Devourer

  Table of Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  CHAPTER 1 The Crystal from Eridanus

  CHAPTER 3 Ants

  CHAPTER 4 Acceleration

  CHAPTER 5 The Lunar Refuge

  CHAPTER 6 Planting the Bombs

  CHAPTER 7 Humanity’s First and Last Space War

  CHAPTER 8 Epilogue: The Return

  Devourer

  Author: Liu Cixin

  Translator:Holger Nahm

  Editor: Kim Fout, Verbena C.W.

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright © 2011 by Liu Cixin.

  The English edition copyright © 2012 by Beijing Guomi Digital Technology Co., Ltd.

  All rights reserved.

  Beijing Guomi Digital Technology Co., Ltd. is a young and vigorous publisher based in China, whose goal is to bring the best Chinese books to global readers.

  Website: www.hotinchina.net

  Contact: [email protected]

  CHAPTER

  1

  The Crystal from Eridanus

  It was right in front of him, but the Captain still could barely make out its translucent crystal structure. Floating through the black void of space, it was hidden by the dark, like a piece of glass sunken in the murky depths. Only the slight distortion of starlight its passage provoked allowed the Captain to make out its position. Soon it was lost again, disappearing in the space between the stars.

  Suddenly, the Sun distorted, its distant, eternal light twisting and twinkling before their eyes. It gave the Captain a start, but he maintained his proverbial “Asian cool”. Unlike the dozen soldiers floating beside him, he managed not to gasp in shock. The Captain immediately understood; the crystal, a mere 30 feet away, had moved in front of the Sun, shining 60 million miles in the distance. In the three centuries to come, this strange vista would often play across his mind and he would wonder if it had been an omen of humanity's fate to come.

  As the highest ranking officer of the United Nation's Earth Protection Force in space, the Captain commanded the force's interplanetary assets. It was a tiny unit, but it was equipped with the most powerful nuclear weapons humanity had ever devised. Its enemies were lifeless rocks hurtling through space; asteroids and meteorites that the early warning system had determined to be a threat to Earth. The mission of the Earth Protection Force was to redirect or to destroy these objects.

  They had been on space patrol for more than two decades now, yet they had never had a chance to deploy their bombs. All rocks large enough to warrant their use seemed to avoid Earth, willfully denying them their chance for glory.

  Now, however, a sweep had discovered this crystal at a distance of two astronomical units. The crystal's trajectory was as precipitous as it was utterly unnatural, and that was taking it straight toward Earth.

  The Captain and his unit cautiously approached, their space suits' boosters spinning a web of trails around the strange object. Just as they closed to 30 feet, a misty light flashed to life inside the crystal, clearly revealing its prismatic outline about 10 feet long. As the space patrol drew nearer, they could make out the intricate, crystalline pipes of its propulsion system. The Captain was now floating directly in front of it. Stretching the gloved right hand of his spacesuit toward the crystal, he initiated humanity's first contact with an extra-terrestrial intelligence.

  As he reached, the crystal again faded to transparency. A brilliantly colored image now sprang to life inside it. It was a manga girl, with huge, rolling eyes and long hair that cascaded down to her feet. She was wearing a beautiful, flowing skirt and she seemed to dreamily drift in invisible waters.

  “Warning! Alert! Warning! The Devourer approaches!” she immediately shouted out, stricken with obvious panic. Her large eyes stared at the Captain, a lithe arm pointing away from the Sun in unmistakable alarm. There could be little doubt the unseen pursuer was hot on her dainty heels.

  “Where do you come from?” the Captain inquired, by all appearances unperturbed.

  “Epsilon Eridani, as you apparently call it, and by your reckoning of time, I have traveled for sixty thousand years,” she replied, before again raising her cry. “The Devourer approaches! The Devourer approaches!”

  The Captain continued his inquiry. “Are you alive?”

  “Of course not; I am merely a message,” came the response. But it was only a short reprieve. “The Devourer approaches! The Devourer approaches!”

  “How is it that you can speak English?” the Captain continued.

  The girl again replied without hesitation. “I learned in transit,” she said, only to carry on: “The Devourer approaches! The Devourer approaches!”

  “And that you look as you do…?” the Captain let his question trail off.

  “I saw it in transit,” she said, before continuing to shout with ever greater urgency. “The Devourer approaches! The Devourer approaches! Oh, surely the Devourer must terrify you.”

  “What is the Devourer?” the Captain finally asked.

  “In appearance it matches a gigantic tire. Hm, yes, that would be an analogy that works for you,” the Girl from Eridanus began her explanation.

  “You are very well-acquainted with how things work on our world,” the Captain interrupted, raising an eyebrow behind his visor.

  “I became acquainted in transit,” the girl replied, before again crying out: “The Devourer approaches!” With that last cry she flashed to one end of the crystal. Where she had been a second ago, an image of the “tire” appeared, and it indeed closely resembled a tire, even though its surface glowed with phosphorescent light.

  “How large is it?” one of the other officers queried.

  “Thirty-one thousand miles in total diameter. The 'tire's' body is six thousand miles wide and the hole in the middle has a diameter of nineteen thousand miles.”

