all this time. I did it.
Gordo stood up. “We ought to break this up. I got a lot to talk about with my superiors, if, if, I can swing this.”
Thandie said,“I know you won’t say anything about the nature of the project, Gordo. But why Nimrod? Why that name?”
Ramrod straight, he looked down at her. “I guess you skipped Bible studies at school. Genesis 10, verses 8 to 10: ‘And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth… And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and-’ ”
“Babel?”
“It was only generations after the Flood of Noah. Chapter 11, verse 4.‘And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.’ ”
“But God struck them down when they built the tower.”
“Yes. But why? 11:6. ‘Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.’ That’s what God said about mankind. He feared us, and so He struck us down. We have that verse up on the wall on big banners, to motivate the workforce. ‘Nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.’ ”
“Wow,” Thandie said. “You’re challenging God?”
“Why the hell not?”
Nathan’s radio phone went off. And then Lily’s, then Hammond’s.
It was Piers, calling from Ark Three. The ship was under attack.
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Gordo and Thandie rustled up a helicopter to take them all back to the shore. As the bird came down in Cripple Creek it scattered some of the flimsier shanties that crowded the narrow streets. But the population didn’t seem too scared. Lily supposed that the neighborhood of NORAD was one of the few places on the planet where helicopters would still be commonplace.
They hurried aboard. But Grace was staying behind, with Gordo Alonzo, to be taken away into Project Nimrod, into Ark One, whatever that meant. And Lily knew that this was it, that she would never see Grace again. There wasn’t even time to say goodbye, and anyhow the noise of the bird drowned out everything they said. Lily mouthed, “Forgive me.” Then Thandie pulled Lily into the chopper, and Gordo Alonzo held onto Grace, and the ground fell away, diminishing Grace’s upturned face to a point.
Then the ride itself overwhelmed Lily. She couldn’t remember when she’d last flown. It brought back a rush of memories, the smell of leather and canvas and oil, the shuddering vibration of the turning blades.
From the air, Lily could see Ark Three was listing. Smoke was pouring out of the engine room, oil spilling onto the ocean surface. The bridge was in ruins, and there was a fire in progress on the sports deck. Lily could see the lifeboats being launched, the orange craft swinging from their davits.
And rafts and boats were gathering like sharks around a wounded whale. More were on their way, a fleet of rough vessels making for the stricken ship. Such was the scale of the disaster that it could be seen for kilometers around.
“It looks like she’s been torpedoed.” Nathan turned on Thandie. “Why didn’t your damn sub do something about it?”
“She’s doing something now,” Thandie said. She pointed to a slim hull. “The New Jersey will be going in for your seed store if nothing else, Nathan.”
A sub officer said to Nathan, “We’ll save as many of your people as we can, sir, you can be sure of that.”
As the chopper descended Lily saw the first boarders taking on the crew on the rope ladders and the promenade deck. She thought of Piers, and Kristie and Manco, and everybody else she cared for down there, the only world she had known for years. And me, she wondered. Where am I going to live now? A shack on some mountainside, a raft?
“Get us down, damn it.” Nathan was hanging in the open doorway, a pistol in his hand.
Five
Mean sea-level rise above 2010 datum: 1800-8800m
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August 2041
Nathan and Hammond personally carried Piers out of the wreck of the Ark. He was limp in their arms, tall, frail, his long legs folded up like a cricket’s, a length of bony forearm protruding from each sleeve cuff. The Lammocksons had to clamber across a gathering archipelago of lifeboats and rafts, some of them Ark inflatables, others improvised from wreck debris. The crowded boats bobbed and dipped under their steps, and it was a miracle they didn’t end up in the water, the two of them and the man they were carrying. But they kept going.
Lily, Kristie and Manco had a liferaft to themselves, much patched but serviceable. Manco and Kristie cowered in the shade of the raft’s tentlike cover. Kristie’s battered pink backpack was at her feet, following her into yet another new phase in her life. Manco, ten years old, was wide-eyed, naked save for swimming trunks and his bulky life jacket and his precious red New Jersey baseball cap. Kristie held him close, and when the popping of the guns or the screams got too loud she put her hands over his ears and pressed his face against her chest.
The Lammocksons reached Lily’s raft. Gently they laid Piers down in the bilge.“Found him on the prom deck,” Nathan said, panting, sweating hard. “Out cold. Got him in his jacket, hauled him here.”
Hammond just stood there, massaging one arm, his face crunched into a scowl. He looked as if he might be carrying some wound himself. Every so often he looked to the shore, back to where they had left Grace with Hammond’s unborn child.
“Well, you did the right thing,” Lily said. She threw Nathan a bottle of water from the raft’s small emergency supply. He swigged down a big mouthful, and poured more over his head before handing it to Hammond. Lily winced a bit at the waste, but it wasn’t the time to make a fuss about that.
She looked down at Piers. It was wet on the floor of the raft, but there was nowhere else to put him. She scrunched forward and took his head on her lap.
Kristie sat staring at Piers’s pale, motionless face. “Maybe it’s best not to move him.”
Hammond grunted. “Take a look under his life jacket.”
Lily leaned forward, unzipped the jacket, and exposed a mess, Piers’s overalls and ripped flesh mingling in a pool of sticky blood. “Oh, God.”
“Actually I think he got shot in the back,” Hammond said in a matter-of-fact way. “That looks like an exit wound to me.”
“He went down fighting,” Nathan said. “Always knew he would.”
“Is there a medic? Dr. Porter, or Doc Schmidt-anybody nearby?”
“No idea,” Nathan said.“And I don’t see any way of finding out right now. Sorry, kid-you’re on your own.” Suddenly the steam seemed to go out of him. “Ah, Christ.” He folded up and sat down on the boat’s inflated hull, and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “We’ve got to go back in there, there are still people trying to get off the wreck. But I’m beat. Just give me a minute, son.”
Hammond shrugged. As ever in the shadow of Nathan, he wasn’t about to go anywhere without his
