LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Admiral Gray!” the translated voice of the being said when she swiveled an eyestalk in his direction and saw him. “The great moment is upon us, yes-no?”

      The Agletsch had been the first nonhuman civilization encountered by humans as they spread out into interstellar space, an encounter in 2312 in the Zeta Doradus system, just 38 light years from Sol. Zeta Doradus was not their homeworld. No human knew where they’d come from originally; the price the Aggies put on that piece of information was literally astronomical. Called spiders or bugs by many humans, their oval sixteen-legged bodies vaguely resembled some terrestrial arthropods … in a bad light, perhaps, or after too many drinks.

      Few humans trusted them. Some of that was due to their phobia-triggering looks, true, but for most Navy men, it was the fact that many carried nanotechnic storage and communications devices called seeds planted by the Sh’daar, which made them little better than spies. Gray had worked with them on numerous occasions, and didn’t think they would willingly betray their human clients, but he also knew that understanding nonhuman motives and mores was a tricky bit of guesswork at best. For a time, human warships had stopped carrying Agletsch advisors despite their obvious usefulness as translators and as sources of Sh’daar insight and galactography.

      But Gray had insisted that Agletsch be brought along on this mission to assist in translating for the Sh’daar. The Joint Chiefs and President Koenig had agreed, but only if the beings were restricted to the Glothr vessel. That suited Gray just fine. He’d wanted someone over there that he could trust handling translations between humans and the Glothr anyway.

      “The great moment is indeed here, Aar’mithdisch,” Gray replied. “I’d like to stress that it is vitally important that we have accurate translations of both sides of the negotiations. This may be the most important bit of diplomacy in my world’s history.” He grinned. “No pressure.”

      “We do not understand this last comment,” the alien said. “The gas-filled portions of the Glothr vessel maintain an internal pressure of—”

      “Never mind, never mind,” Gray said. “It was just a humorous expression.”

      The Agletsch’s four weirdly stalked eyes twitched in complicated patterns, a rapid semaphore of sorts. Gray still couldn’t read the emotional overtones that eye movements conveyed to other Agletsch. No doubt, they had the same difficulty understanding human facial expressions, like the grin he’d just tossed into the conversation when he’d said “no pressure.” The Agletsch built very good electronic translators, but no translation system or artificial language could possibly take into account all of the subtle differences among cultures, biologies, and worldviews.

      Considering how truly alien different species were when compared to one another, it was a wonder anyone could understand anything that another species was trying to say.

      “We translate, Admiral Gray. Accurately … though we note that humans sometimes have trouble understanding other humans even when they share the same terrestrial language.”

      “You understand us disturbingly well,” Gray said.

      The being responded with a dip in two of its eyestalks—a gesture, Gray assumed, of agreement or, possibly, one simply of acknowledgement. Two more Agletsch materialized alongside the first, and the three of them appeared to be in close conversation among themselves.

      “Look what just dropped in,” McKennon said, nodding toward the front of the room. The image of another being had just materialized. It looked like a stack of starfish three meters tall, smaller at the top, larger—almost a meter across—at the bottom. Several skinny arms with multiple branchings, like the branches of a tree, emerged from different points along and around that body, while eyes gleamed at the tips of myriad highly animated tendrils.

      “Well, well,” Gray said, his eyes widening. “My software is flagging it as Ghresthrepni … one of the Adjugredudhra.”

      “One of the senior spokesbeings for the Sh’daar,” McKennon said, nodding slowly. “And commander of the Ancient Hope.”

      “Ah. That’s the ship that warped us in here. Big sucker.”

      Like so much about this mission, not a great deal was known about the Adjugredudhra. They’d been prominent, Gray knew, among the ur-Sh’daar before the Transcendence … a species that had delved deeply into advanced nanotechnology. From what few records he’d seen, acquired during America’s visit to the N’gai Cluster twenty years before, the original Adjugredudhrans had developed nanotech to an astonishing degree, building smaller and smaller machines of greater and greater power, machines that allowed them to transform their own bodies molecule by molecule, to literally remake those bodies into any shape or form they desired.

      But very few galactic cultures, it seemed, were completely monolithic. Some species organized along the lines of ant or bee colonies, perhaps, could maintain a laser-sharp focus in the way they saw themselves and the universe … but for most, sapient cultures usually contained diversity and variability, subcultures and factions, even misfits and renegades, refusers who did not drink too deeply of the background culture of their civilization. When the Transcendence came … the Schjaa Hok, the Time of Change, there were millions of refusers left behind. Their civilization collapsed, technologies were lost, and wars—survivor remnants squabbling in the ruins of a galactic civilization—destroyed what was left.

      Over the course of thousands of years, however, those who remained pulled together and rebuilt much of what had been lost, including worldviews, traditions, and imperial ambitions … until the Sh’daar rose anew from the wreckage that the vanished ur-Sh’daar had left behind.

      Another nonhuman being had appeared alongside the first … a huge squid standing on its head was Gray’s first thought, its tentacles spread across the floor holding semiupright a two-and-a-half-meter brown-mottled body curled at the end. A single saucer-sized eye—plus other sensory organs of more dubious uses—peered out from the base of the tentacle mass. Those tentacles flashed and shifted in their color patterns and textures; like the Glothr, they communicated with color and light in vivid visual displays.

      Gray’s in-head database filled in the Agletsch name of the species: Groth Hoj. According to what humans had learned with the Koenig Expedition, the Groth Hoj had been masters of robotics, manufacturing massive robotic bodies for themselves … imitations of their natural bodies, at first, but then more and more outlandish machine designs.

      Not all Groth Hoj had followed that route, which many apparently thought to be an evolutionary dead end. The refusers had stayed behind. And that must be who was here, today.

      Another nonhuman appeared … but with this entity Gray drew a complete blank. He’d never seen anything remotely like it in any downloaded report or description of the N’gai civilizations.

      His first impression was that it was a dinosaur—a long-necked sauropod—but it was held off the ground by six legs, not four. No tail, either, and the extra legs were unusual, set along the being’s center line, one behind, and one ahead; its walking pattern, Gray thought, would be … odd.

      The hide looked like broken rock, the flanks like the side of a cliff, the neck like a cantilevered crane.

      Most of all, the image he saw before him looked like it must be of a creature absolutely titanic in size, hundreds of meters long, perhaps, and massing tens of millions of tons. The head, broad, flattened, and wide, like the head of a hammerhead shark, swung ponderously at the end of that massive neck. Eyes—Gray thought they were eyes—glittered within the shadows underneath the head. A forest of what might have been a tangle of hair hung from the head’s underside like an unkempt beard. As the hairs twitched and writhed, Gray realized that they were manipulatory appendages. They almost hid a pulsing, V-shaped orifice that might be a mouth …

      No. Not a mouth. A breathing orifice, perhaps? A creature that huge would have to eat continuously to feed that ponderous bulk, and a mouth that small just wouldn’t be up to the task. So how did the thing eat? And what?

      For

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