Thog kept three optical sensors on the ugly wimpy creature, encased in red synthetic metal and hardened plastic, and forced its mass to stay still. It couldn’t believe that such a species beat the Arachnids, nor outthought the Bezins, nor outtraded the Osterals. It held an appendage over the bolt blaster bolt button as its split sibling’s orders reverberated in its head, ‘‘‘Do not engage. Do not fire. Only watch.’’’

So close to the Terran’s construction site, Thog’s insides tingled in anticipation of combat, of the massive Terran ion cannons to sense it and open fire. It didn’t care if it died, but it had a mission, and it needed to fulfill its mission before expiration.

A formless blob, massive, the size of six of those terran wimps, Thog represented the warrior class of the race. Its split sibling, Thoh, hunched behind, a representative of the administration class. Similar features, squishy, roundish, leather-like skin, six optical sensory organs, fourteen manipulation appendages, and they absorbed UV light for food. Beneath their thick, near-impervious skin lay a brutal, simple structure, built for violence and thought, with muscle-like fibers and a dense, decentralized nervous system that served as a brain. The superior ones, as they called themselves, Molds to the rest of the universe, reproduced by division, in pairs, one took most of the muscle fibers and movement knowledge, warriors, the other took the primary thinking patterns, administrators.

Thog, a seasoned warrior with five strings of ruby red diamonds on its body, each for a successful training battle, knew to flex its muscles, ready to fight, ready to kill. Thoh, who wore two strings of blue-green diamonds to signify a level two administrator, analyzed the situation.

‘‘‘Get closer. See what it’s building,’’’ Thoh said. The superior ones spoke in a slight hum, vibrating the ground on this planetoid.

The race had five languages: the royal language that they used to speak to each other, no matter the class; the common language that they used to speak to other races; an administrator language that only administrators spoke; a warrior language that only warriors spoke; and a paired language that only pairs spoke to each other. The multiple languages made eavesdropping on them extremely difficult. The Arachnids never learned any of the languages, while the Bezins and Osterals only learned the common language. Unfortunately for the Superior Ones, Terrans learned to translate all the languages.