  There was a long pause before someone asked the question now on everyone's mind. “Are the miles you are talking about our miles?”

  The girl immediately and calmly answered. “Of course. It is so large that it can encircle an entire planet, just like one of your tires might fit around a soccer ball. Once it has encased a world, it begins plundering the planet's natural resources, only to spit out the remains like a cherry pit once it is done!”

  There was another pause before the officer spoke again, his voice quivering with trepidation. “But we still do not understand what the Devourer really is.”

  The girl in the crystal offered more information without hesitation. “It is a generation ship, although we do not know where it came from or where it is going. In fact, even the giant lizards that pilot the Devourer surely do not to know. Having wandered the Milky Way for tens of millions of years, they will have certainly forgotten both their origin and their original purpose. But this much is certain: In the far past, when the Devourer was built, it was much smaller. It eats planets to grow, and it devoured our world!”

  As she finished, the image of the Devourer in the crystal grew, gradually coming to dominate its entire surface. It soon became apparent that it was slowly descending upon the unseen camera operator's world. Seen through the eyes of the planet's inhabitants, their world had become nothing more than the bottom of a slowly spinning, cosmic well. Complex structures were clearly visible, covering the walls of this titanic well. At first, they reminded the Captain of infinitely magnified microprocessor circuitry. Then, he realized that they were an endless string of cities, stretching the entire inner ring of the Devourer. Looking up, the image in the crystal revealed a circle of blue radiance emanating from the well's mouth. In the sky above it formed a gigantic halo of fire, encircling the stars.

  The Girl from Eridanus told them that they were seeing the jets of the Devourer's aft ring engine. As she spoke, her entire body erupted into a flowing flourish, and even her casc
ading hair began to wave like countless twisting arms, with every last part of her expressing boundless terror.

  “What you are seeing is the devouring of the third planet of Epsilon Eridani,” she told them. “The first thing you would have noticed, had you been on our world then, was your body becoming lighter. You see, the Devourer's gravitational pull was powerful enough to counteract our planet's gravity. The destruction this wrought was devastating: First our oceans surged to meet the Devourer as it passed over our planet's pole. Then, as it moved to fully encircle our world, they followed it to the equator. As the oceans swept the globe, their waves raised high enough to engulf the clouds.

  The incredible gravitational forces tore at our continents, ripping them apart as if they were nothing but tissue-paper. Our sea floor and dry land were pockmarked by countless volcanic eruptions.” The girl paused in her narrative, only to pick it up with a flutter of her big eyes. “Now that it had encircled our equator, the Devourer stopped, perfectly matching our planet in its orbit around our Sun. Our world was right in its maw.

  “When the plunder of a world commences, countless cables thousands of miles long are lowered from the Devourer's inside wall to the planet's surface below. An entire world is trapped, like a fly in the web of a cosmic spider. Giant transport modules are then sent back and forth between planet and Devourer, taking with them the planet's oceans and atmosphere. As they shuttle to and fro, other titanic machines begin to drill deep into the planet's crust, frenziedly extracting minerals to satisfy the Devourer's hunger.” The girl again paused, her eyes staring intensely into the distance. She continued as abruptly as she had stopped. “Devourer and planet cancel out each other's gravity, creating a low-gravity zone between this tire-like entity and the planet. This zone makes it that much easier to bring the planet's resources to the Devourer. The epic plunder is extremely efficient.

  Expressed in Earth time, the Devourer only needs to chew on a world for a century or so. After it is done, all of the planet's water and atmosphere will have been picked to nothing. As the Devourer ravages, its gravity will also come to deform the planet, slowly stretching it along its equator. In the end, it will become…” the girl paused a third time, this time struggling for words rather than effect, “how would you call it? Yes, discus-shaped. The Devourer, having sucked the planet completely dry, will move on, spitting out the planet. When it leaves, the planet will return to its round shape. As it reforms, the entire world will suffer an ultimate global catastrophe; its surface coming to resemble the molten sea of magma that heralded its birth many billion years ago. Much like then, no trace of life will remain in this inferno.”

  “How far is the Devourer from our solar system?” the Captain immediately asked as she finished.

  “It is just behind me!” she warned urgently. “In your reckoning, it will arrive in a mere century! Alert! The Devourer approaches! The Devourer approaches!”

  CHAPTER

  2

  Emissary Fangs

  Just as the debate over the crystal's credibility began to rage in earnest, the first small Devourer ship entered the solar system. It was heading straight toward Earth.

  The first contact was again initiated by the space patrol led by the Captain. The mood of this contact could not have been more different than the last and mood was by far not the only contrast. The exquisitely-wrought structure of the Eridanus Crystal bore all the hallmarks of the ethereal technology of a delicate civilization. The Devourer's ship represented the polar opposite. Its exterior appeared exceedingly crude and ungainly, somewhat like a frying pan that had spent the better part of a century forgotten in the wilderness. It immediately reminded onlookers of a giant steampunk machine.

  The envoy of the Devourer Empire was his vehicle's equal, a massive, ungraceful lizard covered in huge slabs of scale. Erect, he stood nearly 30 feet tall. He introduced himself as “Faingsh,” but his appearance and later behavior quickly led to him being called “Fangs” instead.

