

After taking a few scoldings for trying to meet other adolescent castoffs—joining games in shapes stolen from passengers in the starport; hanging around eateries and school chambers—he grows sullen. He understands, but he chafes.

He never becomes angry at the alien who controls his life, however. In fact, he realizes that there is a possibility he hadn’t considered: the Arn is his guardian, but is also his friend.

Shorquorel is bewildered at first, when his young charge tries to engage with him on matters other than survival and learning. He is harsh at first, but softens quickly, and soon their evenings after their practice sessions are filled with casual talk.

Merlin cannot tease many details out about his mentor’s history. On their homeworld, the Arns lived in cavern cities carved into the walls of a planet-circling equatorial chasm. Their machines were simple though the less isolationist communities imported electronics from other worlds. In Shorquorel’s more bohemian home they used their DNA-altering venom for artistic purposes: they designed pets and utility animals for offworlders, decorated themselves with luminescent skin patterns and elaborate new wings and fashionable facial wrinkles. Before the Yeerk incursion—well over a century ago—Shorquorel had been a musician, had lived nearly a full human lifespan traveling and composing and performing, perfecting a craft he had now not touched for just as long and could scarcely remember.

The alien edges away from any events in his past, particularly surrounding how he came to possess the morphing gift, but the boy learns to infer. For instance: he hears the wistful tone with which the Arn speaks of his species’s homeworld, the tension in his voice when mentions the long and hopeless war to drive the conquerors away. And he will not talk or the Andalite warriors who aided the Arn and Hork-Bajir resistance. Especially a particular one, to whom conversation almost turns now and then, always shuttered by a sudden stop, a long silence, and a harsh change of subject.

Merlin thinks he understands the story. He imagines a scene:

His dour old mentor young (after a fashion) and full of fire, drawn to one of the offworld warriors helping to defend his planet. They have planned and fought side by side, then they have sung together and dreamt together of a life after the Yeerks have been repelled. Then the tide turned, and now the Yeerks’ shock troops are at the gate, flooding and overpowering the resistance cell. There is fire, there is gas, there is blood. The Andalite brings a device to the Arn, presses it into his hands, whispers instructions into his ear, before they are parted. Young Shorquorel escapes and destroys the device, but the Andalite never appears at their rendezvous.

What Merlin imagines may be completely wrong, but it is what he holds to be the defining pivot in his guardian’s life, from then until they, too, are parted, and beyond.

He had always held the Yeerks in disdain, had nodded along with Shorquorel’s litany of their evils, but he had never hated them, truly and personally hated them, until he derived that scene from the Arn’s dodges and silences.

Merlin

Merlin had expected to regret giving up his treasures, but he found himself rather more eager to replace them. Possible Earth artifacts became the focus of his hunting in the bazaar and starport. One for me, one for her.

He used his new Raasthian morph frequently in the bazaar. The axeblade-faced alien became a regular at a few offworld oddity shops and other eclectic vendors. He spent some time developing them as a character: they were a little shy but effusive, passionate about their new career finding unique items to sell on to interstellar venders. They gesticulated a lot, preferred to point rather than name an object. Humbly fashionable; wore baggy clothes that hid their athletic body and a headscarf that suggested an OIP underneath it. He had to trim their quills every time he morphed to preserve the illusion.

When asked, Jin-en-on the Raasthian said they lived in the part of the civilian quarter colloquially named Bloatsburg, a tangle of housing and storage that was notoriously impossible to keep records on. That was the site of Merlin’s first solo hideout after Shorquorel’s death, so he could give convincing answers about it if needed.

Good finds in the bazaar were scarce but not impossible. He found a jug that looked terrestrial in origin, some machine parts with the label HUMANS WORLD plastered boldly on them. A decoration that made of fragments of what he recognized as pre-invasion Earth electronic circuits, strung together with twine. The jug he thought Alimena would like; the others came back to his hideout. He paid with coins he had stolen from the same vendors as a mouse the night before.

The starport was still his main resource. He spent hours every day scrolling through the manifests of incoming ships and planning his approach—taking the new increased security into account now. He allayed most of his worry by grudgingly adding the precaution of finding a hiding place once he was in the starport and morphing to one of the ubiquitous mice, sparrows, or kafit birds that made their lives in the periphery of the open space, rather than his usual quicker and more exciting direct infiltration. He could store his uniform in zerospace and take a new sentient form once inside a ship. If he could carry his quarry in animal form then he could make a run entirely undetected; if not, well, he had eliminated half the danger.

He saw an ancient portable television among the stores of an antique dealer refuelling en route to Galkad; not something that would ever function again, but certainly a pleasing artifact. The personal luggage of a low-ranking Yeerk contained part of a disc-shaped calendar Merlin recognized as originating from somewhere on the Earth continent of South America. And the personal library of a wealthy non-Yeerk contained a book listed as being Ashinurian in origin, but Merlin was certain the name Murasaki came from somewhere on Earth. Anything he found in the starport he stored in his hideout for now, and falsified the port records as he always did. He didn't want it to be clear that items from Earth disappeared frequently from ships docking on this asteroid, let alone if the same items consistently appeared in the museum soon after.

He also managed—successfully, this time—to acquire the DNA of an Earth animal called a capybara, that was being shipped to a buyer in Cenirus. He tried it out in his hideout later. It was nice.

The Empire was a big place and Earth was small, but the Yeerks took a lot with them when they abandoned it. Merlin hadn't expected pickings to be so rich.

Though his contributions were paltry compared to the private collection on which the museum was founded, Merlin still took pride in having a role in expanding it in its early days. He helped set up the lobby and populate its cases, and rearranged the main gallery—with the help of some extra muscles he summoned briefly from a Hork-Bajir morph, hidden by his clothes.

They leaned against either side of a display case one day, tired from rearranging it, and Merlin gave an exaggerated account of the haggling he'd done to get some of the bazaar items.

"An Iskoort tried to sell me a Rhanovan wall clock," Alimena countered. "Insisting that it was an ancient Polynesian calculator."

"At least they knew some place names, and not just 'Humans World.'"

"I don't know, I might have been more inclined to believe that."

"It would be a simpler lie."

They were quiet a minute, looking over the gallery space. The Earth museum was coming together. Much faster with Merlin's help in addition to the Amati workers. Alimena, as it turned out, had no experience with museums of any kind, and was playing by ear. As far as Merlin could tell, she had a good sense for it. She had designed a walking path through the gallery, and agonized over the arrangement of artifacts. Natural history and the Earth itself were represented on the inner path, and human life on earth the outer. Behind the desk in the lobby she kept a satchel full of paper mockups that she could arrange and rearrange and contemplate.

It was starting to look much too good to be a tiny new non-profit in the civilian quarter. Almost like the upscale establishments in the restricted Imperial-only sector on the south end of the station. He couldn't say that out loud; he didn't want to imply that he frequently toured those as a sparrow or bug—but he could be inwardly proud of it.

"You know," he noted. "Now you may have to go a few weeks without cleaning, so no policeyeerks look in and think the place is too nice for civilians."

Alimena looked away, flush with pride and seemingly embarrassed of it. She started to say something, but was interrupted by a piercing alarm that sounded from outside.

Merlin recognized the syncopated, two-note arpeggio as the station-wide alert, the kind that sounded during a disaster or a security action. Normally he morphed wherever he was and got out of the way fast. He resisted the instinct this time, and looked to the Ductee.

"Security personnel are pursuing a criminal," a computerized voice announced in several dialects of Galard. "Civilians are to shelter in place and cooperate."

The morpher wondered only briefly if he was the target, but put the worry aside. He knew how asteroid security worked: the Imperials would have charged in on him without warning, and issued an alert if he fled. There was some other hapless criminal on the run, identified by the increasingly vigilant police and capable enough of escape that the Yeerks wanted leave to give chase and fire their weapons unhindered. He might have run interference if he had been in a position to. As it was, it still meant violence and stray dracon beams just outside the museum.

Alimena pursed her lips in consternation. After a moment she made a decision. She motioned for Merlin to be quiet, and waved for him to follow her to the back room. Intrigued, the morpher followed through the simple curtain divider.

Beyond was a simple staging area, a relatively wide, undecorated room with rows of cabinets and shelves shoved to its edges, clearly bought from a variety of sources and most of them pretty ragged. A pair of long desks in the middle were stacked with sheets of newsprint and plexiglas, rows of brushes and tubes of mounting glue. Merlin's badger skull sat on one, amidst the supplies to mount it for display.

It wasn't in the back room that Alimena intended to take shelter, though. Between two cabinets on the far wall there was a subtle hatch that Merlin barely noticed, which opened to a scan of the Ductee's retinas and revealed a tight, cold stairwell.

She was taking him to the Ductee tunnels.

While most of the asteroid’s native human population lived in the civilian quarter or volunteered as Yeerk hosts, like the offworlders, there was still nearly half of it that exercised its meager right to live separately. Shorquorel had vacillated between urging vigilance—keeping an eye on every avenue by which the Yeerks might discover the morphers—and keeping a respectful distance. It was only because they had little to offer the Empire that the Ductees were allowed as much freedom as they had, but that still seemed, to the Arn, like a successful resistance, which meant the Yeerks may reach in and crush it at any time. He and Merlin had kept track of many entrances to the tunnels, had often taken on insect morphs and explored them. They had talked often about the necessity of hiding down there and, if capture became inescapable, holding a Ductee morph until it became permanent.

So he knew the tunnels well, or at least their layout and where they ran beneath the station's surface levels. He had never mingled with their inhabitants, though, let alone been invited down by one.

The highest level of the tunnels was all electrical, service, and sewage, with a rail track running above it for suspended trams. Metal- and concrete-walled, pipes and ducts of all sizes running the length of every chamber. On the other side of the hatch at the bottom of the stairs was a narrow corridor, a mass of pipes and valves just an arm's length away. A maintenance bot worked at an electrical panel. A couple levels down, Merlin knew, the tunnels became very cold, walled with raw rock.

She led him through a few dozen yards of tight tunnels, into a wider and cooler concrete room, whose walls were lined with doors. Another Ductee crouched in one corner, eyes down and possibly asleep.

"First," Alimena stopped at a door and gave Merlin a serious look. "We don't bite. Second: I think it's time for you to meet our collector."

The chamber beyond the door was like a subterranean civilian quarter neighborhood, but smaller and more ramshackle. A village in itself. It was a wide space, whose original purpose wasn’t immediately clear, and which had been divided, using sheets of plywood and fiberglass into cubicles roughly like the half-buildings above. Dozens of the slim, large-eyed asteroid seminatives loitered around it, as if uncertain whether the command to shelter-in-place extended below the surface. Adults and children, some halted in their work and others vindicated in listlessness.

Ductees usually kept to their own up above, but never in such numbers. As Alimena guided Merlin through to a particular cubicle, they eyed him with suspicion or distaste. The supposed earther smiled in return, frustrated to be stuck in baseline but making the best of it.

The cubicle Alimena unlocked proved to be larger than Merlin had expected, room enough for several cots and a firepit, a nullfridge that would probably be requisitioned if the Imperials ever discovered it. Alimena exchanged a few hushed words with a pair of Ductees who were tending to the fire—they spoke in Galard, but it was a dialect mixed so thickly with the patois of Medieval Earth languages that their ancestors had brought to the asteroid, that it was barely recognizable. One of them nodded, casting a not-quite-trusting glance at Merlin, and disappeared behind a curtain that further divided the cubicle’s last few yards.

She returned pushing a wheelchair, in which sat the oldest human Merlin had ever seen. An Earther (judging by the gnarled, five-fingered hands resting atop the blanket in his lap), with ochre skin and close-cropped white hair. Shrunken and wrinkled, but with heavy-lidded eyes that were bright and canny. His smile suggested that he’d heard a lot about Merlin.

“Merlin,” Alimena folded her hands as if bracing for a conflict. “This is Rodrigo. Rodrigo was born on Earth.”

Merlin almost lost his balance where he stood. It was nearly a century since the last human had been extracted from Earth. It stood to reason that there may be a few Earthborn survivors in the Empire, but never in his life had Merlin thought he might encounter one. Let alone receive such a sly and perceptive look from one.

“I’m honored,” Merlin shook his head. “Honored.”

“Don’t be,” Rodrigo chuckled. His voice was strong and firm, but he needed a long breath from an oxygen mask after speaking. “I’m just someone who stood on dirt and hasn’t died yet. Not for lack of trying.”

The old man raised a finger to stop Alimena from saying something.

Merlin liked Rodrigo.

“Leem here doesn’t know how to take an old man’s joke,” Rodrigo’s eyes were jovial. “You’re the one who collects earth things?”

“I don’t know if I can even call it collecting, next to what you do.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. In my day, we called what I do hoarding. But I only hoard Earth junk, and there’s not enough of that to fill a house with.”

“Well I’m…overjoyed to be affiliated with your museum.”

“It’s Leem’s museum. I was happy having my junk piled up down here where no one ever saw it. Apparently you’re stuck down here for a while. Do you wanna see the rest?”

Rodrigo gestured for the Ductee who’d brought him out to take him and their guest back behind his divider. On the other side of the curtain he had his own room, not much more space than anyone else in this shantytown had. Bare concrete walls and floor, with a rug and a narrow bed, a nightstand covered with some arcane medical equipment. What of his Earth hoard he hadn’t allowed Alimena to display apparently fit in one ancient leather trunk.

Ortha, the Ductee who seemed to take care of the old Earther, brought the trunk up onto the bed and let Marco unlock it with a retinal scan. She sorted through the items in the trunk, letting Rodrigo choose which to showcase.

What he accepted was a pocket-sized notebook, as old and battered as he. His eyes became distant for a moment as he held it, before offering it to his guest.

“This is the personal journal of one of the Animorphs,” he held it reverently, but with a twinge of bitterness in his voice. “There’s a lot to learn in those pages.”

Merlin sucked in a sharp breath as he gingerly took the notebook. A personal account by one of the legendary morph-capable resistance fighters of the Yeerk invasion. Of whom there were dozens if not hundreds of late-Earth folk stories, turning their lives and their long, hopeless fight into myth and magic. Myths that had inspired Sadon to think his gift would seed meaningful resistance everywhere he left it. In many ways, a direct ancestor of his.

He gently thumbed it open, to find the pages burnt, smeared, and torn, and the little fragments remaining written, naturally, in an Earth language.

“But you won’t,” Rodrigo leaned forward with surprising spryness to snatch it away. “Because it’s been torched to shit.”

“How did you get that?” Merlin asked, only a little disappointed.

“I’ve had it a hundred and twenty years. I was in the resistance they started. I was a real stud in my youth. And my middle-age, and my old age. Before the Andalite medicine kicked in and stopped me dying when I should have.”

“Andalite medicine?”

“We had the Andies on our side, even back before the open invasion. Of course for them it was just a proxy war, they didn’t really care what happened to Earth.”

The old man fell quiet for a moment, much like Shorquorel would when talking about the same.

“Do the Yeerks know about you?” Merlin pressed, just a little. “That there’s an Earth-born resistance fighter living with the Ductees?”

“Of course they do. If you ask me, they probably think it’s funny. Look—”

Rodrigo twisted in his chair the best he could, to show Merlin the back of his head. He ran bony fingers through real hair.

“They know I’m down here. They even send controllers to check up on me now and then. If you ask me, I think they think it’s funny. I’m no threat to them, and I’m no use to them. The resistance is long gone, Earth has nothing for them anymore. They don’t even want to know the things I know.”

He sat back with a pained huff, eyes distant.

“Give us a minute, ladies,” Rodrigo addressed Alimena and Ortha. “We’ve got some hoarder business to discuss.”

The Ductees left the two Earthers alone and pulled the curtain behind them. Merlin suppressed a giddy grin, expecting Rodrigo to entrust him with the museum’s entire collection.

“Where are you from, Merlin?” the old man asked, gravely.

“Here. But obviously my roots are on Earth.”

“Everyone says that. Everyone says their roots are on Earth. Do you know what the word ‘earth’ means? It means ‘dirt.’ I guess if you want to hold it, you could call it by its formal name, Terra.”

“Terra.”

“Do you know what the word ‘terra’ means? It also means ‘dirt.’”

He held up a practiced straight face as long as he could, before breaking down into a chuckle.

"We had some good dirt on Earth," he softened. "Leem talks about you like she's finally found someone who respects the homeworld as much as she does."

"For what it's worth, I do think Earth should be held sacred."

"You've never been to Earth, boy. Your parents, your grandparents, even their parents had never been to Earth."

Merlin allowed that. It was hard even to imagine that the ancient man in front of him actually had. Having no occipital port didn't mean he had never been infested...in a way, Merlin envied any Yeerk who might have hijacked that brain and gained access to forty years of direct sensory memories of the place. As it was, he wouldn't accept that there was nothing special about it.

"But on top of everything," Rodrigo continued. "You're determined to impress her. She's shown me some of the things you've brought. I know those weren't all for sale in the bazaar."

Merlin shrugged. He didn't need to explain himself.

"I just want to make sure you know what you're getting into," Rodrigo took a long breath of oxygen, maybe as an excuse to look away.

"Stealing from the Yeerks?"

The old man's wrinkled brow set itself deeply.

"Dealing with the Ductees," he said, as if astonished that he had to clarify.

"What about them?"

"What do you know about them?"

"They're human. They were abducted from Earth to work the mines, they've evolved a little but they're still the same species. Most of them don't think Earth matters. And some of them don't like being called 'Ductees'."

"And who brought them here?"

"It was an economic federation of several species, but they haven't had control of the asteroid for hundreds of years."

"Why not?"

"They mined the asteroid out and the mines caved in, so they gave it up."

"And that's it, right?"

"That's all there is."

"That's never all there is. I've lived on this rock for fifty years, with the Ducks. They know more about their past than they let on."

Merlin folded his arms pensively. The Ductees he had interacted with could be private and standoffish, but he'd never detected a shred of secrecy.

"What about it?" he asked.

Rodrigo shrugged this time. "I don't know. I like the mystery, and it doesn't inconvenience me any. But I'm a motormouth who just tells his own stories. You have an interest in history. Which means you might ask them about theirs, which they don't like."

"What does that mean? Are they informers?"

"They think I won't notice when someone they do business with goes missing, or never gets mentioned again. Maybe they're just fickle. But even if they hate the Yeerks almost as much as the slugs deserve, the Empire is an awfully convenient wood chipper to have around if you get fed up with someone."

Merlin nodded. He kept a serious face, but, if anything, he was all the more intrigued.

"Besides," the old man rustled the curtain to call Ortha back in. "You've made the mistake of giving them your real name. Now, I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm getting a little old. And you don't know how hard it is for a native English speaker to be both wise and funny in Galard. I'm taking a nap."

That was all the goodbye Merlin got. He found himself shuffled back out into the main body of the plywood cubicle, with only dust from the crumbling journal on his hands. Alimena was waiting for him with an expectant look.

"Hoarder business," she smiled.

"A lot to think about," he summarized.

"A lot," she agreed.

