The Flooded Earth

by Mardi McConnochie

  “I don’t think the submarine made it,” Pod said.

  There was floating debris in the water; it looked like the submarine had been seriously damaged, if not destroyed entirely. They had decided to steer clear of it and swiftly left Kapa Island behind.

  “I found some things I think you should see,” Essie said, when they were out in open water once again.

  While Pod had been searching for his sister, Essie had made the most of the Princess’ signal and done some searches. She’d begun with the four names on the list.

  “I found a few references to them,” Essie said, “but none of it’s recent. In fact, most of it’s from before we were born.”

  She flicked through the little she’d found: young men and women attending university, winning medals, publishing scientific papers, appearing in campus musicals, performing with long-vanished bands, smiling from long-ago news stories. The most recent entries were fifteen years old. Then nothing.

  “They’ve all gone underground,” Annalie said. “Every single one of them.”

  “Yes. But I did manage to find this,” Essie said.

  It was a photograph, slightly fuzzy, showing seven people standing on some elaborate steps outside a building. They all had Admiralty kit bags, although they were not wearing uniforms. There was a man in a cowboy hat, a woman with long red hair in a plait, a big woman, and a thin, dark-eyed man, older than the others, with a dark coif, already threaded with silver.

  “It’s Spinner!” Annalie said.

  “Is that them?” asked Will excitedly.

  “It has to be them,” Essie said. “And look. That’s the guy who tried to arrest us in Southaven.”

  His face was less grooved and his hair was much fuller, but it was recognisably Avery Beckett. He was on a higher step than the others, positioned between Spinner and a third woman.

  “Who do you reckon that is he’s standing next to?” Essie asked.

  “I think—” Annalie began.

  “That’s our mother,” finished Will.

  The twins leaned in closer. The woman was young and lovely, smiling at the camera. She had the same thick hair as Annalie, Will’s square jaw. The two of them studied the fuzzy image, trying to trace themselves in that unfamiliar face.

  “So that’s what she looked like,” Annalie murmured.

  “You don’t remember her?” asked Essie.

  “Don’t remember her, never seen a photo of her,” Will said. “She died when we were babies.”

  They were all quiet for a moment. Then Pod whistled. “Hey, Graham. Come look at this.”

  Graham flew down and cocked his head on one side as he studied the picture. Then he began to squawk with excitement and fly round and round Pod’s head, words escaping him.

  “Yep. He recognizes them,” Will said.

  “I recognize the building too,” Essie said. “They’re on the steps of the Ministry of Science. See?”

  She’d found a second photo of the Ministry of Science to compare it with. It was a very old building with the same elaborate marble staircase the seven young people were standing on.

  “I wonder where they’re going,” Will said.

  “The desert?” Pod suggested.

  “I searched “Ministry of Science” and “desert” but I didn’t get very far,” Essie said. “Mind you if it was top secret, I wouldn’t expect to find much.”

  “I can’t believe you found this much,” Annalie said. “It’s amazing.”

  “Searching the links is what I do,” Essie said modestly.

  * * *

  Later, Essie took Annalie aside. “There’s something else I wanted to show you,” she said, activating her shell again. “After I recognized him in the picture I thought I’d look into that Avery Beckett guy too. There was heaps of stuff on him.”

  He was, as he said, an agent of the Admiralty’s Department of Scientific Inquiry, and was listed with a name and photo on their personnel page as Head of the Special Investigations Section. The description of what the department actually did was brief and vague.

  Next, Essie showed her a news article that had appeared six years ago in the Daily Herald, one of Dux’s main newsfeeds.

  Victory in international piracy fight

  The Admiralty has smashed an international smuggling ring trading in stolen technology with the arrest of pirate captain Ambo Suz Mila, 35, and his confederates. Suz Mila has been charged with conspiracy to steal, transport, and sell top-secret technology taken from the Admiralty’s Department of Scientific Inquiry, and also with using that technology to carry out acts of piracy against vessels traveling through Allied Federation of Nations waters.

  The investigation into the pirates has been conducted over a period of eight months, and culminated this morning in a dawn raid on Moombass Island, one of the Moon Islands, where the pirates had a heavily fortified compound. The Admiralty team overcame strong resistance to penetrate the compound, coming under heavy fire, without sustaining any serious injuries. The pirates attempted to detonate the compound to destroy the evidence of their activities, risking the lives of the family members and children also living there, but they were prevented from doing so by the swift action of the Admiralty team. The team then made numerous arrests and recovered a large amount of stolen technology, weapons, and other contraband items.

  “The theft of naval technology represents a grave threat to the ongoing security of everyone who lives under the Admiralty’s protection,” said Commander Avery Beckett, who headed the operation. “These people are ruthless, and they’ll stop at nothing to steal the technology that helps us keep people safe. By smashing this ring, we’ve struck a blow against the pirates who want to steal from us, and made the high seas a safer place for all of us.”

