Drowned Worlds

by Jonathan Strahan

  The Senior Technician blinked. Standing waist deep in water in a critical access tunnel she had been doing nothing less than wool gathering. What on earth was wrong with her?

  Still, there was something in what she’d just been thinking about. Concrete. Of course.

  “We need to be monitoring the stresses on the load-bearing buttresses,” she said. “Particularly on the seaward side.”

  Givens was obviously mystified by this seeming change of topic. “The buttresses?” he asked. “Outside? What about the flooding?”

  The Senior Technician began working her away up the tunnel toward a set of rectangular steel rungs set into the concrete wall. “There’s nothing we can do about that right now,” she said. “Come on. The local structural integrity control center is down on the Matamoros side of the river, but specs call for it to be hardwired to the sub-sector monitors and there’s one of those less than a mile away.”

  She was not ungenerous to her subordinates, especially to those like Givens who trusted her enough to shrug and follow along after just a moment’s more hesitation. So once they were above the flooded tunnel and briskly walking northwest, dripping as they went, she told him what she was worried about.

  “We’ve been worrying about the support systems,” she said. “We need to be thinking about what they support.”

  Givens nodded, but said nothing. He was used to acting as her sounding board, and knew when to ask questions and when to let her talk.

  “The city is more or less tubular, with the flanking buttresses driven down to bedrock on both the seaward and landward sides. Everything we need is inside, and everything we need boils down to two things, power and fluids. Their continued and efficient circulation is our job.”

  Though she had no particular gifts for biology, the Senior Technician was a diligent student and an admirer of well-built systems. The peculiarities and failings of individual organisms aside, respiration was something to be studied. She had come to the utility of metaphor late in her life—a gift of her husband’s—and now saw the city’s systems in terms of inhalation and exhalation. Take in (and circulate!) water and air and calories, exhale waste, whether the waste was gases or matter or heat. Her job very rarely directly involved the intakes and the outflows, but all of city life, she knew, was dependent on them. Just like all of city life was dependent on their circulation.

  “Their protected circulation,” said Givens, and she realized she’d been speaking aloud.

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “Leaks are inevitable, but all this water, all at once, might mean something worse than an unregulated outflow of steam or a release of waste into the Gulf. If the buttresses are undermined, the integrity of the walls themselves could go. A full on breach, exposure to the exterior, who knows what the consequences would be?”

  “And we’re going to check the old sensor network that monitors the buttresses to try to determine where something like that might occur?”

  The Senior Technician shook her head. “I already know where it will occur. At the arcs, where the city bridges local waterways like the Rio Grande here at Brownsville.”

  Givens let out a low whistle. “How many arcs does the city make? There must be dozens.”

  They had come to the sub-sector monitoring station. The Senior Technician slashed her identification card through the lock and the bolts released. “Hundreds,” she said. “Maybe thousands.”

  The overhead lighting came on as they entered the unmanned station. It was tinted red, something neither of them had ever seen.

  “Wake up the consoles,” said the Senior Technician. “I’m going to see if I can get anything on the comms here.”

  Givens did as he was told, pushing levers and opening valves, while she sat down at communications array and fed it power. There was a hiss of static from the grilled speaker, then a squawk of competing signals as voices in Spanish and English competed with one another and with the hair-raising squeal of raw data given audible form.

  She turned the gain with one hand and adjusted the frequency with the other, seeking some kind of clear signal in the tumult. She caught snatches of reports, heard numerous calls for help, and even, somehow, a few seconds of what was clearly a private conversation between two women discussing who they were going to vote for in a local council election.

  The chaos of noise subsided slightly and she took the opportunity to press the transmit button and lean into the microphone. “This is Substation”—she glanced at the brass plaque screwed into the table—“TR-549 in Brownsville, calling active crews in the area. Attempting to reach any coordinated response effort to the crisis.” Or anyone at all, really, she realized, but did not say.

  She waited for a moment before repeating her call. There was a hollow echo of it transmitted back to her, but nothing like a coherent response.

  The scents of damp cloth and grease made her realize that Givens was standing right behind her.

  “Maybe there is no coordinated response,” he said. His voice was as hollow as what had just sounded over the comms.

  The Senior Technician frowned at him. “Well, if there wasn’t, there is one now, and we’re it. Come on, let’s see what we’ve got.”

  What they had, it turned out, was a limited amount of information, none of it particularly heartening. The buttresses in the Brownsville/Matamoros sector were under tremendous stress. From what the Senior Technician could make of the data, the seaward buttresses were being undermined, probably by erosion, at a prodigious rate. This left the landward side experiencing torque in directions the buttresses had not been designed to deal with.

  “The city”—Givens hesitated—“the city can’t actually roll into the sea, can it?”

  “I think I’d be more worried about the sea coming to the city than the other way around,” murmured the Senior Technician, calmly typing figures into a calculator fished from her toolkit. The numbers didn’t take. The calculator had apparently been damaged by water back in Access Tunnel #6.

