This time I did hesitate, trying to find the answer that had been eluding me. Finally, I shook my head. “No. I’ve been thinking about it, but it doesn’t make sense. We’ve been here so long. Even if the armada was on the other side of the galaxy, there was no reason to send us this far in advance—no reason except for the cultural-literacy thing. But we could have accomplished that in a year. They gave us decades.”

“That’s another word you all use, you know,” said Toni. “You all say ‘armada.’ Not ‘fleet,’ or ‘ships,’ or even ‘invasion.’ ‘Armada.’ Doesn’t that say something?”

“Yes, it says ‘armada,’” said Jeff, raising an eyebrow. The effect was surreal, given his largely green complexion.

Toni snorted. “It’s nice to know that stupidity isn’t a purely human trait. Even if you assholes eat us all, you’ll still have to deal with the limitations of your own intellect. I’ve listened to you argue about whether you were coming in peace, and here’s the final answer: you’re not coming in peace. Even if we weren’t delicious, you wouldn’t be coming in peace.”

“You can’t know that,” protested Mandy. “Cows are delicious, and PETA exists.”

“Going to ignore the part where you just compared humanity to cattle, and move on to the more-salient point that PETA exists because people abuse animals. I don’t like their approach, I don’t like the way they treat pets, I don’t like basically anything about them, and yet I can’t pretend we didn’t bring them on ourselves by acting like assholes toward our fellow creatures—who, by the way, at least share an evolutionary origin with humanity, which is more than we can say about our uninvited guests.”

The senator raised an eyebrow, looking genuinely amused. “All right, then: how do you know that we don’t come in peace?”

“No one brings an armada when they’re ‘coming in peace,’” Toni said. “They might bring a fleet, or an expedition, or even a detachment, but they don’t bring an armada. An armada is what you bring when you’re looking to fuck shit up. Your people are coming here to fuck shit up, and I don’t expect them to apologize for it.”

“Interesting,” he said. “So you think our cultural literacy will come with a precise vocabulary? Do you honestly believe every scout on this planet will choose the same words for the same situations?”