The Next Continent Read Free Page A

need to take it so hard,” said the old man. “You’re not one of the crew, are you?”
    â€œNo. I’m with Gotoba Engineering. We built Dragon Palace and the three shuttles.”
    â€œThen this isn’t your problem. Well, no—I guess it is. But it’s not important. You handled the situation perfectly. ‘Drink!’ That was a stroke of genius. ‘Drink!’” The old man laughed briefly. “And your name?”
    â€œSohya Aomine. I work for Gotoba’s Engineering Task Force.”
    â€œI’ll remember that. Let’s be going, Tae.”
    â€œYes, Grandfather.”
    The old man took the girl’s hand, and they headed for their seats. Sohya called after them, “I’m sorry, but who are you?”
    â€œOh, you’ll see us again soon enough. Who we are isn’t important right now. Perhaps you’d better get your passengers some towels?”
    This obvious measure had escaped Sohya completely. He hurriedly returned to the passengers to explain how to access the blankets under their seats. Back on the bridge, he met a barrage of questions from the pilot, who had had to stay at the controls throughout the entire incident.
    By the time Sohya finished his explanations, Leviathan ’s navigation lights had pierced the darkness to reveal a number of gigantic egg-shaped domes laid out in a geometric pattern on the ocean floor. It was Dragon Palace, the multipurpose undersea city of the Spratly Islands.
    [2]
    TWO THOUSAND KILOMETERS south of Japan, in the South China Sea between the Philippines and Vietnam, an archipelago of more than 650 reefs, atolls, and islands lay like pebbles scattered across the ocean surface. Since the end of World War II, the Spratly Islands had been the focus of a struggle for territorial rights between China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia.
    The prize at stake was not the insignificant bits of land peeking out above the sea. It was the vast, deep-ocean oil fields in the surrounding waters. The islands had been used as an anchorage since the time of Ming dynasty Fleet Admiral Zheng He, and China’s territorial claims were the most insistent. The Chinese had surveyed the area and estimated that it held as much as two hundred billion barrels of oil, nearly as much as Saudi Arabia’s known reserves. In fact, since the end of the twentieth century, Malaysia had been producing millions of cubic feet of natural gas every day from offshore platforms. That enormous treasure lay beneath these waters was a certainty.
    During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, oil had become increasingly precious, and friction between the five nations surrounding the Spratlys had intensified. They began competing to build structures on the islands, and occasional exchanges of gunfire erupted between rival patrol boats. In 2018, after eighty-five crewmen died when a Chinese frigate exchanged fire with a Philippine missile cruiser, the five nations decided the situation had become too dangerous.
    By this point, the overall international political climate had turned toward reconciliation and cooperation. The wars between the United States and the Islamic world during the first decade of the century had subsided after an undignified American retreat forced on the president by public opinion. Since then, use of military force in pursuit of national aims had fallen out of sync with the international political climate. No matter how great the value of the Spratlys’ oil, the idea of going to war over it was unacceptable. The five nations agreed to set aside long-held grudges and find a path to peaceful cooperation. They formed a joint consortium to develop the Spratlys, and after casting about for a way forward, they agreed to start with a joint construction project that had no connection with resource exploitation. The project would serve as a symbol of their commitment to avoid armed conflict.
    The consortium