Flood

by Stephen Baxter

  Lammockson laughed at him. “Firing off those antiquated old birds before you turn into a museum piece yourself, eh, Gordo?”

  Gordo shrugged. “You can’t change your luck.”

  They were leaving the Reykjavik suburbs behind now, and the traffic was clearing. Lily saw that the road ran over fields of hard black rock, sheets of it, all but free of vegetation. It was like bulldozed tarmac. This was lava, she supposed, frozen in the air, some of the youngest rock on the planet—the stuff that built seabeds and pushed continents aside. But the lava soon gave way to a landscape that was very European, farmland and grass, save for the lack of trees. Sheep watched incuriously as they sped by, a released hostage, a stranded astronaut, and one of the richest men in the world.

  26

  The Endurance was a modern European research vessel, constructed in Italy and fitted out in dockyards in northeast England and Scotland. Her superstructure was studded with sensors, radar dishes and comms domes, and an ungainly drill derrick that towered over the hull. She was solid, sleek, streamlined, as gray and anonymous as the sea itself. Now she was serving as a support ship for the Trieste, which would be strapped to the deck during the cruise like a geeky toy submarine in a theme-park exhibit.

  Endurance sailed roughly south from Iceland, following the line of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge—which, once Iceland was out of sight, would be invisible until they reached the next Ridge islands to protrude from the ocean, the Azores. The crew, many of them recruited by AxysCorp from the oil companies, kept working throughout the cruise. The purpose of the expedition was to explore the deep subsurface of the ocean, the layers beneath the seabed. So they had sonar and radar which probed at sub-sediment layers, and periodically they launched overboard a device like a mechanical porpoise packed with more sonar gear.

  The most interesting work was the drilling. The ship would halt, held in place against the current by a computer-controlled array of propellers, and the oilmen all turned into roughnecks, adopting roles like “tool pusher” and “drill superintendent.” They used their drilling derrick to sample the deep subsurface directly, hauling up meter after meter of mud, cores replete with data for the sedimentologists. They got on with this work on a sea that surged constantly, restless, its turbid gray flecked with mud drawn up from the deep ooze below, a sea that was troubled even when the weather was calm.

  And down in the science lab, under the foredeck, the sedimentologists swore as they sleeved their layered cores in Mylar, sliced them in two, used electromagnetic wands to test water concentrations, and picked out minute samples of rock types and living things, fine, unrepeatable work performed in conditions like a funfair ride.

  Lily had crossed the Channel a few times, caught ferries to the Isle of Wight, Arran. She was no sailor, save for some dinghy work during her survival training with the USAF. The surging North Atlantic was a shock to her. None of the five “hydronauts”—Lily and Gordo, Thandie, Gary Boyle and a thirty-year-old meteorologist pal of Thandie’s called Sanjay McDonald—was ever at ease, even Thandie who was the specialized oceanographer among them. You couldn’t rest, you slept badly, and when you ate you couldn’t always keep it down. Mostly they used up their time helping out the roughnecks with their drilling.

  In fact, Gordo told Lily, it would be a relief to take the Trieste down into the depths; at least beneath the waves you could get a little peace for a few hours.

  Once they were away from Reykjavik and out of Nathan Lammockson’s direct control, Gordo took it on himself to draw up a manning rota for Trieste to reflect the science priorities and the need to rotate the crews to give them a break. Thandie and Gary were actually both capable of driving the Trieste themselves, so there were overlapping pools of four pilots and three scientists to make up each dive crew’s complement of two, a pilot plus a scientist. As a result it wasn’t until the fourth dive that Lily was to pilot the Trieste, and Gordo paired her with Thandie; tactfully he didn’t explain his reasoning, but as Thandie was the most experienced of the scientist-pilots it made sense.

  On her designated day, Lily went up on deck. It was a warm, blustery morning, under a blanket of rolled-up gray cloud; in fact they had arrived not too far north of the Azores, at around forty degrees north. But Lily, like Thandie, was bundled up warm in her AxysCorp-issue thermal underwear, coverall and parka, with a Mae West over the top; she had a Russian fur hat and gloves tucked in her pockets. Where she was going, she was assured, it was cold.

