Flood

by Stephen Baxter

  “You really are an asshole, Domingo,” Gary said with faint disgust.

  Domingo laughed. “But this is a day for assholes. What next, O great non-asshole gringo?”

  “The mayor’s going forward. I guess Ollantay’s planning the next step. Come on, we’ll go up with her.” He took Grace’s hand.

  “We are mere foot soldiers,” Domingo said.

  Gary shook his head. “We got friends in this city. Anything we can do to reduce the body count today, we’re going to do.”

  Domingo bowed. “Then I follow your lead.”

  Holding Grace’s hand and followed by Domingo, Gary worked up the line until he caught up with the mayor’s party. They had stopped at another major intersection, beside a green space beneath the shoulders of a monumental-looking church.

  Standing before this blocky pile, Ollantay held court. He was in his Inca finery, gaudy woolen tunic and trousers, those gold ear-studs bright in the sun, and he had a gold helmet on his head, looted from some private collection during the bee-sting raids he had mounted on Cusco before this main assault. He stood erect, his face dark and proud, here on this day of his apotheosis.

  Mayor Thorson stood before Ollantay dubiously, listening to the conversation that passed between Ollantay and his senior generals, such as they were. They were a pack of thugs and troublemakers who had been attracted to Ollantay’s cause from the highland communities, farms and mines, here to settle old scores. There were even a few of the dispossessed from the raft communities offshore. This core group stood around a wooden box that looked like a coffin, hauled here on a cart.

  Among them was a man Gary didn’t recognize, in a fresh-looking AxysCorp uniform. Aged maybe thirty, he was overweight, an unusual sight nowadays; he had a puffy, resentful face, and he stood by Ollantay nervously.

  And Kristie was here. Her little boy wore feathers in his hair and had his own Inca-prince costume. He held his mother’s hand, one free finger probing a small nostril. It had been a shock this morning, the first shock of the day, for Gary to see Kristie Caistor at the side of a man like Ollantay. In fact, he saw, she wore a pink plastic backpack, incongruous amid the Inca stuff, and Gary had a faint memory of how she had carried the thing as that bright, pretty London kid, long ago.

  Gary murmured to Thorson, “So what’s the plan?”

  “Ollantay has spies in Project City,” she said. “Moles. Like that fat guy, evidently. Lammockson and his senior people have holed up in a sports stadium a few blocks thataway.” She pointed northeast along the transverse avenue.

  And that was where Lily and Piers must be, Gary thought. What a strange reunion this was going to be. “So we’re going to lay siege?”

  “Yeah. Although Ollantay seems to think he has a way in. Meanwhile Ollantay has some kind of ceremony to carry out here.”

  “A ceremony. Some Inca thing?” Gary glanced around, at the blank faces of the buildings that surrounded them, the empty roads. He heard the distant buzz of a chopper. “The longer we wait here the more vulnerable we are.”

  “Tell me about it. But you know Ollantay. Look at these guys. A lot of them aren’t thinking at all. They’re dispossessed, they’ve slaved for Lammockson, they’re refugees—as we are. The guys from the rafts in particular have got nothing to lose. This is their moment in the sun, their chance to strike back at something, somebody. The events of today have as much to do with testosterone as Lebensraum, I’d say.”

  “That’s a grim thought.”

  Her face was hard. “Well, we’re here to maximize our own gain. We owe nothing to Nathan Lammockson.”

  The fat thirty-year-old broke away from Ollantay’s circle and approached Gary. “I know you,” he said. “You’re Gary Boyle. One of the hostages from Barcelona.”

  Gary stared at him, startled. “Have I met you?”

  “I was just a kid when you got out. Maybe you don’t remember. I’m Hammond Lammockson.”

  Gary immediately saw the likeness to Nathan, which had been pricking his memory. He even spoke with a trace of his father’s London accent. “Wow. Yes, I do remember you. What are you doing here?”

  “With AxysCorp’s enemies, you mean? I guess you don’t know my father well. The game’s up for him. He will be put on trial by the newly constituted government of Qosqo.”

  “Trial, huh. And what are you, a witness for the prosecution?”

