As he continued, Fangs pointed at the large pile of earth in front of them. “That is the final resting place of the Realm of the White Mountain. As you archaeologist worms were preoccupied by your excavations of a lost and dead fifty-thousand-year-old city, you completely failed to realize that the soil above those ruins was teeming with a city that was very much alive. In scale it was easily comparable to New York, and the latter is a city on merely two-dimensions. The city here was a grand three-dimensional metropolis with many layers. Every layer was densely packed with labyrinthine streets, spacious forums, and magnificent palaces. The design of the city’s drainage and fire prevention systems handily outshone those of New York.
“The city was home to a complex social structure and a strict division of labor,” he told his captive audience. “Its entire society ran with machine-like precision and harmonious efficiency. The vices of drug use and crime did not exist here and hence there was neither depravity nor confusion. But its inhabitants were by no means devoid of emotion, showing their abiding sorrow whenever a subject of the Realm passed away. They even had a cemetery on the surface at the edge of the city and there they would bury their dead an inch under the ground.
“However, the greatest acclaim must be reserved for the grand library nestled in the lowest layer of this city. In this library one could find a multitude of ovoid containers. Each container was a book filled with pheromones. The exceedingly complex chemistry of these pheromones stored the city’s knowledge. Here the epics detailing the enduring history of the Realm of the White Mountain were recorded. Here you could have learned that in a great forest fire all the subjects of the kingdom embraced each other to form countless balls, and that with heroic effort they were able to escape a sea of fire by floating down a stream. You could have learned the history of the hundred-year war against the White Termite Empire; or of the first time that an expedition from the kingdom saw the great ocean…” Fangs let his translator’s voice trail off.
Then his booming voice again rang out. “But it was all destroyed in three short hours. Destroyed when, with an Earth-shattering roar, the excavators came, blackening the sky. Then their giant steel claws came cutting down. They grabbed the soil of the city, utterly destroying it and crushing all within. They even destroyed the lowest layer where all the city’s children and the tens of thousands of snow-white eggs, yet to become children, rested.”
All of the world again seemed to have fallen deathly quiet. This silence outlasted the quiet that had followed Fangs’ horrible feast. Standing before the alien emissary, humanity was, for the first time, at a loss of words.
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
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.
CHAPTER 5
The Lunar Refuge
Finally, humanity’s negotiations with the alien emissary showed some small signs of progress. Fangs yielded to the demand for a lunar refuge.