  When Fangs landed before the United Nation's Building, his craft's engines blasted a large crater, the splattering concrete leaving the surrounding buildings scarred and battered. As the alien emissary's massive size made entry into the Assembly Hall impossible, the world's heads of state had gathered on the United Nations Plaza in front of the UN Building to meet him. Some among them now covered their faces with bloody handkerchiefs, staunching foreheads gashed open by flying glass and concrete.

  The ground shook with every step Fangs took toward them and when the alien spoke, his voice roared. It was a sound like the screaming horns of a dozen train engines and it left the hair standing on end of all who heard it. Fangs spoke through an unwieldy translator hanging around his neck. The device repeated his words back in English; he, too, had learned the language in transit. The rough male voice his translator produced, despite being much less in volume than Fangs' real voice, nonetheless made his listeners' flesh creep.

  “Ha! Ha! You white and tender worms, you fascinating little worms,” Fangs jovially began.

  All around people covered their ears until the thunderous roar had ended and only removed their hands slightly to hear the translation.

  “You and I will live together for a century and I believe that we shall come to like each other,” Fangs continued.

  “Your honor, you must know that we are very concerned as to the purpose of your great mother ship's arrival in our solar system!” the Secretary General stated, raising his head to address Fangs. Even though he was shouting at the top of his lungs, he still managed to sound no louder than a mosquito's buzz.

  Fangs adopted a human-like posture, raising himself on his hind legs. As he shifted his weight, the Earth trembled. “The great Devourer Empire will consume the Earth so that it may continue its epic journey!” he proclaimed. “This is inevitable!”

  “What, then, of humanity?” the Secretary General asked, his voice quivering ever so slightly.

  “That is something I will assuredly determine this very day,” Fangs replied.

  In the pause that followed, the heads of state exchanged meaningful glances. The Secretary General finally nodded and said, “This definitely requires that we enter into private consultations with one another.”

  Fangs shook his massive head, interrupting before they could speak further. “It is a very simple matter; I must merely have a taste ...”

  And with that, his giant claw reached into the gathered crowd and snatched up a European head of state. He gracefully tossed the man, a throw of 20-odd feet, straight into his mouth. Then he carefully began to chew. From the first crunch to last, his victim remained completely mute; it was impossible to tell whether it was dignity or terror that stayed his screams.

  In the terrible moments that followed, the only sound was that of the man's skeleton snapping and cracking between Fangs' giant, dagger-like teeth. After about half a minute, Fangs spat out the man's suit and shoes, much as a human might spit out watermelon seeds. Even though the clothes were covered in oozing blood, they remained horrifyingly intact.

  All the world seemed to have fallen completely silent, a deathly quiet seeming to be without beginning or end; without end, that is, until a human voice broke it.

  “How, sir, could you just pick him up and eat him?” the Captain asked as he stood amongst the crowd.

  Fangs walked toward him with colossal, thundering steps. The crowd scattered in his wake. He stood before the Captain and lowered his gaze of pitch black, basketball-sized eyes until he was staring right at him. He asked, “I shouldn't have?”

  “Sir, how could you have known that you can eat him?” the Captain asked flatly. “From a biochemical perspective it is almost impossible that a being from such a distant world should be edible.”

  Fangs nodded, his large maw almost seeming to grin. “I have had my eye on you. You watched me with cool detachment, lost in thought. What is it that you were contemplating?”

  The Captain returned his smile and replied, “Sir, you breathe
our air and speak using sound waves. You have two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. You have four limbs arranged along a bilateral symmetry…” He let his thought drift off into silence.

  “And you don't understand it?” Fangs asked, snaking his giant head right in front of the Captain's face. With a hiss, he exhaled a nauseating breath, reeking of blood and gore.

  “That is correct. I do understand the principle of the matter well enough to find it incomprehensible that we should be so similar,” the Captain answered, showing no signs of revulsion or fear.

  “There is something I do not understand. Why are you so calm? Are you a soldier?” Fangs asked in response.

  “I am warrior in defense of Earth,” the Captain answered.

  “Hm, but does pushing around small stones really make you a warrior?” Fangs countered with more than a hint of mockery.

  “I am ready for greater tests,” the Captain solemnly stated, raising his head.

  “You fascinating little worm.” Fangs laughed, nodding. Raising his body to its full height, he turned back to the heads of state. “But let us return to the real topic at hand: Humanity's fate. You are tasty. There is a smooth and mild quality about you that reminds me of certain blue berries we found on a planet in Eridanus. I therefore congratulate you. Your species will continue. We will raise you as livestock in the Devourer Empire. We will allow you to live a good sixty years before we bring you to market.”

  “Sir, do you not think that our meat will be too gamey at that age?” the Captain asked with a cold chuckle.

  Fangs roared with laughter, his voice like an erupting volcano. “Ha, ha, ha, ha! The Devourers like chewy snacks!”

  CHAPTER

  3

  Ants

  The United Nations engaged Fangs in several further meetings. Even though no one else was eaten, the verdict on humanity's fate remained unchanged.