Stephen Baxter - Flood

Gordo shrugged. “I could maybe get a certain class of people on there. And it doesn’t include you, Nathan. There are various categories you have to fit-such as, young enough to have a kid. That rules out you.” He stiffened, subtly. “And me.”

Grace spoke for the first time.“You’re working on this project knowing you won’t be included yourself?”

“It’s what we call duty, ma’am,” he said.

Thandie caught Lily’s eye and shook her head. Was there anything more corny than an astronaut being a hero? But Lily found herself moved even so.

But Nathan’s thoughts were surging ahead.“Not me, then. But Hammond here.” He clapped his son on the shoulder. “He’s only thirty-five. You could take Hammond, right?”

Hammond’s blocky face showed an extraordinarily mixed expression, relief he might be saved from a danger he evidently hadn’t been imaginative enough to consider before, and resentment as his father reshaped his life once again.

Gordo’s face worked. “It’s possible-”

“No,” Lily snapped. They all turned to look at her. She leaned forward, her heart beating. This was the crux of the situation-of her whole life, in a sense, since Barcelona. “Not you, Hammond. Grace. Send Grace, Nathan. That’s who you must save.”

Nathan immediately saw what she was doing. “Right. And so you’ll fulfill your promise to Helen, all those years ago. With you people it always comes back to those days in the fucking cellars, doesn’t it? It always comes back to that.”

Lily shrugged. “You know us better than anyone.”

“All right. But why should I do this? Why should I bump my own son out of this safe haven, whatever the hell it is, and put her in instead?”

“Because she’s carrying Hammond’s child.” She pointed at Grace’s belly. “Your genes are in there, Nathan.”

Thandie glanced at Gordo. “She’s actually a better candidate than Hammond, in terms of Nimrod’s criteria. She’s not academic, but she has shown independent survival skills that Hammond never has, frankly. And with a pregnant woman you’re getting two for the price of one, two sets of genes-twice the genetic diversity. She will be an easier sell.”

Grace looked utterly shocked. “ You planned this,” she said to Lily, and she touched her own belly.“You set up my relationship with Hammond-even the timing of my pregnancy, to get me onto this Ark. You’ve been planning it for years!”

Hammond snapped, “And what about me? Why should I allow this to happen? If I push you, Dad, you’ll give me that place. I know you will. Why should I help her, knowing I might not survive myself?”

Gordo Alonzo said, “So that you will be remembered.”

After that, nobody spoke for long seconds.

Lily felt the decision congeal around them. She felt a vast relief. I did it, Helen. I kept my promise to you after all this time. I did it.

Gordo stood up. “We ought to break this up. I got a lot to talk about with my superiors, if, if, I can swing this.”

Thandie said,“I know you won’t say anything about the nature of the project, Gordo. But why Nimrod? Why that name?”

Ramrod straight, he looked down at her. “I guess you skipped Bible studies at school. Genesis 10, verses 8 to 10: ‘And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth… And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and-’ ”

“Babel?”

“It was only generations after the Flood of Noah. Chapter 11, verse 4.‘And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.’ ”

“But God struck them down when they built the tower.”

“Yes. But why? 11:6. ‘Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.’ That’s what God said about mankind. He feared us, and so He struck us down. We have that verse up on the wall on big banners, to motivate the workforce. ‘Nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.’ ”

“Wow,” Thandie said. “You’re challenging God?”

“Why the hell not?”

Nathan’s radio phone went off. And then Lily’s, then Hammond’s.

It was Piers, calling from Ark Three. The ship was under attack.

Gordo and Thandie rustled up a helicopter to take them all back to the shore. As the bird came down in Cripple Creek it scattered some of the flimsier shanties that crowded the narrow streets. But the population didn’t seem too scared. Lily supposed that the neighborhood of NORAD was one of the few places on the planet where helicopters would still be commonplace.

They hurried aboard. But Grace was staying behind, with Gordo Alonzo, to be taken away into Project Nimrod, into Ark One, whatever that meant. And Lily knew that this was it, that she would never see Grace again. There wasn’t even time to say goodbye, and anyhow the noise of the bird drowned out everything they said. Lily mouthed, “Forgive me.” Then Thandie pulled Lily into the chopper, and Gordo Alonzo held onto Grace, and the ground fell away, diminishing Grace’s upturned face to a point.

Then the ride itself overwhelmed Lily. She couldn’t remember when she’d last flown. It brought back a rush of memories, the smell of leather and canvas and oil, the shuddering vibration of the turning blades.

From the air, Lily could see Ark Three was listing. Smoke was pouring out of the engine room, oil spilling onto the ocean surface. The bridge was in ruins, and there was a fire in progress on the sports deck. Lily could see the lifeboats being launched, the orange craft swinging from their davits.

And rafts and boats were gathering like sharks around a wounded whale. More were on their way, a fleet of rough vessels making for the stricken ship. Such was the scale of the disaster that it could be seen for kilometers around.

“It looks like she’s been torpedoed.” Nathan turned on Thandie. “Why didn’t your damn sub do something about it?”

“She’s doing something now,” Thandie said. She pointed to a slim hull. “The New Jersey will be going in for your seed store if nothing else, Nathan.”

A sub officer said to Nathan, “We’ll save as many of your people as we can, sir, you can be sure of that.”

As the chopper descended Lily saw the first boarders taking on the crew on the rope ladders and the promenade deck. She thought of Piers, and Kristie and Manco, and everybody else she cared for down there, the only world she had known for years. And me, she wondered. Where am I going to live now? A shack on some mountainside, a raft?

“Get us down, damn it.” Nathan was hanging in the open doorway, a pistol in his hand.

Mean sea-level rise above 2010 datum: 1800-8800m

August 2041

Nathan and Hammond personally carried Piers out of the wreck of the Ark. He was limp in their arms, tall, frail, his long legs folded up like a cricket’s, a length of bony forearm protruding from each sleeve cuff. The Lammocksons had to clamber across a gathering archipelago of lifeboats and rafts, some of them Ark inflatables, others improvised from wreck debris. The crowded boats bobbed and dipped under their steps, and it was a miracle they didn’t end up in the water, the two of them and the man they were carrying. But they kept going.

Lily, Kristie and Manco had a liferaft to themselves, much patched but serviceable. Manco and Kristie cowered in the shade of the raft’s tentlike cover. Kristie’s battered pink backpack was at her feet, following her into yet another new phase in her life. Manco, ten years old, was wide-eyed, naked save for swimming trunks and his bulky life jacket and his precious red New Jersey baseball cap. Kristie held him close, and when the popping of the guns or the screams got too loud she put her hands over his ears and pressed his face against her chest.