Merlin spent most of an afternoon among the Ductees, the klaxon above blaring a just-audible note every few minutes to reinforce the alert. This community seemed to be one of the more amenable ones to the presence of offworlders, though few were as invested in their species's history as Alimena. Few had anything to say to him, but they didn't begrudge him his presence. They had ways of cooking and seasoning the station's tasteless nutrient slugs that made them downright palatable, and they were happy to let a guest eat three times as much as any of them.

“So,” he said to Alimena when they had some space. “‘Leem’?”

“He’s a character,” she rolled her eyes, with a smile.

“I like him. He’s spunky.”

“When he’s not being moody. He’s been through things. What did he want to talk to you about?”

“He asked if I was stealing things from the Yeerks. I told him I’d have to fight him to defend my honor.”

“You’d better not be,” feigned seriousness.

She slid him what if her grilled loaf she hadn’t eaten, and he took it eagerly.

“I was thinking, I don’t know anything about Ductees’ history,” he prodded gently.

“We don’t have a lot,” Alimena’s large eyes narrowed slightly, maybe at the question but maybe not.

“You have eight hundred years’ worth. You are unique.” He set his five-fingered hand opposite hers between them. “Something about living on this asteroid made you mutate faster. I’d think that has to be a proud heritage.”

“Eight hundred years of sitting in caves and losing fingers.”

“You have your own cuisine,” Merlin downed the remainder of her seasoned loaf. “That’s culture. I’d like to know.”

Alimena paused for a long while, eyes meeting his but her attention inward.

“It’s not something about the asteroid,” she said. She opened her mouth to say more, but a hardness fell over her face and she shut it. The topic was closed.

“You’re sure you’re safe having him down here?” Merlin returned to the earlier subject.

“He’s lived here longer than I’ve been alive. I think if the Yeerks had a problem with that, they would have done something a long time ago. I was hoping…every now and then, he’ll be in the right mood, and he’ll let anyone ask him anything about Earth, and he’ll talk all night. People naturally gravitate to it, even kids. That was what got me interested.”

“Wow, I wish I could have been there.”

“There’s no knowing when he’ll be in the mood. There’s no way I could let you know. Where do you live?”

“Bloatsburg.”

“Oh.”

That may have been a misstep. The Imperials didn’t like for civilians to move around, but given that they couldn’t keep records on Bloatsburg, that risked making her think he had license to spend more time down here.

“What kinds of things has he said about Earth?” he pivoted.

Alimena smiled.

“Well, his favorite thing to talk about—what do you know about TV?”

Kordriss 57

Despite his determination to conduct himself with the utmost professionalism for the duration of Kether 19's visit, Kordriss 57 needed something strong after the day he'd had. A finger of bourbon would do him fine.

With the help of Kether's operatives over the past weeks, she and the security team had identified some patterns in the morpher's activities. It made sense to focus their search, at least at the start, on the bazaar. The bustle, the relative anonymity, the presence of wild animals—combined with the goods available, of course—all made it a prime venue for someone to ply those skills in secret. The discovery had come quite by accident, when, while questioning sellers about suspicious patrons, one of the operatives had noticed an abundance of ratty, threadbare, and patched cloaks among the wares of a particular Chotagni hawker. The insectile alien had admitted, unashamed, that it found those on the bazaar floor often, discarded and trampled; gave them a cursory cleaning and put them back up for sale.

"It's a tactic many of the Hundred have arrived at," the morph-capable operative had explained. "They find a cheap garment that obscures their face. When they think they might attract attention by stealing something—or acquiring a form—in the open, they morph to something small within the garment, and abandon it. They don't need to find as good of cover before morphing, and witnesses assume they only didn't see someone take the cloak off while running."

Dinad, the Qochu-iratt morpher who was now Agent Evras 438's host, had been observed doing something similar before being caught and claimed for the Empire. Kordriss had seen it in the operative's file. It had been the next approach he had intended to propose.

"There's no need to worry that you didn't discover it earlier," Kether 19 had smiled at him, not a trace of venom in her voice. That made it worse.

Immediately, they had added cloaks similar to that one to the list of subjects to flag in security footage, since it was clearly a type which the morpher favored. They revealed nothing to the Chotagni, only assigned a camera bot to watch its stand. As always, they did their best not to alert the morpher. They did not want their target to change tactics. Their hope was for a complacent quarry, one that would walk into their hands unknowingly, in the course of their routine.

Kordriss had also assigned a remote drone to follow the hawker. Whenever foot traffic began to wane towards the end of the artificial day, the Chotagni scuttled out into the wide aisles in search of anything dropped that was not too damaged to sell. It was hardly the only one to do this. It had found no new cloak in the few days that since security had begun watching it, but that meant little. They had identified a path they knew the morpher would travel, now it was time to find more.

Then today, someone had bought one of the Chotagni’s cloaks.

As soon as the cameras identified the buyer, all his files had come up on Kordriss’s screen. A spaceborn human from a tenement hall in the civilian quarter, he had the body plan for the cloak, and his build was convincingly close to estimates of their target’s. However, security had numerous files on him, for infractions of all kinds. He had been questioned before, had spent time in work camps; large swathes of his life had been watched and documented.

He couldn’t be the morpher. Kordriss and Kether both knew this.

But neither said it.

Watching each other’s host’s body language—and very aware of the other doing the same—they had studied the buyer. He was clearly a criminal, a nobody who stole and sold drugs out of starport shipments, and took muscle work for organized crime. He had hundreds of charges against him that were nominally punishable by execution or lobotomy according Imperial law.

Kether didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to: Kordriss allowed petty organized crime to persist in the civilian quarter, for the same reason he allowed small resistance groups. Both kept the civilians occupied, destabilized their organizations, prevented them from building any infrastructure independent of the Empire’s. It was common practice, recommended by the officers under whom Kordriss had trained, and probably she as well. She didn’t say anything. But he could see the set to her Dayang eyes, the way she glanced at him: they said: I know you’re small time. You can’t afford to keep perfect order like you should, like the cities of the homeworld and our great orbital stations do. No one blames you.

Oh, so indulgent, was his Empire.

That was why he had ordered that the human be brought in. He didn’t know exactly why Kether had issued the same order.

The ISO officer had backed off, and allowed him to take the lead. It was his asteroid, after all. And it was a routine arrest at most. He sent a trio of police officers, two in human hosts and one in an Amati but a particularly tough one. No one had expected the human to be as fast or as violent as he was, or to have such a command of the civilian quarter’s halls and tunnels. He’d escaped and run, led the police on a chase all through the quarter, taking hostages and fleeing again when it hadn’t slowed his pursuers. In the end he had holed up in a storefront, firing a stolen dracon beam at anyone who approached.

Maybe he was the morpher. Maybe the pursuit was worth it.

Watching it on the screens in his control room, Kordriss felt every beam that was fired as if it hit his host body. In the end he had more than twenty police officers at the site of the shootout, and two lost their host bodies. A number of civilians were killed, and a stray beam punctured a suction tube and risked a vacuum blowout in another sector of the quarter.

Kether had showed no sign of amusement, nor of satisfaction when she finally stepped in and dispatched her morpher to end it. Evras 438 had slunk without a word out of the control room, looking, with their hunched body and long-jawed head, more like an animal than a sentient. The ISO officer had shared her operative's location with station security, so Kordriss could watch a beacon move with alarming swiftness first through rooms and halls, then air ducts and pipes and even spaces where the model of the station showed no opening. Twenty minutes later, the human fugitive had screamed, and the bestial morpher carried his battered corpse out through the front door.

It had been a failure, and a success, and a failure. And worse than the debacle, worse even than Kordriss's humiliation, was that Kether 19 had also ordered the human caught. That should have been a comfort, but instead it was a question, whose answers were all as humiliating as the failure.

He tilted his glass from side to side and watched the bourbon pool and tilt. It was easy to see the value of Sadon's Hundred to the Empire. He supposed he had never seen one in action before, insofar as he had seen anything today. Evras 438 had transformed their host into a Gedd, a Kungran flighted eel, a rat, and a cockroach, in turn, to gain access to the isolated back room of the suspect's storefront, all while communicating psychically with their commander. And it seemed to be a fractional display of the Andalite technology's power.

The Empire should have it.

Though at the same time...what was really the benefit to the Empire of another great power? There was no war to win. There were no more species to take, no rebellion to put down. Other galaxies were out of reach; exploratory infestation teams in cryogenic sleep en route to them wouldn't arrive for thousands of years. Of the galaxy that counted, the Yeerk Empire had total control.

He would be a good slug, and deliver the Empire this gift, this minuscule trophy to be filed away with trillions of others. And, if in return he was offered promotion to chiefdom over a larger or more central colony, he would politely decline it.

His private quarters were connected to the security network, but rather than bring up its interface, he called for his personal zombie Arn. The rotting beast loped in from the closet he kept it in.

“Sir,” it stood to attention as best it could. It was rapidly losing muscle, and its eyes were completely gone. Pulsating tissues in the backs of the enormous sockets hinted at the Yeerk struggling to control the decaying brain behind them.

“Servitor, relay this instruction: A team is to be assembled to capture, test, then tag and monitor wild animals at random. Bring someone from Non-Sentient Control to consult on their behavior.”

“Yes, sir.”

There, a second vector.

Kordriss tilted his glass again. The rim reminded him in both shape and size of those eyesockets.

“Servitor,” he said, before the zombie could leave to carry out its orders. “Exit your host, I’m going to infest it myself. I want to see how much I can make it hurt.”

Merlin

When he looked through the scant public reporting on the day’s police action, something about the few details available made Merlin uneasy. While he scowled inwardly at any assault by the Yeerks on one of their subjects, he was rather, by necessity, immured to violence, random dracon fire, news of strangers’ deaths. But something he couldn’t quite identify nagged at him about the failed arrest and ultimate killing of the human career criminal. Something that some part of Merlin recognized, but the rest of him could only grasp for. Even the few levels of classified security documents he could access didn’t explain it.

He couldn’t study it much, though. The meeting with Rodrigo buzzed in his brain, like a kafit bird thrumming against a window. He still couldn’t believe that there was someone within his reach who had actually lived on Earth. Right there, just a few dozen meters from where he had grown up, ready to talk about the lost homeworld at any moment. And most of the Ductees didn’t care! What a waste.

The question of the Ductees wouldn’t leave him alone, either. Secrets, disappearances, lies—it didn’t make sense. Had they actually sabotaged the mines and thrown off their own shackles? That didn’t follow; he had never heard anyone suggest that, and there was no reason for it to be secret. Maybe Rodrigo was only an aging prankster. Merlin would believe that. But Alimena had dodged his questions.

It's not something about the asteroid.

He spent his time in the next few days trying to learn about the Ductees from a distance. He searched through online chatter and security records. Nothing he saw cleared anything up. Just as some Ductees wanted nothing to do with Earthers, some Earthers held various prejudices against their asteroid cousins: that they must be unintelligent, or inherently violent, or couldn't be trusted, or simply that they were weird. Merlin knew all this; he'd studied how the asteroid's species responded to one another just as how they did to different animals, it was part of Shorquorel's training. Armed with Rodrigo's warning, though, the morpher looked specifically for mentions of disappearances and distrust, and he found them.

The Yeerks had taken the asteroid a few years before their first contact with Earth, and had written its inhabitants—mostly Ductees but some small pockets of other species represented in the federation that had owned the ancient mines—off as low-priority for subjugation. Only when the Empire consumed Earthborn humanity and spread with exponential speed did the primary species and its offshoot come in contact. Most records from those early days, gathered to assess the resources of each colony for the Empire's use, had been made public by now, so there was a great deal available on the early interactions between the natives and their new indentured neighbors. Before the common moniker of Ductee, they had only ever referred to themselves as humans, but the need for a new distinction arose very suddenly. The Earthers called them, at different times, "natives", "stroiders", "old-timers", or "miners"; less generously, "weirdos," "fingerbiters," "skinnies". There was never outright conflict between the groups, though. Individuals fought on occasion, but resentment of Yeerk oppression was so much deeper for both that community-wide interfighting was never a risk.

There were some early accounts, recorded by Imperial peacekeepers, of the outbursts that did occur. Audio and video were still restricted to official viewers, but Merlin got around the security easily. Recorded interrogations, drone and eyecam footage showed him a station that was very similar but much smaller and far less cosmopolitan to the one he knew, Imperial uniforms that were a little less sharply designed, civilians who were as poor as ever. In one instance, an Earther father claimed that his daughter had run off with a skinny boy and had never returned; he suspected human sacrifice. In another, a group of Ductees were being punished for attacking an Earther household that had been harrying them, demanding to know where one of their number had gone. In neither case had the Imperials conducted any meaningful investigation, having deemed the matters no threat to their infrastructure. Punitive measures were applied to both parties, of course.

Dissatisfied, Merlin considered morphing Ductee and infiltrating the tunnels himself. A few weeks ago he might have, but now he could only imagine the conversation if he had to explain himself to Alimena.

Don't form an attachment you can't quickly escape, Shorquorel had warned him, in the voice of a wise, defeated freedom fighter.

Well, it was only one.

Still, he made sure to offer himself to the museum and its founder as nothing more than an occasional donor and helper. And he tried to resist cloying for access to Rodrigo and his stories. But he didn't slow down his hunting. Jin-en-on of Raasth kept busy.

It was in Raasthian morph in the bazaar, rather than on his terminal, that he heard about the Leerans.

He was sorting through a basket of textiles—Raasthian fingers were surprisingly sensitive despite the keratinous armor and claws, Merlin couldn't help shopping by touch—hoping for some ancient silk, polyesther, or denim. The Chotagni salesbug hovered nearby, oddly vigilant of its customers, but was called aside by a human regular to discuss prices on Auran headwear. The two haggled briefly, and then fell into friendly conversation. They commiserated about intrusive Yeerk supervision, about which bazaar buskers they preferred, about tactics for selling to picky Imperials. About the difficulty of preparing travel papers for the human's cousin, relocating to the asteroid from another distant colony.

"It cost me a year's pay just to find a ship that would use zerospace for twenty percent of the distance," the regular rolled his eyes.

"They want their subjects to stay put," the Chotagni agreed.

"She's been on the ship for a year already, but she finally gets here in just a few days. It cost another half a year's pay to make them stop here at all, because there are Leerans aboard."

Merlin froze for a moment, before leaning farther into the basket to maintain his cover. Leerans never came to the asteroid. He had given up hope of ever acquiring one. Arriving in a few days…

He hurried and found something the Chotagni would believe Jin-en-on would want, and quietly paid the asking price while the seller and human continued to chat. Barely suppressing his excitement, he canceled the rest of the day’s hunting and snuck away to morph in privacy, carried his new uninteresting fabric scrap in sparrow form to the vents.

Back at his terminal, he scoured all the incoming ships that he had already looked over, with an eye for mentions of Leerans. When he identified it, it was clear how he had missed them before. The manifest listed them not by the name of their species, but only as Aliens, class T. He was sure he’d found them, though, because there was a single human aboard (civilian, uninfested), scheduled to disembark at the station. The ship wasn’t large enough to carry drop pods, so it would have to land itself. The cousin’s half-year pay was giving it a quarter of an hour to refuel.

Given a few days for Merlin to plan his approach, fifteen minutes should be plenty of time.

Kordriss 57

After another few days on the hunt, Kordriss 57’s vectors for information on the morpher had proliferated into a web that must be inescapable. The security chief worked tirelessly, collecting footage of all kinds, studying the captures of others of the Hundred, conferring with experts on the station’s every system to determine how they might show the target’s activities. He fed his host body stimulants designed for humans, and bathed in ones meant for Yeerks. He would show the ISO what his small operation could do.

He also put aside his personal prohibition on pleasure hosts. He spent his nights with them, ordered them to his office. He took no precautions: he hoped Kether 19 would see. If she did, he would tip his hat to her. Especially if he was infesting one of the hosts at the time.

Which he did, more and more often, lately. The yearning for a brain with a living mind was growing every day. He needed to hold it down, to feel it squirm and suffer. Perhaps, he thought bitterly, the presence of a superior brought it out in him.

As he was, when one of his analysts came to him today. The young human-controller was startled to see his chief indisposed—braindead—on the couch in his lobby, a naked-but-for-the-hat Ductee woman standing over him with a dracon prod and another Yeerk stranded helplessly on the coffee table. He understood quickly, but Kordriss gave him a stern look to drive it home anyway. The security chief rested the prod on the table to take the report from the analyst and read along as it was explained.

"These are the power and air circulation numbers, sir," the analyst said.

"I asked for anomalies," Kordriss agreed. The Ductee host's voice was husky, a little weak from a burn he had given her. "I assume you found something."

The analyst hesitated. There were protocols for sharing information while in an unsanctioned host.

"She won't hear, go ahead."

Untrue. The Ductee mind was dormant, well accustomed to a lifetime of infestation, but he made sure inwardly that she couldn't help but hear. It elicited a twinge of terror in her.

"Yes, sir. I've highlighted them, sir."

The anomalies the analyst had noted were quite small, would be—and had been—overlooked normally, but Kordriss recognized what he was looking at immediately. Each time the dual power grids were cycled, one sector registered a minute spike not present elsewhere. The analyst had highlighted the power levels following thes spikes, and when Kordriss tapped on them, the tablet showed him a list of dates and time ranges, all from twenty to thirty years prior, sections of the graph showing minimal noise.

"The power use report for this sector is being constructed using previous records," the analyst explained.

"It's being falsified," Kordriss smiled. "Someone is hiding there."

The sector mapped to the east end of the station, somewhere between the bazaar, the civilian quarter, and the civilian administrative offices. Backed up against the ruined mine, whose miles and miles of frigid and airless tunnels were both a no-man's-land and a perfect power drain to disguise the falsified records.

It wasn't necessarily proof of a morpher. But it was certainly something to quash.

"What about air circulation?" he flipped through the report. He found several highlighted discrepancies.

"The volume of clean air circulated doesn't match the volume passing through the ducts. There's also been an increase in traces of...animal detritus, excluding droppings, and damage to vent interiors."

Kordriss almost laughed. This was a lead. A real lead.

"Concentrate on those, around this sector," he returned the tablet to the analyst. "Find me a pattern. High priority. Using our resources; we don't need help from the ISO."

The analyst fumbled with the tablet for a moment, and froze.

"This order comes from Security Chief Kordriss Fifty-Seven," Kordriss hissed. "This host is uncompromised."

"Sir."

The analyst left him alone. Kordriss folded his arms, quietly composing his next orders. His team would scan the vents on the east side, record animal traffic, reconstruct the hidden power use. Wily as his morpher was, he would have them.

He studied his standard host on the couch. Its specially bred brain didn't encode verbal information into memories, but it was still forbidden for another Yeerk to occupy it, hence the pleasure-host's Yeerk waiting inert on the table. Which was for the better; it was handsome, and strong, and it was his. It was, after all, him.

He gave himself another small burn on the side. It would keep him alert tomorrow.

Interlude

Shorquorel has always insisted that, if their enemies find them, neither must be taken alive. The cost on Merlin's part would be a life of misery, of helpless passengership as a series of slugs used his body to commit atrocities in their Empire's name. For the Arn it would be something different.

