She read on, scrolling through page after page until her eyes were blurry as she attempted to cram three months’ worth of information into her head.
To their credit, the League seemed to have reacted to the invasion with appropriate speed and discipline. What was the point of arguing among yourselves when the monsters in the dark were attacking? Reserves had been mobilized, civilian ships had been commandeered, and on Earth and Venus, mandatory drafts had been enacted.
The cynic in Kira saw the measures as just another effort on the part of the League to expand their power. Never let a good emergency go to waste, and all that. The realist in her saw the necessity of what they were doing.
All the experts seemed to agree: the Jellies were at least a hundred years more technologically advanced than humans. Their Markov Drives let them jump in and out of FTL far closer to stars and planets than even the most cutting-edge UMC warships. Their power plants—separate from the fusion drives used for propulsion—generated the staggering amounts of energy needed for the Jellies’ inertial trickery via some as-yet-unidentified mechanism. And yet they didn’t use radiators to dissipate the heat. No one understood that.
When troops had boarded the first Jelly ship, they had discovered rooms and decks weighted with artificial gravity. And not the spin-an-object-in-a-large-circle kind, but honest-to-god, actual artificial gravity.
Physicists weren’t surprised; they explained that any species that had figured out how to alter inertial resistance would, by definition, be capable of mimicking a naturally occurring gravitational field.
And while the aliens didn’t seem to possess any new types of weapons—they still used lasers and missiles and kinetic projectiles—the extreme maneuverability of their ships, combined with the accuracy and efficiency of their weapons, made them difficult to fend off.
In light of the Jellies’ technological superiority, the League had passed a law asking civilians everywhere to salvage and turn in any pieces of alien equipment they could. As the League spokesperson—a rather oily man with a fake smile and eyes that always seemed a touch too wide—said, “Every little bit is valuable. Every little bit could make the difference. Help us help you; the more information we have, the better we can fight these aliens and end this threat to the colonies and to the Homeworld.”
Kira hated that expression: Homeworld. Technically it was correct, but it just felt oppressive to her, as if they were all supposed to bow down and defer to those lucky enough to still live on Earth. It wasn’t her homeworld. Weyland was.
Despite the Jellies’ advantages, the war in space wasn’t entirely one-sided. Humans had won their share of victories, but as a whole, they were few and hard-fought. On the ground, things weren’t much better. From the clips Kira saw, even troopers in power armor had trouble going one-on-one with the aliens.
Vishal had been right; the Jellies came in different flavors, not just the tentacled monstrosity she’d encountered on the Extenuating Circumstances. Some were large and hulking. Some were small and agile. Some were snakelike. Others reminded Kira more of insects. But no matter their shape, they could all function in a vacuum, and they were all fast, strong, and tough as hell.
As Kira studied the images, pressure built behind her eyes, until, with sudden sharpness—
—a shoal of graspers jetted toward her in the darkness of space. Hard-shelled and tentacled, armed and armored. Then a flash, and she was climbing a rocky scarp, firing blasters at dozens of scurrying creatures, many-legged and clawed.
Again in the ocean, deep below, where the Hdawari hunted. A trio of figures emerged from the shadowed murk. One thick and bulky and nearly invisible with the midnight hue of its armored skin. One sharp and spindly, a broken nest of legs and claws topped by a brazen crest, now pressed flat to better swim. And one long and supple, lined with limbs and trailing a whiplike tail that emitted a tingle of electricity. And though it could not be guessed from appearance alone, the three shared a commonality: they had all been first of their hatching. First and sole surviving …
Kira gasped and screwed her eyes shut. A pounding spike ran from her forehead to the back of her skull.
It took a minute for the pain to fade.
Was the Soft Blade making a conscious effort to communicate, or had the video just triggered fragments of old memories? She wasn’t sure, but she was grateful for the additional information, no matter how confusing.
“Maybe don’t give me a migraine next time, okay?” she said. If the xeno understood, she couldn’t tell.
Kira returned to the video.
She recognized several of the Jelly types from the Soft Blade’s memories, but most were new and unfamiliar. That puzzled her. How long had the xeno been stuck on Adrasteia? Surely it couldn’t have been long enough for new forms of Jellies to have evolved.…
She detoured to check some of her professional resources. One thing xenobiologists seemed to agree on: all the invading aliens shared the same base biochemical coding. Heavily varied at times, but still essentially the same. Which meant the different types of Jellies belonged to a single species.
“You have been busy,” she murmured. Was it gene-hacking or did the Jellies have a particularly malleable physiology? If the Soft Blade knew, it wasn’t telling.
Either way, it was a relief to know humanity wasn’t fighting more than one enemy.
There were plenty of other mysteries, though. The Jellies’ ships usually traveled in multiples of two, and no one had been able to determine why. They didn’t at Adra, Kira thought. Likewise—
… the Nest of Transference, round of shape, heavy of purpose …
Kira winced as another spike shot through her skull. So the xeno was trying to communicate. The Nest of Transference … Still not very informative, but at least she had a name now. She made a mental note to write down everything the Soft Blade had been showing her.
She just wished it didn’t have to be so damned cryptic.
No one had been able to identify a planet or system of origin for the aliens. Back-calculating the FTL trajectories of their ships had revealed that the Jellies were jumping in from every direction. That meant they were dropping back to normal space at different points and deliberately altering their course in order to hide their starting locations. In time, the light from their return to normal space would reach astronomers and they would be able to determine where the Jellies were coming from, but “in time” would be years and years, if not decades.
The Jellies couldn’t be traveling too far, though. Their ships were faster in FTL, that much was apparent, but not so ridiculously fast as to allow them to travel hundreds of light-years in a month or less. So why hadn’t signals from their civilization reached Sol or the colonies?
As for why the Jellies were attacking … The obvious answer was conquest, but no one knew for sure, and for one simple reason: to date, every attempt to decipher the Jellies’ language had failed. Their language, according to the best evidence, was scent-based and so utterly different from any human tongue that even the smartest minds weren’t sure how to begin translating it.
Kira stopped reading, feeling as if she’d been struck. Under the jumpsuit, the Soft Blade stiffened. On the Extenuating Circumstances, she’d understood what the Jelly had said as clearly as any English-speaking human. And she could have replied in kind if she’d so wanted. Of that Kira had no doubt.