Five-step attack strategy

The Five-step attack strategy is Judith Li’s attempt to read the Yrr’s actions as a coordinated campaign against human civilization. Its sequence moves from control of the seas through the displacement of coastal populations and destruction of infrastructure to the retreat from cities and, finally, a climate shift that could make Earth uninhabitable for humans. The plan gives a pattern to otherwise disparate disasters, but the novel presents it as a human strategic interpretation, not as knowledge confirmed by the Yrr.

The plan as an interpretation of events

Li lays out the five stages during a government discussion about whether the Yrr have a strategy. She describes the first step as clearing the waters of all human presence, both at the surface and below it. The second is to expel or annihilate coastal populations, with northern Europe offered as an example. The third targets infrastructure, including the offshore industry in northern Europe and the fishing industry. In Li’s account, the loss of fishing would have consequences beyond the coast, contributing to malnutrition, especially in poorer countries.

The final two stages widen the attack from infrastructure to the foundations of social life. Major cities, which Li calls the pillars of civilization, would be targeted, forcing their populations to retreat inland. The fifth step is a shift in climate, potentially rendering Earth uninhabitable for humans. Li cannot specify whether the planet would freeze, flood, warm or cool; she allows that several of these changes might occur together. The lack of a single predicted mechanism makes the final stage less a tactical forecast than the endpoint of the scenario she is constructing.

Escalation from sea to land

The sequence is organized by expanding reach. It begins in the marine environment, where human ships and underwater operations are exposed, then advances toward the coast, the systems that support economies, and the cities where populations concentrate. Its logic is not simply that attacks become more destructive: each stage removes another condition on which human settlement depends. Disruption at sea becomes displacement on land; damage to fisheries and industry becomes a threat to food and social order; climate change completes the progression by challenging the viability of human life itself.

The stages also connect events that might otherwise appear unrelated. Li’s example of northern Europe joins coastal evacuation to damage to offshore industry, while the fishing disruption links marine conflict to distant food insecurity. By making these consequences part of one sequence, the strategy presents the crisis as a campaign with cumulative effects rather than as a collection of isolated animal attacks or ecological anomalies. That coherence, however, comes from Li’s synthesis: the evidence discussed by officials does not establish that the Yrr themselves follow this five-part plan.

A nonhuman enemy and human uncertainty

When an official asks whether the proposed climate catastrophe would make Earth uninhabitable for the entire animal kingdom, Li answers that it would devastate life on land, wiping out most plant and animal species. She invokes an event from fifty-five million years earlier, when many species died out and others took their place, as evidence that the Yrr might have considered their own survival before precipitating a crisis. Her response reframes the question: what would look like indiscriminate destruction from a human perspective might not have the same meaning for a nonhuman intelligence.

The exchange exposes a limit within the plan. It assumes that the sequence can be understood through strategic reasoning, yet its proposed final stage exceeds the officials’ ability to predict what would happen to the wider living world. Li’s account makes the Yrr’s apparent campaign intelligible as strategy without making its intentions transparent. The officials’ description of the plan as extreme and inhuman meets Li’s blunt reminder that the Yrr are not human; the difference between their survival logic and human expectations remains unresolved.

From caution to emergency measures

The plan develops against an earlier official insistence on restraint. Li had publicly warned against speculation, threats of violence, and action by would-be vigilantes, arguing that animal attacks might indicate that animals were threatened or ill and that investigators should first identify the cause. As the crisis widened, however, her government-facing responses became increasingly coercive. She reported that New York had been isolated, that Washington would also have to be quarantined after crabs were detected, and that troops armed with flamethrowers had been ordered around key coastal cities while an antitoxin was being developed.

The military response also illustrates the difficulties of acting against threats in the ocean. Li reported that ROVs sent down by scientists detected a blue glow before their cables were cut, leaving crews to retrieve frayed wires; four Russian scientists in MIR submersibles had been rammed and sunk. Despite doubts about whether a sonar offensive could succeed without killing whales, she supported using SURTASS LFA against them, arguing that the creatures remained under external control and that the response should match the methods of attack. These measures do not prove the five-stage scenario, but they show how the prospect of a coordinated strategy helps turn uncertain ecological events into grounds for quarantine and military action.

Secrecy and the costs of the framework

Li’s interpretation is delivered within an emergency politics already shaped by secrecy. At Chateau Whistler, she explained that the crisis centre was kept away from the media, that officials described its work as an exercise, and that committee members would have to sign declarations of silence. She presented concealment as necessary to prevent panic and framed the situation as a war in which truth would be an early casualty. The strategy therefore operates on two levels: it organizes the imagined Yrr offensive, while also supporting exceptional human measures taken in the name of understanding and defeating it.

Its dramatic force comes from the gap between pattern and proof. The five stages make the crisis appear legible and directed, but they remain a forecast imposed on events that exceed human control and knowledge. The sea is not merely the first battlefield in Li’s account: it is the environment from which the sequence expands, while the failures of remote vehicles and the uncertainty surrounding the final climatic stage underscore how little the human authorities can verify. The plan’s clarity is consequently double-edged—it offers a way to comprehend escalating danger, and a rationale for increasingly forceful decisions made under uncertainty.