After their first contact with the Yeerks but prior to the invasion, a decree had been issued among his people, that they would not be taken. That they would render themselves untakeable. Using their gene-altering venom, their species-sculptors developed a plan: they would introduce a trait to the Arn brain that, in the presence of a controlling parasite, would kill the Arn instantly. It was a romantic notion: we will die rather than be enslaved. The stoics and the hardliners agreed to the procedure instantly; the others acquiesced under pressure. Registries were composed, resistors were dragged from their homes to be altered. As the invaders took the Hork-Bajir in the forests above, the Arns felt themselves secure. The Yeerks wanted bodies, they thought; if they cannot have ours, they will ignore us.

They were wrong: what the Yeerks wanted was empire. The altered brain was an insult, and it was met with fire.

But it was also a challenge.

A highly skilled Yeerk, they discovered—after years of experimentation, about which Shorquorel would not speak—could seize control of the Arn brain swiftly, and prevent death. To an extent. The Arn's higher cortices still perished, and most of their autonomic functions. The mindless half-corpse remained a puppet to be piloted by the slug until it decayed too thoroughly to be of use.

The Yeerks thought this a suitable revenge.

With that discovery, the extermination of Shorquorel's kind was halted. The insult the Arns had dealt the Yeerks was now useful to the Empire: a zombie Arn body could be punishment for an insubordinate officer, or a weapon with which to spread disease among pockets of resistance. And being usable was survival under the Empire.

For a morph-capable altered Arn, it is a paradox. The future Merlin's mentor has to look forward to if caught is short, but full of tortures and indignities he cannot make himself describe to his young ward. The boy can imagine it, though. Imperial captors holding the Arn as long as possible, seeking the limits of what they can force him to use his morphing ability to do for them, and reinstating their Arn infestation research once they reach it. Or else a quick and painful death, followed by the loose remaining dregs of consciousness experiencing a few months of decaying slavery as a nightmarish hallucination before oblivion.

The inevitability hangs as a specter over them, even in the most peaceful times. For Merlin it is the way of things, but for Shorquorel, the anxiety grows worse with each year. Every time they are caught in mouse form and chased out of a kitchen, or a civilian seems to recognize one of their sentient morphs, the mentor is distraught once they reach safety. He insists on excess caution, on hiding wordlessly for hours, until they are far behind absolutely certain they have not been followed. He worries, aloud, that every misstep is the beginning of the end. To assuage his guardian’s worries, Merlin redoubles his practice, pushes himself for visibly greater control of his morphing, and as a fighter. It does help. And the human is always tired.

That is how he leads a controller back to their nest.

A foolish mistake: Merlin lingers too long in a civilian quarter eatery, raises someone’s suspicions about the urchin watching customer’s plates. Famished, he doesn’t realize he is being watched. He is using the form of another human teenager, but he has developed the nervous habit of letting his features shift, little by little, when he is idle. His brow line or his nose or his cheeks. If no one were watching, it would be unnoticeable. He is noticed.

The controller who sees him is no police officer, nor Imperial agent, only a citizen of the Empire in a human host. It has been years since Sadon was killed, and nothing about the boy’s nervous habit reminds the controller of the morphing ability, but it has his attention, and makes him uneasy. When the boy gives up and leaves, the controller follows, certain that there is something suspicious about him. It always pays for citizens to alert the authorities of wrongdoing among the mongrels.

Merlin does not even notice the controller. He demorphs when he thinks he is alone, in full view, at the entrance the stretch of alley they have claimed as their home. Behind him, Shorquorel leaps from the shadows to tackle the intruder. Though old and smaller than a human, the Arn takes the controller down, fingers and toes tearing, secondary arms wrapped around his throat. When the controller’s host is unconscious, the transparent skull plate shows the semiliquid slug wrapped around his brain. Both morphers stare in horror.

They have no choice. They bind and gag the human host, agonize over what to do. In the resistance on his homeworld, Shorquorel had been made hard: in those days, he would have applied a simple scratch across the host’s cheek with his claws, injecting gene-altering venom with no particular plan, inflicting a fast-acting sickness and forcing the Yeerk out. Without the venom sacs, killing the host would require an act of much more direct and intimate violence, and he cannot. Nor can his young charge, who has never killed.

There is a simple solution, though. Deprived of the flesh of his own kind, the Yeerk in the human’s brain would become dependent on the rays of his homeworld’s sun, and soon starve. The host may or may not survive.

The week of sitting vigil over the captive is the most unpleasant time in Merlin’s life. He has to watch the human host grow ill with hunger and dehydration, thrash against his bonds with increasing desperation.

Though the man is gagged, his eyes communicate a great deal. They say that he knows what his captors are, and while they burn with fury at the aliens’ villainy, they also sparkle with avarice, knowing what prizes would await should he turn the tide and bring them to the authorities.

At least, that is what his eyes say at first. After a few days, there is only desperation and terror, and despair.

The Yeerk doesn’t succeed in holding out to the point of starvation. After several days in captivity, the host begins to convulse, then falls limp as the slug reconstitutes itself and backs out through the human’s occipital port. It hits the fiberglass floor with a sickening plop. While the barely-conscious host shivers, the morphers stand over the Yeerk. It is so small, only the length of a hand, barely mobile on land. Its cruel-looking fins and protuberances are only soft flesh. It feels with its palps, but Kandrona starvation has already begun to contract its tissues, so it can only wriggle in place.

Shorquorel takes it in his hand. It cannot resist, though its limited tactile sense must be sophisticated enough to know what is happening. The Arn shoves it into Merlin’s hands.

Watch it, he says.

In the meantime, Shorquorel gathers up the host and takes him away. Merlin will never know what his mentor does, whether he debriefs, bribes, or disposes of the man. Instead he sits back in his alley, dying Yeerk languishing in his hands, watching his infernal enemy dry up, shake like the host had, and finally flake away into dust.

It is an image he will think of often for the rest of his life, and a feeling in his hands, as if they are coated with greasy Yeerk-corpse dust forever.

Holding one in his hands makes the prospect of infestation so much more immediate than it had ever been before. But it also muddies the waters of his hatred for the Empire. It becomes hard for him to imagine the dying slug occupying and subjugating a living brain, directing it to be cruel and to oppress and to steal. One of these, he knows, has been responsible for every horror he has heard of. One of these will one day kill his only friend, and likely worse. Yet he has only seen a Yeerk once; the only thing he has seen a Yeerk do is die.

Horribly confused, he never voices this concern to Shorquorel. He never has a chance, because this time really is the beginning of the end.

Kordriss 57

"You've been busy, Brother Kordriss," Kether 19 said once they were alone in his office.

The security chief leaned back in his chair and leveled a hard look at her. He waited for her to reveal what she knew. Everything, he suspected.

"You've shared a number of your 'vectors' with me," the ISO officer flexed her Dayang's split lower jaw, a gesture that meant nothing to the species but could be feigned boredom in a Yeerk—or, perhaps, imperious indulgence. "Yet I learn today that you're pursuing so many more."

“I wouldn’t dare withhold anything from the ISO,” Kordriss said flatly. “What makes you think I am?”

“Don’t forget that I’ve brought one of the Hundred with me. They allow me to be privy to plenty of things. Can you be sure they’re not listening now?”

Kordriss spread his hands.

“I’m merely conducting the search as befits its importance to the Empire.”

The four eyes glittered. She loved to see him chafe under her authority.

“It’s clear to me,” she made a show of measuring her words. “That you don’t want to be interfered with. So, I haven’t been interfering. The search is yours. My operatives are on standby if you want them.”

Kordriss resisted the urge to narrow his eyes at her suspiciously. Did she anticipate another debacle? Did she suspect him of sabotage? Or was she in earnest?

“That’s generous of the ISO,” he tented his fingers on the desk. “I’ll take it into consideration. As I’ve said, station security is in no way at odds or in competition with you.”

“As is appropriate.”

“You’re welcome to investigate alongside me.”

“I’m welcome to investigate wherever the ISO sends me. However, I would like to see how you operate, and if it bears fruit in this case. The result will be the same.”

“We’re close. We’ll flush our morpher out soon.”

“We’ll see.”

Kordriss said nothing to that. His superior stood as though to leave, but hovered over his desk.

“There’s also the matter of your quota.”

“I deliver on my quota.”

“You have, until you decided you needed to out-hunt me. You can’t neglect the sludge farms.”

Kordriss glowered.

“I’ll catch up,” he muttered.

“If I may suggest something, to free some hours for your broader duties,” Kether said. “You’re taking a very concrete approach. Forensics is useful, but there’s an element you’re forgetting.”

“Indulge me, sister.”

“You’re tracking our morpher, but there is virtue in anticipating, as well. We don’t know what this person likes, what they do, how they live. But we know something they need, and probably something they crave. They will be looking for species.”

A small quirk forced its way unbidden to Kordriss’s lip.

“I’ll keep you apprised of developments,” he said flatly. “Sister.”

It was a tease. That was her team’s approach, and she was giving him a chance to catch up.

Kordriss navigated on his tablet to a list of sentient species present on the asteroid. He sorted it by rarity.

The Starport

The Leerans’ ship was due to touch down at noon. It would be on the surface for precisely fifteen minutes before lifting back off. Its passenger bay would be open for nine of those, to let off the cousin. Merlin had to be in place well before the hatches opened. He had his approach planned, and he had the right morph.

Fly, this time. An Earth insect that had proliferated in every corner of the galaxy with the Yeerks’ conquest. Compact, ubiquitous, and superbly mobile. It required storing almost all of his body mass in zerospace, which made it slow to morph in and out of, but he planned ahead for that, too.

He got his start early in the morning. A long run, followed by a cold shower and a strong coffee. A few easy test morphs to keep himself loose. In a dock worker's uniform, he went moth at seven in the morning and took to the vents.

A light blinked in the security control room display, indicating that an animal was in the vents.

As Kordriss had expected, the sensors his team had installed in the ventilation system were unreliable; something interfered with them, no matter how they were configured. They missed things, the reported locations were never accurate. That was a problem a colony nearer the Empire's center would not have had. Kether 19 certainly took pleasure in offering to request newer equipment from her office. However, this alert came right on time. Whether or not the morpher was in the particular vent that blinked on his schematic, they were no doubt on the move.

"High alert, sir?" control operator asked.

"No. Don't scare them. We know exactly where they'll be in five hours"

Kether 19, quietly observing as he worked, gave him a smile. He returned it, politely.

Since the increase in security, Merlin had found that the tunnel to the starport was much safer to take at ground level than airborne, though it cost him time. Mice got into the tunnels, but they mostly froze with fright until they had the chance to escape the way they came. However, the edges of the outgoing tunnel were home to many tiny creatures, including a colony of Actuan myriamanders that spanned its length. An eighth of an inch wide, Merlin could scurry on twelve amphibian legs, well away from the tram's wheels and without arousing suspicion. The rumbling frightened the animal's brain, and its eyes were only good for a few body lengths, but he'd made the run enough times to time it and count the seconds.

There was a stack of crates near the opening, which would give him space to demorph far enough to shift to another form. As soon as the wall fell away and the scent of the colony ceased to comfort the myriamander's brain, he headed for the crates. Incomprehensibly huge shapes moved around and above him, that he could only with effort decode as human workboots and alien feet, but he only had to give the animal brain the hint of a destination for it to skilfully avoid them as they thundered to the ground, throwing up dust and detritus where they went.

One rubber mountain crashed down and stopped in front of him. The myriamander navigated around it, but it didn't lift off like usual. Shadows and intense vibrations rolled around him, and another giant shape followed. Merlin recognized it as a hand, reaching down to try and close on his body. The meaty tips of human fingers pressed against the ground on either side of him, pinched his sides, but couldn't come close enough to keep him from slipping through. The amphibian's heart raced, as it did following any de rigeur threat, but eased after a few more seconds of freedom. Merlin was more concerned. He'd had to dodge a few idle hands in recent weeks, far more than usual. The hand made no second attempt, though. To be safe, Merlin huddled in the darkness between the mountainous crates for several minutes before he risked demorphing.

"Order a halt on animal tests," Kordriss waved the alert away. There were several dozen animals snatched and tested every day, and many failed attempts, and he received notice of all of them. He should have paused them for today anyway.

He stole a glance at Kether, whose eyes were on the display. She couldn't blame him for being thorough. Shouldn't.

It was possible, with great concentration, to morph directly from one form to another, but Merlin saved his energy. He withdrew a fraction of his baseline form from zerospace, body mass pumped into the analogous parts of the myriamander, as the nanites dissolved and reformed its bones and tissues to stand up against the new weight. From there, he redirected their process to forming the fly. A minute later, he was even smaller than he had started, in a body pleasingly little related to his baseline, and he lifted himself into the air.

The Leerans' ship was scheduled for a landing zone not too far from the entrance. A long flight for a fly, but a fraction of what it could have been. He let the fly's ganglia determine a loose, meandering route that would look convincingly dipterid to onlookers. Found a floor grate in the neighboring landing zone and crawled to its underside, and waited.

He had about an hour to spare.

"Post-orbital handshake accepted," the starport's traffic controller said. "We are entering you into the queue. You'll be fourteenth in line."

The control room was patched into communications between the tower and the ship carrying the Leerans. It was mostly jargon that was meaningless to Kordriss, but it functioned as a useful countdown for the squad waiting to storm the ship. Sixteen security officers—with combat experience—waited, undercover in starport uniforms, where they wouldn't disturb the normal crew. More waited at every exit, and all ventilation, drainage, electrical, and other openings would be sealed once the ship landed.

He had learned much about the limits of the Andalite morphing technology since this hunt had begun, both from his own research and from interviews with Evras 438 about their host body. They could take any DNA-defined shape, no matter how small, but they couldn't hold it forever

He would lock the starport down if he had to, traffic be damned.

The ship's pilot responded.

"Stabilization good, debris field clear, holding orbital lane Three Three One Zero point One Six."

"Copy that. All vessels up to your position are on schedule."

Telling time in animal form was a skill Shorquorel had drilled Merlin on relentlessly. Used as he was to standard measurements when his nominally human brain was fully incorporated in positive space, it was very different when semi-remotely piloting an inexperienced animal brain freshly constructed out of some fraction of his own tissues. A natural fly would never know seconds and minutes, but after years of practice, Merlin had instilled a count in his morphed mind. Not an exact time, but close enough that he knew when to leave the grate and find a spot amidst the loading equipment from which his insect eyes would show him the ship's approach.

To be safe, he introduced a little bit of dragonfly into this form, just enough that the panoramic expanse of light and shadow around him gained some color and detail. Not long after, the sentients around him began to scramble, and a shape appeared in the darkness far above.

A smooth, brass cylinder fifteen stories high—a common commercial model—the vessel lowered itself to the ground, like a pipe set carefully on a table. A blast of cold threatened to drag the fly off its perch, as the ship's outer walls absorbed heat from the climate-controlled air, balanced by the surge of air it displaced as it landed. The crew that jumped to open the hidden panels around the cylinder and refuel it was unusually large, presumably because they had to do it much faster than usual.

Merlin lifted off. He swung wide of the crew and aimed for the dark slit that opened twelve feet above the floor, the start of the gangway. Once inside he crawled through the seal and locking mechanism as they disengaged. A single human waited in the dark airlock, nervously clutching a tattered scarf and a small bag. Merlin buzzed on past in search of the utility closet he’d chosen for his next morph.

“Several organisms have entered,” the operator reported. “Within the average.”

Kordriss had requested that Evras 438 be held back for this operation. Kether had made no promises, but assured him that her team wouldn’t steal the arrest from his. Of the insects and airborn worms shown on the screen to have entered the ship and quickly been lost, he suspected Evras to be the Earth fly.

“Move in,” he ordered the undercover squad. “Slowly. Give him time to find the Leerans.”

His squad broke away from the maintenance crew and brushed past the human who was disembarking. It wasn’t possible—it shouldn’t be possible—for the morpher to have taken that human’s form and replaced her, but Kordriss privately requested that she be prevented from leaving the starport just yet. Evras could attest that any of the Hundred still active and free were by necessity skilled at breaking their own limits.

“Thirteen minutes and forty seconds,” the operator informed the squad.

Kordriss could order the ship grounded as long as he wanted, of course, but it was useful to have insight into the morpher’s timeline.

Prods and guns at the ready, the security team moved to take positions at the exits to the passenger bay and close in. Kordriss kept watch from each of their body cameras, as well as from sensors of all kinds within the ship. Its regular crew had been ordered to stay at their posts until the ship returned to space. He watched the cluster of Leerans within their cabin, shivering like their species always did when they visited his asteroid. The countdown reached nine minutes.

"Sir," an operator called Kordriss's attention to a new mark on the ships schematic, an unaccounted-for light moving through the corridors around the Leerans' cabin.

Kordriss grinned.

The cabin door opened for Merlin's stolen starport badge, revealing the Leerans huddled inside. He couldn't help but smile a little, in awe of them. In all his years, he had never seen one in person, and they didn't disappoint in their strangeness. Below a big-eyed, flabby amphibian head, they had a radial body plan, fronds and lappets dangling and obscuring a bulbous trunk, and supported by long, folded legs that were capable of but poorly suited to walking on land. The nine of them aboard the passenger ship were all of the yellow-and-black phase that left their homeworld most often. They ignored the cabin's standard biped furniture to gather in the middle of the room, leaning against each other like Earth birds in winter, eyes shut and concentration written in the set of their froglike jaws.

Whatever affect this star system had on them, it kept them away. It seemed awful, but they would be back on their way in just a few minutes.

None of the Leerans reacted to the appearance of a starport crewman in their cabin. Merlin had prepared excuses if he had needed to explain himself, but he dropped them. He had been in the form of another human, but as he approached the huddle he released the morph and came back to baseline. The hand he set on the shoulder-joint of a Leeran's radial leg was his own.

The Leeran he acquired relaxed for the length of the trance, tension draining from their eyelids and jaw. A similar but lesser effect passed through the others, through their psychic bond. As soon as the morphing nanites had captured the DNA, however, the strain returned.

Then there was movement behind Merlin.

He put on a practiced benign smile and raised his clipboard before turning, unsettled at being caught in baseline but ready with his cover. The orange coveralls he saw reassured him somewhat that it was only another member of the ground crew—until the dracon prod swung for his face.

Merlin deflected the prod with the clipboard, which was scorched almost in half by the dracon discharge on impact. He ducked and drove a shoulder into the assailant's gut, driving him back into the corridor, where two more crewmates waited with rays trained on him.

He had a brief moment to be shocked, to wonder how he'd let himself be caught, and to be furious at himself for it, before he gritted his teeth and focused. Using the first assailant as a shield, he pulled back away from the two with guns. He twisted the man's wrist behind his back until the dracon prod dropped, kicked it away, and shoved him at the other two to make his escape down the hall. A beam almost grazed his shoulder. It must have been set to stun, or it would have left him with a burn even from a few inches away.

