Stephen Baxter - Flood

The sight of the drenched people, the bodies on the stretchers, horrified Amanda. She found it impossible to believe that only half an hour ago, less, she had been sitting in an arena, warm and relaxed with her kids beside her, listening to a boy band murder madrigals. And now, this. Had people died?

And if the Jubilee Line was flooded, the tube network was probably shut down entirely. Travel was going to be a nightmare, even once they got off Greenwich. Bit by bit the day continued to unravel.

Benj pulled her hand. “Come on, Mum, I’m getting cold.”

“Yes. I’m sorry.” They hurried on.

Lily and Piers had to wait for a chopper to take them from Shoeburyness to Greenwich. The hydrometropole’s limited landing facilities were clogged by craft whisking parties off to their “disaster vacations.” This was a kind of insurance policy offered by Nathan’s AxysCorp, where in the event of a calamity like a flood you were just taken away to a luxury hotel, somewhere safe, to ride it out, and let somebody else deal with the mess. Lily was bemused to see how accustomed the world had become to disaster. Some of these fleeing plutocrats didn’t even pause in their drinking as they were escorted smoothly from party venue to vacation transport.

At last Lily and Piers got their chopper, and lifted. The wind was rising all the time, and even this pilot’s consummate skill couldn’t save the bird from shuddering as it rose, the hull groaning, the engine roaring as the rotors bit into the turbulent air.

The delay hadn’t been long, but enough that by the time they flew over greater London, heading west, the flooding was already extensive. The river had breached the flood defenses on both banks, and buildings and lamp posts and trees protruded from the water like toys in puddles. Evacuations continued frantically all along the line of the rising water, the roads crammed with chains of slow-moving cars, trucks, buses, fire engines and ambulances, their lights gleaming like jewels, and with a denser, porridgelike mass that had to be people fleeing on foot, too many of them and too far away to distinguish, human beings reduced to particles.

Piers looked down at the inundation, his gaze frank and intelligent, listening in to the police feeds. A situation like this should bring out the best in him, Lily thought, his training and instinct for command. But he was pale, and he had lost weight like the rest of the hostages. Their captivity was only six days past, and they all had finite reserves. But the world evidently wasn’t going to wait for their recovery.

When they passed over the Thames Barrier the pilot dipped to give them a view. The Barrier, a line that cut across the river, was overtopped all along its length, and a kind of waterfall thundered down on the upstream side, throwing up spray and churning up the river water.

“That,” Piers murmured, “is a sight to tell your grandchildren about. A once in a thousand years event, supposedly. Actually the Barrier is itself now the subject of a rescue operation. Chaps trapped in the control towers, and in some kind of connecting tunnel under the river. The city’s defenders now need defending themselves. Well.” He turned away.

The chopper dipped and surged onward again, heading steadily west.

At last they swept over Greenwich. The pilot stayed high, keeping out of the way of the rescue operations already underway.

Here the river described a fat S-shape in a great double meander, creating two peninsulas, one dangling from the north bank and the other from the south, from Lily’s vantage pressed up against each other like yin and yang twins. The fatter, pendulous peninsula on the left was the Isle of Dogs, a tongue of lowland incised by dock developments, some centuries old; to the north, at its neck, the huge new office developments around Canary Wharf sprawled, acres of glass glistening. The slimmer peninsular to the right, pushing up from the south, was Greenwich. Lily could clearly see at its tip the spiky dirty-gray disc that was the Dome-once the Millennium Dome, now called “The O2.” Somewhere down there were her sister and the kids.

All this was only a few kilometers west of the breached Barrier. And already the waters were breaking over the land to north and south, drowning wharves and jetties and flooding jammed roads, and choppers hovered over the landscape, angels of despair.

“Unbelievable, you know,” Piers Michaelmas said. “Thirty years ago, forty, hardly any of this was here. Just the docks, the old housing stock. Derelict, basically. Now look at it. The police are saying there are somewhere over half a million people down there right now, in the office blocks and the leisure developments. It’s a blister, a huge concentration of people.”

“All on the flood plain.”

“Hindsight is a marvelous thing.” He listened again. “I know you want to get to the Dome and find your sister, yes? But I’m being called to the Isle of Dogs, Millwall, a major evacuation there.”

“We’ll split up, then.”

“Yes.” He leaned forward. “Pilot, did you get that?”

The pilot nodded, distracted, listening to his own feed. “My computer’s asking for clearance. Having to talk to two different Silver Command stations… I can take you to Millwall first, sir. Put you down in Mudchute Park, they’ve given me clearance for that. Then I’ll hop over to Greenwich with Captain Brooke.”

“That’ll do,” Michaelmas said.

The chopper slid north over the river and dipped down toward the Isle of Dogs. Detail coalesced, housing, a park, streets already running with filthy water, and Lily made out the line of the DLR, the Docklands Light Railway, striding on its elevated track toward the north. A group of police and military trucks had been drawn up in the park, evidently some kind of field command post. The water lapped around the vehicles’ wheels.

The pilot set down gently on sodden grass. The door slid open, allowing in a buffeting wind and a spray of cold rain.

Piers pulled up his hood, grabbed an emergency pack, released his harness and clambered out of his bucket seat. He twisted back and grabbed Lily’s hand. “Good luck,” he yelled.

“You too. Now piss off and close the ruddy door.”

He grinned and stepped out. The door slid closed, and the chopper lifted immediately. Piers watched the bird rise, his hand sheltering his eyes from the rain.

Piers made his way straight to the field command center in the park.

His rank, and recognition by some of the officers, got him into a meeting in a briefing room full of laptops, TV screens and whiteboards, into the center of things. Here the local chief constable hosted a rolling conference with representatives of the ambulance and fire services, the local authority, the utilities, the Environment Agency, transport, health, and the media, a couple of local reporters. The British system was to have the police at the heart of the management of civil emergencies. Most of the attendees here had mobiles clamped to their heads. Piers knew the mobile networks had been co-opted for the emergency services’ use, a shutout that would be giving civilians problems by now, even if the power hadn’t failed to the phone masts.

Piers listened for a while. The centerpiece of the planning seemed to be the evacuation of the most flood-prone areas, which was in fact most of Millwall. With the roads already clogged, the plan was to get the public out using the Docklands Light Railway, north and to the mainland. It was only a few kilometers; nowhere in London was far from anywhere else, geographically. The DLR ran on an elevated rail, above the anticipated flooding, and even when the power went it could conceivably be used as a walkway.

Of course what would become of the refugees after that was anybody’s guess. City Airport was flooded. Traffic was clogged all over London, and there was a solid jam on the M25 rippling back from the flooding at the Dartford Crossing. And there were other problems. Aside from the pressure on the mobile networks, Docklands hosted some major internet service providers and international landline telephone exchanges; communications were fritzing all over the place as the area was flooded, building by building.