“He’s right,” Eiko said. “All she sees are the fish that aren’t being caught. The profit she’s losing. The company’s bottom line. She’s built to do one thing—rake profit from the sea. And she knows how to make us work the nets to get it done. Turns out, the guards were mostly there for show, and to make convincing us a little easier.”

Indra bared his teeth again. “Well, she doesn’t know Indra. I’m not dying a slave. I’ll do no more fishing for her.”

“I’m with you,” Indra’s lieutenant said. “No more—”

The lieutenant’s torso and head ceased to exist. Afterward came the whump, and the membrane of expanding air across the faces of the crew. Then the pink cloud of blood and flesh, sharp with shattered bone. A shard of skull cut the throat of Indra’s other lieutenant. One of the lieutenant’s molars blinded the right eye of a Malay who had joined their crew from the factory ship.

The Sea Wolf’s recoilless rifle, barrel smoking, pointed down at them from a telescoped platform above the barracks. The lieutenant’s hips and legs collapsed to the deck. The recoilless rifle retracted, disappearing again behind the barracks with a squeal of badly oiled gearing. The net gantry began to whir.

By the time Indra’s other lieutenant had bled to death on the deck, the Sea Wolf’s net was in the water.

The crew pushed the bodies overboard—the one in parts, the other whole.

Indra did not help. For a long time, he stood motionless, the blunt grenade launcher dangling from a limp hand. Then he sat down on the deck, covering his head with his forearms.

An hour later, he was still there—motionless, head hidden from view behind blood-spattered arms, the grenade launcher in his lap.

The crew hauled in a meager netload of protein from the sea, mechanically gutting and cleaning it for the flash-freezer, eyes blank.

For dinner, some of it was redistributed to them in half-ration cakes.

And there was plenty of desalinated, oily water to drink.

Chapter 28

In movies, communication with alien species is usually achieved by means of some amazing technology. Translations are fluid, immediate, and accurate.

This idea rests on the false assumption that all languages have a single conceptual foundation. But we know this is not the case, even in human societies. Languages are not based in universalities: they reflect national traditions, ethnocentric worldviews, the specific histories of their societies.

Imagine, then, how many obstacles there will be to interspecies communication, when even the physical metaphors of life, and the species’ sensory apparatus, differ.

From the most complex to the simplest of our communicative acts, there will be endless opportunities for misinterpretation.

—Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

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