There were more around the corner. And though they were dressed in the same coveralls as his, he could tell they were no dock workers.

This was more than the starport would send to stop a suspected thief. Someone knew what Merlin was.

He raised his hands as the seven human-controllers pincered on him, their guns and prods ready. Before they reached him, though, he dropped to the floor. The Antarean harvest skink was an easy and fast morph: small, but almost exactly his same mass. Merlin was fully morphed before the security team could understand what was happening, a flurry of stubby, clawed legs and a huge mouth full of gnashing teeth, scrabbling under and around their boots. They were alert enough to swipe at him with their prods, but his thick hide was barely effected. Past them, he withdrew his human shape extremities first, as Shorquorel had taught him, not disrupting his clambering gait.

There were more around the next corner. Merlin had been preparing to morph sparrow, but an Amati among them carried a net. He could probably get around that, but the risk of being taken down and trapped in one swipe was too great. Instead, he unlocked a passenger cabin as he passed it and rolled inside. It was sheer luck that the ship hadn’t been locked down yet; he wouldn’t be getting through any more doors.

A pair of elderly Morlens watched in confusion, as the crewman who had just barged into their cabin slammed the emergency lock on the door’s panel and searched frantically for an air vent or electrical socket. Failing that, he grabbed a blanket. When his pursuers got the emergency lock overridden, they were in time to see their human prey lift the sheet up over himself, and disappear from behind it. They fired and beat at the fluttering wrinkles in the fabric, and missed the rapidly shrinking mouse that slipped out past them.

Charging away at the mouse’s astonishing speed, Merlin just avoided the Amati’s net slamming over him. The hum of its tensor beam field made his ears burn. The Yeerks chased after him—joined by yet more—but despite their well-organized pursuit, they could only watch the tiny Earth animal shrink further and vanish.

The fluid-filled body of the chameleonfly was more vulnerable than Merlin preferred, but at a sixteenth of an inch long and completely transparent, it was virtually invisible. He spun his feathery wings to lift off, keeping away from the dark metal walls that might catch his minute shadow, and drifted up to the ceiling over the Yeerks, who continued to search and curse.

Any satisfaction he might have felt at evading them was short lived. This was exactly the nightmare he had been holding off for decades. He should have seen the signs—the police activity, the animal catching. Were the Leerans bait the entire time? How much did security know?

<Merlin,> a voice boomed suddenly. The vibrations in his environment rattled his tiny body as he drifted through the corridors, but they would have been unrecognizable as words if the message weren’t being broadcast in thoughtspeak as well. <This is Security Chief Kordriss Fifty-Seven. I know you’re there, Merlin. You have something that belongs to the Yeerk Empire.>

Fury bubbled in the morpher. At the speaker, at the controllers below him, at himself. Nevermind that he despised thoughtspeak.

<I can outwait you, Merlin. I know you won’t risk becoming stuck in whatever insect or worm shape you’ve taken.>

When he found a place where the controllers wouldn’t see him, Merlin clung to the wall and exchanged the chameleonfly morph for that of a Biyari fairy roach, larger and more visible but much faster. He charged along the ceiling, until he found a seam between polymer sheets and dragged himself up into the narrow gap to hide and plan.

“You can make this easy on yourself,” Kordriss said into the microphone.

The moment a security camera had focused on the morpher, the screen had been filled with every file available on him. There wasn't much, since he had never been arrested, or even flagged for anything. Of course he hadn’t. He had the perfect cover available any time he had to stick his neck out. Though his biometrics appeared to be in the system under a number of names. He was apparently employed by just about every official business on the asteroid.

The computer was already compiling every camera sighting of him available. Kordriss doubted they would need it, but that would lead him to the morpher’s hideout, his haunts, any confederates he had. He hadn't initiated any hunt for those just yet. With luck, this would all be behind him in a matter of hours.

Complaints came in from the captain of the passenger ship, now several minutes behind schedule. Kordriss issued a reminder that a matter of the Empire overrode any civilian plans, and silenced communications from the captain. By necessity everyone in the starport heard the message, whether aurally or by thoughtspeak, so most of them understood the matter. There were several dozen ships in the starport currently, and naturally they would remain grounded until the morpher was apprehended. No one else complained, yet.

Seconds of silence stretched into several minutes. The ship was being repeatedly swept up and down by every sensor available, all biomass aboard was being analyzed. Hundreds of organisms were equally suspicious.

"Evras Four Three Eight would be able to find him," Kether 19 offered.

"I'm sure they would," Kordriss growled to himself.

"He has the entire starport to play with, you know. He could be burrowing into the concrete, or jumping from ship to ship."

Kordriss sniffed. As if he hadn't anticipated that possibility. He leaned back to the microphone to announce: "The pressurization field will be discharged in exactly two minutes. Organic personnel are to exit the starport or board a pressurized ship. One minute and fifty-five seconds."

He waved a dismissive hand over the head of an operator who seemed ready to question him and stood back to watch the screen. It wasn't an unusual measure, but the time limit was harsh. It had to be.

"This is excessive, Brother Kordriss," Kether tried to chide him, but amusement came through in her voice.

"All in service of the Empire, Sister Kether."

Klaxons blared and hundreds of starport workers scrambled, speeding in cars for exits and cramming themselves into hatches of ships before they closed. No one was caught in the instant depressurization that toppled equipment and exploded crates and luggage—perhaps for the better, though a few deaths might have helped coerce the morpher.

"Now we know he's on that ship," Kordriss explained.

"All in service of the empire," Kether agreed.

There was no way off the ship. Merlin spent an hour searching every pipe and conduit he could reach, and another, and another. He could feel the strain on the nanites, keeping nearly his entire body mass constituted in zerospace, a kind of warm vibration Shorquorel had insisted he must be imagining. He could hold on a few more hours—but he believed Kordriss 57, when the Yeerk said he could be outwaited.

And there was no demorphing. Merlin had no doubt that, no matter how remote a spot he found, he would be detected immediately. Maybe he could escape a second time, but not indefinitely. And he hadn't shunted any other clothes into zerospace with him; wherever he demorphed, he would appear either completely naked or in bright orange coveralls.

But there were the Leerans...

Exhausted and tense, he pulled away from the corner he had hidden in and made his way back to the Leerans' cabin. Some of the security personnel, their coveralls peeled to the waist to reveal the white uniforms beneath, waited in its doorway, guns and communicators ready. Merlin skirted them easily and crawled down to the floor. In fairy roach morph, the aliens towered over him, though these eyes were better than the myriamander's, so he could roughly make them out all the way to their heads. He crawled between their shifting tentacles and trembling feet, found the largest gap he could.

Demorphing after several hours was like having tensed every muscle for just as long and finally releasing them. As the nanites reformed his human limbs he drew them in under himself, grew curled on the floor. With luck, the Leerans shifting to make space for the shape beneath them looked no different from their uncomfortable fidgeting.

He allowed himself two breaths once his body was fully human, before morphing again. This time, he selected his newest morph.

Unlike human as the Leeran body was, the nanites began by liquifying his internal anatomy. He didn't exert any control over the process, but gave into the sickening and dizzying process. In a few moments, his body was radial and his appendages numerous, useless to him until the oversized Leeran brain finished forming.

Once it did, though, he couldn't breathe.

Pain overcame him, a crushing and roiling agony in his new froglike head, as though he had been suddenly plunged a mile deep into an ocean. Not physical pain, though, but an ache in a part of his mind that a human didn't have. There was something pressing against him on another plane, he was being crushed. There was...vastness.

The wordless anxieties of the other Leerans around him bombarded his newly psychic brain, clinging to one another against the pain they had been promised would be brief. Thoughts, half-images, indescribable neural patterns rolled around the edges, broadcast by the Yeerk-infested brains in the doorway, things the Leeran brain could naturally decode as easily as spoken language, but silenced by the sheer volume of the presence that pressed on his mind.

He had to demorph—he had to...

"Movement," one of Kordriss's men announced, in the cabin with the Leerans.

An operator brought that room into focus on the screen and rotated it for the clearest view of the three human-controllers raising their weapons and moving to circle the huddle of aliens. One of the Leerans, in the center of the group, had begun to buck and thrash.

"The asteroid hurts Leerans," an analyst began to explain, but Kordriss shook his head.

"There were only nine Leerans aboard," he smiled. "Count them."

The convulsing alien, of course, made ten.

"That's him," Kordriss informed the team. "Take him now."

His men lay into the false Leeran with their prods, but they didn't need to. It had already fallen, sprawled out and unconscious.

“Sister,” he turned to Kether. “I have your morpher.”

Kordriss 57

The morpher was sedated on the scene and transported to security headquarters. He couldn’t be allowed to remain in morph, but neither could he be woken until he was well contained.

As soon as Kether 19 had revealed her purpose, a special chamber had been set up in the place of an interrogation room. Its inner surfaces were coated in a nanofilament weave, shiny as glass and ultradense. A DNA molecule, the theoretical hard minimum size the morphing technology could achieve, could not fit between its fibers. Only vented through an osmotic plate that nothing solid could pass. Blindingly bright. The interrogation table and one uncomfortable seat were allowed to remain.

The Leeran was lain out on the table, held down by the station’s two Hork-Bajir hosts and attended by a human-hosted medic. Kordriss and Kether joined them, with Evras 438 in a transport tube to do the honors.

“Wake him up,” Kordriss gave the order.

The medic halted the sedative drip. The Leeran remained limp for several seconds, long enough for Kordriss to worry that they hadn’t apprehended the morpher at all, but then began to stir. He began to involuntarily release his morph, a human body expanding on the table, Leeran appendages swelling, curling and fusing. It was always a disgusting process. The demorph took about three minutes, but finally it was a human, the apparent nobody named Merlin, on the table between the Hork-Bajir and the officers.

There was nothing particularly impressive about Merlin. A somewhat fair-skinned human with short, reddish hair, comely but not handsome. Physically quite fit. A few small scars on his torso and one side of his chin. Clearly one to skulk and hide rather than to fight. He lolled, still unconscious, as the security chief examined him.

“Bring them,” Kordriss gestured to the ISO officer.

Kether joined him at the head of the table. She removed Evras 438 from the tube, cupped the anonymous slug in her Dayang hands, ready to insert him. Kordriss nudged Merlin’s head to the side.

There was no occipital port.

The morpher’s original skull was intact. Not even a scar where a port had been installed but rejected by the Andalite technilogy. None of the man’s files had indicated that—of course they hadn’t.

 “Ah,” Kether intoned, neutrally. She moved to set her underling back in the tube.

“It’s no problem,” Kordriss grit his teeth. “Use his ear. The old way.”

“The old way caused permanent damage,” Kether said.

Kordriss let go of the handful of red hair he hadn’t realized he was clutching.

“We’ll have a port installed,” he said. “Most of the Hundred had them. He was overconfident. Cocky.”

“The port has to be installed before the morphing technology is applied. Otherwise, the damage to the skull remains after morphing, but the port is destroyed and leaves a hole in the head. We will call for a subjugator.”

“It could take weeks for one to arrive. An ear can be repaired.”

“I can wait. You seem hurried to be rid of him.”

Kordriss breathed and righted his posture, bitterly.

“I’m just eager to deliver my gift to the Empire,” he didn’t disguise the venom in his voice.

The medic began to readminister the sedative, but Kordriss stopped him.

“Let him wake up,” the security chief commanded. “If he’s going to be here for weeks, I want to watch him figure it out.”

He brushed out past Kether and his personnel, and motioned for the rest to follow. The door slid shut and sealed itself tightly, leaving the captive morpher alone on the table.

Interlude

There is no warning on the day the end comes. It can’t be prepared for; all preparation is for the times you escape. The real end comes on a day when you wake like usual, when everything seems to go well, and then it happens.

Nothing leads to Shorquorel’s capture. He and his ward are not careless, nor have circumstances pushed them to take greater risks. One day, as was inevitable, they are simply caught. Someone sees one of them stealing, and it draws eyes, and eventually police. The two morphers are cornered in a civilian quarter alleyway, the voices of Yeerk police all around them.

Even when he first noticed the police trailing them, Merlin had not realized how dire the situation already was. The grim look in Shorquorel’s huge eyes, however, stills any mirth he feels. They have attracted police, and not only one. Out in public, where they cannot morph, yet have no other recourse. And just a simple infraction, that has nothing to do with their secret.

We can go flies, Merlin says.

Shorquorel shakes his head. They have shadow to hide in but no cover. The police have not found them but they are circling; in the long half-minute such a small morph would take, they could easily be seen mid-morph.

Rats, mice, Merlin insists. Come on.

The Arn says nothing, but there is pain in his eyes. The nod he gives Merlin will live at the edge of the teenager’s mind for the rest of his life, haunt his dreams. It says, Go, and directs him back farther in the alley.

Merlin only just has time to realize what his mentor and caretaker means, before the Arn pushes out from the shadows and towards the alley’s mouth. Shorquorel will draw the police’s attention long enough for Merlin to safely morph and escape.

The moment the police see him, Shorquorel will be committed to forcing them to kill him. He cannot be arrested.

The police are prowling the street, where the offended shopkeeper has pointed them to the thieves. Late in a boring day, they are eager and have the time to spare for such a petty hunt. The civilian quarter street is messy, dining tables and empty shipping crates scattered around the shops and houses, so that there are many places to hide. One officer has almost reached the alley, when the rattling and resonant alien bellow issues from it, followed shortly by the charging hexapod. The officer swings his dracon gun around, but lowers it when the young human leaps on top of the Arn from behind, bearing him to the ground, crying out wordlessly too. It’s an odd scene, and disappointing to the police; they have found their thieves, without a fight.

They have to drag Merlin off the now furious Arn, shouting and kicking. The other seems totally defused, remaining limp on the ground. The Amati who witnessed the theft identifies them, and the police load them onto a motorized cart to bring back to headquarters.

Shorquorel glowers at Merlin in silence. The human is unapologetic, but still hurt by that anger.

You know how this ends, the Arn says softly after a long silence. I’ve never hidden it from you. You know what has to happen.

Merlin is not as pliable as he used to be, much more accustomed to challenging his mentor at this age. As the policeyeerk drives the cart through the winding civilian quarter streets and halls, the two thieves shackled to its dorsal rail, the boy seethes and plots his retort.

So what if they see us? he manages finally. We can get past them; they probably won't even realize what we did.

The look Shorquorel gives him in return is full of a weariness he has never seen before. As if the Arn has aged another half a century in minutes.

I've known for all these years that the end for you was going to be in chains or by dracon. From the moment he gave you his Gift.

The despair in Shorquorel's voice hits Merlin with a percussive force, as much as do the words. The Arn has long insisted the same, but it has always come before as a warning; there is no warning, now. At most, it is an apology.

Slowly as the cart moves, Merlin has a long time to reflect on it. He tries to plan an escape, to think how he will free his mentor without giving away their secret. He cannot, though: whatever scenario he envisions, it rewrites itself as the same disaster.

He imagines: They are brought to the security offices, thrown into a dark room to be punished and questioned, on the charge of disrupting order, and the more serious charge of evading arrest. The police are offput by the thieves' standoffishness, and begin to suspect they are guilty of something more than petty theft. They have a solution for that: they bring one of their own in a transport tube, unhosted. Merlin fights and thrashes, but is saved when Shorquorel looses a noticeably unArn roar in his defense, something that requires reshaping his own throat and lungs. It startles the police, but does not intimidate them; instead, they turn their attention to the alien. They bring the Yeerk close to him, hold him down to position the tube's exit over his earhole. Shorquorel does not fight. In terror, Merlin cries out, and reveals their secret. Now they are both lost.

Normally Merlin would be youthfully assured of his ability to withstand police torment, to grit his teeth and survive long enough to formulate a plan. Now, chained to the cart and with afterimages of the police's contemptuous gazes still pressing against his mind, that assurance is gone. Because that ending is definite and guaranteed. It's the solid point from which his and his mentor's lives radiate. That death necessitates this drive, which necessitates their capture, which necessitates their being witnessed. Back to the Yeerks’ conquest of Earth in the first place, and to their first contact with it, and to the birth of humanity itself.

Merlin spends several minutes with his eyes downcast, following this trail of inevitabilities. The sound reaches him but he doesn't hear when Shorquorel shouts. By the time he recognizes the sound, the Arn has broken loose from his shackles, likely with strength borrowed from a morph, and is leaping from the cart, which halts with a violent lurch.

They are in the atrium. It is wide open and busy, but there is plenty of room for Shorquorel to bound away, pantherlike, his secondary arms spread and tattered wings trailing. Merlin can see his guardian's gait is languid, deliberately sluggish. He rattles at the cart's bars and calls after the alien, but his voice fails him when he remembers his vision of the interrogation room. The police have abandoned the cart to chase the escapee, trusting the shackles to hold the human. Shorquorel dances just beyond their reach, knocking startled travelers out of the way and shouting threats all the while.

To Merlin, it feels as though he hesitates for hours, agonizing over the sight of the police training their dracon guns at his mentor and friend, fighting with himself over how to help. He knows, though, that that isn't the matter. He knows that Shorquorel has given him a chance, again, and that to give that chance up this time is to waste the sacrifice.

While all eyes are on the alien clambering across the atrium, Merlin clenches his fists and lets out a last wordless cry, before he begins to morph. Only partially: he chooses the form of a sparrow, and his human body immediately begins to shrink. The shackles fall off him easily after only a few seconds, and he suspends the process long enough to push himself off the cart and towards the crowd that is too transfixed by the police chase to notice him.

He has time to see the dracon beam fired that downs Shorquorel, the small yellow body knocked to the ground by the explosion of flesh and gore from its back. At that, he turns his back and runs through the crowd, not caring if anyone sees him morphing. Soon he is running through knees and ankles, and after that he is flapping his wings and rising.

Kordriss 57

Kordriss kept the camera view of the morpher in his prison visible wherever he went for the next day. There was some satisfaction to be had in watching the human slowly wake, assess his surroundings, succumb to horror. The subjugator was to arrive in six days.

In his blindingly white box, Merlin paced and felt the walls. The door was invisible when sealed, but the human could assume it was opposite the chair that had been left for him. He spent a few hours alternating between pounding at it, pacing, and sitting dejectedly on the floor. Holding out hope, perhaps, that his captors had not personally seen him morph.

But he wasn’t a fool. He accepted the truth eventually, and began to employ every tool available to him. Kordriss kept watch through the distressing morphing process, as the clothes were drawn into the human’s flesh, that flesh twisted and compressed. From the camera’s view, Merlin seemed to shrink and melt, over the course of several seconds, until he was gone. As if drawn out through a hole in the universe.

A few hours later, he was back. Frustrated and despondent. He’d become something small, maybe even microscopic, and inspected as much of the cell as he could, and confirmed that there was no escape.

Later Merlin became some kind of cat, prowling and scratching at the walls. A bat that fluttered at the ceiling. An Earth badger, crouched and ready to pounce at anyone who entered.

When he gave up on that morph, that was when Kordriss chose to make an appearance.

