Devourer (3 page)

Finally Fangs said, “We still have a very long time to get along and very many things to talk about, but let us not speak of morals. In the universe, such considerations are meaningless.”

CHAPTER
4
 Acceleration

F
angs left the people at the dig site in a state of deep shock and despair. The Captain again was the first to break the silence. He turned to the surrounding dignitaries of all nations and said, “I know that I am but a nobody and the only reason that I am fortunate enough to attend these occasions is because I was the first to come into contact with two alien intelligences. Nonetheless, I want to say two things: First, Fangs is right; second, humanity's only way out is to fight.”

“Fight? Oh, captain, fight ...” the Secretary-General shook his head, bearing a bitter simile.

“Right! Fight! Fight! Fight!” the Girl from Eridanus shouted from her crystal pane as she flitted several feet above the heads of those assembled. In her Sun-drenched crystal the long-haired girl's entire body erupted into a flowing flourish.

“You people from Eridanus fought them. How did that end?” someone called out. “Humanity must think of its survival as a species, not of satisfying your twisted desire for vengeance.”

“No, sir,” the Captain said, turning to face the assembled crowd. “The Eridanians engaged an enemy they knew nothing about in their war of self-defense. Furthermore, they were a society that had historically not known war. Given the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that they were defeated. Nonetheless, in a century of bitter warfare, they meticulously acquired a deep understanding of the Devourer. We now have been handed that vast reservoir of knowledge by this spaceship. It will be our advantage.

“Judicious preliminary studies of the material have shown that the Devourer is by no means as terrible as we had first feared,” he told them. “Foremost, beyond the fact that it is inconceivably large, there is little about the Devourer that exceeds our understanding. Its life-forms, the ten billion-plus Devourers themselves, are carbon-based life forms, just like us. They even resemble us on a molecular level, and because we share a biological basis with the enemy, nothing about them will remain beyond our grasp. We should count our blessings; just consider that we could just as well have been faced with invaders made of energy fields and the stuff of neutron stars.

“But there is even more cause for hope,” he said. “The Devourer possesses very little, shall we say, 'super-technology'. The Devourer's technology is certainly very advanced when compared to humanity's, but that is primarily a question of scale, not of theoretical basis. The main energy source of Devourer's propulsion system is nuclear fusion. In fact, the primary use for water plundered from planets – beyond providing basic life-support – is fuel for this system. The Devourer's propulsion technology is based on the principle of recoil and the conservation of momentum; it is not some sort of strange, space-time bending MacGuffin.” The Captain, paused looking at the faces before him. “All of this may dismay our scientists; after all, the Devourer, with its tens of millions of years of continuous development, clearly shows us the limits of science and technology; but it also clearly shows us that our enemy is no invincible god.”

The Secretary-General mulled over the Captain's words, then asked, “But is that enough to ensure humanity's victory?”

“Of course we have more specific information. Information that should allow us to formulate a strategy that will give a good shot at victory. For example –”

“Acceleration! Acceleration!” the Girl from Eridanus shouted over their heads, interrupting the Captain.

The Captain explained her outburst to the baffled faces around him. “We have learned from the Eridanian data that the Devourer's ability to accelerate is limited. The Eridanians observed it for two long centuries and they never once saw it exceed this specific limit. To confirm this, we used the data we received from the Eridanian spaceship to establish a mathematical model that accounts for the Devourer's architecture and material strength of its structural components. Calculations using this model verify the Eridanian's observations. There is a firm limit to the speed at which the Devourer can accelerate and this limit is determined by its structural integrity. Should it ever exceed it, the colossus will be torn to pieces.”

“So what?” the head of a great nation asked, under-whelmed.

“We should remain level-headed and carefully consider it,” the Captain answered with a laugh.

CHAPTER
5
 The Lunar Refuge

F
inally, humanity's negotiations with the alien emissary showed some small signs of progress. Fangs yielded to the demand for a lunar refuge.

