Chapter 1

Robin Hampton and Megan Watkins skidded to a stop beside the coach and Robin’s daughter. Mitzi sat up, her right hand going to her forehead.

“Owww,” she complained.

“What happened?” asked Robin.

“I don’t know,” moaned Mitzi. “He went all goofy and started flopping around and then head butted me.”

“He’s unconscious,” said Megan, who was Robin’s best friend. She also happened to be the mother of Todd, who was Mitzi’s boyfriend.

“Do you think he had a stroke?” asked Robin.

“He’s a little young for that, don’t you think?”

Chuck groaned.

“What should we do?” asked Robin. “Should we call 911?

“What if it turns out he just fainted or something?” asked Megan. “Do you know how much they charge for an ambulance ride these days? It’s obscene!”

“We could take him to the ER,” suggested Mitzi.

“We’re not an ambulance,” said her mother.

It must be noted here that while stereotypes are rarely good things to employ, that is not always the case. Robin Hampton was a natural blond, ex cheerleader, for whom math, science and just about any other subject had been a challenge. Robin was the epitome of the dumb blond, primarily because she was a dumb blond. That said, she was still a wonderful mother, in spite of being a single one. She had a good imagination, but some difficulty in recognizing the difference between fantasy and fact. That was mitigated by the fact that her children kept an eye on her. They were a very close family.

“Since he’s not bleeding, we don’t have to be an ambulance,” said Mitzi, who knew exactly how to phrase things so that her mother understood them. “We can just give him a ride.”

“Oh,” said Robin. She leaned down to slap coach’s cheeks gently. “Wake up, Chuck,” she said. “We can’t carry you to the car.”

Coach Dillworthy opened his eyes. They focused on the deep cleavage between Robin’s heavy breasts which were, at the moment, gently cupped in a straining halter top.

“Boobs” he whispered, and smiled.

Robin, who had had a thing for Coach Dillworthy for over two years now, but had never acted on it because she was six years his elder, felt a familiar tingle in her loins.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

Izzlestax strained harder than he had ever strained in his entire existence. He’d found a set of pathways that he sensed would control his host, but he also sensed something was amiss. Logically, he should be in complete control by now. He explored, sending his senses further through the tissue and felt something that, he had a gut feeling was pain in the host. It was remarkable how similar thought patterns were between species. His host was injured. That must be the problem. He found and explored autonomic nervous impulses that controlled major organs. They seemed to be in good condition. He didn’t want to ask for recall and try again. Getting control over this host had been difficult enough. He suddenly realized he hadn’t made an initial report and opened a comm channel.

“Izzy to base,” he projected.

He waited for someone to answer the comm channel.

Nothing.

He sent again: “Izzy to base, come in base.”

Still nothing.

He switched over to mental impulse, which would establish mind meld with Sergeant Dulpprizwa. Dulpprizwa’s consciousness should have appeared in the host’s mind as a shining blue sphere that Izzy could touch with an imaginary tentacle. That was how Izzy had always visualized a mind meld. He communicated through the tentacle.

But there was no sphere.

He came to the conclusion that he was cut off from the ship for some reason. He had no idea why that was, but he suspected, instinctively, that it had something to do with that pain tag he’d noticed as he explored the host brain. He decided to explore further.

He started looking for the hosts sensory inputs.

“Chuck?” Robin let him look. That was normal for a man, and she wanted him to be normal.

“Thirty-eight dee,” said Chuck, blinking.

“What?”

His hands rose from the ground beside him and came to grip her breasts, as though they were rocks on a climbing wall. He twisted them in opposite directions gently and said “I lust for thee, orbs of desire.”

Robin gasped and leaned back. His hands, now claw-like, attempted to follow and reattach to the mounds of her breasts.

“Chuck!” she scolded. “I can’t believe you did that!”

“I can,” muttered Mitzi under her breath. Ever since she had succumbed to coach Dillworthy’s rather blatant attempts at seduction, she had noticed that he had a breast fetish. Not that she minded. He was very very good at nipple love, and he didn’t short her on foreplay. But she saw how he looked at other girls’ breasts. He was a horndog, plain and simple. But he was a much more mature horndog than guys her age, including her boyfriend, who truly had a one track mind. But coach, as lusty as a good pair of breasts made him, had never been this bald-faced about things. Something was wrong with him. It was obvious. “We need to get him to a doctor,” she said. “Something is really wrong with him.”

“Help me get him up,” said Megan. “Let’s get him to my car. It’s the closest.”