  The technology recovered includes experimental communications equipment and a new kind of propulsion engine. Although the details of this new engine remain classified, Commander Beckett noted that this new-generation high-speed engine would make pirates virtually impossible to catch.

  “The recovery of this technology was of the highest priority for our team,” he said.

  The Admiralty leadership has commended Commander Beckett and his team for the surgical precision of the successful operation. The accused, who come from non-Federation countries or are non-documented persons, have been transported to Dux to await trial.

  “Yikes,” Annalie said, when she’d finished reading. “That guy’s even more hardcore than I realized.”

  “Wait until you read this,” Essie said.

  The second article she showed her was much longer. It was a feature article that had been published on a newslink called Uncover.

  “What’s Uncover?” asked Annalie.

  “It’s an independent investigative newslink published out of Barbassa,” Essie said. Barbassa was a small, mountainous, landlocked country that had never seen the need to join the Admiralty’s Federation of Allied Nations and maintained a lofty neutrality to the squabbles of the world.

  Death on Moombass

  They came in the pre-dawn darkness: four landers from the Admiralty warship Defiance, each containing an operational team of five men. They slid silently onto the beaches at 4.54 a.m., weapons ready, and moved up the beach and into the trees. Their target was a large encampment, protected by armed guards and an electric fence, where as many as two hundred men, women, and children lived together. To the Admiralty, this camp was a pirate base and a vital link in the international tech-theft network. To the two hundred people who lived there, it was the only home they’d ever known.

  Team A’s mission was to disable the electric fence. Team B was responsible for taking out the guards. Team A found the electric fence was non-functional and penetrated it easily. Team B found there were no guards on duty. The four teams entered the compound at 5.14 a.m.

  Less than an hour late
r, the encampment would be in flames, with scores of the inhabitants dead, injured, or missing, including forty-two children. And yet the Admiralty team who carried out the raid, led by Commander Avery Beckett, was officially praised for its “surgical precision”.

  What really happened that morning on Moombass?

  Hulk Harbor is the largest refugee camp in the world. In the immediate aftermath of the Flood, desperate people from all over the world set out in boats to escape the rising waters. Some of them were escaping from coastal regions that disappeared under the sea, some from the ghost countries that were completely immersed by the Flood. Still others came seeking refuge in those fortunate countries that had escaped the worst effects of the Flood.

  Many of these ships were unsuitable for large groups of passengers, poorly provisioned, or had been damaged by the floodwaters, and in one of the great heroic acts of the post-flood period, the Admiralty found and escorted all these refugee ships to safer waters. A place was found for them in the great Bay of Kinute, on Tappa Island, off the north-east coast of Dux. But plans to repatriate these refugees came to nothing. Many of the refugees no longer had homes to go to; others were unwilling to return to countries rendered destitute by floods. Some nations closed their borders completely. Many more would accept only a small number of refugees in any given year. Waiting lists for the richest countries are now decades long. Hulk Harbor—a collection of rusting, barely habitable boats, floating in the filthy junk-strewn water of the Bay of Kinute—has become a permanent floating home to millions. Generations have been born there, with little hope of escape.

  Some of these refugees have taken matters into their own hands. Giving up on any hope of resettlement through official channels, they are leaving Hulk Harbor and finding their way south, to the Moon Islands. Although this low-lying part of the world was the hardest-hit by the Floods, for many people, it is their one hope of salvation. New communities are springing up there, unconnected to national governments or authorities. The Admiralty call it “a vast zone of lawlessness.” The people who live there see it as a kind of freedom. But it can be a perilous freedom.

  There is no doubt that piracy represents an ongoing threat to the security of international shipping. The Admiralty have long used this threat to justify their continuing presence at the heart of government. However, independent analysis of crime statistics over the post-flood period shows that the number of attacks currently grouped under the heading of piracy has been either steady or falling over the last ten years. These statistics are difficult to verify, as the Admiralty and government keep the details secret “for operational reasons.” However, it does seem clear that the trend in international piracy is downward. The public, however, believes that piracy is increasing, and is increasing in sophistication.

  The Admiralty has carried out a number of well-publicized raids on pirates and technology thieves over the last five years, with the stated objectives of reducing international piracy and smashing the trade in stolen technology.

  However there are persistent rumors that the technology making its way out of the Admiralty and onto the black market is not all being stolen by spies or pirates. Some say it is being provided by secret elements from within the Admiralty itself. These deep cover operatives are supplying new technology to pirates, creating an atmosphere of lawlessness and fear. The law-enforcement arm of the Admiralty then cracks down on these pirates, without ever seeming to uncover the source of the leak that let the technology onto the market in the first place.

  Moombass began as one of these crackdowns. But something went wrong.

  The electric fence around the camp on Moombass ran off a wind turbine generator. The Admiralty have argued that the presence of an electric fence indicates that the camp was a fortified compound. Residents say it was largely defensive; the electric fence had been put up to deter ordinary looters.

