Flood

by Stephen Baxter

  In the meantime life in Britain was changing in more subtle ways. Transport was more difficult, with washed-out road and rail links and the steadily increasing cost of fuel, and this was forcing a profound adjustment on everybody. Amanda’s kids were going to local Buckinghamshire schools, crowded with London refugees who were picked on by the locals. Amanda still commuted daily into her job in London, but she made the last leg on a riverboat that sailed past drowned river-front flats. She did her shopping in a Waitrose or a Tesco’s in Aylesbury, going in and out by bus, but what you could buy in the supermarkets changed daily as their supply and distribution chains broke down. Small independent stores were making a comeback, in fact, boasting fresh local sources.

  “Everything is sort of stretched out of shape,” Amanda said stoically. “I sometimes think it’s as if we’re regressing to the past. Local schools, jobs, food. But things are still working, just.”

  Lily sympathized about the caravan. “I can imagine you and the kids crammed in there. I expect I’ll have more room in Gary’s submarine.”

  The talk turned to that, the nature of the dive, the dangers, its purposes.

  Lily said, “Gary, Thandie and their crew simply don’t believe the UN’s assurances about the limits to the sea-level rise.”

  Amanda snorted. “Never mind the scientists. Just ask Benj and Kristie. There’s endless online chatter about it all. You have Aussie kids who watched Bondi Beach disappear, Inuit kids watching the permafrost drown in the Arctic—and a lot of them measuring what’s going on in some way, even if it’s only chalk marks on a pier. Kristie’s keeping up her scrapbook of this stuff—do you remember that project, Lily? I mean they’re all just kids, but kids aren’t necessarily stupid, my kids certainly aren’t, and they’re telling each other what they see. And they all agree that the rise is real, and in fact it’s accelerating. So, Lily, you don’t need to go diving at all. Not unless it’s just an excuse to get up close and personal with that astronaut.”

  “Gordo, you mean—”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling her too,” came a new voice.

  In her screen image, Lily looked up, startled. “Oh, hi, Piers.” Helen saw Lily shove sideways to let him sit beside her; they seemed to be on the edge of her hotel room bed.

  Helen and Michael exchanged a glance. So Piers had made it after all.

  “Looking good, Piers,” Helen said. “Texas cooking agrees with you.”

  Piers smiled, but it was a strained expression, and his eyes looked dark. Helen remembered it was past midnight for him, and he’d clearly been working hard. He turned to Lily. ‘Gordo.’ You name-dropper.”

  “He’s taking me on a personal tour of Johnson tomorrow. How cool is that?”

  “Well, it’s good that you should see the space center before it becomes a museum.”

  Piers’s tone startled Helen. He was right, of course. Despite heroic efforts Cape Canaveral was under severe threat; from space Florida looked as if it had been cut in half by the ocean. But the remark was cynical for Piers, and personal, even cruel. One of the many secrets they had learned about Lily in Barcelona was that Lily had joined the USAF, despite being raised in Britain, in the faint hope of making it into NASA; this was an old dream for her, now flung back at her by Piers. Perhaps he was tired. Or, just maybe, there was some small grain of jealousy lodged in his soul.

  Lily, however, didn’t react.

  Piers said now, “Just a minute.” He reached forward and tapped at an invisible keyboard.

  The laptop images blinked, then recovered, but the picture quality was poorer, the sound scratchier.

  Amanda asked, “What was that? Something on the fritz?”

  “No. I put us through a military encryption filter; we’re reasonably secure now. Look, I overheard the last bit of your talk. I want to give you some advice, all of you. This theorizing about the sea-level rise is actually irrelevant. Whatever happens to the ocean, in future things are likely to get a good deal more difficult.”

  “ ‘Difficult,’ ” said Michael.

  “Yes, difficult. I talked over some of the bigger picture with Lily earlier. We’re already seeing petty wars triggered by refugee flows and shortages of fresh water and dry land, new pressures exacerbating old tensions. At present it’s the usual flashpoints that are kicking off, India versus Pakistan for instance—though that conflict’s largely overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the deltas. But nowhere will be immune, ultimately.”

