Stephen Baxter - Flood

She asked, “What tough decisions?”

He glanced around, as if they might be overheard. “The worst is yet to come, believe it or not. The services are working flat out to recover the power stations, and get the water-treatment works running again, and so on. We’re continuing with the immediate recovery operations-there are twenty hospitals in the flooded regions to be evacuated, for example. We’ve also got far too many temporary holding centers not yet cleared, old folk and mums and babies who’ve been stuck in schools and church halls for weeks.

“But a few more days of these conditions and you’re looking at epidemics. Typhoid, cholera. The water’s full of toxins from the industrial areas too. That’s not to mention the deaths we’re already seeing through starvation and thirst. All this even if the flooding doesn’t recur.”

That last sentence, with its if, chilled her.

“We want to do everything we can to avoid a full-scale evacuation of London. That really is a last resort. We’re preparing for it, of course. We’re bringing in assault craft and inflatable boats, battlefield ambulances and field hospital units, heavy gear from across the country. It’s like another D-Day! Away from the city we’re assembling new caravan parks and tent cities on the high ground, the Chilterns and the South Downs and so forth. We’re even looking as far north as Birmingham. We’re using military police to keep open the routes out of London.

“But the thought of doing it for real, of moving millions, is an horrific one. I mean we have no way of shifting most of them save just walking them out. Not to mention the fact that the citizens in the reception areas aren’t altogether happy about the idea of accommodating so many drowned-out Londoners. I suspect a lot of pie-eating flat-cap types in the north are rather enjoying seeing London dished!

“But the fact is we have a capital city whose infrastructure is ruined-water, transport, communications, power. Millions homeless. Insurance claims alone could bring the financial sector down. The international banks and so forth have already relocated to their disaster recovery centers-our friend Lammockson has no doubt made plenty of money out of that-but what’s to induce them to come back? It will take London years to recover from this, if ever. And so there are limits to what the country can afford…”

“But we must try,” Lily said. “I think you’re looking forward to the challenge, actually, Piers, for all you’re a doom merchant.”

“Well, perhaps. I admit it is nice to get up in the morning with something to do. I think I’m a realist, however. Things won’t be as they were before. But we will recover, one way or another, if the waters go down.”

And she noted that word again. If.

They sailed under Lambeth and Westminster bridges. The Palace of Westminster, lapped by water, was lit from within, a rump of the government machine defiantly functioning inside its walls.

Harry nosed the craft cautiously toward the shore, away from the course of the river, just before Hungerford Bridge. “I’m aiming for the centerline of Northumberland Avenue,” he murmured, concentrating, watching his sensors and the lamp posts and building fronts that protruded from the water around him. “Have to be careful not to snag..”

Trafalgar Square came into sight. Lily saw that a Chinook sat proudly before the steps of the National Gallery.

Harry killed the engine, and jumped out into water that rose up to the crotch of his waders. He tied up to a lamp post before the ruined shopping parade on the south side of the square, and helped Piers and Lily down into the water. Then he went back to wait with the boat.

They waded the few meters to the square itself. The water was grimy here, even worse than upstream in Fulham, littered with floating garbage, splitting bin bags, the corpses of pigeons. In the square itself the water was only centimeters deep, but they had to pass through a military cordon to get to it. Aside from more squaddies around the square’s perimeter, and what looked like gallery staff coming and going laden with packages, the square was empty. Lily looked back the way they had come, down Northumberland Avenue. The buildings of London stood proud of water that stretched to the horizon, flat and calm and gleaming in the sun.

“I can’t help thinking of those elders from Tuvalu,” Piers said. “You remember, at Lammockson’s party.”

“What about them?”

“I wonder if they’re gloating.”

“Hm. So why the Chinook? Why the perimeter?”

“Can’t you tell? They’re stripping the National Gallery. The water didn’t quite breach the steps, but it did make a mess of some of the cellars. We’ve got squaddies helping the staff move their treasures to upper stories, or shipping them out altogether to the higher ground. I just thought you’d like to see what’s a pretty unusual sight-a Chinook at the feet of Nelson.”

“You’re showing off, is what it is, Piers.”

Gary Boyle came strolling up, grinning. Lily hadn’t seen him since Lammockson’s party on the afternoon of the flood. And here came Helen Gray, walking arm in arm with an older man Lily didn’t recognize. Lily felt inordinately glad to see them all, islands of familiarity in a world full of strangeness. They embraced each other.

Piers said, “We did promise to keep in touch, back in Barcelona. I thought we should get together again before the winds of fortune scatter us. Oh-lest I forget.” He handed the others mil-spec radio phones of the type he’d given Lily.

Helen introduced her companion. He turned out to be with the Foreign Office; he was called Michael Thurley. “Mike was assigned to help me sort out the issues around baby Grace. And no,” she said with a forced smile, “I haven’t got her back yet. Don’t even know where she is.”

Gary said grimly, “I can guess what your future plans are, then.”

“Well, I don’t have a choice, do I?”

Thurley said, “And I’m intending to help her.” He said he had got a kind of sabbatical leave to travel with Helen full time. Their first destination was to be Saudi Arabia, home of the baby’s father. “It’s become something of a cause for me, I’m afraid. We of the FO didn’t achieve a great deal for Helen-and she did pretty much save my life on the day of the flood.”

He sounded tweedy, self-mocking in a very English way that reminded Lily of Piers. His mannerisms seemed exaggerated, and he linked arms with Helen like an older brother. Maybe he was gay. Lily sensed a strength in him, under the public-school bullshit. She did wonder if there was something else he was really after, if he was glomming onto Helen to serve some need of his own. But the flood had been a great trauma for a lot of people. Maybe Michael was simply as he said he was, his motives uncomplicated.

Gary said, “So what about you, Lily? You going to stay with your sister?”

Since coming out of the hole in Barcelona she’d been living from day to day, without thinking much further. Her USAF pay was coming in for now; she supposed she’d be pulled back into the fold eventually. But ahead of that she’d made no plans. “I haven’t decided.”

Gary said immediately, “Then come with me.”

That took her aback. “Where?”

“Iceland.”

“Say what?”

He told her of his encounter with an old friend at the Barrier, a ragged-sounding American oceanographer called Thandie Jones.

“There’s more to what’s going on than they’re releasing to the public.” He waved south over the square, at the placid water. “This wasn’t a freak event, a one-off storm. Thandie thinks there’s a global sea-level rise going on. And that’s why there’s been flooding all over the country, all over the damn world-”