  Hammond’s face was resentful, angry. “I don’t know what you think of Nathan Lammockson. I don’t care. As a father he’s a disaster. He spent his life putting me down, belittling me, marginalizing me.”

  Gary could imagine that. “Maybe he thought he was toughening you up.”

  “Well, he succeeded.”

  Gary said, “Lily Brooke, Piers Michaelmas—they’re here, they’re still alive? I’ve not been able to contact them since we came to the area.”

  “Oh, yeah. Still alive. Still my father’s favorites. Whereas I’m just a passenger. He was always closer to you people than to me, you hostages.” He sneered. “Like pets.”

  Gary recoiled from this man’s bitterness. “You’re his son. I remember Nathan saying that everything he did he was doing for you, you and his grandchildren.”

  “Grandchildren. Yeah. You should have seen the frigid bitch he chose for me to have those grandchildren for him. Well, I failed to oblige.”

  “I can’t believe you’re planning to betray him.”

  “Watch me.” And he walked away, back to the Quechua group, as Ollantay began his ceremony.

  Ollantay climbed up onto the coffinlike box. The murmur of conversation around him ceased.

  “So we begin the end-game,” Ollantay said. “The showdown with Nathan Lammockson, and the eradication of the stain of colonialism. And it’s fitting that we make ready for the final battle here at this historic site.” He waved a hand. “This is Qoricancha, the temple of the sun—the most important place of worship in the Inca empire. Once, seven hundred sheets of gold covered the walls. The mummified bodies of emperors sat on thrones of gold and silver. Even in this patio where we stand there were golden statues of beautiful women, and llamas, trees, flowers—even golden butterflies. The Spaniards desecrated the temple, seeking only gold, caring nothing for the Incas and their gods, and they turned this stone husk into a Christian church.

  “But now the Inca sun rises once more.” He raised a military boot, and slammed it down on the coffin lid. The lid splintered and broke open. Ollantay reached down and hauled up a tangle of bones, broken and dusty, fragments threaded together with bits of wire into a loose representation of a skeleton. Ollantay grasped the skull, its jaw gaping open, and rattled the bones in the air. “Behold Pizarro! Behold Pizarro!”

  There was a huge roar from his followers. Two men pushed upright a gibbet improvised from tent poles, and a noose was passed around the neck of the conquistador, five hundred years dead, his bones yellowed and splintered.

  As the skeleton was hoisted aloft before the mighty walls of the temple, Mayor Thorson murmured, “God help us all.”

  70

  It had been an awfully long time since Cusco’s Estadio Universitario had been used for the purposes it was designed for, Lily reflected. Now the stadium’s pitch was crowded by tents and Portaloos. The grass was trampled and cut up by vehicle tracks, where it wasn’t covered by duck boards. Stocks of food and water had been laid in, the gates sealed shut, and gantries that had once hosted television cameras were home to machine gun nests. Lammockson’s private army was short on heavy weaponry, but the pitch was ringed by small artillery pieces.

  This was where Nathan Lammockson would make his stand. Since the reports had come in of Ollantay’s approach with his ragged army, Lammockson had put in place a kind of scorched earth policy. He had retreated to this preprepared fortress with a couple of thousand people, his most trusted guards, his closest advisers and supporters, everybody that was precious and loyal to him, in fact. The rest of Project City had been evacuated, the citizens either holed u
p in churches and cellars or sent to Chosica where they were sheltering on the unfinished Ark. After that the town had been emptied of supplies. Nathan was convinced the rebels would disperse as soon as they got hungry and thirsty.

  Inside the stadium the atmosphere was strange. The sky above was bright blue, and the sun, low this winter day, cast a golden light into the stadium, making the polished weaponry gleam, and the murmur of the thousands gathered in this echoing bowl gave it the feel of a sports crowd. It all made Lily feel peculiarly cheerful, as if it were a Saturday afternoon in London and she was taking Amanda’s kids to a football match, at Fulham or Queen’s Park Rangers. But a different sort of fixture was being planned today.

