We had looked outward for so many years, and thought that we were alone. A sobering truth—if it had remained that way. But the universe has a dark sense of humour, and when we first saw them—spaceships, I should clarify—we rejoiced in the fact that we were not alone. Then we saw how many ships they had brought with them. How fast they moved. We were not alone, and we were not friends. That was the terrifying truth.

Interstellar conquest requires resources, and humans, as they call themselves, will raid any location to obtain them. They are less a race and more a force of nature. There is no stopping them. They are vengeful, as we found to our detriment. Warmongers, as we deduced from their approach fleet. Brutal, as we witnessed upon their landing in our cities. Savage, as we witnessed how they fought.

They are almost impossible to kill—and that's without their armour. If we were not fighting them they would be a fascinating race to study. But their skin is too smooth, and comes in disgusting tones of pink and olive. Not a nice, hardshell black or green. They have no patterning, but are unaware of it. They cannot see shine, glare, or flicker. Those are our colours.

When they do not wear armour we find their head covered in fur, on top, and sometimes at the base also, around the mandibles. The fur around the mandibles is sometimes trimmed and cropped, in what must be atavistic tribal patterns to show allegiance within the group. But perhaps such crudities are necessary for those that lack a gestalt.

That was a horrific discovery. We thought to isolate a human, to disable them like we become if separated from our mind-home. But they don't have mind-homes. Or a gestalt. Their language is made of crude, monochromatic glyphs and guttural rasps of laryngeal strands. Nothing like the proper and complex click-clack of true language.

Worse than that, than finding they have no mind-homes, was finding out they can regenerate. If we lose a limb, we die. If a human loses a limb, well, it just seems to piss them off. They might die, some time later—after chewing their way through another squad—but most return, with hard-shelled metal limbs replacing those they lost.

Their blood is disgusting, and when exposed to air it congeals and hardens like glue. Disgusting, but it means a single cut won't cause them to bleed horribly and die without medical care. Against crushing injuries they are protected by an evolutionarily ingenious layer of muscle and fatty tissue, with bone underneath. What kind of horror has to keep its support structure inside, protected by that kind of padding?

Then we have their tenacity and endurance. They can survive days without water. Weeks without food. They can still fight, even when close to death from exhaustion. They fight even when it makes no sense—and many times they have driven our army back with impossible victories.

But these are only the less terrifying aspects—because of all the things humans know, they know how to harness the power of a dying sun; to place it within a canister and release it such that it turns our burrows to glass. We never developed nuclear weapons. The risk was too great. But this is my greatest fear of the humans—not that they have nuclear weapons, for merely having them makes them dangerous to both user and target.

No, it is the fact that the humans have made the use of nuclear weapons into an art form. We cannot fight that. no one can.