Chapter 54:
Yomotsu Hirasaka Island

 

THICK CLOUDS HAD GATHERED over the newly formed island, although its peak was still visible, if only because the clouds didn’t reach that high. The summit, which was so tall that its collapse seemed inevitable, was nineteen thousand meters above sea level and just breached the bottom of the stratosphere. You could stack two Mount Everests on top of each other, and you still wouldn’t get to the top.

The stratospheric network of airships, which was now the world’s only method of communication, would be forced to rethink their routes. The larger American and European observation crafts had circled the thick clouds several times, confirming that Yomotsu Hirasaka was now a new island in the Pacific Ocean.

The island had the topography of a plateau and the perimeter of a pentagon.

The energy from the fall had caused the ocean floor around it to rise up as a ring of smaller islands. Most of the sentry drones had dropped out of range, but one of the operators reported seeing a thick forest behind all that fog. The lunar origins of Yomotsu Hirasaka should’ve made it impossible for it to support any kind of plant life, yet there were chlorophyll reactions in the log before the drone dropped out of reach. People were skeptical but not altogether unbelieving.

The last thing the drone saw was a large-scale landslide, which unveiled a mountain range shaped like the back of a large beast.