“The face of the enemy,” Commander Steenblik said, as an alien face appeared in front of them.  “This is the most intact body we have, although it is quite badly damaged in several places.  By comparing this body with the others, we have been able to put together a comprehensive picture of what the aliens actually look like.  However, we still have plenty of unanswered questions about their biology, let alone their society.”

He smiled, rather humourlessly.  “Despite being humanoid, they are completely unrelated to humanity,” he continued.  “Although we believe that they and we can share the same worlds, the food we found in their stomachs – they have two separate stomachs – would be poisonous to us.  We don’t think they can eat our foodstuffs.  Their diseases will probably not affect us and vice-versa.”

“So no hope of any human-alien hybrids to end the war,” Fitzwilliam said, dryly.  He nodded towards the holographic alien.  “What sex is it?”

“Male, we think,” Steenblik said.  “We’ve identified organs that seem to serve the role of testes, but the penis seems to be completely retractable ... in truth, it will be several months before we can say anything with confidence.  All the remaining bodies seem to share the same sexual characteristics, so we are assuming that they’re all male.  However, I must caution you that we could be completely wrong.  We have very little experience with alien biology.”

“Assuming you're right,” Ted said, “what does this say about them?”

“Nothing for certain,” Steenblik warned.  “They may be as sexually restrictive as some of our darker societies or we may simply have failed to recover any female bodies.  Statistically, two-thirds of the Royal Navy is composed of men, while certain units are male-only – the Marines, for example.  We simply don't know enough to be able to say anything about their society from what little we pulled from the bodies.

“One thing we are fairly sure about is that they need water more than we do,” he continued, rotating the image so they could see the leathery skin.  “This might explain the high concentration of water droplets in the wreckage; the aliens need a moist atmosphere to survive.  Their eyesight may be better than ours, their bodies slightly weaker ... although, again, we have no way to be sure.  The alien bodies we recovered may well be atypical.”

Ted nodded, studying the alien.  It was ugly as sin, he decided, although the aliens probably felt the same way about humanity.  Was that the cause of the war?  Had the aliens looked at humanity and decided that they were too ugly to live?  Or maybe just that humans were inherently inferior and needed to be knocked down and out before they posed a threat to the alien civilisation?

Or maybe they’re just nasty bastards, he thought.  But there was no way to know.

Fitzwilliam coughed.  “Can they speak to us?”