“Humans are homesick creatures,” the Secretary-General had said in one of their meetings, tears in his eyes.

“So are the Devourers, even though we no longer have a home,” Fangs had sympathetically answered, nodding his head.

“So, will you allow a few of us to stay behind? If you permit, they will wait for the great Devourer Empire to spit out the Earth after it has finished consuming the planet. After waiting for the planet's transformed geology to settle, they will return to rebuild our civilization.”

Fangs shook his gargantuan head. “When the Devourer Empire consumes, it consumes completely. When we are done, the Earth will be a Mars-like desolation. Your worm-technology will not be enough to rebuild a civilization.”

The Secretary-General would not be dissuaded. “But we must try. It will assuage our souls, and it will be especially important for those of us in the Devourer Empire being raised as livestock. It will surely fatten them if they can think back on their distant home in this solar system, even if that home no longer necessarily exists.” 

Fangs now nodded. “But where will those people go while the Earth is being devoured? Besides Earth, we also will consume Venus. Jupiter and Neptune are too large for us to consume, but we will devour their satellites. The Devourer Empire is in need of their hydrocarbons and water. We will also take a bite out of the barren worlds of Mars and Mercury, as we are interested in their carbon dioxide and metals. The surfaces of all these worlds will become seas of fire.” 

The Secretary-General had an answer ready. “We can take refuge on the Moon. We understand that the Devourer Empire in any case plans to push the Moon out of orbit before consuming the Earth.”

Fangs nodded. “That is right. Combined, the gravitational forces of Devourer and Earth will be very powerful. They could crash the Moon into our ring ship. Such a collision would be enough to destroy our empire.”

The Secretary-General smiled ever so-slightly as he replied. “All right then; let a few of us live up there then. It will be no great loss to you.”

“How many do you plan to leave behind?” Fangs queried.

“The minimum to preserve our civilization, one-hundred thousand,” the Secretary-General answered flatly.

“Well then, you should get to work,” Fangs concluded.

“Get to work? What work?” the Secretary-General asked, perplexed.

“Pushing the Moon out of its orbit. For us, that is always a great inconvenience,” Fangs answered dismissively.

“But,” said the Secretary-General as he grasped his hair in despair as he meekly voiced his protest. “Sir, that would be no different than denying humanity our meager and pitiable request. Sir, you know that we do not possess such technological prowess!”

“Ha, worm, why should I care? And besides, don't you still have an entire century?” Fangs concluded with a chuckle.

CHAPTER
6
 Planting the Bombs

O
n the gleaming white plains of the Moon, a spacesuit-clad contingent stood next to a tall drilling tower. The emissary of the Devourer Empire stood somewhat apart, his giant frame another towering silhouette against the horizon. All eyes were firmly focused on a metal cylinder being slowly lowered from the top of the drilling tower down into the drill well below. Soon the cable was speeding into the well. On Earth 240,000 miles away, an entire world was glued to the unfolding events. Then came the signal; the payload had reached the bottom of the well. All observers, including Fangs, broke into applause as they celebrated the arrival of this historic moment.

The last nuclear bomb that would propel the Moon had been put in place. A century had passed since the Eridanus Crystal and the emissary of the Devourer Empire had arrived on Earth. For humanity it had been a century of despair; a hundred years of bitter struggle.

In the first half of the century, the entire Earth had zealously thrown itself at the task of constructing an engine that could propel the Moon. The technology needed to build such an engine, however, utterly failed to materialize. All that was accomplished was that the Moon's surface had gained a few scrap metal mountains, the remains of failed prototypes. Then there were also the lakes of metal, formed where experimental engines had melted under the heat of nuclear fusion.

Humanity had asked the emissary of the Devourer Empire for technological assistance; after all, the lunar engines would not even have to be a tenth of the scale of the countless super engines of the Devourer.

