5Consider this a prologue to the main plot. I've done my best to write in such a way that no previous knowledge of either canon is required to understand the story; please let me know if there is something in particular you are confused about, and I will answer the question, incorporate the information into a future or past chapter, and/or laugh evilly to myself and remain silent, as appropriate.
Fair warning, I'm not making any promises as to updates. I have plenty of stuff planned for this story, but I don't exactly have a good track record of finishing writing projects, so we'll see how it goes.
Now then, Odrish Three-Zero-Eight, was it? The beginning—let's start there. What do you remember about the day the ship crashed?
I have a very clear memory of that day—or, the beginning of it at least. Later on, things got…confusing.
Naturally. Everyone did. Moving on…
Yes sir. That was the same day that I received my first official host body. I heard my name being called through the sonic relay in the pool. "Odrish Three-Zero-Eight, to the infestation pier. A gedd host has been prepared for you." That was a first as well; the sub-vissers never had a reason to call on me before. Anyway—my first host was a gedd.
It was a bit like the old male gedd I'd practiced in during training, and like the training gedd, this one was also a male. He was younger, though, stronger. He was thrashing around in the yeerk pool. I could tell because the waves from his motion kept striking my body as I jetted over to the infestation pier, and even as inexperienced as I was, I still recognized the sound and feel of a struggling creature in water. Whoever was holding him down got him under control though, and I squeezed myself through his ear and wrapped my body around his brain, as I'd been taught.
As soon as my palps connected with the host's brain, I became aware of senses and thoughts beyond my own. The gedd was grumbling in the back of his mind, but once I took control of him, he stopped fighting and settled down, recognizing the futility of struggling. It allowed me to raise the gedd back to his feet and look around so I could get my bearings.
Of course, we were right beside the yeerk pool, which sits in the dead center of the pool ship under a portable kandrona generator. The area around the edges of the pool were bustling with yeerk controllers in host bodies, as usual. I'm not sure I'll ever get used to the sense of sight. I'd only had a few experiences with the dulled senses of the training gedd, and what really struck me about this new host was how much sharper and more focused everything seemed.
I looked around me at the other controllers. The gedds' fur was bluer than I remembered, their eyes yellower as they shuffled by on clumsy legs and knuckles. The taxxon worms' many blood-red eyes stood out sharply against their glistening, sickly yellow skin. Even the liquid in the yeerk pool had a metallic tinge from the kandrona that I had never noticed before, where the water wasn't rippling with the presence of unhosted yeerks—er, but I don't think that's what you wanted to talk about.
Indeed. Then again, you never know what may turn out to be important. This is an interview, Odrish Three-Zero-Eight, not an interrogation.
…Right. Well, as I said, it was my first "real" host, and it took me a while to get used to it. Since gedds aren't really build to stand upright on just two legs, I found it easier to hunch my back and rest the extra weight on one of my arms. I discovered this gedd body preferred the left arm. It was about then that I noticed another gedd controller sitting by the nearest unused infestation pier, watching me get acclimated to the new body.
As soon as I was properly balanced, I gave him a salute with my free arm, guessing this controller was most likely higher-ranked than me. His body was also a male, though it was older and stronger than mine; it intimidated my own gedd brain. He spoke in Galard, despite the difficulty of the galactic common tongue on gedd throats and teeth.
"Rr-you are Odrish Three-Zero-Eight, yes? Rr-you work for me now. My rrrank is Sub-Visser Two-Hundred-Twenty-Nine. Come."
"Rr-yes, sir," I replied. I was, of course, excited at the opportunity to prove my worth to the Empire, and I was eager to get started. Sub-Visser Two-Hundred-Twenty-Nine led me on a very short tour around the relevant parts of the ship—the gedd quarters, the kitchens and storage bays, and so on—until we came back to the main yeerk pool. He gestured at the hall leading to the bridge of the pool ship.
"Rr-that's where the vissers work," he explained. "Rr-I am sometimes rr-called to assist them, rr-and you will be assisting me. Rr-but don't get in their way."
It turned out that mostly, I would be working in the kitchens, preparing food for the host bodies and cleaning up. It…was not enviable work, once I realized it included feeding taxxons as well. The first time I caught a glance—and whiff—of a taxxon greedily devouring a chunk of raw, fresh meat, it made my host start to shake in fear. I redoubled my efforts to get promoted to a position where I could do something useful.
That was where I worked for the next several hours, under the supervision of Sub-Visser Two-Hundred-Twenty-Nine. The other controllers in the kitchens had no more rank than I did, and the sub-visser was the only ranking yeerk I'd met. Almost the minute my shift ended, an alarm began to blare, three times in quick succession, and I asked him what it was.
"Rr-that's just the zero-space rr-alert system. Rr-it means we're going back into real space. Ignore it; we'll be rr-jumping into z-space again soon, rr-no doubt," the sub-visser explained.
I hadn't even known we were in z-space at the time, nor why we were apparently jumping in and out of a non-dimension repeatedly. "Rr-where are we going?" I asked.