  His dry, laconic way of speaking was oddly chilling. Helen wondered what briefings might lie behind his words. “So what’s your advice, Piers?”

  “To go home. Back to Britain, as soon as you can. Look—Britain is under pressure, from the loss of farmland, the flooding of London and the other cities. And we’re still heavily reliant on imported food and energy sources. But the fact is Britain is an island, and that gives us a certain natural security. It always has. The government is beginning a crash program of resilience, of securing food and energy supplies without a reliance on foreign imports—I mean, we have coal, North Sea gas and oil, nuclear. Even in some of the worst-case climate change scenarios Britain fares reasonably well. A Gulf Stream collapse, a cooling of the north Atlantic, might be balanced by a general warming of the Arctic.”

  “We should retreat to Fortress Britain,” Lily said. “While the rest of the world drowns.”

  “Well, just think about it. You did want us to stick together, Lily. What else can I do but give you my best advice?”

  Lily said, “I appreciate it, Piers, but you’re not going to put me off my dives. There’s no scientific consensus about the sea-level rise. Don’t you think it’s worth a few submarine jaunts to try and find out?”

  “The correct question is, is it worth losing your life?” He looked at her steadily. “I’m actually concerned for your safety, Lily, believe it or not.”

  She reached across and grabbed his hand. “I know. But I have to go. Because if I don’t, who’s going to look after Gary?”

  He laughed. Then he pulled his hand away, withdrawing into himself again. He stood up. “I need to get back to work.”

  Helen frowned. “You can’t be serious. You’re exhausted.”

  Piers smiled, ducking so the others could see his face in their screens. “I’m fine. Good night, all.”

  “Good night and good morning, Piers,” Amanda said.

  When he’d gone, Michael shook his head. “He’s wearing shorts and no tie, but nothing has changed about him. I’ve said it since the first time I met him. One of these days that man is going to snap like a dried twig.”

  Lily snorted, and stretched. “Well, he’s not talking me out of my submarine trip. And I’m not done chatting yet, the night is young. What say we have a coffee break? I’ll see if I can get this lousy military filter off the link.”

  They agreed, and broke up. Lily filled the screens with a silly saver image, some relic of her childhood perhaps, a puppet aqua-girl with long blond hair and webbed feet who swam past to a soppy crooning song.

  But Helen’s phone sounded with a news flash. A nuclear warhead being hastily moved from a flood-threatened missile facility on the north German plain had been involved in a high-speed vehicle pileup. The warhead had partially detonated; Hamburg had been declared a disaster zone, and the German government was appealing for aid.

  24

  June 2017

  From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

  Mrs. Reese Shelby of Belle Glade, Florida, used her blog to protest at the state’s use of school buses to ship low-category prisoners from flood-threatened correctional facilities to safer institutions upstate.

  “It’s not just that my kids have to tramp their way to school through the pouring rain, that’s not what I object to. And it’s not even that the governor has put the safety of thieves, murderers and rapists ahead of the safety of decent people. No, what I object to is the state these convicts leave the buses in. The seats are van
dalized, they scrawl the most obscene graffiti, and there are bodily fluids everywhere . . .”

  Mrs. Shelby went on to protest about the government decision to open up selected national parks to refugees from flooded areas.

  25

  October 2017

  Nathan Lammockson had Lily flown into Keflavik airport, thirty kilometers west of Reykjavik.

  An AxysCorp car met her there and drove her, not into the city itself, but inland, across desolate country. She glimpsed mountains, ice-crested. She was curious about this strange island; it was the first time she had visited. But she had no time to explore. Now that Lammockson had got hold of his bathyscaphe it was full speed ahead with his ocean survey project, and Lily was suddenly pitched into a whole new phase of her life. Lily Brooke, submarine pilot: who’d have thought it?

  They arrived at what looked like a staid hotel. It turned out to be Bessastadhir, the residence of the president of Iceland.

  The next morning Lily waited outside the residence for the car to return. The air was fresh and cold, with a bite in the wind from the sea, but there was no frost on the ground, no snow. Her usual AxysCorp coverall kept her warm enough, but she pulled the hood up around her face.

