Back to The Lost Fleet Character Index
The Enigma Race
- Do Unto Others Before They Do Unto Us: Their philosophy is attacking any potential threat.
- Due to the Dead: In The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Resolute, Geary begins to wonder if the Enigmas destroying any trace humans ever lived on the planets they conquer is a Blue-and-Orange Morality example of this. The Enigmas destroy any traces of their own dead, and doing the same thing to the humans they kill might be a twisted form of respect.
- Fish People: Revealed to be amphibious based on an examination of a single, badly burned body that the Alliance manage to get their hands on.
- Greater-Scope Villain: Started the Forever War between the Alliance and the Syndics in the first place by misleading the Syndicate Worlds with fake promises of military aid.
- The Paranoiac: Willing to conquer systems, enslave or murder millions of humans, and kill their own people just to reduce the chances of information being found out about themselves.
- The Spook: Enforced. They kill any member of their species who might be captured with suicide bombs, and are obsessed with keeping every detail about themselves (especially their appearance) shrouded in secrecy.
- Subspace Ansible: The Enigmas seem to have some primitive means of FTL communications, which allows them to send brief messages to other systems.
- Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: They have quantum computer coding that humanity can barely even understand, and have effortlessly detected and defeated any Syndicate attempt to reclaim territory through force or stealth (although they are cheating by hacking into the Syndicate databases to know everything first). Their ships are also incredibly nimble and good at avoiding fire.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: There are strong indicators that, like humanity, the enigmas lack a united government and just as mistrustful of each other as they are of humanity. Also like humanity, however, they're willing to band together to fight a common enemy.
The Dancers
- Big Damn Heroes: The Dancer flotilla sweeps in to prevent the enigma bombardment of Midway, and later they bring a small armada to aid the Alliance fleet against the dark ships.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Relative to humanity, as they see everything in patterns. Dr. Shwartz and General Charban both note that this is deeply alien to the human way of thinking.
- Dark Is Not Evil: They're extremely ugly and unnerving to humans, but are nothing but friendly and helpful.
- Due to the Dead: They recovered the body of a human test pilot who became trapped in jump space centuries ago, carefully preserved his corpse and all his personal belongings, and insist on returning him to his hometown on Earth as soon as they have the opportunity.
- The Engineer: As it turns out, this is their Hat; they are excellent engineers with a flair for design. This also affects their worldview. According to Dr. Jasmine Cresida, they view the universe as inherently predictable. While they don't discount quantum physics, they interpret it to fit their own deterministic worldview. Whenever something doesn't go the way they planned, they simply assume the plan needs adjustment, not that there's always a possibility of randomness.
- Good Is Not Soft: They have hypernet-gate mines built on their borders with the Kicks and the enigmas and have used them in the past, and it's suggested that they may eat any Kicks they capture.
- Innocent Aliens: The only example in the series so far, although they have lethal self-defense capabilities and have constructed hypernet mines on their borders with the enigmas and the Kicks.
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Ugly Cute: Described as a mix of spiders and wolves - and are so friendly and benignly weird they come off as endearing.
The Kicks
- Absolute Xenophobe: The Kicks are hostile to all other races in the universe and exterminated most other animal life on their homeworld. All attempts to communicate with them result in their suicide and they immediately attack every other species they encounter. The Dancers and Enigmas actually have formed a non-aggression pact against them with the former extending it to humanity.
- Blood Knight: Devote a lot of effort to fighting and their only known entertainment is plays of them killing other species.
- Cute Is Evil: A race of adorable four foot tall genocidal maniacs who every alien race in the galaxy fears, including the Enigmas and Dancers. The Kicks resemblance to teddy bears and cows mean that Geary finds it very difficult to convince the rest of humanity they are an existential threat.
- Explosive Breeders: Their population is enormous, thanks to the Kicks having exterminated all their predators.
- Herbivores Are Friendly: Utterly averted, they're Absolute Xenophobe herbivores.
- Killer Teddy Bear: Resemble a mix between teddy bears and cows and are highly agressive.
- Mighty Glacier: Their battle strategy revolves around maintaining pursuit of the enemy for as long as it takes to wipe them out utterly, and their superbattleships are constructed with this mindset. They take forever to get up to speed, but they have tremendous amounts of armor and shielding and essentially unlimited range.
