His name was so familiar coming from her mouth; just her saying it seemed to reveal some underlying structure to his mind, and out of that the memories surfaced. He now saw her walking beside him in that enclave in the Dinaric Alps of old Albania as he talked about dying, talked about escape. He remembered another escape – when they were children – from the suffocating care of their parents, out into a zero-asset area, and that glimpse of another world before the enforcers came for them and dragged them back. By groping for other such memories, he began establishing connections between the disparate parts of his mind. Finding only fragments caused a deep frustration, and made him push harder.
A muggy day spent in the constant roar of a city arose in his mind. The triple-glazed window shut it out as his gaze slid to a large computer screen showing the exploded schematic of a fusion engine, which was assembling automatically, then shrinking down small and dropping into another schematic recognizable as that of a Mars Traveller. The woman sitting before the screen sat back, for a moment studied the wedding ring on her finger, smiled at it, then swung her chair round to face him.
‘Of course I can do better,’ she said.
Varalia Delex, whose second name she had acquired by marriage to her husband Latham Delex. Varalia whose maiden name had been Saul.
‘Hello, sister,’ Saul’s voice grated, and he opened his eyes.
Earth
The four giant ships had been supertankers in a previous incarnation, and were the last of their kind turned out at the Port of Dalian shipyards. That they had remained functional for so long after the wells ran dry was testament to the then-innovative materials and technologies used in their construction: graphene and metals foamed on Earth before that technology really got into its stride in more suitable zero-gravity environments, new ceramics, tough new forms of glass, nano-coatings, clean-burn fission reactors and computer-controlled robots that continued maintaining those vessels during all the later years they served as floating prison ships. Now the prisoners were all dead: the ZAs killed by the Scour and the remaining SAs dying either of starvation or diseases prevalent amidst tens of thousands of rotting corpses.
‘I am impressed,’ said Serene, as she piloted the big aero down towards the landing deck. ‘I didn’t expect them to be ready so soon.’
The manager of the new project was a marine biologist called Michael Palgrave, a thin severe-looking man with blond hair and a badly sunburned nose, who stood nervously behind her; Sack was in the seat behind him, arms folded and a bored expression on his lizard face.
‘We had the robots here, and it was simple enough to get them to strip out the cell partitions inside the old oil tanks,’ he replied. ‘We then constructed the nursery pools on the old prison floors and utilized plumbing already in place to get things started. It took longer to automate the sea-seeding system, and we have had problems with the stock.’
‘I understand,’ said Serene, quite happy to let the man ramble on because she was pleased with what was happening here.
As she finally settled the aero down on the landing pad, she glanced towards land and noted the green smear extending out across ten kilometres of sea. This was why they had chosen this area for the releases. The Dubai swamps had soaked up over two hundred million Scour victims and thus become poisonously anaerobic. However, from them this algae bloom had spread out to sea, and just beyond it the sea plankton had undergone a resurgence. There was food here now: microscopic food but billions of tonnes of it. She silently thanked the erstwhile rulers of the small but wealthy country that had once lain inland.
After surviving international crashes of the financial system with copious oil money, the rulers of Dubai had continued their project of turning their country into a tourist destination in readiness for when the oil ran out. After building the Palm Tree and the World island groups on their coastline, they became more ambitious and transformed that coastline from end to end. However, to maintain all this required the constant work of massive dredgers and underwater silt pumps the size of mosques. This was all fine while the oil money flowed and as it began to wane, when the influx of wealthy tourists took up the slack.
Serene stepped out of the aero behind her close-protection team, Sack immediately behind her and Palgrave a step behind him. She waved the marine biologist forward to stand beside her as her various PAs and other staff also exited the aero. ‘So where first?’
He pointed ahead to one of the new buildings erected on the hectares of deck. ‘We call it the panoquaria. It’s where we harvest eggs, milt and spores from the adult fauna and flora, and it also serves as the hatchery.’
‘Lead on,’ said Serene happily, flicking another glance back towards the coast, and considering the disasters that occurred there before she was born.
The first oil-quake, which dropped the Burj Al Arab hotel and its population of four hundred and eighty billionaires into the ocean and left the Burj Khalifa tower tilted at twenty degrees, was also the first nail in the lid of the coffin constructed by Middle Eastern fundamentalism. Other nails were soon to follow. No one knew who had fired the missile at Tel Aviv from Iraq, but the warhead the ancient SCUD carried could only have come from Iran’s shiny new collection. Mossad was blamed for the detonation of a similar device in a Baghdad cellar, and was also held responsible for the air-burst biological weapon detonated over Mecca during the Hajj, but that was only after the month-long incubation period of the virus, when it started killing returning pilgrims, as well as their families and friends around them.
After her close-protection team had checked what lay ahead, then signalled an all-clear, Serene followed Palgrave into the new building and gazed round in wonder. Along a row of tanks a group of human workers clad in hazmat suits – which were actually not protection for them but for what they were handling – were netting fish from tanks and gently squeezing milt and eggs from them into containers strapped to their waists. To her right a long, low aquarium swarmed with shrimp, while in others she spied prawns, crabs and various other crustaceans.
As she gazed at these, Serene considered the final chapters in the disaster that occurred inland of here. Resources – it was always about resources. As it was finally recognized that the human race had passed over the Hubbert Peak – that Peak Oil had passed – and as new technologies were finally taken out of the laboratory and applied across the world, Middle Eastern
