It took a minute for the pain to fade.

Was the Soft Blade making a conscious effort to communicate, or had the video just triggered fragments of old memories? She wasn’t sure, but she was grateful for the additional information, no matter how confusing.

“Maybe don’t give me a migraine next time, okay?” she said. If the xeno understood, she couldn’t tell.

Kira returned to the video.

She recognized several of the Jelly types from the Soft Blade’s memories, but most were new and unfamiliar. That puzzled her. How long had the xeno been stuck on Adrasteia? Surely it couldn’t have been long enough for new forms of Jellies to have evolved.…

She detoured to check some of her professional resources. One thing xenobiologists seemed to agree on: all the invading aliens shared the same base biochemical coding. Heavily varied at times, but still essentially the same. Which meant the different types of Jellies belonged to a single species.

“You have been busy,” she murmured. Was it gene-hacking or did the Jellies have a particularly malleable physiology? If the Soft Blade knew, it wasn’t telling.

Either way, it was a relief to know humanity wasn’t fighting more than one enemy.

There were plenty of other mysteries, though. The Jellies’ ships usually traveled in multiples of two, and no one had been able to determine why. They didn’t at Adra, Kira thought. Likewise—

… the Nest of Transference, round of shape, heavy of purpose …

Kira winced as another spike shot through her skull. So the xeno was trying to communicate. The Nest of Transference … Still not very informative, but at least she had a name now. She made a mental note to write down everything the Soft Blade had been showing her.

She just wished it didn’t have to be so damned cryptic.

No one had been able to identify a planet or system of origin for the aliens. Back-calculating the FTL trajectories of their ships had revealed that the Jellies were jumping in from every direction. That meant they were dropping back to normal space at different points and deliberately altering their course in order to hide their starting locations. In time, the light from their return to normal space would reach astronomers and they would be able to determine where the Jellies were coming from, but “in time” would be years and years, if not decades.

The Jellies couldn’t be traveling too far, though. Their ships were faster in FTL, that much was apparent, but not so ridiculously fast as to allow them to travel hundreds of light-years in a month or less. So why hadn’t signals from their civilization reached Sol or the colonies?

As for why the Jellies were attacking … The obvious answer was conquest, but no one knew for sure, and for one simple reason: to date, every attempt to decipher the Jellies’ language had failed. Their language, according to the best evidence, was scent-based and so utterly different from any human tongue that even the smartest minds weren’t sure how to begin translating it.