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asked.
    “It is. A crack. A three thousand mile-long crack,” the Marshal said, nodding. “The Eridanians did not betray us. The data in the crystal was accurate. The acceleration limit is real, but as the Moon approached, the despairing Devourer decided to damn the consequences and to exceed it by four-fold, desperate to avoid the collision. This, however, had consequences: The Devourer has cracked.”
    Then they found more cracks.
    “Look, what's going on now?” someone shouted as its rotation brought another part of Devourer's surface into view. A dazzling bright light began glowing on the edge of its metal continent as if dawn were creeping over its vast horizon.  
    “The rotational engine!” an officer called out.
    “Indeed. It is the rarely used equatorial rotational engine!” the Marshal explained. “It is firing at full power, trying to stop the Devourer's rotation!”
    “Marshal, you were spot on and this proves it!”
    “We must act now and use all available means to gather detailed data so that we can run a simulation!” the Marshal commanded. Even as he spoke, the entire Supreme Command was already executing the task.
    In the past century a mathematical model had been developed that precisely described the Devourer's physical structure. The required data was gathered and it ran very efficiently, and so the results were quickly produced: It would take nearly 40 hours for the rotational engine to reduce the Devourer's rotation to a speed at which it could avoid destruction. Yet, in only 18 hours the centrifugal forces would completely break it to pieces.
    A cheer rose among the Supreme Command. The big screen shone with the holographic image of the Devourer's coming demise: The process of the break up would be very slow, almost like a dream. Against the pitch-black of space, this giant world would disperse like milk foam floating on coffee, its edges gradually breaking off, only to be swallowed by darkness beyond. It looked like the Devourer was melting into space. Only the occasional flash of an explosion now revealed its disintegrating form.
    The Marshal did not join the others as they watched this soul-soothing display of destruction. He stood apart from the group, focused at another screen, carefully observing the real Devourer. His face betrayed no trace of triumph. As calm returned to the bridge, the others began to take notice of him. One after the other they joined him at the screen. There they quickly discovered that the blue light at the Devourer's aft had reappeared.
    The Devourer had restarted its engine.
    Given the critical state the ring structure was already in, this seemed like an utterly unfathomable mistake. Any acceleration, no matter how minute, could cause a catastrophic breakup. But it was the Devourer's trajectory that truly baffled the onlookers: It was ever so slowly retracing its steps, returning to the position it had held before its evasive maneuvers. It was carefully reestablishing its synchronous orbit and re-aligning its axis of rotation with Earth's.
    “What? Does it still want to devour the Earth?” an officer exclaimed, both shocked and confused.
    His question provoked a few scattered laughs. All laughter, however, soon fell silent as the others became aware of the look on the Marshal's face. He was no longer looking at the screen. His eyes were closed. His face was blank and drained of all color. In the past hundred years, the officers and personnel who had made fending off the Devourer a pillar of their soul had become very familiar with the Marshal's countenance. They had never seen him like this. A calm fell over the gathered Supreme Command as they turned back to the screen. Finally they understood the gravity of the situation.
    There was a way out for the Devourer.
    The Devourer's flight toward the Earth had begun. It had already matched the Earth in both orbital speed and rotation as it approached the planet's South Pole.
    If it took too long, the Devourer's