Stephen Baxter - Flood

The mood on the ship had been dreadful, too, since Nepal. Nathan had tried to keep quiet about what had happened in Tibet, but of course news of it had got out to the Ark’s crew. It was a confrontation with the nightmare that had plagued most thinking adults since the beginning of the flood itself: the extreme end that might yet come to all of them. The encounter in Tibet had shattered Nathan’s plans. The Ark had got away from Nepal intact. But without a destination the voyage became purposeless.

On the gathering world ocean there were new hazards to be survived. Vast burps of methane, released from melting permafrost, could send chunks of fizzing clathrates to the surface, and fill the air with a noxious stink-lethal if it got too strong-or even create down currents that could sink a ship. As the weight of the water settled over the submerged lands, there were quakes and vast landslides, huge events that created tsunamis and whirlpools, events magnified if you happened to be drifting anywhere near the old drowned continents.

And at the very top of the Ark’s command structure relationships were near breakdown, with Nathan, Hammond and Juan Villegas locked together in a triangle of mutual loathing. It had been typical of Nathan not to do the obvious thing and throw Villegas overboard after his attempted mutiny at Nepal. Nathan seemed to see betrayal as a challenge, not a terminus. Villegas kept his life, and his job, no doubt after suffering some unspoken private humiliation. But Lily had not seen Villegas and Nathan share a single conversation since then, outside of formal exchanges on the bridge or in the crew parliaments.

Lily had come to think that the Ark was a classic example of the flaws in Nathan’s thinking. He always followed his vision and his grand impulses, but failed to think a project through to the end. The ship had never been designed in the kind of modular, multiply-redundant way that might have made her truly self-sustainable, over years or decades. Obsessed by his civilizing dream, Nathan had gone for style and looks, and had left function to sort itself out. Now here was the result, this ridiculous clone of the Queen Mary towering over the rafts that lived off this sea of garbage, steadily consuming herself to stay alive, like a starving body metabolizing its own internal organs.

And as the world became more dangerous, as the ship’s fabric and materiel corroded, so did the morale of those crowded aboard, surrounded by shabbiness and peril and the endless sea…

A salty wind stirred her hair. She looked to the north, to the storm system that was a brooding band across the horizon. Was that cloud band growing thicker? In which case-

Her phone pinged. She dug it out of her wetsuit, opened it up. “Piers?”

“Lily. Get back here.”

She heard a deep thrumming, a growl of turbulent water. The wall of the ship’s hull edged past her, and her dinghy bobbed. Unbelievably, although she and the kids and the divers were still in the water, the Ark’s screws were turning.

“Piers? What the hell is going on? Is it the storm?”

“Not that. Fetch Manco and get back aboard, now. There’s trouble. I think-”

A boat roared past her, painted gray as the sea. Its wash nearly turned the dinghy over. Lily had to grab the sides to keep from being thrown overboard, and she dropped the phone. She scrabbled for it in the water that puddled in the bilge.

The motor boat turned in a tight circle, sending a spray of foam over the Ark’s hull. Lily thought she heard children scream. Then divers lunged out of the boat and into the water, two, three, four of them. They carried weapons, big tubes like bazookas. One of them started firing before he hit the water, and she heard bullets sing, splashing into the sea. The AxysCorp divers were struggling to form up, to respond. But she saw trails of turbulence, like the wake of miniature torpedoes, stitching through the crowd of AxysCorp divers, and they writhed and died while crimson blood seeped out. Conventional shots rang out, Nathan’s crew firing down from the decks, but the sea blocked their bullets and unless they happened to catch a bandit out of the water there was little chance of hurting them.

All along the length of the hull more of the bandit craft were racing in, more divers with their unwieldy weapons hitting the water.

Lily just watched, shocked into immobility by the attack’s suddenness, and by the effectiveness of the bandits’ weapons. She knew that Nathan’s technicians had been working on the problems of underwater combat. You could, for instance, insert a pulse of high-pressure gas into the water, and your bullet would drag the air with it, slipstreaming its way through. Or you could use the water itself, shoot out high-pressure pulses that moved so fast they cavitated, creating low-pressure volumes of vapor that would go zinging through the ocean, the world’s deadliest water pistol…

On the Ark, all this was still experimental. The AxysCorp divers had no answer to this attack, no operational weapon save harpoons, like bows and arrows against flintlocks, like Incas against the Spaniards. We were complacent, Lily thought. We aren’t tough enough to compete out here in a world of ocean scavengers, and now we’re going to pay the price.

And then she heard a cry, a boy’s voice. She came out of her shock in an instant. That had been Manco.

Inside the swimming rope, while the divers fought at its perimeter, the children were scrambling out of the water, dragging themselves up a rope ladder which was itself being hauled up into the ship. But one boy still thrashed in the water, leaping for a rope ladder that was passing out of his reach. It was Manco. He didn’t have his flotation belt on. He’d probably taken it off so he could dive.

Lily didn’t think about it. “I’m coming, hold on!” She fired up the boat’s engine and surged over the sea scattering bits of vividly colored garbage. If she could get to the rope cordon she might be able to reach Manco, and haul him in. Then if she could get away, around the far side of the Ark-

The bullet spray stitched the length of the dinghy. Without thinking she dropped over the side, through the shallow crust of garbage and into the water with a shock of cold, and her head filled with the noises of the sea.

And then she was hit. She actually felt the shot enter her leg, above the ankle, and pass through her flesh and out through her wetsuit. She didn’t know if it was the pirates or her own side. The wound wasn’t painful. It just felt cold.

More bullets ripped through the dinghy, a drifting shadow above her, and sang through the water like diving birds. And she was sinking. She felt the water push into her ears, its salt stinging her eyes, washing in her mouth, salty, bloody. She wasn’t far below the surface, and the light was strong; she watched as a plastic cap emblazoned with a soft drink logo turned in the water before her face, more indestructible than the pyramids, pointless and beautiful. This was the nightmare she had dreaded since splashing through drowning London, which she had climbed mountains and boarded a damn cruise liner to escape. At last the water had got her, she was immersed, and sinking into a boundless ocean.

Manco. She had to find him. She thrashed and inhaled water, spluttered, coughed, and inhaled more. She felt a tearing in her chest, a burning. Water in the airway. She worked arms and legs, trying to complete breaststrokes, but her wounded leg pulsed with pain when she tried to move it.

Something rose past her, bright orange-a flotation belt. She couldn’t tell how far away it was. She reached out, grabbed it. It pulled her up, like a balloon. Trying not to inhale again, she looked up to the surface, seeking the ship. She saw it, a black wall that divided her universe in half. She was dimly aware of the churning screws; she had to keep away from them for fear of being dragged in and cut to pieces.