  Lammockson himself was at the very center of the pitch, where once soccer teams had kicked off their matches. He was sitting in the sun on a fold-out canvas chair, sunglasses masking his face. But he was ringed by troops, and he sat only a few meters from two AxysCorp-livery helicopters that rested on the grass. Piers was with him, and Juan Villegas with Amanda sitting in the background, and Sanjay McDonald. Though he rarely spoke Piers had the distracted look of a man listening to a dozen conversations at once, probably through a mil-spec version of an Angel. Other advisers came and went, especially Nathan’s top military people, informing him of the disposition of the rebels. Nathan seemed cool amid the tension, like a director on some unlikely film set.

  As Lily approached, Sanjay got up and hurried to her, small, intense, nervous, his beard ragged. “Lily, thank God. There’s news. I’ve been speaking to Thandie, in Denver.”

  That cut through her preoccupation. “Thandie?”

  “A Comsat drifted into the right position and we got a contact . . . It’s surging again. The sea-level rise.”

  For years the rise had roughly followed Thandie’s rule-of-thumb exponential curve, doubling every five years. But the reality was always more ragged, more uncertain than that.

  “Another subterranean sea broke open, I guess,” Lily said.

  “Something like that. Actually it backs up reports we had from Chosica. There have been flooding episodes below the town. Seems Nathan’s Ark Three might be floating off sooner than he expected. But that’s not all Thandie had to say. Listen, Lily. She’s made a place for herself in Denver, got in with government circles.”

  Lily smiled. “That sounds like Thandie.”

  “And she’s discovered—”

  “So you showed up, Brooke.” Nathan had spotted Lily and cut across Sanjay.

  Sanjay, anguished, had to break off.

  Lily mouthed, “Later.” She turned to Nathan. Once she would have bridled at his goading, but over the years she’d hardened to his insults. “You know where I’ve been, Nathan. Touring the perimeter.”

  “And?”

  She shrugged. “You know the situation. The perimeter’s secure, all units in place, armed and provisioned. But the rebels are in place too.” She had looked down from the old TV gantries at the grubby army Ollantay had assembled, a band that stretched right around the walls of the stadium. They were like fans waiting to be admitted to a sports event, a cup final. But most sports fans didn’t go noisily looting surrounding properties, or letting off potshots at the stadium.

  “So we’re under siege,” Nathan said, unperturbed. “Fuck ’em.”

  “Ollantay himself is there,” Lily said, glancing at Amanda. “You can’t miss him, strutting around in his Inca feathers, that golden helmet gleaming. Kristie is with him. And the kid.” She admitted, “A sniper could take Ollantay out. You don’t even need the spotter scopes.”

  Amanda looked away, her face white, her eyes shadows. Juan put his hand over hers.

  Nathan shook his head. “No. I want him alive so he can surrender. That’s the most orderly way out of this.” He grinned at Lily in that cruel way of his. “And besides, to you he’s family.”

  “Oh, shut up, Nathan,” Lily snapped. “And speaking of family, your own son’s been spotted out there too.” There had been rumors that Hammond had gone over to the rebels.

  Now it was Nathan’s turn to look away. “Ah, the hell with him too. My boys are under instruction to keep him safe. When all this fizzles out he’ll come around. I’ll make him eat a little shit, and that will be that.”

  “ ‘Fizzles out,’ ” Lily repeated. “You’re confident about that, are you?”

  “Why not?”

  Piers put in, “We planned for this, Lily. You know that.”

  Project City had been preparing for Ollantay’s assault for weeks, putting into place operations that had been worked out over months and years, plans drawn up for the event of a rebellion. The rebels’ reinforcement by the Walker City Okies was just a complication. Nathan wanted minimal resistance, no fighting at all if possible, and he had forbidden the use of heavy weapons or mines unless absolutely necessary. He wanted to preserve his city intact, he said. Lily was among the few who knew Nathan had a plan B.

  She glared at him. “No need for any last resorts, then, Nathan.”

  “Not unless circumstances change,” he replied smoothly.

  A single scream pierced the air like a bugle call.

  Nathan stood. Amanda clung to Juan’s arm. Lily heard the rattle of weapons being cocked. There was a crump, a sound like distant thunder, and people flinched. Lily turned, scanning, looking for the source of the scream, the bang.

