Stephen Baxter: Flood

“I don’t know. But whatever they’re doing at Denver has got to be a better long-term bet than Nathan Lammockson’s schemes. I remembered your pledge to your fellow hostages, to Helen Gray’s daughter. Gary made the same promises.”

“Grace, yes. She’s on Ark Three.”

“I don’t have any idea how you’d get Grace into Ark One, whatever it is. Maybe I could find out, though. I have contacts back in Denver. Gordo Alonzo, for one.”

Lily held her breath, choosing her words carefully, not wishing to extinguish this flickering flame of hope. “It would be a hell of a challenge.”

“Oh, I like challenges.”

More days passed. Lily wasn’t always sure if she was awake or dreaming. She found she read passages of Dickens until some sentence or memorable image stuck in her memory, and she realized she was reading the same page as yesterday. Gradually, however, day by day, she felt fitter in mind and body.

It was just as she began to feel restless that Thandie invited her to come view her work area.

This was an extensive science bay that had been cannibalized from part of the missile compartment. There was a well-equipped biology lab, with glass flasks and tubing and pipettes and white-box equipment Lily didn’t recognize. An area for geology and hydrology stored shallow sea-bed cores and minute samples of sea water from the changing oceans, held in neat racks, and Lily remembered going to NewYork with Thandie to present a bank of evidence like this to the IPCC, a visit all of twenty years ago.

The pride and joy was the in-cruise observation area, a curtained-off room lit only by a dim red glow. Those sitting here in near silence were mostly scientists, supplemented by a specialist crew like sonar operators. All middle-aged men, they glanced around as Lily and Thandie entered, irritated at the light they let in. Then they went back to their work, mostly simply monitoring the screens, making occasional notes verbally into microphones or scribbled on paper blocks-seashell paper from the Ark, Lily was pleased to see, if surprised.

“At last,” she said in a whisper.“Red lights, bleeping sonar, guys huddled over screens. This is what I’ve been waiting for. Red October chic.”

“Oh, shut up. Listen, the boat has its standard complement of sensors.” Thandie pointed to displays labeled BQQ-6, BQR-19, BQS-13. “Bow-mounted and active sonar, navigation arrays. But for these cruises that’s supplemented by science gear. We have a towed array, robot vehicles, and we’re shadowed above the water by various surface drones and UAVs.”

Lily guessed at the latest acronym. “Unmanned air vehicles.”

“Yes. With pressure, temperature, density, chemistry sensor suites, imaging in various wavelengths, sonar, radar, and a link to the surviving GPS network. We can put together quite a picture. Look at this.” She pointed to a screen that displayed a kind of false-color map, an archipelago of scattered islands isolated in an immense ocean. A flashing green splinter was, Lily guessed, the position of the New Jersey. “This is what I brought you in to see, Lily. This submerged landscape. Thought you’d be interested.”

“So where are we?”

“Britain.”

Thandie showed Lily to a seat, and handed her a china mug of coffee.

All that was left of Britain was a scattering of islands over what had been Scotland, the peaks of the submerged highland mountains.

“Ben Nevis still shows above the sea. But England has long gone, and all of Wales-even Snowdon is a couple of hundred meters down by now.”

“Britain? But you picked me up in the Pacific. What’s the speed of this boat?”

“Around twenty knots cruising.”

“So how long have I been shambling around like a zombie?”

“Longer than you think, I guess. Ask the MO…”

They looked over the operators’ shoulders at screens that showed external views, from cameras mounted on the hull. The water was murky, full of floating fragments which sometimes glimmered with bright, unnatural colors, indestructible plastic detritus speckling the sea. But it was mid-morning, the sun was high, and the particles in the water caught the light, creating long beams like the buttresses of some immense church. It was quite beautiful, and rendered in the boat’s screens in true colors, a deepening oceanic blue. And in the further distance, dimly visible, Lily made out a hillside, with a tracery of rectangles that might have been field boundaries, and blocky roofless buildings.

“This is what we call the photic zone,” Thandie said. “Top of the water column. Water is pretty opaque; ninety-nine percent of the sunlight is blanked out in only a hundred and fifty meters. Below that you’re in permanent darkness.”

“But the flood’s around a kilometer deep, isn’t it?”

“A bit more than that.”

“So most of Britain isn’t just submerged, it’s in darkness.”

Thandie said gently, “Does that make a difference?”

A darting shape shot across the field of view of one of the screens, making the operator jump back.

Lily asked, “What was that, a seal?”

“No… Bill, you want to play that back in slo-mo?”

It turned out to be a child, a boy naked save for a pair of shorts, his lithe body sliding past the boat’s hull. Aged no more than eight or nine, he actually turned and waved into the camera.

“Cheeky little bastard. Visitor from a raft up above us. Fisher folk, probably.”

“Wow. How deep are we?”

“Oh, a hundred and fifty feet,” an operator said.

Thandie grinned. “This is nothing. You get the kids following you down as far as three hundred feet, and I’ve heard reports of deeper dives yet. It’s happening all over the world. The kids are figuring out breathing techniques for themselves, and passing them on through radio networks, and they’re going deeper and deeper. This is innocent enough. We do get less welcome visitors, people trying to damage the sensor arrays, even plant limpet mines on the hull.”

The freeze-framed kid reminded Lily faintly of Manco, another avid ocean swimmer. “The world was flooded before these kids were born. The ocean is all they have to explore.”

“So long as they stay away from my sensors, they can play Aquaman as much as they like,” Thandie said sternly.

Lily watched the maps as the boat turned south, and began to track the length of Britain.

Thandie said, “We’ll skirt the highlands to the east, cross the Firth of Forth over Edinburgh, and then track down the east side of the country over the Lammermuir hills. Even the Lammermuirs will be hundreds of meters below the prow. Nothing’s going to foul us. Then we’ll cross the border to England over the Cheviot Hills. There’s a point to the voyage, Lily. We’re surveying the topography of the country, studying how it’s adjusting as the water mass settles over it, mapping the quakes and the landslides as the isostatic load changes. It’s part of a global portrait that we hope will help us predict future quakes, and hence tsunamis.”

The boat sank deeper, and the glimmering light from above dwindled to darkness, those cathedral columns dimming. At last, somewhere below two hundred meters, external lights mounted on the boat’s hull flared to life, and picked out a sparse array of living things, Lily saw, things like fish and jellyfish and eels. It was impossible for Lily to believe that she was effectively poised in the sky above southern Scotland, flying in a submarine, surrounded by these wriggling creatures.

“This is the midwater,” Thandie murmured. “There’s no sunlight down here. Photosynthesis is impossible. So there are no plants, only animals and bacteria. And with no primary production these creatures have got nothing to eat but each other. They have evolved all sorts of strategies to evade predation-invisibility for instance. The water is full of gelatinous creatures, there’s even an invisible octopus. Hey, look at that.” She pointed to an unprepossessing-looking fish. “That’s a bristlemouth. Thought to be the world’s most common vertebrate, the most abundant animal with a backbone.”