The sea level rose slowly, covering a large part of the coast, Elmer, sitting on the sand, felt his trousers get wet and his ass wet, he stood up and saw his feet under the thin layer of water, he could remember the cold sea wetting them, I wish he could feel it, it was just a memory of other times, when it had not yet been broken.
He went back to where he was again on dry sand and sat down again, perhaps in an hour or so, the small island would be completely covered by a thin layer of water, and so it would be all night long until morning when it would rise from underwater covered with mollusk algae and other creatures that were trapped, drying under the embracing heat of the day.
One hundred and sixty years ago he was on this same islet, but in a different situation. The placid climate and peace that was breathed today in Cepheus had not always been the same, the pose had a turbulent past, exactly one hundred and sixty years ago, over this sky, beyond the atmosphere, about eight hundred kilometers away, developed one of the most violent and costly battles ever carried out by humanity.
More than fifteen thousand ships for each side were conflated in a whirlwind of violence and destruction, in the middle of a thunderous silence, almost three hundred thousand people, between military and civilians perished, many of them exposed to the devastating emptiness of space, compressed by the difference in pressure when the gases of their bodies were violently expelled into space and explode their blood vessels and boil their blood exposed to the difference in pressure. It is perhaps one of the most horrible ways to die, a terrible agony, fortunately of a few seconds.
The battle of the Polux space station was the worst scenario of the war for the control of Cepheus between the pro-parliament forces and the members of the separatist rebellion, part of the station was destroyed taking hundreds of thousands of civilians, while hundreds of pilots of both sides also died or were seriously injured or mutilated in combat.
Elmer was one of them, he had joined the rebel forces following the ideal of a planet free from the intervention of Heracles and his parliament of the colonies, today after so long realized the futility of their ideals and how unnecessary were the pain and losses caused by the war.
During the battle he was part of the first wave in attacking the Polux station, where almost two million souls were refugees, who fled from Cepheus, trying to escape the war, so that, by the pettiness of the rebel commanders, the war would be brought to them, in an unnecessary attack on a civilian target.
His ship was shot down in the first assault, even before leaving the gravitational attraction of Cepheus, he was hit by a projectile fired by a pro-parliamentary fighter hundreds of kilometers from him, his shattered body was thrown into the sea, mutilated by the explosion, his legs and right arm had been torn off, and he suffered severe burns.
For his fortune the system of descent and flotation of the pod of expulsion of the ship, was not compromised by the explosion, and could survive the fall of more than eighty kilometers, then the currents would lead him to strand on the same islet where they were today, there for five days, exposed to heat and cold, with his body half submerged in the sea during the night, when the islet was covered by water.
His broken body was able to survive thanks to the compression system and the thermal insulation of his flight suit. Fortunately, five days later a patrol of the pro-parliament forces found him following the signal of his emergency beacon.
Every ten years, he visits the same islet that saved his life, today again his body was complete, although with cybernetic parts; it was no longer broken. Again the water began to moisten his ass, so he decided it was time to get on the ship and return to his home on the coast, where his wife waited for him, before boarding her, again he saw his feet under the water and wished he could feel it.