“Show yourself, you bastard.” Lights came on in a circle high overhead. A block of transparent crystal lay in the center of the octagonal chamber, occupied by a creature unlike anything Olmy had ever seen. It had a large, blue-gray vertical hammer-like head cut through with three horizontal clefts. Out of the uppermost cleft protruded shimmering white tubes tipped with black—eyes, perhaps—and out of the two lower, long black tufts of hair. Behind the oversized head—roughly the size and shape of a man’s trunk—stretched a long, smooth green horizontal thorax. Bifurcated pale pink tentacles each as thick as Olmy’s wrist and as long as his arm rose in a crest along the back. To the rear, behind the tentacles, was a bristle of short red barbs or feelers. A thick uplifted tail ended with a purple bugle flare. Perhaps strangest of all, seven pairs of lower “legs” or supports lined both sides of the body, not legs or limbs in the traditional sense but poles or long sharp-tipped spikes, each the color of obsidian, and just as shiny. Below the head, or perhaps emerging from the lower head itself, were two sets of many-jointed arms, one set tipped with appendages remarkably like hands, another with pink translucent palps.

Despite his years of experience dealing with non-humans, Olmy shuddered. As he stepped closer, against his strongest instincts, he frowned, appreciating a deeper truth about the creature; that this body was not alive, merely preserved so that it would not decay. There was something undignified, disordered about its awkwardness that told him it must be dead.

“Beautiful, no?” Mar Kellen circled the transparent block. The creature, fully extended, would have been about four meters long from vertical head to uplifted tail. “Our ancestral defenders, perhaps people we knew…people who trained us…they caught a Jart, and he or she or it is stored right here. But why not spread the news? This sort of thing would have been sensational, invaluable…”

Olmy knew what he meant. With the weapons possessed by both sides, battles were infrequent and cataclysmic. The Jarts had never responded to diplomatic overtures; in truth, after a few decades of the war, humans had stopped making them. Neither side could ever be certain what its enemies looked like. Decoys and deceptions had been used by both sides; information of any sort was suspect. To capture a Jart—even a dying or dead Jart—and understand something of its thinking…

That would have been special, indeed. Why keep it so secret, even down the ages? What had they discovered about their prize that required such caution?