Livets Skepp – The Rainmakers

Earth needs fresh water and we happen to be bringing tons of it, but it might be too late.

Imagine a body of water the size of Lake Erie, all of it, 480 cubic kilometres. Now imagine something the same size, 4.8 billion tonnes of fresh water, as it rode at the bow of the great cylinder in a single, perfect sphere five kilometres across. For a century it had been cargo, collateral, a balance sheet entry that would finally pay the colony’s birth-debt. Now it was the last free freshwater reservoir in the inner solar system.

The message from Earth had been brutally clear:

Do not aerobrake. Do not flood.

Deliver 480 km³ as calibrated ice bombs.

We need rain, not a deluge.

Coordinates and drop masses follow.

So the two thousand awake souls of Livets Skepp did what engineers do best: they turned a lake into ammunition.

While the ten-kilometre Tail still howled behind them, pushing the cylinder at a sustained 7.1 m/s², the forward factories came alive. Robotic arms carved the shrinking Great Lens into precise blocks (each one a perfect rectangular prism wrapped in thin diamondoid film to survive entry). Sizes ranged from fifty-metre cubes down to five-metre bricks, every gram weighed, every trajectory calculated to the metre.

The target list read like a requiem for a wounded planet:18 000 blocks of 8 000 tonnes each for the American Ogallala aquifer footprint (timed to melt at 12 km altitude, 40 mm rain over Nebraska in a single afternoon).
42 000 blocks of 3 200 tonnes each for the North China Plain (gentle 25 mm over Hebei, no flooding of Beijing’s subway tombs).
110 000 smaller bricks for the Murray-Darling basin, the Sahel, the Aral remnant, Punjab, California’s Central Valley (each drop tuned to the millimetre by altitude and latitude).

Captain Dirk Hansen stood on the axis with the release officer, both men wearing nothing but skinsuits and the hollow-eyed look of people who had not slept in real gravity for four months.

“First salvo in sixty seconds,” the officer said. “Nebraska package. Eighteen thousand rounds.”

Dirk nodded. Behind them the Tail still burned, braking now, bleeding off the terrible speed they had stolen from the lake itself. The cylinder had flipped hours ago; the ten-kilometre lance pointed away from Earth, painting interplanetary space with a sword of plasma while the bow faced home.

A ripple crossed the remnants of the Great Lens. The sphere was no longer round; it looked bitten, pockmarked with geometric scars where the carvers had taken their harvest.

“Open the gates.”

Magnetic rails along the cylinder’s spine woke with a low thrumming hymn. The first rank of ice blocks (eight thousand tonnes each, gleaming like cathedrals of frost) slid forward on cushions of electrostatic force, accelerated gently to 400 m/s relative, and vanished into the dark.

From Earth they would appear as a constellation of new meteors, silent and deliberate, burning just enough to become clouds instead of craters.

Batch after batch followed: Nebraska, then Sichuan, then Punjab, then the ghost towns of Syria. The Tail kept roaring, slowing the ship to a gentle 11 km/s as it crossed cislunar space, close enough now that the exhausted crew could see city lights flickering beneath brown haze.

When the last block left the rails (a tiny two-tonne cube destined for a refugee camp outside old Dhaka), the Great Lens was gone. Nothing remained at the bow but an empty diamondoid bowl and a few glittering snowflakes drifting in the sunlight.

Livets Skepp coasted into high Earth orbit under chemical thrusters alone, quiet for the first time in half a year.

Below, the first rains began.

Satellite cameras caught it: perfect circles of cumulus blooming over dead farmland, moving at the pace of the planet’s own turning. Forty millimetres over Nebraska, soft and steady. Twenty-five over the North China Plain. Children who had never seen rain ran into streets that suddenly smelled of petrichor instead of dust.

Captain Dirk Hansen watched the feeds with the rest of the awakened crew. No one spoke. Someone started crying; within seconds the entire control deck was weeping without shame.

A final transmission rose from Geneva, what was left of it:

Water debt forgiven.
Colony debt erased forever.
Welcome home, rainmakers.
Livets Skepp hung above the slowly healing world, her ten-kilometre Tail cooling to black, her cargo holds empty, her people finally, mercifully, at rest.

Lake Erie had come home one careful raindrop at a time.