The Rain - The Sun

The Rain - The Sun

The three men sat in silence inside their ThermaTech storm tent. Outside, an icy wind buffeted the shelter, threatening to tear it from its moorings. None of the men took notice; each had seen situations far more threatening than this one.

Their tent was stark white, pitched in a shallow depression, out of sight. Their communication devices, transport, and weapons were all state-of-the-art. The group leader was code-named Delta-One. He was muscular and lithe with eyes as desolate as the topography on which he was stationed.

The military chronograph on Delta-One’s wrist emitted a sharp beep. The sound coincided in perfect unison with beeps emitted from the chronographs worn by the other two men.

Another thirty minutes had passed.

It was time. Again.

The time. New Jersey. Photo by Elena

Reflexively, Delta-One left his two partners and stepped outside into the darkness and pounding wind. He scanned the moonlit horizon with infrared binoculars. As always, he focused on the structure. It was a thousand meters away—an enormous and unlikely edifice rising from the barren terrain. He and his team had been watching it for ten days now, since its construction. Delta-One had no doubt that the information inside would change the world. Lives already had been lost to protect it.

At the moment, everything looked quiet outside the structure.

The true test, however, was what was happening inside.

Delta-One reentered the tent and addressed his two fellow soldiers. “Time for a flyby.”

Both men nodded. The taller of them, Delta-Two, opened a laptop computer and turned it on. Positioning himself in front of the screen, Delta-Two placed his hand on a mechanical joystick and gave it a short jerk. A thousand meters away, hidden deep within the building, a surveillance robot the size of a mosquito received his transmission and sprang to life.

Though the latest glaciation had yet to reach its deepest cold, the sea level had already dropped hundreds of meters. In the coastal reshaping that resulted, the islands of Java and Sumatra had been joined with Southeast Asia to form a great shelf, and much of Indonesia had become a long peninsula. Similarly Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea had been merged into a single mighty mass.

In this unique, temporary geography, there were places where the Asian landmass was separated from greater Australia by only a hundred kilometers or so.

(Rain, the novel by Elena and George).