...the Hork-Bajir were walking killing machines. Amazingly fast. Incredibly strong. Armored, bladed, almost fearless. They were the shock troops of the Yeerk empire. Hork-Bajir had come close to killing Rachel several times. And all of us had felt the Hork-Bajir blades at least once...

...you see this kind of thing all the time in nature. It's a dominance ritual...The two Hork-Bajir had stopped slashing. Now they preened, circling around each other, stretching up on tiptoes to see who was taller...they bent their heads forward and touched their scythelike horns together with surprising gentleness...

...they were talking earlier. Mostly in their own language. But even then they used some English words...The Hork-Bajir were never a very intellectual species...Their own language was primitive. It only had about five hundred words...I guess for their duty here on Earth, the Yeerks thought they should be able to speak a few words of a human language...

...without any delay, he walked over to a tree. A pine of some sort. He drew back and slashed at the tree trunk with his elbow blade. SCCCRRAAACK! He sliced it straight up, opening about a three-foot gash in the bark. With his wrist blade, he began to slice the bark away in chunks ranging from a few inches long to almost a foot square. He tossed slabs of the stripped bark to his mate and took some for himself...He chewed the bark and seemed to be looking far off...

...these deadly looking Hork-Bajir were not predators at all. Despite their looks, they were no more dangerous than a deer with a large rack of antlers...They were just victims. Just a species that had the bad luck to look fearsome. And now they were caught up in a war between Yeerks and the rest of the free species in the galaxy...