was submerged once more. But she came up again, coughing, the water spilling from her mouth, her chest aching. This time she stayed up, clinging to the belt.
She saw the rope cordon with its orange floats. It had been cut adrift of the ship. She ducked over it, kicking despite the pain in her leg. And she saw a body under her, a small figure descending, unresisting, into the darkness of the deeper water. It had to be Manco. She dived, kicking, dragging at the water with her arms, chasing him. She managed to get her hands under his armpits, and pulled his small face against her chest. He was limp, unbreathing. She kicked again, and screamed into the water at the pain in her leg, her breath bubbling out of her mouth.
And she saw a deep flash, far beneath her, under the hull of the liner. She knew what that signified, what Nathan had done. She tried to kick again, to get away.
Then the shock was on her, a silver wall that slammed through the water and over her, and a huge noise that penetrated deep into her aching chest, and turned her thinking to mush. That was Nathan’s acoustic mine, his latest weapon of last resort, a high-pressure bubble of plasma driving an intense shock wave. Good old Nathan. Always thinking ahead. It seemed to go on and on, a dinosaur’s bellow. Kick, and hang on to Manco. Kick, kick, kick…
She broke the surface again. She gasped for air, the salt water splashing in her eyes, a deadening cold ache spreading through her leg. She was surrounded by debris, drifting boats, what looked like corpses, and potato chip packets and condoms and nappies.
The Ark was receding from her, a gray cloud. Further out, more motor boats roared, fast and lethal. And behind it all the storm system gathered. She saw boats darting away, like flecks of scum on stirred-up pond water. She felt a laugh bubble deep inside her. If the bad guys didn’t get her, the storm would.
A new wave washed over her from her right-hand side. She came up coughing, clutching Manco helplessly to her chest.
And there was a new shape in the sea with her: a great black fin like a shark’s, water streaming from its flanks. Not a fin. A conning tower. People climbed up through a hatch, and stood behind a Plexiglas screen. One of them waved, and an amplified voice washed over her. “Hi, Lily. What an entrance. Talk about a deus ex machina, huh?”
The drawl was unmistakable. It was Thandie Jones.
The world folded up and fell away, and she drifted into a dark deeper even than the sea.
84
June 2038
Lily woke up in a hospital room.
Some of it was familiar, the bed, bits of furniture, medical monitoring gear, regular hospital stuff. But the walls were steel. The battered paperback books on the shelf beside her bed were held in place with a wooden bar. And there was a constant regular thrumming, as of vast engines.
She wasn’t sure where she was, but she felt vaguely reassured. She drifted back into unconsciousness.
When she came round again she found herself looking up at a medical officer in a blue coverall.
“Welcome to the SSGN New Jersey,” he said. Aged about fifty, he was a round, smiling, reassuring man with a broad Texan accent. He told her he’d set her up in a kind of private ward.“Look, it’s just a store room. But we sleep in nine-man berthing spaces on this boat. Believe me, you don’t want to be recuperating surrounded by a bunch of enlisted guys snoring their ugly heads off.”
“Manco…” Her voice was a scratch.
“The little boy? He’s fine. A lot better off than you, in fact. Get some rest.”
The next time she woke, Thandie Jones was there.
In her fifties, Thandie was still slim, tall, a handsome woman, her graying hair worn long and brushed back into a bun. She wore blue coveralls and sneakers, as the MO had; this seemed to be the standard-issue uniform here.
She leaned over Lily’s bunk and gave her a hug. “Hi.”
“We’re in a submarine, aren’t we?”
“Yeah. Bit of a change from the Trieste, right?”
“The coffee’s no better,” Lily whispered.
Thandie laughed.
Lily longed to ask her about Ark One, whatever it was, and Sanjay’s cryptic message about Thandie’s connection with it, over which she’d been fretting for years. She’d never wanted to discuss it over the radio. But now wasn’t the time.
Thandie insisted Lily had to rest. “The MO says your problem isn’t only the shooting, though that was a clean wound, or your near-drowning. You’re over sixty-”
“You’re no spring chicken yourself.”
“Doc Morton says you’re having a kind of crash. A system breakdown. You’re exhausted, Lily. I guess living with Nathan Lammockson is hard work, huh?”
In the humming, fluorescent-lit calm of this undersea boat, Lily thought back to Ark Three, the perpetually fraught atmosphere among the commanders, the slow deterioration of the fabric of the ship, the deepening sense that they were all stuck on a cruise to nowhere. “Hard work. Yes, I guess it is.”
“Look, you don’t need to worry. We contacted Nathan. We told him you’re OK-and so’s the Ark, if you want to know. Nathan says they fought off those pirates without significant losses.”
“Nathan would say that.”
“Well, there’s nothing you can do about it anyhow. We couldn’t get you back to the Ark, things were kind of chaotic after the pirate attack and the storm. We’re off on our own course, and it’s going to be a while before we cross the Ark’s path again.”
“A while? How long have I been out of it?… Kristie. My niece. Manco’s mother. I need to speak to her.”
“I’ll arrange it. But she knows Manco’s OK; Nathan told her. For now just take it easy.” Thandie stood and made for the door.“Sleep, read, kick back, watch TV. It’s not as if you’re missing anything. A nuclear sub isn’t the most exciting place to be.”
“Take care of Manco for me.”
Thandie grinned. “I will-not that he’s going to need it.”
Lily lost count of the days she dozed away.
She tried to watch TV on the big plasma screen on the wall of her cabin. She still couldn’t bear old movies. The crew put out a kind of inboard broadcast service, where you watch them indulging in sports like wrestling and poker, or read their blogs, and look at their comics and artwork. All this was mostly incomprehensible in-jokes by a crew who seemed to be mostly middle-aged men who knew each other very well, with little news of the outside world. It meant nothing to Lily.
She tried the books on the shelf by her bed. They were mostly novels, yellowing paperback editions. The contemporary fiction made no sense, contemporary meaning any time from the last few decades before the flood, every single assumption they made about the world having been proved wrong. But she found a few historical novels, accounts of worlds that had vanished even before her own, and older fiction, “classics.” There was a Dickens omnibus, and for a while Lily lost herself in complex tales of a vanished England.
There was also an astronomical almanac, tables of star declinations and eclipses through to the end of the century. A sailor’s book. Sometimes she found a study of the meaningless celestial precision of the almanac tables more comforting even than Dickens.
The engines hummed, the lights never flickered. She felt cradled. Sometimes as she dozed she felt her bunk tilt, the whole boat tipping as it undertook its maneuvers. So that was why the bookshelf had a bar across it.
Manco visited her. As it turned out, for the first couple of days after their rescue he had stayed close to the sleeping Lily. After so long on the Ark new faces freaked him out, and he clung to familiarity. The medical crew accepted this and set up a cot in Lily’s room for him, and even installed a little chemical toilet so he wouldn’t have to go out in the night.
But he came around. Being on a submarine didn’t bother him fundamentally. After the Ark he was used to
