Many times in the messages she saw the phrase two-form. At first she thought it was a term for the Soft Blade. But as she read, it became clear that couldn’t possibly be the meaning.

It was with a sense of revelation that she realized two-form had to be the Jellies’ term for humans. She spent some time puzzling over that. Do they mean men and women? Or something else? Interestingly enough, the Soft Blade didn’t seem to recognize the term. But then, why would it? Humans were newcomers to the galactic stage.

With that crucial piece of information, the messages began to make more sense, and Kira read with increasing avidness of ship movements, battle reports, and tactical assessments of 61 Cygni and other systems in the League. There were numerous mentions of travel times, and from the Soft Blade, Kira was able to glean a sense of the distances involved. The nearest Jelly base (system, planet, or station, she wasn’t sure) was several hundred light-years away. Which led her to wonder why no hint of the aliens had shown up in the League’s telescopes. The Jellies’ civilization had to be far older than two or three hundred years, and the light from their worlds had long since reached human-settled space.

She kept reading, trying to pick out confluences of meaning—trying to see the larger patterns.

Perversely, the more she understood of the aliens’ writing, the more confused she became. There were no references to the events at Adrasteia or to the Soft Blade, but there were references to attacks she’d never heard of: attacks not of Jellies on humans but of humans on Jellies. She also found lines that seemed to indicate the aliens believed that humans were the ones who had started the war by destroying … the Tower of Yrrith, and by tower she understood them to mean a space station.

At first Kira had difficulty believing that the Jellies—the Wranaui—thought they were the victims. A dozen different scenarios flashed through her mind. Maybe a deep-space cruiser like the Extenuating Circumstances had stumbled across the Jellies and, for whatever reason, initiated hostilities.

Kira shook her head. The summons was a maddening distraction, like a fly that wouldn’t stop buzzing about her head.

What she was reading didn’t make sense. The Jellies seemed convinced they were fighting for their very survival, as if they believed the two-forms posed an extinction-level threat.

As she continued to dig through the archive of messages, Kira began to notice repeated mentions of a … search the Wranaui were carrying out. They were looking for an object. A device of immense importance. Not the Soft Blade—that much she felt confident of, as they made no mention of Idealis—but whatever the object was, the Jellies thought it would allow them to not only defeat the League and win the war, but conquer the whole galaxy.

The back of Kira’s neck prickled with fear as she read. What could be so powerful? An unknown form of weapon? Xenos even more advanced than the Soft Blade?