  The car showed up, flying an AxysCorp cradled-Earth flag. This time Lammockson himself was in the back. And up front, Gordon James Alonzo was driving. Lily buckled up fast. Gordo drove like an astronaut; she’d learned that from the time she’d spent with him in the States. She hung on to the door grip as the car was thrown down the drive and out onto the road.

  Lammockson offered her coffee in a lidded plastic cup. She refused, but he took a deep draft from his own cup, and there was a strong aroma. Lammockson wore a heavy overcoat of what looked like fake fur, finely tailored, very expensive; he used up most of the room on this seat. Before her the back of Gordo’s head was like a warhead, solid, stubbled with silver-gray hair; a stocky man, big for an astronaut, he was around forty-five.

  “So,” Lammockson grinned at her. “Enjoying your trip so far, Lily? How do you like staying at the White House of Iceland?”

  “Yes, how did you swing that with the president?”

  “Well, the old girl owes me. I’ve brought enough investment and employment to this Godforsaken rock in the last few months, while every other ‘entrepreneur’ around the world is filling sandbags and lying low. Besides, half the hotels in Reykjavik are flooded out, you’ll see, same as everywhere else. And now you’re being chauffeured by a genu-wine astronaut. Of course if not for me he’d be flying old ladies and puppy dogs out of the Mississippi floods, not piloting mysterious voyages to the bottom of the sea. I’ve got his balls in my pocket, and he knows it. Right, space boy?”

  “You’re a funny guy.”

  Gordo spoke in his usual Californian drawl, but Lily could hear the tension in his voice. In Houston, she’d got to know this stranded astronaut well enough to understand that his sudden grounding when the space program died was an open wound the size of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge itself. But this was Lammockson’s way, she’d learned that too. If you worked for him, he never missed an opportunity to exert his power over you in the most brutal way, all delivered with that hustler’s grin.

  They were driving into the city now. Suburban Reykjavik looked a clean place, neat, modern in a European way, pretty little houses with brightly colored roofs, lots of concrete and glass. Occasionally she glimpsed the flat, steel-gray surface of the sea, with ice-capped mountains shouldering above the horizon. But out here the only sign of the flooding that must be afflicting this coastal port was the heavy traffic; traffic was bad all over the world, it seemed, everybody inching around the floods.

  Gordo turned his head. He was good-looking in a big-boned surfer kind of way, but his neck was thick, and lines gathered around his eyes and mouth. He exuded competence. “You ever been here before, Lily? To Iceland?”

  “No.”

  “We’re sat right on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. In fact Iceland is one of the ridge mountains, strictly speaking. So it’s a good place for Thandie Jones to be running her sea-floor-spreading surveys.”

  “But it’s not just that.” Lammockson pointed out of the window to a large blocky building that sat on a low rise, topped by a glass dome from which light glimmered. “See that? I asked Gordo to bring us this way. It’s a remarkable sight in my humble, and I try to make sure everybody who comes out here takes a look. They call it ‘the Pearl.’ Geothermal water distribution tanks. Since 1930 this whole city’s taken nearly all its central heating from the heat of the Earth, the steam that just bubbles up out of the ground.”

  Lily thought she saw his point. “So the city is independent of external energy sources. Oil supplies, coal.”

  “Not entirely, but it could be made so,” Lammockson said. “An inexhaustible supply. Not only that, we’re sitting on an island. Defensible, see? Quite a thought, isn’t it? This is a stable point, a refuge from the flooding, a place the post-flood recovery could begin . . .”

  He said this briskly, businesslike, as if he was planning no more than a disaster recovery option for one of AxysCorp’s computer centers. But she had learned that this was the way he thought, as he acted: decisive, far-seeing, brutal. This Iceland operation was typical of Lammockson’s way of thinking in that it achieved multiple goals, the ocean survey work and the establishment of a possible refuge for a dismal future.

  They drove back through the anonymous suburbs and headed inland once more.

  “Where to now?” Lily was here to be trained to pilot Lammockson’s deep-submergence vehicle, and she’d imagined she’d be taken to the coast.

