Tube Worm

Although there had been a few minor problems, our journey had gone fairly smoothly, and we had been surveying all the way around the lake.

I had been treating it like a fairly carefree trip too, but now we had run into trouble.

The northern side of the lake had become a cliff that plunged straight into the water.

Put simply, there was no shore.

We had no idea how far this situation continued, but we decided to head for Sakura while surveying the cliffs.

Once the sandy beach ended, the cliff became almost vertical—though in reality, it was probably angled at around seventy degrees—and it was not a wall humans could climb.

Many black-and-white birds had built nests in hollows in the cliff, staining the rock white.

If enough droppings had accumulated, we might have been able to hope for a phosphate mine like the one on Nauru, a southern island in my old world...

For now, I sent the drone up and had it climb to an altitude of about a hundred meters.

"It looks like we can't see where the cliff ends from here."...