Free Devourer by Liu Cixin Page A

before continuing to shout with ever greater urgency. “The Devourer approaches! The Devourer approaches! Oh, surely the Devourer must terrify you.”
    “What is the Devourer?” the Captain finally asked.
    “In appearance it matches a gigantic tire. Hm, yes, that would be an analogy that works for you,” the Girl from Eridanus began her explanation.
    “You are very well-acquainted with how things work on our world,” the Captain interrupted, raising an eyebrow behind his visor.
    “I became acquainted in transit,” the girl replied, before again crying out: “The Devourer approaches!” With that last cry she flashed to one end of the crystal. Where she had been a second ago, an image of the “tire” appeared, and it indeed closely resembled a tire, even though its surface glowed with phosphorescent light.
    “How large is it?” one of the other officers queried.
    “Thirty-one thousand miles in total diameter. The 'tire's' body is six thousand miles wide and the hole in the middle has a diameter of nineteen thousand miles.”
    There was a long pause before someone asked the question now on everyone's mind. “Are the miles you are talking about our miles?”
    The girl immediately and calmly answered. “Of course. It is so large that it can encircle an entire planet, just like one of your tires might fit around a soccer ball. Once it has encased a world, it begins plundering the planet's natural resources, only to spit out the remains like a cherry pit once it is done!”
    There was another pause before the officer spoke again, his voice quivering with trepidation. “But we still do not understand what the Devourer really is.”
    The girl in the crystal offered more information without hesitation. “It is a generation ship, although we do not know where it came from or where it is going. In fact, even the giant lizards that pilot the Devourer surely do not to know. Having wandered the Milky Way for tens of millions of years, they will have certainly forgotten both their origin and their original purpose. But this much is certain: In the far past, when the Devourer was built, it was much smaller. It eats planets to grow, and it devoured our world!”
    As she finished, the image of the Devourer in the crystal grew, gradually coming to dominate its entire surface. It soon became apparent that it was slowly descending upon the unseen camera operator's world. Seen through the eyes of the planet's inhabitants, their world had become nothing more than the bottom of a slowly spinning, cosmic well. Complex structures were clearly visible, covering the walls of this titanic well. At first, they reminded the Captain of infinitely magnified microprocessor circuitry. Then, he realized that they were an endless string of cities, stretching the entire inner ring of the Devourer. Looking up, the image in the crystal revealed a circle of blue radiance emanating from the well's mouth. In the sky above it formed a gigantic halo of fire, encircling the stars.
    The Girl from Eridanus told them that they were seeing the jets of the Devourer's aft ring engine. As she spoke, her entire body erupted into a flowing flourish, and even her cascading hair began to wave like countless twisting arms, with every last part of her expressing boundless terror.
    “What you are seeing is the devouring of the third planet of Epsilon Eridani,” she told them. “The first thing you would have noticed, had you been on our world then, was your body becoming lighter. You see, the Devourer's gravitational pull was powerful enough to counteract our planet's gravity. The destruction this wrought was devastating: First our oceans surged to meet the Devourer as it passed over our planet's pole. Then, as it moved to fully encircle our world, they followed it to the equator. As the oceans swept the globe, their waves raised high enough to engulf the clouds.
    The incredible gravitational forces tore at our continents, ripping them apart as if they were