26

Possessor

'A' drifted aboard the launch he had stolen earlier, as it reached the periapsis of Midinia. The trajectory would take it back to the same orbital plane that the Kl'Deesius had taken earlier, but he wasn't concerned with such things. All he knew was that he needed to get to this point in space.

He wasn't even sure what precisely compelled him to do this, only that it had been a deep seated instinct from years ago, when he was on Earth.

Consciously, none of this made sense to him. He enjoyed making others suffer for his own amusement. He had taken great pleasure in torturing everyone that he had taken from the colony. He had railed at anyone that might resist him. Finally, he had been determined to free the Earth people from whatever this society was that the 'aliens' had brought along with them.

It was this kind of thinking that the fragment of consciousness residing in his mind capitalized upon. The species were a non-corporeal, gaseous collective mind, one that could split its consciousness into individual units akin to the individuals that they used as hosts, and very similar to those individuals that they had descended from so many millions of years before.

The fragment had used 'A' and his tendency to cause suffering as a means to get it to try and fragment the alliance between the Tau Cetians and the Earth people, and had met with near complete failure. When the fragment had encountered this individual on the surface of the planet, on one of the very few occasions this individual had ventured out from his luxury shelter built by his ancestors and provided for by untold amounts of elitist wealth, it had no idea what it would find. The mission had begun as one of possession, subjugation of the entire populace of Earth, while attempting to evade the notice of the Tau Cetian people, who had developed an uncanny ability to detect their presence. As it begun to infuse itself with the man's mind, it found concepts of intellectual superiority, desire for control, a strong belief that he was meant to be someone great and powerful, and he had considered himself a master planner, a strategist, and a leader of men.

The fragment had never known delusion, and did not know at the time, that the man in question was kidding himself.

Nevertheless, the fragment did find a use for this man, and as soon as it realized the man was not as competent, skilled or charismatic as he thought he was, it triggered instincts and inserted vague impressions of what it wanted him to do. This was a new trick for their species, in that they did not take total control over the host, but rather turned their natural personality traits to their own advantage, in this case, encouraging more paranoia, inflating the sadistic tendencies of the man, and even going as far as sharpening the man's focus so that he could obtain critical information that the fragment could deploy into a later plan.

The fragment had directed 'A' to capture and detain a Tau Cetian technician, one that had been fortunate for the fragment, to have been running behind schedule in deploying some command code access to the settlement so that their security forces could maintain watch over the Earth people. This came in useful when infiltrating the command network, and allowed the fragment to give 'A' the knowledge needed to operate the control systems for the Tau Cetian information network, if only temporarily.

It had been a boon to finally tap a way to gain access to the Tau Cetian command network and gain access to the teleporter technology, and gave the fragment a way to return to its' people and provide an intelligence report without the Tau Cetians being able to stop it in time. The whole take-over of the Kl'Deesius was a diversion, as was the kidnap and torture of the human prisoners. The fragment did not care one way or another what the humans did to each other, only that it was able to tap them to find a weakness.

Now, as the fragment prepared to signal its' host ship to close in on their position, it prepared to have 'A' eject itself into space. The intelligence and the personality of the subject was of little consequence. The fragment would be able to take everything it needed without issue, even if the host perished completely. What having 'A' near the ship and in position to eject into the fragment's own host ship would provide instead, was an opportunity to take genetic material that the fragments' own species could then turn to its' own advantage.

This was a long game for the non-corporeal species known to the humans as the Possessors, and one that had caused a great schism early in their non-corporeal existence.

Somewhere out there was another hive mind, one who was vehemently opposed to their objectives here in human space, but they were far less powerful, and so far, had stayed distant. None of their kind had been seen in this half of the galaxy in hundreds of thousands of years.

The organic vessel closed the distance, altering its' velocity so it held still relative to the launch, and 'A' tapped a control, ejecting the canopy into space, along with himself.

That same instant, the host ship opened up, creating a cavity for the host body to fly into, sealing itself again in an instant.

The host human body would be preserved, and the fragment detached itself slowly from the host, and re-absorbed into its own host ship, reconnecting with the rest of its' consciousness and becoming a whole being once more. Now, it was time to leave the system and return to the hive mind so it could reconnect with the rest of them.

Very slowly, very carefully, the organic vessel that the Possessor now inhabited, began to reverse direction, increasing its speed to increase its orbit. Once the opportunity presented itself, it would break orbit and head to a Lagrange point between this fifth planet and the gas giant beyond, where it would hopefully have enough distance to make a safe transition to the under-fabric of space-time and exit the system in a more timely manner.

As the journey continued, and the Possessor consciousness patiently waited for the right moment, the host ship ejected the canopy into space now that it had sequestered the human body safely within. Their ships were capable of preserving any organic tissue, living or dead, for weeks at a time. They would be able to get it back to the hive collective long before 'A' expired.