The essence of Izzlestax couldn’t sweat, because its physical shell was in a climate controlled cylinder. And making the host sweat wouldn’t do any good. Izzy’s problem was that this host was unimaginably difficult to control. He had found the portion of the host brain that was active, and held the host’s essence. That essence was incredibly strong. While Izzy could exert complete control over various parts of the host brain, he could not yet control the whole package, small as it was. And trying to use the rest of the brain was like yelling in an empty cavern. All he got were echoes of his thoughts.

The hosts visual organs suddenly began working and Izzy analyzed the inputs. The host was operating on his own for the moment. Izzy decided to just ride along and gather intel. He needed more information and practice before he could completely take over all the functions of this human brain.

He secured the part of the brain he was currently inhabiting. Idly he explored, trying to find what tasted like memory centers. Locating some he explored and found a stash of information on the body he was inhabiting. His current resting position was in something called the prefrontal cortex. It had something to do with behavior, but wasn’t used all that much, which was why he was able to wrest control of it from his host. He was quite sure now that the host had some kind of injury, but still seemed to be functioning reasonably well.

He felt the host attempt to gain control over the prefrontal cortex again, and retreated into that part of the brain to secure his control. The barrier he put up could not be breached by a mind this undeveloped. He was sure of that. He would just watch for a while and figure out how to control this human. He wasn’t about to admit defeat to those on the scout ship. He tried again to establish contact with the ship, but there was still nothing.

Captain Xixxnoir was no longer bored. Lieutenant Izzlestax’s communications had cut off after that last word, which meant nothing in the language the Blagtox used. He snapped to Rilpak to research it in the archives of intell about this planet. Rilpak was under the hood, where he could call up any of the electronic communications that had been intercepted coming from this planet for years. The Blagtox were always scanning the universe, looking for primitive electronic communications. Such signals meant the inhabitants had achieved a certain technological level that allowed them to locate and harvest resources and flourish in the process. That almost always meant that the Blagtox could flourish there too. If the natives couldn’t be co-opted into the empire as slaves, they were simply destroyed and used for food. Or mulch, if they tasted nasty. In addition, the signals could be used to learn a lot about the inhabitants as a scout ship approached.

“Got something!” came the muffled voice of Rilpak. The hood rose. Rilpak punched a button which sent information to the big screen so they could all see it. Two Earthlings appeared on the screen. They were Earthlings of the human variety, which were suspected of being the most intelligent on the planet. Much was known about humans. They had sent thousands of hours of descriptive information out into space, as if they were showing someone what they were like. It was through these signals that their language was decoded. It turned out there were different languages, which suggested they had co-opted beings from other planets, though that was not agreed upon. The only vehicles they had that appeared to be able to leave the atmosphere of the planet were incredibly primitive, inefficient tubes powered by chemical combustion. They seemed to be proud of that. Many of their electromagnetic signals displayed those vehicles rising from the planet in clouds of wasteful thermal reactions. The spectra collected over the years was difficult to interpret sometimes. For example, the earliest of recordings always showed humans covering most of their bodies with clothing, some of it obviously functional, most of it not. Later signals, however, sometimes showed them with little or no clothing on. The most recent interceptions had tons and tons of data showing them with clothing on, then taking it off and interacting physically, only to put clothes back on. There was an intense debate on whether parts of the planet were heating up due to volcanic activity.

“I love your fucking boobs,” said the male on the screen. He reached for twin mounds of flesh on the female’s upper torso, and squeezed them, as if they contained some substance he was trying to make come out.

Rilpak spoke. “The mounds are collectively called boobs, breasts, tits, hooters, flappers, bullets, milk bags, bazongas, melons, chest puppies, fun bags, headlights, the twins, and some few dozens of other names. All humans have them, but they are functional only in the female, who manufactures something called milk in them and then feeds it to infant humans.

He punched another button and a new picture blossomed on the screen. It was a close-up of one boob, with human fingers squeezing a dark nodule located in the front center of the device. As the fingers squeezed, thin streams of white liquid burst from the nodule, going in different directions. As Rilpak cycled to yet another picture, a miniature human opened its mouth and sealed around a similar nodule on an adult female human’s chest. This one was protruding from the female’s clothing.

“This may be the feeding of an infant human,” said Rilpak, pleased with himself for finding and tying together the various disparate recordings.

“Why would Lieutenant Izzlestax be hungry?” asked the captain. “Are you telling me he jumped into the body of a human infant? How could this be? How could an infant be the most predatory creature within range?”

“I’ll keep looking,” said Rilpak. “Maybe there’s some other meaning for the word.”

“What did you find on the other words ... that string that might have been a sentence?”

“I got nothing on them at all,” said Rilpak. “I tried all the languages in the database.

“Keep trying,” said Captain Xixxnoir, as if it was his own idea.