  There had been a celebration in the camp the night before the raid. A young couple had got married, and everyone had joined in the celebrations, which went until late into the night. When the marines broke into the camp at first light, the vast majority of the inhabitants were sleeping it off. Accounts differ about exactly what happened next.

  The official Admiralty report, written by Commander Beckett, states: “My men disabled the electric fence and entered the compound. We were fired upon by an unseen shooter and we immediately took cover and returned fire.”

  An eyewitness living on Moombass tells a different story. He says: “I woke up and saw a terrifying face looking in at me through the window of my house. It was a marine in helmet and combat goggles. He had a gun trained on me and my wife. We thought we were dead for sure. He chased us outside, and when we came out we saw they were emptying all the houses around us. I could see the people stumbling out, some of them still half-asleep. A couple of us were angry and started shouting back at them. That was a mistake. We started shouting, and then they started shooting.”

  The eyewitness estimates that at least fifteen people were shot in that initial exchange.

  Another eyewitness recalls: “They started going from house to house, tearing everything apart, knocking over the furniture. You could hear things going crash, smash. People’s precious possessions, being smashed to bits.

  “Then a man came and spoke to us. He was wearing a uniform and I saw his name on it—Beckett. He held up a picture—I didn’t know what it was exactly—some piece of high tech. He said, ‘If you want all this to stop, you’d better tell me where to find this. Or I’ll tear this place down to the nails and screws.’

  “At first no one said anything. Maybe they didn’t know what that thing was. I certainly didn’t know. Then finally Ambo says, ‘I’ll tell you where it is. Please don’t wreck our town.’ The man called Beckett took him away.”

  According to the Admiralty’s report, Ambo Suz Mila, 35, was discovered hiding in his home with an automatic weapon. When marines attempted to enter the property to search it, he fired on them. The marines managed to subdue him and take him into custody, despite fierce opposition. When they searched his home they found a number of stolen items hidden there. Subsequently, Suz Mila would be charged with a range of offenses, and accused of being the ringleader of the operation.

  But what was the nature of this operation?

  The waters around Moombass were once rich in marine life. The sudden change in sea level caused the fisheries to collapse, but since then Moombass has seen a revival of its fish stocks. For the people of Moombass, fish is an increasingly important part of their livelihood. The Moombass fishing fleet is small—only five boats—and just one of these is suitable for traveling long distances. This boat has become the island’s lifeline, transporting a part of its catch to the busy market at Gomba Island, which sells new, old, and reconditioned tech as well as fish. Over the last few seasons, the Moombassans have begun making improvements to their fishing fleet. One of the things they bought was a device that could help them locate fish. Another was a better engine for their boat, so they could get their catch to market faster.

  The Admiralty alleges that these items were important new technologies stolen from Science Special Projects. Moombassan witnesses insist that none of these items were hidden in people’s homes. They had been bought openly, and were being used as part of the day-to-day business of the fishing fleet. They deny that there were large caches of weapons in the compound or on board the fishing boats, although each captain did keep a gun or two on board for self-defense.

  “Every pirate claims to be a fisherman until you find the automatic weapons in the hold,” said Commander Avery Beckett at a press conference.

  “We’re not pirates. We’re just families, trying to live our lives. Old people and parents and children trying to get by,” said a Moombassan woman.

  Today, the future is uncertain for those who remain on Moombass. Their largest boat has been impounded as evidence, making it almost impossible for them
to continue trading with Gomba. But still they hang on, hoping to rebuild. What choice do they have? They have nowhere else to go.

  When Annalie had finished reading, Essie looked at her expectantly. “Do you think it could be true?”

  “Which article?”

  “The long one, obviously.”

  “Sure,” Annalie said. “You hear about stuff like that happening.”

  “Really?” Essie asked. “Marines going into people’s camps and just shooting unarmed people?”

  “I’ve heard stories like that,” Annalie said.

  “Well I haven’t!” Essie said, upset. “The Admiralty I joined wouldn’t do stuff like that. They wouldn’t let someone like that work for them either.”

  “But he does work for them.”

  Essie looked at Annalie angrily. “We both went to Triumph so we could get into the Admiralty one day. How could you go to school, knowing you’d have to do active service, if you already knew they did things like this?”

  “I was never all that keen on going into the Admiralty at all!” Annalie said. “It seemed like a—necessary evil. That’s the way Spinner made it sound. If you want to go to university and do something important with your life, you need to go to an Admiralty school.”

  “That’s all it ever was to you? Something your dad made you do so you could get on in life?”

  “Well, what was it to you?” Annalie asked.

  “The mission—the oath—I believe in it. It’s important,” Essie said, unable to express herself clearly.

  Annalie could see her distress. “I know you believe it. Lots of people do believe it. And of course the Admiralty do good work. Of course they do.”

  “They do,” Essie agreed, somewhat appeased.

  “But in an organization as big and complicated and powerful as the Admiralty, it’s probably not surprising there are a few rotten apples.” This was the sort of thing she’d heard Spinner say; it was the closest he’d ever come to direct criticism.