Stephen Baxter - Flood

Ollantay faced him, and Gary sensed the silent conflict between them, a contest for dominance. “Not spears,” Ollantay said at last. “I will tell you one thing, one fact to take back to your footsore mayor. We have Kalashnikov rifles. AK47s. They were extracted from a saved cache in Lima, our drowned capital. We used Lammockson’s own salvage submarines to achieve this, right under his nose. We have the guns, and the ammunition. That is how we will fight our battle. Perhaps we could win without you, though we are not numerically strong. But you, who have come walking out of nowhere, are an opportunity for us. With you we will overwhelm Lammockson and his AxysCorp guards and his Project City, his technological Utopia.”

“We didn’t come here for this,” Gary said.

Domingo, determined now, said, “No, but this is what we’ve found, Gary. Before, we always walked away when we came to a crisis. But this is the end of the journey. You always knew it would come to this, some day, when the land ran out, and people crowded together tighter and tighter, like goats on a mountain summit. You heard what that guard said. If we’re driven away from here there’s nowhere else to go. It is the crunch for us. Fight or die.”

“I won’t take this back to the mayor.”

“But I will,” Domingo said.“In fact it’s not your choice.” He glanced at Ollantay. “Are you ready to come with us now?”

Ollantay smiled. “I have been waiting for this all my life.”

Gary looked at Grace. Her expression was closed up, unreadable.

And suddenly he was retching, his head pounding, the altitude beating him again. He leaned over, resting his hands on his knees, while Grace rubbed his back.

From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

All along the flooded fringes of the Andes the rafts drifted. Nobody knew how many there were, how many people were struggling to survive out there on the breast of the sea.

Nathan Lammockson posted troops along the shifting coastline to stop them landing. There was never any shortage of volunteers for that duty.

And he sent out boats among the rafts. The boats carried doctors, but not to administer to the sick.

Nathan had long been digging up old population-reduction philosophies and techniques. Even before the flood began there had been voluntary human extinction movements, developed by those who believed mankind was essentially a scourge and that its sole remaining duty was to restore Earth to its pre-human condition as best as possible, before submitting gracefully to the dark. Lammockson argued that here you had a rationalization for not fleeing from the encroaching flood, for submitting to it. So the doctors in the boats were “suicide missionaries,” trained to counsel refugees to accept their fate. They were equipped with appropriate medications.

Other missionaries, not sanctioned by Lammockson, sailed among the desolate raft communities. One motorboat carried a preacher, gunning up and down the shore, haranguing with a loudhailer. This is how it feels to live in a world with an intervening god, he said. How mankind was back in the days of the Old Testament. Nathan considered shutting him up, but decided he was doing as effective a job as his suicide doctors.

The population of the rafts wasn’t fixed. Rafts broke up, or were cannibalized by others. Or they drifted away, over the horizon, to a fate nobody on the land cared to imagine. But there were always more, rising up from the flooded towns.

Kristie watched this. Isolated from Cusco for years, she wondered if there was anybody in there who fretted as she did about how long this could go on.

August 2035

Ollantay’s ragtag army broke through Project City’s outer perimeters near the airport.

The invasion force had no armor or heavy weapons. But it did have a lot of people, the Quechua and the other dispossessed from the highlands, and a good number of the resentful poor from P-ville, as well as hundreds of able-bodied adults from Walker City. And it did have an awful lot of AK47s and ammunition to spare.

Few died in the desultory exchanges of fire around the airport. Nathan’s forces were too well dug in to be vulnerable to Ollantay’s crude tactics, but on the other hand they seemed reluctant to deploy the heavy weapons they must have possessed. When the skirmish was over, the rebels left a significant detachment of Lammockson’s forces pinned down, holed up in the terminal building. Ollantay presented the stalemate as a victory, because it left this quadrant of Cusco largely undefended.

Then he led his army into the city from the southeast.

The invaders worked their way up a broad, deserted street called the Avenida El Sol, which, according to the elderly maps downloaded into Gary’s sleeve patch, ran straight into the old center of Cusco.

The rebels broke into two files which proceeded down either side of the road, in the cover of the buildings, keeping away from the center line where they would be vulnerable to sniper fire. Such rudimentary military tactics had been grafted into Ollantay’s thinking by a handful of military veterans among the Okies of Walker City. But inexperience showed in the cowering, nervous way the invaders huddled in doorways, clinging to scraps of cover, peering fearfully at shadows and at the sky. Most of them had Kalashnikovs, weapons they waved around with a casualness that scared Gary.

Walker City’s current mayor, Janet Thorson, was a tough fifty-something who originally hailed from Minnesota, graying blond, short, strong-looking, wary. Now she walked with Gary in the van of Ollantay’s army. They both wore their antique AxysCorp-durable coveralls, still their most flexible and enduring garments and, dirtied down as rough camouflage, the nearest they had to battle dress-garments whose purchase had once made Nathan Lammockson that little bit richer, now worn by an army come to bring him down. Neither of them carried weapons save the handguns tucked inside their coveralls. They had no armor, no flak jackets or helmets, and Gary, who was no soldier, felt very vulnerable.

“Shit, these kids got a right to be wary,” Janet Thorson said.“Let’s face it, we’re none of us used to cities anymore. Some of the Walker kids have never been in an environment like this, never in their young lives. And I guess most of these Andean hill-folk types are first-timers too.”

Gary imagined that was true. And it was true that Cusco was a better functioning town than any he personally had seen for years. The buildings were reasonably intact, the road surface maintained. There were even shops lining this long avenue, shut up and boarded now but obviously still working. But there was nobody around, no adults or children, not even a dog; even the birds were quiet. “I guess the town itself is a reflection of Nathan Lammockson’s will,” he said.“Willpower and discipline and leadership, applied across decades.”

Thorson grunted. “Yeah, that and the money he managed to vacuum up while the world was going to hell. But discipline, foresight, yes. Which is why this lull makes me uneasy.” She pointed to a CCTV camera on a stand; it panned silently, viewing the advancing army.“They know we’re here. I think Nathan Lammockson knows exactly what he’s doing. He must have seen that a day like this would come, when the workers in the shantytowns and the mountains who’ve been spending their lives for his precious city would rise up-even if we walkers are a joker in the pack. No, he’ll have foreseen this; he’ll have prepared. We’re walking into some kind of trap, is what I think,” she said grimly. “It just hasn’t snapped shut yet.”

As they pressed on the advance units came up against more defensive perimeters, at intersections of the El Sol with transverse roads called the Avenida Pachacutec, just north of the rail station, and the Avenida Garcilaso a few blocks further on. At each halt Gary, maybe a hundred meters back from the advance guard, was able to hear the popping of gunfire, screams, yells before the column was waved on. Evidently Nathan’s resistance was proving no tougher in the town than at the airport.