The sub-visser's yellow eyes blinked at me. "Rr-you don't know what happened? Rr-you are new." He chuckled, but it was not a pleasant sound. "The rr-pool ship was attacked by rr-andalites near the Basyor system. Rr-they destroyed our z-space targeting and navigation system, and rr-we lost an engine trying to get away. The ship's alright as long as we drift in deep space or zero-space, but rr-we need to land to rr-make repairs, and with an rr-engine out…" His head shook back and forth sadly, and my imagination finished the thought. "Rr-that's why the vissers are rr-sending us through all our z-space coordinates at rr-random, to find a rr-safe planet to make a controlled landing on."
I was sorry I asked. Now I knew that at any moment, we could all die in a fiery crash through a planet's atmosphere, if somebody miscalculated. With the transition out of zero-space and into real space, though, I was allowed a break, and I wandered back up to the yeerk pool center. It was also one of the only parts of the ship with a vid-screen to show our surroundings outside the ship. Since we had not yet transitioned, the screen still showed the blank whiteness of z-space, but as I watched, the screen flashed and turned black, dotted with stars. I thought I even felt a lurch in my gedd body as we arrived in real space. We were near enough to the closest star to see it clearly, and even make out some of the planets orbiting it. I was far from the only yeerk who paused to stare at the vid-screen.
The sun was a medium-sized yellow, and at the moment, I could make out two round, rocky shapes that looked like planets. In those first few minutes out of z-space, nobody seemed too concerned or excited about this solar system. Apparently they'd seen quite a few already that ended up failures. It was nearly an hour before we began to realize that something was different.
I learned from other controllers that the vissers would send the ship back into z-space after about half an hour, when they realized that whatever system we'd landed in didn't have a safe or habitable planet. But something about this time was different. The pool ship wasn't going back into z-space.
In fact, somebody seemed to have decided we had found the planet we were looking for. We were definitely moving closer to the sun, and one of the planets was getting larger. Soon we could make out at least two natural satellites around it, as well as another, red-colored planet. The planet getting steadily larger was a greenish blue color with swirls of white, which boded well for an atmosphere. A few controllers even pointed out two brownish landmasses before the sub-vissers yelled at us to get back to work.
Whenever I got an opportunity, I would watch the planet growing larger on the vid-screen, until eventually, Sub-Visser Two-Hundred-Twenty-Nine came to give me my next set of orders. I thought he was going to send me back to the kitchens, but he didn't. "Rr-I've been called to the rr-bridge. You'll come along, rr-to help me."
It took me by surprise—it wasn't much of a promotion, but it was more than I was expecting. More likely, I just happened to be the first non-busy gedd assistant he saw. But that's how I got onto the bridge, the same day we ended up crash-landing on a strange planet.
And did you notice anything out of the ordinary while you were on the bridge?
Everything seemed normal to me…but then, this was my first day. Besides, Sub-Visser Two-Hundred-Twenty-Nine had me running back and forth between his quarters and the bridge most of the time, fetching chips and drives that seemed useless—though I'm sure they were actually vital information.
The only other yeerks I recognized were the vissers themselves, and that was because, in addition to the two of them having strong, imposing hork-bajir hosts in their prime, the sub-visser addressed Visser Seven and Visser Twelve by rank.
That was how I learned to tell them apart, as well, because mostly, they looked alike. Visser Seven's host was a tall and slender hork-bajir female; she had two thick legs ending in talons, a pair of arms with clawed hands, scaly green skin, a beaked mouth, and of course the serrated blades protruding from the forehead, limbs and tail. As the higher-ranked visser, she gave most of the orders.
Visser Twelve…I wasn't sure whether he was subordinate to Visser Seven or not, but he seemed content to let her give the orders. As far as the rest of us were concerned, though, he expected to be obeyed when he did open his mouth, and we listened. His male host was even larger and taller than Visser Seven's, with an extra horn on his forehead, but otherwise they looked quite similar to my gedd eyes.
To tell the truth, though, I was somewhat less interested in observing the vissers than I was in watching the planet we were approaching. Like the yeerk pool, the ship's bridge had a vid-screen. But this one was both bigger and of a higher quality than the one I had seen before, and it was zoomed in on the blue-green planet. I could see that it had oceans and three continents, as well as two natural moons. More intriguing, however, were the three metallic objects clearly visible now, orbiting the planet closely. The bridge went completely silent the moment the strange objects came into view.
"Rr-those are spaceships," one of the other gedd-controllers spoke up, breaking the silence. "Rr-someone's already been here."
"The question is, are they still here?" Visser Twelve rumbled. "What species is responsible for that build? I don't think I recognize the ships."
"Any activity on them?" Visser Seven added.
The gedd opted to answer Visser Seven first. "Rr-No, visser. They seem to be rr-depowered. Most likely rr-abandoned. No signs of rr-life aboard."
"So, someone sent three decent-sized ships to a backwater planet and left them there to rot?" The skepticism was clear in Visser Seven's voice.
"Rr-they seem very old. Rr-I don't have any rr-records of these ships rr-in the database. Says it's rr-not a known species." There was an uneasy ripple of fear among the controllers. A trio of unknown, abandoned ships, orbiting an unexplored planet, stank of bad luck, I guess.
