Stephen Baxter - Flood

Amanda cut her off. “You’ve been spending too much time with Gary Boyle. What’s an earthquake off Ireland got to do with us?”

“This,” the pilot said. He produced a laptop and opened it up before them. “This is a view from Exmoor, looking west.”

It was an image of the sea, and a line of black on the horizon, a line that thickened as Amanda watched. And in the foreground you could see that the sea was retreating, exposing drowned towns, fields.

“Tsunami,” Kristie said immediately.

“A tsunami, heading for England,” Amanda said, still disbelieving.

“It’s happened before,” Lily said.“It’s in the geological record, tsunamis hitting the Channel ports and the Severn estuary and Scotland, because of quakes off Ireland and in the Channel and off the coast of Norway.”

“How high?”

“We don’t know, not yet,” Lily said. “We should be safe here. But it’s going to make a hell of a mess of the whole west coast.”

Amanda recalled images of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, and Istanbul just a year ago, and Macao and Hong Kong since. Bodies hanging from trees. “So Dartmoor’s not safe after all.”

“Amanda, you can see why I had to get you out. This is going to smash apart what’s left of Britain, and there won’t be the resources to recover.”

Kristie was staring at the screen. “What about Molly and Linda, and Barry and George-?”

“Local kids in Postbridge,” Amanda explained to Lily.

“Can we warn them?” Kristie asked.

Lily handed over her phone. “Call whoever you like, honey. There will have been an official warning by now anyhow.” Kristie immediately began to make calls.

Benj was angry.“You knew this was coming, didn’t you, Lily? It’s just like Greenwich. We just ran off and left them to die, even though you knew this was going to happen.”

“Yes. But if I’d shot my mouth off none of us would have got away. Look-you’ve got a conscience, Benj, and that’s a good thing. But can you see what I had to do?” She glared at him until he subsided.

Much later, when they were in the air aboard the AxysCorp chopper, Lily’s phone chimed with another urgent incoming call. Kristie was still making her calls to Postbridge; she handed the phone back.

The call was from AxysCorp, in fact from Nathan himself. Helen Gray had been staying with family in Chester. She had been lost when the great wave hit.

Amanda took Lily’s hand.“I know what that means to you. The first of you gone.”

“I promised to look after her kid,” Lily said desolately.“How the hell am I supposed to do that?”

Stephen Baxter

Flood

June 2019

From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

A patrol of river police searching for survivors in submerged districts of Paris came under automatic fire from an apartment building.

A raid was organized. A gang of teenagers was flushed out; one officer was lost. Half-starved, many of them ill from drinking polluted floodwater, the teenagers had plenty of alcohol, and weapons. All but one had carried Kalashnikov AK47s.

This was a global phenomenon. Even before the flood there had already been something like a hundred million Kalashnikovs, or close imitations, circulating in the world, so simple was the AK47 to manufacture, so reliable was it at doing its job. Even more had been churned out by factories around the world before they had drowned. Many guns had been stashed away by “ faux Napoleons,” the French police spokeswoman said, fueled by visions of future wars over the high ground. Nobody knew how many of these stashes might exist across the planet, or where they were, or how many AK47s existed.

The AK47 was said to be the most effective weapon ever invented, in terms of lives taken. Now it was emerging as a final bloodstained monument to the age of industry and mechanized killing that had spawned it, and was likely to be a shaping force in the age to come.

The Parisian teenagers were, all but one, killed with the weapons in their hands.

October 2019

Gary Boyle was working at the instrument reel on the aft deck of the Links. He saw Sanjay McDonald hurry aboard just as the ship was about to cast off. He called and waved.

Sanjay made his way aft. Laden with a bulging backpack, Sanjay was sweating from the heat of the day, and he wore a thin linen mask over his bearded mouth to keep out the smoke from the Istanbul fires. He dumped his bag with relief, and accepted a flask of cold water from Gary. He lifted his mask and took a deep slug of water; then he poured the rest over his head and face. “Do you mind?”

“The ship’s got its own desalination plant,” Gary said. “Fill your boots.”

“Thanks.”

It was time to leave. A boatswain lined up cast-off hawsers into neat parallel rows. Gary could see the captain on the bridge, standing alongside the Turkish pilot who would navigate the boat through the strait. The whole boat shuddered as the twin screws churned the waters of the Golden Horn. Some of the scientists came up from the main laboratory below decks to see the sights. Mostly young, mostly weather-beaten and shabby, they milled around the deck, peering at the murky water, the walls of the channel. But this was a working cruise, and in the small compartment above the bridge, which they called the top lab, a couple of researchers were already booting up the echo-sounding gear.

Sanjay leaned on the rail and looked out at the skyline of Istanbul, gliding slowly past the ship. Despite the flooding, despite the quakes, it was still a stunning sight. Eighteen months after the initial quakes the stubbornly unbroken dome of the Hagia Sophia had become an iconic image for a stressed world, and the low morning sun glinted from the minarets and gilded domes of the mosques that crowded the old city. But smoke rose up in lazy towers from the burning districts, and choppers flapped through the murk.

Gary was glad to see Sanjay, who was one of a loose network of climatologists and oceanographers Gary had kept bumping into in the last couple of years, as they traveled the planet monitoring its extraordinary changes. But he’d thought Sanjay had missed his chance today. “You cut it fine, don’t you?”

Sanjay shrugged. “You know what travel is like nowadays.”

“Yeah. Well, there are plenty of spare berths. I’d guess only about half the promised attendees turned up, despite all Woods Hole could do.”

“But Thandie Jones is here?”

Gary grinned. “You couldn’t keep her away.”

“This is a Woods Hole ship, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Gary kicked a rusty deck plate. “Used to be a salvage ship during the Second World War. Shivers like a drying-out drunk. But I figure if she hasn’t sunk in eighty years, she’s not gonna sink under me now.”

“Let’s hope not.”

One by one the scientists drifted off to begin work. Gary’s laptop beeped for his attention, as data came in from the various teams aboard the vessel.

The narrow Bosporus strait was the only connection between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, which in turn linked to the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles, and then the Med kissed the Atlantic at Gibraltar. So the Bosporus was the only way the rising global ocean could reach the Black Sea.

For millennia the Black Sea had been a freshwater ocean, fed by several major rivers and draining out into the Marmara. But under the Bosporus’s freshwater outflow there had always been a deep countering saltwater current going north, from Marmara into the Black Sea. Since antiquity navigators had made use of this; you could lower a basket full of stones into the deep water and have yourself pulled against the surface current. The saltwater flow was a relic of the post-Ice Age surge which had seen a dammed and half-dried-up Black Sea refilled catastrophically from the rising Marmara. Now the oceans were rising again, and that subsurface salt current was much stronger than it had been. Gary supposed that eventually it would overwhelm the surface flow altogether, and the Bosporus would become a saltwater aqueduct, filling up the Black Sea basin.