  Suddenly AxysCorp soldiers fled from the tunnels where once the players had come out onto the sports field. Smoke gushed after them. They were pursued by people spilling out of the tunnels, ragged, mostly men but some women, even a few children. The men wore bright woollen tunics and cloaks. They all seemed to be armed, even some of the kids, and Lily recognized the deadly, simple form of Kalashnikovs.

  Lammockson’s fortress was breached, just like that.

  AxysCorp troops took shelter behind sandbag heaps and Portaloos. Gunfire began, the popping of small-arms fire, the rattle of automatic weapons. The first shots landed home, and people twitched like puppets and fell to the dirt. The troops around Lammockson drew in, their weapons at their shoulders. Lily heard the slicing noise of helicopter rotor blades cutting into the air.

  But pandemonium filled the stadium. The rebels were still pouring in through the tunnels, and the AxysCorp troops were struggling to figure out what was going on, to get into position.

  And now there was a charge by a handful of men in bright Inca costumes. They cut through the AxysCorp lines, heading straight for Lammockson’s party. Piers screamed orders, and the AxysCorp troops responded, lined up and fired. Inca types fell, but they fired back.

  Lily heard a round hiss past her ears. She threw herself to the ground. “Down! Get down!”

  The engine roar intensified. Lily squirmed and looked around. From a circle of people lying flattened like corn stalks in a gale, one of Nathan’s helicopters was lifting into the sky. She saw a bullet ping off its hull, leaving a dent in its armor, but it rose smoothly, and Nathan Lammockson was already gone. The other bird still stood on the ground, the blades turning vigorously. Everybody was down on the ground—everybody but Amanda, Lily saw with horror.

  Amanda was standing up, looking bewildered. She called her daughter’s name, over and over: “Kristie! Kris!”

  Juan Villegas, on the ground himself, plucked at her arm. “Amanda, for God’s sake—”

  Her forehead exploded, red-black blood and tissue fanning out in front of her face. For a second she stood, trembling. Then she fell, limbs loose, tumbling to the ground.

  Lily got to her knees and crawled toward her sister, through the noise of the chopper, the screaming, the shots. “Amanda!”

  Piers Michaelmas lunged across the ground and hit her with a rugby tackle around the waist, forcing her flat on her belly.

  Lily struggled. “Let me go!”

  Piers held her down. “It’s too late for her.”

  She balled her fist and punched him in the mouth, but still he wouldn’t let go. “You prick, Piers. So much
for your siege defense. It didn’t last five minutes.”

  “Listen to me. Just listen,” he shouted over the noise. “You can see what’s happened. We’ve been betrayed.”

  “Who by?”

  “Hammond Lammockson. It was always a risk not to hunt him down after he absconded. He betrayed his own father—gave Ollantay plans of the stadium, the military preparation, got him through the gates.”

  “Then it’s finished.”

  “No.” He shook his head, as if to clear it. “The city is lost. Nathan’s out of here already. You can say what you like about him but he’s decisive. And that second chopper is going in a few minutes.”

  “Going where?”

  “The Ark at Chosica, I think. That’s still well defended. We’ve a chance to be on it, you and I. But he’s given me a mission.”

  “To do what?”

  “Bring in Hammond.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. You know Nathan: blood’s thicker than water. Hammond’s already in the stadium, with the rebels. Ollantay has the advantage of surprise, but these aren’t trained military units. A handful of us ought to be able to get through, retrieve Hammond, and make sure Ollantay is down.

  “Listen to me, Lily. This is our chance. Kristie is there, and her kid. We think they’re close to Ollantay—well, they must be. There’s nothing you can do for Amanda now. But if you want to save her daughter—”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Let’s go.”

  He grabbed her arm. “Wait. Take these.” He took a handful of lightweight gas masks from his pocket, shook them so they folded out into shape. “Put one on. We should be safe, it’s the Quechuas who are targeted by Nathan’s ethnic weapons, but—”

  “Nathan wouldn’t do it.”

  He pointed upward. “He already is.”

  Looking up, she saw that the chopper in the air was venting a yellowish gas. Heavier than the air, it descended quickly. The chopper banked and circled, spreading its gas throughout the stadium.