Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

…You guys don’t know what you’re doing. Do you? You don’t fucking know…

The control centre had been set up on the roundabout itself, in the back of a police Land Rover which had been bumped onto the grass, leaving untidy scuff marks. The local commander turned out to be a superintendent, a thin, forty-ish man surrounded by a ring of officers, and beyond that by a wider, untidy crowd of irate drivers There were maps of the area opened over the back of the Rover, Emergency Procedures Manuals spread out on the grass.

The atmosphere was tense: the crackle of lapel radios, officers watching the crowd nervously, eyes sharp.

Ted knew that look well. Trouble brewing.

With an effort, Ted’s tame copper got him through to the centre of things.

Finally the super made eye contact with Ted.

“Billy MacEwen,” Ted said.

The super’s thin face creased. Ted knew what he was thinking: I don’t need this complication. “Ted Dundas. I haven’t seen you since—”

“Since you were a buck-toothed copper on the beat. You’ve done well for yourself.”

“Is Murphy here trying to get you to the Rest Centre? Ted, you should—”

There was blackness around the edge of his vision. Just a little longer…

“Listen to me,” Ted rasped. “You’re not going to be able to keep this up.”

“What?”

“Christ, boy, this isn’t 1940.”

“The Procedure Manuals—”

“ — are out of date. Just look around. This is how people behave now, Billy They have their cars. They aren’t going to get out to be processed by us, and herded onto buses. Get out of the way. Let them leave. Back off, and just keep the roads open. Manage the traffic, Billy, not the people.”

“But the registration—”

Ted sighed. “We always assume people are going to panic, and have to be herded and registered. Bullshit. I tell you, if you bottle people up here you’ll have a riot on your hands, Billy boy.”

As if on cue, there was a tinkle of glass somewhere. Raised voices. The coppers around Ted straightened up further, peering out like meerkats. Some of them bustled off towards the disturbance.

“I mean it,” Ted said gently.

Billy MacEwen was thinking hard. Evidently this wasn’t the first time he’d had advice like this. “Ted, you know how the command structure works. I’m only a silver commander. Gold says—”

“Gold isn’t here,” Ted said wearily. The blackness was closer, like a curtain closing. “Just do it while you still have control.”

MacEwen didn’t respond.

Ted closed his eyes, and let himself lean a little harder against the young copper, Murphy.

“I think it’s the Rest Centre for you anyway, sir,” Murphy said.

Christ, he could barely see. Taste of iron in his mouth. The sunlight seemed remote, and at least the pain was gone. The vertical, marked out by these pillar-like young coppers, was tilting sideways.

Where was Jack? Still here. Safe.

He didn’t fight it. He’d made his point. MacEwen wasn’t going to lose face by changing his strategy in front of him. Not a bad time to pass out.

Not Billy’s fault anyhow, he thought. They just weren’t ready for this. None of them were. How could they have known?

Time to leave the stage for a bit, he thought, and he smiled, and gave himself up to the darkness.

The policewoman gave Henry directions to the police authority headquarters in Fettes Avenue, on the north side of the New Town.

Traffic was snarled everywhere, and Henry had to walk. So he stomped his way north along the Mayfield Road towards the city centre.

Close to Arthur’s Seat the smell of smoke, the wail of sirens, the clatter of helicopters filled Henry’s sensorium, masking the outlines of the familiar world. But away from the zone of the immediate disaster — just a few hundred yards — normality seemed undisturbed. True, the traffic was clogged, but there were people walking, coming to and from work — they were even carrying shopping, for God’s sake. In his torn and bloodied clothes, he felt out of place. Ill-mannered. People stared at him.

Only the smoke rising from the east of the city served as a reminder that all was not well, here.

It took him two hours to reach the Lothian and Borders police authority headquarters.

The desk officer stopped him, of course, and Henry resorted to a mix of persuasion, string-pulling, ranting and bluster to penetrate the layers of bureaucracy which, inevitably, surrounded the decision makers here. He even produced his passport. But ultimately it was his physical state, the filth and blood, that bore testimony that here was a man who had just walked out of the heart of it all, that lent him the authority to bamboozle these low-ranking cops.

Actually it wasn’t the first time he had had to bully his way through obstructive organizations: a career at NASA had trained him in that.

Even so, he was kept waiting on a hard-backed plastic chair, cradling a polystyrene cup of what might have been tea, for more than an hour. Then, at last, he was ushered into the big incident room that was, he was told, serving as the command centre for the response to the emergency.

The control room was chaos, on first appearance.

Police officers and civilians moved from area to area, desk to desk, shouting and gesturing. Mobile phones and pagers sounded continually. The walls were coated with white boards, on which were listed cryptic notes, contact numbers, lists of areas and actions. There was an immense map of the east of the city, cluttered with colour-coded stickers: bright primary colours, red and green and yellow and blue. There were yellow emergency jackets and hard hats, some scorched, hanging on pegs and draped over the chairs. The desks were covered with yellowed Home Office procedure manuals.

On one desk he saw a document marked “Evacuation Plans 2 and 3’. It was dated 1938 It was the plan for evacuating the city that had been used during the Second World War.

Holy shit, he thought.

At last he was brought to the Chief Constable.

“Yes. I’m Romano. Who the hell are you?”

The Chief Constable was a woman, fifty-ish, with strong Italian-extract features, hair that was thick and black though streaked with grey. She stood before the big area map, hands empty, an island of stillness amid the bustle of the pot-bellied male cops around her.

“Henry Meacher. I’m from NASA.”

Romano laughed. “NASA. That’s all we bloody need.”

“Yes, you do,” Henry said seriously. “Are you the decision maker here?”

“For now.”

“Then I need to understand what you’re planning.”

Romano eyed him. Henry thought he could read the calculation there, the mind of a senior officer accustomed to using her time efficiently. This guy is different. He might have something. Or he might not. He has thirty seconds before I throw him out.

Romano said, “We’re evacuating the area in the vicinity of the disaster.” On the wall map a rough chinagraph-pencil circle, diverting to follow the lines of the streets, enclosed Arthur’s Seat and the Moonseed surge area, to a radius of about a mile. “We’re setting up assembly points and Rest Centres here and here.” Points on the roads leading out of the marked area, and outside. She raised an eyebrow at Henry. “Does that meet with NASA’s approval?”

“Hell, no,” Henry said. He looked around, at the circle of officers around Romano, watching him. “Don’t you guys get it? It’s not going to stop here. You need to evacuate on a much bigger scale, or you’re facing major losses.”

Romano rubbed the bridge of her nose; for an instant she looked immensely tired, but when she straightened up her command was returned. “Do you know what you’re asking? Do you know the difficulty and cost of mounting such an evacuation? We have to consider the elderly, the ill; we have to think about the needs of businesses. We have to think about where all those people will go. Sanitation. Shelter. Food.”