Rattlesnake Morph

The rattlesnake. That would be the morph to use. What better way to strike suddenly than with the body of a snake?

I focused my mind on the snake. I concentrated on the change. I felt it begin almost immediately.

It was unlike any morph I had done before. Usually my legs would become some other type of leg. My arms would become some other type of arm, even if they were only fins.

But this time there were no arms, no legs. Nothing of my own body would find an echo in this new shape, except for my eyes and tail.

My legs simply melted away. Withered. Disappeared. I fell to the ground, a legless stump.

My arms shriveled and evaporated.

I heard the sounds of grinding inside my body, as all my bones melted together into my spine.

I was shrinking, but since I was already lying on the grass, it didn't seem as extreme as it sometimes did. The stalks of grass grew higher around my head, and the purple flowers grew larger, but there wasn't the usual feeling of falling as I shrank.

What I did feel was a terrible sense of utter weakness. I had no arms! I had no legs!

But my tail . . . ah, that I kept, although in a very different form. The blade of my tail suddenly broke up into a sort of chain. There were dozens of raspy blisters, all connected. The rattler's tail.

My fur disappeared very swiftly, and over my bare skin scales grew. Like tiny, interlocked armor-plates that formed a pattern in brown and black and tan.

I grew a mouth. A huge mouth for the size of my body. I was a tube, and the open end was my mouth. It was a shocking body. A bizarre body. Stranger even than morphing an ant or a fish. I was a creature with no separate parts.

My Andalite stalk eyes went dark. A large, amazingly long, fast-moving, forked tongue grew in my mouth. But it wasn't like a human tongue.

This tongue's sense of taste was beyond anything a human tongue could ever achieve. This tongue tasted the very air.

And then, I felt the feature I had waited for. Huge, long, curved fangs. Fangs that were each a tiny, hollow needle. Above them poison glands grew and filled with toxin.

I felt the snake's mind emerge beneath my own awareness.

It was not a hot, driven mind like some animals. It did not overwhelm me with fear and hunger. It was a slow, calm, deliberate mind. The mind of a predator. A hunter. A calm, deliberate killer.

And the senses!

The lidless eyes saw strange colors, but they gave me a good range of vision.

The tongue, which shot out from a slit on the bottom of my mouth, taste-smelled the air. It brought me an incredible array of sensations: the scent of grass and earth, the scent of insects, and the scent of living, warm-blooded creatures.

Just below and behind my snake nostrils were two pits that sensed heat, especially the levels of heat put off by prey.

Yes, this was a good morph to use. The Visser would not expect me. The Visser's Andalite body was fast, but it was not faster than the snake. I knew that from my own experience.

I began to move, slithering through the grass. I moved with sinuous grace, easily, silently. I followed my tongue. It shot out and back, again and again, sensing, smelling, tasting.

I felt the rattler's mind with my own. It was unafraid. It had no honor. It had no friends to worry about, no family to disappoint, no laws to break. It felt no loneliness. The snake had always been alone.

I settled into the grass and waited, patient, motionless, counting off the minutes in my head.

And then I felt the vibration of the earth beneath me. The vibration that was the sound of a Bug fighter landing. Then another. Just two. Not far away.

It was time.

The Yeerks were coming. Visser Three was coming.

And as I drowned my fear in the calm lake of the snake's predator brain, I prepared to kill.

And to die.