- The Paranoiac: Dr. Setin and the fleet captains speculate that a lot of their aggression comes from being convinced that anyone with sharp canines is a predator out to eat them, and responding with a massive attack.
- Single-Biome Planet: They have wiped out everything on their homeworld except for themselves, a few pets, and crops they grow for food.
- Tractor Beam: The massive Kick battlestations are able to redirect any kinetic bombardment projectile aimed at them with a beam of some kind.
- We Have Reserves: The superbattleship that the Alliance fleet captures has only one escape craft with just enough space for the captain and his senior staff, meaning that the rest of the Kick crew is abandoned to their fate.
- Xenophobic Herbivore: Oh, yeah. They started by killing all of their predators... and all carnivores on their planet... and all the other animals on their planet... And all plant life that they couldn't eat... and any sentient species that get near them...
The Taon
A species that first appears in The Lost Fleet: Outlands: Boundless. They come from planets with low gravity and their bone structures are more pronounced. There are different, warring factions of Taon, one of which is a trading partner of the Dancers and makes uneasy overtures toward the Alliance.
- Absolute Xenophobe: One faction of Taon seems to hate all other races, attack them on sight, and try to take their territory at any opportunity.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: The non-hostile faction and humans are able to understand each other fairly well, but the faction seems confused about the idea of a race that took the trouble to make warships trying to avoid unnecessary battles, don't see any problem with holding people hostage to gain allies against the xenophobic Taon, and casually risk their lives to conduct a Secret Test of Character. However, they genuinely mean well and respectfully seek to expand their horizons of understanding human morality.
- No-Neck Chump: Their heads seem to be connected directly to their shoulders due to the gravity on their planet making their features more bunched together.
- One-Gender Race: The Alliance can't detect any distinct and differing sexual organs on Taon and believe they are all the same gender and reproduce asexually.
- You No Take Candle: The Taon speak human languages, but they have difficulty making complete sentences.Taon leader Lokaa: May fight anyway before jump. Peace between this Taon and human.
The Wooareek
- Aliens Steal Cable: Their receiving devices have downloaded all of mankind's art and culture, although, due to their Innocent Aliens nature, their scientists only distribute this information amongst the general Wooareek populace after getting formal permission to do so from humans.
- Beware the Nice Ones: They are extremely laid-back and have a strict code of honor, but they also have the most advanced technology seen to date, and even the Kicks and Enigmas are scared of their mysterious defensive capabilities.
- Innocent Aliens: They make fair trades and diplomatic overtures to other races instead of trying to conquer them with their vastly superior starship technology.
- Mellow Fellow: They are very calm, polite, and cheerful even while refusing requests, have a Totally Radical speech pattern, and have very loose social hierarchies.
- Starfish Aliens: They resemble large octopi and change colors depending on their mood. The ones named so far, Wave Breaks and Warm Clear Waters, have ocean-related names.
- Totally Radical: What comes out of their translator is an antiquatedly hip choice of words.Wave Breaks: Hey humans! Miss us? This is your old pal Wave Breaks. Here's your ship back, good as new. Had a wild time, lots of good talk, made friends, Your guy [Captain Boudreaux] has all the news. We have to fade now, got other chores, you know? We'll be back. Talk things over. Looking forward to dealing with you guys. Cool? Cool. Peace to all!
Other/s
Resolute confirms the existence of at least two more alien species whose territory is marked in a star map the Dancers give Geary. One of them borders the Rift Federation and the other is separated from human space by a cluster of unoccupied stars.
- Ambiguously Evil: Geary and his allies observe that the star map revealing the existence of the two races could be either a warning or harmless knowledge trading. It is also implied that the species bordering the Rift Federation have been destroying or intercepting their space probes, although they may not be doing so maliciously.
- Ambiguous Situation: It is unclear whether one of them is the same species as the Wooareek due to the limited information given about the territory the Wooareek control.
- Hufflepuff House: Neither species has physically appeared as of the twentieth novel. Little is known about them besides their locations on a map and that they control large amounts of territory.