Robin and Megan walked on either side of Coach Dillworthy, who was taller than both of them, and a lot heavier. They staggered as his feet stumbled along between them. He looked down at each of them in turn, and his hands came around their backs to cup a breast in each one. He squeezed and giggled.

“Bippity boppity boob!” he chanted. “There’s something stiff in my tube!”

“Chuck!” gasped Robin as he squeezed her left breast.

“That knock on the head tipped over his naughty box,” grunted Megan, whose right breast was being massaged by the big, handsome man.

“Stop it, Chuck!” yipped Robin, even though she’d had delightful dreams about this very thing happening.

“My cock’s all hard. It’s full of lard,” sang Coach.

“You know,” said Megan. “Roger has been neglecting me lately. Maybe I should just take Coach home and nurse him for a bit.”

“So spread ‘em wide, babe and let’s fuck!” yelled Coach. He stopped suddenly, dragging the two women to a stop as well. “No wait,” he said, looking all around. “That didn’t rhyme.”

“Come on, Coach,” said Robin. “Just a little farther, and we can go for a nice ride to the emergency room.”

“I have an emergency!” he said, his voice sounding like he was trying to be a radio announcer.

“Yes, you do,” said Megan. “So start walking again.”

“It’s in my pants!” he barked. He leaned down to peer at Robin’s face. “Hi, Robin. I don’t feel too good. I think I could use a stiff one.” He blinked. “No, wait. I mean I have a stiff one. You could use a stiff one. I’ve been trying to give you one for years, ever since Tom took off.” He blinked. “Am I supposed to be talking about this? Why does my head hurt?”

“Just sit down in the car, Chuck,” cooed Megan, turning the coach so that his backside was pointed at the door Mitzi was holding open for them.

Then, just as they got him into the car, he lost consciousness and went limp again.

“Should we unfreeze the rest of the landing party?” asked Munwavvatii. He’d been on at least a dozen first contacts, and none of them had gone like this one. He felt nervous for the first time in his career.

“It’s a little premature for that,” said the captain. “I don’t think it’s likely that he jumped into an infant. Besides, his vitals look fine. He’s probably just having a commo problem. If the host mind is so primitive that they don’t have telepathy yet, then he’ll have to grow that capability in the host brain. That takes time.”

“I’m just worried because he did communicate, and now he’s not,” said the first contact specialist.

Captain Xixxnoir flicked a minor tentacle toward his control panel. The picture of the human infant eating at the breast of the female disappeared and was replaced by a six section chart showing the cognitive function centers in Izzlestax’s brain, there in the transfer tube.

“As you can see, his brain is registering no distress. He’s just having a commo problem,”

Izzy took stock. His host was injured. That much was obvious. It had gone dormant, which meant it was probably trying to repair the damage. Izzy decided to help.

He let his consciousness float around the body, looking for things that didn’t make sense. He paid particular attention to the area where the two lower appendages met the torso. That had been a very active area when the host was awake. He traced neural pathways and examined the condition of tissue. He located areas where tissue was being replaced, but it was only on a cellular level that appeared to be routine maintenance. He went on.

“Aha!” he said, finding a tube, which was obviously supposed to transport something, but which ended abruptly. The end was closed off by scarring. The end of another tube nearby displayed the same problem. Somehow, this tube had been severed, and the ends had scarred as it healed. He had no idea whether restoring it would help, but he had nothing else to do. Searching the part of the brain that he had converted to his use, he sent signals, causing the muscles to push the two severed ends together. Calling on the cells that were making repairs in other areas, he surrounded the joint with them. It took him almost an hour, but he finally confirmed that the connection was viable now, and that other cells, shaped like little round balls with a tail, could now travel through it without problem. Once he was certain proper function had been restored, he tried waking the host. It didn’t work. Then he tried to establish communication with the ship again, also without success. Giving a mental sigh, he kept looking for things to repair.

“Mrs. Hampton?”

Robin looked up into the dark eyes of a doctor who reminded her of Doctor Foreman on the TV show House.

“I go by Ms. Hampton,” said Robin, automatically. Ever since her husband had discovered he was gay and took off to live with his best friend, Danny, she had decided that the married honorific put up barriers to advances from men ... real men. Never mind that Tom had gotten her pregnant when she was just sixteen.

“I’m Doctor Neuman. I understand you brought Mr. Dillworthy to the hospital?”

“Uh huh,” said Robin.

“Did you see what happened to him?”

“No,” said Robin, who usually took questions very literally and answered them the same way.

The doctor had obviously expected to get additional information, and looked annoyed. Mitzi raised her hand, as if she were in school.

