“Okay … a Nungie’s eye, then.”
“Nope. They have sensor clusters that process light—well, red and orange light, anyway, and short infrared—but they’re not really eyes. Squishy-looking tentacles and spongy tissue, more like.”
“Okay! Okay!” She laughed. “What are those three-legged octopus things?”
He had to pull down a list of known alien species inside his head and scan through an array of photographs. There it was.
“Jivad Rallam? Okay. They have eyes a lot like ours, agreed. Just more of them.”
“Fine. I could spit in its eyes. All of them!”
“Outstanding!”
Gregory stood up, stretching. The nanodust had left him feeling a bit light-headed and weak, almost trembling. He stepped to the entrance of their privacy area and looked up at the swimming sphere, internally lit with shifting, colored lights and hanging 20 meters above his head. Nude couples, threesomes, and a few larger groups cavorted within the shimmering globe of water.
The Intermundi Pleasure Club was an enormous structure, 100 meters across, rotating to provide about a half G of spin gravity at the outer deck, less on the elevated levels and walkways closer to the center. Outside the labyrinth of smaller privacy areas, the club’s interior opened up into a vast cavern. Transparencies in the floor looked out on the slow-wheeling stars of space punctuated occasionally by a blast of light from Earth or sun; multiple decks, verandas, and soaring arches gave a multilevel fairyland effect to the architecture, and at the exact center of the space a 10-meter bubble of water hung motionless as the club rotated around it. Gregory and Vaughn had chosen an open deck well above the main floor; spin gravity here was only about a quarter G, more than the moon but less than the surface of Mars, and the water was an easy climb overhead.
“Want to go for a swim?”
“No, I want something to eat. I’m hungry!”
“Whatcha want?”
“I’m feeling carnivorous. Surprise me.”
“One surprise, coming up.” He palmed a contact on the entrance to their cube, scrolled through the menu that opened in his mind, and selected Steak Imperial for two. What arrived in the receiver a moment later, hissing and moist, had never been within 36,000 kilometers of the Brazilian Empire, but the program that had assembled the component atoms and heated them to palatability had been designed by world-class chefs—probably AI chefs—and could not be distinguished from tissue that once had been alive and roaming the pampas south of the Amazon Sea.
“How do you think it’s going to end?” she asked him later, as they ate.
“What?”
“I was just thinking … so many alien species out there, and most of them seem to be on board with the Sh’daar and out to get us. We can’t face them all.”
Gregory shrugged. “Yeah, well, they seem pretty disjointed, don’t they? The Turusch attack us here … the H’rulka attack there … then the Nungies show up someplace else with their little Kobold buddies. They’re all as different from one another as any of them are from humans. Coordination, planning, even basic communication must be a real bear for them.”
The thought was not original with Gregory, but had been circulating through the squadrons as a series of morale downloads from the Personnel Department. It was propaganda … but it was propaganda based on fact and that actually made sense.
The Turusch were things like partially armored slugs that worked in tightly bound pairs and communicated by heterodyning meaning into two streams of blended, humming tones. The H’rulka were gas bags a couple of hundred meters across; they had parasites living in their tentacle forests that were larger than individual humans. The Nungiirtok were 3 meters tall and very vaguely humanoid … except that what was inside that power armor they wore was not even remotely human. The Jivad were like land-dwelling octopi that swarmed along on three tightly coiled tentacles, and used both speech and color changes in their skin patterns to communicate. The Slan used sonar as their primary sense, rather than a single weak, light-sensing organ, and apparently could focus multiple sound beams so tightly that they could “see” as well as a human; they couldn’t perceive color, of course, but according to the xenosoph people they could tell what you’d had for breakfast and watch your heart beating and your blood flowing when they “looked” at you. Communication for them appeared to be in ultrasound frequencies, patterns of rapid-fire clicks at wavelengths well beyond the limits of human hearing.
“That shouldn’t matter that much, should it?” Vaughn said. “I mean … those translators the Agletsch wear seem to work pretty well. Communications wouldn’t be that much of a problem for them.”
“No, it is a problem,” Gregory replied, “and a big one. Alien biology means an alien way of looking at the universe. Like the dolphins, y’know?”
Centuries ago, attempts to communicate with the dolphins and whales of Earth’s seas had demonstrated that differences in biology dictated how a species might communicate—dolphins, for instance, simply could not form the sounds required for human speech. And different modes of speech shaped how their brains worked, how they thought of themselves and the world around them. There were, Gregory knew, AIs residing within implants in dolphin brains now designed to bridge the linguistic barriers between the species, but those translations had only proven that dolphin brains were as alien to humans as the group minds of the abyssal electrovores inhabiting the under-ice ocean of Enceladus.
“Anyway,” Gregory went on, “the theory is that the different va-Sh’daar species have trouble cooperating militarily because of the biological differences among them. They’re so different from one another that the damned war has dragged on for fifty-seven years, now, and they still
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