after Gary?”
He laughed. Then he pulled his hand away, withdrawing into himself again. He stood up. “I need to get back to work.”
Helen frowned. “You can’t be serious. You’re exhausted.”
Piers smiled, ducking so the others could see his face in their screens. “I’m fine. Good night, all.”
“Good night and good morning, Piers,” Amanda said.
When he’d gone, Michael shook his head. “He’s wearing shorts and no tie, but nothing has changed about him. I’ve said it since the first time I met him. One of these days that man is going to snap like a dried twig.”
Lily snorted, and stretched.“Well, he’s not talking me out of my submarine trip. And I’m not done chatting yet, the night is young. What say we have a coffee break? I’ll see if I can get this lousy military filter off the link.”
They agreed, and broke up. Lily filled the screens with a silly saver image, some relic of her childhood perhaps, a puppet aqua-girl with long blond hair and webbed feet who swam past to a soppy crooning song.
But Helen’s phone sounded with a news flash. A nuclear warhead being hastily moved from a flood- threatened missile facility on the north German plain had been involved in a high-speed vehicle pileup. The warhead had partially detonated; Hamburg had been declared a disaster zone, and the German government was appealing for aid.
24
June 2017
From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:
Mrs. Reese Shelby of Belle Glade, Florida, used her blog to protest at the state’s use of school buses to ship low-category prisoners from flood-threatened correctional facilities to safer institutions upstate.
“It’s not just that my kids have to tramp their way to school through the pouring rain, that’s not what I object to. And it’s not even that the governor has put the safety of thieves, murderers and rapists ahead of the safety of decent people. No, what I object to is the state these convicts leave the buses in. The seats are vandalized, they scrawl the most obscene graffiti, and there are bodily fluids everywhere…”
Mrs. Shelby went on to protest about the government decision to open up selected national parks to refugees from flooded areas.
25
October 2017
Nathan Lammockson had Lily flown into Keflavik airport, thirty kilometers west of Reykjavik.
An AxysCorp car met her there and drove her, not into the city itself, but inland, across desolate country. She glimpsed mountains, ice-crested. She was curious about this strange island; it was the first time she had visited. But she had no time to explore. Now that Lammockson had got hold of his bathyscaphe it was full speed ahead with his ocean survey project, and Lily was suddenly pitched into a whole new phase of her life. Lily Brooke, submarine pilot: who’d have thought it?
They arrived at what looked like a staid hotel. It turned out to be Bessastadhir, the residence of the president of Iceland.
The next morning Lily waited outside the residence for the car to return. The air was fresh and cold, with a bite in the wind from the sea, but there was no frost on the ground, no snow. Her usual AxysCorp coverall kept her warm enough, but she pulled the hood up around her face.
The car showed up, flying an AxysCorp cradled-Earth flag. This time Lammockson himself was in the back. And up front, Gordon James Alonzo was driving. Lily buckled up fast. Gordo drove like an astronaut; she’d learned that from the time she’d spent with him in the States. She hung on to the door grip as the car was thrown down the drive and out onto the road.
Lammockson offered her coffee in a lidded plastic cup. She refused, but he took a deep draft from his own cup, and there was a strong aroma. Lammockson wore a heavy overcoat of what looked like fake fur, finely tailored, very expensive; he used up most of the room on this seat. Before her the back of Gordo’s head was like a warhead, solid, stubbled with silver-gray hair; a stocky man, big for an astronaut, he was around forty-five.
“So,” Lammockson grinned at her. “Enjoying your trip so far, Lily? How do you like staying at the White House of Iceland?”
“Yes, how did you swing that with the president?”
“Well, the old girl owes me. I’ve brought enough investment and employment to this Godforsaken rock in the last few months, while every other ‘entrepreneur’ around the world is filling sandbags and lying low. Besides, half the hotels in Reykjavik are flooded out, you’ll see, same as everywhere else. And now you’re being chauffeured by a genu-wine astronaut. Of course if not for me he’d be flying old ladies and puppy dogs out of the Mississippi floods, not piloting mysterious voyages to the bottom of the sea. I’ve got his balls in my pocket, and he knows it. Right, space boy?”
“You’re a funny guy.”
Gordo spoke in his usual Californian drawl, but Lily could hear the tension in his voice. In Houston, she’d got to know this stranded astronaut well enough to understand that his sudden grounding when the space program died was an open wound the size of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge itself. But this was Lammockson’s way, she’d learned that too. If you worked for him, he never missed an opportunity to exert his power over you in the most brutal way, all delivered with that hustler’s grin.
They were driving into the city now. Suburban Reykjavik looked a clean place, neat, modern in a European way, pretty little houses with brightly colored roofs, lots of concrete and glass. Occasionally she glimpsed the flat, steel-gray surface of the sea, with ice-capped mountains shouldering above the horizon. But out here the only sign of the flooding that must be afflicting this coastal port was the heavy traffic; traffic was bad all over the world, it seemed, everybody inching around the floods.
Gordo turned his head. He was good-looking in a big-boned surfer kind of way, but his neck was thick, and lines gathered around his eyes and mouth. He exuded competence. “You ever been here before, Lily? To Iceland?”
“No.”
“We’re sat right on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. In fact Iceland is one of the ridge mountains, strictly speaking. So it’s a good place for Thandie Jones to be running her sea-floor-spreading surveys.”
“But it’s not just that.” Lammockson pointed out of the window to a large blocky building that sat on a low rise, topped by a glass dome from which light glimmered.“See that? I asked Gordo to bring us this way. It’s a remarkable sight in my humble, and I try to make sure everybody who comes out here takes a look. They call it ‘the Pearl.’ Geothermal water distribution tanks. Since 1930 this whole city’s taken nearly all its central heating from the heat of the Earth, the steam that just bubbles up out of the ground.”
Lily thought she saw his point.“So the city is independent of external energy sources. Oil supplies, coal.”
“Not entirely, but it could be made so,” Lammockson said.“An inexhaustible supply. Not only that, we’re sitting on an island. Defensible, see? Quite a thought, isn’t it? This is a stable point, a refuge from the flooding, a place the post-flood recovery could begin
…”
He said this briskly, businesslike, as if he was planning no more than a disaster recovery option for one of AxysCorp’s computer centers. But she had learned that this was the way he thought, as he acted: decisive, far- seeing, brutal. This Iceland operation was typical of Lammockson’s way of thinking in that it achieved multiple goals, the ocean survey work and the establishment of a possible refuge for a dismal future.
They drove back through the anonymous suburbs and headed inland once more.
“Where to now?” Lily was here to be trained to pilot Lammockson’s deep-submergence vehicle, and she’d