  She set the useless machine aside and closed her eyes, thinking. Evidence indicated that the city was, to use a phrase her husband might have, being assaulted by the Gulf of Mexico. There was nothing she could do about that.

  Evidence indicated that locally, the six mile stretch of the city that arced above the Rio Grande delta might come uncoupled at one end or the other and collapse. There might be something she could do about that.

  “Look in those cabinets and see what kind of schematics they have for the local city sectors,” she told Givens.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked, and the Senior Technician suddenly realized that, while she had probably read his birthdate in some personnel file or another at some point, she did not actually know hold Givens was. Looking at him, he seemed impossibly young.

  “We’re going to use all the creditable information available to us to assess the situation. The assessment will identify various threats and problems to the city’s infrastructure and cohesion. We will determine which, if any, of those threats and problems can be countered by the work of two highly trained and skillful technicians. Once that determination is made, we will audit our resources and determine a timeline for actions. Then we will act.”

  The young man shook his head. “It feels like the world’s ending and you want to bail water.”

  The Senior Technician pointed at the cabinets she had told him to search. “Schematics, now,” she said. “Desperation later.”

  THE PASSENGER CARS, as the Junior Conductor had guessed they would be, were a tumult. Passengers were standing and shouting at the Porters, at each other, at the now-quiet speakers of the intercom system, and when they spotted him, most especially at the Junior Conductor himself.

  “Take your seats!” he heard Sandra shouting from the back end of the car he had just entered, but he could not see her through the milling crowd. As he had in each of the previous Passenger cars he’d traversed making his way through the train, the Junior Conductor pulled out his whistle and so
unded it long and loud. His luck held, and once again, the crowd calmed.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “The train has stopped short of the station due to an unforeseen emergency. Your safety is our paramount concern. Please take your seats.”

  But then a young man with incongruously thin black hair combed over the top of his head said, “What is happening? You have to tell us more than that! What kind of emergency?”

  “An unforeseen one, the Conductor said,” said Sandra, suddenly beside the young man and managing somehow to get him seated when he clearly wanted to bluster on.

  But the Junior Conductor heard a note in the Porter’s voice he’d never heard before. A questioning note, maybe even a fearful note. He needed more information, and he needed to share it with the rest of the crew as soon as possible.

  But how to get it?

  The Engineers were clearly not going to be any more forthcoming at this point, he could only interpret their actions as panic. The Senior Conductor knew nothing. Thinking hard, he pulled out his rulebook and flipped to the pages in the back that showed the time and distance tables.

  Glancing at his watch, thinking back over the past half-hour, he calculated that the train was between forty and fifty miles short of Brownsville Station. The Junior Conductor found himself faced with a complicated choice. He walked to the gangway between two passenger cars and looked out through the window.

  The red emergency running lights dimly illuminated the nearby wall. As luck would have it, there was signage at that very spot, the cryptic stenciled letters the track tenders used to communicate among themselves. He couldn’t understand any of it, but it reminded him of something. It reminded him of an option.

  He hustled engine-ward, tapping Sandra on the shoulder and jerking his chin toward the next door. She followed him without question. In moments, they reached the crew lounge, where the Junior Conductor opened a panel and pulled out a large flashlight.

  “I have determined,” he said, “that my duties to the train demand I leave it.”

  Sandra looked at him, clearly confused. “There’s nothing out there but tracks and tunnel walls,” she said. “It would take you—I don’t even know how long it would take you to get to Brownsville Station. Days, probably.”

  The Junior Conductor pulled more supplies out of the emergency kit in the closet: a canteen of water, an extra battery for the flashlight, an oilskin jacket, and, finally, a ring of three large plastic keys. He held these up.

  “The tenders caches,” he said. “They’re spaced evenly between the principal stations, no more than ten miles apart. I’ll walk along the tracks toward Brownsville until I find one, then take the tender cart stationed there the rest of the way. They’re not as fast as the trains, of course, but they move a sight faster than walking pace. I should be at that station within a few hours.”

  Sandra said, “Do you know how to operate the carts? That wasn’t covered in our training—in fact we were told to never touch any tender equipment at all.”

  The Junior Conductor considered lying to Sandra to assuage her fears, but then rejected the notion. The whole point of this scheme was to get more and better information about the situation, not to obfuscate with false reassurances. “Conductors are told the same thing,” he said. “But at the same time, we’re supplied with keys to the stations in event, this is directly from the manual, ‘in event of catastrophe.’ Whatever is happening, it’s clearly catastrophic.”

  Sandra shook her head. “You didn’t answer my question, sir. Do you know how to operate the carts?”

  “I’m a fast learner,” he said, trying to sound confident and failing to his own hearing.

  “I should come with you,” said Sandra. She rummaged in the locker and came up with another flashlight.

  “No,” said the Junior Conductor. “Someone has to keep the passengers calm and you’re best suited for that. Better than me, even. And if the train is allowed to continue, someone will have to help the Senior Conductor manage the stop at Brownsville.”

  “He’s helpless without you,” protested Sandra. “And I don’t have the training to manage a stop.”