  She watched as cables were attached to the Trieste, and a derrick raised her into the air to swing her out over the ocean. Roughnecks working in pairs hauled on cables fore and aft to steady the boat. And Lily got her first good look at the ship that was about to become hers.

  Around fifteen meters long, the Trieste had a stubby, roughly streamlined shape something like a conventional submarine. At either end were air-filled ballast tanks. But most of her hull was filled with flotation tanks full of gasoline, a hundred thousand liters of it, and Lily could see the release outlets of the heavy iron-ballast hoppers protruding from her keel. Her propellers were fixed to her upper deck.

  And under the main hull hung the observation gondola, the pressurized sphere within which Lily and Thandie would be descending kilometers into the ocean.

  Thandie approached Lily, waddling in her own Mae West. She was grinning. “So, virgin, you OK with this?”

  “Ready to do it right.”

  “Christ, you sound like the space cadet. You’ll love it, believe me.”

  Awkward in their life jackets, they clambered down a steel ladder to an orange inflatable, manned by a single crewman, waiting for them on the ocean surface. The crewman gunned his engine to take them the few meters to the bathyscaphe.

  When they reached the Trieste she was rolling alarmingly, and the boat bobbed just as vigorously. Thandie showed off. She just stood up, got her balance, and stepped over the half-meter or so to the bathyscaphe. Lily, sooner safe than spectacular, was happy to grab hold of the crewman’s hand, then Thandie’s, as she made her own way across.

  And then, as the mooring arm was released and the ship bobbed free, they gave a last wave to the watching crew and scientists on the deck of the Endurance. Gordo gave them a crisp salute. Gary stood beside him, watching silently. It struck Lily how odd it was to see that familiar face here, in circumstances that could hardly be more different from their long confinement in Barcelona.

  Lily and Thandie climbed down through the access tunnel to the gondola. The tunnel ran vertically through the body of the bathyscaphe, cutting between two of the gasoline tanks. Lily had gone through this during her training with Gordo, and knew the drill. At the bottom of the tunnel she had to lower herself feet-first through a hatch into the gondola itself. The hatch more than any other component showed the bathyscaphe’s age, its handles rubbed smooth by decades of wear.

  Once they were both in, Thandie pulled the hatch closed. “Christ,” she said. “This tub always stinks of gasoline. Let’s get it done.”

  They shucked off their Mae Wests, settled at their stations and ran through a quick checklist of their essential systems. They would be kept alive by oxygen cylinders and a modern carbon dioxide scrubbing system, cylinders, fans, pumps, filters, derived from similar technology used on the Space Station. When the scrubbing system started up there was a wheezing noise, like the hum of the fan on an old-fashioned desktop computer. Lily confirmed that the propulsion system, the steerable propellers set on the upper hull, was functional. And Thandie checked that the external sensors were working, the TV cameras, a sample-collection pump system, a pod of down-pointing sonar and radar to explore the deep subsurface. There was a kind of robot arm which could be used to manipulate objects outside the hull.

  As they worked, the gondola, fixed to the keel of the rolling hull, swung sharply back and forth. The bucket seats had harnesses, and Lily strapped herself in. But the rolling made it hard to work the controls, even to read the display screens, and her stomach churned. But
she was most definitely not going to throw up in here. Thandie whistled as she checked over her equipment, deliberately nonchalant.

  The gondola was a sphere only about two meters across, equipped with a couple of bucket seats, a small chemical toilet and a provisions bag. Opposite the hatch, looking downwards, was the single window, a solid block of Plexiglas set into the ten-centimeter-thick steel walls. There was actually a lot more useful room in here than there had been back in the 1950s. The interior had been stripped out and remodeled with modern instruments and controls; the scuffed walls were plastered with foldable screens.

  But still the gondola felt very cramped to Lily. She could see why Gordo had taken to the work so easily; spacecraft like the Soyuz were just as confining. Lily was a flier, used to small cabins maybe but usually surrounded by infinite space. She wondered how well she was going to cope with the containment inside this steel coffin with kilometers of ocean piling up above her, and absolutely no way out.

