Stephen Baxter - Flood

But he came around. Being on a submarine didn’t bother him fundamentally. After the Ark he was used to living in a machined environment, to living at sea. And the crew befriended him. Supplies ran him up a kid-sized version of the standard-issue blue coverall and gave him a red SSGN New Jersey baseball cap to wear. Lily learned that only the captain was ordinarily entitled to the grandeur of a red cap, so it was quite an honor.

After maybe a week, the medics let Lily out of her cage. She was issued with sneakers and a blue coverall of her own, and Thandie took her on gentle walks.

The boat’s interior was all corridors, brightly lit by fluorescent strips. The curve of the pressure-hull walls was obvious. The roof was a tangle of ducts and pipes and cables, and the walls were paneled with instrument boxes. It was a noisy place, the crew’s voices echoing from the steel walls, overlaid by the rasp of a tannoy system relaying orders mostly incomprehensible to Lily. She was surprised that most of the doors were rectangular, ordinary-looking, unlike the curved wheel-handled hatches of the submarine dramas of her childhood. Thandie said there were only a handful of watertight doors on the boat, separating the big compartments, and those doors were circular, not oval.

The New Jersey was a hundred and seventy feet long, beam forty-two feet-the US Navy still worked in feet and inches-which made her a big boat, but you could walk her length in minutes. Despite some artful paintwork there was a continual sense of claustrophobia, and you could never forget you were in the guts of a machine.

“I hope Manco’s not making any trouble down here.”

“The men think he’s terrific.”

“I guess they would. But he’s used to the space of the Ark. And he gets to go swimming whenever we heave to. He must be rattling around in this tin can like a wasp in a jam jar.”

Thandie shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. There are sports facilities. Exercise machines like treadmills and bikes, virtual reality systems where you can play tennis and so on. The guys wear him out. Mind you, since he was shown the control room, he’s been nagging to have a crack at piloting the boat. The helm is a joystick, like a games console.”

“He’ll have us leaping out of the water like a salmon if he gets the chance.”

Thandie laughed. “There are simulators, a big educational suite in the galley. We’re allowing him time on that. Don’t worry about him. The Chief of the Boat told me he would take personal care that Manco doesn’t get into any trouble.”

“Well, thank him for me.”

This was an Ohio-class boat, Thandie told her, her keel laid down long before the flood. Once she had carried Trident nuclear missiles, but she had been refitted as an SSGN, her mission to launch guided missiles and other conventional weapons: Tomahawk cruise missiles, unmanned air vehicles, various reconnaissance systems.

The nuclear submarines, designed for cruises lasting months with minimal resupply and refurbishment, continued to patrol the world. They were used to maintain physical contact with the scattered communities that were the refuge of mankind-and to protect the interests of the US. The subs were armed, some of them still bearing nukes, and this crew had seen action, Thandie said, mostly escorting convoys or driving off attempted forced landings on the US coastline. But most potential aggressors were far away from the remnant continental US, and the Denver government rarely intervened in third-party conflicts. The days when the US had acted as a global policeman were over.

And the boats served as floating platforms for scientists like Thandie, oceanographers and climatologists and biologists studying the fast-changing world-even historians and anthropologists recording what was becoming of the remnants of mankind.

Lily grunted. “Recording for who?”

“Well, we never ask such questions.”

The crew was a hundred and forty enlisted men and fifteen officers, all men also, and a handful of passengers, mostly scientists like Thandie, men and women. They all wore the ubiquitous blue coveralls and soft sneakers, though the officers wore khaki belts rather than black, and had rank insignias on their lapels. Many wore baseball caps, faded souvenirs of long-disbanded sports teams.

Traditionally the enlisted men on a boat like this would have been young, but aboard the New Jersey there were few under thirty, and the mean age seemed to be late forties. Recruitment into the Navy had been wound down in recent years, Thandie said. As the subs and ships approached the end of their operational lives, the Navy just kept on the men until they retired with their boats. And besides, the men themselves didn’t want to be anywhere else; where on Earth was there a better environment than this?

The boat seemed cramped to Lily, but was roomy enough for courtesy; as she and Thandie passed the men got out of their way, smiling. Everything was spotlessly clean, brightly lit. And with everybody wearing those same blue coveralls, everybody being about the same age, it was a faintly eerie environment. It was like being in a hospital, Lily thought, an institution.

As they walked the corridors, and Lily slowly rebuilt her strength and walked off the ache in her healing leg, they spoke of their lives since they had last met.

Thandie had always tried to keep in touch with those she had known in the old days, the slowly diminishing network of scientist types-including Gary Boyle, who was still holding out in the Andes-and Nathan and his community on the Ark. When Thandie had noticed that the New Jersey ’s course was going to cross the Ark’s, she had persuaded the captain to make a minor detour; the Ark was a significant enough vessel for the Denver government to take an interest in. It had been no coincidence that Thandie and the sub had shown up when she did, though fortunate for Lily.

Thandie listened to Lily’s accounts of the Ark’s voyage, the seaborne communities of aging boats and disintegrating rafts, what she had seen of the brutal regime emerging in Tibet. She encouraged her to relate all this to the anthropologists on board.

“Things are better than that in the US, for now. Much of Utah has flooded now, and that’s put paid to the Mormons. But you still have this relentless pressure of refugees from the lower lands, crowding into the last scraps of high ground-or trying to.”

“You can’t take them all.”

“No, we can’t. We’ve not yet fallen into the barbarism of Tibet. But we have pretty rigid border control, Lily. We do take doctors and engineers and the like, if you have a proven qualification of some kind-but that’s rare since most colleges shut down long ago. Otherwise you’re turned away.”

“How long can it last? Even Denver will go in the end.”

“Something else we don’t talk about. It may not come to that, however. Not for all of us.”

Lily looked at her. “Sanjay said something about Ark One.”

Thandie nodded. “I told him to get a message to you, if he could. I wasn’t sure if I should send such news through Nathan… Whenever I’m in Denver I keep hearing rumors of some kind of last-ditch program. The Arks, they call them. Supposedly top secret but it’s leaky as hell, because that’s the way of the engineers and scientists who are working on it; we talk. Nathan himself was involved at one time.”

“Hence Ark Three.”

“Yes. I think it began as an initiative of the rich, a global network of them trying to find ambitious, high-tech ways to save themselves. I briefed some of them, years back. They shared ideas, technicians, resources. The operations on US soil were taken over by the Denver government long ago, but the program has continued. So I hear.”

“So what is Ark One?”