"What about the planet itself? Does it support life? Those colors make me hopeful," Visser Twelve said.
About this time, I was sent away again, to fetch fresh meat for the taxxon-controllers with some of my fellow low-ranking yeerks. I left with reluctance, and not just because I missed the rest of the conversation. Feeding a taxxon was always dangerous—you could never know whether one of those carnivorous worms would get over-excited and mistake the server as part of the meal, and even the yeerks inside their heads couldn't seem to control that hunger. I think the less said about that experience, the better.
When I had completed my tasks and returned to the sub-visser, the conversation on the bridge had died down. The pool ship's sensors had completed their scans of the planet's surface, and they were completing their reports of the planet's lifeforms and any technology present. I stifled a yawn as I listened—it was going into the ship's night-cycle and my gedd body was used to sleeping by now, but this was hardly the time to take a rest.
The scans had discovered clear signs of life on the planet, even what seemed to be a primitive civilization, which boded well for potential host bodies if we needed them. There was an undercurrent of discomfort among the gedd. It took me awhile to even notice it, but eventually, I managed to pinpoint the cause of it. It was the ships—a silent and ominous reminder that we still didn't know where they came from or who they belonged to.
"Rr-can we be certain this rr-species is rr-really as primitive as they seem? This rr-may be an offshoot of a more powerful force, a colony," one of the sub-vissers on board cautioned.
"But there's no communication signals from the planet, no technology at all that we can detect. Whoever built those ships was much more advanced than the species on that planet, and they don't seem to care about taking back their property," Visser Twelve pointed out.
A taxxon sub-visser spoke up through his translation communicator (only the other taxxon controllers would've been able to understand the incomprehensible taxxon tongue, anyway), and said, "We are losing speed and fuel as we approach the planet. We must soon decide: either attempt an emergency landing on this planet's surface and subdue whatever species we discover, or retreat back into zero-space and start our search over again."
Visser Seven grunted, and everyone's eyes turned to her. "The galaxy's teeming with andalites and other races too powerful for us to face at the moment. We need to regroup and repair before we can get in touch with the rest of the Empire; to do that, we need to make a landing, no matter the risks. I doubt we're going to find a more suitable planet than this one." She paused thoughtfully. "No time to find all the centers of their population, but try to aim for the mountains. We're less likely to encounter a large city that way, and I'd rather not alert the local population to our presence immediately if we can avoid it."
"Yes, visser!" The pilots and navigators, most of them in many-eyed and many-clawed taxxon hosts, leapt to obey Visser Seven's orders.
"How much power is left in the right engine now?" Visser Twelve asked.
"…It's down to five percent effectiveness, sir." The taxxon's translator didn't convey emotion, but there was a noticeable tremor of fear in his hissing and spitting, sounds which he didn't bother to translate. Now that I was concentrating on it, I could feel the ship listing slightly to one side, which the artificial gravity was failing to correct.
"Well then," Visser Twelve rumbled. "Prepare for a rough landing, people." And that's when we began our "descent."
But it was a controlled landing in the beginning, not a complete crash?
It…started out that way. We were going faster than we should have as we entered the atmosphere, and I wasn't sure how the pilots planned to compensate for it. We started out aiming for the smaller continent in the west, but there was trouble maneuvering the ship correctly as we continued. But at that point, I think we still would have been alright, if things had gone according to plan.
What exactly happened to make the pool ship crash completely, the way it did, Odrish Three-Zero-Eight?
We were over the ocean and listing towards the larger continent, and something hit us. At first, the vissers and sub-vissers thought it was a fighter-plane of some sort, that the species below was more advanced than we realized. But it wasn't a beam weapon that struck us, just a stream of pure fire, as far as the sensors could tell. And…I didn't see much, but it did show up on the vid-screen, sir, just before it attacked us. It didn't look like a ship at all. It looked like…a flying creature of some sort. It looked alive.
…And what happened to this biological fire-spitter of yours?
I don't know. I tried to find and help the sub-visser, but the bridge dissolved into chaos after that—the other engine started to fail, and we lost control entirely. Whatever it was, it hit us dead-on at short range, and then immediately vanished from the sky. I don't know how…it couldn't have flown away so quickly, but it disappeared from all of our sensors, and as far as I know, nobody's seen our attacker since. But I know what I saw, sir, and it wasn't a ship.
It's not impossible for a fire-producing creature to evolve, but it does seem unlikely. You were new to your host body, and gedd eyes are not that efficient. The crash was chaotic, as well. Weren't you one of the ones who had to be rescued from their host body?
They had to crush the gedd's skull to get me out of his brain. He…was already doomed at that point.
A pity…we lost so many of our most useful hosts in the crash, not to mention both of our noble vissers. We will need to be careful while we scope out this planet, but the local natives do seem promising.
Sir?
A scouting group has already captured a few of the native species. Sub-Visser Two-Hundred-Twenty-Nine —excuse me, Visser Twelve now—specifically requested that you be one of the yeerks to infest them. Be honored; you'll be one of the first yeerks to control a new species. You may even be able to find something in their memories to prove your story of this "attacker" of yours.
I…yes, sir.