  The Junior Conductor considered that for a moment. He considered the parameters of his duties and what he knew of Sandra’s capabilities. He considered the likely chaos of an emergency full off-loading at Brownsville. Then he pulled his whistle out of the front pocket of his waistcoat and handed it over to the young woman.

  “Here,” he said. “It’s mostly a matter of blowing this as loudly as you can and pointing. I have every confidence in you.”

  The Porter took the whistle almost reverently, staring at the silver instrument like it was a badge of office. Which, considered the Junior Conductor, it more or less was.

  “Now,” he said. “Help me open one of the emergency doors. I want to disable the alarm so that the passengers don’t have something else to wonder about.”

  Sandra closed her fist around the whistle and nodded firmly. “Right. You want to prevent the emergency egress alert from sounding, and, I’m guessing, prevent the notification alert from flashing in the engine as well?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that, but yes. I realize I’m asking you to break at least a half dozen regulations—”

  She waved him off. “As it happens, sir, I know how to do both of those things.” With that, she stuffed the whistle into her pocket and marched briskly out the break room door, pausing in the passageway only long enough to ensure that the Junior Conductor was following.

  At the emergency exit halfway along the car, watching Sandra efficiently unscrew an access panel with a screwdriver hung from her own key ring, he considered asking her exactly how she knew to disable the alarms. But he remembered his early days conducting the locals, and the various extra-regulatory workarounds he’d been taught by older crew members when the pursuit of his duties was hampered instead of helped by following the rulebook. He supposed Porters had their own secrets, just as Conductors did.

  The hiss of escaping air told him when Sandra had successfully unsealed the emergency door. The dry, cool, conditioned air of the train was overwhelmed in the passage by a warm, humid, inrushing current that reminded the Junior Conductor of a time his wife had taken him on a tour of the maintenance tunnels in Key West. He brushed the thought aside.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he said, and stepped down onto the concrete siding.

  “Be careful, sir,” said Sandra, pausing in closing the door.

  “I always am, Porter.”

  IT WAS IRONIC, thought the Junior Conductor, as he walked along the tracks, that he was both fifty miles from the nearest help and no more than fifty yards from the nearest human habitation. The enormous tube of the linear city had no unpopulated stretches, but the architecture of the express train line, very near the bottommost layer of the city, sealed it off from the local lines, not to mention the neighborhoods and pedestrian passageways above him.

  If he could, instead of walking along the tracks, travel straight up through the layers of concrete and steel and plastic that formed the cartilaginous matter of the spinal column of the city, he would find the veins and arteries that carried water and power and air, and also, ultimately, the open spaces where the millions of tightly packed citizens lived.

  But he could not. Instead, he was in the express tunnel, which consisted of a rounded-off passageway wide enough for three sets of tracks and the sidings between them. He kept his flashlight switched off as he walked alongside the Point a Punto, trailing one hand along the train, imagining that he was scratching the flank of some enormous, sinuous beast. When he reached the engines, he paused.

  The hum of the batteries that were keeping the train’s systems powered up competed with ticking noises from the cooling engines themselves. The powerful headlamp at the front of Engine #1 was extinguished, probably to save battery power, and this was a relief to the Junior Conductor. If the Engineers saw him out in the tunnel, they would call him back and there was n
othing he could say to properly explain the quixotic mission he had set himself. I have to find out what’s happening at Brownsville, he thought. I have to bring help.

  Knowing it was foolish, he walked on tiptoe as he passed the Engines. He paused at the prow of Engine #1 and peered into the darkness. Far ahead, he could see the dim red glow of the next set of emergency lights. Perhaps he wouldn’t need the flashlight at all. If he kept to the siding, there shouldn’t be anything for him to stumble over, even in the darkness.

  He walked perhaps a dozen yards before falling flat on his face.

  Swallowing a curse, bringing the base of his right thumb to his mouth and tasting blood from a deep scrape, he got to his knees. His feet brushed against whatever it was he’d tripped over.

  He looked back toward the Point a Punto and found that it was already lost in the darkness. He risked switching on the flashlight and found that his feet had tangled in a coil of thick cable made up of dozens of twisted strands of wire, probably fallen from a tenders cart and no doubt the detritus of some repair job or another. The coil was cleanly cut at one end and frayed at the other, rusted along its whole length, which, were it stretched out, probably came to about six feet.

  The Junior Conductor felt dampness at his right ankle, just above the leather of his uniform shoe, and played the flashlight beam over his foot. One of the frayed wires had cut him there, fairly deeply. His sock was soaked with blood already.

  When he stood, he found that he could put weight on his right foot, but only with some degree of pain. He supposed he should be worried about infection, but infections were long term, and he had many short term problems to deal with. He hoped the tenders cache was nearby.

  BECAUSE HE HAD no sense of how fast he was shambling along, the Junior Conductor could not calculate exactly how far he had progressed towards Brownsville when, some ninety minutes after leaving the train, he came to open-sided shed on the landward side of the tunnel. He had held out a small hope that some representatives of the Tenders Corps would be present, but there was no one to be seen.