Fangs, however, refused, and instead quipped, “Don't assume that you can build a planetary engine just because you understand nuclear fusion. It's a long way from a firecracker to a rocket. Truth be told, there is no reason at all for you to work so hard at it. In the Milky Way, it is perfectly commonplace for a weaker civilization to become the livestock of a stronger civilization. You will discover that being raised for food is a splendid life indeed. You will have no want and live happily to the end. Some civilizations have sought to become livestock, only to be turned down. That you should feel uncomfortable with the idea is entirely the fault of a most banal anthropocentrism.”

So humanity placed all their hope in the Eridanus Crystal, but again they were disappointed. The technology of the Eridanian civilization had developed along completely different lines from Earth's or that of the Devourer. Their technology was wholly based on their planet's organisms. The crystal, for example, was a symbiont to a kind of plankton that floated in their world's oceans. The Eridanians merely synthesized and utilized the unusual abilities of their planet's life forms without ever truly understanding their secrets. And so, without Eridanian life forms, their technology remained completely unworkable.

After more than 50 valuable years were wasted, the despairing humanity suddenly produced an exceedingly eccentric scheme to propel the Moon. It was the Captain who first came up with this plan. At the time he had a leading role in the Moon propulsion program and had advanced to the rank of marshal. Even though his plan was unapologetically crazy, its technological demands were modest and humanity's available technology was fully capable of making it work; so much so, in fact, that many were surprised why no one had come up with it earlier.

The new plan to propel the Moon was very simple. A large array of nuclear bombs would be installed on one side of the Moon. These bombs would for the most part be buried about two miles under the lunar surface. Their spacing would ensure that no bomb was destroyed by the blast of another. According to this plan, five million nuclear bombs were to be installed on the Moon's 'propulsion side'. Compared to these bombs, humanity's most powerful Cold War-era nuclear bombs were mere conventional weapons.

When the time came to detonate these super powerful nuclear bombs under the lunar surface, the force of their explosions would be wholly incomparable to the nuclear tests of earlier ages, suffocated deep underground. These denotations would blow-off a complete stratum of lunar matter. In the Moon's low gravity, the exploded strata's rocks and dust would reach escape velocity. As they were launched straight into space, they would exert an enormous propulsive force on the Moon itself.

If a certain number of bombs were detonated in rapid succession, this impulse could become a continuous propelling force, just as if the Moon had been fitted with a powerful engine. By detonating nuclear bombs in different places it would be possible to control the Moon's flight path.

The plan would even go one step further, calling for not one, but two layers of nuclear bombs within the lunar surface. The second layer would be installed at a depth of about four miles. After the top layer had been completely used up, two miles of lunar matter would be stripped from the propulsion side of the Moon. The unceasing denotations would then smoothly transition to the second layer. This would double the duration for which the “engine” could propel the Moon.

When the Girl from Eridanus heard of this plan, she came to the conclusion that humanity was truly insane. “Now I understand. If you had technology to match the Devourers, you might be even more savage than they are,” she exclaimed.

Fangs, on the other hand, was full of praise. “Ha, ha! What a wonderful idea you worms managed to dream up. I love it. I love your vulgarity. Vulgarity is the highest form of beauty!” he commended humanity.

“Absurd; how can vulgarity be beautiful?” the Girl from Eridanus retorted.

“The vulgar is naturally beautiful and nothing is more vulgar than the universe! Stars burn manically in the pitch-black cold abyss of space; is that not vulgar? Do you understand that the universe is masculine? Feminine civilizations, like yours, are fragile, fine and delicate; a sickly abnormality in a tiny corner of the universe. And that is that!” Fangs replied.

A hundred years had passed and Fangs' huge frame still brimmed with vitality. The Girl from Eridanus was still vivid and bright, but the Marshal felt the weight of years. He was 130, an old man.

At the time, the Devourer had just passed the orbit of Pluto. It was awakening after its long journey of 60,000 years from Epsilon Eridani. In the dark of space its huge ring lit up with brilliant lights and its immense society began its works, preparing to plunder the solar system.