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 to the next star. In that time the star’s state will have already changed, burning the planets that we wish to eat. Because of this we had to chew the planets of the Sun in great haste and we could not pick them clean,” Fangs explained.
“That fills us with great comfort and honor,” the Marshal said, looking at the soldiers surrounding him.
“You are most worthy of it. It truly was a great interstellar war. In the lengthy annals of the Devourer’s wars, ours was one of the most remarkable battles! To this day, all throughout our world, minstrels sing of the epic achievements of the Earth’s soldiers,” Fangs stated.
“We would more hope that humanity would remember the war. So, how is humanity?” the Marshal queried.
“After the war, approximately two billion humans were migrated to the Devourer Empire, about half of all of humanity,” Fangs answered, activating the large screen of his portable computer. On it pictures of life on the Devourer appeared. The screen revealed a beautiful grassland under blue skies. On the grass a group of happy humans was singing and dancing. For a while it was difficult to distinguish the sex of these humans. Their skin was a soft, subtle white. They were all dressed in fine, gauzy clothes and on their heads they all wore beautiful wreathes of flowers. In the distance one could make out a magnificent castle, its appearance clearly modeled on something from an Earth fairytale. Its vibrant colors made it look as if it were made of cream and chocolate.
The camera’s lens drew closer, giving the Marshal a chance to study these people’s countenance in detail. He was soon completely convinced that they were truly happy. It was an utterly carefree happiness, pure as crystal. It reminded him of the few short years of innocent childhood joy that pre-war humans had experienced.
“We must ensure their absolute happiness,” Fangs said. “It is the minimum requirement for raising them. If we do not, we cannot guarantee the quality of their meat. And it must be said that the Earth people are seen as food of the highest quality; only the upper class of the Devourer Empire society can afford to enjoy them. We do not take such delicacies for granted.” Fangs paused for a moment. “Oh, Marshal. We found your great-grandson, sir. We recorded something from him to you. Do you care to see it?”
The Marshal glimpsed at Fangs in surprise, then nodded his head.
A tender-skinned, beautiful boy appeared on the screen. Judging by his face he was only 10-years-old, but his stature was already that of a grown man. He held a flower wreathe in his feminine hands, having obviously just been called from a dance.
Blinking his large, shimmering eyes, he said, “I hear that my great-grandfather still lives. Then I ask only one thing of you, sir. Never, ever come see me! I am nauseated! When we think of humanity’s life before the war we are all nauseated! What a barbaric life that was, the life of cockroaches! You and your soldiers of Earth wanted to preserve that life! You almost stopped humanity from entering this beautiful heaven! How perverse! Do you know how much shame, how much embarrassment you have caused me? Bah! Do not come looking for me! Bah! Go and die!” After he had finished, he skipped to join the dancing on the grassland.
Fangs was first to break the awkward silence that followed. “He will live past the age of sixty. He will have a long life and will not be slaughtered.”
“If it should have anything to do with me, then I am truly grateful,” the Marshal said, smiling miserably.
“It does not. After learning about his ancestry, he became very depressed and filled with feelings of hate toward you. Such emotions prevent his meat from meeting the standards,” Fangs explained.
As Fangs looked at these last few humans before him, genuine emotions played across his massive eyes. Their spacesuits were extremely old and shabby and the many years past were etched into their faces. In the 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.”