“He was talking to me one second, and he had some kind of fit. He flopped around on the ground and then banged his head on an aluminum bench. That’s when he went unconscious.”

“Oh,” said the doctor, looking the girl up and down. She was delicious looking in her loose soccer uniform. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” said Mitzi, politely.

“Do you know how to contact his family?” asked Doctor Neuman.

“He doesn’t have any,” said Mitzi. “He lives alone. His parents are dead and he doesn’t have any brothers or sisters or anything like that.”

Her mother looked at her in surprise.

“I didn’t know you knew so much about Coach,” she said.

Mitzi decided not to tell her mother that she’d learned that, and much, much more as she relaxed, after Coach Dillworthy fucked her socks off in his bed and they engaged in pillow talk before he fucked her socks off again. Coach was always good for going twice. She was very happy he’d had a vasectomy and she didn’t have to worry about when, during her cycle, he fucked her socks off.

“I think he told us about that on one of our road trips,” she said, innocently.

“Well, we need to do an MRI, and he’s still unconscious,” said the doctor.

“Well then go ahead,” said Robin. “I’m sure he’d want you to do one.”

Doctor Neuman looked at her like she was crazy.

“I can do it without his consent if you’re sure he hit his head,” he said to Mitzi.

“He hit it hard,” she said, helpfully. “And he woke up and talked gibberish and then passed out again.”

The doctor nodded, turned away, and hurried through swinging double doors.

Izzy had only inhabited one foreign brain before. He was a Lieutenant not because of his experience, or time in service. His great uncle was General Zaggtorbex, in sector nine of the empire, and had pulled some strings. His previous host had been a marine species, that had enough intelligence to know it was hungry all the time. It also knew how to search for food, which consisted of pretty much anything it could get its razor sharp teeth into. Izzy had almost dropped to the same level before they sucked his essence out of the creature. He had convinced the medics that he was fine, though he had to undergo counseling for the nightmares he had. That creature’s brain was where he learned how to identify pain centers in a brain. His host had been in pain a lot, usually when one of the others of its’ species was trying to eat it.

So Izzy thought he’d been through the toughest experience there was out there. This species was clearly more advanced and more intelligent than that fish had been. But try as he did, he couldn’t break through to communicate with his superiors on the ship. Furthermore, his host kept becoming dormant without any warning. Izzy didn’t become dormant when that happened. He was just trapped in a brain that, while it kept his host alive, wasn’t giving Izzy any information to work with. He’d found the organs that processed sound, and he could hear voices of other humans, but his vocabulary wasn’t up to the task of translating them.

For example; A male voice had just said “Process to MRI STAT. May be a bleeder. Move it! Move it! Move it!”

Now what the fuck did that mean?

He was pretty sure he’d found the visual works too, but the host had external protective shields over the eyes, and they were deployed at the moment.

He visualized clamping a minor tentacle onto the aural input and heard the sounds that meant technological machinery. He felt the host body moving laterally. Since the legs weren’t moving, and he could feel pressure on the skin covering the back of the host head, he decided the host was lying down.

“Clear?” came a disembodied voice.

“All clear. Slice ‘em and dice ‘em,” said another voice.

“You better hope the chief doesn’t hear you say that,” said the first voice.

Then all hell broke loose, and Lieutenant Izzlestax held on to his own sanity for dear life.

It was as though he suddenly had his body back, and something was trying to tear him out of the host’s brain bodily. There was a screaming wail as what felt like unshielded cosmic rays bored through the host’s brain. There was no place to hide from the deadly rays, and all Izzy could do was add his own silent scream to the electronic noise and beg the sixteen gods to let him live.

“We’ve got a problem!” yelled Sergeant Dulpprizwa, who had jumped up and was looking at the transfer tube. “He’s screaming into the mind meld!” His major tentacles wrapped protectively around the scutum that protected his own brain and he winced. “I can buffer the noise, but he’s in some kind of major distress.”

The captain turned to Munwavvatii. “Wake up the rest!” he snapped. “We may have to go get him.”

Rilpak had abandoned the porn he’d been watching. The human males only had one tentacle, and it was stubby and useless at first glance. Even extended it only grew a few inches. But it was what they did with that tentacle that was so bizarre. They actually stuck it up inside the female! Never in his wildest dreams would he have thought of doing something like that. Once they took over this planet, though, he was going to try it. It must be a lot of fun, because the male did it a lot, inserting the tentacle and then pulling it out, only to insert it again. Over and over they did that until it appeared to cause them intense pain. It had to be painful, because inevitably, they cradled the tentacle in their hand and it bled in long, white spurts. He closed the hood. “What if we can’t get him out of the host?” he asked.