The prisoner made no move to morph when the door opened. He was smart enough to know it wouldn’t be open long enough for him to morph into something small enough and get past both Kordriss and the Hork-Bajir beyond. He waited quietly in his seat as the security chief set down another chair for himself, sat leisurely, and looked him over.

Detainees tended to think it was some kind of victory to make the interrogator talk first. Indeed, some of Kordriss’s commanding officers had tried to impress on him that giving one the sense of a victory, however false, was dangerous. Kordriss disagreed. Someone in Merlin’s seat had nothing of value to say except what was asked of them by the person in his seat, and they should know it.

“You know where you are,” he began. “Who I am. I think you can guess what it took to get you here.”

Merlin was on the defensive, but he was also sizing his captor up. Someone like him never let a moment pass without planning for the next.

“So,” he said. From the first word Kordriss heard him speak, the Yeerk knew he couldn’t open his mouth without sounding mischievous. “What is it I have that belongs to the Empire?”

“Do you need me to answer that?”

“No. But I’ll enjoy watching you try to say something so ridiculous with a straight face.”

“Okay. You belong to the Empire. The Andalite technology in you, and your mastery of it.”

Merlin tried to stay calm, but a hint of contempt crept into his eyes.

Ah, to be looked at with contempt by a mongrel. It was like taking your first host.

“Everything in this galaxy belongs to the Empire,” Kordriss added.

“Only this one? Where’s your ambition?” Merlin sobered. “Why haven’t I been yeerked?”

“Most of Sadon’s Hundred—the ones who survive past childhood—have an OIP installed. With your skill, it would he child’s play to retain it when you morph. But if I had a port installed in you, and I put one of us in your head, and you had never morphed that port, that Yeerk wouldn’t be able to morph it, and you would come back from your next morph with your brains exploded out the back of your skull.”

“What about the ear?”

“I wouldn’t damage Imperial property.”

“Lucky me.”

“You’ve bought yourself some time by being cocky. You should congratulate yourself.”

“I congratulate myself all the time. I’m worth celebrating. So, am I waiting for an expert Yeerk to come infest me?”

“There’s a subjugator on the way.”

“Then why are you here? Do you think you can convince me to give up and help you do it yourself?”

There was some fear, finally.

“Let me give you an idea of what’s coming your way,” Kordriss crossed his legs genially. “We will have your occipital bone replaced zero-refraction polymer, and an infestation port. The subjugator will arrive and will enter your skull through it. She will have complete and total control instantly, she won’t need to probe your memories or practice using your body. You’re thinking maybe you would have a chance to change the shape of your brain and crush her, but that’s moot against a subjugator. After she’s broken your brain in, she’ll hand you off to the lucky Yeerk who’ll be selected for the privilege of using your body.

“At that point, you will be host to an elite commando in service of the Empire. Your morphing acumen will be the handle they use to use the body. And they’ll use it. They'll infiltrate resistance cells. Yours will be the face enemies of the Empire see when it comes for them. This Yeerk will take you to the ends of the galaxy, you’ll see the stars, and a thousand worlds. A much better use for your body than scrounging for leftovers on some backwater, I think you’ll agree.

“Now, when I talk about you, I’m talking about your mind. You’ll be useful, for a while. Your Yeerk will be using your skills, at first, tapping into the neural pathways you’ve developed. They’ll learn, though, and eventually you’ll become more of a…reference manual that they can refer to. And in, oh, fifty or sixty years, they’ll surpass you in every way. At that point, you’ll be removed. Cut out a few lobes, cauterize a few blood vessels, deprogram a few engrams. Your troubles will all be over. By that time, you’ll have been on a journey few in the galaxy will ever have the privilege to experience. And you’ll have been wide awake for every moment of it. So, even if you could, I don’t think you’d argue for a second.”

Merlin was trying to keep a neutral face, but he was trembling. Kordriss held his eyes for several long seconds, before standing and folding his chair back up to leave.

“We’ve had a good talk,” he said.

“Why are you telling me any of this?” Merlin demanded lowly, between his teeth.

Kordriss considered his answer, and set his chair down to lean on the table, close to the shivering prisoner.

“I could have you sedated until the subjugator comes,” he said. “But I want you to know you’re caught. Completely, fully, totally caught. And I want you to have time to know it. I want to look into your eyes and see you watching oblivion come for you.”

He left Merlin in the cell, the human trying and failing to look dignified. All this would be off his hands soon.

Merlin

No one came to interrogate Merlin after Kordriss 57. He was alone for what seemed like days.

Not that there was any night or day in this cell. Only the painful reflected light from the smooth, impenetrable surfaces, against which he had to cover his eyes with his hands, and which seemed to have no source. It was blinding even to the least visually sensitive of his morphs. All he could do was crawl under the table and pull his shirt over his eyes.

This was how it was always going to end, he figured. The destination he had been pointed towards since the moment the strange, travel-weary human in the atrium, whom years later he would learn had been the rogue Andalite in human morph, had offered him the luminous blue box to hold. Merlin had cried then. Of course he had, he had been six years old and the shock of the nanites being transferred into his body was painful. But it was fitting to know that nothing good was to come from it.

There were ways he could avoid being infested. He could hold a morph beyond his limit, make himself just another human body with no morphing capability. Assuming they didn’t know how long he could hold a morph. If he managed it, they’d probably infest him anyway, give him to a low-ranking Imperial and use him for demeaning work for a few years until he was worn out. Or walk him around, have him watch himself make enemies of every ally and friend he had on the asteroid.

At Shorquorel’s insistence he had acquired his mentor, too. He could make himself an Arn, either uninfestible or rendered braindead by infestation.

Or an animal. Leave the Yeerks a full-sized Earth cow to deal with, too big to get out the door. He could make himself a fly, doom himself to a lifespan of days if Kordriss didn’t come in and smash him. Or a worm.

In that case, he might as well swallow his tongue.

A worm’s meager light receptors might not be as tormented by these walls, at least. Did he have any morphs that had no light sense at all?

Oh.

There was that one.

The one he’d never used, hadn’t even tried after acquiring. The one he had promised Shorquorel he never would. And that would doom him for sure.

But he had to admit, he would like to see Kordriss 57’s face when the chief came in and found his morpher permanently transformed into a Yeerk.

Not that he would be able to see it.

However long he had lasted in the white box, that was when Merlin decided how it would end. Somewhere, in the psychically indexed catalog of organisms to whose genome his nanites had access, he selected the dusty, unused form of the Yeerk whom he and Shorquorel had starved. His vision dimmed mercifully, the light became bearable and then vanished, as he shrank, and shrank.

Much as Merlin reeled at the thought of being the enemy, the Yeerk form was strangely peaceful. It took in no light or sound, but neither did it expect any. The small, roughly gastropodan body wasn’t senseless, like the Imperial propaganda described it. Its tactile sense wasn’t exactly what an Earth animal had, but was present. And it was keenly proprioceptive; he was acutely aware of the state and relationship of every point of his anatomy. The fins and palps on his mantle were very sensitive. And there was the odd thrumming, which he took to be the Yeerk’s electromagnetic perception.

And the mind.

Merlin hadn’t experienced a sentient mind in such a small body, though he knew it was possible. Morphs came as newborns, with no memories or experience, no thoughts or language, only motor skills and base instinct—but there was a sense of something there. Like entering a room that was prepared to be populated but was currently empty. The sense of capacity, enormity, and openness struck him immediately. It was different from that of a human, or Arn or Amati or Raasthian, given that there was no brain, but it was there.

Ah, the joy of bodies. It made it hard to want to die.

He tested the Yeerk body, waved its fins and flexed its skirt. Its already limited mobility on land was rendered almost null by the flat surface. He could inch, slowly. The electromagnetic thrumming was stronger in one direction, and he followed it to its source, not far away. Nothing there, except a surface that gave a very slightly better grip.

Still, Merlin didn’t like that he didn’t hate the Yeerk form.

There was something odd about the ground here, though. It seemed to drag the mucus layer off him, as his body generated it.

It was a drain. Inwardly, within the human brain string out in zerospace, Merlin could have laughed. Kordriss 57 had sealed in anything solid. He hadn’t thought about the Yeerk adaptation that allowed them to take a brain in the first place.

He couldn’t have described the sensation of consciously liquefying his body, let alone osmosing through the floor plate. It was akin to relaxing his every muscle, and also to making himself vomit. The solid but permeable surface sliding through him might have helped with the latter.

The pipe he found himself in afterwards was too small to do anything in but stay liquid and follow its path, until it released him, as a sack of mucoid ooze, into a cistern of some kind. He dripped into it with a plop that he needed no ears to feel, and then he was free.

Somewhat. He was still somewhere within security’s headquarters, and the cistern was too full to safely demorph in. But it was a start. He had no way of knowing where he was, except by choosing another pipe and following it. The morph he selected for the job was one of his most exotic: the Ankojan needleloach. Long and thin and flexible, and most importantly agile.

The water began immediately to burn his gills, but he wouldn’t have them for long. He swam upstream through a series of ducts, chosen less for their direction than for their purity, until—

Bright but not blinding light, refracted through the rushing water in front of him. It expanded, and he was hurled outward, onto a wet tile floor.

Neither of the giants on either side of him seemed to notice the pencil-thin fish that sputtered out of the showerhead. The loach’s eyes were too weak in open air to make them out, beyond their towering, shadowy forms. He knew enough to avoid them, at least. With weak flips and hops he managed to reach the edge of the shower, where he pulled out the familiar myriamander, for its gripping legs. Shifting from morph to morph was becoming exhausting. He lifted himself out of the shower and swam in the eighth-inch-deep puddle outside it to dry ground, and from there he sought a shadowy corner.

When he had demorphed far enough to see more clearly, he realized where he must be. The humans in the showers, lockers, drains and sinks. It was the security barracks.

Deep in the heart of the security block.

Merlin waited near the entrance to the Earth museum’s block, sweating and twitching, until Alimena exited. Thank god they hadn’t come after her yet. When she passed the empty storefront in front of which he loitered, he hissed her name.

She slowed and looked warily in his direction, trying not to make eye contact. Merlin’s vision was blurring and he was nauseous, but he could see Alimena recoil at the white uniform, fear in her eyes, wondering why the police would approach her. He stepped forward clumsily and grabbed her arm, hoping his eyes didn’t look too hard. She didn’t resist, but drew her arms in tight to her body while he dragged her into the empty building.

“I haven’t done anything!” she insisted, as many did when the police turned on them. “I have all the licenses, I got permission…”

“No,” Merlin struggled to form any more words.

He let go of her arm—it took a conscious effort—and backed away. Closing his eyes, he turned to the side to make sure she could see the policeman’s OIP. Slowly, relying on the Yeerk body’s instinctual abilities because he had none analogous to them, he let go of the brain and pulled himself together, squeezing out through the port. The slightly abstracted human sensations available to him by way of controlling the brain slid away as his liquid form let go of its tissues.

After having that, even so meagerly, the Yeerk experience was far less peaceful than it had seemed at first. He could understand why senses beyond their innate ones had the potential to addict Yeerks. His morph had now learned what sight and sound were, and the absence of them roared in his ganglia.

But not for long. He had his own eyes and ears back soon, as his baseline form coursed back in from zerospace. In the faint light let in around the boards over the storefront’s windows, he could see his human hands, and the police corpse sprawled on the floor where it had fallen, and Alimena backed against the far wall in terror.

This was a hell of a way to tell her what he was.

“It’s me,” he stepped forward, hands raised in peace. “It’s okay. It’s just me.”

Alimena’s eyes went in turn to him, to the body on the floor, and miles away. She understood quickly, while Merlin was still trying to think what to say.

“You’re one of those,” she whispered. There was anger in her voice, as much as there was wonder and shock.

“Sadon’s Hundred,” Merlin confirmed.

“I can’t believe this. I can’t be near you. Go—and what’s that?”

She gestured at the body, which had quivered briefly but was now completely still, face down in the dirty floor. Her anger was fair; she’d just seen him emerge from the policeman’s head as a Yeerk, and then transform in a rather horrific fashion, all while the hijacked body died.

“That’s…” Merlin realized he didn’t know where to start. “Don’t worry about him, he’s just a police drone body. He only has part of a brain, there's no one in there.”

“You were in there.”

“They had me in their barracks, and they knew to look for an animal trying to escape. That was the only way out.”

“You’re going to lead them to me!”

Merlin tried to respond, but was overwhelmed with dizziness and had to sit down. The natural Yeerk brain-control was well-developed, and mostly instinctual. Some suggested that Yeerks had evolved parallel some other species, like the Yoort and their bio-engineered Isk hosts—which was now somehow completely extinct. Otherwise, there was no explanation for their ability. But it had not been so natural for Merlin, already piloting a mindless Yeerk body within the mindless human one. It had felt a bit like being very, very drunk and also very, very sick.

“You’re one of the…those ‘Hundred’,” Alimena’s voice was gentler. She didn’t run when he was incapacitated, but still hung against the wall she had backed into. “…And you turned into a Yeerk.”

“For what it’s worth, I was very bad at being one.”

The Ductee regarded him anxiously in the dim light. She had a nervous habit of scraping the surface of her thumbnails with the edges of her middle nails, very pronounced when she was deep in thought.

“All of the security,” she said. “Was that all about you?”

“It might have been,” Merlin shrugged. “I didn’t know they even knew about me.”

“Evidently they did. I knew you were too good to be true. Is everything you donated stolen? Are they going to come after me?”

“Everything I donated was honorably bargained for,” Merlin defended himself. “…Or at least, belonged to someone who’s across the galaxy by now.”

Alimena took a moment to think, hands on hips.

“And I put you in touch with Rodrigo,” she groaned.

“The Imperials don’t want him.”

“Not as a former rebel they don’t, but what about as leverage? To get you?”

Merlin clutched at his hair, exhausted. She wasn’t wrong. Knowing Rodrigo was down there, and knowing what he represented, Merlin couldn’t stand by if the Yeerks threatened the old man or the underground village.

“What should I do?” he levered himself back to his feet. “Should I never talk to anyone? I carry that exact same risk for anyone, and I have all my life. It’s like a disease. Like it or not, I infected you with it as soon as I looked at your museum. I can’t help it. Do you want to turn me in?”

She met his eyes levelly and was quiet for a long time.

“Of course not,” she said, and pressed her hand against her eyes. “And you’re right, aren’t you. You’re my ultimate artifact. My own Animorph.”

“I can fit under glass if you need me to.”

“Don’t. Don't be cute. So, why did you come tell me?”

“Because I don’t know what they know. They might know I help at the museum, so they might come looking for me.”

“Well, if you’d just run, then I wouldn’t have been able to tell them anything.”

“They’d still try. Do you want to be questioned by Yeerks? They wouldn’t just get information about me, they’d get whatever all the Ductees are hiding.”

Alimena gave him a hard look.

“I know somewhere we can hide,” Merlin offered, gravely.

Kordriss 57

Kordriss 57 worked every third two-hour shift himself, watching the camera feed of the blinding white holding cell. The subordinate for whom he took over had nothing to report; early in the previous shift, the prisoner had crawled under the table and remained there for a while, and then taken some shape that wasn’t visible from the camera’s vantage point. No movement during the ensuing shift, either, at least none visible.

“Just a ploy, sir,” the officer concluded, and stepped away for Kordriss to take the seat, which he did with a smirk.

“What are you up to?” he muttered to himself, rolling the camera around to look for evidence of an insect or a worm trying to dig at the cell’s rounded corners. “Sulking, most likely. Just some lowly animal curled up under that table.”

The human didn't reappear, though. Kordriss watched the table, which couldn’t have hidden the morpher’s six-foot human frame.

An hour passed, and most of another.

Experienced morphers could push the time limit on holding a morph, Kordriss knew. Merlin was at five and a half hours now. Could he do six? Was he getting himself stuck in morph? A last act of defiance?

No, this human wouldn’t. He was proud, he was fairly young, he was deeply invested in his species’s history.

“He’s not in there,” Kordriss said aloud. He hit the control console with a balled fist.

He charged across the hall to the cell, where one of his Hork-Bajir-controllers and one human-controller stood guard. Before they had the chance even to salute, he hit each hard across the face with his dracon prod, drawing deep, already-cauterized wounds across them and rendering their hosts unconscious. The sludge farms for both of them.

Kordriss kicked the door once, but there was no point searching it. The morpher was gone. He was going to have to report this to Kether 19. She would take charge, send her morpher out into his station to fix his error.

There were things he could do first, at least. He brought out his communicator and issued new orders for his analysts.

“Go through all his files. Find where he’s been hiding and occupy it. Find out where he goes and who he talks to. Bring him back.”

Little comforted by taking action, Kordriss gave the unconscious Hork-Bajir host another thrashing. He issued another order: to the sludge farms also for the designer and installers of the nanofilament cell, and for every Yeerk who had been on watch. By rights, he should just crush and eat them himself.

Merlin

It was no secret that the civilian quarter was home to several Andalites. Nearly all of their kind living under the Yeerk Empire came together in resistance cells. Dominated by a warrior culture, they were secretive, but they didn’t hide. They were allowed to persist so long as they were no real threat to the Empire, even allowed to resist it, so long as their resistance made them look pathetic.

Naturally, Merlin had an Andalite morph. Acquired from one of the warriors in this very cell, in fact. He didn’t like to use it, foremost for the fact that it was very conspicuous. Andalites always drew eyes—and resentment, as the self-proclaimed heroes in the fight against the Yeerks. Their hooves were loud on the hard surfaces of station floors, their fur could be vibrant, and their unusual stature caused a gap in any crowd they moved through. But most of all, Merlin hated that the morph necessitated the use of thoughtspeak.

In the guise of an Andalite, Merlin came to the door deep in a hall towards the center of the civilian quarter. He urged the deeply uncomfortable Alimena to stay near the wall. While it had no written sign, the door was marked for what it was by the sign of a cloven hoofprint in old, faded paint on the door itself, a foot off the ground. Merlin raised a forehoof to kick it three times, as he and Shorquorel had observed the warriors doing.

A few moments later, a panel above face level (for an Andalite) became transparent, allowing a pair of stalk eyes to peer through. Suspiciously, at first, but then quizzically.

<You are unannounced,> the words slithered through the language centers of Merlin’s brain like writhing worms. At least natural thoughtspeak was better than electronic. <Name yourself.>

<My name is Merethren-Garumbral-Ennshogath,> Merlin gave the false name he had reserved for this morph for years. <I’ve just arrived from the starport, I come in aid of a fugitive from the Empire.>

<Were you followed?>

<Only until I passed the first security checkpoint.>

Brief discussion, the tickling of private thoughtspeak dancing at the edge of Merlin’s brain as the warriors discussed.

<It is our honor to extend our aid to any child of Andal,> the stalk-eyes announced, and the door folded open.

Merlin stood tall in a warrior’s greeting, parallel to the Andalite revealed in the door. The exaggerated posture made up for the mandatory amputation of the tail blade, one of the Empire’s cruelest insults. It would have made the morph untenable, but that Merlin blocked the tail from being formed at all in the process. The true Andalite took Alimena gently but firmly inside, backing up through the short entry hall that was too narrow for him to turn in. Not with a warrior’s dignity, at least.