  Finally Lily tested the comms system. Gordo was acting as what he called “capcom” today; it was reassuring to hear his voice. They had a long-wavelength radio link, and also a backup hydrophone link, although at the depths they would reach it would take several seconds for a sound wave to pass through the water to the support ship on the surface above.

  All was confirmed ready, by Lily, Thandie, Gordo and the Endurance crew. Lily tapped a screen.

  The ballast tanks fore and aft flooded, and the Trieste dropped. Just for a moment there was a surge, like a fast elevator descending. But that soon smoothed out, and so did the rolling; already they had left the surface waves behind them. Lily glanced through the window. Looking down she saw nothing but a bluish glow, and random particles of murk.

  27

  Thandie looked over Lily’s shoulder at the pilot’s display. It was centered on a schematic of the ship, the hull sliced up into the floats and ballast tanks, the blister of the gondola suspended beneath, the image covered with status numbers. “Looks nominal to me.”

  “Yes . . .”

  The principle of the bathyscaphe was pretty simple. She was like a hot air balloon, laden with ballast. Gasoline was used as the float material, the “air” in the balloon, because it was lighter than water but incompressible even at extreme pressures, and so retained its buoyant properties. The ballast was heavy iron shot. Right now the Trieste was heavier than the sea water she displaced, just, and so she sank steadily. The descent would be a powered dive, with Lily directing their fall to points of interest with the steerable propellers.

  When it was time to lift, the external pressure would be too high to allow them to blow ballast tanks with air in the usual way. So Lily would shut down an electromagnet to release the iron ballast from its hoppers, and the Trieste would instantly become lighter than the water, and up she would go like an air bubble. It was a fail-safe arrangement; if onboard power failed the shot would be released immediately.

  The whole design was an advance on older bathyspheres, which were simple balls of steel lowered from ships on cables, like bait on a fishing line. The Trieste was a free-falling, self-directing super-bathysphere.

  Thandie tapped a depth meter. “We’re dropping at around sixty centimeters per second. Well, that’s about right, two kilometers an hour. The Ridge summits are around two and a half kilometers below sea level, and the flank of the mid-Atlantic rise is five kilometers deeper than that. I’m hoping to make it down to around four klicks today—about two hours down.” She sat back and looked at Lily. “So. Welcome to my world.”

  “Thanks.”

  “We may as well relax.” Thandie rummaged in the provisions bag and produced a thermos. “You want some coffee? We have chocolate. You’re supposed to save it until we’re down in the depths, when it gets pretty cold in here, seven or eight degrees, and you need the sugar rush. What I always say is, fuck it.” She hauled out a slab of chocolate, tore off the wrapper, cracked it and handed Lily a piece.

  The two of them sat there, eating their chocolate sociably and drinking coffee, while the smooth descent continued.

  “I’m glad we’re doing this,” Thandie said, munching. “We haven’t had a lot of time together, you and me, since all this started. But I feel I know you already. I should tell you the stories Gary has about you, from Barcelona.”

  “Go on,” Lily said cautiously.

  “Like the time you took on the guard who walked in wearing the ring he stole from you.”

  “Yeah. They took stuff off each of us in the first minute, as soon as we were captured. But to tell the truth I was just as pissed at the way he wore my sunglasses all the time.”

  Thandie laughed. “And the time you cut off your own hair, rather than let them do it to you.”

  “I always wore my hair short anyhow. But I couldn’t bear to have them do that, you know? It was all I had left, of me. So I fought back when they tried to shave me.” Which had earned her beatings, and from Said a threat of violation with a broken Coke bottle. “They gave up in the end and let me do it myself.”

  “And,” Thandie said, “the time Gary said you dug him out of the worst pit he fell into. When he had diarrhea, and wasn’t allowed out to the john. It wasn’t the illness, he said, it was the shame in front of the others.”

  And so Lily had lifted her faded T-shirt, dropped her shorts and shat in the corner, just as Gary had. “My finest hour,” she said.

