Fangs left the people at the dig site in a state of deep shock and despair. The Captain was again 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 that the only reason I am fortunate enough to attend these occasions is because I was the first to come into contact with the two alien intelligences. Nonetheless, I want to say a couple of things: first, Fangs is right; second, humanity’s only way out is to fight.’
‘Fight? Oh, Captain, fight…’ The Secretary-General shook his head with 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 a war of self-defence. 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; consider that we could just as well have been faced with invaders made of energy fields and the stuff of neutron stars.