“It’s tricky to see until you get cued in,” Thandie said. “And life down here is sparse… There. See that?”
There was a scattering of lights like a drifting toy submarine, too dim for Lily to make out their colors. And then a more spectacular sight, a blue spiral sparkling yellow.
“That’s a siphonophore,” Thandie said. “Kind of a colony, hundreds of jellies strung out along a central cord. Uses those glowing tentacles to lure in its prey. It’s thought that eighty percent of the species down here in the midwater are bioluminescent. You use it to attract food-”
“And predators, surely?”
“Well, some species use their lights to attract bigger predators to fight off their own hunters. Lots of intricate strategies.”
Lily saw a thing like a jellyfish, illuminated by its own spectral light, swelling and diminishing like a puff of smoke. It was extraordinarily beautiful.
Thandie said, “Actually there is an ongoing extinction event out there. As the world gets warmer there’s a reduction in the volume of the big cold currents from the poles that plunge under the lighter, hotter water from the lower latitudes. That displacement used to carry oxygen into the depths, and fuel life. Now that vast transport is shutting off. Everything down here is suffocating and starving. But it’s happened before. The fossil record shows there were similar pulses of excess warmth ninety million years ago, sixty million. But an extinction is also an opportunity…”
Traveling steadily south, they passed over a mountain called the Cheviot in Northumberland, an old volcanic mound, its summit once twenty-seven hundred feet above sea level. Now the cairns built by climbers on its crown were twelve hundred feet down. But life gathered over the mountain’s ice-carved slopes, a loose column of fish and gelatinous predators swimming over the summit. Lily thought she saw a shark.
“An oceanographer would call the Cheviot a seamount,” Thandie said. “Ocean currents are forced up and over the hill. That causes a cycling of the water above, called a Taylor cell, an exchange of nutrients and life forms. Stimulates the biota. Makes for good fishing too.” One of the operators confirmed there was a human raft community drifting on the surface above them. Thandie said, “From the air you can still make out the topography of the drowned countries, from the fishing fleets clustered over the peaks of the hills.”
“A shark, swimming over Northumberland,” Lily said, wondering.
“That would once have seemed unusual,” Thandie conceded.
The New Jersey slid deeper into the water. Forty or fifty kilometers further south from the Cheviot, around the latitude of Newcastle, a remote camera swimming alongside the boat picked out a ridge on the landscape, its crest marked by a cluster of colorful sponges.
Thandie punched the air. “Ha! I knew it. You know what that is?”
“Surprise me.”
“Hadrian’s Wall. We’re near the fort called Housesteads here. Most of the countryside is coated by calcareous ooze, cruddy sea-bottom stuff. But there are some species that prefer bare rock, they seek out ridges and slopes where the ooze won’t settle. Corals, sea lilies, specialized starfish, sea squirts, crinoids. So there’s a whole carnival colonizing the ridge the Wall stands on, as well as the stones of the Roman Wall itself.” Her grin widened. “Even in the circumstances that’s a remarkable sight, isn’t it?”
“Show-off.”
Lily and Thandie took breaks to eat and sleep. But Lily was always drawn back to the observation room, this red-lit hive of mystery and quiet monitoring, of screens like windows into a changed world. She marked their progress as they sailed inland toward the Pennines, a chain of mountains that ran down the spine of the drowned country. They detoured to pass over the carcasses of Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, cities that had once glowed with the furnaces of the Industrial Revolution, now lost in the abyssal dark. And still the New Jersey sailed on, heading for the lowlands of southern England.
Over Nottingham Thandie showed Lily a recording of a creature they had just observed, picked out by the boat’s lights. It looked like a vase, maybe, or a flowerpot, with the seams bristling with spines. “Sorry you missed it… That’s a vampire squid.”
“A what?”
“A real relic-like the coelacanth, the fossil fish that turned out not to be a fossil at all. You see these things in deep strata two hundred million years old. We’re somewhere near an oxygen minimum, Lily, around fifteen hundred feet down. Right here, not much can survive.”
“Save this vampire squid.”
“Yeah. A peculiar niche. It’s a strategy to avoid predators, just hide out where nobody else can breathe. And when the mass extinctions come your descendants can radiate out into all those empty niches.” Thandie shook her head, marveling. “It’s like finding a living dinosaur, to see this thing. I wish you’d seen it live. You think Manco would be interested?”
“You could try.”
But he wasn’t.
Over the Midlands, over Leicester and Northampton, the submerged land was two thousand or twenty-five hundred feet down. Thandie got unreasonably excited when she spotted various exotic life forms wriggling in the “calcareous ooze” that now blanketed the streets and fields of central England. One of them was a sea spider, with yellowish legs that Thandie said had a twenty-centimeter span. “Antarctic fauna in Leicestershire! It’s astonishing that they found their way this far north in just a few years…”
Remarkably, Lily learned, the southern English lowlands were now deeper than the offshore continental shelf had been before the flood, and the life forms that had inhabited those undersea plains around Britain couldn’t survive here. But the shelf around Antarctica had always been deeper. The whole continent had been thrust down into the body of the Earth by the sheer weight of the kilometers-thick ice sheet it carried, and the life forms on the shelf had adapted to the greater depth. Now those polar creatures were colonizing new environments, like Leicestershire and Northamptonshire.
The final target of the journey was London. But at more than three thousand feet down the city was too deep for the New Jersey, which had a hull crush depth of eighteen hundred feet. So the scientists planned to send down ROVs, remotely operated vehicles, self-propelling platforms laden with cameras, lamps and sensors for temperature, pressure, salinity and other indicators, while the New Jersey hovered over the city’s streets like a wartime barrage balloon.
On the day the ROV flotilla was scheduled to launch, the Chief of the Watch made an announcement about it over the tannoy. There was a lot of excitement among the crew, who usually behaved as if the world outside the curving walls of their boat didn’t exist at all. But the fate of a great city like London stirred imaginations. The captain arranged for the images returned from the ROVs to be piped through the ship, to the flat screens in the galley and elsewhere. Even Manco was interested, though he barely understood what was happening, and he came with Lily to the observation room.
Thandie waylaid Lily before they went in.“Listen, Lily. I’ve had some luck.”
“With what?”
“With finding out about Ark One.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s something to do with Pikes Peak-the USAF base there. And there’s some kind of operational center in the town of Alma, Colorado, which happens to be the highest city in the continental US. I got a few hints because some of my buddies at NOAA are involved. It’s evidently a major operation.”
“So what is it, another ship, a submarine, a refuge?”
“I don’t know. Nobody’s speaking. But the leaks are coming because they’re recruiting a crew. Tough selection for skills; sounds like you have to have two doctorates just to make the short list. And single people only, no families, no kids. But they are taking pregnant women, early term anyhow.”
“Why?”
“Genetic diversity, I guess. As large a variation as possible given the size of the crew. If I’m pregnant I’m carrying the father’s genes along for the ride.”
“So how do I get Grace onto this program?”
“I’ve no idea. Tell you who I’d ask, however.”
“Who?”
“Nathan Lammockson. If anybody can pull the strings to swing something like this it’s going to be Nathan,