  “Well, it worked, you were a true friend,” Thandie murmured. “You know, I don’t know if I could have stood it. Not the captivity, but the fact of not being able to do anything.”

  Lily shut up, as she had developed a habit of doing when people pronounced how they would react in situations they could know nothing of.

  Thandie said, “I have to do things. I’m an agent, you know? The frustration would drive me crazy.”

  “Everybody feels like that. We all missed our lives, our families, our careers—”

  “Yeah, but I got it in spades,” Thandie said ruefully. “Lucky for me I had the smarts to pursue an academic career, where you can be your own boss, though you’re continually fighting for sponsors and contracts and equipment funding. But even so I always seem to spot that limb and head right out on it.”

  “Like your theories about the source of the flood water.”

  “Yeah.” Thandie grinned, but her eyes were unfocused as she thought about it.

  Lily knew that Thandie was getting her share of fame, or notoriety, through her outlandish hypotheses about the true source of the flooding and its likely rise—and everyone knew she hoped to get a book deal out of it. That was her true dream, it seemed, to transcend her profession, even the science, and become famous: to be the Thandie Jones, a media figure, a modern Jacques Cousteau. But to do that, of course, she needed to validate her theories with some hard data. Which was why she was down here now, spending Nathan Lammockson’s money.

  However it seemed to Lily that Thandie hadn’t thought it through much further than that. After all, if she was right, if the sea-level rise really was going to become much worse than the consensus of experts was predicting, what would it mean for the world? Thandie was clearly ferociously intelligent. But it was possible she lacked some deeper qualities of imagination. Empathy, perhaps.

  Maybe Thandie detected Lily’s reservations about her. They ran out of conversation, and much of the descent passed in silence.

  So they dropped into the sea, the dive’s events unfolding relentlessly, the light outside deepening through shades of blue to black. As the air grew steadily colder condensation formed on the walls, making Thandie fret over the effect on her computer screens. It turned out a dehumidifier was faulty. After a time Lily pulled on her Russian fur hat.

  At a kilometer down there was an ominous creaking. Lily imagined the small, cramped gondola being crushed like a meringue in a clenched fist. Thandie told her not to worry; it was just the external instrument mounts settling into place as they contracted with the cold.

  More th
an two kilometers down, Thandie’s sonar revealed the shape of the submerged mountains of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

  She had Lily direct the bathyscaphe toward the mountain slope. Powerful quartz arc-light lamps fixed to the gondola’s exterior picked out the slope, and they studied the TV image and peered through the small, murky Plexiglas window. Lily saw a featureless surface covered in some kind of ooze, a mess of mud, sand and rock. She could see only a few meters in either direction; there was no sense of the scale of the undersea mountain they cautiously skirted. Thandie powered up her radar system, and tested it out on the mountain slope. It returned bright, clear echoes, embedded in which, Lily understood, there was a wealth of data on the deeper structure of the rocks.

  When they got close enough a kind of handler arm implanted small charges in the mud. After the Trieste was safely away, these would be detonated to generate seismic signals, another way to probe the rock’s deep interior. Fish and crabs and worms swam by, disturbed by the arm. They were ordinary-looking creatures, but pale, adapted for the dark and the thousand-atmosphere pressures of this deep. Thandie quoted names like echiuroid worm and ethusa and bassogigas. It was an unprepossessing sight, a deep-sea fauna unremarkable to nonspecialist eyes.

  Thandie had Lily sail the Trieste away from the slope so she could direct the radar to peer down the mid-Atlantic rise to the deeper floor. As soon as she did so the radar stopped returning clean echoes. The data display was flickering, jumbled.

  “Shit.” Thandie ran through a quick diagnostic. “Everything seems OK.” She bounced a quick test pulse off the mountain; the echo came back clean. “But when I send the pulse downwards . . .” She shook her head. “If I take the results seriously, the sea floor down there is shattered. Broken up. Some kind of subsidence maybe.” The bathyscaphe shuddered. Thandie grabbed the arms of her chair. “Now what?”