The hall opened into a wide main room, that had once been the common room of a small tenement. The Andalites had all of it, but they spent most of their time together in the big room. There were eight of them—well, seven, because one was clearly a Garatron (Merlin had impressed on Alimena the importance of not pointing that out)—and they lived communally. They had made the main room as much of a grove as they could, stunted trees under ultraviolet lamps and grass growing on a thin and uneven soil layer scattered over the floor to allow for some semblance of naturalistic feeding. The Garatron had painted a continuous mural across the walls, showing heroic, if schematic, centaurs with tail blades raised proudly, leading the other species against a horde of Hork-Bajir.

Shorquorel had brought Merlin, in insect morph, to watch some of that process, homesick for the vibrant art-life long since destroyed on his homeworld. It made Merlin surprisingly sad to see it again.

The Andalite who had let them in moved to stand beside a sentry, who knelt facing the hall.

<Prince Agash,> he announced the asylum-seekers, though they had clearly already spoken. <These are our guests, the child of Andal is Merethren-Garumbral-Ennshogath.>

The sentry was Galagash-Moraloc-Sess, the oldest of the cell, and the only who had actually fought the Yeerks prior to their conquest. He was decorated with bangles and ringlets, chains from his ears, scarification and tattoos replacing most of his fur. His hands rested on the hilts of two swords, forged in the shape of severed tailblades, ready to take them up at the first hint of a threat.

Prince Agash said nothing. Merlin had seen him kneel stoically in place for days on end. His eyes studied morpher and human both, though, and his pierced breathing slits flared.

<I’ve come to help this human find shelter from the Imperials,> Merlin explained, his thoughtspeak intense enough that all of their hosts could hear it.

<Are they chasing her?> the one from the door asked, failing to hide eagerness. <Do we need to prepare for battle?>

<No, we’ve evaded them so far.>

The slimy prickle again, of thoughtspeak that excluded him. The speaking Andalite narrowed his eyes.

<Prince Agash asks if you would share your heritage. Given that your names originate from very different parts the galaxy.>

Merlin barely resisted falling back a step in embarrassment. His research into Andalite names hadn’t told him that. He may have given himself away before they’d even arrived, without knowing it.

“Please,” Alimena stepped in. “We’ve been hiding from the Yeerks all day. Merethren has promised me protection.”

The Andalites conversed among themselves again. More voices joined, from the six others who watched from around the common room.

<We have a guest room,> the one from the door said, wary of Alimena’s invocation of the warriors’ protection. <I’ll show you.>

He led them to one of the ten doors that opened from the common room. The others (and the Garatron) approached cautiously as they passed, reached out their strangely delicate hands to touch Merlin’s shoulders and flanks, their minds projecting a chorus of <Peace,> and <Welcome, Brother.> Merlin bowed his head politely, not knowing the exact proper response.

When they were alone in the cell’s small spare bedroom, Merlin demorphed as soon as he could. The lingering thoughtspeak sensitivity felt like a pound of mucus in his sinuses, that wouldn’t dislodge even when he shook his head.

Alimena turned to him, her arms folded.

“This is as safe as it gets,” she observed, put off by but not avoiding seeing his transformation.

Merlin told her everything. To his own surprise, there really wasn’t much. His life was honing and protecting his Hundredhood, but for a smattering of thefts and escapes. And months in mouse morph dragging computer components through air vents. And many, many miles on the treadmill.

“Why Earth, then?” Alimena challenged.

Merlin shrugged, a little indignantly. He couldn’t remember a time he hadn’t been fascinated with the homeworld.

“What you’re saying is, ‘Tell me you think it’s your fault I’m in danger.’ I can’t. We’re humans living under the Yeerks; the pull of the homeworld was always there.”

The room was sparse, walled and floored in colorless but durably lacquered fiberglass, well lit but obviously used more for storage than for guests. It had only a chair and a cot in it; there was nowhere for Alimena to distance herself from Merlin. She turned away, pensively.

“Alright,” she said. “You’re right. We’re even.”

“No,” Merlin shook his head. “We both have something the Yeerks want, and we both knew about ours, but we didn’t know about the other’s. Mine is me.”

“What do I have?”

“When you asked what I talked about with Rodrigo, I lied. He wanted to warn me about dealing with Ductees. He said you have secrets.”

“Rodrigo has a lot of reasons to be paranoid.”

“I know. He worked with the Animorphs. But then, when Security had me, I had a lot of time to think. Do you know how they caught me? I morphed Leeran.”

Alimena froze.

“There isn’t much on this asteroid. A little city and a big crater. And I know two things: the Ductees, who’ve been here for hundreds of years, will make someone disappear for asking questions about them; and Leerans, the most naturally psychic species in the galaxy, are afraid to come here. That tells me that there’s something you’re hiding, and it’s big.”

Alimena turned back around.

“Okay,” she huffed. “What they’d want from you is you. What they’d want from us is much bigger.”

“A mind,” Merlin hazarded.

A long pause, as Alimena weighed the betrayal of her people’s secret.

“We call it the Psionophore,” she explained.

Kordriss 57

Kordriss 57 turned the ancient Earth calendar over in his hands, while one of his men examined the morpher’s terminal. He already knew that this, and all the other Earth artifacts he’d recovered, would be listed in cargo missing from ships that had stopped on his asteroid in recent months. Nothing valuable, but a smudge waiting to be smeared on his reputation.

“This is the source of all the interference in the electrical reports,” his underling confirmed. “It’s built shoddily, but it has a strong connection to every intrastation network.”

It had been easy to find the morpher’s hideout, once they had turned their focus there. The measures Merlin had taken to hide it and mask his coming and going had begun to decay once he had been detained, and it hadn’t taken long for Kordriss’s team to tear down the interference and triangulate on the real power and air sink. They’d had to remove walls and erect a temporary pressurized tunnel to reach it. It was a drab and urbane nest, one that spoke to an industrious but stagnated occupant. Little to indicate a purpose or identity, just a pile of furniture and some knickknacks. And a computer that seemed to reveal nothing.

“Look for any indication where he might have gone,” Kordriss commanded, though it should have gone without saying.

“Evras 438 will take point in the hunt from here on,” Kether 19 announced directly to her local counterpart. “I think you’ll agree that bringing him in is more important now than your pride, Brother.”

Kordriss ignored her. He was losing control, but he wouldn’t cede it. The calendar, the television, the pinball machine, they told a story. The security chief expected that, when his team searched for other items missing from ships that had docked at his starport, those would tell the same one.

“He collects things from the human homeworld,” Kordriss observed aloud to his men. “He has an interest in Earth and human history. He’ll have made contacts for that reason. Question sellers in the bazaar who might carry offworld antiquities. Look in the civilian quarter, too.”

His men saluted him, but they looked to Kether for permission. She granted it, unimpressed with his reasoning.

“We’ll root him out,” she assured him. “There won’t be any more mistakes.”

“No, Sister Kether,” Kordriss muttered. “There won’t.”

The ISO officer closed in on him and drew him away from his underlings.

“You need to resist seeing me as your enemy. A morpher who’s survived this long is powerful and wily. It takes the Empire’s resources to tame one.”

“Am I not the Empire?” he gave her a bitter smile.

“Oh, we’re all the Empire. But some of us are in a better position to wield its full weight.”

“Of course. Some of us are more Imperial than others.”

“Don’t be childish, Brother Kordriss. Serving the Empire is its own reward. That’s something lesser species can’t appreciate, if they can even comprehend it. I’ve always thought that was a high risk in making humans the official standard host bodies for officers. It makes us too likely to think there’s something valuable in thinking like them.”

She flashed the bioluminescence within her Dayang’s eyes at him, and broke away to issue an order to her operatives. Kordriss rankled, but he didn’t let it frustrate him. For all her talk of equality and resources, he didn’t think he could trust her not to report him as a failure when they were through—but he had to. He was just a part of her team, now. That would make this all move faster, and soon it wouldn’t be his problem anymore.

Merlin

“The federation came to Earth to abduct humans to use as workers in the mine,” Alimena explained. “Just as a test case, to see how reliable Earth would be as a source of labor. It was about eight hundred years ago, the 1300s by the old calendar. They made several trips over a year and grabbed about ninety humans from all parts of the planet. About two thirds of them died within the first few years, because the mining concern was testing their limits—or just didn’t know what humans needed to survive, and didn’t care.

“Go forward a couple generations. The human population is back up to about eighty. No original abductees left, everybody born to the mines, but still pure Earth stock. They speak a patois of Latin, Urdu, and Apachean. The mining concern polices them carefully, watches any gatherings closely, doesn’t allow them to tell stories about their homeworld. It’s not experimenting anymore; it’s just a business managing slave labor to work the mines.

“There’s a man named Karolus, whose grandmother was taken out of the Holy Roman Empire. He’s about forty years old, a hardened laborer. We have a lot of stories about him, I don’t know what of them are true so I’ll spare you. He’s a digger in a new shaft that goes deeper than any of the others. He volunteered for it; people say it’s because he was depressed. He’s always at the front, at the greatest risk of collapse, or of reaching a pocket of toxic fumes. At this point they still keep the mines pressurized, so it’s just him in a jumpsuit with a sonic grinder and a pickaxe.

“Karolus thinks he’s about to break through into an open chamber, but when he brushes the rock away, there’s something else under it. He describes it as flesh inside the rock, very lightly pulsating. He’s tired, overworked, and delirious, so he doesn’t think about the risk, he takes off his glove and he touches it, just for a few seconds. He tells stories for the rest of his life about what he felt.

“He says, in those few seconds, he woke something up. He says, it was aware of him there, and it was curious. He says he could feel its awareness, like the entire universe turned its eyes on him, and he felt the weight of its attention like he was at the bottom of the ocean being crushed by tides. But it’s a childlike, joyful energy. It turns him over and over and examines him inside and out, in a hundred dimensions. He says he feels like he was unraveled, strung out like miles of thread, and a thousand hands ran over that thread in fine detail. And afterwards, the thing went back to sleep.

“He fills in the hole over the fleshy thing and pretends to be injured. The deep dig wasn’t finding anything useful anyway, so the mining concern discontinues it. He doesn’t actually talk about it for years, but everyone knows something happened to him.

“A few years later, he has children, and they’re like us. There’s no period of rapid evolution or mutation; there’s Karolus, who’s like you, and the very next generation is like us. He isn’t surprised when they’re born like that. It takes years for people to drag it out of him. He says, the thing in the mineshaft had been confused about him. It had thought, ‘What’s the use of five fingers and toes? What’s that nictating membrane on the eye for? What’s that ridge on the ear? And that organ, and that instinct?’ And with a flash, with an offhand thought, it removed them all from his offspring, and any who interbred with them. We’re all his direct descendents.

“When people get him to explain that, it opens a floodgate. In the moment the thing was awake, he saw so much through it, and now he wants everyone to know. People get together in secret to hear him talk, even though they have to avoid the mining concern’s police and spies. He says, being in contact with the thing made him temporarily a part of it. For a fraction of a second, he saw all of the cosmos, and understood everything in it. He felt the extent of the thing: it’s more than a mile across, a giant bag of flesh, all geared towards producing a consciousness greater than anybody can imagine. And it’s just one of many, like remote neurons in a cosmic brain. He uses the word Psionophore.

“Ever since then, we’ve kept it a secret. My ancestors sabotaged the mine, caved in most of its shafts…poisoned a lot of the other workers…to make it useless for the mining concern. That’s why they abandoned it. It’s been our secret ever since. For hundreds of years.”

Merlin was quiet for a long time.

“That is bigger,” he admitted.

“A little bit.”

“It can’t be all of you who know it. The Yeerks would have found out the first time they infested one of you.”

“It’s just a few bloodlines that learn about it, and individuals we trust. Don’t be flattered.”

“I’m not. I mostly think it was incredibly reckless for you to set up your museum in the first place.”

Alimena threw up her arms. “Am I supposed to live in isolation?” she echoed.

“Fine, fine,” Merlin backed off. He wasn’t sure what to think of any of this. It was dizzying, even frightening. “That’s what the Leeran felt,” he said. “A mind that’s too big for them, it was like being squeezed in a pressure chamber. And then…the poisoning is why all Ductees are…Karolingian?”

Alimena sighed.

“You shouldn’t yknow any of this,” she said. “You’re not seeing me at my proudest moment.”

She ran her hands through her hair, and unclipped what Merlin had never realized must have been extensions. The shoulder-length hairpiece dropped to the bed, revealing her OIP and transparent skull plate, so she could rub the tense scalp around it. It shouldn’t have, but it made Merlin intensely uncomfortable to see her like that.

“Well, I do know it now,” he didn’t let himself look away. “What do we do?”

She shook her head, finished talking.

“We hide,” Merlin answered himself.

The Ductee nodded, in time for an Andalite hoof to clatter at the door.

<We’ve summoned a medic to examine the fugitive,> a thoughtspeak voice crawled into Merlin’s brain. <We will not compromise on the matter. But we assure you the medic is trustworthy.>

“Thirty seconds,” Merlin whispered to Alimena.

“I’ll be ready soon,” she called to the Andalite outside, as Merlin began to morph.

That was a short window for this morph; the nanites had to generate more than his baseline mass out of zerospace energy, while reshaping him at the same time. He braced himself against the bed, while Alimena pressed her knuckles into her eyes and bit her lip. Making it look like she had been crying; good cover for the delay. Merlin gave her the okay when he was almost finished, the last details shifting into place as she pressed the Admit button.

One of the other Andalites, a young one whose name Merlin had never overheard when spying, led in an Amati. Both gestured respectfully to the guests, the former with a stiff salute and the latter a deep bow. Merlin met the salute while kneeled beside the bed; Alimena affected a sniff and a pained nod.

“Have you been injured?” the medic went straight to business, setting a plastic medical kit down and taking one of the Ductee’s hands.

“No,” she said. She recited a version of the cover she and Merlin had developed before coming to the Andalites. That she had left the asteroid with a blackmarket travel permit to visit an ill relative, and while returning had been detained by Imperials hoping to use her brain to crack down on the forgers. Having never been infested, she panicked and struggled, but the Andalite aboard the ship had rescued her. He had promised to keep help her evade the Yeerks as long as he could.

Merlin watched the Amati closely for signs of suspicion on the wrinkled gray face. It was only when he felt the tingle of private thoughtspeak that he realized his mistake, and saw that the young Andalite’s eyes had been on him the whole time. The boy—a full-fledged warrior but only barely—stood rigidly still.

The dull thudding of hooves on the thin turf told Merlin that he was too late to do anything about it.

He fired a quick wordless warning to Alimena, just before the sentry appeared in the door, blades at the ready. There was nothing she could do but flatten herself against the far wall, startling the Amati medic,as the older Andalite charged in and struck Merlin with the butt of one of his swords, knocking him to the side to pin his humanoid shoulders uncomfortably against the wall.

<Your tail, morpher.>

The cruelly bladed tail twitched reflexively, curled against Merlin's cervid spine. He'd forgotten to prevent it from growing when he had remorphed.

<You should have made a nothlit of yourself,> Prince Agash's thoughtspeak was strong, rough and clipped. <Instead, you use us as a shield between the enemy and your cursed body.>

<We don't mean any harm—> Merlin tried to interject, but the blade pressed harder against his neck.

<What's to stop him from morphing now?> the younger Andalite asked, in conspicuously public thoughtspeak. He moved to rest a hoof on Merlin's tail.

<I could have his throat open to the spine in half a second if he tries.> To Merlin, <You are the one they shut down the starport to capture. And the human is your cover?>

<Let us explain...>

<Demorph first. You sully the Andalite form.>

Merlin hesitated, finding himself reluctant to give up the tail blade, one of the most effortlessly lethal natural weapons any sentient species possessed, now that he had it.

"Do it, Merlin," Alimena urged.

Spreading seven-fingered hands, he conceded. He allowed the blue-and-cream Andalite fur melt away, the secondary cervid body dissolve and merge with the humanoid one that remained. Prince Agash's blade bit all the harder into his neck when the human Adam's apple reformed in its path.

"I'm defenseless," he promised. "Can I sit down?"

Prince Agash narrowed his eyes, let out a thought-blast equivalent to a forceful grunt, and backed away. The rest of the commune had gathered outside the door, many of them armed like the prince. There were plenty of weapons at hand if Merlin tried anything, or even if he didn't. His head crawled with the irritating echoes of thoughtspeak, and the unintelligible ripples of several private exchanges happening only a few yards away. The young warrior and another stepped in to force Merlin and Alimena to sit on the bed. Three were too many quadrupeds for one small room.

<There were rumors about one of Sadon's Hundred here,> Prince Agash said, a judge holding trial. <Explain yourself.>

"I kept to myself," Merlin defended.

"Until you got reckless," Alimena added, eyes down.

"Until they flushed me out."

<You know that three generations of my people, billions across the galaxy, lay down their lives to destroy this technology. My father and grandfather and great-grandfather, all my uncles. We reduced ourselves to scattered refugees, to make sure the Yeerks would not have it. You galavant, and you let yourself fall into their hands, whether you escape or not. Can you comprehend what an insult it is?>

Many eyes bored into Merlin, eight quartets of them, carrying the same accusation.

“They could have lived,” he prodded. The thoughtspeak was making him aggressive.

<Do you know the meaning of the word nothlit? It is “fool beast.” An Andalite does not become a fool beast.>

“But I should?”

<You are not Andalite.>

Alimena whispered at Merlin, “Stop it.”

"It was foisted on me," he sighed. "Sadon didn't give anyone a choice. Do you expect a five-year-old to know what the blue box meant?”

<A child with a sword is as good as a sheath for an enemy to draw it from. You think I am inviting you to defend yourself. I am accusing you of nothing. I am taking your sword away from my enemy.>

Prince Agash raised a blade again, so that its tip hovered a finger’s width from Merlin’s breast.

<Morph,> he commanded.

“Morph what?”

<I care not. If you wish to be a cockroach, be a cockroach. I would suggest a sentient, but it would please me to see you wallow. I don’t know how long you can hold a morph, but I promise you that I can wait.>

Merlin looked at the sword, and at the Andalite’s decorated face. If the others thought Agash’s ultimatum was draconian, they kept their silence. Okay, then. Merlin brought out the blue fur, the eyestalks.

The fury that twisted Prince Agash’s decorated face was delicious. Worth the blade closing that finger’s width.

“Stop,” Alimena called out. “Stop this.”

The elder Andalite’s eyes remained locked with Merlin’s, four on four. The one who was watching Alimena shifted uncomfortably, though. That was enough to break Merlin’s concentration. He released the morph, jaw set.

“You can’t take him away from us,” the Ductee continued. “He’s pledged himself to us. My people.”

<A pledge,> Agash didn’t soften. <What is a pledge not made by a warrior?>

<Isn’t it the pledge that makes the warrior?> someone else thoughtspoke, a voice so sharply different that it must have been the Garatron.

Again, the prince had to reluctantly concede. He kept the sword where it was, but relaxed his stance slightly.

