Conflict And Communication

Starfarers, 15.

When robot craft attack Envoy, Ruszek and Brent, the two crew members with military experience, go EVA to defend their ship:

"The jetpacks on their backs were like the wings of the warrior angel Michael." (p. 110)

- a Biblical reference. See here. There is battle in heaven.

Meanwhile, Sundaram attempts communication on every wavelength:

flashes for numbers from 1 to 100;

digital symbols for operators identified by conducted operations;

sinsusoidal, parabolic and exponential variations of amplitude;

a succession of prime numbers.

This is First Contact in this timeline. I am not a mathematician so I do not understand all of Sundaram's experiments in communication but they are intended to show that Envoy is inhabited by conscious minds, not by automata.