‘There really is water!’ a young lieutenant shouted with joyous surprise. It was true; a vast surface of water stretched out before them.Sparkling waves shimmered under the dusky heavens.

The Marshal removed the gloves of his spacesuit. With both hands,he scooped up some water. Opening his visor, he ventured a taste. As he quickly closed his visor again, he called, ‘Hey, it’s not too salty.’ When he saw that the lieutenant was about to open his own visor, he stopped him.‘You’ll suffer decompression sickness. The composition of the atmosphere is actually not the problem; the poisonous sulphuric components in the air have already thinned out. However, the atmospheric pressure is too low.Without a visor, it is like what being at thirty thousand was before the war.’

A general dug in the sand at his feet. ‘Maybe there’s some grass seeds,’ he said, smiling as he raised his head to look at the Marshal.

The Marshal shook his head. ‘Before the war, this was the bottom of the ocean.’

‘We can go have a look at New Land Eleven. It’s not far from here.Maybe we can find some there,’ the lieutenant suggested.

‘Any will have been burnt long ago,’ someone commented with a sigh.

Each of them scanned the horizon in all directions. They were surrounded by an unbroken chain of mountains only recently born by the orogenic movements of the Earth. They were dark blue massifs made of bare rock. Rivers of magma spilling from their peaks glowed crimson,like blood oozing from the body of a slain stone titan.

The magma rivers of the Earth below had burned out.

This was Earth, two hundred and thirty years after the war.

After the war had ended, the more than one hundred 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 and 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. By the time 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.