Storm Cloud Rising: Book One Of The Rain Trilogy

FORWORD

Science fiction writers. What an odd breed we are. Our speculations often take us to distant, fanciful places and times. We flippantly play the "What If" game with all sorts of exotic ideas and themes. We tinker with time. We go into galaxies unknown. Science frequently is stretched to the breaking point...sometimes beyond. We take trips to unknown worlds and visit alien species. We even make war with them, make love to them (no matter how unlikely that may be), and we come away...changed for the experience.

But there are changes that happen closer to home. Changes brought about by reasons that some would say are mundane. Profound changes. Changes that will affect all of humanity for all time. Changes permanent in their nature. No aliens need apply. No wars are necessary. No cross breeding required.

The Rain Trilogy deals with such changes and, by its very intent, tries to open the eyes and minds of an unsuspecting audience seemingly content to live out their lives without giving these simple propositions so much as a passing thought. For some reason we find it easier to deal with things like slimy green lizards come to kill us all, or things that crawl into our bodies and take over our minds. We entertain the idea of intelligent insect populations so malevolent that they have nothing more in their brains than to eliminate humans from the universe. They don't need to have a reason.

Read on...and be changed. Read on...and understand that your world and its place in this system of planets near a small, yellow star is not the safe cocoon you may have thought it to be-you wish it to be.

Prologue

Space; frigid, silent darkness punctuated by a multitude of points of piercing light-light generated by the fury of hydrogen fusing to helium and other, heavier elements. Among all those brilliant pinpricks, more than half huddle inside vast girdles of gas, ice, mineral dust, and metal. In time these materials coalesce through a horrifying, violent and whirling dance into rocky planets, huge balls of gases, and globes of frozen gases, water ice, stone, and nickel-iron crystals. Some of the solid, stony-iron masses are pulverized into chunks that continue the ballet of the bullies, while others, out in the frozen fringe, wait quietly for something to come along that will jostle them enough to send them dashing headlong to join the fray, and the random violence erupts anew.

Some of these events are cyclical. Here, in our quiet little solar system, there appears to be one such cycle that occurs every thirty-two to thirty-five million years as we pass through the galactic plane, a transition we are now making, but other episodes can be triggered by the random, close passing of any massive object; dense clouds of dust and gas, blazars, planets ejected from their home systems with enough speed to wander free until they are trapped or forced to change direction by the cold grip of gravity, stars, or the burned out cinders of dead stars, and the list goes on.

That this cosmic clutter exists within our galaxy, indeed between the galaxies, too, is known with a high degree of surety. That these things make an occasional pass by or through our solar system is also well understood, but when they will come calling or when they have visited us and gone on their way, no one can say, with the notable exception of stellar data collected by the Hipparcos mission. It has to be mentioned also that the Hipparcos data only include information on selected visible stars coming our way or those that have already gone by-not the things that remain unseen, hidden from us. All that can be said is, it has happened in the past with devastating results. It will happen again. The passing of objects we know has occurred in the dimness of years past, but it often requires millions, even billions of years for the evidence of any such visitation to appear. When the signs of a chaos producing incident do make themselves known...it is too late, the chaos arrives full grown and the time of death follows not far behind-the Reaper spurs a silent, black steed into our midst and in his wake comes...THE RAIN...the hard rain.

Although what follows is a speculative fiction, it is rooted firmly in the soil of past, present, and future realities. It is a fiction that could easily become a living nightmare of hell while you are reading this, or it may not manifest itself for millennia. The only thing that can be said with certainty is, it will happen. The storm cloud will rise and the rain will fall. Are you ready? Should it arrive during your lifetime, do you have the information, the knowledge and the will you need to survive the advancing storm of hard, deadly rain that gouges out huge holes in our little planet/spaceship and pulverizes entire regions of Earth? Will you be prepared to face the long, cold Winter that follows, one that lasts for years, perhaps centuries?