Devourer

CHAPTER 4 Acceleration

Fangs 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.