"There he is!" Kara shouted, and Chit whirled and fired at the flickering 
tail as it vanished behind a clump of leaves. Two leaps and he was there,
but the anesthetic dart was stuck in the trunk -- another miss.

Now where had he gone... Kara hadn't shouted, so he was still in this tree.
Chit carefully prowled from branch to branch, trying to stay out of sight as
much as possible. But the bastard was probably watching him the whole time.
It was hopeless. 

"Come out and fight, coward," he chittered in squirrel, but he wasn't even
sure if that  would make sense to a normal squirrel from Ohio, let alone
Missourri. It certainly didn't work. He was beginning to see why UCirc's 
general policy was to only convert willing squirrels.

Suddenly Kara shouted, and he heard the hissing sound of darts being fired,
and the rustle of leaves from the far side of the tree as someone moved. He 
dashed from branch to branch, but by the time he got there it was over. The
squirrel staggered along the branch of the next tree over, one of Kara's
darts in his side, then slipped and fell to the ground. Chit leaped off the
branch to see if he was okay -- squirrels didn't usually jump off branches
withough bounce-packs...

oops...

[crunch]

Luckily, the trees hadn't been very tall, and squirrels were light. After 
a couple seconds he realized that nothing was broken, and helped Kara carry
their captive back to the burrow for Zaphod to convert.

Zaphod was fiddling with a strange mechanical contraption, which Chit guessed
had been in the boxes they'd carted from UCirc. "Is that the experiment?" 
Chit asked. Zaphod snorted, but didn't answer.

"You have him. Good." He left what he was doing and went to examine the
barrels of virus piled over by one wall. He rejected three before finding one
to his liking, which he rolled into a receptacle in the side of the machine.

He handed Chit a clamp. "Plug this in, will you?" 

Chit looked around. "I don't see any outlets. We dug this thing yesterday,
you know?"

Zaphod gave a pained sigh. "Clamp it onto the transformer. I thought you
said you were a scout? Isn't that why you were assigned to this mission?"

"More of a spy, really," Chit muttered.

"I'll do it," Kara said, "He'd probably electrocute himself anyway." She
ran outside with the wire, and thirty seconds later the machine hummed to
life.

"What is it?" Chit asked.

"Classified," Zaphod replied, "Now put him inside, will you?"

"I didn't know conversion needed a machine. I thought you just injected them.
Hell, I thought you could just BITE them."

"The machine makes sure he survives the process. This is the portable 
version." Chit looked at the foot high apparatus, and decided that, at least
from a squirrel's point of view, 'portable' was not the word to describe it.
"Now put him in."

"You do it," Chit said, "I'll go check on Kara, she should be back by now."
He figured she was just waiting for one of them to tell her to take the
clamp back in, but he didn't want to get any closer to that thing than he
had too -- it just felt wrong. Besides, Zaphod was getting far too arrogant.

"Kara?" he said, stepping out into the sunlight. He followed the wire as it
slanted up towards the power lines that ran along the road. He checked the
poles and the trees, and looked all around, but Kara was nowhere to be seen.

Then, off to one side, he thought he heard a faint chittering. As quietly as 
he could, he crept through the undergrowth until the source was clear.

Kara was there, talking to two strange squirrels. In English, although he
couldn't quite make out what they were saying. He walked up to see what was 
going on.

"What's going on?"

"These squirrels tried to jump me after I hooked up the power," she 
explained. "It seems that that squirrel we were chasing wasn't a normal
squirrel at all. He was scouting for the resistance. Or what's left of it."

Chit flinched. "So what would happen if we gave him the squirrelvirus?" He
looked at the two -- a pretty sorry sight. "They don't look too stable."

"Virus?" one of the strange squirrels chittered.

"Nanites." The other, a bit... fluffier, replied.

Kara [shrugflicked]. "Probably nothing good. We'd better tell Zaphod not to
go through with it."

"Not!" the fluffy one screeched.

"I think he already has..."

--
Chit                    (damned bunnies can't do *anything* right!)