Devourer by Liu Cixin Read Free Book Online Page B

pale yellow of the Sun they looked like a group of rust-stained statues. Fangs closed his computer and, full of regret, said, “At first I did not want you to see this, but you are all true warriors, well capable of dealing with the truth, ready to recognize,” he paused for a long while before continuing “that human civilization has come to an end.”
    “You certainly destroyed Earth's civilization,” the Marshal said staring into the distance. “You have committed a monstrous crime!”
    “We finally have started to talk about morals again,” Fangs said with a laugh and a grin.
    “When you invaded our home and after you brutally devoured everything in it, I would think that you lost all rights to talk about morals,” the Marshal said coldly.
    The others had already stopped paying attention; the extreme, cold brutality of the Devourer civilization was just beyond human understanding. Nothing could have been less interesting to them than to engage them in an exchange about morals.
    “No, we have the right. I now truly wish to talk about morals with humanity,” Fangs said before again pausing. “‘How, sir, could you just pick him up and eat him?’” he continued, quoting the then Captain. Those last words left nobody unshaken. They did not emanate from the translator, but came directly from Fangs' mouth. Even though his voice was deafening, Fangs somehow managed to imitate those 300-year-old words with perfection.
    Fangs continued, returning to the use of his translator. “Marshal, three hundred years ago your intuition did not mislead you: When two civilizations – separated by interstellar space – meet, any similarities should be far more shocking than their differences. It certainly shouldn't be as it is with our species.”
    As all present focused their gaze on Fangs' frame, they were overcome with a sense of premonition that a world-shaking mystery was about to be revealed.
    Fangs straightened himself on his walking-stick and, looking into the distance, said, “Friends, we are both children of the Sun; and while the Earth is both our species' fraternal home, my people have the greater claim to her! Our claim is one-hundred-forty million years older than yours. All those millennia ago, we were the first to live on this beautiful planet and here we established our magnificent civilization.”
    The Earth's soldiers stared blankly at Fangs. The waters of the remnant ocean rippled in the pale of the yellow sunlight. Red magma flowed from the distant new mountains. Sixty million years down the rivers of time, two species, each the ruler of this Earth in their own time, met in desolation on their plundered home world.
    “Dino … saur …,” someone exclaimed in shocked whispers.
    Fangs nodded. “The Dinosaur Civilization arose one-hundred million years ago on Earth, during what you call the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic. At the end of the Cretaceous, our civilization reached its zenith, but we are a large species and our biological needs were equally great. In the wake of our population explosion, the ecosystem was stretched to its limit and the Earth was pushed to its brink as it struggled to support our society. To survive we completely consumed Mars' elementary ecosystem.
    “The Dinosaur Civilization lasted twenty thousand years on Earth,” he continued, “but its true expansion was a matter of a few thousand years. From a geological perspective, its effects are indistinguishable from those of an explosive catastrophe; what you call the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event.
    “Finally, one day all the Dinosaurs boarded ten giant generation ships and with these ships sailed into the vast sea of stars. In the end, all these ten ships were joined together. Then, whenever this newly united ship reached another star's planet, it expanded. Now, sixty million years later, it has become the Devourer Empire you know.”
    “Why would you eat your own home world? Are Dinosaurs bereft of all