She persisted.

The Jellies’ language seemed relatively unchanged since the last time the Soft Blade had encountered it, but the terms Kira encountered were context dependent, and context was something she so often lacked. It was like trying to understand technical jargon in a field she wasn’t familiar with, only a thousand times worse.

The effort exacerbated her headache.

She tried to be methodical. She tried to keep track of every action she took and every piece of information the computer threw at her, but it was too much. Far, far too much. At least her overlays were keeping an audiovisual record. Maybe she could make more sense of what she was seeing once she was back in her cabin.

Unfortunately, she had no way to copy the nearscent for later study. Again Kira wished she had implants, ones capable of full-spectrum sensory recordings.

But she didn’t, and there was no changing it.

Kira frowned. She had hoped it would be easier to find useful information on the Jellies’ computer. After all, it wasn’t hard for her to understand the aliens when they spoke. Or at least that was the impression the Soft Blade gave her.

In the end, she resorted to pushing random icons on the panels, hoping that she wouldn’t accidently vent the air or fire a missile or somehow trigger a self-destruct. That would be a bad way to go.

“Come on, you piece of shit,” she muttered, and hit the paneling with the heel of her hand.

Alas, percussive maintenance didn’t help.

She was just grateful there was no sign of pseudo-intelligences or other forms of digital assistants guarding the computer system, and no indication that the Jellies had anything similar to human ship minds.

What Kira really wanted to find was the Jelly equivalent of a wiki or an encyclopedia. It seemed obvious that an advanced species like theirs ought to carry a repository of scientific and cultural knowledge in their computer banks, but—as she was painfully aware—few things were obvious when it came to an alien species.

When button-pushing failed to yield helpful results, she forced herself to stop and reevaluate. Surely there was something else she could try.… Nearscent had worked before; perhaps it would work again.

She mentally cleared her voice and then said: [[Kira here: Open … open … shell records.]] Shell felt like the correct word for ship, so that was what she used.

Nothing.

She tried twice more with different wording. On her third try, a new window opened in the display, and she caught a whiff of welcome.

Gotcha!

Kira’s grin widened as she started to read. Just as she’d hoped: message logs. Not a wiki, but equally as valuable in their own way.

Most of the entries didn’t make sense to her, but some things started to become clear. First was that the Jellies had a highly stratified, hierarchical society, with one’s rank determined by all sorts of complicated factors, including which Arm you belonged to and which form you had. The specifics escaped Kira, but the Arms seemed to be some sort of political or military organizations. Or at least, that was what she assumed.