Deep Space

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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