Devourer by Liu Cixin Read Free Book Online

Eleven. It’s not far from here. Maybe we can find some there,” the lieutenant suggested
    “Any will have been long ago burned,” someone said with a sigh.
    Each of them scanned the horizon in all directions. They were surrounded by an unbroken chain of mountains only recently born by the orogenic movements of the Earth. They were dark blue massifs made of bare rock. Rivers of magma spilling from their peaks glowed crimson, like blood oozing from the body of slain stone titan.
    The magma rivers of the Earth below had burned out.
    This was Earth, 230 years after the war.
    After the war had ended, the more than 100 people aboard the control ship had entered the hibernation chambers. There they waited for the Devourer to spit out the Earth; then they would return home. During their wait their ship had become a satellite, circling the new joint planet of Devourer and Earth in a wide orbit. In all that time, the Devourer Empire had done nothing to harass them.
    One-hundred-twenty-five years after the war, the command ship's sensors picked up that the Devourer was in the process of leaving the Earth. In response, it roused some of those in hibernation. When they woke, the Devourer had already left the Earth and flown on to Venus. The Earth had been transformed into a wholly alien world, a strange planet, perhaps best described as a lump of charcoal freshly out of the oven. The oceans had all disappeared and the land was covered in a web of magma rivers.
    The personnel of the control ship could only continue their hibernation. They reset their sensors and waited for the Earth to cool. This wait lasted another century.
          
    When they again woke from hibernation, they found a cooled planet, its violent geology having subsided; but now the Earth was a desolate, yellow wasteland. Even though all life had disappeared, there was still a sparse atmosphere. They even discovered remnants of the oceans of old.
    So, they landed at the shore of such a remnant, barely the size of a pre-war continental lake.
    A blast of thunder, deafening in this thin atmosphere, roared above them as the so familiar crude form of a Devourer Empire ship landed not far from their own vessel. Its gigantic doors opened and Fangs took his first tottering steps out, leaning heavily on a walking stick the size of a power pole.
    “Ah, you are still alive, sir!” the Marshal greeted him. “You must be around five hundred now?”
    “How could I live that long? I, too, went into hibernation, thirty years after the war. I hibernated just so I could see you again,” Fangs retorted.
    “Where is the Devourer now?” the Marshal asked.
    Fangs pointed into the sky above as he answered. “You can still see it at night; it is but a dim star now, just having passed Jupiter's orbit.”
    “It is leaving the solar system?” the Marshal queried.
    Fangs nodded. “I will set out today to follow it.”
    The Marshal paused before speaking. “We are both old now.”
    Fangs sadly nodded his giant head. “Old ...” he said, his walking stick trembling in his hand. “The world, now ...” he continued pointing from heaven to Earth.
    “A small amount of water and atmosphere remains. Should we consider this an act of mercy of the Devourer Empire?” the Marshal asked quietly.
    Fangs shook his head. “It has nothing to do with mercy; it is your doing.”
    The Earth's soldiers looked at Fangs in puzzlement.
    “Oh, in this war the Devourer Empire suffered an unprecedented wound. We lost hundreds of millions in those tears,” Fangs admitted. “Our ecosystem, too, suffered critical damage. After the war, it took us fifty Earth years just to complete preliminary repairs and only once that was done could we begin to chew the Earth. But we knew that our time in the solar system was limited. If we did not leave in time, a cloud of interstellar dust would float right into our flight path. And if we took the long way round, we would lose seventeen thousand years on our way