Stephen Baxter - Flood

“And Helen never knew she’d given birth to a Saudi royal,” said Gary. “A princess!”

Helen had become convinced this was why her baby hadn’t been returned to her, since the first moment of their rescue five days ago under La Seu. The baby must be at the center of some enormous diplomatic row.

Gary said, “So you think that’s why Helen called us, why she’s so adamant we should go to the AxysCorp reception?”

“I guess so. If Lammockson can get us out of Barcelona, maybe he can get the baby back from Riyadh, or wherever the hell she is. So we go, I guess.”

“Sure,” Gary said. “We said we’d stick by each other, didn’t we, the four of us? But, Lily, your mom-”

“There’s nothing I can do for Mum,” Lily said firmly,“but Helen and the baby I can help. In the meantime we’re going to my sister’s for dinner. You’ll love the kids. Come on.”

They set off back, plodding out of the park and over sodden pavements.

At the roundabout where the High Street joined the Fulham Road a drain had blocked, and a lake had formed. The cars were pushing through it, raising great rooster-tails of water, and Lily and Gary had to detour. By the time they made it to the Fulham Road they both had wet feet. This was life in London now, it seemed, rain and wet shoes and road blockages.

But by now the schools were emptying, and the roads filled up with yellow school buses, American style, another innovation since Lily had been away. On the Fulham Road they merged into a growing crowd of parents and children, noisy, laughing, hurrying along the pavement between gushing gutters and lines of sandbags. Lily wondered how many of the world’s nations were represented in the exhilarating rainbow of faces around her. This was an old village long overwhelmed by the growth of London, a place you just drove through, but people still lived here just as they had when Lily was a kid, still worked and went shopping and took their kids to school, still were born and grew old and died in this place.

And then the rain lightened, and a shaft of sunlight broke through the scattering clouds and glimmered from the water that stood on the roads and in the gutters, on lawns and playgrounds. Unaccountably, on this day she had learned her mother had died, Lily felt optimistic. She was free, and here was the sun trying to shine. On impulse she grabbed Gary’s hand, and he squeezed back.

The next day George Camden phoned Lily early at her hotel. Camden was the smooth ex-military oppo who had retrieved them from Barcelona. Camden said that the summons to lunch with Nathan Lammockson that day was confirmed. Lammockson’s “hydrometropole,” as Camden put it, was in Southend, some fifty kilometers east of central London at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. A chopper would pick up Lily and Gary from London City Airport at eleven that morning.

Gary met Lily outside the hotel, in the rain. He was gazing into his handheld.“You followed the news? Remember that North Sea storm on the car radio? Well, it’s on its way south.”

The rain was already lashing down, and now a storm was on the way. “Great.”

“Overnight flooding all down the east coast…”

He showed her the handheld. The BBC news was all about the weather, with images of the Tyne breaking its banks and forcing its way into the fancy restaurants along Newcastle’s Quayside. The island of Lindisfarne, only ever connected to the mainland by a tidal causeway, was cut off, stranding pissed-off holidaymakers. Beaches in Lincolnshire had been damaged. There were flood alerts out for East Anglia, for Boston and King’s Lynn, where the sea was challenging new flood barriers around the Wash. And so on. The weather girl’s animated map showed the storm as a milky swirl of cloud that was still heading south.

Lily asked,“Is this unusually bad? If it keeps coming south, is London threatened?”

“They haven’t said so. I don’t think this is even a particularly powerful storm. If it combines with all the fluvial runoff or a high tide it could become a difficult event. But I don’t know. Things seem to have changed.”

“Kristie, my niece, you know, said sea levels have risen by a meter.”

His eyebrows rose. “A meter? Where the hell did that come from? A meter rise wasn’t in the old climate-change forecast models until the end of the century, even in the worst case.”

“I wouldn’t believe everything Kristie says. She’s quite liable to have mixed up her meters with her centimeters.”

“Well, if she’s right it would make a mess of everything… I just don’t know, Lily. I’m three years out of the loop, and Britain’s not my area anyhow.” He glanced at her. “Kind of stressy, your sis.”

“Always was. She’s not dumb, though. She took a law degree. But she ended up in events, handling people rather than dealing with cases. She has that kind of personality, I guess. Bright, bubbly, engaging. A bit fragile. But on the other hand, neither you or I are raising two kids.”

“That’s true enough,” he conceded.

After their years together he knew the rest: that Lily had never married, and it was many years since she had had a relationship that lasted much beyond six months. At one point she had sworn off men entirely. A base commander had hit on her, and when she didn’t come over he threatened to put her on sentry duty: a pilot qualified on three different birds, stuck on the wire. The guy was later drummed out of the service for “command rape,” in the jargon. But the damage to Lily’s capacity for relationships was permanent. She’d never meant to end up alone at age forty, but that was the way it worked out.

The handheld flashed up a new projection by the BBC, showing how the storm might curve into the Thames estuary later in the day.

And then the news channel cut away to a breaking story from Sydney, Australia. Picture-postcard images of the landmarks, the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, were interspersed with scenes of rising waters in Darling Harbour and Sydney Cove and Farm Cove. The water was already splashing over the bank walls around the Opera House and spilling onto the curving cobbled pedestrian footway. For now it was a novelty; tourists filmed the incident with their phones and leapt back squealing from the water, an adventure that made their holiday memorable. But in the Royal Botanic Gardens to the south of the Opera House water was gushing from broken drains and ponding over the grass. And out of town at Bondi, would-be surfers looked down on a beach entirely hidden by breaking waves.

Lily found it hard to take in this news, as if it was crowded out by the images she’d seen of Britain. Flooding in Sydney? How was that possible?

Gary looked thoughtful, puzzled.

Another headline flashed for their attention. The Test match at the Oval, between England and India, had been abandoned for another day.

The car arrived.

City Airport was east of Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs. They endured another slow jerking ride, driving north of the river along the A13. They peered out at the towers around Canary Wharf, glimpsed through the rain. By the time they reached the airport, according to the news on Gary’s handheld, people had died in the flooding at King’s Lynn and Hunstanton, around the Wash, and the storm had pushed down the east coast as far as Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft.

The airport was small, the runways sheeted by rainwater and battered by winds, but planes were taking off and landing, leaping up like salmon from alarmingly short runs.

The AxysCorp chopper was the same lightweight new model that had picked them up from Barcelona. They boarded quickly and the chopper soared into the air. The pilot seemed to have total confidence in his machine, despite the buffeting wind. Lily felt confident, too, now that she was in the bird, more so than in a car squeezing its way through the crammed and troubled streets of London, for here she was in her element.