<What was his pledge?> he demanded.

“To protect us from the Yeerks.”

That didn’t satisfy the Andalite.

“To protect…our secrets from the Yeerks.”

<And what are those?>

“They’re secrets,” Merlin spat, and received a foreknee to the gut.

<Secrets worth risking the enemy taking him?>

“Worth a lot more than that,” Alimena glowered.

<Something you would withhold from the enemies of your enemy?>

Eighteen eyes were on the Ductee now. She kept her eyes down, hands clutching at the bedspread.

“You think your people are the only ones that lost generations to the Empire,” her voice was even. “They sacrificed themselves before they could be enslaved. My people, our people, were enslaved. Billions of us were taken away from our home, now they use us as their favorite host bodies, they breed us to be more pliable. You can’t even be infested. We live under their thumb, we have to be ready at any moment for them to take us. You’re scattered, you live in small, helpless colonies, but you have a freedom no human will ever have again. You lost three generations; we’ve lost five, and every generation going forward will be lost, too.”

<Humans are a young species. You cannot compare your loss to ours. You have not achieved the things we have. You cannot comprehend the beauty that we imbued our home with. Andal is a place of beauty, of genius, and of ages. Earth was a pitiful upstart by comparison.>

Alimena raised her head, unsurprised by his argument. “I’ve spent my life preserving what I can of Earth. It was a planet of poetry, of art, and of honor. And war, and death, and thousands of years of invention and spirituality. My people haven’t lived on it for centuries, but we’re still its scions. I’m begging you, for all that, not to take away our protector.”

The prince took several long breaths, then finally lowered his sword. Buzzing thoughtspeak rattled Merlin’s brain, as the Andalites argued among themselves.

<Very well,> Agash announced. <We will spare him. And we will return him to your people. Then we will discuss his role, and these secrets.>

He backed away, allowing the young warrior to step forward and seize Merlin’s wrists to lead him away. Another ordered Alimena to stand.

“This was your safe place to hide,” the Ductee reminded Merlin.

It would be hard to hide a procession of Andalites through the civilian quarter, leading two obvious prisoners. The Imperials would allow it under normal circumstances, to let the Andalites erode what little trust the other civilians had in them. And for their own amusement, of course. These weren’t normal circumstances, though: Prince Galagash would remain take a small contingent to smuggle the humans to an underground tram system to the Ductee village. Three centaurs was plenty force to show.

The tram was old and slow, and shared its tracks with any number of automated service bots whose transit took priority. Merlin and Alimena sat in one small, suspended car, under the watch of the lone female Andalite and the Garatron. The latter, Merlin knew, could be on him in an instant if he tried to morph; most likely the other, too.

“Does your village have a protocol for something like this?” Merlin prodded at Alimena.

“Something like what?”

“Their vaunted hero being marched back to them in chains, maybe?”

The Ductee rolled her eyes. Merlin could see the terror in her, dragging at her face. She had as well as given up the ancestral secret, twice. Once in Merlin’s defense. There was nothing he could do, though; the lie had been hers. The only leverage he had was the one thing they couldn’t reveal.

“They’ll be mad,” he kept going. “I’m their patron morpher, their invincible bandit, yet here I am, caught and chained, so to speak.”

“Quiet.”

“Probably for the better, though. It’s Andalite technology, after all.”

“Shut up.”

“The Ductees will probably just ask the Andalites to take over for me. They’re great at keeping secrets. The Yeerks never keep tabs on them.”

“I swear…”

“I’m not digging for anything. I’m fine, I don’t feel shafted. I’m not going to…sigh…on the floor…”

Alimena groaned loudly and gave in.

“This is a mistake,” she addressed the Andalite. “Let me go ahead and talk to my people, at least. We can work something out.”

<We will do as our prince has commanded,> the Andalite refused, placidly.

“You’re going to march three warriors in to my home and start making demands.”

<Prince Agash wishes it. Warriors follow their princes.>

“What does Prince Agash think we have?”

<Something you would conceal an abomination to protect. Therefore, it is either something you would rather the enemy did not have.>

“And what did the Andalites do when they had something they didn’t want the enemy to have?” Merlin said.

The centaurs both gave him a harsh look.

“I’d just like to say,” he raised his hands in peace. “That I’m not the abomination. Alimena will tell you that Earth has a rich history; we also have a rich history of human morphers. You know about that, don’t you?”

<The Animorphs,> the Garatron confirmed. Their thoughtvoice was monotone and bubbly. <Also abominations. But folk heroes>

“I grew up hearing stories about them,” Alimena glanced briefly at Merlin. “They were Earth’s last heroes. There are dozens of stories about them, I don’t know which were true, but some were.”

“Like the one where they found the Yeerks trying to breed sharks to make better hosts, and they sunk the lab.”

“That one might have been true. Or how they had an army of robot dog men.”

“I heard that one. And when they peed in the Visser’s coffee.”

“You’re thinking about the golem of Prague. But they probably did it too.”

<They founded a free Hork-Bajir colony on Earth,> the Garatron put in. There was just a hint of joviality on their sloped face, high-set eyes.

“People say,” Alimena nodded. “That if we ever find Earth, it’ll be a Hork-Bajir planet.”

<But the Animorphs didn’t stop the Yeerks,> the Andalite said soberly. <Their resistance was symbolic at best.>

That let the air out of any levity the other three had shared. There had been enough, though; neither captor had noticed the Andalite tail creeping up under the back of Merlin’s jacket.

The tram let them off a short crawl from the chamber that housed Alimena’s village. Prince Agash disembarked from another tram car. Infinitely stoic as he was, there was an air of excitement about the other two, exploits distracting from the drudgery of their cell’s routine. Swaggering among the slaves and the cavedwellers. They pushed the humans along.

<Let us in,> the prince demanded when they reached the hatch.

Alimena stepped forward to scan her handprint, but stopped just before her hand met the plate. She looked sidelong at Merlin: if he had a move to make, this was the last chance. He gave her a subtle nod, and began to withdraw his temporary tail from under his jacket.

Before he could, the hatch opened. On the other side was Kordriss 57.

Kordriss 57

The shock on the humans’ faces was almost worth the morpher’s escape. Not quite, but made up for it somewhat. And confused rage on an Andalite was always pleasing. Especially on an old one like his resident war prince.

“Come inside,” Kordriss stepped back to give them room, and to make sure they saw the several armed troopers behind him, and the seminative humans on their knees with dracon guns aimed at their heads. It didn’t take much urging to convince the Andalites—and whatever that other one was—to bring their captives inside.

“You were right, Brother,” Kether 19 nodded approvingly. “Much as I would have enjoyed clearing out an Andalite cell.”

“It’s cleaner this way.”

Of course, it was only luck, and she knew it. They had already raided the museum and the woman’s village when word had come that the Andalites were on the move. Seeing who they had in tow, it was no clever guess where they would be heading.

The Andalites forced the humans to their knees a few paces away. Galagash then stepped between them and their rightful captors.

<You’ll not have the morpher,> he declared. His many-ringed hands were clenched at his sides; he couldn’t carry weapons in public, but he would be well-trained in unarmed combat as well. And tailless.

“You’re right,” Kordriss folded his hands mildly behind his back. “He will be the Empire’s, not mine.”

<I swear by my name and my bloodline that you will not have this weapon.>

“What are your name and your bloodline worth, war prince? Because, you see, we already have so many. You’ve failed both several hundred times over, I suppose.”

The Andalite stepped forward, but was stopped by the whirring of a dozen and a half dracon capacitors charging. Throughout his training, Kordriss had been assured of two things about Andalites: that they were arrogant, and that they were easy to manipulate.

“I could erase both right now,” he said. “But I’d rather not. You are my only war prince, it would be such a waste.”

It looked for a sweet moment as though the Andalite were going to push his luck and advance again, but it was just as well that he backed off. Posture forcibly rigid against deflating pride, Prince Agash retreated without a word. The other two didn’t follow him, but stood stolidly on.

“Now,” Kordriss addressed them. “What did your prince have in mind for my morpher? Aside from rooting him out for me.”

“They were just escorting us home,” Merlin spoke up. “They said I was too dangerous to protect.”

Kordriss leaned forward to where the morpher knelt. “Is that all? That’s why Prince Galagash marched you out here himself?”

<We do not trust a morpher to do as we say,> the one who wasn’t Andalite said. <Our prince demanded that he make a nothlit of himself, and he would not, so we were sending him back where he came from.>

Kordriss regarded the two blue aliens thoughtfully. Thoughtspeak-capable species thought they made good liars, but they had as many tells as audible speakers. But much as he would have liked to poke and prod at these two, wheedle out what they thought they could make the morpher do for them, he was almost done. He had only to let Kether take this damned renegade away, and it was all out of his hair for good.

“You can join your prince. Unless you’d like to try and get out of here with him.”

They hesitated, probably conferring privately.

“Are you debating whether to lay down your lives to keep this prize away from the Empire? Whether your warriors’ code demands it? As I’ve said, we have so many; what’s one more? And you would be laying down your lives.”

That seemed to get through to them. They showed their empty hands and backed away, eyes full of contempt. Kordriss wasn't interested in having to flush out and exterminate the whole cell to prevent a reprisal from Galagash. Nor in the chaos afterwards, if any other upstarts perceived that as a power vacuum. He really couldn't wait to have his asteroid back in order.

"You'll be glad to know," he addressed the fuming morpher now. "That our subjugator arrived just this morning. The zerospace lanes were kind to us. Are you ready, or do you need to be stunned?"

It wasn't Merlin who spoke, though. The human woman with him, even more anxious than he, muttered:

"You can't let him take you. If they put a Yeerk in you they'll know everything you know."

"That is the point," Kordriss reminded her. To the morpher: "Up."

Merlin tried to say something to Alimena, but Kordriss gave him a light buzz across the chest with his prod, just enough to expel the air from his lungs.

"Go on," he waved the woman back to the circle of captives at the village center.

She stood, but instead of joining her people she gave the morpher a wide-eyed and urgent look, her jaw clenched.

"This is taking too long," Kether called. She gave a signal to her human-hosted operative, who gestured to the troopers to get ready to fire.

"No," Kordriss stopped them, studying Alimena, who barely seemed aware of him. Too much mess. "Bring him out."

One of his men emerged from one of the wooden dividers that constituted houses down here, pushing the Earth survivor in his wheelchair. The ancient human scowled, gnarled fingers trembling on his armrests. The trooper pressed the emitter of his dracon gun into the crown of the thin-haired head. Kordriss tapped his prod on Alimena's shoulder and directed her gaze.

Ah, he loved to see the kind of helplessness that oozed from her. Her chest heaved, and she put her head down and jogged to take her place among the hostages.

"Keep them all here until I give the signal," Kordriss commanded. "Join us, Sister?"

Merlin

The Imperial security chief shoved Merlin brusquely back out into the tunnels, where he was joined by the Dayang and a pair of other officers. Merlin tried to form a plan, but he was hampered by the concentration required to keep his Andalite tail from disintegrating. Having that killer blade snaked into his sleeve was his only advantage right now, as it was. He only glared between the controllers around him, their smug faces and their weapons.

He recognized something in one of those. The one with the hunched posture and gnashing teeth—a species he didn’t know but would have liked to acquire given the chance. There was something in that one’s deepset eyes, something the Yeerk wasn’t quite succeeding at suppressing, that told him: this was another of Sadon’s Hundred. They’d brought their own morpher in; he had never really had a chance to escape them.

With his wrists bound, they led him up the stairs that connected the tunnel to the back of the Earth museum. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to him to see the boxes and drawers ransacked, priceless artifacts knocked to the floor; somehow it still struck him like a dracon prod to the gut to see it.

Worse was the motorized police cart waiting in the street outside the museum. The same kind to which Merlin had been shackled when Shorquorel was killed. The human-controlling officer in the offworld uniform forced his cuffs to the dorsal rail, which magnetized them to it. As if Merlin could do anything—even morph—with both Kordriss 57 and the Dayang-controller training their weapons on him.

“I think congratulations are in order,” the security chief said to the Dayang. “You have your morpher back.”

“Let’s not be hasty until we have the subjugator in him,” the Dayang said. “We had him quite securely last time, as well.”

Kordriss 57 gave a strained smile as the cart rumbled into motion.

“I don’t think he’s going anywhere, not knowing what will happen to his friend and her village if he tries.”

“We can only guess how strong his allegiances are,” the Dayang glanced at Merlin appraising. “I still wouldn’t loosen your grip on him. But be proud, Brother. We’ve apprehended the hardest and most valuable kind of fugitive there is.”

“We have. Yet another.”

“The Empire will be pleased once he is infested.”

“I’m sure it will.”. The security chief caught Merlin watching and gave him a mockingly amicable nod. He said, “I hope you’re prepared for your adventure. You’re going to go places and see things I never will. Though I’m content right here, myself.”

The cart wasn’t taking Merlin all the way to the security headquarters, but instead to a junction between two blocks. A ladder in the junction’s wall led up to a hatch in the ceiling, where there was an air transport docked. Pesumably the one that had brought thirty troopers directly to the museum without having to march through the entire civilian quarter. The offworld officers demagnetized the cart’s rails and pushed their prisoner along to the ladder. Those two and the Dayang climbed first, Kordriss 57 remaining behind to handle the human personally.

When the security chief reached to take Merlin by the cuffs, he fell back with several fewer fingers.

With the Andalite tail blade sticking out just slightly from his sleeve, Merlin sliced through the blood-spattered cuffs easily. He swung his newly free hand at the Yeerk again, giving him a deep gouge across the shocked face, and ran.

He let the tail dissolve, reducing the strain it put on his spine and his mind. He didn’t have to get far, he didn’t even have to fight.

All he had to do was get Kordriss 57 alone.

Enraged shouting from the bleeding imperial warned civilians in the next block to make way. An Amati backed away from their door, and Merlin threw himself into it, stumbling into the dingy living room beyond. Kordriss 57 was on him only seconds after he fell to the floor among the scattering Amati’s feet.

Two blows from the security chief's prod, however low its setting, was enough to quiet any thoughts he had of continuing to run.

Kordriss 57, clutching his uniform with his bloodied hand, drew the prod back to swing it again, pausing to turn up its power.

"Just let me be rid of you!" he growled.

"Wait!" Merlin held out a hand as well as he could against the pain. "I can give you...what the Ductees are protecting..."

Kordriss 57 ignored him. The third strike felt like a burning hook dragged through the flesh of Merlin's shoulder. A click and a whirr, as its holder raised the power again.

"You...have one chance," Merlin struggled. "Before the Dayang-controller gets here. You can be the one to give it to the Empire, but as soon as she Yeerks me, she'll get it out of my head and it'll be her who gets credit."

With the pain in his side and his shoulder, Merlin had to let his head drop back. There fourth strike seemed to take hours to come. Then, instead, Kordriss 57 grabbed him by the collar and hauled him to his feet.

"What is it?" the Yeerk demanded.

"I'll take you to it."

The tip of the prod pressed up under Merlin's jaw, capacitors humming.

"What is it?"

"It's an organism—it's an extremely powerful psychic organism. They've been keeping it a secret for centuries."

"If that's so, I could cut a hole in you and get it from one of them on my own time."

"They'll die before they give it up. Every one of them."

The cold human eyes stared into Merlin's for long seconds, before Kordriss 57 twisted his arm around his back and shoved him towards the door.

"Let's go see it, then" he said.

The Mine

Kordriss 57's communicator barked commands from the offworlders the entire time he dragged Merlin along. The security chief said nothing until he had reached another junction and activated its emergency transport, at which time he squeezed the communicator and lied, gravely:

"I'm in pursuit."

The emergency transport was a small, two-person craft, little more than a cockpit that could slide over the junction's ceiling hatch and receive them. It lifted off as soon as they were both seated, firing them a quarter-mile into the black sky as it would if they had boarded it to escape an explosion or gas leak.

The station receded below, as Merlin had never seen it before. The civilian quarter was a tangle of mismatched construction, the bazaar and governmental and administrative offices an array of severe metal and concrete slabs. On the west side, the starport was a huge ring, and on the east the mines were a yawning crater, vastly larger than the rest combined.

"The mines," Merlin pointed. "You'll have to pressurize them."

Kordriss 57 issued a command into his communicator and took control of the transport with the joystick on the center console. He kept the prod against Merlin's shoulder.

“No tricks,” he said.

“I’m trying to think of tricks. No luck yet.”

As the transport glided slowly over the crater, the Yeerk watched Merlin closely. He flexed the stumps of his severed fingers, freshly finished bleeding, around the prod. There was a hint of a smile on his face.

“You’d sell their secret out.”

“Happily, if you let me go. Grudgingly, if you promise to kill me before the Dayang gets me.”

“Your fellow humans.”

“They’re not humans, not really. Not the same as Earth humans.”

Merlin shrugged as casually as he could. He had to have a plan. He had to do something before they reached the psionophore.

Well, he did have a plan. The plan was to morph. Every plan was to morph.

"Now you're thinking like an Imperial," the Yeerk laughed.

"Ouch."

"Don't be sanctimonious. If you had to feed on other humans to use your Andalite power, you'd choose the ones that aren't quite the same. I'm told the process doesn't hurt, is that true?"

"It's like...grinding your knuckles together."

"Hm. I'd hoped that was a lie. I suppose the Andalites can't do anything right."

The transport passed through a pressure field like the one that sealed the starport, and descended past the lip of the crater. Derelict structures and cranes and vehicles were clustered in flat concentric rings around the outside of the full collapse. Many had fallen in over the centuries, and were part of the rocky slope. Kordriss 57 brought up a three-dimensional scan of the mines on his tablet. In the tangle of shafts that descended from the surface, like hairs clinging to a drain, one of them reached much deeper than the others. Merlin pointed to that one.

They descended to the deepest open space available, a relatively stable chamber so far down in the crater that none of the rim was visible from it, only stars and the queue of spacecraft waiting to land. The transport let them out amidst the ruins of a level buried in fallen rocks. Roughly circular, several inclined and vertical shafts opened from its walls.

“You’ve seen this organism?” Kordriss 57 held out his tablet to find the right entrance.

“I’ve felt it. It was how you caught me.”

“When you were a Leeran.”

The prod pressed into Merlin’s back, and he followed its direction towards the shaft entrance.

“You can’t imagine the power it has,” he continued. “The size of that mind. It crushes Leerans when they’re here. That’s why they stay away. And you know what a huge mind means.”

“A huge brain.”

“You’ll be a hero. I’ve heard about the advances in linking Yeerks to control bigger brains. Think of…the use cases.”

“You don’t need to sell me, I’m already here. Keep moving.”

The shaft entrance was partially caved in, but the stairs beyond it were still accessible. They spiraled far into the darkness, down to the asteroid’s mantle. There was no telling if the two of them could reach the bottom, if the stairs would end, or if the point to which Karolus had dug was actually much deeper and was long sealed away. Any of those possibilities were acceptable. If Merlin could knock Kordriss 57 off the stairs, or even leave him below and morph bird to reach the transport first…

The Yeerk was still right behind him, though, still ready to dracon him at the first sign of mischief. And he had a flashlight; Merlin didn’t.

