more monuments to see here, glass monoliths protruding from the grimy water. Rafts constructed of ganged- together rubber tires nosed cautiously between the cliff faces of the buildings, and Amanda saw that divers were descending into the swollen water, hauling down plastic tarpaulins and power lines.
“What’s this?” she asked Lily. “Salvage?”
“Some of it. But also storage. It’s amazing how much stuff there was in London the day the Barrier was overtopped, Amanda, just a normal day, and it’s mostly still down there-tools, machinery, even bottled water and tinned food. There’s too much to bring up all at once. What they can’t retrieve quickly they’re trying to make safe from the rising water. A store for the future.”
They passed through Westminster. Most of the London Eye was still above the water, like an immense bicycle wheel. You could make out ropes dangling from broken-open viewing pods, relics of the last rescue operations. On the opposite bank, the Big Ben clock tower stood a brave sixty meters above the water line. But one of its clock faces was smashed, only fragments remaining. The copper knew about that. “Some little-Britain nutter with a rocket-propelled grenade…”
Lily’s phone chimed. She dug it out of her pocket. It was a heavy mil-spec model, a radio phone.
The copper’s radio crackled.
And the AxysCorp pilot’s screen lit up.
Benj saw this. “What’s happening?”
Lily looked saddened, but oddly relieved. “What I’ve been waiting for. The seismologists got it spot on.”
Amanda snapped, “Got what spot on?”
“There’s been a major ocean earthquake, southwest of Ireland.”
That sounded ridiculous. Amanda found herself laughing. “Ireland? You don’t have earthquakes in Ireland-”
“It’s what this has been all about, Amanda,” Lily said. She started talking patiently about “isostatic subsidence,” about how drowned land could be forced by the weight of the water down into the softer rocks beneath the crust, by as much as a third of the depth of the water above it. But the semi-rigid crust didn’t like being bent. And thus the flooding was causing huge seismic stresses all over the world.
Amanda cut her off. “You’ve been spending too much time with Gary Boyle. What’s an earthquake off Ireland got to do with us?”
“This,” the pilot said. He produced a laptop and opened it up before them. “This is a view from Exmoor, looking west.”
It was an image of the sea, and a line of black on the horizon, a line that thickened as Amanda watched. And in the foreground you could see that the sea was retreating, exposing drowned towns, fields.
“Tsunami,” Kristie said immediately.
“A tsunami, heading for England,” Amanda said, still disbelieving.
“It’s happened before,” Lily said.“It’s in the geological record, tsunamis hitting the Channel ports and the Severn estuary and Scotland, because of quakes off Ireland and in the Channel and off the coast of Norway.”
“How high?”
“We don’t know, not yet,” Lily said. “We should be safe here. But it’s going to make a hell of a mess of the whole west coast.”
Amanda recalled images of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, and Istanbul just a year ago, and Macao and Hong Kong since. Bodies hanging from trees. “So Dartmoor’s not safe after all.”
“Amanda, you can see why I had to get you out. This is going to smash apart what’s left of Britain, and there won’t be the resources to recover.”
Kristie was staring at the screen. “What about Molly and Linda, and Barry and George-?”
“Local kids in Postbridge,” Amanda explained to Lily.
“Can we warn them?” Kristie asked.
Lily handed over her phone. “Call whoever you like, honey. There will have been an official warning by now anyhow.” Kristie immediately began to make calls.
Benj was angry.“You knew this was coming, didn’t you, Lily? It’s just like Greenwich. We just ran off and left them to die, even though you knew this was going to happen.”
“Yes. But if I’d shot my mouth off none of us would have got away. Look-you’ve got a conscience, Benj, and that’s a good thing. But can you see what I had to do?” She glared at him until he subsided.
Much later, when they were in the air aboard the AxysCorp chopper, Lily’s phone chimed with another urgent incoming call. Kristie was still making her calls to Postbridge; she handed the phone back.
The call was from AxysCorp, in fact from Nathan himself. Helen Gray had been staying with family in Chester. She had been lost when the great wave hit.
Amanda took Lily’s hand.“I know what that means to you. The first of you gone.”
“I promised to look after her kid,” Lily said desolately.“How the hell am I supposed to do that?”
Stephen Baxter
Flood
40
June 2019
From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:
A patrol of river police searching for survivors in submerged districts of Paris came under automatic fire from an apartment building.
A raid was organized. A gang of teenagers was flushed out; one officer was lost. Half-starved, many of them ill from drinking polluted floodwater, the teenagers had plenty of alcohol, and weapons. All but one had carried Kalashnikov AK47s.
This was a global phenomenon. Even before the flood there had already been something like a hundred million Kalashnikovs, or close imitations, circulating in the world, so simple was the AK47 to manufacture, so reliable was it at doing its job. Even more had been churned out by factories around the world before they had drowned. Many guns had been stashed away by “ faux Napoleons,” the French police spokeswoman said, fueled by visions of future wars over the high ground. Nobody knew how many of these stashes might exist across the planet, or where they were, or how many AK47s existed.
The AK47 was said to be the most effective weapon ever invented, in terms of lives taken. Now it was emerging as a final bloodstained monument to the age of industry and mechanized killing that had spawned it, and was likely to be a shaping force in the age to come.
The Parisian teenagers were, all but one, killed with the weapons in their hands.
41
October 2019
Gary Boyle was working at the instrument reel on the aft deck of the Links. He saw Sanjay McDonald hurry aboard just as the ship was about to cast off. He called and waved.
Sanjay made his way aft. Laden with a bulging backpack, Sanjay was sweating from the heat of the day, and he wore a thin linen mask over his bearded mouth to keep out the smoke from the Istanbul fires. He dumped his bag with relief, and accepted a flask of cold water from Gary. He lifted his mask and took a deep slug of water; then he poured the rest over his head and face. “Do you mind?”
“The ship’s got its own desalination plant,” Gary said. “Fill your boots.”
“Thanks.”
It was time to leave. A boatswain lined up cast-off hawsers into neat parallel rows. Gary could see the captain on the bridge, standing alongside the Turkish pilot who would navigate the boat through the strait. The whole boat shuddered as the twin screws churned the waters of the Golden Horn. Some of the scientists came up
