“I’m not going to run all of the footage. You’ll be spending enough time going over it as it is. Rather, I’m fast forwarding to the jellyfish attack on the UUV.”

Kalico stopped the image as the tunnel formed around the UUV, the jellyfish all turning red.

“What you see here is communication through color and patterning. I’ll leave it to you to work out how they do it, but here’s what I want you to see and understand. First, the UUV is an entirely new phenomenon in their environment. Maybe it resembles some prey species of theirs, maybe it doesn’t. What’s important is that they’ve never seen a drone. What they do, however, is form a trap, capture it, and try to kill it.”

Kalico let the vid run as the jellyfish wrapped themselves around the UUV. On the recorder, it registered Shinwua’s discharge and the attackers backing off, the flashes of colors and dots as they reacted.

Kalico froze the image. “Okay, they got shocked. Backed away. See the spots? My call is that they’re discussing what to do. Communication, people. Dr. Yoshimura? You want to add anything?”

Yoshimura stood, looked around at the people sitting at the tables. The man took a moment to pull his trembling expression together. As if he finally got his brain re-geared from Shinwua’s death and into the more comfortable paradigm of a scientist, he said, “This is a highly ordered, disciplined, and cooperative hunting behavior. It’s being orchestrated among what we would consider an unsophisticated phylum of invertebrate organisms. The more I watch this, the more unsettled I become. If we misjudged and underestimated something that looks simple, like a jellyfish, what else are we going to mistake?”

Kalico said, “I’ll leave that to you all to figure out. Meanwhile, let’s get a look at the predator that got Dr. Shinwua. We didn’t get a complete image of it to begin with, but I think it’s the same creature that sonar picked up while we were still off the beach, the thing that sheered the second UUV into pieces. All I could see down through the water was a long and very colorful shape. We recorded this”—she displayed the UUV’s final video of the three slashing blades and tooth-filled mouth—“and then the drone was destroyed.”

The room was so quiet Kalico thought she should be hearing their hearts beating.

She stepped out around the table. “When we were ashore, I saw an eye sticking out of the surf. Watching us. I think the creature—Dr. Yoshimura and I are calling it a scimitar—destroyed the UUV, withdrew, and monitored us as we went ashore. My call is that it waited, watched, and studied us.”