“The ship was beautiful. Not military-beautiful — not the functional, aggressive beauty of a warship or the brutal efficiency of a transport. The Delphinian ship was beautiful the way water was beautiful: smooth, curved, the hull a seamless gradient of blue-green that caught the light and distributed it across the surface like a living thing. It moved through the atmosphere with the silence of a creature that belonged in the sky, and it landed on our designated zone with the particular grace of a species that had been building ships for ten thousand years longer than humans had been building anything.”