  Gordo said, “We’ve established a DSV sim facility inland. Right now I’m the only pilot we’ve got; you’ll be the second, though some of the scientists can double as pilots also. We’re hoping to train up a slew more. Nathan and Thandie want to run their survey dives around the clock. It’s a two-person boat, in the current configuration, one scientist, one pilot, so we need the cover.”

  “And you don’t want to tie up the one operational boat while you’re training novices.”

  “That’s the idea. The sim is fairly crude, you’ll see, but it’s as good as it needs to be. Compared to flying Shuttle or Orion, the Trieste is a simple bird. More like piloting a dirigible. You’ll have no problems with it.”

  “You said the Trieste?”

  Nathan Lammockson looked at her, his eyebrows raised. “Name rings a bell?”

  When Gary had made his invitation to join him, back in London, she had known nothing about deep diving. Since then she had done some Googling. “Trieste was the tub that explored the Marianas Trench in the 1960s.”

  Gordo said, “The boat was designed by the Swiss, bought by the US Navy in 1958, and in 1960 she reached the Challenger Deep in the Marianas, eleven thousand meters down, the deepest part of any ocean on Earth. No vessel has ever revisited the Deep. In fact no vessel constructed since has been capable of reaching such depths, manned or unmanned.”

  Lily said to Lammockson, “So this Trieste is named as a tribute to that pioneer.”

  “Not exactly,” Lammockson said. “Lily, she is the Trieste, the original. Or what’s become of her, in the years since.”

  After her jaunt into the Challenger Deep the Trieste was retired, but her pressure sphere, the most advanced bit of engineering, was incorporated into a new DSV called the Trieste II. The new boat was used as a test vehicle for the Navy’s deep-submergence program, and qualified four “hydronauts.” Trieste kept working until 1980, when she was made obsolescent by the Alvin-class subs.

  “Which everybody’s heard of, because Alvin went to the Titanic,” Lammockson said. “While they stuck the Trieste in a naval museum at Keyport, Washington.”

  “And that’s about where the engineering development stopped,” Gordo said. “Last decade there was talk of replacing Alvin with a new breed of DSVs but it came to nothing.”

  “And the Navy won’t even release Alvin for this project,”
Lammockson said bitterly. “Nor will Woods Hole.”

  Gordo said, “Woods Hole is a major oceanographic institute in Massachusetts. They operate Alvin.”

  “More like ‘Arse Hole’ if you ask me,” Lammockson said. “The Russians have deep-diving submarines too, that they call Mir. Two of them touched bottom of the North Polar Ocean a few years back. But I can’t get hold of those either. I blame the Shirshov Oceanology Institute in Moscow for that.”

  Lily nodded. “So you liberated the Trieste from her museum.”

  Lammockson snorted. “What choice was there? There’s no time to redevelop a whole technology from scratch. The Iceland Glaciological Society is formally sponsoring us here, and God bless them. But I’ve had nothing but minimal cooperation, if you can call it cooperation at all, from agencies who should know better.” He railed about other organizations and eminent individuals who, he claimed, had done their best to impede his project. There was a widespread denial of the reality of the ocean rise, because it didn’t fit any of the old models of likely climate change, which themselves were still at the center of intense disputes. “But you just have to deal with them all,” Nathan said.

  “Well, that’s what you’re good at, Nathan,” Gordo murmured.

  “Yeah, I spend my life sucking off bureaucrats, lucky me. Anyhow I think we ended up with the right tub for Thandie’s work. I’m happy with the Trieste. But of course it’s not me who’s got to fly the thing. Just think,” he said, goading, “you’re getting to see the deep ocean bed, Gordo. Exploring landscapes nobody’s ever seen before. A consolation for not walking on Mars, hey?”

  “You take what you can get,” Gordo said. “For sure I’d rather be doing this than working with the rest of the guys, mothballing Johnson and Canaveral, or working on the panic launches.” This was NASA-speak for a series of rapid-turnaround launches in which the inventory of vehicles at Canaveral was being fired off to Earth orbit, delivering whatever useful payload could be placed up there, mostly weather satellites and Comsats, before the launch facilities were finally lost to the flooding.