Harlock wakes to the blaring of alarms and instinctively springs out of his bunk, as he stands he notices the hull is lilted at an angle and assumes the fleet has been ambushed en route to their destination. Pulling his com-pad off his desk as he sprints out of his quarters and turns towards the bridge. He clicks a button on the side of the com-pad
“What’s going on up there?! Are we hit?” he barks into the device as he winds his way through the tilted bulkheads. The device crackles with the voice of one of his bridge officers
“Negative captain, no enemy contact, but I… I don’t know how to explain what I’m seeing sir. Are you near a porthole? You need to look outside.”
Harlock turns up a corridor leading to the outer hull walls of his flagship where spots one of the portholes at the end of the hall. Now running uphill due to the tilt of the hull he approaches the portside wall of the hull. Huffing as he struggles to find grip on the angled steel floor panels, the view outside slowly comes into focus. Coming to a stop in front of the porthole Harlocks eyes widen as the com-pad slips from his fingers, clattering to the ground.
“Captain, are you there? Confirm visuals?” crackles the voice on the other line.
Harlock stares out the window, speechless for a moment, his mouth agape. “Repeat. Captain, confirm visuals?” He swallows, picking up the com-pad again and clicking the button
“Visual Confirmed… It’s… dry.” He stammers. “I don’t understand. We were on course with all conditions optimal just hours ago. How could this happen overnight?”.
“We don’t know yet, Captain,” the bridge officer reports. “All we can say for sure is that all our other fleets are reporting the same thing.”
“The entire ocean?!” Harlock roars “That’s impossible!”
“Captain, Admiral Brennus is hailing. He wants to debrief.” dispatches the officer.
“Get the intel officers to their stations” Instructs Harlock “they need to pour through any logs from the last day for anything that could be related to this… development. Patch Brennus into my console on the bridge, I’ll be right there.”
~ Later that day ~
“Let me get this straight,” says Harlock, pacing the bridge, arms folded “Over the course of an hour every drop of ocean water has mysteriously evaporated and we have no idea how?”
“Yes, it seems that between the hours of 0100 and 0200 there was a spontaneous and near instantaneous mass evaporation event of unknown origins.” Brennus reports from the bridge's main viewscreen.
“The amount of energy required to achieve that magnitude of reaction would be… astronomical. No known factions possess that capability. I think we can rule out any faction being responsible unless the Draconians have secretly discovered zero-point energy, if they had done so we and every other faction would already have been wiped off the face of the planet...” Brennus continues to tap away on his console as he delivers his report.
“Our only conclusion at this time is that this is the result of rapid climate acceleration. Though we have been monitoring sea levels as they declined over the decade since the flood, it was only at a rate of approximately 8 millimeters per year. This level of acceleration is many orders of magnitudes greater than we predicted.”
“So the oceans just simply vanished on their own?” Inquires Harlock.
“That is my conclusion upon reviewing the current evidence, yes.” Confirms Brennus.
Harlock sighs. “What do we tell the other Commanders?”
Brennus pauses, looking up from the console he had been glued to up until now.
“The oceans dried up slowly first, and then all at once.”