The ancient stairs seemed sturdy enough.

“The Dayang is your superior, right?” Merlin prodded him.

“I’m the highest ranking officer on this asteroid.”

“But she came from somewhere else. A whole other echelon.”

“Be quiet.”

The stairs took them down to another level, from which a few more shafts branched. There was a whole network down here. Plenty of space to lose a pursuer, but finding the way back out would be a different matter.

Kordriss 57 stopped Merlin a few paces off the base of the stares to pull out his map again. He hissed and fumbled with it in his injured hand and dropped his flashlight.

“Not one step,” he ordered, feeling gingerly for it while he kept his prod on Merlin. “I’ll have a new hand soon, but I can melt parts off you so they can’t be replaced.”

Despite the warning, Merlin ventured one step away. He kept his hands up, though. It would only take one lunge from the Yeerk to burn a hole clear through him.

“People like you,” Kordriss 57 muttered, finding his place on the map again. “You have a leg up on your fellows. But you can’t see when someone is in another class above you. You can’t accept when you’re beaten.”

They both heard the sound at the same time, from another shaft that opened onto this level. Merlin took it at first to be the settling of rocks knocked loose by the pressurization field, dropping in the tunnel opening behind his captor. A soft, rhythmic thudding. Kordriss 57 turned to shine his flashlight in that direction.

The beam revealed a Siberian tiger, barreling across the level at them.

Merlin broke into a run, just as the giant Earth cat bowled the security chief over, scattering tablet and dracon prod, claws tearing chunks of flesh out of his host in passing. The threat of the prod out of the way, he morphed in mid stride.

He went first for his Antarean harvest skink, the fastest transformation he had. It wouldn’t outrun a tiger, but it dropped him to the floor and gave him a burst of six-legged speed in the opposite direction. The tiger overshot him and skidded into a rubble wall, knocking loose a cloud of asteroid dust. Merlin, a frantic lizard, swerved and scrabbled for the stairs.

The morpher-controller emerged from the dust in their own baseline form, long jaws grinding sharp teeth in concentration. They clambered after Merlin on the stairs, grasping the ancient metal with clawed hands and feet that gave them better purchase than the skink had. Turning a corner and seeing the morpher gaining quickly, Merlin turned and flung himself off the edge. Plummeting, he became an owl, before he could break his spine against a lower railing. Wings first, to slow the fall as he pumped the lizard’s mass into zerospace, eyes soon after to make the dark navigable.

He let the owl’s instincts aim his fall, level after level of spiraling stairway along the inclined shaft. The other morpher leapt nimbly from railing to railing above him, quickly but still falling behind. There was no chance to turn and watch, but Merlin knew they must be selecting a morph as well.

Whatever that morph was, it slammed into Merlin’s back from above, a heavy weight with grasping claws that wrapped around and clutched his feathered body while some kind of sail controlled the fall.

They struck earth far below with what would have been a bone-crunching impact, if Merlin hadn’t been in mid-morph. He was a sack of unshaped biomass in the thing’s clutches: moments later, he was a Muverian cave beetle, armored and equipped with sharp pincers that tore the leathery alien apart like thin plastic. It bought him time to scuttle away, but it came with too little spatial sense to navigate. Putting a several outcroppings of fallen and buried rock between him and the site of their landing, he took his pursuer’s lead and chose the form of an Earth cat. The ocelot had been one of dozens of animals he’d acquired from the collection of a traveling Yeerk several years ago, and one he used often for sneaking at night. So far underground, there wasn’t enough faint light for its nocturnal eyes to see like on a terrestrial night, but he could at least make out the shape of the space and the location of the other morpher.

They had reached the point at which the collapse had pinched the mineshaft closed. Centuries of settling had formed a somewhat flat surface, surrounded by walls of rock that were almost vertical. The stairs ended ten yards above the ground. There were plenty of footholds for a cat to reach it, if he didn’t have a chance to go bird.

At the center of the landing, the slashed and bleeding trashbag-sail creature had contracted and was reforming into the controller’s baseline shape. The Yeerk may not have mastered direct intermorphing—but, more likely, they had judged that the long-jawed alien body was adequate for this environment. Merlin crouched low, already exhausted by his own multiple morphs. Shifting rapidly to skink and then owl and then beetle and then ocelot had fixed his broken bones and saved his inner ears from the crushing change in air pressure, but it had also strained the nanites. His body screamed to return to baseline, even if just for a moment.

He thought he could do a bird, though. The trustworthy sparrow could get him up to the staircase, at least, and possibly undetected. Studying the alien’s body, though, the spindly but lithely muscles legs and high, springy ankles, he could imagine it reaching the stairs easily with one jump off the rock wall.

Maybe it was best to hide. Maybe he needed to find a crevice and make himself a pill bug and vanish. That might be dooming himself, too.

“Merlin,” the morpher-controller hissed, sweeping their head around and prowling on their knuckles. “I know you’re here. There’s no escape. I’ll be taking you back, or you’ll die here.”

The ocelot crouched low, slinking around the jutting rocks and hunks of concrete.

“You should know my name. My name is Evras Four-Thirty-Eight. This host’s name was Dinad, they were like you. And they were caught like you.”

Evras 438 struck, leaping in Merlin’s direction. What met them, bounding out from cover, was not an Earth cat, but an Andalite. They narrowly avoided the tail blade as Merlin’s hooves skidded and he spun to face them. Merlin swept the tail again and again, charging and dodging. He sheared away several quills from the back of the alien’s head, but nothing else. His enemy caught the tail in their jaws and dug a foot into his flank, pulling until spine and sinew gave and the tail tore clean from the secondary pelvis. The pain was an explosion that blasted back and forth across Merlin’s brain, filling his already limited night vision with fog.

Evras 438 was pinning him down, one foot on his paralyzed cervid hindquarters and hands pinning his shoulders. The toothy jaw was all he could see.

“Are you going to morph and run?” they taunted him. “Where are you going to go? Where are you going to hide? There’s no one like you left. We have you all. You’re our final prize.”

He was demorphing almost involuntarily. The pain echoed, even as the Andalite brain that recognized its source dissolved and the nanites streamed his human one back into place. And he was in complete dark.

Evras adjusted, moving their hands to Merlin’s throat. Merlin grasped at them, but his human fingers were weaponless. The scaled thumbs only had to restrict his airflow for a minute longer and he would be unconscious; no doubt the morpher-controller had some form capable of carrying a limp human body back to the surface.

The thumbs pressed tighter, threatened to crush his thyroid cartilage, but careful not to.

Baseline thumbs. Merlin almost laughed.

He acquired Dinad.

Immediately, Evras’s grip relaxed, and the alien body sagged. Merlin gasped, only now realizing how close he had been to passing out.

But Evras didn’t fall. Trembling, the hands tried to squeeze again. Labored breaths puffed from between the teeth of the face that had fallen against Merlin’s. The Yeerk was resisting the acquiring trance. Merlin couldn’t see the alien’s eyes, but he felt the rage radiating from them, the concentration.

Claws curled, biting into his neck from all sides. Either Evras wasn’t in complete control of the body, or they weren’t concerned with bringing him back alive anymore.

Cool alien flesh encircled Merlin’s neck, a stiff-quilled browline pressed into his forehead. He gave up trying to acquire. Instead, he selected a morph and took those hands with him into zerospace, just as if they were his own clothes.

Maybe not the whole hands. A few layers of skin, at least.

The shocked howl of agony grew fainter as Merlin shrank, until it was reduced to a vibration in the air. The morphing nanites melted and divided his body, which was almost crushed beneath the thrashing alien, produced leaving him with a small but long shape, with sixty pairs of agile legs. He let the centipede’s instincts detect the nearest gap in the rock and slipped into it.

His human senses, remote as they were, were useless for navigating the cracks and crevices below the surface. He only spurred the centipede on, feeding its ganglia with a sense of danger and urgency.

He didn’t have to for long, though: soon, there was something in there with him.

There was no way to know what form Evras had taken, but it was something the centipede recognized instinctively as a predator. He was only a flashing wave of legs in the lightless cracks, darting into tunnels, curling to escape dead-ends, diving deeper and deeper into the asteroid. Jaws snapped at him, catching his elongated rearmost legs whenever something slowed him. More than two jaws. More than four, or six.

Suddenly his hundred and twenty legs had no purchase. A tunnel opening gave way, rock collapsed into dust that his infinitesimal claws tried uselessly to cling to, and he was falling. He fell and fell, trying to grab for the edges of the vertical gap but unable to differentiate between them and the dust he held. The drop must have been dozens of feet, hundreds of times his body length. Before he crashed to the ground he chose an even smaller morph, a spider smaller than one of his centipede segments.

The landing was jarring, even with as little mass as he had now, and it took him a moment to orient himself. There was no light at all, but the spider had some other spatial awareness to navigate by. Tiny vibrations told him Evras was still in pursuit, crawling down the shaft in some many-legged form.

There was something else, too. Something below the rock he stood on, movement that terrified the spider. Like an earthquake rumbling just a few inches below, unfathomable in scale.

He didn’t let the spider flee. Instead he found another crevice and dove farther down.

The spider wasn’t as fast as the centipede had been, but it was still fleet of foot and well-coordinated. Merlin clung to the floor and sides and ceiling of a winding open space not much larger than a human fingernail, rocketing himself forward towards the source of the terrible rumbling. Evras wasn’t far behind, now hurling wordless messages of hate and fury at him in nanite-assisted thoughtspeak.

When the rock opened up, what was below it was flesh. An infinite expanse, much farther in every direction than the spider could comprehend, but unmistakable. The gap between it and the rock wasn’t much bigger than the crack Merlin had been following, but it was worn smooth by millennia of the immense body’s tiny vibrations.

Once he set foot on it, something happened. Merlin was dazed, as if caught by a flashbang that disrupted his every sense. As if he were being acquired by another morpher.

In a fraction of a second he felt a wave of feelings and sensations flow across his being. Startlement at first, confusion, and curiosity. He felt the being notice him—he couldn’t feel anything except what the being felt, as if it and he were the only things in the universe, and its thought pulsed out of it like solar radiation.

It noticed him, and then it went back to sleep.

Evras was coming, only inches away by the sound of it, squeezing into the ever-tighter space, probably morphing to fit. They would be on him soon. Above, there were hundreds of feet, maybe hundreds of yards of solid rock. If he weren’t being chased, he might be able to find his way back up, but he would more than likely find himself trapped, with no room to demorph before whatever tiny form he’d taken became permanent.

He summoned his Yeerk morph.

The slug body was hundreds of times the size of the spider. Mass flowed in from zerospace, he grew and grew. Pressed against the ceiling, pressed against the flesh. If he could just form the body, he could liquify it, and maybe in that form he could communicate with the psionophore…

It was no use. The skin was taut, it crushed his Yeerk organs before they could fully form, unfelt but detectable pain alerting him that he wouldn’t survive. He returned to spider morph

And he acquired it.

The psychic gasp it released was a tremor of horror that very likely reached every mind on the asteroid, maybe even in its star system. It may not know what had happened, it may not even have fully awakened, but it knew the result, as well as Merlin did.

There was no time to feel the guilt, though. Merlin concentrated on the new genetic pattern in his system, directed the nanites to it, and brought it out. Hard skin first.

The morphing process protected him from the pain, as his spider body grew. Unlike the soft Yeerk, though, it wasn’t crushed by the rock and the body below. The psionophore’s body compressed, and the rock above shifted and cracked.

And the mind. The mind bloomed.

The first psychic sensation Merlin’s new developing psionophore brain detected was of Evras 438’s horror, as this new wall of flesh caved the narrow gap in. It didn’t last long.

The next was the dying psionophore’s waking thoughts. He couldn’t understand them, they may as well have been spoken in another language. But the creature was placid.

Then there was a flood. Awareness poured in through senses Merlin had no names for, filled a mind that grew more capacious by the moment. Merlin himself, the tiny human consciousness, was a single bottle tossed by a rolling ocean.

Rock collapsed, burst, fell away. Merlin’s body took form: more than a mile long, a gargantuan bead of neural tissue bound within a comma-shaped shell, rising under the open sky. The mine was gone, tossed to the side; the asteroid station lurched and twisted on the side of a new ridge that had been flat minutes before.

There were thousands of minds in there. Merlin could feel them all, perceive their bodies. He could remember where they had been all their lives…he could remember where they would be for the rest of their lives, and what other minds and bodies would replace them. They were only faint flashes to him, but if he had years to learn to use this morph, he knew he could enter them, study each one’s life, speak to them, understand them. Change them.

Then the others were there.

They were numerous, they were dormant, and they were distant, but he could feel them. He was one of them—no, they were all one, and he was a part of whatever it was they were a part of. Thousands, all separated by parsecs, yet also as connected as if they were collected together. Together they dreamed, something so immense and complex that it was only a dull, painful shadow to Merlin.

That was the psionophore. A colonial brain, spread across the galaxy, maybe beyond it. Space was nothing to it, time was nothing to it. It saw forward and backward in time, and in other directions Merlin couldn’t comprehend.

Did the Ductees know the scale of their secret? Could the Yeerks have harnessed it? From his zerospace haven, the insignifcant part of the psionophore that was Merlin imagined them trying. A vast net of Yeerks, linked by electrodes and amplifiers, boring through the shell and wrapping around a small portion of the brain underneath. It was hard to believe it could be possible, but the Yeerks would try. They would sacrifice a thousand planets in the attempt.

The mind was so vast. It was filling up, learning. Like the empty room of a sentient mind reproduced by the morphing nanites, being gradually filled by perception and exprience—but at a rate and a scale far beyond that. Merlin raged and thrashed against it, becoming smaller and smaller next to its immensity. It would be a real, living mind soon, and it would cast him out like a tick on its ankle.

He took control of the nanites, impressed his instructions on them with all the mental force he had. They caught hold, and the growing stopped. Merlin’s psionophore body lay still amidst the wreckage, and then began to shrink.

It took most of an hour for the nanites to disperse the extra mass. It was indescribable; Merlin spent the time in a state of vertigo. Worse was the enormous mind closing itself off to him. Like the loss of an Earth raptor’s enhanced vision, or an Errit’s superhuman sense of numbers and proportions, but magnified beyond compare. When he was fully human, laying on his back at the bottom of the new crater and covered in scraps of Evras’s skin and bone, he almost wept. He had never felt so small, so weak and so naked.

But he had survived. He was awake, uninfested, and staring at the stars.

Merlin

The body Merlin had borrowed from Dinas, Evras 438’s host, proved to be perfect for scaling the crater wall. When he crested it, he was relieved to see the station below. Not intact—far from it—but not destroyed. Much of the administrative block had been crushed by the upheaval, and maybe the bazaar, too.

It was Jin-en-on of Raasth who stumbled through the airlock on the east end of the civilian quarter, was shoved aside and unquestioned by the dazed Yeerk police who were struggling to keep order among themselves, let alone the populace. Merlin kept the morph for the time being.

Nothing was undamaged. Large sectors of the station had lost their pressure seal. Sections of the rails underground had been forced out of place, tearing up through the street. There were thousands dead. No one Jin-en-on asked had any idea what had happened. Some speculated that the Andalites had smuggled in a bomb; they had been on the move yesterday, after all.

The Earth museum was lost. The roof of its block had been punctured, and it was all depressurized.

A number of civilians, with little help from the Yeerks, had already set up a field hospital in the block next to it. Near panic, Merlin searched it though he had to push through hurried nurses tending to the injured.

Along with several other familiar Ductees, he found Alimena on a cot with the stable survivors. She was asleep, her head and thorax tightly bandaged. That may have been for the better. Merlin didn’t know what he would say to her. She was breathing easily.

“Hey,” a weak and raspy voice coughed from across the tent.

It was Rodrigo, in his wheelchair, apparently unharmed. Merlin pretended not to hear, even less sure what to say to the old Earther.

“I know it’s you, asshole,” Rodrigo accused. “You’re not as good at disguising your body language as you think.”

Merlin rushed to his side, a hand ready to acquire him if he wouldn’t be quiet.

“Put your weird alien mitts away, kid. I know how to keep my voice down. All this is because of you, I’d hazard.”

“I…” Was there anything he could say to that?

“I’m not judging you. You made a tough choice, I’m guessing. And it came out worse than you expected. Welcome to my world.”

“I couldn’t let them…”

“I don’t wanna know what the stakes were. It’s gonna be yours to carry for the rest of your life, anyway. And you will carry it, if you’re worth your salt. You look like someone who can’t stick around. Don’t let me keep you.”

Merlin sighed and nodded. There would be Imperials swarming the place soon, trying to identify how one of Sadon’s Hundred had caused so much destruction. Maybe they would find the psionophore, but it would be long dead by then, if not from being crushed, then from rapid necrotization from being acquired while in morph.

“I know where Earth is,” he dropped his Raasthian voice low. “I saw it…I can remember it.”

“I know it too, dumbo. Get going and let me rest. I had a hell of a time dragging all these ducks out of the rubble.”

A knowing glint in the old man’s eyes told Merlin that that wasn’t a joke. That just made it harder to pull away.

The old man, whose name was definitely not Rodrigo, saw that.

“Nurse!” he called. “I need my bedpan.”

A helper bot came to life a few cots away and began to roll over to Rodrigo’s side.

“Oh dear,” it said. “Dreadfully sorry for the wait. Oh dear.”

Merlin huffed and stood up. Rodrigo left him with a parting wink.

The starport was mostly still functional. Its crew worked in space suits while the pressure field was being repaired, and the queue up above was in chaos. Most ships that had been waiting to land had been diverted to other planets, and most that needed to leave were badly delayed. Merlin waited on the edge, morphed as an Amati worker on a perpetual stimstick break, waiting for a chance to stow away. He didn’t know where he would go; wherever the first safe ship to smuggle himself onto was going was probably fine. Where he went after that was more of a question.

He couldn’t shake the image of the Yeerks trying to harness one—he hoped it was only his imagination, and not a vision from his on briefly psionophorized mind. How connected were its neurons? Had he killed them all when he acquired this one? Had that one’s death even been worth noticing to the others? Or had they awoken? Would they be detectable now? Would the Yeerks find them?

There was no one else who could answer any of those questions. It had to be Merlin.

It had to be this Merlin. He didn’t know what the other Merlin would do. The one who had come into being when he had morphed the cosmic brain. Whom he had perceived only for that split second, when they had intersected. That Merlin would always be out there, getting younger and younger, or maybe preserved by the Andalite technology forever. Most likely, after-before their encounter, that one would use the psionophore’s knowledge to find Earth. make his way there, decades in the past, when it was safe and wouldn’t alert the Yeerks. And he’d have a long life there, to share the wisdom of what could be thousands of years of future life behind him.

A brass tube ship came down and began to unload its passengers, who looked none too happy to be disembarking in a recent disaster zone. Some of them argued with the crew, a shoving match broke out.

That one would do. Merlin dropped his stimstick, and became a moth.